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[The Independent, U.K.] [Click Here for Jumbo Version] The Frontier Post, Pakistan Osama Episode PlacesSafety of Pakistan's Nuclear Assets in Peril "Firstof all, it has given tremendous grist to our detractors, who are campaigning topaint Pakistan as the epicenter and state sponsor of global terror. Secondly,it has opened the gates to the Americans, to not only intensify their droneincursions, but to mount ground raids on our territory." EDITORIAL May 3, 2011 Pakistan - The Frontier Post - Home Page (English) The doing in of Osama binLaden is certainly a momentous episode, although it's highly questionable that itwill enfeeble al-Qaeda. He was long ago reduced to a spiritual inspiration,cloaking his blood-soaked campaigns in religious garb. In reality, the movementhas never been monolithic. It has always been a conglomerate of regional andnational groups, each with its own agenda, and all given to violence andbloodletting to perpetuate their designs. Even the commonly repeated legendof Dr. Aymanal-Zawahiri's role is a stretch. He may be known as al-Qaeda's militarycommander and chief of operations, and he may be considered an existentialthreat to Pakistan for openly calling for its destruction, but each group thatruns under the generic name of al-Qaeda has its own mastermind, commanders, cadres,sources of funding and weapons, and chain of command and control. So even if al-Zawahiri iseliminated, al-Qaeda's bloody movement will continue unless the causes it feedson are removed, such as the Palestinian and Kashmir imbroglios, Westernanti-Muslim hate campaigns and the bolstering of repressive regimes inthe Muslim world by the West. This would marginalize the extremists from the nationalmainstream. Nonetheless, Osama's killing isa huge prize for President Barack Obama. Notwithstanding the doubting Thomases,unwilling to believe it was Osama that was killed, the death of the terroristmastermind gives a tremendous boost to Obama's bid to recapture the WhiteHouse. For the most part, the American people have joyously accepted theirgovernment's claim. But be that as it may, the binLaden episode puts Pakistan in dire straits both domestically and externally. Domestically,it has triggered very disturbing questions in the minds of the people. First, theyare deeply flabbergasted as to why our intelligence agencies were so ignorant abouthis location: he was holed up not in a secluded area, but in a densely populatedresidential area of a bustling city - Abbottabad - and for as long as threeyears. Also, Pakistanis are horrifiedthat American Special Forces - Navy SEAL commandoes - flew unmolested deep insideour territory in four helicopters, and were engaged in battle for about two hours. Theirraid on bin Laden's hideout was just a stone's throw from an army garrison and Pakistan'spremier training academy. And yet the intrusion drew no response either fromthe Army or Air Force. Perhaps the American raidersor their controllers jammed Pakistan's radar. With a military budget greaterthan the entire planet's combined, they possess the state-of-the-art in weaponryand technology. But what so disconcerts people is that while the U.S. raidcontinued for hours - in such close proximity to our military installations - there wasno reaction. So while this episode has seriously dented the military's publicimage, it has simultaneously stirred fears regarding the security of our preciousnuclear assets, and the possibility of foreign assault. Externally, the episode has createdgigantic problems.
