Official history of raid camouflages US protection of governments
behind 9/11
By Nafeez Ahmed
July 04, 2015 "Information
Clearing House"
-
"Medium"
- The White House’s story of how US special forces hunted down and
assassinated arch terrorist Osama bin Laden in his secret lair in
Pakistan is unraveling.
The official
narrative of the bin Laden raid is that for over a decade, US
intelligence hunted for the terror chief until a
surveillance/torture-enabled breakthrough tracked him to a secret
compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. On 1st May 2011, US Navy Seals
entered the compound and assassinated him in a furious firefight.
The
operation demonstrated how far the US military intelligence
community had come since the days of 9/11, proving how its disparate
agencies had now developed a tremendous capacity to share and
process often obscure intelligence data, to guide precision covert
counter-terror missions.
After
killing bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader was buried at sea. When the
raid was officially announced, Pakistan, a key US ally in the fight
against al-Qaeda, was incensed at the US operation on its own soil.
According to
veteran reporter Seymour Hersh’s
scoop in the London Review
of Books, all this is a convenient fairy-tale. Rather,
Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) captured and detained
bin Laden in 2006 with the support of another US ally, Saudi Arabia.
Bin Laden’s
location was brought to the CIA’s attention in August 2010, by a
former ISI officer and CIA consultant who wanted to claim the reward
money. In 2011, the US staged the military intelligence ‘raid’ on
bin Laden’s compound with ISI complicity.
There was no
firefight. Bin Laden was torn to pieces quickly and easily under
rifle-fire, and his remains were thrown out of a helicopter over the
Hindu Kush mountains.
Hersh’s
account has been rejected by some on the grounds that he relies on
unverifiable anonymous sources. This investigation conducts a
systematic review of open sources and key journalistic reports
relevant to the events leading up to the bin Laden raid.
While much
corroboration for Hersh’s reporting is uncovered, elements of his
account and the Official History contradict a wider context of
critical revelations disclosed by many other pioneering journalists.
When that context is taken into account, a far more disturbing
picture emerges.
The
geopolitical relationship between the US, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan
played a central role in identifying and locating Osama bin Laden
far sooner than officially acknowledged — yet nothing was done. The
role of a former ISI officer in blowing the whistle on the ISI’s
protection of bin Laden in August 2010, brought his concealment out
into the open and triggered high-level White House discussions on
how to resolve the situation: to kill or not to kill?
Declassified
documents, official government reports and intelligence officials
confirm that since before 9/11, and continuing for the decade after,
the US intelligence community was systematically stymied from
apprehending Osama bin Laden due to longstanding relationships with
Saudi and Pakistani military intelligence.
Despite
specific intelligence available to elements of the US intelligence
community on bin Laden’s location in Pakistan, under the protection
of US allies, no action was taken to apprehend bin Laden for years.
That failure to act coincided with the launch of an anti-Iran US
covert operations programme around 2005, pursued in partnership with
Saudi Arabia, to finance Islamist Sunni militants including al-Qaeda
affiliated groups.
Bin Laden’s
assassination in 2011 followed an escalating split within al-Qaeda
between the terror chief and his most senior deputy, Ayman
al-Zawahiri. Contrary to US claims, bin Laden was positively
identified and monitored in the months leading up to the raid, with
the assistance of Saudi, Pakistani and Afghan intelligence agencies.
The decision
to do so coincided with an extraordinary proposal made to al-Qaeda
from British intelligence: to accept a renewed ‘covenant of
security’, whereby Western forces would withdraw from Afghanistan
and give al-Qaeda a free-hand, on condition that they refrain from
targeting British interests.
Bin Laden
refused the British offer. Four days later he was assassinated.
In the wake
of his death, and under the leadership of al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda
expanded its operations in many of the countries that had
experienced turmoil in the wake of the ‘Arab Spring’ revolutions
that year.
Since
then — as official Pentagon and other sources confirm — the West’s
allies, the Gulf states and Turkey, deliberately sponsored
al-Qaeda-affiliated groups in Syria to hijack the revolution and
destabilise the Assad regime, a strategy that was covertly supported
by the West in 2012, but now openly admitted.
US
government officials have scrambled to conceal the facts around the
bin Laden raid.
They hope to
suppress public recognition that the
primary factor in bin
Laden’s ability to oversee al-Qaeda until 2011 was US collusion with
his state-sponsors, for short-sighted geopolitical purposes.
Corroboration — four years ago
Hersh’s
critics, for the most part, have taken issue with his heavy reliance
on anonymous sources. As that makes the story supposedly
unverifiable, contradictions between Hersh’s narrative and other
Known Facts in the ‘war on terror’ Official History mean that
Hersh’s narrative must be false.
There is one
big problem with this response: Hersh was not the first to break the
story.
US national
security journalist Dr. Raelynn Hillhouse, a former University of
Michigan political scientist and Fulbright scholar who has broken a
number of exclusive stories on the privatisation of the US
intelligence community, punched holes in the Obama administration’s
narrative of the bin Laden raid before Hersh. At that time, her
story was blacked out by the US media, but picked up elsewhere such
as
The Telegraph and
New Zealand Herald.
In August
2011, in a series of articles on her national security blog, Dr.
Hillhouse cited senior unidentified
sources in the US intelligence community who told her that the
US government had received notice of bin Laden’s whereabouts from a
Pakistani ISI informant, seeking the $25 million State Department
reward. Hillhouse’s sources said that “the Saudis were paying off
the Pakistani military and intelligence (ISI) to essentially shelter
and keep bin Laden under house arrest in Abbottabad.”
What
happened then according to Hillhouse’s sources only raises further
questions:
“The CIA offered them a deal they couldn’t
refuse: they would double what the Saudis were paying them to
keep bin Laden if they cooperated with the US. Or they could
refuse the deal and live with the consequences: the Saudis would
stop paying and there would be the international embarrassment.”
The upshot,
Hillhouse reported, is that the ISI and Pakistani military
cooperated with the US on the bin Laden raid.
In an
interview with The Intercept,
Hillhouse
confirmed that it seemed clear her sources were different to
those who had spoken to Hersh, as they did not consult for US
Special Operations Command.
She also
said that her own sources had independently confirmed the same facts
to her about the disposal of bin Laden’s remains over the Hindu
Kush — except that she had decided not to mention this as she
couldn’t corroborate it at the time. Hersh’s reporting provided that
corroboration.
But the
person who
first broke this story was neither Hersh, nor Hillhouse. Just
days after the raid, former CIA and State Department
counter-terrorism official Larry Johnson cited active intelligence
sources who told him:
“The US Government learned of bin Laden’s
whereabouts last August when a person walked into a US embassy
and claimed that Pakistan’s intelligence service (ISI) had bin
Laden under control in Abottabad, Pakistan… The claim that we
found bin Laden because of a courier and the use of enhanced
interrogation is simply a cover story.”
Johnson also
confirmed that US intelligence had “learned that key people in Saudi
Arabia were sending Pakistan money to keep Osama out of sight and
out of trouble.” He also adds some other interesting details,
notably that Leon Panetta, then CIA director, ensured that all
intelligence leading up to the operation was highly
compartmentalised, and fed directly to him.
The charge
to assassinate bin Laden was led by Panetta, who wanted to launch
the operation as early as February 2011. But it was opposed by
Valerie Jarrett, a senior advisor to Obama. The US president
“initially sided with Jarrett. The White House spin that Obama had
to persuade senior advisors to go after Osama is pure unadulterated
bullshit.”
The
corroboration of the Hersh account from Johnson and Hillhouse adds
weight to its credibility. But other evidence in the public record
confirms that it is by far not the whole story: and that the
cover-up of events leading to the decision to kill bin Laden
occurred precisely to avoid public scrutiny of a wider context of
unsavoury geopolitical relationships.
Both the
Official History, and the alternate accounts offered by Hersh,
Hillhouse and Johnson, agree that the White House did not know of
Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts, and that US intelligence was eagerly
hunting him down.
But there is
already credible evidence in the public record which suggests that
while some sections of the US intelligence community were trying to
locate bin Laden, other elements of that community had been aware of
the likely location of bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan,
for years, and knew that Pakistani military intelligence was
protecting him — but did nothing about it.
2004: Musharraf and ISI
In 2004,
three months before the release of the 9/11 Commission Report,
executive director of the government-appointed Commission, Philip
Zelikow, requested a high-level Pakistani to produce a report that
would “fill in the gaps about what was happening behind the scenes
in Pakistan in the period immediately preceding the terrorist
attacks on New York and Washington.”
The report
was perhaps the most extensive piece of research on Pakistan’s
connections to terrorism, and was based on interviews across the
country with sensitive sources including former and active
government officials, senior military officers and ISI personnel.
Although the
document arrived too late to be included in the final report, like
many other sensitive interviews and materials obtained by the
Commission, it was not published and remains classified.
Leaks about
the content of this classified addendum to the 9/11 Commission
Report showed that it had concluded that senior ISI officers had
known in advance about the 9/11 attacks, that Osama bin Laden was
being protected by Pakistani military intelligence officials, and
that President Pervez Musharraf himself had approved for the terror
chief to be treated for renal problems repeatedly at a military
hospital near Peshawar.
Zelikow,
currently a consultant to the Office of the Secretary of Defence,
was a former White House National Security Council staffer in the
first Bush administration, and a member of President Bush Jnr.’s
2000–2001 transition team, before joining the President’s Foreign
Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) until 2003. During his tenure,
he played the lead role in re-drafting the Bush administration’s new
National Security Strategy. After his directorship of the 9/11
Commission, he was appointed Counselor of the State Department for
Secretary of State Condaleeza Rice. More recently, under the Obama
administration he served once again on the PFIAB from 2011 to 2013.
The
existence of this classified report to the 9/11 Commission
demonstrates that the US government had received detailed
intelligence confirming the protection of bin Laden by senior
Pakistani government, military and intelligence officials as early
as 2004.
2006: Abbottabad flagged
Bin Laden’s
specific location in Abbottabad had been flagged up in a secret
September 2008 US Department of Defence
memorandum from Joint Task Force Guantanamo to the Commander, US
Southern Command. The memo contained information obtained from Abu
Faraj al-Libi, al-Qaeda’s “operational chief” and third in command.
Al-Libi is
described by the document as manager of al-Qaeda operations in Iraq,
as well as a “senior commander of operations in Pakistan who
maintained communication with senior al-Qaeda leadership including
UBM [Osama bin Laden].”
Detained by
Pakistani security forces and passed to the CIA in May 2005, the
document recorded that he had “provided safe havens for UBL and
senior al-Qaeda leader Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri in 2001 and 2003.”
The document
goes on to say that in July 2003 — the year that al-Libi provided a
safe haven for Osama bin Laden:
“… detainee [al-Libi] received a letter from
UBL’s designated courier, Maulawi Abd al-Khaliq Jan… UBL stated
detainee would be the official messenger between UBL and others
in Pakistan. In mid-2003, detainee moved his family to
Abbottabad, PK [Pakistan] and worked between Abbottabad and
Peshawar.”
Thereafter,
Abu al-Libi continued to be “the main contact between UBL and
Islamic extremists operating inside Pakistan,” and was described as
“the communications gatekeeper for UBL and al-Zawahiri.”
According to
Gareth Porter, citing Mehsud
tribal sources in South Waziristan, Pakistan, al-Libi himself
had been tasked with finding the best location for bin Laden and his
family to reside, and had “suggested Abbottabad.”
The document
thus reveals that al-Libi had moved to Abbottabad precisely to carry
out his appointment as bin Laden’s official emissary — a major
indicator of bin Laden’s likely presence in Abbottabad. He was
simultaneously to act as a communications gatekeeper for al-Zawahiri — a
major indicator of al-Zawahiri’s likely presence near bin Laden in
Abbottabad.
Al-Libi had
been passed onto the CIA by Pakistani security forces in late May
2005, during which he provided detailed information on plans by
UK-based cells to attack nightclubs and the “subway” network in
London, before being moved to Guantanamo the following year.
CIA
records show that the torture and interrogation of al-Libi had
exhausted the retrieval of information long before his transfer to
Guantanamo in September 2006. After more than a month of continually
applied ‘enhanced interrogation techniques,’ the decision was
eventually made to cease their use as “CIA officers stated that they
had no intelligence to demonstrate that Abu Faraj al-Libi continued
to withhold information, and because CIA medical officers expressed
concern that additional use of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation
techniques ‘may come with unacceptable medical or psychological
risks.’”
