Osama Bin Laden is dead and his corpse is in US hands.

[Officer of Engineers]

For the same reason the US did- no net or phone, burning trash, 12' walls with razor wire.....

For that part of the world? Not out of character. Omar put cows in his living room.

[rj1]

He lived in a compound, the neighbours whom lived there were in absolute shock when they found out OBL was living there. Its quite easy to keep a low profile in Pakistan, stop thinking from an American point of view.

I don't care what culture anyone lives in or is from, everyone gossips. These neighbors never asked themselves: "who lives in that big building with barbed wire at the top of the walls?"

[pmuklherjee]

Well done

Well done America. Wish the US could have nabbed the guy years ago, but then, he obviously had help. So, well done again.

[Agnostic Muslim]

So a bunch of poorly equipped jihadis can do it but 2-4 MH-60 Pavehawks flying on the deck and high speed in the dead of night carrying superbly trained commandoes and backed by an impressive US technical capability to take over the target areas communications can't?

A bunch of 'poorly equipped Jihadis' also do the same time and again in territory under the control of US security forces in Afghanistan, and did so for the longest time in Iraq as well.

A 'bunch of poorly equipped jihadis' are not flying around in half a dozen choppers across most of Pakistan to launch a raid. Had this raid not been an 'airborne raid', the claim that Pakistan had no idea about it would have held some credibility.

'Superbly trained commandos' are not the sole domain of the US, nor are they some sort of 'supermen' themselves. And 'impressive US technical capability to take over the target areas communication' to facilitate a raiding party flying across the entire country is yet more fanciful 'Rambo nonsense'.

Don't forget in 2003 we called Iraqi commanders at home and on their cells and told them to stand aside. We provided the technical means for the Stunext worm and likely used Suter to help the Israelis take out the Syrian reactor- but we can't jam/ collpase the local communications in Pakistan.

First - no reports of 'collapsed communications' from Pakistan. People were twittering, posting and commenting the entire time. The administrator of one Pakistani forum that is still online was posting updates yesterday about access being restricted to the area after the chopper crash and while gunfire was being heard. Sorry, but the facts simply don't support your Star Wars tale.

In part I guess because the Pakistani security forces are supermen who can respond faster than anyone else on the plant.

US forces are not 'supermen' either, nor is there any evidence to suggest anything along the lines of a 'communications blackout to facilitate insertion and assault' that you appear to be suggesting took place.

There was probably only a couple of minutes of shooting and it was over before your security services even had time to figure out that fact that Pakistan had been caught with its pants down.

The helicopter crash (unknown cause at the time) and news reports indicating gun fire and restricted access to the area, were being broadcast yesterday, and posted on Pakistani forums.

Don't be so gullible.

For the same reason the US did- no net or phone, burning trash, 12' walls with razor wire.....

You need to live in Pakistan some more then ....

Mumbai proved to the world that the ISI is in bed with militants. Nor did the government ever have any problem contacting the TTP (although getting them to obey was a problem). AQ was also linked to ops in Kashmir which is the ISI's pet, as was the A-stan Taliban.

Mumbai proved nothing about the ISI's links to militants since absolutely no evidence about the ISI's connection or knowledge to the attacks has been provided so far.

[Agnostic Muslim]

For that part of the world? Not out of character. Omar put cows in his living room.

Exactly - my parents house in Lahore has 10ft boundary walls topped with glass shards.

High crime rates and extremely poor law enforcement means a lot of people (especially wealthy ones) take all sorts of precautions to protect themselves.

Drive through any wealthy neighborhood and you'll see plenty of 'suspiciously high security' residences.

[troung]

For that part of the world? Not out of character. Omar put cows in his living room.

They were living in a nice area on a million plus dollar property. PA officers lived in the area. Can't see PA high ups slumming it up.

[Kasmir]

Yes, indeed Zraver. That makes the most sense. US would have used "zero day" signals technology for this op if necessary, although I doubt it was. The US is regularly overflying Pakistan; what could be easier cover for an insertion like this?

And to the Pak folks posting here: if the US had indeed pulled off killing OBL right in his sanctuary near a Pak military academy, how would the public reaction of the Pak military be any different? Even within the military, that would be the official story.

Taking credit for the operation is the only way for the Pak military to avoid humiliation. It's highly interesting that the US is barely being polite about this. One would have actually expected Obama to over-credit Pak cooperation as you would think it's in the US interest to avoid embarrassing the Pakistan military. Instead he publicly denied the participated. Extremely unusual lack of diplomacy. Me thinks there is US anger involved.

I hope the next step is to clear out that rat's nest in Quetta.

[troung]

The secret team that killed bin Laden
By National Journal national Journal 18 mins ago

By Marc Ambinder
National Journal

From Ghazi Air Base in Pakistan, the modified MH-60 helicopters made their way to the garrison suburb of Abbottabad, about 30 miles from the center of Islamabad. Aboard were Navy SEALs, flown across the border from Afghanistan, along with tactical signals, intelligence collectors, and navigators using highly classified hyperspectral imagers.

