On Wednesday, as new details continue to emerge about the killing of Osama bin Laden during an American raid in Pakistan this week, The Lede provides updates on breaking news and charts the global reaction.
While there is little argument about the most important detail of where Osama bin Laden’s compound was located – very close to a Pakistani military academy – on Wednesday, journalists in Pakistan took issue with the fact that it has been described by U.S. officials as a million-dollar mansion, “in an affluent suburb of Islamabad.”
To assess the property’s value, Declan Walsh, reporting from Abbottabad for The Guardian, wrote that he consulted two real estate agents in the town, who assured him that it was worth no more than a quarter of a million dollars.
Based on the size of the plot and the house, which was built in 2005, and using recent property sales as a guide, they estimated that it would fetch no more than $250,000 on the current market.
“Twenty million rupees, maximum,” said property dealer Muhammad Anwar, a 22-year veteran of the local market, at his Abbottabad office. “No swimming pool. This is not a posh area. We call it a middling area.”
Asked about the American estimate, he chuckled. “Maybe that’s the assessment from a satellite. But here on the ground, that’s the price.”
In a “Media Watchdog” blog post for Karachi’s Express Tribune, Laaleen Khan poured scorn on the idea that Bin Laden’s “ramshackle home” was a “luxury mansion.”
Ms. Khan also insisted that Abbottabad is just not “an Islamabad suburb.”
It seems likely that the hyperbolic description of the home as a mansion worth a million dollars might been an intentional exaggeration by American officials, who perhaps hoped to score a propaganda victory by undercutting the image of Al Qaeda’s leader as a humble, cave-dwelling man.
But what explains the description of Abbottabad as a suburb of Pakistan’s capital? That also seems to have been part of an intentional propaganda effort, designed to make the point that Bin Laden was sheltering not in some remote, tribal area out of the control of Pakistan’s government, but less than a two-hour drive from its capital. After all, when President Barack Obama first announced the killing of Al Qaeda’s leader he said that Bin Laden had been living “deep inside of Pakistan.”
Then too, it has to be taken into account that the word means different things in different parts of the world. In Britain, and in places that were relatively recently under British control, a suburb is, as the O.E.D. explains, “The country lying immediately outside a town or city; more particularly, those residential parts belonging to a town or city that lie immediately outside and adjacent to its walls or boundaries…. Outlying parts, ouskirts, confines, purlieus.”
For many Americans though, a suburb is something quite different: not an outlying part of a city or the area just beyond it, but any town within potential commuting distance of a major urban area.
While, in fact, there might not be many, or any, commuters driving back and forth between Abbottabad and Islamabad each day, to an American intelligence analyst looking at the driving directions on Google Maps, it might seem fair to describe a town just 70 miles away from Pakistan’s capital as a suburb.
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The Lede is signing off for the evening, but will continue to follow the aftermath of Osama bin Laden’s death in the days ahead. In the meantime, please visit the home page of NYTimes.com to read and watch reports from my colleagues.
Thanks for your comments.
Here, from the CBS News Web site, is a video excerpt from the interview in which President Barack Obama explained why he decided not to release any of the graphic photographs of Osama bin Laden’s dead body.
For a transcript of Mr. Obama’s complete remarks on the subject, see the 2:40 p.m. update below.
Sohaib Athar, a 33-year-old resident of Abbottabad, Pakistan who has gained more than 100,000 followers on Twitter since he inadvertently live-blogged the start of the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound on the social network, is taking questions.
Since Mr. Athar, who describes himself as an “IT consultant taking a break from the rat-race by hiding in the mountains with his laptops,” posted an update on Twitter at about 1 a.m. local time on Monday noting that there were helicopters hovering over the town, he has been deluged with questions about the raid from other users of the social network and journalists.
While he does seem to have tired of giving interviews, Mr. Athar wrote about three hours ago that he will try to answer questions from his growing pool of Twitter fans, if they submit them using the hashtag #q2rv.
To save himself from having to continually answer the same queries over and over again, Mr. Athar has also posted a detailed and quite funny list of replies to some Frequently Asked Questions on his blog, Really Virtual. Here is a sample:
ReutersA Pakistani security official’s photograph of Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, hours after Monday morning’s deadly raid.Q: Describe what you saw during the operation?
A: I did not ‘see’ the operation, as some reports quote. I ‘heard’ what was later revealed to be the start of the operation – I did proactively gather all the rumors and facts that I could from the Abbottabad locals who were online, and tweeted them. There is a big difference between ‘seeing’ and ‘hearing’ that the media should ideally be aware of.
Q: How long did the gunfights last?
A: I did not witness the gunfights/shots that are being attributed to me. The gunshots were too far away from me to hear. I did hear a car/van rushing by very fast, before the helicopter stopped hovering above my neighborhood, and then I heard the loud explosion – which prompted me to talk to friends in Abbottabad who were up and online. The locals said there was firing for at least a few minutes though.