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Nile Gardiner Nile Gardiner is a Washington-based foreign affairs analyst and political commentator. He appears frequently on American and British television and radio, including Fox News Channel, CNN, BBC, Sky News, and NPR. May 2nd, 2011 6:02  President Obama announces the death of Osama Bin Laden (Photo: EPA) In historic scenes of jubilation, thousands of people are celebrating the death of Osama bin Laden in front of the White House tonight. The architect of 9/11, the murderer of thousands of innocents, and one of the most barbaric figures on the face of the earth has finally been taken out. This is a great day for the United States and for the free world, and a message to Islamist terrorists that the enemies of freedom will be hunted down. It is also a powerful reminder of the determination of the West to strike back against those who seek to threaten it. There can be no doubt that this is a massive blow not only to the al-Qaeda network,… Read More April 30th, 2011 5:31 
If further evidence were needed of the decline of American network television – aka the “mainstream media” or MSM - look no further than ABC The View's dumbed down and crass coverage of the royal wedding. The Emmy-award winning show is watched by a large audience on weekday mornings, and its hosts on Friday included Oscar-winning actress Goldie Hawn. One of the The View's co-hosts yesterday, Joy Behar, a controversial liberal “comedian” with her own show on CNN Headline News, thought it would be immensely funny to mock the 85-year old Queen as “a bumble bee with a drinking problem” simply because she was wearing a yellow dress to the wedding of her grandson Prince William. Here is what she said while watching footage of the Queen entering Westminster Abbey – the video can be viewed here:
“A bumble… Read More
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May 04 2011, 10:03 pm - Replied by: grapevine
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Tim Stanley Dr Tim Stanley is a research fellow in American History at Royal Holloway College. He is working on a biography of Pat Buchanan. His personal website is www.timothystanley.co.uk and you can follow him on Twitter at timothy_stanley. May 2nd, 2011 11:27  Osama's death has the feel of a peculiarly American-style of justice. Finally, America has her revenge. As crowds gather outside the White House to celebrate, even the anti-war Huffington Post finds oddly political cheer in the news that Osama is dead, while USA Today leads with “Bin Laden Death Could Boost Markets”. Obama has prevailed; the patient, grisly War on Terror seems justified. And all of this has the feeling of a peculiarly American kind of justice, the kind that no other country in the world would probably either execute, or enjoy, quite so well. America is a nation of laws, but beneath all that fine sentiment about procedure there is a stronger hunger for natural justice. One is put in mind of the great, 19th-century historian Hubert Howe Bancroft, whose work on the Wild West discovered and defended an American tradition of personal, violent justice. Lynch law and vendettas, he wrote, were the informal exercise of a people's will to obtain a verdict that the state was currently powerless to achieve. Europeans had been emasculated by their reliance upon formal law and bureaucracy. It was in the American wilderness that the individual was once again freed to pursue their own kind of rough justice. The assassination of Osama is as American as the shootout that killed Billy the Kid. It is a personal Wild West drama writ-large on the global stage. In the past decade, some Americans have talked about “putting Osama on trial”. But those that did inevitably sounded slightly less desirous of justice than those who talked of personally putting a bullet between his eyes. For Osama must not just be caught, the public had decided, but be hunted down and killed. Even John Kerry, the figurehead for doubt and indecision in 2004, promised that much. But this kind of raw justice has been hard to achieve. Ever since America's war on Islamism began (and it's been going in some form or other since the late 1970s), she has been defeated by her size. The USA is a big, lumbering whale; al-Qaeda is a small, persistent piranha, nibbling at her side. Actions like the bombing of Tripoli of 1986 or the strikes on Sudan in 1998 killed few, missed their actual targets and angered the Arab world. They had cathartic value, but made little strategic sense. Al-Qaeda escaped and prospered, too small and flexible to be caught by America's gigantic military machine. But today, justice has finally been had. The outlaw swings from the yardarm, the townspeople rejoice, the sheriff may get re-elected after all. And in this moment, all the suffering of the past ten years seem justified. The beast is dead. All the horrors of Hell await him.
