U.S. Seeks Access To Bin Laden's Wives, May 9 2011

by Phil Mattingly and Sandrine Rastello
Bloomberg
Pakistan hasn’t given the U.S. access to three of Osama bin Laden’s widows or other information collected following last week’s operation in Pakistan, creating more questions about the country’s role in hiding the late al- Qaeda leader.

National Security Adviser Tom Donilon said the U.S. has requested — and not yet received — access to three of bin Laden’s wives and additional materials recovered by the Pakistanis after the raid in which bin Laden was killed in a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The role, if any, of Pakistani government officials harboring bin Laden also remains a question, President Barack Obama said.

“We think that there had to be some sort of support network for bin Laden inside of Pakistan,” Obama said in an interview on CBS’s “60 Minutes” program. “But we don’t know who or what that support network was. We don’t know whether there might have been some people inside of government, people outside of government, and that’s something that we have to investigate and, more importantly, the Pakistani government has to investigate.”

Full article here

The Propoganda Machine At Work, May 7 2011

Was Bin Laden Betrayed By His Right-Hand Man, Al Qaeda's Deput Leader?


Osama Bin Laden's deputy led U.S. troops to the Al Qaeda leader's hideout so he could take over the terrorist group, it was claimed today.
Egyptian Ayman Al Zawahiri, who has been touted widely as the man who will succeed Bin Laden as the head of Al Qaeda, turned his back on his terrorist leader following a prolonged power struggle, according to a Saudi newspaper.


The plot to get rid of Bin Laden began when Zawahiri’s faction persuaded bin Laden to leave the protection of the tribal areas along the Afghan-Pakistan border.

Power struggle: This photograph from October 2001, one month after 9/11, shows Osama Bin Laden alongside his top lieutenant, Egyptian Ayman Al Zawahiri

Instead, they convinced him to set up home in Abbottabad, where he was finally killed by U.S. Navy SEALS earlier this week, a regional source told the Al-Watan newspaper.

Zawahiri's Egyptian ally Saif Al Adel is said to have moved to Pakistan last autumn as Al Qaeda's 'chief of staff' after a period of house arrest in Iran.

With his return, Al Qaeda's Egyptian faction then hatched a plan to dispose of Saudi-born Bin Laden after irresolvable divisions developed between the terrorist group's top two men. 

Judas? Al Qaeda's number two Ayman Al Zawahiri is said to have tipped off U.S. troops about the whereabouts of Bin Laden

'The Egyptian faction of Al Qaeda is defacto running the organisation now and since he was taken ill in 2004 they have been trying to take full control,' the paper wrote on Thursday.

The courier who led U.S. forces to Bin Laden was a Pakistani national working for Zawahiri, according to the source.

The man is said to have known he was being followed by American troops and to have intentionally led them to their target.

Zawahiri met Bin Laden in the mid-1980s and they have since became the closest of allies, with analysts describing Zawahri as Al Qaeda's chief organiser and bin Laden's closest mentor.

Compound: The walled lair where Osama Bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad, Pakistan

 

Scene: The bloodied room inside the compound where Bin Laden was killed by U.S. troops in Abbottabad, Pakistan

As the terror group's number two, he has at times been Al Qaeda's most public face, often seen denouncing the United States and its allies in video messages