So the
information filed in the 2008 Pentagon report, which collated the
basis for recommending al-Libi’s prosecution, had in fact been
extracted by the CIA prior to his move to Guantanamo in September
2006.
Therefore,
as early as 2006, the CIA had compelling evidence that bin Laden had
planned to operate from Abbottabad since 2003, and was communicating
with militants in Peshawar and elsewhere through al-Libi.
That
document disproves claims by Hersh’s sources that bin Laden moved to
Abbottabad in 2006 as a result of his betrayal by locals who handed
him over to the ISI for money — rather, the al-Qaeda chief had begun
that move three years earlier of his own accord.
2006: NATO spots bin Laden
Hersh’s
account asserts that bin Laden had been detained under “house
arrest” at the Abbottabad compound since 2006 by the Pakistani ISI
as part of a deal with Saudi Arabia, but that the US was not privy
to this arrangement.
Yet in the
same year, secret US military intelligence documents confirmed not
just one, but regular monthly sightings of bin Laden in Pakistan at
al-Qaeda planning meetings. A NATO
threat report from the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF)
in Afghanistan — part of the Afghan War logs published by Wikileaks — stated:
“Reportedly a high-level meeting was held in
Quetta, Pakistan, where six suicide bombers were given orders
for an operation in northern Afghanistan. Two persons have been
given targets in Kunduz, two in Mazar-e-Sharif and the last two
are said to come to Faryab… These meetings take place once every
month, and there are usually about 20 people present. The place
for the meeting alternates between Quetta and villages (NFDG) on
the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan… The top four people
in these meetings are Mullah Omar [the Taliban leader], Osama
bin Laden, Mullah Dadullah and Mullah [Baradar].”
Although the
paucity of reports on bin Laden in the Afghan War logs is testament
to the terror chief’s largely successful efforts at discretion, they
show that as early as 2006, having surmised bin Laden’s location in
or near Abbottabad, US intelligence and its assets on the ground had
repeatedly sighted bin Laden.
From 2003 to
2009, as the few other intelligence reports in the logs reveal, bin
Laden moved around Pakistan routinely, playing a key role in
galvanising and planning terrorist operations. He was certainly not
under house arrest.
2007: NSA confirms bin Laden in Pakistan
According to
top secret National Security Agency (NSA)
documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden, US
intelligence had confirmed bin Laden’s location in Pakistan in 2007,
and been able to track his communication from Pakistan to al-Qaeda
operatives in Iraq and Iran:
“SIGINT [signals intelligence] uncovered a
message from Usama bin Laden (UBL) intended for al-Qa’ida’s #1
man in Iraq… The message was dated 12 February 2007 and was
passed via a communications conduit. The movement of the letter
from Pakistan to Iran provided the US intelligence community
with unique insights into the communications path used by senior
al-Qa’ida leaders in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas
(FATA) of Pakistan to communicate with al-Qa’ida leaders in Iraq
and Iran.”
The
intelligence report on the bin Laden communication — clearly
confirming his residence in Pakistan and homing in on the
“communications path used by senior al-Qa’ida leaders” — was
circulated to the Vice President, the Secretary of the Department of
Homeland Security, and the Attorney General, who gave it “rave
reviews.”
2008–2009: bin Laden’s “villa” in Abbottabad
After the
May 2011 bin Laden raid, renowned ABC News correspondent Christiane
Amanpour
revealed that precise intelligence on bin Laden’s location had
been available much earlier.
She recalled
that during a live interview with Bill Maher in early 2008, she had
told her host that a senior US intelligence officer informed her of
bin Laden’s location in a villa in Pakistan:
“I just talked to somebody very knowledgeable…
This woman who is in American intelligence thinks that he’s in a
villa — a nice comfortable villa in Pakistan.”
When Maher
joked whether the villa was in Cabo, Amanpour replied that bin Laden
was “in Pakistan. Not a cave.”
The detail
is worth noting — the source appeared to be aware of bin Laden’s
location down to the comfort of his building.
India’s
external intelligence service had also provided
specific information to its US counterparts on bin Laden’s
presence in “a cantonment area” — a military or police
quarters — “in a highly urbanised area near Islamabad.” The
intelligence also included “definite information that his [bin
Laden’s] movement was restricted owing to his illness and that it
would have been impossible for him to go to an ordinary hospital. We
told the Americans that only in a cantonment area could he be looked
after by his ISI or other Pakistani benefactors.”
The US did
not show much interest in these revelations, according to a senior
Indian security source.
The main
“cantonment area” nearest to Islamabad is precisely the Pakistani
military garrison city of Abbottabad, which is just 75 miles north
of the capital. Bin Laden’s compound was 800 odd yards from the
Pakistan Military Academy, the equivalent of America’s West Point.
Even
Pakistan’s own government believed that Abbottabad served as an
al-Qaeda haven. According to an official statement from the
Pakistani Foreign Ministry, the ISI had been monitoring bin Laden’s
compound in Abbottabad for years, and was providing specific
intelligence to the US about the compound since 2009.
Abbottabad
generally had been “under sharp focus of intelligence agencies since
2003” due to its role as an al-Qaeda stronghold, according to the
Foreign Ministry
statement:
“The fact is that this particular location [of
bin Laden’s compound] was pointed out by our intelligence quite
some time ago to the US intelligence. The intelligence flow
indicating some foreigners in the surroundings of Abbottabad
continued until mid-April 2011. It is important to highlight
that taking advantage of much superior technological assets, CIA
exploited the intelligence leads given by us to identify and
reach Osama bin Laden.”
Pakistan had
purportedly urged the US to identify the occupants of the compound,
as the US had “much more sophisticated equipment to evaluate and to
assess” what was going on inside.
The CIA and
the White House did not deny that this intelligence was shared by
Pakistan with its American counterparts.
Other
Pakistani ISI sources went further than this official statement in
off-the-record interviews with Pakistani Army officer Brigadier
General Shaukut Qadir. They told Qadir that they had identified the
Abbottabad compound as a likely terrorist base in July
2008, and asked the CIA to conduct surveillance of the building.
In his book,
Operation Geronimo (2012),
Qadir — who has no ISI affiliation — writes that these ISI sources
were unaware of bin Laden’s presence at the compound at the time,
but confirmed that the building was being investigated for
connections to terrorism. National security journalist Gareth Porter
reports:
“Five different junior and mid-level ISI officers
told Qadir they understood Pakistan’s Counter Terrorism Wing
(CTW) had decided to forward a request to the CIA for
surveillance of the Abbottabad compound in July 2008.”
Abbottabad safe-house
Satellite
photographs show that bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound was not
present in 2001, but appears on images in 2005, confirming it was
built that year.
Yet
according to the
Associated Press, bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad had been
“known” to the US intelligence community “for years” — in what sense
it was known, AP does not clarify:
“The walls surrounding the property were as high
as 18 feet and topped with barbed wire. Intelligence officials
had known about the house for years, but they always suspected
that bin Laden would be surrounded by heavily armed security
guards. Nobody patrolled the compound in Abbottabad.”
According to
one ISI official speaking to the BBC: “Just look at the
house — it sticks out like a sore thumb from a mile off. You’ve been
to Abbottabad — you know how these small towns are. Everybody knows
everything about everybody, and secretive people are routinely
investigated, especially by the police.”
In October
2010, a senior NATO official “with access to some of the most
sensitive information in the NATO alliance” told CNN that both bin
Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri were believed by the
intelligence community “to be hiding close to each other in houses
in northwest Pakistan, but are not together.”
“… al Qaeda’s top leadership is believed to be
living in relative comfort, protected by locals and some members
of the Pakistani intelligence services, the official said.”
This report
suggested that NATO intelligence had pinpointed both bin Laden’s and
al-Zawahiri’s location to particular “houses” in northwest
Pakistan — but, contrary to the Official History, that NATO was
fully aware of their protection by ISI officials. This corroborated
the CIA intelligence extracted from al-Libi between 2005 and 2006 on
the proximity of bin Laden and al-Zawahiri in Abbottabad, under ISI
tutelage.
Therefore,
the evidence is overwhelming that by 2008, the US intelligence
community was in receipt of detailed, specific information from
Indian, Afghan and Pakistani intelligence, locating Osama bin Laden
in a military cantonment area in Abbottabad — and pinpointing the
location of his compound.
Surveillance
If Hersh’s
account is correct, this means that despite all this intelligence
pinpointing the Abbottabad compound, the CIA waited several years
before establishing a safe-house nearby to conduct extensive
surveillance on the premises using telephoto lenses,
eavesdropping equipment, infrared imaging, and radars — only after
walk-in source exposed bin Laden’s concealment in August 2010.
The CIA
also, according to the Official History, deployed dozens of
high-altitude
stealth drones in Pakistani airspace for months before the raid
to capture high-resolution video.
In the
context of the evidence of mounting intelligence pinpointing bin
Laden in the Abbottabad compound, the Official History raises the
following question: Why, in the wake of all the intelligence that
bin Laden was in Abbottabad, and despite receiving the request from
a Pakistani counter-terrorism agency to investigate the Abbottabad
compound in July 2008 — as reported by Brig. Gen. Qadir — did the
CIA wait until late 2010 to do so?
It is
difficult to avoid the conclusion that the CIA inexplicably sat on
intelligence pointing to bin Laden’s presence in the Abbottabad
compound for over two years, and perhaps much longer.
When the CIA
finally began moving into action, the Official History has it that
these efforts were done in such secrecy that even Pakistani
intelligence, which was also monitoring the compound, did not know
about the CIA surveillance operation (despite having requested it in
2008).
And despite
the sophistication of that operation, the Official History has it
that the CIA was never able to
identify Osama bin Laden. Instead, they managed to catch a
glimpse of a man taking regular walks through the compound’s
courtyard, who roughly fit bin Laden’s description, and whom
intelligence officers dubbed “the pacer.”
Former
Canadian Army officer and electronic communications specialist Prof.
Sunil Ram, who teaches members of the US Armed Forces at the
American Military University in West Virginia,
dismissed the idea that such sophisticated surveillance could
not have identified bin Laden:
“The public farce around the months of CIA
surveillance to determine if it was bin Laden defies logic.”
This is
backed-up by Jack Murphy, an eight year US Army Special Operations
veteran, in a 2011 article for Sofrep, the news and analysis website
run by former US military and special operations officers:
“In reality, Bin Laden was not tracked to the
Abbottabad compound by following his courier network. That story
was ludicrous when it was first leaked and got even sillier in
Bigelow’s movie. Also, the use of stealth aircraft and reports
of UAVs conducting electronic jamming operations to obscure the
radar signature of the helicopters was also a myth. The truth is
that the highest levels of the Pakistani government knew that
the [SEAL Team Six’s] Red Squadron assaulters were coming. At
least two Pakistani Generals were informed, and this is how
Operation Neptune Spear was able to take place so deep into
Pakistan without the Pakistani military scrambling fighter jets
or troops to the scene.”
Murphy’s
confirmation that “at least two Pakistani Generals” had advanced
knowledge of the raid, corroborates Hersh’s identification of former
Army chief Gen. Ashfaq Kayani and ISI director Gen. Ahmed Shuja
Pasha, as the senior Pakistani generals complicit in the raid.
Corroboration for these assertions comes in the form of an
ISI source who spoke to Robert Fisk, one of the few journalists
who had interviewed bin Laden face-to-face. “I called up one of the
[ISI] men I know last night,” Fisk told al-Jazeera, “and put it to
him, ‘look, you know, this house was very big, come on, you must
have have had some idea.’
“What he said to me was ‘sometimes it’s better to
survey people than to attack them.’
“And I think what he meant was that as long as
they knew where he [bin Laden] was, it was much better to just
watch rather than stage a military operation that may bring
about more outrages, terrorism, whatever you like to call it.”
If the ISI
had long monitored the compound, and requested the CIA to monitor it
too, the idea that they had no idea the CIA was also monitoring it
beggars belief.
Indeed,
New York Times journalist
Carlotta Gall, who has spent over a decade reporting from
Afghanistan and Pakistan, cites Pakistani officials who give a
completely
different picture of bin Laden’s presence at the compound,
consistent with the sparse reports already discussed from Wikileaks’
Afghan War logs.
Far from
being holed-up to avoid detection, or under house arrest, bin Laden
“occasionally traveled to meet aides and fellow militants,” wrote
Gall.
