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[xbhaskarx]

New York Times: Seized Phone Offers Clues to Bin Laden’s Pakistani Links

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The cellphone of Osama bin Laden’s trusted courier, which was recovered in the raid that killed both men in Pakistan last month, contained contacts to a militant group that is a longtime asset of Pakistan’s intelligence agency, senior American officials who have been briefed on the findings say.

The discovery indicates that Bin Laden used the group, Harakat-ul-Mujahedeen, as part of his support network inside the country, the officials and others said. But it also raised tantalizing questions about whether the group and others like it helped shelter and support Bin Laden on behalf of Pakistan’s spy agency, given that it had mentored Harakat and allowed it to operate in Pakistan for at least 20 years, the officials and analysts said.

In tracing the calls on the cellphone, American analysts have determined that Harakat commanders had called Pakistani intelligence officials, the senior American officials said. One said they had met. The officials added that the contacts were not necessarily about Bin Laden and his protection and that there was no “smoking gun” showing that Pakistan’s spy agency had protected Bin Laden.

But the cellphone numbers provide one of the most intriguing leads yet in the hunt for the answer to an urgent and vexing question for Washington: How was it that Bin Laden was able to live comfortably for years in Abbottabad, a town dominated by the Pakistani military and only a three-hour drive from Islamabad, the capital?

“It’s a serious lead,” said one American official, who has been briefed in broad terms on the cellphone analysis. “It’s an avenue we’re investigating.”

The revelation also provides a potentially critical piece of the puzzle about Bin Laden’s secret odyssey after he slipped away from American forces in the Tora Bora region of Afghanistan nearly 10 years ago. It may help answer how and why Bin Laden or his protectors chose Abbottabad, where he was killed in a raid by a Navy Seals team on May 2.

Harakat has especially deep roots in the area around Abbottabad, and the network provided by the group would have enhanced Bin Laden’s ability to live and function in Pakistan, analysts familiar with the group said. Its leaders have strong ties with both Al Qaeda and Pakistani intelligence, and they can roam widely because they are Pakistanis, something the foreigners who make up Al Qaeda’s ranks cannot do.

Even today, the group’s leader, Maulana Fazlur Rehman Khalil, long one of Bin Laden’s closest Pakistani associates, lives unbothered by Pakistani authorities on the outskirts of Islamabad.

Wielding a Militant Tool

Harakat is one of a host of militant groups set up in the 1980s and early ’90s with the approval and assistance of Pakistan’s premier spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, to fight as proxies in Afghanistan, initially against the Soviets, or against India in the disputed territory of Kashmir. Like many groups, it has splintered and renamed itself over the years, and because of their overlapping nature, other groups could have been involved in supporting Bin Laden, too, officials and analysts said. But Harakat, they said, has been a favored tool of the ISI.

Harakat “is one of the oldest and closest allies of Al Qaeda, and they are very, very close to the ISI,” said Bruce O. Riedel, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer and the author of “Deadly Embrace: Pakistan, America, and the Future of the Global Jihad.”

“The question of ISI and Pakistani Army complicity in Bin Laden’s hide-out now hangs like a dark cloud over the entire relationship” between Pakistan and the United States, Mr. Riedel added.

Indeed, suspicions abound that the ISI or parts of it sought to hide Bin Laden, perhaps to keep him as an eventual bargaining chip, or to ensure that billions of dollars in American military aid would flow to Pakistan as long as Bin Laden was alive.

Both the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan, and the panel’s ranking Democrat, Representative C. A. Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland, said this month that they believed that some members of the ISI or the Pakistani Army, either retired or on active duty, were involved in harboring Bin Laden.

Bin Laden himself had a long history with the ISI, dating to the mujahedeen insurgency that the Americans and Pakistanis supported against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Two former militant commanders and one senior fighter who have received support from the ISI for years said they were convinced that the ISI played a part in sheltering Bin Laden. Because of their covert existence, they spoke on the condition that their names not be used.

One of the commanders belonged to Harakat. The other said he had fought as a guerrilla and trained others for 15 years while on the payroll of the Pakistani military, until he quit a few years ago. He said that he had met Bin Laden twice.

