WAR ON TERROR - More Bin Laden, Prison of His Own Making

"In Abbottabad, Bin Laden Lived in 'Prison of His Own Making'" PBS Newshour 5/4/2012

Excerpt

MARGARET WARNER (Newshour): For a decade after 9/11, Osama bin Laden was the most hunted man in the world. This week, on the first anniversary of bin Laden's killing by U.S. special forces in Pakistan, more details are emerging about the operation and the relentless, often frustrated, intelligence effort that led to it.

Journalist Peter Bergen has written a graphic and gripping account of all that in his new book, "Manhunt." Bergen himself has been reporting and writing on bin Laden since meeting him in Afghanistan in 1997, as the producer of a CNN interview in which the al-Qaida leader declared war on the United States.

COMMENT: Peter Bergen's comment on Bin Laden's living conditions fails to compaire to the general living conditions in Pakistan. From what I have seen, Bin Laden's living conditions are NOT 'squalor' but close to normal in Pakistan.

Fascinating excerpts

PETER BERGEN: I think it is a matter of deductive logic.

Relatively early on, the couriers were something that they really thought were important, 2002, 2003 -- there was a memo written in 2005 which sort of made the analytical case that was probably the only way we were going to find him or one of the key ways. But then his name surfaced, but it was an alias, and then attaching the alias to a real name, then attaching a real name to a real cell phone, then following that cell phone back to the compound.

This was, you know, more Agatha Christie than James Bond.


PETER BERGEN: The National Security Agency tracked down the location of this guy's cell phone. So that's signals intelligence. And then there was human intelligence, spies on the ground, who followed this guy back to where he lived. So that is nothing to do with interrogations of any kind.


On the did Pakistan know Bin Laden was there

PETER BERGEN: We the United States, yes, because there's not -- it's not like our relations are so good, that we would keep that back.

And I have talked to multiple people who have read the documents, and they say there is nothing there. And also just as a matter of deductive logic, bin Laden was an enormously disciplined, paranoid, secretive guy. There were people living on that compound, adults, who didn't know he was there.

He wasn't going to clue in anybody who didn't need to know. Al-Qaida had tried to kill Pakistani President Musharraf on two occasions in 2003. There was no love lost between these groups.