One
Pakistani security official told her:
“Osama was moving around. You cannot run a
movement without contact with people.”
Gall added:
“Bin Laden traveled in plain sight, his convoys
always knowingly waved through any security checkpoints.”
She cites a
Pakistani Interior Ministry report (conducted therefore by
Pakistan’s domestic intelligence agency, Intelligence Bureau), which
confirmed in 2009 that bin Laden had met with Qari Saifullah Akhtar,
leader of the group Harkat ul-Jihadi al-Islami, the first
Pakistan-based jihad network formed during the Afghan war against
Soviet occupation. According to the Pakistani intelligence report,
the two discussed militant operations against Pakistan.
The meeting,
and its monitoring by Pakistani authorities, is significant for
several reasons. It shows that Hersh’s narrative that bin Laden was
under “house arrest” in Pakistan under the alleged arrangement with
the Saudis is incorrect. If that arrangement existed, Pakistani
authorities had guaranteed bin Laden’s freedom of movement in the
country.
The report
also corroborates the sources reviewed above asserting that Pakistan
had been closely monitoring the Abbottabad compound for some years.
But those sources did not acknowledge the implied kicker of Gall’s
piece: the positive identification of Osama bin Laden inside
Pakistan by certain government authorities in 2009, and the
meticulous surveillance of his movements by Pakistani intelligence.
Fateful triangle: US, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan
The Official
History claims that the bin Laden raid was fundamentally and solely
a US operation.
Hersh’s
account claims that events leading up to the raid revealed that bin
Laden was under house arrest by the Pakistani ISI, with Saudi
financial support.
But the
preceding reports indicate that bin Laden was never under house
arrest, that his residency in Abbottabad had been confirmed to US
intelligence at least three years before the raid, and that his
meetings with militants were being routinely tracked by Pakistani
intelligence — which was urging the CIA to investigate the
Abbottabad compound as of July 2008.
Yet a
further extraordinary report discredits the official and Hersh
accounts even further. Both Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, who were
harbouring bin Laden in the first place, were also conducting
extensive surveillance of bin Laden’s movements in the months
leading up to the raid, on behalf of the US.
In other
words, in early 2011 the US was working directly with the same Saudi
and Pakistani governments that had been protecting bin Laden in
Abbottabad.
The report
was authored two months before the raid by the late Syed Saleem
Shahzad, Pakistan bureau chief for the Hong Kong-based
Asia Times and the Italian
news agency, Adnkronos. Shahzad was described by the
New Yorker as
being “known for his exposés of the Pakistani military.”
In his
Asia Times
article, Shahzad reported that the CIA had launched a series of
covert operations in the Hindu Kush mountains of Pakistan and
Afghanistan after receiving “strong tip-offs that al-Qaeda leader
Osama bin Laden has been criss-crossing the area in the past few
weeks for high-profile meetings.” Bin Laden had been tracked to
“Kunar and Nuristan for meetings with various militant commanders
and al-Qaeda bigwigs.”
US
“decision-makers have put a lot of weight on the information on Bin
Laden’s movements as it has come from multiple intelligence
agencies, in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia.” Intelligence
officials now believe they have “top-grade accounts as they come
from the inner circles of militant camps.”
Intelligence
officials, Shahzad wrote, were “‘stunned’ by the visibility of Bin
Laden’s movements, and their frequency, in a matter of a few weeks
in the outlawed terrain of Pakistan and Afghanistan.”
He cited
“leaks” from the “inner circle” of the militant group, Hizb-e-Islami
Afghanistan (HIA), confirming that weeks earlier, bin Laden had met
with the group’s leader, “Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the legendary Afghan
mujahid… in a militant camp in thick jungle on the fringes of Kunar
and Bajaur provinces in Afghanistan.”
During the
Cold War, Hekmatyar’s HIA received the largest share of military and
economic assistance from Saudi Arabia, supervised by the CIA and
delivered through the Pakistani ISI.
After the
post-9/11 invasion of Afghanistan, HIA was among the many insurgent
groups, including the Taliban, that targeted NATO troops and Afghan
security forces. But in the years preceding the bin Laden raid, this
changed as the US sought ways to end the insurgency and stabilise
Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai regime. Saleem Shahzad noted that:
“Hekmatyar’s representatives of the HIA have been
in direct active negotiations with the Americans and have also
brokered limited ceasefire agreements with North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) forces in Afghanistan.”
Journalist
Edward Girardet, in his book
Killing the Cranes: A Reporter’s Journey through Three Decades of
War in Afghanistan (2011), reports that in 2009, he was told by
former HIA supporters in Kunar, eastern Afghanistan, that “Hekmatyar
was operating from the Pakistani frontier tribal agencies of Mohmand
and Bajaur with the support of the ISI.”
Thus,
throughout this period, bin Laden’s movements appear to have been
heavily monitored by the ISI, which even knew precise details about
bin Laden’s discussions with Hekmatyar. Shahzad refers to
“intelligence sources” that were “privy to the meeting in Bajaur,”
where the two terror chiefs discussed a future “grand strategy.”
Corroboration for Shahzad’s report of Osama bin Laden being on the
move comes from an interview of a senior official of the Taliban
faction, the Haqqani network, by BBC reporter, Syed Shoaib Hasan.
The Haqqani network member
told the BBC that “he met Bin Laden near the town of Chitral two
months ago” — that is, two months before the raid.
Shahzad’s
report flies in the face of claims that bin Laden could not be
identified by CIA surveillance because he never left his compound,
or that he was under perpetual house arrest at the behest of Saudi
Arabia and Pakistan. It also corroborates the other reports showing
that bin Laden had significant freedom of movement, albeit under the
watchful eye of the ISI, and extensive patronage of ISI-sponsored
groups, HIA and the Haqqani network.
But more
strikingly, Shahzad’s report shows that elements of Pakistani,
Saudi, and Afghan intelligence agencies were all involved in
monitoring bin Laden’s movements, and were regularly sharing
intelligence on bin Laden with the CIA. Clearly, though, this
hitherto unacknowledged joint surveillance operation was highly
compartmentalised, and known to only certain specialised units in
these agencies.
Given that
therefore both the Official History and Hersh’s account omit this
revelation, the question must be asked as to how long the US was in
fact cooperating with Saudi and Pakistani intelligence to monitor
bin Laden as he moved back and forth from his base in Abbottabad?
At the end
of May 2011, nearly a month after the bin Laden raid, Shahzad was
tortured and murdered.
A Human
Rights Watch investigation concluded that Shahzad had been
assassinated by the Pakistani ISI. Obama administration officials
later
revealed that classified intelligence proved the culpability of
senior ISI officials in directing the operation.
The fact
that the US government had such intelligence on the inner high-level
workings of the ISI in itself demonstrates the extent of the US
intelligence community’s penetration of the Pakistani agency and its
secrets.
Walk-in?
Under
Hersh’s account, the walk-in provided the breakthrough intelligence
that allowed the US government to begin putting together the
assassination plan against bin Laden.
The evidence
reviewed here shows that the US already had precise intelligence
indicating bin Laden’s presence at the Abbottabad compound since
2008 at latest — yet the CIA failed to act on this information until
an ISI officer walked into the US embassy and spilled the beans to
CIA staff in return for a lucrative reward.
This means
that neither the courier cover-story, nor the ISI walk-in, were the
real sources of intelligence on bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad.
Rather, the numerous reports of his movements across Pakistan to
meet leaders of various militant groups indicate that bin Laden was
identifiable to multiple intelligence agencies months and years
before the raid.
And there is
no avoiding the fact that two months before the raid, information on
bin Laden’s movements had come to the CIA via the intelligence
agencies of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan — the very agencies involved
in the secret operation to protect Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad.
Indeed, the
US had obtained precise information on bin Laden’s movements from
all its main regional allies, including Pakistan.
There are
related anomalies. As national security reporter Gareth Porter
points out, the retired Pakistani military officer, Brig. Gen.
Qadir, found from interviews with locals in the area of bin Laden’s
compound that there was no evidence whatsoever of the compound being
guarded by the ISI, in a manner consistent with Hersh’s account of
bin Laden being held captive. Security forces were nowhere to be
seen guarding the complex.
In fact,
during the course of his investigation, Qadir had also come across
the same ‘walk-in’ story. But Qadir discounted it for being
implausible in the fraught climate of Pakistan’s intelligence world.
“Qadir had picked up the walk-in story,” relates
Porter, “complete with the detail that the Pakistani in question was
a retired ISI officer who had been resettled from Pakistan — from
American contacts in 2011.” In his book, the Brigadier General
writes: “There is no way a Pakistani Brigadier, albeit retired,
could receive this kind of money and disappear.” For such a
betrayal, the ISI’s retaliation would be ruthless and immediate.
This
suggests that the walk-in played a different role to that assumed by
Hersh and his sources: rather than being instrumental in identifying
bin Laden’s location, the walk-in was simply instrumental in
triggering the events leading to his assassination: he blew the
whistle on a highly compartmentalised intelligence operation,
bringing bin Laden’s presence in the heart of Pakistan’s military
intelligence community to the attention of disbelieving CIA staff in
August 2010, and forcing the wider US intelligence community to take
action.
Intelligence asset
Several
compelling accounts confirm that bin Laden’s presence at the
Abbottabad compound was sanctioned at the highest levels of
Pakistani military intelligence. In the
New York Times, Carlotta
Gall reports that the “handling” of Osama bin Laden himself was a
closely-guarded ISI operation, and that bin Laden himself was an ISI
asset.
“According to one inside source, the ISI actually ran
a special desk assigned to handle Bin Laden,” reports Gall.
“I learned from a high-level member of the
Pakistani intelligence service that the ISI had been hiding Bin
Laden and ran a desk specifically to handle him as an
intelligence asset… It was operated independently, led by an
officer who made his own decisions and did not report to a
superior. He handled only one person: Bin Laden. I was sitting
at an outdoor cafe when I learned this, and I remember gasping,
though quietly so as not to draw attention. (Two former senior
American officials later told me that the information was
consistent with their own conclusions.) This was what Afghans
knew, and Taliban fighters had told me, but finally someone on
the inside was admitting it. The desk was wholly deniable by
virtually everyone at the ISI — such is how supersecret
intelligence units operate — but the top military bosses knew
about it, I was told.”
This is
possible due to layers of careful compartmentalisation, not just
between the ISI and other government agencies, but also within the
ISI itself.
“In 2007, a former senior intelligence official
who worked on tracking members of al-Qaeda after Sept. 11 told
me that while one part of the ISI was engaged in hunting down
militants, another part continued to work with them.”
It is
therefore not surprising that other ISI officials, although they
knew that a raid was occurring, had
no idea that the target was bin Laden. “They gave us a grid and
told us that they were going there after ‘a high-value’ target.
There are certain protocols when that happens — we take care of the
outer security, while they go in and do their work. We certainly
didn’t know who exactly was in there.” The same official, like US
Army special operations veteran Jack Murphy, dismissed claims that
the US had jammed Pakistani radars.
But certain
senior ISI officials were involved. Corroborating Hersh’s account,
in a report for Asia Times
from 12th May 2011, Syed Saleem Shahzad
reported that “Pakistan’s military and intelligence community
was fully aware of and lent assistance to the United States mission
to get a high-value target in Abbottabad.” But Shahzad’s sources
also told him: “What it did not know was that it was Osama bin Laden
who was in the crosshairs of US Special Forces.”
In reality,
Shahzad’s sources did not know, but according to Hersh’s and
Murphy’s sources, two Pakistani Generals did know bin Laden was the
target. And Hersh’s sources specifically identified the officials as
Pakistani Army chief Ashfaq Kayani and ISI Director-General
Lieutenant Gen. Ahmad Shuja Pasha.
Shahzad’s
previous report from before the raid had already put paid to the
idea that bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad was unknown to
Pakistani intelligence. It showed that Saudi and Pakistani
intelligence were tracking bin Laden’s meetings with militants on
behalf of the CIA months before the raid — indicating that bin
Laden’s presence and movements from his base in Abbottabad were
known to senior ISI officials.
Shahzad’s
May piece further corroborated Hersh’s account in reporting meetings
between Pasha, Kayani, and US officials. Before the raid, he wrote,
the US and Pakistan were negotiating a deal under which the US would
have the unilateral right to conduct attacks on “high-value targets”
like bin Laden and his deputy Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri, in return for
“better economic deals” for Pakistan and “a greater role in the
Afghan end game.”
