WASHINGTON, May 7, (Agencies): The compound in Pakistan where US forces killed Osama bin Laden was an active command center from which he directed al-Qaeda, a senior intelligence official said on Saturday as he released videos showing bin Laden watching himself on tape and rehearsing speeches.
The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said information carted away from the compound by US forces following Monday’s raid represented the largest trove of intelligence ever obtained from a single terrorism suspect.
“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,” the official said. “He was active in operational planning and in driving tactical decisions.”
The official released five video clips of bin Laden taken from the compound, most of them showing the al-Qaeda leader, his beard dyed black, evidently rehearsing the videotaped speeches he occasionally distributed to his followers.
One video segment, however, showed a gray-bearded bin Laden in a more casual setting wrapped in a blanket and apparently wearing a ski cap while watching videotapes of himself. The official said the personal nature of the videos was further evidence that the man killed in the raid was bin Laden.
The official said bin Laden’s body had been confirmed in several different ways, including identification by a woman at the compound, facial recognition methods and matching against a DNA profile with a likelihood of error of only 1 in 11.8 quadrillion.
Al-Qaeda acknowledged bin Laden’s death on Friday as well, and the official said it was “noteworthy that the group did not announce a new leader, suggesting it is still trying to deal with bin Laden’s demise.”
The official said US intelligence assumed Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s No. 2 leader, was likely to assume control of the organization but that he was disliked by some members.
“To some members of al-Qaeda he’s extremely controlling, is a micromanager and is not especially charismatic,” the intelligence official said.
An initial review of the information taken from the compound showed that bin Laden continued to be interested in attacking the United States and “appeared to show continuing interest in transportation and infrastructure targets,” the official said.
“The materials reviewed over the past several days clearly show that bin Laden remained an active leader in al-Qaeda, providing strategic, operational and tactical instructions to the group,” the official said. “He was far from a figurehead. he was an active player, making the recent operation even more essential for our nation’s security.”
Trip
President Barack Obama’s promised trip to Pakistan this year, once seen as a reward for a key ally in the fight against terrorism, is now a looming headache for the White House as it tries to determine whether the government in Islamabad was complicit in allowing Osama bin Laden to live for years within the country’s borders.
Obama told Pakistani officials in the fall that he planned to travel there in 2011, in part to soothe concerns that the president was favoring Pakistan’s neighbor and archrival, India, by visiting there first. White House spokesmen questioned this week by The Associated Press refused to say whether Obama still planned to go.
In the hours after bin Laden’s killing by a US special forces team in Pakistan, John Brennan, Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, left the topic open. “I’m not going to address the president’s schedule,” he said. “I think there’s a commitment that the president has made that he is intending to visit Pakistan. A lot depends on availability, scheduling.”
The decision is of enormous strategic and symbolic importance to both countries. A presidential trip would signal a continued US commitment to its complicated, yet necessary, relationship with Pakistan, a country that is not only integral in dealing with terrorism, but will also play a key role in the US troop drawdown in neighboring Afghanistan.
Canceling the visit could be seen as a sign of US mistrust of Pakistan’s handling of extremists within its borders — as underscored by the news that bin Laden lived in what Brennan himself called “plain sight” in a neighborhood home to many in the Pakistani military.
Karl Inderfurth, a former assistant secretary of state who traveled to Pakistan with then President Bill Clinton, said the White House should hold off making any decisions about Obama’s travel until the tensions that have heightened since bin Laden’s death have eased.
“I don’t think that responsible officials on either side want to inject into that situation all that is required for a presidential visit, including safety and security, said Inderfurth, now a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The Pakistanis know they are sitting atop a very volatile situation.”
Obama aides had never publicly set a date for the president’s visit to Pakistan, and it’s unlikely they will even if he does go there. Because of security concerns, Obama would probably travel unannounced and under heavy security, as Vice President Joe Biden did earlier this year. Obama has traveled to Iraq and Afghanistan under similar circumstances.
The US has spent years and billions of dollars trying to coax Pakistan to be a more willing partner in the fight against terrorism, offering aid to its military and trying to bolster weak political leaders. But there have always been questions about how committed Pakistan is to that effort — questions that only increased after bin Laden’s death.
Some in Congress say the fact that bin Laden may have been hiding in a comfortable compound near Islamabad for up to six years is proof that Pakistan is an unreliable partner and are calling for ending or reducing the $1.3 billion in aid the US sends each year to Pakistan.
For its part, Pakistan’s army has acknowledged the shortcomings in its efforts to find bin Laden but also threatened to review cooperation with Washington if the US forces continue to penetrate Pakistani airspace without permission.
Obama has canceled a foreign trip before, but under far different circumstances. In 2010, he twice postponed a planned visit to Indonesia and Australia to deal with pressing domestic issues. He eventually made it to Indonesia, while Australia is still waiting for its visit.