Q: What was your initial reaction when you started tweeting about the operation?
A: First of all, I was not trying to sleep when the noise of a helicopter startled me. I did not jump up and had this sudden urge to tweet about it using my smartphone, and there was no dramatic background music either. The truth is, I usually work at night, and was working (on my laptop) when I heard the noisy helicopter hanging in the air, and tweeted about it. No jumping or waking up was involved.
Reuters has obtained photographs taken by a Pakistani security official that appear to show the inside of Osama bin Laden’s compound in the immediate aftermath of the deadly predawn raid on Monday in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
The Guardian posted the new images, four of which are extremely graphic, in a slide show on its Web site.
Reuters explained that the photographs, which were purchased from an unnamed Pakistani security official who entered the compound soon after the raid, include graphic images of “two men dressed in traditional Pakistani garb and one in a t-shirt, with blood streaming from their ears, noses and mouths.” The men have not yet been identified. An American account of the raid said that Navy Seals had killed “two Al Qaeda couriers,” on the first floor of the building where Bin Laden lived.
The news agency added:
Based on the time-stamps on the pictures, the earliest one was dated May 2, 2:30 a.m., approximately an hour after the completion of the raid in which bin Laden was killed.
Other photos, taken hours later at between 5:21 a.m. and 6:43 a.m. show the outside of the trash-strewn compound and the wreckage of the helicopter the United States abandoned. The tail assembly is unusual, and could indicate some kind of previously unknown stealth capability.
According to Nevine Mabro, a producer for Britain’s Channel 4 News who is in Abbottabad, Pakistan, a Taliban spokesman just said that the White House decision not to release photographs of Osama bin Laden’s body proves that Al Qaeda’s leader is not dead.
Writing on Twitter, Ms. Mabro adds:
Many people we’ve spoken to in Pakistan say they do not believe OBL lived in Abbottabad or that the raid actually took place.
She also reports that one resident of the town who lived near the compound said the man identified as Bin Laden’s courier, Arshad Khan, told locals that he was a refugee from Waziristan and had moved to Abbottabad for a peaceful life.
Another person living in the vicinity of the home told Channel 4 News: “we didn’t question the tight security at the compound because we assumed it was an ISI safe house.”
As we noted in an earlier update, Canada’s Globe and Mail reported that an unnamed police official said on Tuesday that the home was owned by men with ties to a militant group that has been linked to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency.
According to a report from Geo News, a Pakistani television channel, “The contractor who built the huge fortified compound where Osama Bin Laden was killed has been detained from Abottabad.”
In response to a question from my colleague Mark Landler about whether the killing of Osama bin Laden was legally justified, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney read the following prepared statement:
Associated Press Video of White House Press Secretary Jay Carney explaining why President Obama’s decided that “graphic” photographs of Osama bin Laden’s body will not be released.The team had the authority to kill Osama bin Laden unless he offered to surrender, in which case the team was required to accept his surrender, if the team could do so safely. The operation was conducted in a manner fully consistent with the laws of war. The operation was planned so that the team was prepared and had the means to take Bin Laden into custody.
There is simply no question that this operation was lawful. Bin Laden was the head of Al Qaeda, the organization that conducted the attacks of September 11, 2001, and Al Qaeda and Bin Laden himself had continued to plot attacks against the United States. We acted in the nation’s self defense. The operation was conducted in a way designed to minimize and avoid altogether if possible civilian casualties. And if I might add, that was done at great risk to Americans.
Furthermore, consistent with the laws of war, Bin Laden’s surrender would have been accepted if feasible.
White House Press Secretary Jay Carney just presented President Barack Obama’s explanation for his decision to not release photographs of Osama bin Laden’s dead body to reporters in Washington.
Mr. Carney read from a partial transcript of an interview Mr. Obama gave to Steve Kroft of the CBS News program “60 Minutes,” on Wednesday afternoon. Video of the remarks will be broadcast on CBS News on Wednesday evening.
Asked by Mr. Kroft how certain the White House was that the dead man was Osama bin Laden when the commando team landed at their base in Afghanistan with the body, President Obama responded: ” When they landed we had very strong confirmation at that point that it was him, photographs had been taken, facial analysis indicated that, in fact, it was him. We hadn’t yet done DNA testing, but at that point we were 95 percent sure.”
The interview continued:
CBS News: Did you see the pictures?
Mr. Obama: Yes.
CBS News: What was your reaction when you saw them?
Mr. Obama: It was him.
CBS News: Why didn’t you release them?
Mr. Obama: We discussed this internally. Keep in mind that we are absolutely certain that this was him. We’ve done DNA sampling and testing and so there is no doubt that we killed Osama bin Laden. It is important for us to make sure that very graphic photos of someone who was shot in the head are not floating around as an incitement to as an incitement to additional violence or as a propaganda tool. That’s not who we are. We don’t trot out this stuff as trophies.