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Reward, Don't Punish CIA Interrogators While the Obama administration deservedly revels in the success of the U.S. operation to kill Osama bin Laden this week, one question remains: Why is the Justice Department threatening criminal prosecution of the men who made the mission possible? CIA Director Leon Panetta has acknowledged that the initial information that led to the discovery of bin Laden's hideout in Abbottabad came, in part, from information obtained by "enhanced interrogation techniques against some of those detainees." Yet, Attorney General Holder persists in what appears to be a vendetta against these very CIA interrogators. In August 2009, Holder ordered a continued investigation into "enhanced interrogation" techniques used by the CIA, even though an earlier investigation by career prosecutors concluded that no crimes were committed. The irony in all of this is made worse by President Obama's acknowledgment of intelligence agencies' role when he announced that bin Laden had been killed. "Tonight, we give thanks to the countless intelligence and counterterrorism professionals who've worked tirelessly to achieve this outcome," Obama said. "The American people do not see their work, nor know their names. But tonight, they feel the satisfaction of their work and the result of their pursuit of justice." Some thanks. Instead of admitting that CIA waterboarding provided vital information -- including the nom de guerre of the courier who led us to bin Laden -- the administration appears to want CIA operatives behind bars. What seems clear is that Obama came into office with one set of assumptions about what it takes to protect national security and has changed his mind after two years of intelligence briefings and firsthand experience. It was easy for candidate Obama to criticize President Bush for authorizing what Obama called "torture" and quite another to be confronted with what it takes to protect Americans from another devastating attack. But Holder may not have gotten the message. It is noteworthy that among those gathered in the Situation Room to watch the bin Laden mission unfold, Holder was nowhere to be seen. Among the many inconsistencies in the Obama administration's disavowal of enhanced interrogation is its willingness to use lethal force. I have no problem with the decision to kill bin Laden, regardless of whether he was armed at the time or posed a direct threat to the Navy SEALs who took him out. He declared war on the U.S. and has publicly admitted that he was responsible for the 3,000 deaths on 9/11. The president's spokesman has finally confirmed that bin Laden had no weapon when he was killed and that he did not use his wife as a human shield, as initial accounts suggested. Indeed, the only armed resistance came early in the 38-minute mission, when bin Laden's courier -- the one whose name CIA interrogators obtained from enhanced interrogation -- fired on SEALs as they entered the compound's outer buildings. So the president is perfectly willing to kill terrorists but not willing to waterboard them? It makes no sense. Holder has already had to reverse himself on military tribunals for detainees and has admitted that Guantanamo will not likely be closed before 2013. It's seems that both decisions were influenced by the fact that Obama knew that bin Laden was within our grasp. Even Holder couldn't imagine putting bin Laden in a U.S. jail and trying him in criminal court. Obama has taken much of the credit for making the decision to go after bin Laden and to risk American lives in taking him on the ground: "(L)ast August, after years of painstaking work by our intelligence community, I was briefed on a possible lead to bin Laden. It was far from certain, and it took many months to run this thread to ground. I met repeatedly with my national security team as we developed more information about the possibility that we had located bin Laden hiding within a compound deep inside of Pakistan. And finally, last week, I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action, and authorized an operation to get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice." It was the right decision -- but the president should reward all those who made it possible, including those initial CIA interrogators. It's time for the administration to admit its error and drop the investigation of the intelligence professionals whose work ended in bin Laden's death. Linda Chavez is the author of "An Unlikely Conservative: The Transformation of an Ex-Liberal."
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 by Ulsterman in Issues, May 3, 2011 "What Valerie Jarrett, and the president, did not know is that Leon Panetta had already initiated a program that reported to him –and only him, involving a covert on the ground attack against the compound." 
Note:This update comes some 24 hours after our longtime Washington D.C. Insider first outlined shocking details of an Obama administration having been “overruled” by senior military and intelligence officials leading up to the successful attack against terrorist Osama Bin Laden. What follows is further clarification of Insider's insights surrounding that event. _______ Q: You stated that President Obama was “overruled” by military/intelligence officials regarding the decision to send in military specialists into the Osama Bin Laden compound. Was that accurate? A: I was told – in these exact terms, “we overruled him.” (Obama) I have since followed up and received further details on exactly what that meant, as well as the specifics of how Leon Panetta worked around the president's “persistent hesitation to act.” There appears NOT to have been an outright overruling of any specific position by President Obama, simply because there was no specific position from the president to do so. President Obama was, in this case, as in all others, working as an absentee president. I was correct in stating there had been a push to invade the compound for several weeks if not months, primarily led by Leon Panetta, Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, David Petraeus, and Jim Clapper. The primary opposition to this plan originated from Valerie Jarrett, and it was her opposition that was enough to create uncertainty within President Obama. Obama would meet with various components of the pro-invasion faction, almost always with Jarrett present, and then often fail to indicate his position. This situation continued for some time, though the division between Jarrett/Obama and the rest intensified more recently, most notably from Hillary Clinton. She was livid over the president's failure to act, and her office began a campaign of anonymous leaks to the media indicating such. As for Jarrett, her concern rested on two primary fronts. One, that the military action could fail and harm the president's already weakened standing with both the American public and the world. Second, that the attack would be viewed as an act of aggression against Muslims, and further destabilize conditions in the Middle East. Q: What changed the president's position and enabled the attack against Osama Bin Laden to proceed?