Resign
Pakistan’s elected leaders on Saturday came under mounting pressure to resign in the wake of the US commando operation that killed Osama bin Laden not far from the capital Islamabad.
As the covert operation piled embarrassment on Pakistan’s civil and military leadership, the leader of the parliamentary opposition demanded that President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani resign.
“The operation tramples on our honour and dignity, and the president and prime minister must either give an explanation or resign,” Chaudhry Nisar Ali told reporters.
“The government is keeping silent and there appears to be nobody to respond to propaganda against Pakistan,” he added, saying that people in the country were feeling “insecure” after the covert US mission.
The fact that bin Laden was living in a garrison city less than a mile from a top military academy has fanned US suspicions that elements of Pakistan’s intelligence services may have known his whereabouts and been protecting him.
“Those who are responsible must admit and quit,” said Ali.
He also criticised the country’s powerful intelligence agencies, saying that Pakistani institutions had “deviated from their real role”.
Cricket hero turned budding opposition leader Imran Khan and Shah Mehmood Qureshi, a ruling party lawmaker sacked as foreign minister earlier this year, have joined the chorus for Zardari and Gilani to resign.
The president, prime minister and army chief of staff, General Ashfaq Kayani, held talks Saturday to discuss “the present situation in its totality”.
According to Pakistan’s official account of events surrounding the raid, Kayani was briefed after the operation by chief US military officer Mike Mullen several hours before US President Barack Obama telephoned Zardari.
An official statement later said the prime minister would brief the nation in a speech at parliament on Monday. It did not give a time.
Slammed
Former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf has slammed the United States for violating Islamabad’s sovereignty in carrying out the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, a media report said Saturday.
The former military strongman told the expatriate Pakistan community in Dubai that all “peace loving people” should be happy that bin Laden was killed, but no Pakistani accepted the violation of their sovereignty.
“...no country will accept such a violation by the US, which undermines Pakistan’s sovereignty, army and intelligence,” Musharraf was quoted as saying in The National daily. “This is not acceptable to any Pakistani individual.”
However, Musharraf insisted that Pakistan and the US must work together to eliminate terrorism and urged that there should not be a showdown between the two.
“The relationship between Pakistan and the US has not been at its best for a while now, but to defeat al-Qaeda and the Taleban, which is now our biggest threat, this relationship should not develop into confrontation,” he said.
Gaza’s Islamist rulers Hamas on Saturday broke up a Salafist protest against the killing of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden .
Dozens of Salafists — conservative Islamists who have clashed with Hamas — gathered in Gaza City’s main square holding up posters of bin Laden and chanting “We warn you America, we warn you Europe.”
Some banners read “We are all your soldiers Osama” and “Osama is alive inside us”.
Hamas police forces cordoned off the square, stopped protesters from marching through the streets and ordered them to leave.
Hamas’s head in Gaza Ismail Haniyeh had denounced bin Laden’s killing as an assassination “of an Arab holy warrior”.
Analysts said he was trying to cool tensions with Salafist groups who consider Hamas too moderate and call for a fundamentalist version of Islam based on the faith followed by its founders.
Shabaab
Somalia’s al-Qaeda-linked rebels vowed on Saturday to avenge the killing of Osama bin Laden and said his death would not hurt their fight to topple the country’s Western-backed government.
Analysts have said bin Laden’s death is unlikely to dampen the insurgency waged by Somalia’s al Shabaab militants, who are regrouping amid infighting among the country’s politicians after a recent government offensive.
After news broke of bin Laden’s death in Pakistan some al Shabaab combatants in the Somali capital Mogadishu wore white as a sign of grief, residents said.
“We shall redouble our jihad and we shall overpower our enemies. Osama is not the first martyr, may God rest his soul,” al Shabaab spokesman Sheikh Ali Mohamud Rage told reporters on Saturday.
“We shall never divert from the path of Sheikh Osama and we shall continue the jihad till we taste the death our brother Osama faced, or achieve victory and rule the whole world,” he said in the capital Mogadishu.
Al Shabaab is battling to overthrow the government and impose its own harsh version of sharia law on the nation, although its predominately nationalist agenda is also coloured by clan rivalries and money-making rackets.
Relieved
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she was “relieved” over the killing of Osama bin Laden, a report said Saturday, after she drew fire for previously saying she was pleased at his death.
“Bin Laden was the leader of an international terrorist network who sponsored monstrous crimes. We can and should be relieved he will no longer harm anyone,” Merkel told Passauer Neue Presse daily in an interview.
Merkel said after US commandos shot dead the al-Qaeda leader: “I am pleased that it was possible to kill bin Laden.”
