What Really Happened in the Killing of Bin Laden?

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"And How Much did We Pay Pakistan To Allow Us To Take Him Out ?"

Obama will reap the publicity, but the facts are not really being portrayed as they are. I've had a Pakistani buddy for years who comes from a suburb around Islamabad, very near where they got Bin Laden. He returns there several times each year.

He and I would always talk about how Osama Bin Laden was in one of the satellite cities of Islamabad, living a high life retirement in a fancy villa. In point of fact, I'd always kid him upon his return, asking how bin Laden was doing.

Bin Laden hasn't run al Qaeda for a very long time now, being more of a symbol than anything else. The issue is purely emotional. In point of fact, al Qaeda is more dangerous than ever because it is decentralized, although Bush did a great job in cleaning them out of the Afghanistan/Pakistan area as well as Iraq.

Everything revolved around negotiations with the Pakistanis over how much money we would give them to allow the operation. Obama met the dollars and they gave the okay for the American military and CIA to take him out when appropriate.

Until then, surveillance worked for us because we could keep track of the people who were coming and going and secure excellent intelligence. But alas, Bush will not get the credit for spending years in creating excellent military Special Forces and a much more efficient CIA that kept America safe.

That Bin Laden was executed and his body disposed of was the way to go. We should have done that to the terrorists in Guantanamo instead of setting up a prison there.
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Of course, if Bush did this, the left would be screaming about how he acted like a "cowboy" and "war criminal" for not using our legal system. But Obama is President and should get the credit. A President always gets the credit for successes and takes the heat for operational failures, although Barack has a penchant for dismissing the bad and only accepting the good.

P.S. The author of this post (Dublin9) holds the retired military rank of Lieutenant Colonel and spent years in a domestic anti-terrorist rapid response force unit.

http://www.sodahead.com/united-states/what-really-happened-in-the-killing-of-bin-laden/question-1749419/

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Eight mysteries about the killing of Osama Bin Laden.
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1. Aerial surveillance? Despite the compound's high walls, the U.S. knew a lot about the folks inside it.
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How did we know so many things about these people—things that could be seen only from above? The New York Times says the CIA used "satellite photos" to ascertain the inhabitants. But given the family's careful security and the inconvenient timing of uncontrolled satellite passes, I wonder whether, in order to get information at this level of precision, we also used unarmed drones.
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2. Air cover? Obama authorized the raid early Friday morning, but it didn't take place till nearly 48 hours later. Why?
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3. Capture or kill? The U.S. says it killed Bin Laden because he "resisted" the commandos. But did they try hard to capture him alive? I doubt it. A U.S. official says the government dumped his body at sea quickly because "we don't want a bunch of people going to [a] shrine" for him. The same logic argued against putting him on trial, which would have made him even more of a martyr.
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4. Intel bonus? The U.S. says its team "was on the compound for under 40 minutes." That includes the entry, the firefight, blowing up its crippled helicopter, and extracting Bin Laden's corpse
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5. Gitmo vindicated? The U.S. says "detainees" provided the initial information about Bin Laden's courier, which eventually led to the raid.
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6. Sloppy defense? Eighteen-foot walls, barbed wire, an oversized plot of land, and a lack of phone wires made the compound highly conspicuous. U.S. officials say that once they began to look at it, they were "shocked by what we saw" and knew it was a good target. Yet despite all the fortifications, apparently only three men were with Bin Laden to defend him. Despite how long it took us to get him, it seems he was neither well-hidden nor well-protected.
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7. Who knew? The U.S. says the area around the compound has "lots of retired military." The Washington Post reports that it's "the headquarters of a brigade of the Pakistan army's 2nd Division."
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8. Did Pakistan help? Since elements of the Pakistani security apparatus may have been complicit in keeping Bin Laden hidden, it was logical for the U.S. not to tell Pakistan anything about the raid beforehand.
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http://www.slate.com/id/2292705/

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Osama bin Laden's death: Pakistan will pay the blood price
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"Hunting down a wanted terrorist in Abbottabad is, in American or British terms, like hunting him down near West Point or Sandhurst."
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So a debate is raging in Pakistan over what really happened. Conspiracy theories abound. Some say that Pakistani intelligence agencies uncovered Bin Laden but wanted the US to take responsibility for his killing in order to blunt a possible backlash against Pakistan. Others argue that it is inconceivable that US helicopters could have penetrated so deeply into Pakistani airspace without being detected by the Pakistan army and air force (in the past, US helicopter incursions near the Afghanistan border have been turned back with warning shots), and therefore that the operation must have been jointly authorised.

But there are other, truly frightening theories, such as that even in a town with as dense a military presence as Abbottabad, Bin Laden managed to elude Pakistani security forces, suggesting a remarkable degree of incompetence. More terrifying still would be if there were official complicity in harbouring him, putting Pakistan on a collision course with the US. Pakistanis must hope that neither of these is true.

Because Pakistan is suffering badly. Crowds are justifiably celebrating Bin Laden's death in downtown Manhattan, where a decade ago al-Qaida terrorists infamously massacred nearly 3,000 people.

Less well known is the statistic that since the subsequent US invasion of Afghanistan, terrorists have killed nearly five times that number of people in Pakistan.

The annual number of Pakistani fatalities from terrorism has surged from fewer than than 200 in 2003 to almost 1,000 in 2006, to more than 3,000 in 2009.

In all, since 2001 more than 30,000 have died here in terror and counterterror violence; slain by bombs, bullets, cannons and drones. America's 9/11 has given way to Pakistan's 24-7-365. The battlefield has been displaced. And in Pakistan it is much more bloody.

If Osama Bin Laden's death means that the war in south and central Asia can now begin to end, that America can begin to withdraw its forces from the region, and that Pakistan and Afghanistan can somehow rediscover peace, then one day there may be celebrations here as well.

In the meantime American, Pakistani, Afghan, and terrorist commanders will go on conducting their operations, the slaughter will continue, and human beings – all equal, all equal – will keep dying, their deaths mostly invisible to the outside world but at a rate evoking a line of aircraft stretching off into the distance, bearing down upon tower after tower after tower. Bin Laden is dead. But many Pakistanis sense the impending arrival of yet another murderous plane, headed their way.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/may/02/pakistan-osama-bin-laden-death