The fact of the matter is, this is somebody who was deserving of the justice that he received, and I think Americans and people around the world are glad that he is gone. But we don’t need to spike the football, and I think that given the graphic nature of these photos it would create some national security risk, and I’ve discussed this with Bob Gates and Hillary Clinton and my intelligence teams and they all agree.
CBS News: There are people, in Pakistan for example, who say. ‘Look this is all a lie; Obama, this is another American trick; Osama is not dead.’
Mr. Obama: The truth is, that we were monitoring worldwide reaction: there is no doubt that Bin Laden is dead. Certainly, there is no doubt among Al Qaeda members that he is dead. And so we don’t think that a photograph, in and of itself, is going to make any difference. There are going to be some folks who deny it; the fact of the mater is: you will not see Bin Laden walking on this Earth again.
Attorney General Eric Holder told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday that the killing of Osama bin Laden, even though he was unarmed, “was justified as an act of national self-defense.”
As Reuters reports, America’s senior law-enforcement official told the committee: “Let me make something very clear: The operation in which Osama bin Laden was killed was lawful. He was the head of Al Qaeda, an organization that had conducted the attacks of September 11. He admitted his involvement.”
Mr. Holder also said: “If he had surrendered, attempted to surrender, I think we should obviously have accepted that, but there was no indication that he wanted to do that and therefore his killing was appropriate.”
Here is a live video stream from the White House, where Jay Carney, the press secretary, is expected to brief reporters on President Barack Obama’s decision to not release any photographs of Osama bin Laden’s dead body.
(The news conference has now concluded, as soon as an archived copy of the video is available, it will be posted on The Lede.)
President Barack Obama told CBS News on Wednesday that he has decided not to release images of Osama Bin Laden’s body taken to prove his death.
Mr. Obama’s explanation of the thinking behind the decision will be broadcast on the CBS Evening News later on Wednesday.
U.S. officials had previously described the images as “gruesome” and raised the possibility that making them public could incite anti-American hatred.
On Monday, Steve Coll, the author of “Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001,” wrote that the “initial circumstantial evidence” suggested that it was quite possible “that bin Laden was effectively being housed under Pakistani state control.” He added:
Pakistan will deny this, it seems safe to predict, and perhaps no convincing evidence will ever surface to prove the case. If I were a prosecutor at the United States Department of Justice, however, I would be tempted to call a grand jury. Who owned the land on which the house was constructed? How was the land acquired, and from whom?
On Tuesday, two reporters for Canada’s Globe and Mail, Graeme Smith and Muzammil Pasha, followed Mr. Coll’s advice. In an article headlined, “Bin Laden Given Haven by Militants Linked to Pakistani Security Forces,” they report:
As suspicions grow about how Osama bin Laden spent years living next door to Pakistan’s military, there are indications emerging that the terrorist mastermind was sheltered by one of the militant groups that has enjoyed tolerance, if not support, from Pakistani security services.
A police officer familiar with Mr. bin Laden’s compound in the scenic town of Abbottabad said the location was used by Hizbul Mujahideen, one of the biggest militant outfits in the disputed territory of Kashmir. Like other groups fighting Indian troops in the borderlands, HM’s radical membership has never been rounded up by Pakistani forces and some analysts say Islamabad covertly supports the group. [...]
“The place belonged to Hizbul Mujahideen,” the police officer said. “But the authorities have asked us not to share any information about the exact ownership.”
Land-registry officials in Abbottabad, known in the local language as patwaris, were summoned to a meeting on Tuesday and urged to keep quiet.
“The patwaris are meeting right now,” a local official said. “They are being instructed not to say anything about the land-ownership issue.”
As The Lede explained on Tuesday, both Reuters and The BBC reported that two members of Osama bin Laden’s family, a wife and a young daughter, survived the deadly American raid in which Al Qaeda’s leader was shot and killed and are now in Pakistani custody. Both news organization based their reports on information provided to them by an unnamed official with Pakistan’s powerful spy agency, the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI.
The Pakistani intelligence official told Reuters that Bin Laden’s daughter, who is about 12 years old, “had seen her father being shot dead by U.S. forces.” The BBC’s source, possibly the same ISI official, also said that the girl had witnessed the killing.
On Wednesday morning, Al Arabiya, a Saudi-owned satellite channel, reported that a Pakistani “security source,” who requested anonymity, said that Bin Laden’s wife and daughter are being held in Rawalpindi, the home of Pakistan’s military and intelligence services, “told her Pakistani investigators that the U.S. forces captured her father alive but shot him dead in front of family members.”
