"Good Luck, Break A Leg"

Barack Obama's last words to John Kerry before his latest trip to disgrace America by deal making in Iran was "Good Luck, Break A Leg" and the rest you know.  John Kerry has a great deal of spare time during these tough times for entertainment, good food and a little outdoor activity as the Iran deal is almost paid for by now, billions changing hands around the world. 

Economic Failure 101, professor Barack Obama has transformed the U.S. economy into a failed enterprise

Economic Failure 101, professor Barack Obama has transformed the U.S. economy into a failed enterprise and Muslim killers take aim at the Free Enterprise System, U.S. Constitutional Rights as most Americans fail to realize they just lost everything.  The economy is shrinking down to nothing. 

Allah All Mighty, Free at Last

Cuba is now a great state.  No more killing, just chevy and coca-cola.  The radical Obama is well on his way to giving GITMO back to Cuba, good news for killing more and more Americans. His last trade for one deserter for five Islamic Muslim killers moves to the next stage as they will be free at last, Allah All Mighty, Free at Last and return to the killing fields targeting Americans around the world.  As Baltimore burns Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton cruise through history cheating every taxpayer, selling influence for cash and stirring up racial problems. Allah All Mighty, Free at Last

RICO charges are filed against Bill and Hillary Clinton, The book Clinton Cash has stirred up some but not the main stream liberal progressive media ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC or CNN

RICO charges are filed against Bill and Hillary Clinton, The book Clinton Cash has stirred up some but not the main stream liberal progressive media ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC or CNN as they refused to admit criminals have invaded the democratic party.  In an attempt to push back against the serious questions dogging his charity, Bill Clinton sent a letter to some 30,000 Clinton Foundation donors insisting that the allegations are “just politics” and saying that the campaign against him is just an effect of Hillary’s run for the 2016 Democrat nomination for president.  The sex scandal of Bill Clinton and his billionaire friend receives no press attention or the fact that Bill is flying around with naked teenager girls, "high school chearleaders" but that story will be written another day, most likely by a trial judge.  In the mean time Hillary Rodham Clinton continues to avoid her past and her future failure by not answering or participating in the political process, running for president.  Putin is watching U.S.A. uranium moving to Iran with a smile. 

Shabazz wants to free "his people", and it's clear he's been watching to much t.v., as Barack Obama, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Eric Holder, Bill De Blasio and now Lynch will rack in millions of dollars like Hillary and Bill Clinton and their Clinton Foundation. If you can get enough stupid poor people together you can create a street party, maybe call it the progressive socialist democratic party.

The Radical Islamic Extremists have a home inside the New Black Panthers Party once headed by the idiot Malik Zulu Shabazz.  Good ole Negro Zulu thinks that all the black people should hit the streets with guns and defend themselves against that evil white cop taking cover and ducking in every black neighborhood in Detroit, Chicago and Baltimore. Born Paris S. Lewis; September 7, 1966 he's just another fake Muslim Brotherhood American Hater like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. 

The Nation of Islam is a neat sounding name for gun carrying Negro's and with good ole Zulu Shabazz things are going to get a lot worse as Zulu wants to organize, arm every little black roaming around on welfare and defend themselves and their welfare ridden and taxpayer funded neighborhoods against police brutality. 

Although he's sometimes identified in the mainstream media as a mere "legal adviser" or "community organizer," Malik Shabazz is a racist black nationalist with a long, well-documented history of violently anti-Semitic remarks and accusations about the inherent evil of white people. He is also particularly skilled at orchestrating provocative protests. Ousted from the Nation of Islam after he became an embarrassment even to that hard-line group, Shabazz went on to take up the leadership of the New Black Panther Party.

In His Own Words

Shabazz: "Who is it that caught and killed Nat Turner?"

Audience: "Jews!"

Shabazz: "Who is it that controls the Federal Reserve?"

Audience: "Jews!"

Shabazz: "What? You're not scared, are you?"

Audience: "Jews! Jews!"

Shabazz: "Who is it that controls the media and Hollywood?"

Audience: "Jews! Jews!"

Shabazz: "Who is it that has our entertainers … and our athletes in a vice grip?"

Audience: "Jews!"

— Speech at Howard University before becoming Panther leader, 1994 

"The Caucasians and the government are arrogant, telling us how to suffer. America should be glad that every black man is not on a killing spree for all the suffering they have done." 

— Speech at the African Black Holocaust Nationhood Conference in Washington, D.C., 1995

"What we have against Jews and others is simple facts of history — that the Jews have been involved in the African holocaust and that the Zionists are causing problems, you know, for people of color around the world."

— Comments to New York One television, 1998

"Kill every goddamn Zionist in Israel! Goddamn little babies, goddamn old ladies! Blow up Zionist supermarkets!"

— Speech during protest of B'nai B'rith International, Washington, D.C., 2002

 "If 3,000 people perished in the World Trade Center attacks and the Jewish population is 10%, you show me records of 300 Jewish people dying in the World Trade Center. … We're daring anyone to dispute its truth. They got their people out."