After bursts of fire over 40 minutes, 22 people were killed or captured. One of the dead was Osama bin Laden, done in by a double tap -- boom, boom -- to the left side of his face. His body was aboard the choppers that made the trip back. One had experienced mechanical failure and was destroyed by U.S. forces, military and White House officials tell National Journal.

Were it not for this high-value target, it might have been a routine mission for the specially trained and highly mythologized SEAL Team Six, officially called the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, but known even to the locals at their home base Dam Neck in Virginia as just DevGru.

This HVT was special, and the raids required practice, so they replicated the one-acre compound at Camp Alpha, a segregated section of Bagram Air Base. Trial runs were held in early April.

DevGru belongs to the Joint Special Operations Command, an extraordinary and unusual collection of classified standing task forces and special-missions units. They report to the president and operate worldwide based on the legal (or extra-legal) premises of classified presidential directives. Though thegeneral public knows about the special SEALs and their brothers in Delta Force, most JSOC missions never leak. We only hear about JSOC when something goes bad (a British aid worker is accidentally killed) or when something really big happens (a merchant marine captain is rescued at sea), and even then, the military remains especially sensitive about their existence. Several dozen JSOC operatives have died in Pakistan over the past several years. Their names are released by the Defense Department in the usual manner, but with a cover story -- generally, they were killed in training accidents in eastern Afghanistan. That's the code.

(Analysis: Bin Laden's death a triumph for Obama)

How did the helos elude the Pakistani air defense network? Did they spoof transponder codes? Were they painted and tricked out with Pakistan Air Force equipment? If so -- and we may never know -- two other JSOC units, the Technical Application Programs Office and the Aviation Technology Evaluation Group, were responsible. These truly are the silent squirrels -- never getting public credit and not caring one whit. Since 9/11, the JSOC units and their task forces have become the U.S. government's most effective and lethal weapon against terrorists and their networks, drawing plenty of unwanted, and occasionally unflattering, attention to themselves in the process.

JSOC costs the country more than $1 billion annually. The command has its critics, but it has escaped significant congressional scrutiny and has operated largely with impunity since 9/11. Some of its interrogators and operators were involved in torture and rendition, and the line between its intelligence-gathering activities and the CIA's has been blurred.

But Sunday's operation provides strong evidence that the CIA and JSOC work well together. Sometimes intelligence needs to be developed rapidly, to get inside the enemy's operational loop. And sometimes it needs to be cultivated, grown as if it were delicate bacteria in a petri dish.

In an interview at CIA headquarters two weeks ago, a senior intelligence official said the two proud groups of American secret warriors had been "deconflicted and basically integrated" -- finally -- 10 years after 9/11. Indeed, according to accounts given to journalists by five senior administration officials Sunday night, the CIA gathered the intelligence that led to bin Laden's location. A memo from CIA Director Leon Panetta sent Sunday night provides some hints of how the information was collected and analyzed. In it, he thanked the National Security Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency for their help. NSA figured out, somehow, that there was no telephone or Internet service in the compound. How it did this without Pakistan's knowledge is a secret. The NGIA makes the military's maps but also develops their pattern recognition software -- no doubt used to help establish, by February of this year, that the CIA could say with "high probability" that bin Laden and his family were living there.

(Step-by-step: How the U.S. killed bin Laden)

Recently, JSOC built a new Targeting and Analysis Center in Rosslyn, Va. Where the NationalCounterterrorism Center tends to focus on threats to the homeland, TAAC, whose existence was first disclosed by the Associated Press, focuses outward, on active "kinetic" -- or lethal -- counterterrorismmissions abroad. Its creation surprised the NCTC's director, Michael Leiter, who was suspicious about its intent until he visited.

That the center could be stood up under the nose of some of the nation's most senior intelligence officials without their full knowledge testifies to the power and reach of JSOC, whose size has tripled since 9/11. The command now includes more than 4,000 soldiers and civilians. It has its own intelligence division, which may or may not have been involved in last night's effort, and has gobbled up a number of free-floating Defense Department entities that allowed it to rapidly acquire, test, and field new technologies.

Under a variety of standing orders, JSOC is involved in more than 50 current operations spanning a dozen countries, and its units, supported by so-called "white," or acknowledged, special operations entities like Rangers, Special Forces battalions, SEAL teams, and Air Force special ops units from the larger Special Operations Command, are responsible for most of the "kinetic" action in Afghanistan.

Pentagon officials are conscious of the enormous stress that 10 years of war have placed on the command. JSOC resources are heavily taxed by the operational tempo in Afghanistan and Pakistan, officials have said. The current commander, Vice Adm. William McRaven, and Maj. Gen. Joseph Votel,McRaven's nominated replacement, have been pushing to add people and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance technology to areas outside the war theater where al-Qaida and its affiliates continue to thrive.

(What does it mean for al-Qaida?)

Earlier this year, it seemed that the elite units would face the same budget pressures that the entire military was experiencing. Not anymore. The military found a way, largely by reducing contracting staff and borrowing others from the Special Operations Command, to add 50 positions to JSOC. AndVotel wants to add several squadrons to the "Tier One" units -- Delta and the SEALs.