To
facilitate the deal, “top Saudi authorities” were called in,
including “Prince Bandar bin Sultan,” to play a “pivotal role in
fostering a new strategic agreement of which the Abbottabad
operation was a part.”
As we shall
see later, Saudi Arabia and Prince Bandar’s role in facilitating the
agreement under which the Abbottabad raid took place is highly
significant. During this negotiation period, bin Laden was already
under extensive surveillance by US, Saudi, Pakistani, and Afghan
intelligence.
Then in
early April, ISI chief Ahmad Shuja Pasha visited the US to discuss
“intelligence cooperation.” Shahzad’s security sources told him that
“the new security arrangement” being negotiated between the US,
Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, “was high on the agenda.”
According to
Hersh, a retired US government official was at that April meeting
with Pasha: “Pasha told us at a meeting in April that he could not
risk leaving bin Laden in the compound now that we know he’s there.
Too many people in the Pakistani chain of command know about the
mission… Of course the guys knew the target was bin Laden and he was
there under Pakistani control.”
In the last
week of April, Shahzad reported, the US’s top man in Afghanistan,
Gen. David Petraeus, met with Pakistani military chief Gen. Kayani
“and informed him of the US Navy Seals operation to catch a
high-value target. The deal was done.”
By Hersh’s
account, as early as January 2011, according to his retired US
official, Kayani had agreed to a lethal strike on bin Laden: “He
eventually tells us yes, but he says you can’t have a big strike
force. You have to come in lean and mean. And you have to kill him,
or there is no deal.”
That the ISI
had a super secret unit dedicated solely to the task of ‘handling’
Osama bin Laden — and that “former senior American officials” had
concluded the same — raises a host of issues. If bin Laden had a
dedicated ISI handler, by definition he was operating as an agent on
behalf of the ISI. And at least some senior US officials were aware
of this.
If that is
the case, then it also raises questions about the very nature of the
intelligence sharing arrangements by which Pakistan was passing on
intelligence to Americans relating to Abbottabad and Osama bin
Laden.
How much did
the Americans know about this operation? Reports from the Pakistan
Foreign Ministry, Brigadier General Qadir, Syed Saleem Shahzad,
among other sources, showed that Pakistan was routinely sharing
intelligence on bin Laden’s movements and the Abbottabad compound
with the US.
If Pakistani
intelligence on bin Laden was, indeed, compartmentalised to a secret
unit within the ISI under the authority of the most senior ISI
officials, then the sharing of intelligence on his movements with
the US (which apparently occurred about three months before the
raid) could only have occurred as part of the same ‘handling’
arrangement, and with the approval of those officials — who would
have exerted absolute control on how the ISI dealt with all
intelligence related to bin Laden.
In internal
emails obtained by Wikileaks, Stratfor’s Vice President for
Intelligence Fred Burton — former deputy counter-terrorism chief at
the State Department — told colleagues about information available
to US government investigators:
“Mid to senior level ISI and Pak Mil with one
retired Pak Mil General that had knowledge of the OBL
arrangements and safe house. Names unk [unknown] to me and not
provided. Specific ranks unk to me and not provided. But, I get
a very clear sense we (US intel) know names and ranks.”
The
leaked email stated that up to a dozen Pakistani ISI officials
knew of bin Laden’s Abbottabad safe-house, and were in routine
contact with the al-Qaeda chief.
In the
context of the evidence already explored, the Stratfor
correspondence suggests that contrary to official denials, US
authorities not only knew that senior Pakistani military
intelligence officers were harbouring Osama bin Laden since 2004,
they knew that they were harbouring him in his Abbottabad compound
for years, and by early 2011 they were working with the ISI in
ongoing surveillance of the terror chief and his movements outside
Abbottabad.
Collusion
Carlotta
Gall’s account of bin Laden as an ISI intelligence asset is further
corroborated by astonishing
statements from former Pakistani Army and ISI chief, Gen.
Ziauddin Butt, at a conference in October 2011.
Butt told
conference attendees that bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad was in
fact a safe-house used by a Pakistani intelligence agency, the
Intelligence Bureau. He identified retired Intelligence Bureau chief
Brigadier Ijaz Shah as the official responsible for keeping bin
Laden there, with the knowledge and approval of Gen. Musharraf. If
true, this would suggest that Brig. Ijaz Shah was bin Laden’s
appointed ISI ‘handler.’
Lending
credence to his claims, Pakistani intelligence officials had warned
journalists present at the conference not to report Gen. Butt’s
explosive revelations.
The
Intelligence Bureau connection is crucial, as in the same
NYT report, Gall refers to
a Pakistani Interior Ministry Intelligence Bureau report documenting
the surveillance of bin Laden’s movements outside Abbottabad to meet
militants in 2009. This means that the intelligence unit that housed
him was also the intelligence unit that monitored him.
Other
senior ISI sources have also confirmed that bin Laden’s
Abbottabad mansion was a safe-house used by the ISI. And a
local police officer familiar with the compound said that the
location was being used by Hizbul Mujahedeen, a militant group
operating in disputed Kashmir, which has received extensive military
and financial support from the ISI.
According to
Pakistani security specialist Arif Jamal, writing for the Washington
DC-based Jamestown Foundation’s
Terrorism Monitor journal, “As an ISI officer he [Ijaz Shah]
was also the handler for Omar Saeed Sheikh, who was involved in the
kidnapping of Wall Street
Journal journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002. Omar Saeed Sheikh
surrendered to Brigadier Shah who hid him for several weeks before
turning him over to authorities.”
Jamal refers
to an interview in 2000 with a Pakistani security official, who
disclosed Shah’s relationship with Ahmed Omar Sheikh Saeed on
condition of anonymity.
Brig. Shah’s
connection to Omar Sheikh Saeed is deeply troubling. Sheikh Saeed
was not simply accused of murdering Daniel Pearl — he was al-Qaeda’s
finance chief during the 9/11 attacks. After 9/11, Indian
intelligence officials
confirmed that then ISI director Gen. Mahmoud Ahmad had ordered
Omar Saeed to wire at least $100,000 to the chief 9/11 hijacker,
Mohammed Atta.
As I
documented in my books The War
on Truth (2005) and The War
on Freedom (2002), which was among 99 books selected for the
9/11 Commissioners to use as part of their inquiries, multiple US
intelligence investigations
corroborated the Indian allegations. US authorities had further
confirmed that Sheikh Saeed had wired as much as $500,000 if not
more to several of the 9/11 hijackers — all at the behest of the ISI.
Despite this, US authorities took no measures to designate or
extradite either Sheikh Saeed or his ISI boss, Mahmoud Ahmad.
As former
British Cabinet Minister Michael Meacher
observed: “It is extraordinary that neither Ahmad nor Sheikh
have been charged and brought to trial on this count [of financing
9/11]. Why not?”
In his
memoirs, In the Line of Fire,
Gen. Musharraf revealed that Omar Sheikh Saeed was a MI6 agent who
had executed certain missions on behalf of the British intelligence
agency, before travelling to Pakistan and Afghanistan where he met
Osama bin laden and Mullah Omar.
Sheikh Saeed
was first recruited by MI6 while at the London School of Economics,
recounts Musharraf. The agency persuaded him to join anti-Serb
demonstrations during the Bosnia conflict, and later sent him to
Kosovo to join the jihad. Musharraf argues that at some point, Saeed
likely became “a rogue or double agent.”
Musharraf’s
claims are no doubt self-serving, deflecting from the
widely-reported fact that Sheikh Saeed was an ISI asset. But they
chime with other facts in the public record.
Former US
Justice Department prosecutor John Loftus, for instance, who held
top secret national security clearances, has confirmed that MI6 was
working with leaders of the now banned British group al-Muhajiroun — Omar
Bakri Mohammed, Abu Hamza and Haroon Rashid Aswat (who would later
become bin Laden’s bodyguard) — to recruit British Muslims to fight
in Kosovo in 1996.
Sheikh Saeed
would have been part of that MI6-backed funnel. Others in
Musharraf’s government were convinced that Sheikh Saeed was also a
CIA asset. In a little-noted article on Saeed’s murky background in
March 2002, the Pittsburgh
Tribune-Review reported that: “There are many in Musharraf’s
government who believe that Saeed Sheikh’s power comes not from the
ISI, but from his connections with our own CIA.” Officials believe
that “Saeed Sheikh was bought and paid for.”
Some senior
US intelligence officials agree. John Newman, a former executive
assistant to the director of the NSA who spent 20 years in the US
Army Intelligence and Security Command, pointed out that despite
Sheikh Saeed’s kidnapping of British citizens and related terror
offenses, he faced no indictments from the US or Britain, and was
even able to travel back to London in January 2000. He had also
kidnapped American citizens, but faced no indictments from the US
until after 9/11.
“Did the United States not indict Saeed Sheikh
because he was a British informant? Did the agency [CIA] receive
information provided by Saeed Sheikh from British or Pakistani
intelligence?” asked Newman rhetorically at a 2005 Congressional
briefing on the findings of the 9/11 Commission Report.
“This would help explain why Saeed Sheikh was not
indicted and escaped justice for his crimes and traveled freely
around England… If the foregoing analysis has any merit, Western
intelligence agencies were receiving reports from a senior
al-Qaeda source. Once again, however, al-Qaeda had used Western
intelligence to accomplish its own mission. Saeed Sheikh was
probably a triple agent.”
Ahmed Omar
Sheikh Saeed’s role in the 9/11 attacks on behalf of the head of the
ISI, Newman noted, was completely ignored by the 9/11 Commission
Report. But the revelation that Sheikh Saeed was likely a triple
agent of the ISI, CIA and MI6, also raises questions about bin
Laden’s protection by the ISI after 9/11. The failure of US
authorities to out Sheikh Saeed’s 9/11 role suggests that his
freedom of movement before 9/11 was very much enabled by what Newman
describes as his “triple agent” status.
In other
words, bin Laden and Sheikh Saeed — apparently a CIA and MI6
asset — shared the same ISI handler, Brig. Ijaz Shah.
Newman
argues, essentially, that the Sheikh Saeed story shows how US and
British determination to maintain an intelligence asset in the heart
of bin Laden’s operations, gave him and his associates an
extraordinary freedom of impunity that blew up in our faces on 9/11.
Our
jihadists
The
Saudi-Pakistani arrangement at Abbottabad provided bin Laden with
significant freedom of movement, and an ability to continue
maintaining direct contact with al-Qaeda militants. Yet it also
coincided with the acceleration of a covert US strategy launched to
empower Sunni jihadists.
Around the
middle of the last decade, the Bush administration decided to use
Saudi Arabia to funnel millions of dollars to al-Qaeda affiliated
jihadists, Salafi militants, and Muslim Brotherhood Islamists. The
idea was to empower these groups across the Middle East and Central
Asia, with a view to counter and rollback the geopolitical influence
of Shi’ite Iran and Syria.
Seymour
Hersh himself
reported in detail on the unfolding of this strategy in the
New Yorker in 2007, citing
a range of US and Saudi government, intelligence and defence
sources. The US-backed Saudi funding operation for Islamist
militants, including groups affiliated with or sympathetic to
al-Qaeda, was active as far back as 2005 according to Hersh — the
same year that bin Laden’s move to Abbottabad under Saudi financial
largess was approved.
The thrust
of Hersh’s 2007 report has been widely confirmed elsewhere,
including by several former senior government officials speaking
on-the-record.
The
existence of a US
covert programme of this nature was corroborated by ABC News
that very year.
Then in
2008, a US Presidential Finding
disclosed that Bush had authorised an “unprecedented” covert
offensive against Iran and Syria, across a huge geographical area
from Lebanon to Afghanistan, permitting funding to anti-Shi’a groups
including Sunni militant terrorists like the pro-al-Qaeda Jundullah,
Iranian Kurdish nationalists, Baluchi Sunni fundamentalists, and the
Ahwazi Arabs of southwest Iran. The CIA operation would receive an
initial influx of $3–400 million.
Although
spearheaded under Bush, the strategy escalated under the Obama
administration.
Alastair Crooke, a retired
30-year MI6 officer and Middle East advisor to EU foreign policy
chief Javier Solana, explained that the US-Saudi alliance would
generate a resurgence of al-Qaeda jihadists:
“US officials speculated as to what might be done
to block this vital corridor [from Iran to Syria], but it was
Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia who surprised them by saying that
the solution was to harness Islamic forces. The Americans were
intrigued, but could not deal with such people. Leave that to
me, Bandar retorted.”
