News of Rahman’s demise comes as the US gears up to mark the 10th anniversary of Al-Qaeda’s most spectacular attack, on September 11, 2001 on landmarks in Washington and New York, which killed nearly 3,000 people.

Rahman, a Libyan, was killed in the northwest tribal Waziristan area on August 22 after being heavily involved in directing operations for Al-Qaeda, a senior US official said, without divulging the circumstances of his death.

However, local officials in the region told AFP last week that a US drone strike on August 22 on a vehicle in North Waziristan killed at least four militants. It was not clear if the two incidents were connected.

The senior US official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the death of Rahman would be deeply felt by Al-Qaeda because the group’s new leader Ayman al-Zawahiri had relied on him since US Navy Seals killed bin Laden on May 2.

Bin Laden also died in Pakistan, in a sprawling house he was holed up in close to a military academy.

The death of Rahman, who had a $1-million bounty on his head and was said to be an explosives expert, represented “a tremendous loss for Al-Qaeda”, the senior official said.
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“The trove of materials from bin Laden’s compound showed clearly that (Rahman) was deeply involved in directing Al-Qaeda’s operations even before the raid,” the official said.

“He had multiple responsibilities in the organization and will be very difficult to replace.”

Details about Rahman are sketchy and he is not nearly as high profile as bin Laden or Zawahiri.

According to US authorities, Rahman, who was in his late thirties, was appointed personally by bin Laden and was Al-Qaeda’s emissary in Iran, recruiting and facilitating talks with other Islamic groups to operate under Al-Qaeda.

He joined bin Laden in Afghanistan as a teenager in the 1980s to fight the Soviet Union.

Rahman’s death represents another success for President Barack Obama’s intensified and often clandestine operations against Al-Qaeda, particularly in the northwestern tribal regions in Pakistan which Washington says is the group’s lair.

In his weekly radio and Internet address on Saturday, Obama called on Americans to recreate the national unity that emerged after the September 11 attacks, and noted that “We’re taking the fight to Al-Qaeda.”

Another senior US official said “news of (Rahman’s) demise underscores what (Defense Secretary) Leon Panetta has been saying for some time about al-Qaeda: it’s important to sustain intense pressure on this group of terrorists and thugs.

“Dialing back on al-Qaeda leadership in Pakistan, especially while they try to regroup after Bin Laden’s death, isn’t the way to go. For the sake of our national security, they need to be knocked out for good,” the official stressed.

The Washington Post cited unnamed officials in July as saying that evidence taken from bin Laden’s compound suggested the Al-Qaeda founder was concerned about the impact drone attacks were having on his organization when he died.

Washington has called Pakistan’s semi-autonomous tribal region where Rahman died the global headquarters of Al-Qaeda, where Taliban and other Al-Qaeda-linked networks plot attacks on NATO forces in Afghanistan.

Bin Laden was killed in his compound in Abbottabad in a daring raid by US special forces soldiers deep into Pakistan, and the soldiers seized large amounts of intelligence about the group’s operations.

In July, Panetta said that the “strategic defeat” of Al-Qaeda was “within reach” and that 10-20 key operatives had been targeted in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and north Africa.

The post Yet Another Al Qaeda "Number Two" Killed in Pakistan appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

Matt Taibbi writes, “he lived half a mile from a military academy, in a giant walled compound eight times the size of adjacent properties. He burned his trash, instead of putting it out like everyone else. When local kids kicked their ball over his wall, a guy would come out to give them money for a new one, rather than let them in. What more of a tip-off did Pakistani intelligence need?!”

Macleans reports that John Kerry “complained that not only did Pakistani intelligence fail to look for bin Laden, but for years fed the U.S. what he called “misdirects”—false information—such as “the notion that he’s out in the western part of the country and they can’t control that and so forth.” Democratic Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate armed services committee, called on Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari to “follow through and ask some very tough questions of his own military and his own intelligence. They’ve got a lot of explaining to do.” For his part, the Pakistani president issued a personal defence: “Some in the U.S. press have suggested that Pakistan lacked vitality in its pursuit of terrorism, or worse yet that we were disingenuous and actually protected the terrorists we claimed to be pursuing. Such baseless speculation may make exciting cable news, but it doesn’t reflect fact,” Zardari wrote in the Washington Post.”

CIA Director Leon Panetta said that the Pakistani ISI was “involved or incompetent. Neither place is a good place to be.”

The Associated Press reported that “Congress may consider cutting the almost $1.3 billion in annual aid to Pakistan if it turns out the Islamabad government knew where Osama bin Laden was hiding, the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee said Tuesday.”

After 9/11, many allegations of the Pakistani ISI’s involvement in the attacks surfaced. After a decade of barely receiving any funds from the United States, Pakistan was declared our ally in the “War On Terror,” given billions of dollars, and the Pakistani ISI’s involvement in the 9/11 attacks was covered up. It seems the media has helped with that cover up.

Since around 2009, the United States Government has slowly started to acknowledge the Pakistani ISI’s role with terrorism. Many are acting as though this is a new revelation.

Here is an article from the Times of India in 2001 that says, “despite continuing revelations about islamabad’s complicity in terrorist activity, the United States continues to shield Pakistan from terrorism charges in the hope it will turn a new leaf, with the Western media readily toeing the official line. the latest disclosures came at a Congressional hearing on Wednesday at which US intelligence analysts not only spoke about Pakistan’s official role in fomenting and bankrolling terrorism but also addressed the connections between the Taliban and terrorism in Kashmir.”

There is nothing new about it. I think the hypocrisy of calling out the Pakistani ISI now, after rewarding them and covering up their involvement in the 9/11 attacks, should be recognized by everyone. Should the ISI’s role with terrorism be looked at and dealt with? Of course. But so should the U.S.’s support and usage of that “terror nexus.”