When Gen. Stanley McChrystal became JSOC's commanding general in 2004, he and his intelligence chief, Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn, set about transforming the way the subordinate units analyze and act on intelligence. Insurgents in Iraq were exploiting the slow decision loop that coalition commanders used, and enhanced interrogation techniques were frowned upon after the Abu Ghraib scandal. But the hunger for actionable tactical intelligence on insurgents was palpable.

The way JSOC solved this problem remains a carefully guarded secret, but people familiar with the unit suggest that McChrystal and Flynn introduced hardened commandos to basic criminal forensic techniques and then used highly advanced and still-classified technology to transform bits of information into actionable intelligence. One way they did this was to create forward-deployed fusion cells, where JSOC units were paired with intelligence analysts from the NSA and the NGA. Such analysis helped the CIA to establish, with a high degree of probability, that Osama bin Laden and his family were hiding in that particular compound.

These technicians could "exploit and analyze" data obtained from the battlefield instantly, using their access to the government's various biometric, facial-recognition, and voice-print databases. These cells also used highly advanced surveillance technology and computer-based pattern analysis to layer predictive models of insurgent behavior onto real-time observations.

The military has begun to incorporate these techniques across the services. And Flynn will soon be promoted to a job within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, where he'll be tasked with transforming the way intelligence is gathered, analyzed, and utilized.

Visit National Journal for more political news.
Copyright © 2011 Yahoo! Inc. All rights rese

[USSWisconsin]

The 72 virgins will be large men who will make his rear end their playground.

That and those new holes in his head...

[Agnostic Muslim]

And to the Pak folks posting here: if the US had indeed pulled off killing OBL right in his sanctuary near a Pak military academy, how would the public reaction of the Pak military be any different? Even within the military, that would be the official story.

Given regional tensions, it would be extremely foolish to launch launch a cross country assault (from outside the country) close to a military academy and the nations Capital, without the knowledge and cooperation of Pakistan, and 'hope' that no one would notice, regardless of whatever 'technology' Americans claim they have.

[1980s]

JANA, otherwise known as Farzana Shah a half-wit journalist for the Asian Tribune is reporting OBL was killed a week ago and the body handed over to U.S. authorities. It's also being suggested the crashed chopper (destroyed) was Pakistani.

Little wonder that Pakistan is so corrupt and dysfunctional as the "report" given by that pseudo-journalist you mentioned typifies the Pakistani political character so well; one of complete and utter stupidity.

I remember when Abdolmalek Rigi, Iran's most wanted terrorist (who, like Bin Laden, was based in Pakistan) was apprehended on a plane from Dubai en-route to Central Asia last year. The reaction of the Pakistanis was exactly the same as i am seeing from them today in regards to Bin Laden's killing; a confused reaction of embarrassment, denial and then claims of "co-operation" and "knowledge" during the operation. What a farce! As zraver aptly put it, Pakistan has "been caught with its pants down". Just look at them all over Al-Jazeera, BBC et al now scrambling to save face! How quickly their narratives have changed within less than a day to one of denial, confusion and now to 'co-operation' - nobody's buying the latter.

Anyway, it is not surprising to me at all that Bin Laden was found living in a big mansion just a short distance away from a f'n Pakistani military academy. Pakistan is going to have some very, very tough questions to answer.

Any bets on whether Omar's mansion in Quetta is bigger than Bin Laden's was?

[Agnostic Muslim]

I remember when Abdolmalek Rigi, Iran's most wanted terrorist (who, like Bin Laden, was based in Pakistan) was apprehended on a plane from Dubai en-route to Central Asia last year.

Why would the capture of Rigi on a flight from Dubai to Central Asia be embarrassing to Pakistan?

If anything, it proved that he was not in Pakistan.

[USSWisconsin]

My guess - OTM 0.50 - making nice big holes, around 20$ worth of ammo for OBL. I'm glad they shot him rather than bombed him - it is more satifying.

[Kasmir]

Given regional tensions, it would be extremely foolish to launch launch a cross country assault (from outside the country) close to a military academy and the nations Capital, without the knowledge and cooperation of Pakistan, and 'hope' that no one would notice, regardless of whatever 'technology' Americans claim they have.

I notice you didn't answer my question: what else could the Pak military say after the op was pulled off?

The US obviously intended for everyone in the world to notice -- once the mission objective was achieved.

Your faith in Pak technology vs US technology is rather incredible.

[pmuklherjee]

What are these guys talking of? As I was driving around today, I heard news flash quoting Pak media saying that the Pak Army denied any involvement in the OBL killing episode. What was that? Are they claiming involvement now? Involvement at some level is to be expected, Obama said as much. The US could not possible pull off an operation of this kind in the heartland of another country without some form of tacit understanding with the top most administration of that country. Whether that means Mr Zardari or Gen Kayani or Gen Ahmed Shuja Pasha or all of them, does not matter. Pakistan had to be on board. That is what I imply.