This
regional strategy, Crooke said, involved the sponsorship of
extremist Salafis in Syria, Libya, Egypt, Lebanon, Yemen, and Iraq
“to disrupt and emasculate the [Arab Spring] awakenings that
threaten absolute monarchism.”
The
continuation of the strategy under Obama was also confirmed by
John Hannah, former national security advisor to Vice President
Dick Cheney, who remarked that:
“Bandar working as a partner with Washington
against a common Iranian enemy is a major strategic asset.”
Mobilising
extremist Sunnis “across the region” under “Saudi resources and
prestige,” wrote Hannah, can “reinforce US policy and interests…
weaken the Iranian mullahs; undermine the Assad regime; support a
successful transition in Egypt; facilitate Qaddafi’s departure;
reintegrate Iraq into the Arab fold; and encourage a negotiated
solution in Yemen.”
The
activation of the
strategy was perhaps most clearly confirmed in a 2008 US
Army-sponsored RAND Corp report, which recommended eight strategies
for prosecuting the ‘war on terror’ in the region.
Among them
was a recommendation to exploit “fault lines between the various SJ
[Salafi-jihadist] groups to turn them against each other and
dissipate their energy on internal conflicts,” for instance between
“local SJ groups” focused on “overthrowing their national
government” and transnational jihadists like al-Qaeda. The US “could
use the nationalist jihadists to launch proxy IO [information
operation] campaigns to discredit the transnational jihadists.”
The US could
also “choose to capitalise on the Shia-Sunni conflict by taking the
side of the conservative Sunni regimes in a decisive fashion and
working with them against all Shiite empowerment movements in the
Muslim world… to split the jihadist movement between Shiites and
Sunnis.” The US would need to contain “Iranian power and influence”
in the Gulf by “shoring up the traditional Sunni regimes in Saudi
Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan.”
Although
this would mean empowering al-Qaeda’s chief financial backers among
Sunni states, the widening Sunni-Shia sectarian conflict would
“reduce the al-Qaeda threat to US interests in the short term,” by
diverting Salafi-jihadist resources toward “targeting Iranian
interests throughout the Middle East,” especially in Iraq and
Lebanon, hence “cutting back… anti-Western operations.”
The same US
Army-backed RAND report
confirmed that this “divide and rule” strategy had already been
activated in the region, specifically in Iraq:
“Today in Iraq such a strategy is being used at
the tactical level, as the United States now forms temporary
alliances with nationalist insurgent groups that it has been
fighting for four years… In the past, these nationalists have
cooperated with al-Qaeda against US forces.”
Bringing all
this together implies that in the same year that the Pakistani ISI
received funding from Saudi Arabia to harbour bin Laden in his
custom-built mansion in Abbottabad, the US had covertly partnered
with Saudi Arabia to support al-Qaeda affiliated groups as part of a
highly clandestine divide-and-rule strategy to counter Iranian
influence.
Quoting
Hersh from his 2007 report, a US government consultant told him that
Prince Bandar bin Sultan and other Saudis had assured the White
House that:
“… they will keep a very close eye on the
religious fundamentalists. Their message to us was ‘We’ve
created this movement, and we can control it.’ It’s not that we
don’t want the Salafis to throw bombs; it’s
who they throw
them at — Hezbollah, Moqtada al-Sadr, Iran, and at the Syrians,
if they continue to work with Hezbollah and Iran.”
Thus, the
key US contact in Saudi Arabia responsible for the covert
‘redirection’ strategy at its origination was Prince Bandar bin
Sultan, then Secretary-General of Saudi’s National Security Council.
As reported
by Saleem Shahzad, Prince Bandar — who knew bin Laden personally
from their Cold War days — had also met with US and Pakistani
officials in the months leading up to the bin Laden raid.
In other
words, Prince Bandar was the same senior Saudi official who helped
negotiate the agreement under which the Abbottabad operation would
be executed in 2011, and who had been tapped under both Obama and
Bush to accelerate Saudi funding of Islamist militants to counter
Iran.
Yet US
officials knew that Bandar was linked directly to the events of
9/11. In tapping the Prince to assist with the anti-Iran strategy
and the Pakistan-bin Laden strategy, US officials knowingly
collaborated with a Saudi royal who had financed the 9/11 hijackers.
In his book
Intelligence Matters
(2004), Senator Bob Graham, co-chair of the Congressional Inquiry
into 9/11, discusses the contents of a top secret CIA memo dated 2nd
August 2002 about two 9/11 hijackers, Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf
Alhazmi. The CIA memo concluded that there is “incontrovertible
evidence that there is support for these terrorists within the Saudi
government.”
The 28 page
section of the Congressional report including discussion of the CIA
memo was classified, but some of its contents were leaked, and
related issues revealed in press reports. Early in 2000, when
Almidhar and Alhazmi arrived at Los Angeles airport, they were
picked up by a fellow Saudi, Omar al-Bayoumi, who gave them $1,500
in cash, moved them into his apartment building, and helped them
apply for flight school.
Al-Bayoumi
worked for Dallah Avco, a Saudi-based airline chaired by Prince
Bandar’s father, Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz. The firm is a major
contractor for the Saudi Ministry of Defense and Aviation.
In the
following months, al-Bayoumi and his associates received regular
cashier’s cheques of around $2,000 a month, totaling tens of
thousands of dollars. These came from Prince Bandar and his wife,
Princess Haifa bint Faisal. Both Bandar and his wife claimed the
money was donated for charitable purposes (one payment track was
made after one of al-Bayoumi’s associates requested assistance from
the Saudi embassy for thyroid treatment), and that they had no idea
it was being diverted to fund the 9/11 hijackers.
After 9/11,
British authorities questioned al-Bayoumi in London about the Saudi
money trail to bin Laden’s hijackers. They had discovered secret
papers with the private phone numbers of senior Saudi government
officials concealed beneath the floorboards of his flat in London.
The investigation went nowhere: al-Bayoumi was soon released, and
disappeared into Saudi Arabia.
This
disturbing background shows that Prince Bandar was connected to the
9/11 attacks, but protected by US authorities; that he was the White
House’s point-man to launch the wider US-Saudi covert arrangement to
fund al-Qaeda affiliated groups (coinciding with bin Laden’s move to
Abbottabad with Saudi funding); and that by 2011, he was privy to
Pakistan’s harbouring of al-Qaeda’s leader and the US-Pakistan
arrangement that led to his assassination.
Throughout
this period, senior US intelligence officials have said that Osama
bin Laden was actively
engaged in directing the very al-Qaeda terror activity that
Saudi Arabia was busy financing, while also financing bin Laden’s
ISI-controlled base in Abbottabad.
“This compound in Abbottabad was an active command
and control center for al Qaeda’s top leader and it’s clear… that he
was not just a strategic thinker for the group,” said one official.
“He was active in operational planning and in driving tactical
decisions.”
That claim
is consistent with information on bin Laden’s activity contained in
the Afghan War logs. The overwhelming implication, and the
consistent role of Prince Bandar in the alignment of these events,
is that the US-backed Saudi programme to “control” who bin
Laden-affiliated Salafis “throw bombs” at, gave bin Laden a
free-hand to accelerate his terrorist activity under the auspices of
the ISI.
The US-led
strategy had, it seems, enabled
the Saudi-Pakistani arrangement with the al-Qaeda founder as a
matter of geopolitical convenience to undermine Iran.
The
great escape
Credible
reports of bin Laden’s connections to the Haqqani network also point
to the role of the Saudi and Pakistani states in protecting bin
Laden.
Two months
before the US raid on his Abbottabad mansion, a BBC interview with
senior officials of the Haqqani network confirmed a meeting with
Osama bin Laden in Chitral in the northwest Pakistan frontier
region.
The Haqqani
network points directly to the ISI. In his
testimony before the US Senate in September 2011, then outgoing
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, said
that “credible intelligence” confirms that “the Haqqani network…
acts as a veritable arm of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence
agency.”
This
intelligence goes back many years. In 2008, for instance,
confidential NATO reports and US intelligence assessments circulated
among senior White House officials confirmed that Pakistan’s ISI at
the highest levels had provided military support to Taliban
insurgents, particularly the Haqqani network. Gen. Ashfaq Kayani,
who according to Hersh was complicit in protecting bin Laden in
Abbottabad, had been identified as sanctioning provision of military
aid to insurgents affiliated to bin Laden.
In fact, US
and British intelligence analyses from just before 9/11 right up
until the bin Laden raid not only show that the ISI has supported
such al-Qaeda linked insurgent groups in Pakistan and Afghanistan
throughout that period, but that US and British officials were well
aware of the same.
Various
credible sources report that the Haqqani network, with assistance
from the ISI, had played a key role in bin Laden’s escape from the
Tora Bora complex in 2001 into Pakistan in the wake of the US
bombing campaign.
In the
New Yorker, Dexter Filkins
cites Afghanistan’s intelligence chief from 2004 to 2010,
Amrullah Saleh, who told him that ISI operative Syed Akbar Sabir had
escorted bin Laden from Chitral to Peshawar in Pakistan: “We
believed that he was part of the ISI operation to care for bin
Laden.”
Another ISI
agent, Fida Muhammad, had confessed to the Afghans that he had been
escorting Haqqani insurgents from Pakistan into Afghanistan to fight
the NATO occupation for the previous decade. But his most
“memorable” job was in December 2001, when he participated in a
major ISI covert operation — sanctioned at the highest levels — to
help al-Qaeda fighters escape from Tora Bora.
There were
dozens of ISI teams operating on the ground at the time who
successfully evacuated as many as 1,500 militants from Tora Bora and
other jihadist camps.
In his
New Yorker story, Filkins
quotes former CIA counter-terrorism officer Bruce Riedel on former
ISI chief Nadeem Taj, whom he described as being “deeply involved
with Pakistani militants, particularly those fighting against
India.”
But as
Filkins observes:
“Before taking over the ISI, Taj was the
commandant of the Pakistani military academy in Abbottabad. That
is, he was the senior military official in Abbottabad at the
time that American officials believe bin Laden began living
there. Taj retired from the Pakistani Army in April, just days
before the raid in Abbottabad. Attempts to track him down in
Pakistan were unsuccessful.”
According to
a 2009 Senate Committee on Foreign Relations
report into the Tora Bora debacle, US intelligence had confirmed
bin Laden’s presence among al-Qaeda fighters, during the December
2001 bombing campaign — a matter confirmed by the official history
of the US Special Operations Command.
Yet the
commander of the operation, General Tommy Franks, Vice President
Dick Cheney, and other senior officials claimed falsely that “the
intelligence was inconclusive about the Al Qaeda leader’s location.”
Gen. Franks
to this day justifies the decision on an outright lie: “I have yet
to see anything that proves bin Laden or whomever was there.”
In reality,
the Senate report proves that White House and military officials
knew bin Laden was there, and were warned repeatedly that the
failure to mobilise US forces to block the wide-open routes into
Pakistan would result in his escape.
Henry
Crumpton, head of special operations for the CIA’s counter-terrrorism
division and chief of its Afghan strategy, had told the Bush
administration that “we’re going to lose our prey [bin Laden]”
without bringing in US marines already stationed in Kandahar to
block those routes.
“The decision not to deploy American forces to go
after bin Laden or block his escape,” the Senate report noted, “was
made by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his top commander,
General Tommy Franks.”
“The implications of these statements are that bin
Laden was alive and was allowed to escape,” said Prof. Sunil Ram of
the American Military University, writing in the respected Canadian
defence journal, Frontline
Defence.
Just a month
earlier, the Pentagon was directly complicit in secret Pakistani
military airlifts into Kunduz which rescued beleaguered Taliban
and al-Qaeda fighters from America’s elite Delta Force units on the
ground. A CIA official and a Delta Force military analyst told
Seymour Hersh for the New Yorker
that “the Administration ordered the United States Central Command
to set up a special air corridor to help insure the safety of the
Pakistani rescue flights.”
The
operation was purportedly undertaken to save Pakistani military and
intelligence operatives on the ground in Kunduz, whose deaths under
US bombing would jeopardise the political survival of Pakistan’s
then leader, Gen. Pervez Musharraf.