Wikipedia page for Harakat-ul-Mujahedeen

 

[xbhaskarx]

More Bin Laden news (AP story for Daily Mail haters):

Bin Laden planned to change the name Al Qaeda because of image problem

Terrorist organisation was killing too many Muslims and the West was winning the PR fight
Name lacked religious element to convince Muslims they were in holy war with the U.S.

As Osama bin Laden watched his terrorist organisation get picked apart, he lamented in his final writings that Al Qaeda was getting a bad reputation and so needed a name change.

His group was killing too many Muslims and the West was winning the public relations fight.

Faced with this challenge, Bin Laden, who hated the United States and decried capitalism, considered a very American business strategy.

Like Blackwater, ValuJet and Philip Morris, Al Qaeda would start afresh under a new name.

The problem with the name Al Qaeda, bin Laden wrote in a letter recovered from his compound in Pakistan, was that it lacked a religious element, something to convince Muslims worldwide that they are in a holy war with America.

Maybe something like Taifat al-Tawhed Wal-Jihad, meaning Monotheism and Jihad Group, would do the trick, he wrote.

Or Jama'at I'Adat al-Khilafat al-Rashida, meaning Restoration of the Caliphate Group.

As bin Laden saw it, the problem was that the group's full name, Al Qaeda al-Jihad, for The Base of Holy War, had become short-handed as simply Al Qaeda.

Lopping off the word 'jihad,' bin Laden wrote, allowed the West to 'claim deceptively that they are not at war with Islam.'

Maybe it was time for Al Qaeda to bring back its original name.

The letter, which was undated, was discovered among bin Laden's recent writings.

 

[xbhaskarx]

CNN: Member of militant group says his group did not help Osama bin Laden

A member of a Pakistani-based militant group is denying a New York Times report that a cellphone found during the raid of Osama bin Laden's compound contains information that links his group to bin Laden.
The member of Harakat-ul-Mujahedeen said he was not aware of support his group gave bin Laden during the years the boss of al Qaeda was hiding out at a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
The statement by the man, who did not want his name used because no one in his group is authorized to speak to the media, differs from a recent New York Times report.

 

[xbhaskarx]

WSJ: Petraeus Named in Bin Laden Documents

Gen. David Petraeus, the president's nominee to lead the Central Intelligence Agency, was the only person Osama bin Laden targeted by name in materials seized in the raid that killed the al Qaeda leader last month.

Gen. Petraeus was "the only named person" in documents that Navy SEALS took from the bin Laden's compound in Pakistan, North Carolina Republican Sen. Richard Burr said Thursday at the general's Senate confirmation hearing.

The senator, a member of the intelligence committee, didn't say whether the bin Laden documents specified that al Qaeda had a plan to try to kill Gen. Petraeus. But Mr. Burr suggested the general would be wise to bring a security detail with him to Langley.

"There will be agency-provided security," Gen. Petraeus responded.

Members of the intelligence committee were briefed on classified details of the raid. An aide to Sen. Burr said that while Gen. Petraeus, who now commands all allied forces in Afghanistan, was the only official mentioned by name in the bin Laden cache, others, including the president, were mentioned by title.

 

[DanteFox]

he lamented in his final writings that Al Qaeda was getting a bad reputation and so needed a name change.

trololololol.

As bin Laden saw it, the problem was that the group's full name, Al Qaeda al-Jihad, for The Base of Holy War, had become short-handed as simply Al Qaeda.

Lopping off the word 'jihad,' bin Laden wrote, allowed the West to 'claim deceptively that they are not at war with Islam.'

interesting. So he really believes that we're at war with an entire religion?

 

[Neuromancer]

I wonder what network he was on

 

[LaserBuddha]

interesting. So he really believes that we're at war with an entire religion?

It's advantageous for him, and any other extreme mullah or whoever who states as much.

 

[Azih]

A problem with the "War between civilizations' nonsense that gets tossed around in the media is that is a bullshit narrative that the extremists themselves are trying to promote... it's just that they style it as a "War on Islam" and use it as a rallying cry.

 

[nemesun]

I wonder what network he was on

AT&T no doubt.

 

[ShinobiFist]

Getting a bad rep???? I wonder why, Bin Laden.*SMH*