A: Nothing changed with the president's opinion – he continued to avoid having one. Every time military and intelligence officials appeared to make progress in forming a position, Jarrett would intervene and the stalling would begin again. Hillary started the ball really rolling as far as pressuring Obama began, but it was Panetta and Petraeus who ultimately pushed Obama to finally act – sort of. Panetta was receiving significant reports from both his direct CIA sources, as well as Petraeus-originating Intel. Petraeus was threatening to act on his own via a bombing attack. Panetta reported back to the president that a bombing of the compound would result in successful killing of Osama Bin Laden, and little risk to American lives. Initially, as he had done before, the president indicated a willingness to act. But once again, Jarrett intervened, convincing the president that innocent Pakistani lives could be lost in such a bombing attack, and Obama would be left attempting to explain Panetta's failed policy. Again Obama hesitated – this time openly delaying further meetings to discuss the issue with Panetta. A brief meeting was held at this time with other officials, including Secretary Gates and members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but Gates, like Panetta, was unable to push the president to act. It was at this time that Gates indicated to certain Pentagon officials that he may resign earlier than originally indicated – he was that frustrated. Both Panetta and Clinton convinced him to stay on and see the operation through. What happened from there is what was described by me as a “masterful manipulation” by Leon Panetta. Panetta indicated to Obama that leaks regarding knowledge of Osama Bin Laden's location were certain to get out sooner rather than later, and action must be taken by the administration or the public backlash to the president's inaction would be “…significant to the point of political debilitation.” It was at that time that Obama stated an on-ground campaign would be far more acceptable to him than a bombing raid. This was intended as a stalling tactic, and it had originated from Jarrett. Such a campaign would take both time, and present a far greater risk of failure. The president had been instructed by Jarrett to inform Mr., Panetta that he would have sole discretion to act against the Osama Bin Laden compound. Jarrett believed this would further delay Panetta from acting, as the responsibility for failure would then fall almost entirely on him. What Valerie Jarrett, and the president, did not know is that Leon Panetta had already initiated a program that reported to him –and only him, involving a covert on the ground attack against the compound. Basically, the whole damn operation was already ready to go – including the specific team support Intel necessary to engage the enemy within hours of being given notice. Panetta then made plans to proceed with an on-ground assault. This information reached either Hillary Clinton or Robert Gates first (likely via military contacts directly associated with the impending mission) who then informed the other. Those two then met with Panetta, who informed each of them he had been given the authority by the president to proceed with a mission if the opportunity presented itself. Both Gates and Clinton warned Panetta of the implications of that authority – namely he was possibly being made into a scapegoat. Panetta admitted that possibility, but felt the opportunity to get Bin Laden outweighed that risk. During that meeting, Hillary Clinton was first to pledge her full support for Panetta, indicating she would defend him if necessary. Similar support was then followed by Gates. The following day, and with Panetta's permission, Clinton met in private with Bill Daley and urged him to get the president's full and open approval of the Panetta plan. Daley agreed such approval would be of great benefit to the action, and instructed Clinton to delay proceeding until he had secured that approval. Daley contacted Clinton within hours of their meeting indicating Jarrett refused to allow the president to give that approval. Daley then informed Clinton that he too would fully support Panetta in his actions, even if it meant disclosing the president's indecision to the American public should that action fail to produce a successful conclusion. Clinton took that message back to Panetta and the CIA director initiated the 48 hour engagement order. At this point, the President of the United States was not informed of the engagement order – it did not originate from him, and for several hours after the order had been given and the special ops forces were preparing for action into Pakistan from their position in Afghanistan, Daley successfully kept Obama and Jarrett insulated from that order.