As The Lede noted on Tuesday, it seems important to keep in mind that these accounts of what the two members of Bin Laden’s family who witnessed the raid have said about it are not only impossible to verify, but are coming to the media exclusively through the filter of Pakistan’s intelligence service, which has been accused of supporting Islamic extremists, giving sanctuary to the Taliban and sheltering Osama bin Laden for years.
Since the ISI appears to have custody of all of the surviving eyewitnesses who saw the raid unfold from inside the compound – possibly because the mechanical failure of one of the Navy Seal team’s helicopters meant that they could not bring prisoners with them when they left – it seems possible that we may soon have two quite different narratives of what happened there: one offered by the American government, based on what the accounts of the commandos, and another offered by Pakistan’s government, based on what they say the surviving family members witnessed.
Already, there are several places in which the two versions of events do not match. As Reuters explains in a Q.&A. of the raid, “What Really Happened in Abbottabad?” one big difference between the American and Pakistani accounts concerns the fate of one of Osama bin Laden’s sons:
The BBC reported it had been told by a Pakistani intelligence official that the Americans had taken one man alive as captive during the raid, possibly a son of bin Laden. Several U.S. officials said flatly that this is false: that the only person, dead or alive, taken away by U.S. raiders from the scene was the body of Osama bin Laden.
Asked about the suggestion that the U.S. had captured, then killed Bin Laden, and taken his son prisoner, a C.I.A. spokesman told NBC News, “We categorically deny both of those.”
The official from Pakistan’s spy agency who spoke to The BBC also speculated that “the Americans wanted to take away the surviving women and children but had to abandon the plan when one of the helicopters malfunctioned.” During a briefing at the White House on Tuesday, Jay Carney, the president’s spokesman, was asked about this report and said that he knew nothing about any such plan to fly noncombatant prisoners from the compound. He added: “I certainly haven’t heard anything like that in this building.”
The NewsA photograph published in a Pakistani newspaper on Wednesday appeared to show the passport of Osama bin Laden’s Yemeni wife, Amal Ahmed Abdulfattah, who reportedly survived the raid on his compound and is now in Pakistani custody.One more major point of disagreement between the evolving American and Pakistani accounts concerns the length of time Osama bin Laden and his family lived undetected in the compound in Abbottabad, not far from Pakistan’s most important military academy. The Pakistani intelligence official who spoke to The BBC claimed that Bin Laden’s wife, who was shot during the raid and was given medical care in Rawalpindi, told her interrogators that the family had moved to the compound just a few months ago.
That directly clashes with what John Brennan, President Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, told NPR on Tuesday. According to Mr. Brennan, “it’s our information at this point that he had been there at least five years or so.”
Nevine Mabro, a journalist for Britain’s Channel 4 News who produced a video report from outside the gates of Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad on Tuesday, reported on Twitter a few hours ago that Pakistani police had sealed off the neighborhood for a time on Wednesday morning and were “guarding all houses near OBLs compound.”
Lindsey Hilsum, a Channel 4 News correspondent who is also reporting from Abbottabad, wrote on Twitter at about the same time: “I’m told there are police in the houses of Bin Laden’s neighbors this morning. Area blocked but may open up later.”
The video report Ms. Hilsum and Ms. Mabro produced there one day earlier featured interviews with three men from the neighborhood around the home who suggested that it was not accurate to say that the high-walled compound had not drawn any notice at all from the neighbors. One young man even said that the fact that the compound had its own independent supplies of gas and electricity had raised eyebrows locally. He added: “Everyone thought that this house was very strange.”
About two hours ago, Ms. Hilsum posted a new update on Twitter, reporting that the crew had finally been allowed back in to the neighborhood, but noticed a significant change: “At the Bin Laden house again, but all the eyewitnesses are mysteriously absent leaving only police and children.”
She also reported that the absence of visual evidence of Bin Laden’s presence in the compound was fueling speculation in Abbottabad that the raid was an elaborate hoax.
American intelligence officials told members of Congress on Tuesday that Osama bin Laden had 500 euros in cash (worth about $740) and two telephone numbers sewn into his clothing when he was shot and killed during a raid by U.S. Navy Seals on Monday morning, Jonathan Allen of Politico reports.
Mr. Allen does not name his sources but says that the information came from four people: “Three sources who attended the briefing confirmed the details for Politico, and a fourth source said he had been told the same thing outside Tuesday’s meeting. A White House spokesman said he would not comment on the matter.”
According to Mr. Allen, the intelligence officials said that the money and phone numbers were “sure signs that he was prepared to flee his compound at a moment’s notice.”
Christina Lamb, a foreign correspondent for The Times of London who has reported from Afghanistan, observed on Twitter that the choice of Euros was “yet more evidence of the declining dollar.”
yet more evidence of the declining dollar – CIA says bin Laden had Euros sewn into his clothes in case he had to fleeWed May 04 11:44:00 via webchristinalamb
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