Speaking of hypocrisy, one of the most dangerous men in the world, Dick Cheney, is living within a mile of CIA Headquarters. Are they harboring or protecting him?

The post Scapegoating The Pakistani ISI appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

Over two days, the White House has offered contradictory versions of events, including misidentifying which of bin Laden’s sons was killed and wrongly saying bin Laden’s wife died in gunfire, as it tries to sort through what the president’s press secretary called the “fog of combat” and produce an accurate account.

Press Secretary Jay Carney said Tuesday that officials were trying to get information out as quickly as possible about the complex event witnessed by just a handful of people, and the story line was being corrected.

“We provided a great deal of information with great haste in order to inform you. … And obviously some of the information was, came in piece by piece and is being reviewed and updated and elaborated on,” Carney said.

The contradictions and misstatements reflect the fact that even in the case of a highly successful and popular mission, the confusion inherent in a fast-paced, unpredictable military raid conducted under intense pressure in a foreign country does not lend itself immediately to a tidy story line, some experts said.

“People are demanding the equivalent of a movie, they want to know scene by scene the most trivial details. You’re in the middle of a combat operation,” said Anthony Cordesman, a national security analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“One of the things we all have to be careful about is the idea that you can suddenly rush to transparency and understanding in a matter of minutes or hours on the first day of an event like this.”

The circumstances for the Navy SEALs involved hardly lent themselves to careful note-taking. One of their helicopters stalled even before they rushed bin Laden’s compound, entering different rooms from different angles, not knowing who they’d find and then, according to the White House, engaging in a firefight. Some of what happened during those 40 minutes in Abbottabad, Pakistan, may never be known.

Nevertheless, the contradictory statements seem certain to raise suspicions about the White House’s version of events, given that no independent account from another source is likely to emerge. The only non-U.S. witnesses to survive the raid are in Pakistani custody.

Some of the White House contradictions and corrections that have emerged so far:

_White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan told reporters Monday that bin Laden’s son Khalid was killed in the raid. When the White House released a transcript of Brennan’s briefing, it substituted the name of a different son, Hamza. The White House said that was a transcription error.

_Brennan said bin Laden’s wife died while shielding the terrorist leader from U.S. gunfire. Carney said Tuesday that the wife hadn’t died and was merely shot in the leg, although another woman did die. But it wasn’t clear that either of them was trying to shield bin Laden.

_Brennan and other officials suggested that bin Laden was holding a gun and even firing at U.S. forces. Carney said Tuesday that bin Laden was unarmed.

_Officials have offered varying accounts of how President Barack Obama and his team in the White House Situation Room were able to monitor the raid. Without providing details on the technology involved, Brennan said that “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.”

CIA Director Leon Panetta told PBS on Tuesday that “Once those teams went into the compound, I can tell you that there was a time period of almost 20 or 25 minutes that we really didn’t know just exactly what was going on.”

_The night of the raid, administration officials held a telephone briefing for reporters. “During the raid, we lost one helicopter due to mechanical failure,” one of the administration officials said. Later in the same call, another official contradicted that: “We didn’t say it was mechanical.”

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, clarified Tuesday that the explanation was more technical: The air temperature in the compound was hotter than expected and the helicopter was too heavy to stay aloft under that condition.

The post White House Struggles to Get Story Right on Raid appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.

Yesterday, it was widely reported that bin Laden “resisted” his capture and “engaged in a firefight” with U.S. forces (leaving most people, including me, to say that his killing was legally justified because he was using force). It was also repeatedly claimed that bin Laden used a women — his wife — has a human shield to protect himself, and that she was killed as a result. That image — of a cowardly through violent-to-the-end bin Laden — framed virtually every media narrative of the event all over the globe. And it came from many government officials, principally Obama’s top counter-terrorism adviser, John Brennan.

Those claims have turned out to be utterly false. From TPM toda:

It was a fitting end for the America’s most wanted man. As President Barack Obama’s Deputy National Security Adviser John Brennan told it, a cowardly Osama bin Laden used his own wife as a human shield in his final moments. Except that apparently wasn’t what happened at all.

Hours later, other administration officials were clarifying Brennan’s account. Turns out the woman that was killed on the compound wasn’t bin Laden’s wife. Bin Laden may have not even been using a human shield. And he might not have even been holding a gun.

Politico‘s Josh Gerstein adds: “The White House backed away Monday evening from key details in its narrative about the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, including claims by senior U.S. officials that the Al Qaeda leader had a weapon and may have fired it during a gun battle with U.S. forces.” Gerstein added: “a senior White House official said bin Laden was not armed when he was killed.”

Whether bin Laden actually resisted his capture may not matter to many people; the White House also claimed that they would have captured him if they had the chance, and this fact seems to negate that claim as well. But what does matter is how dutifully American media outlets publish as “news reports” what are absolutely nothing other than official White House statements masquerading as an investigative article. And the fact that this process continuously produces highly and deliberately misleading accounts of the most significant news items — falsehoods which endure no matter how decisively they are debunked in subsequent days — doesn’t have the slightest impact on the American media’s eagerness to continue to serve this role.

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Mona Eltahwy has an excellent column in The Guardian today headlined: “No dignity at Ground Zero. As a US Muslim I abhor the frat boy reaction.”

Speaking of “frat boy reactions,” Leon Panetta is excitingly speculating about which actors should portray him in the movie about the Hunt for bin Laden, helpfully suggesting Al Pacino. It’s been a long time since Americans felt this good and strong about themselves — nothing like putting bullets in someone’s skull and dumping their corpse into an ocean to rejuvenate that can-do American sense of optimism.

The post Media Regurgitates False Claims in Bin Laden Killing appeared first on 9/11 Truth News.