Yet on 21st
November, in response to questions from journalists about reports of
the airlifts, Rumsfeld denied the Pentagon’s involvement while also
inadvertently revealing his knowledge of the operation’s foreseeable
consequences:
“Any idea that those people should be let loose
on any basis at all to leave that country and to go bring terror
to other countries and destabilise other countries is
unacceptable.”
In other
words, senior White House and Pentagon officials were complicit in
ISI operations that foreseeably “let loose” Laden’s Taliban and
al-Qaeda fighters to “go bring terror to other countries.”
According to
Prof. Ram, who was a senior military strategy advisor to the Saudi
Royal family for over a decade:
“The Battle of Tora Bora obviously raises the
question why was he [bin Laden] allowed to escape? … if US
Special Forces had killed or captured him in Tora Bora in 2001,
the basic justification for the Global War on Terror would have
been eliminated and the subsequent (and false) claims of links
between al-Qaeda and Iraq would have been meaningless.”
He points
out that many of the “expansionist policies” subsequently pursued by
the Bush administration as outlined by the neoconservative
think-tank, the Project for a New American Century, would have had
little traction had al-Qaeda been routed and bin Laden killed in
Tora Bora.
“The US would have been hard pressed to convince
anyone of the need to invade Iraq or continue the war in
Afghanistan,” concludes Ram, who was previously an editor at
SITREP, the defence journal
of the Royal Canadian Military Institute, where he sat on the
Defence Studies Committee. “Thus, logic dictates that bin Laden was
allowed to escape into Pakistan in late 2001.”
The Haqqani
network, which appeared to have been integral to the post-9/11 ISI
operation “to care for bin Laden,” to quote Afghanistan’s former
intelligence czar, Amrullah Saleh, also remains connected to Saudi
Arabia.
The latest
batch of confidential
Saudi diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks contains documents
revealing that the Saudi ambassador to Pakistan met in February 2012
with Nasiruddin Haqqani, the jihadist group’s chief fundraiser at
the time, and the son of Jalaluddin Haqqani, the group’s founder.
Nasiruddin was later killed in a shooting in Islamabad in November
2013.
The
documents show that Nasiruddin asked the Saudi ambassador to convey
to the Saudi king his father’s wish for treatment in a Saudi
hospital, and mentions that Jalaluddin Haqqani holds a Saudi
passport. Another document shows that a senior Saudi foreign
ministry official then recommended that the treatment go
ahead — although it remains unclear whether it actually did.
Previous US
diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks confirmed US intelligence
has been
well aware for years that Taliban and Haqqani network
fundraisers and associates were routinely residing in or travelling
to Saudi Arabia, where they engaged in fundraising activities.
While
documenting apparent Saudi cooperation with the US to disrupt terror
support activities inside Saudi Arabia, the new leaked Saudi cables
show that Saudi officials at the highest level are still courting
the same militant networks abroad.
In other
words, senior Saudi and Pakistani government officials until well
after the bin Laden raid have retained close ties to the Haqqani
network — the same network which under ISI purview facilitated bin
Laden’s escape from Tora Bora in 2001, and with which bin Laden met
just months before the May 2011 raid.
The
split
But despite
bin Laden’s ongoing involvement in directing militant activity,
often in liaison with groups supportive of al-Qaeda like the Haqqani
network, there can be little doubt that his role in al-Qaeda had
significantly reduced.
According to
Pakistani tribal sources cited by Gareth Porter who were familiar
with bin Laden’s presence in South Waziristan shortly after 9/11,
bin Laden had been increasingly sidelined by other al-Qaeda leaders,
including his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri.
But Porter
vastly overstates his case in arguing that bin Laden’s role in
al-Qaeda had become virtually mute — an idea put forward by the US
West Point Military Academy’s Counter Terrorism Center which
released the
bin Laden files.
The latest
detailed analysis of the documents from the Abbottabad compound show
that bin Laden had
overseen the dispatch of al-Qaeda forces across the Middle East
from Yemen to Libya, where for instance one of his deputies informed
him of “an active Jihadist Islamic renaissance underway in Eastern
Libya (Benghazi, Derna, Bayda and that area).”
The
Abbottabad documents also confirmed that in the months before bin
Laden’s death, al-Qaeda’s leadership and sponsors in the Pakistani
ISI were — as with Hekmatyar — actively seeking some sort of
accommodation with the Americans.
The
documents recorded former ISI chief Hamid Gul telling his al-Qaeda
contacts: “We are putting pressure on them [America] to negotiate
with al-Qaeda . . . [and] that negotiating with the Taliban separate
from al-Qaeda is pointless.”
But the most
intriguing revelation is that Bin Laden’s deputy, Atiyah Abd
al-Rahman, told bin Laden in early 2011 that
UK security services were in contact with Libyan al-Qaeda
operatives in Britain:
“British Intelligence spoke to them (these Libyan
brothers in England), and asked them to try to contact the
people they knew in al Qaeda to inform them of and find out what
they think about the following idea: England is ready to leave
Afghanistan [if] al Qaeda would explicitly commit to not moving
against England or her interests.”
This
proposal had been relayed through an al-Qaeda operative in Libya,
then in hiding in Iran, who was in contact with “some Libyan
brothers in England.”
It should be
noted that in 2007, documents leaked by Snowden showed that the NSA
had acknowledged tracking a “communications path” from Osama bin
Laden in Pakistan to al-Qaeda leaders in Iraq and Iran.
The new
proposal offered a repeat of what British security officials have
described as an informal
‘covenant of security’ with Islamists that had been in place
during the Cold War and through the 1990s.
According to
Lieutenant Colonel Crispin Black, a former UK Cabinet Office
intelligence advisor to the Prime Minister, under the ‘covenant of
security’ Islamist militants would be able to reside unmolested in
Britain and plot to their hearts’ content, as long as they refrained
from targeting Britain or British interests.
Al-Rahman
went on in the letter to explain how he had already responded to the
British proposal:
“I wrote: we can consider the matter and come up
with something appropriate along this vein. I will convey the
idea to the leadership. He may have told the Libyan brothers by
now, and they may have told the British.”
However, bin
Laden was intent on rejecting the proposal. A
letter to al-Rahman from bin Laden dated 26th April 2011 records
the latter’s conviction that UK forces were “sure of being
defeated”:
“Regarding what you mentioned about the British
intelligence saying that England is going to leave Afghanistan
if al-Qaeda promised not to target their interests… I say that
we do not enable them on that, but without slamming the door
completely closed.”
For bin
Laden, the emphasis was on avoiding any such accommodations with the
West, telling al-Rahman: “We would like to neutralise whomever we
possibly can during our war with our bigger enemy, America.”
Al-Qaeda
had, in that context, offered a truce to bin Laden’s Pakistani
benefactors, on condition that they cease cooperation with the US:
“You became part of the battle when you sided with the Americans. If
you were to leave us and our affairs alone, we would leave you
alone.”
Extraordinarily, bin Laden was able to use his position from
Abbottabad to freely threaten Pakistan with further domestic
al-Qaeda terrorist attacks due to the government’s ongoing
coordination with the Americans.
The
documents show that bin Laden remained obsessed with organising a
“large operation inside America [that] affects the security and
nerves of 300 million Americans.”
As for the
Middle East, bin Laden’s 26th April letter further revealed that he
saw the Arab Spring revolutions as an opportunity for the emergence
of populist Islamic governments, largely led by the Muslim
Brotherhood. He urged Rahman to warn “our brothers in the regions…
of entering into confrontations with the parties belonging to Islam,
and it is probable that most of the areas will have governments
established on the remnants of the previous governments, and most
probable these governments will belong to the Islamic parties and
groups, like the Brotherhood and the like.”
Al-Qaeda
jihadists should cooperate with the emerging governments, “as the
current conditions have brought on unprecedented opportunities and
the coming of Islamic governments that follow the Salafi doctrine is
a benefit to Islam.”
The spate of
meetings bin Laden had pursued with militants across Pakistan in the
months before the raid were the terror chief’s efforts to enjoin
that vision and secure the support of comrades. Hekmatyar, for
instance, whom bin Laden had met according to Shahzad Saleem, was
already working on accommodating with the Americans. Bin Laden,
however, was clearly against this strategy, and wanted to Hekmatyar
and others to instead pursue his ‘big tent’ strategy to focus on
hitting the US hard.
In contrast,
bin Laden’s second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, had a very
different strategy of response to the Arab revolutions. Inspired by
his personal experience of the intolerance to “Islamic militancy”
under US-backed Muslim regimes during the Cold War, Shahzad Saleem
reported that in the months prior to bin Laden’s death:
“Zawahiri therefore promoted the idea of
ideological divides within the Muslim world, and encouraged
revolts and terrorism to polarise societies to such a point of
chaos that they would be unmanageable and amenable to Western
intervention. It was believed that such intervention would open
the gates for a battle between the West and the Muslim world.”
The al-Qaeda
number two“encouraged narrow ideological views in resistance
movements as a strategy to boost revolts against Muslim-majority
states,” thoroughly different to bin Laden’s new policy of a
re-unification between al-Qaeda and other non-violent Islamist
groups.
But
Zawahiri’s approach was “shot down” by other senior al-Qaeda
leaders, including Sulaiman Abu al-Gaith and Saif al-Adel. They
agreed with bin Laden’s vision of al-Qaeda reviving contacts with
old networks with “Muslim Brotherhood and Palestinian groups” to
“join forces with mainstream Muslim groups” and launch a “joint
struggle against Western interests in the Muslim world.”
Betrayal
Zawahiri’s
plan was to play the long-game: rather than focusing on Western
“heartlands” with spectacular operations, he wanted al-Qaeda to
fracture the most strategic regions of the Muslim world, bogging
down Western militaries in prolonged insurgencies that would,
eventually, coalesce into a major confrontation.
Zawahiri’s
vision of polarising Muslim societies along sectarian lines aligned
alarmingly well with the Pentagon’s own regional divide-and-rule
strategies to foster Salafi jihadists as a way to not just undercut
Iran and Syria, but even undermine the potency of democratic
uprisings that threatened to endanger the Gulf regimes. It also, of
course, appeared to reduce the risk of major mass casualty attacks.
Four days
after writing his letter declining the British offer of a renewed
‘covenant of security’, bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound was raided,
and the terror chief killed.
By
facilitating the assassination of Osama bin Laden, US, Saudi and
Pakistani intelligence agencies resolved the internal debate among
the terror group’s leadership. While they aborted bin Laden’s vision
of a united Muslim world hell-bent on destroying the West, in doing
so, they brought to the fore bin Laden’s lieutenant Zawahiri, who
was also under Pakistani protection at the time according to ISI
sources.
In her book
The Wrong Enemy (2014),
Carlotta Gall reports that Afghan national security officials were
informed by a Pashtun tribal elder in 2005 that al-Zawahiri was
“staying as a guest at the house of a senior Pakistani government
official in Kohat” — that official was “the governor of the North
West Frontier province, a retired general, and a Musharraf
appointee.”
The
information was passed on to President Karzai, and given US-Afghan
intelligence sharing arrangements, would likely have been passed on
to the Americans. According to Gall, after the bin Laden raid, “two
American counterterrorism officials told me that the account of
Zawahiri’s hiding place was entirely possible and that they had seen
similar such reports.”
That
protection
continues to this day. “There are indicators that some elements
of the Pakistani government may be protecting Zawahiri,” one US
intelligence official told
Newsweek a year after the raid. “We have reports that he’s been
hanging out in Karachi for brief periods, and we just don’t think
he’s going to be doing that without a lot of people knowing about
it.”
Back in
October 2010, a senior NATO intelligence official told CNN that
alongside bin Laden, Zawahiri’s location had also been determined by
US intelligence, and that both were living “comfortably” in Pakistan
nearby each other, under ISI protection. The revelation indicated
that US intelligence on bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad had also
identified Zawahiri’s location.
The 2008
Pentagon memo on Abu al-Libi had also showed that since 2005, the
CIA was aware that bin Laden and Zawahiri had remained in close
proximity, including during bin Laden’s shift toward Abbottabad.
But the US,
Saudi Arabia and Pakistan had chosen to target bin Laden, alone.
Under
Zawahiri’s watch, al-Qaeda’s activities in the region accelerated
across the region in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, Algeria and
beyond. The upshot of these activities has not been to align with
other Islamist forces, but to accentuate splits within the
Salafi-jihadist movements, and within broader Islamist and Salafi
movements overall.