Several figures distanced themselves from the comments, including some from within her own conservative party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU).
Hamburg judge Heinz Uthmann even filed a criminal complaint against Merkel for “endorsing a crime” and described her comments as “disgraceful”.
In the same report Saturday, Merkel also defended the presence of German soldiers in Afghanistan amid a renewed debate on Germany’s military role in the country.
Plan
The United States drew up a plan to kill Osama bin Laden in 2007 in Afghanistan’s Tora Bora region, former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice said Friday, confirming a New York Times report.
The administration of George W. Bush considered bombing a meeting of al-Qaeda leaders during the summer of 2007, in what would be the last chance to kill bin Laden before the 2008 presidential election, the Times reported.
Rice, in an interview with ABC News to be broadcast Sunday, confirmed the information.
“There was supposedly this meeting that would take place, perhaps higher level enough for him to come, but in the end it didn’t materialize,” Rice told ABC.
Washington thought the al-Qaeda chief would leave his hideout from somewhere in Pakistan to attend the meeting, reported the Times, citing military officers and former government officials who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The meeting was to be held in the mountainous region of Tora Bora, along the Pakistani border, which was bombed in late 2001 by the United States. Bin Laden was believed to be hiding in a network of caves in Tora Bora after the Sept 11 attacks on the United States.
“It was the best intelligence we’d had on him in a long time,” a senior military officer told the newspaper.
The US military prepared a massive bombing operation, and set the plan in motion. Bombers were half-way to their target when commanders called them back because of doubts of bin Laden’s presence and the risk of civilian casualties.
Seven years
Bin Laden may have lived in Pakistan for over seven years before being shot dead by US forces, senior Pakistani security officials said on Saturday, a disclosure that could further anger key ally Washington over the presence of enemy number one in the country.
One of bin Laden’s widows told Pakistani investigators that he stayed in a village for nearly two and a half years before moving to the nearby garrison town of Abbottabad, where he was killed on Monday.
The wife, Amal Ahmed Abdulfattah, told investigators earlier that bin Laden and his family had spent five years in Abbottabad, where one of the most elaborate and expensive manhunts in history ended.
“Amal (bin Laden’s wife) told investigators that they lived in a village in Haripur district for nearly two and a half years before moving to Abbottabad at the end of 2005,” one of the security officials told Reuters on condition of anonymity.
Abdulfattah, along with two other wives and several children, were among 15-16 people detained by Pakistani authorities at the compound after the raid.
Pakistan, heavily dependent on billions of dollars of US aid, is under heavy pressure to explain how bin Laden could have spent so many years undetected a few hours drive from its intelligence headquarters in the capital.
Suspicions have deepened that Pakistan’s pervasive Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy agency, which has a long history of contacts with militant groups, may have had ties with bin Laden — or that at least some of its agents did. The agency has been described as a state within a state.
Pakistan has dismissed such suggestions and says it has paid the highest price in human life and money supporting the US war on militancy launched after bin Laden’s followers staged the Sept 11, 2001, attacks on America.
Security officials said Pakistan had launched an investigation into bin Laden’s presence in the South Asian country seen as critical to stabilising neighbouring Afghanistan.
“It is very serious that bin Laden lived in cities (in Pakistan)... and we couldn’t nail it down fully,” said one of the officials.
Pakistani leaders were already facing staggering problems before revelations that bin Laden was in their backyard raised new questions about their commitment to fighting militancy.
Al-Qaeda-linked Taleban militants who seem to stage suicide bombings at will remain a major security threat despite several military offensives against their bases in the forbidding mountainous border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The economy is stagnant and the government must impose politically unpopular reforms to keep money from an $11 billion International Monetary Fund loan flowing to Pakistan.
Pakistanis are growing impatient with high food prices and poor services and an education system that is so flawed that many parents are forced to send their children to Islamic seminaries that spread hard-line ideologies that fuel militancy.
Some attention may shift to Chak Shah Mohammad, where bin Laden’s wife said he lived before shifting to his last hideout.
The small village of mostly brick clusters of three or four houses also contains cave-like dwellings previously inhabited by the poor that are now being used to keep animals.
People there, like in other areas, expressed disdain for Pakistan’s powerful military because bin Laden had spent so much time in Pakistan without being caught or killed.
Such criticism was rare before bin Laden’s death put Pakistan under the international spotlight.
“It’s a weakness of our rulers, military and intelligence that he (bin Laden) was in Abbottabad and they didn’t know that,” said Qazi Shaukat Mehmood, who like other residents highly doubts that bin Laden could have lived in Chak Shah Mohammad unnoticed for any length of time.
“I’m here for more than 20 years. I never saw any unusual activity. I don’t believe this is true. It must be some kind of joke.”
That would please Pakistani officials.