This insulation ended at some point with an abort order that I believe originated from Valerie Jarrett's office, and was then followed up by President Obama. This abort order was later explained as a delay due to weather conditions, but the actual conditions at that time would have been acceptable for the mission. A storm system had been in the area earlier, but was no longer an issue. Check the data yourself to confirm. Jarrett, having been caught off guard, was now scrambling to determine who had initiated the plan. She was furious, repeating the acronym “CoC” and saying it was not being followed. This is where Bill Daley intervened directly. The particulars of that intervention are not clear to me beyond knowing he did meet with Jarrett in his office and following that meeting, Valerie Jarrett was not seen in the West Wing for some time, and apparently no longer offered up any resistance to the Osama Bin Laden mission. What did follow from there was one or more brief meetings between Bill Daley, Hillary Clinton, a representative from Robert Gates' office, a representative from Leon Panetta's office, and a representative from Jim Clapper's office. I have to assume that these meetings were in essence, detailing the move to proceed with the operation against the Osama Bin Laden compound. I have been told by more than one source that Leon Panetta was directing the operation with both his own CIA operatives, as well as direct contacts with military – both entities were reporting to Panetta only at this point, and not the President of the United States. There was not going to be another delay as had happened 24 hour earlier. The operation was at this time effectively unknown to President Barack Obama or Valerie Jarrett and it remained that way until AFTER it had already been initiated. President Obama was literally pulled from a golf outing and escorted back to the White House to be informed of the mission. Upon his arrival there was a briefing held which included Bill Daley, John Brennan, and a high ranking member of the military. When Obama emerged from the briefing, he was described as looking “very confused and uncertain.” The president was then placed in the situation room where several of the players in this event had already been watching the operation unfold. Another interesting tidbit regarding this is that the Vice President was already “up to speed” on the operation. A source indicated they believe Hillary Clinton had personally made certain the Vice President was made aware of that day's events before the president was. The now famous photo released shows the particulars of that of that room and its occupants. What that photo does not communicate directly is that the military personnel present in that room during the operation unfolding, deferred to either Hillary Clinton or Robert Gates. The president's role was minimal, including their acknowledging of his presence in the room.
At the conclusion of the mission, after it had been repeatedly confirmed a success, President Obama was once again briefed behind closed doors. The only ones who went in that room besides the president were Bill Daley. John Brennan, and a third individual whose identity remains unknown to me. When leaving this briefing, the president came out of it “…much more confident. Much more certain of himself.” He was also carrying papers in his hand that quite possibly was the address to the nation given later that evening on the Bin Laden mission. The president did not have those papers with him prior to that briefing. The president then returned to the war room, where by this time, Leon Panetta had personally arrived and was receiving congratulations from all who were present. In my initial communication to you of these events I described what unfolded as a temporary Coup initiated by high ranking intelligence and military officials. I stand by that term. These figures worked around the uncertainty of President Obama and the repeated resistance of Valerie Jarrett. If they had not been willing to do so, I am certain Osama Bin Laden would still be alive today. There will be no punishment to those who acted outside the authority of the president's office. The president cannot afford to admit such a fact. What will be most interesting from here is to now see what becomes of Valerie Jarrett. One source indicated she is threatening resignation. I find that unlikely given my strong belief she needs the protection afforded her by the Oval Office and its immense powers to delay and eventually terminate investigations back in Chicago, but we shall see.
Read more: http://socyberty.com/issues/white-house-insider-obama-hesitated-panetta-issued-order-to-kill -osama-bin-laden/#ixzz1LgKPW3Fa
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