This has
increasingly ended up serving US geopolitical interests. For
instance, the al-Qaeda-affiliated Libyan Islamic Fighting Group
(LIFG), whose fighters reported directly to various senior al-Qaeda
deputies, played a key role in the rebellion that toppled Col.
Gaddafi, under the
sponsorship and protection of NATO.
A Canadian
intelligence
report from 2009 described the rebel stronghold of eastern Libya
as an “epicentre of Islamist extremism”, from which “extremist
cells” operated in the region. The intelligence report confirmed
that “several Islamist insurgent groups” were based in eastern
Libya, many of whom were also “urging followers to fight in Iraq.”
During
NATO’s
intervention in Libya, al-Qaeda’s integral presence on the
ground as part of the rebellion led Canadian pilots to joke
privately that they were al-Qaeda’s air force, “since their bombing
runs helped to pave the way for rebels aligned with the terrorist
group.”
By the
following year, US-backed support for al-Qaeda affiliated groups
through regional allies — the Gulf regimes and Turkey — focused on
Syria. Saudi Arabia played a lead role in the strategy under the
helm of none other than Prince Bandar, who in 2012 was appointed
Director General of the Saudi Intelligence Agency.
In my
exclusive investigation last month, I explored the startling
implications of a declassified Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA)
report revealing that in its drive to topple Bashar al-Assad’s
regime in Syria, the West oversaw these allies in supporting
Islamist extremist rebels, including “al-Qaeda in Iraq.”
The Pentagon
report
showed that in August 2012, two years before ISIS invaded Iraq,
the DIA had received raw information that the support for al-Qaeda
linked rebels
threatened to spawn a “Salafist Principality” in eastern Syria
that could, further, give rise to an “Islamic State” across Iraq and
Syria.
Three years
down the line, under an ongoing US-backed rebel supply and training
operation, the Saudis, Turks and Qataris are continuing the same
strategy that generated ISIS, by
openly sponsoring an “Islamist-dominated rebel alliance” in
Syria, in which the al-Qaeda-affiliated Nusra front is the major
player.
“It is unlikely we are going to operate side by side
with cadres from Nusra, but if our allies are working with them,
that is acceptable,” said former NATO Supreme Allied Commander, Adm.
James Stavrids. The US is likely to go “pretty far… in terms of
engaging with that coalition.”
In reality,
little has changed since the good old days driving the Soviets from
Afghanistan.
Protection racket
Given bin
Laden’s increasing hostility toward any sort of accommodation with
the Americans before his death, the al-Qaeda founder may well be
turning in his grave at the actions of his successor.
The
assassination of bin Laden has paved the way for the complete
opposite of bin Laden’s grand vision of crumbling Muslim regimes
overtaken by populist “Islamic governments.” Instead, his death has
heralded the resurgence of a new geopolitical alliance between the
West, the Gulf regimes, Turkey, and al-Qaeda.
It is
therefore not surprising that to this day, successive US governments
continue to systematically downplay the extent to which the
governments of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan have deliberately fostered
the infrastructure and support network for Osama bin Laden’s
Islamist terrorist activity — much of which has occurred while in
receipt of extensive Western financial and military aid.
As noted
above, just before publishing its report in 2004, the 9/11
Commission received a
confidential document from a high-level “unimpeachable source”
in Pakistan. The report, commissioned by Zelikow, was damning:
“The imprints of every major act of international
Islamist terrorism invariably passes through Pakistan, right
from 9/11 — where virtually all the participants had trained,
resided or met in, coordinated with, or received funding from or
through Pakistan — to major acts of terrorism across South Asia
and Southeast Asia, as well as major networks of terror that
have been discovered in Europe.”
The document
went so far as to reveal that repeated claims about bin Laden’s
premature death could be traced back to ISI disinformation, put out
to deflect attention from the agency’s complicity in harbouring and
promoting al-Qaeda:
“ISI has consistently sought to deny the presence
of al-Qaida elements in Pakistan, and to mislead US
investigators… This deception has been at the very highest
level, and Musharraf himself, for instance, initially insisted
he was ‘certain’ bin Laden was dead.”
Musharraf,
of course, according to former ISI chief Gen. Ziauddin Butt, was
responsible for approving bin Laden’s protection at the Abbottabad
compound under the jurisdiction of Brig. Ijaz Shah and the Pakistani
Intelligence Bureau.
“ISI issues money and directions to militant
groups, specially the Arab hijackers of 9/11 from al-Qaida. ISI
was fully involved in devising and helping the entire affair.
And that is why people like Hamid Gul and others very quickly
stated the propaganda that CIA and Mossad did it.”
The report
noted that although bin Laden was very much alive, reports of his
being ill are accurate. The terror chief suffered “from renal
deficiency [and] has been periodically undergoing dialysis in a
Peshawar military hospital with the knowledge and approval of ISI if
not of Gen. Pervez Musharraf himself.”
The source
of the report even speculated: “Musharraf may be planning to turn
over bin Laden to President Bush in time to clinch his reelection
bid in November.”
Thus, in
2004, the US government-appointed commission to investigate
9/11 — staffed with former and active government and intelligence
advisors — received startling information that Musharraf and the ISI
were not only harbouring bin Laden and fabricating reports of his
death, but were willing to hand him over to the US to aid with
political point-scoring.
To this day,
this unpublished 9/11 Commission addendum on Pakistan remains
classified.
The US
record on Saudi Arabia is equally damning. The infamous classified
28 pages of the 2002 Congressional Inquiry Report into 9/11 has
been described by the inquiry’s co-chair Senator Bob Graham as
providing shocking confirmation of the role of senior Saudi
officials in not just sponsoring al-Qaeda, but providing specific
financial support to the 9/11 hijackers and the operation itself.
This January, he told a press conference:
“What would you think the Saudis’ position would
be, if they knew what they had done, they knew that the United
States knew what they had done, and they also observed that the
United States had taken a position of either passivity, or
actual hostility to letting those facts be known?”
The US has
turned a blind eye to the Saudi relationship with bin Laden since
the end of the Cold War.
A classified
US intelligence report revealed by journalist Gerald Posner in his
book Why America Slept
(2003), confirmed that the US was fully aware of a secret deal
struck in April 1991 between Saudi Arabia and bin Laden, then under
house arrest in the kingdom. Under the deal, bin Laden could leave
the kingdom with his funding and supporters, and continue to receive
financial support from the Saudi royal family, on one condition:
that he refrain from targeting and destabilising the Saudi kingdom
itself.
After 9/11,
a former head of Taliban intelligence, Mohammed Khaksar, gave sworn
statements to US intelligence alleging that in 1998, Prince
Turki al-Faisal (then Saudi intelligence chief) had renewed this
deal with bin Laden. Saudi Arabia agreed to provide material aid to
the Taliban and al-Qaeda, along with continued funding to bin Laden
through Saudi charities and businesses. In return, al-Qaeda agreed
not to attack Saudi targets.
And in 2005,
when the Saudis were accelerating support to groups linked to
al-Qaeda as part of the Bush ‘redirection’ to counter Iran, bin
Laden was being protected by Pakistani intelligence with Saudi
funding.
Former
Canadian diplomat Prof. Peter Dale Scott, a leading authority on US
covert operations, writes about this nexus in his landmark book
American Deep State (2014),
published by the University of California Press. He argues that US
protection of Saudi Arabia’s terrorism infrastructure boils down to
the existence of “a vital triangle at the heart of the American deep
state, in which oil companies paid Saudi Arabia for oil; Saudi
Arabia paid the US arms industry for planes and weapons, and the
resulting huge arms contracts paid for of-the-books US covert
operations like Iran-Contra.”
This nexus
of power undermines establishment claims that “the wars fought by
America in Asia since 9/11 have been part of a global ‘war on
terror.’” In reality, says Scott, this “pseudowar” has been fought
“in alliance with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Pakistan — precisely the
principal political and financial backers of the al-Qaedist networks
the United States has supposedly been fighting.”
That
compartmentalised nexus of power was responsible for harbouring
Osama bin Laden since the very beginning.
Origins
After 9/11,
the CIA issued a
formal denial of having ever had a direct relationship with bin
Laden:
“Numerous comments in the media recently have
reiterated a widely circulated
but
incorrect notion that the CIA once had a relationship
with Usama Bin Laden. For the record, you should know that the
CIA never employed, paid, or maintained
any
relationship whatsoever with Bin Laden.”
This is
false, but throws light on how the bin Laden operation was
outsourced to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan precisely to enable the US
to deny responsibility.
In 1984, bin
Laden and his mentor, Abdullah Azzam, established the charity front,
Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK) (which means “Services Office”), also known
as al-Kifah, to funnel money, arms and fighters to Afghanistan. Bin
Laden himself
moved to Peshawar, a Pakistani town bordering Afghanistan, to
help run MAK.
The 9/11
Commission Report describes MAK as the “precursor organisation to
al-Qaeda,” but denies that MAK received any assistance from the US
in the context of the war against the Soviets.
Yet as
Michael Moran
reported for MSNBC, “What the CIA bio conveniently fails to
specify (in its unclassified form, at least) is that the MAK was
nurtured by Pakistan’s state security services, the Inter-Services
Intelligence agency, or ISI, the CIA’s primary conduit for
conducting the covert war against Moscow’s occupation.”
The ISI’s
handling of bin Laden’s MAK was done under the rubric of the CIA, by
way of ‘plausible deniability.’ In his book
Prelude to Terror: The Rise of
the Bush Dynasty, the Rogue CIA and the Compromising of American
Intelligence (2005), investigative journalist Joseph Trento,
formerly of CNN’s Special Assignment unit and now at the National
Security News Service, reported:
“Azzam joined forces with bin Laden in operating
a recruiting center — Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK — Services
Office). Though this was all fully known to the CIA, the
Agency’s regional experts asked no questions… CIA money was
actually funneled to MAK, since it was recruiting young men to
come join the jihad in Afghanistan. (This information comes from
a former CIA officer who actually filed these reports; we can’t
identify him here because at the time of the writing of this
book, he was back in Afghanistan as a private contractor).”
Trento goes
on to note that “bin Laden’s opening MAK branch offices in the
United States, Europe, and Asia was applauded by the CIA.” By some
estimates, the MAK network recruited over 25,000 foreign jihadis
into the Afghan war.
MAK opened
up branches in 30 American cities alone. Its New York branch in
Brooklyn was known as the al-Kifah Refugee Centre. Apart from the
CIA, its donors included the Saudi intelligence agency, the Saudi
Red Crescent, the Muslim World League, and private donors, including
Saudi princes, according to the Pakistani journalist, Ahmed Rashid,
in his seminal book, Taliban.
Al-Kifah
routinely operated terrorist training camps inside the US with CIA
approval. According to French journalist Richard Labeviere, former
head of Radio France International and editor of Defence, the
journal of the Paris-based Institute for Higher National Defence
Studies which operates under the authority of the Prime Minister,
al-Kifah even had a training camp in Connecticut, where “recruits
received brief paramilitary training and weapons induction.” Writing
in his book, Dollars for Terror
(1999), Labeviere added that former “active service” members of the
CIA were employed at the camp as “expert consultants.”
Former
Sunday Times investigative
journalist Simon Reeve further reported in his book,
The New Jackals (1999),
that US officials had direct contact with bin Laden. “American
emissaries are understood to have traveled to Pakistan for meetings
with mujaheddin leaders.” He cites a former CIA official who said
that “the US emissaries met directly with bin Laden, and that it was
bin Laden, acting on advice from his friends in Saudi intelligence,
who first suggested the mujaheddin should be given Stingers.”
Those
Stingers went to bin Laden’s colleague Hekmatyar, who commandeered
the bulk of US, Saudi and Pakistani aid to the mujahideen network.
To help run
the most controversial elements of this covert operations programme,
the Pentagon was allowed to establish a new US Army Special
Operations division “to conceal from Congress and the media, and
probably also from other executive agencies, details of covert
overseas operations in Afghanistan and elsewhere and their
financing,” according to former ABC News journalist John K. Cooley
in his classic book, Unholy Wars.
These programmes reported to a group “which the Pentagon never
publicly acknowledged to exist: the Intelligence Support Activity
(ISA).”
The
secret raid
ISA’s highly
compartmentalised Afghanistan operations were code-named ‘Gray Fox,’
and also worked closely with the CIA’s paramilitary Special
Activities Division.
Since then,
the Activity has run under numerous other code-names, the latest of
which is unknown.
Operating
through its own command-and-control structure, the ISA is entirely
free from Congressional oversight, and due to the extreme secrecy of
its operations, even remains opaque to senior White House officials.
In July
2002, as Jeremy Scahill reported in
Dirty Wars (2013), the ISA
was transferred to the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) to
focus on combining surveillance, field interrogations and “the
running of local sources and assets.”
Under the
greatly expanded and newly revamped ISA, as revealed by a 2002
document from the Pentagon’s Defence Science Board, the new ISA
programme under a proposed ‘Pre-emptive Pro-active Operations Group’
(P2OG) would involve “duping al Qaida into undertaking operations”
and attempting to “stimulate terrorists into responding or moving
operations” — that is, essentially, provoking terrorists into
carrying out operations: or in the words of
Los Angeles Times military
affairs analyst William Arkin, “prodding terrorist cells into action
and exposing themselves to ‘quick-response’ attacks by US forces.”
This would
also allow more overt military action against “states/sub-state
actors accountable” for harbouring terrorists. Under JSOC, the
greatly expanded ISA would specialise in cultivating the capacity to
penetrate and manipulate terrorist networks. This would involve
harnessing human intelligence assets inside terrorist networks, and
pushing terrorists to undertake violent acts to expose them to US
counter-attacks.
World
renowned Sahara expert Prof. Jeremy Keenan of the School of Oriental
& African Studies (SOAS), who advises the European Union, US State
Department, and UK Foreign Office on regional security issues, has
shown that P2OG style operations have led to the fabrication of
terrorist activity in the Islamic Maghreb, which has in turn
legitimised a US-dominated counter-terrorism architecture in the
region’s oil-rich areas:
“Algeria’s DRS [Department of Intelligence and
Security], with the complicity of the US and the knowledge of
other Western intelligence agencies, has used Al Qaeda in the
Islamic Maghreb, through the almost complete infiltration of its
leadership, to create a terrorist scenario. Much of the
terrorist landscape that Algeria and its Western allies have
painted in the Sahara-Sahel region is completely false.”
While some
terrorist incidents are “genuine,” he said, “the vast majority were
fabricated or orchestrated by the DRS,” and included incidents such
as “provoking” the indigenous Tuareg “into taking up arms” in
conditions of severe economic and political repression. Keenan’s
analysis has been
borne out by intelligence officials.
The covert
strategy is deeply counter-productive. Rather than addressing the
underlying causes and grievances that fuel terrorism, the strategy
is to continuously infiltrate and provoke groups of terror suspects
to undertake acts of terror, which would then provide the strategic
opportunity to ‘take them out.’
Was bin
Laden’s presence in Pakistan under Saudi-Pakistani protection a
byproduct of the US-led ‘redirection’ P2OG-style strategy to
mobilise Sunni Islamist militants against Iranian influence?
Rumsfeld’s
P2OG vision for the expansion of JSOC and ISA was just the
beginning. His successors Gates and Panetta, both of whom served
under Obama, continued to expand JSOC. With its own “intelligence
division, its own drones and reconnaissance planes, even its own
dedicated satellites,” in Arkin’s words, JSOC has effectively
tripled in size since 9/11.
As of 2013,
its budget was $10.41 billion. According to one former senior JSOC
commander, in 2009, “Obama gave JSOC unprecedented authority to
track and kill terrorists, to ‘mow the lawn.’”
The SEAL,
Delta and CIA units
involved in the bin Laden raid were operating under JSOC’s ISA
programme.
The role of
the ISA (which is now known as Mission Support Activity) in
Afghanistan — including sponsorship of networks linked to bin Laden
during the Cold War, continuing through the tracking and
assassination of the al-Qaeda founder — underscores the extent to
which bin Laden-related operations were heavily compartmentalised
from the wider intelligence community. Information on the operation
was available only to a few senior officials with oversight in JSOC,
and on a need-to-know basis.
Although
then CIA chief Leon Panetta exercised overall command over the
operation, JSOC Commander, Admiral William H. McRaven, had
maintained actual command during the raid.
Yet
contradictions in the official accounts of the bin Laden raid
demonstrate that so far, there are few compelling reasons to believe
the White House’s narrative of the assassination.
Details of
the operation’s execution have been repeatedly chopped, changed,
shifted, and altered, often by White House officials themselves. The
three
different
insider accounts put forward by Navy Seal members who
participated in the raid are all inconsistent.
The fog of
war might explain some of those discrepancies, but what can explain
the contradiction between the claims of two CIA directors about the
raid?
John
Brennan, then National Security Advisor to Obama and now CIA
Director,
told journalists immediately after the raid:
“We were able to monitor in a real-time basis the
progress of the operation from its commencement to its time on
target to the extraction of the remains and to then the egress
off of the target… We were able to monitor the situation in real
time and were able to have regular updates and to ensure that we
had real-time visibility into the progress of the operation. I’m
not going to go into details about what type of visuals we had
or what type of feeds that were there, but it was — it gave us
the ability to actually track it on an ongoing basis.”
Later,
however, then CIA Director Pannetta, who had overall command over
the operation with JSOC, contradicted Brennan in an interview on
PBS:
“Once those teams went into the compound, I can
tell you that there was a time period of almost 20–25 minutes
where we really didn’t know just exactly what was going on. We
had some observation of the approach there, but we did not have
direct flow of information as to the actual conduct of the
operation itself as they were going through the compound. There
were some very tense moments as we were waiting for information.
But finally Adm. [William] McRaven came back and said he had
picked up the word ‘Geronimo,’ which was the code word that
represented they got bin Laden.”
Whichever of
these accounts is true — Brennan’s or Pannetta’s — one of them is a
lie. Based on the ongoing failure to resolve the contradictory
accounts of what actually happened inside the compound, this would
suggest that Pannetta’s account is correct: White House officials,
including Pannetta himself — who was the CIA director at the
time — did not have direct visuals of the conduct of the operation
within the compound (including the actual assassination of bin
Laden). They were basing their claims about the details of the
operation on what they were told about it by those who executed it.
Yet, it
seems, even those who conducted the operation did not seem to have a
clear understanding of what it had involved, resulting in
contradictory versions of the story, many of which went on to be
publicised by Obama administration officials.
Rather than
investigating these bizarre discrepancies about one of the most
important covert operations in US history, White House officials
decided to rush to announce the raid, and to pretend that Obama and
other cabinet members had personally witnessed and verified the
events of that day.
Yet
according to Jack Murphy, a former US Army Senior Weapons Sergeant
in a Military Free Fall team in 5th Special Forces Group who served
in Afghanistan and Iraq:
“Various accounts of the raid itself have
surfaced in recent years, some more accurate than others, none
of them close to telling the full account. Contrary to official
denials, helmet cam video of the raid does exist.”
If the video
feed of the raid itself does exist, why was it not broadcast to
White House officials? Did JSOC keep White House officials in the
dark about the real-time execution of the operation?
So resolute
was JSOC Commander Adm. McRaven’s determination to ensure that
public scrutiny of the bin Laden raid, and events leading up it,
will remain forever locked down, he ordered all government records
relating to the raid to be transferred to the CIA, and deleted from
Pentagon files. This guarantees that no information on the raid can
ever be gained under Freedom of Information Act requests, and that
the real details of the operation will indefinitely remain a
closely-guarded intelligence secret.
The Pentagon
had even attempted to keep that act secret, by
removing mention of it from the final version of an inspector
general report published in June 2013. The move allowed the Pentagon
to deny repeated FOIA requests from the Associated Press for files
about the raid, including copies of the death certificate and
autopsy report for bin Laden, as well as the results of DNA tests to
identify the body.
So far,
there is only one reason to believe the White House’s version of
events regarding the bin Laden raid: it is the White House’s version
of events.
But this
investigation proves decisively that given the fog of lies
surrounding bin Laden, and his relationships with the US, Saudi
Arabia and Pakistan, this is no reason at all.
Analysis of
open sources on the secretive bin Laden raid reveals that the
al-Qaeda terror chief was for nearly a decade after 9/11 being
protected by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, two key US allies in the
‘war on terror.’ Despite mounting evidence of the complicity of
those governments in 9/11 and other anti-Western terrorist activity,
successive US governments have systematically protected the Saudi
and Pakistani regimes from exposure.
For Prof.
Peter Dale Scott, this US protection of, and unwavering alliance
with, al-Qaeda’s chief state-sponsors, is “related to the black hole
at the heart of the complex US-Saudi connection…
“… a complex that involves the oil majors like
Exxon, the Pentagon’s concern with oil and gas movements from
the Persian Gulf and Central Asia, offsetting arms sales, Saudi
investments in major US corporations like Citibank and the
Carlyle Group (the owners of Booz Allen Hamilton), and above all
the ultimate United States dependency on Saudi Arabia, Qatar,
and OPEC, for the defense of the petrodollar.”
As precise
evidence of Pakistan’s harbouring of Osama bin Laden streamed into
the US intelligence community from 2004 onwards, the US response was
not to take measures to pressure Pakistan on turning bin Laden over,
but instead, as of around 2005, to accelerate Saudi support for bin
Laden’s global terror network in a bid to isolate Iran and Syria.
When by 2008, the US intelligence community received specific
intelligence indicating bin Laden’s presence at the Abbottabad
compound, the CIA still failed to act.
By August
2010, when a former ISI officer decided to walk into the US embassy
and come clean to US officials who had no idea about bin Laden’s
concealment, what was once a highly compartmentalised secret became
known to the wider US intelligence community. The White House was
forced to do something about bin Laden. But its primary interest,
from the get-go, was avoiding a scandal.
Whatever was
to be done, the White House needed to ensure that bin Laden would
not sing like a canary on his relationships with the West’s own
allies. Administration officials also needed to avoid public
scrutiny of the US government’s policy of turning a blind eye to
mounting intelligence on how bin Laden was harboured, financed and
protected by US allies, under a wider US-backed covert operations
programme to undermine Iran and Syria.
All those
factors no doubt played a key role in the decision to assassinate
bin Laden, and manufacture a cover-story that would conceal the
damning context of his death from public understanding.
It appears
the final decision was not made until late April 2011 — when a
British proposal to renew a ‘covenant of security’ with al-Qaeda was
rejected by bin Laden. The haste with which the operation was
executed perhaps explains the absurd discrepancies in the
cover-story.
In Scott’s
words: “US security appears to have been hijacked by these deeper
forces, in order to protect terrorists who should have been reined
in. And the governing media have been complicit in concealing this
situation.”
And thus, bin Laden’s execution successfully obscured the wider
context of his state-sponsorship, including longstanding US
complicity in protecting the governments that protected the al-Qaeda
terror chief, before and after 9/11.
Dr Nafeez Ahmed
is an investigative journalist, bestselling author and international
security scholar. A former Guardian writer, he writes the ‘System Shift’
column for VICE’s Motherboard, and is also a columnist for Middle East
Eye.
He is the winner of a
2015 Project Censored Award, known as the ‘Alternative Pulitzer Prize’,
for Outstanding Investigative Journalism for his Guardian work, and was
selected in the Evening Standard’s ‘Power 1,000’ most globally
influential Londoners.
Nafeez has also
written for The Independent, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The
Scotsman, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Quartz, Prospect, New Statesman,
Le Monde diplomatique, New Internationalist, Counterpunch, Truthout,
among others. He is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Faculty of Science
and Technology at Anglia Ruskin University.
Nafeez is the author
of A User’s Guide to the Crisis of
Civilization: And How to Save It
(2010), and the scifi thriller novel ZERO POINT,
among other books. His work on the root causes and covert operations
linked to international terrorism officially contributed to the 9/11
Commission and the 7/7 Coroner’s Inquest.
This exclusive is being released for free in the public
interest, and was enabled by crowdfunding. I’d like to thank my amazing
community of patrons for their support, which gave me the opportunity to
work on this story. If you appreciated it, please
support independent, investigative journalism for the global commons
via Patreon.com, where you can donate as much or as little as you like.
It is unacceptable to slander, smear or engage in personal attacks on authors of articles posted on ICH.
Those engaging in that behavior will be banned from the comment section.
In accordance
with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material
is distributed without profit to those who have
expressed a prior interest in receiving the
included information for research and educational
purposes. Information Clearing House has no
affiliation whatsoever with the originator of
this article nor is Information ClearingHouse
endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)