— Morristown, N.J., press conference alleging that Jews (who are 2.2% of the U.S. population) were forewarned about 9/11 attacks, 2003

Background

Malik Zulu Shabazz, who was born with the name Paris Lewis, credits his grandfather, a longtime member of the Nation of Islam (NOI), for introducing him to black separatism. Shabazz took up the cause at an early age. While still in his twenties, Shabazz organized a group of NOI supporters at Howard University, where he obtained both an undergraduate and a law degree. There, he made waves with a series of offensive public comments and also brought a series of controversial speakers to the school, most notably Khalid Abdul Muhammad, who then led the New Black Panther Party (NBPP), in 1994.  Just months before that, Muhammad had been ousted from NOI for a speech widely considered anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic and homophobic.  

It was at the Howard University event that Shabazz led the audience in an infamous anti-Semitic call and response as a prelude to Muhammad's speech, cementing his own reputation as a bigoted and militant activist. Also in 1994, Shabazz was fired from a position with Washington D.C. Mayor Marion Barry, who criticized him for statements "regarding other people's cultural history, religion and race that do not reflect the spirit of my campaign, my personal views or my spirituality."

Shabazz and Muhammad became close colleagues, joining together again on the eve of the Million Man March in 1995 to organize the African Black Holocaust and Nationhood Conference, an event from which more mainstream march organizers distanced themselves. At the conference, speakers discussed Jewish involvement in the "African Holocaust" and disparaged the Holocaust of the "so-called Jews." As the event opened, Shabazz introduced Muhammad as "a man who gives the white man nightmares … a man who makes the Jews pee in their pants at night … Dr. Khalid Muhammad!" 

Muhammad was a mentor to Shabazz, who followed Muhammad's path away from NOI and into the NBPP. Besides adopting the name and some of the confrontational methods of the original Black Panthers, the NBPP differed significantly, advocating a degree of violence and a virulently racist stance that is completely unrelated to the tenets of the original movement, which has strongly denounced it.

Muhammad ascended to the leadership of the NBPP in 1998, with Shabazz becoming his primary spokesperson. As the person responsible for taking Muhammad's message into the mainstream, Shabazz made frequent media appearances in which he advanced vast conspiracy theories about the role of Jews in black oppression and insisted that world problems are caused by "the very nature of white people." Shabazz has also advanced the theory, laid out by some black nationalists, that blacks, not Jews, are the original Hebrews of Israel. (This theology, which is present in many black nationalist organizations but varies markedly from group to group, is usually known as Black Hebrew Israelism.)

Shabazz assumed the leadership of the NBPP in February 2001, following the unexpected and sudden death of Khalid Muhammad. That same year, Shabazz notoriously appeared at a press conference alleging a Jewish conspiracy behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks and embarked on what was to be a long series of controversial protests. The group had previously participated in operations such as a 1998 protest in Jasper, Texas, at which armed, fatigue-wearing NBPP members confronted Klansmen over the savage truck-dragging murder of James Byrd by white supremacists. Shabazz was intent on expanding this strategy of staged high-profile events that drew enormous media attention.

NBPP members began traveling the country to "protect" victims of hate crimes and often angrily denounced the police officers, white business owners and residents who they insisted were complicit. Appearances included a large presence in Jena, La., in 2007, where major civil rights protests broke out over what appeared to be the authorities' sharply differential treatment of white and black students involved in schoolyard violence. The NBPP also held inflammatory protests in New York over the 1996 police shooting death of Sean Bell. At one such protest, Shabazz led the crowd in a chant of "Fifty shots! Fifty cops! Kill the pigs who kill our kids!" The NBPP have also protested the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and attempted to disrupt an interfaith vigil organized by the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington.

In 2007, Shabazz also became involved in the case of Megan Williams, a black woman who was allegedly tortured and raped by six white men and women in Charleston, W.Va. Shabazz was angry that local authorities did not charge the whites with hate crimes in addition to other charges; local authorities, for their part, said that Williams was in a relationship with one of the white men charged and said racial hatred did not appear to be the motive in the crime. (In the end, just one of those charged was charged and convicted of a hate crime.) Soon after the case made national news, Shabazz got himself appointed as the victim's legal counsel and hastily organized a "National March Against Hate Crimes and Racism," which was not held under the banner of the NBPP, but rather that of another organization, Black Lawyers for Justice, which Shabazz had founded in 1996. Shabazz's efforts in West Virginia were supported by the Rev. Al Sharpton and then-Texas Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee. In late 2009, Williams recanted her charges, but only after most of those charged had pleaded guilty. Prosecutors said they did not believe Williams' recantation and had only relied on the offenders' statements to convict them.

Since 2007, Shabazz has increasingly identified himself as the head of the Black Lawyers for Justice, instead of the NBPP that he still leads. Nevertheless, during a march in West Virginia related to the Williams case, Shabazz publicly reaffirmed his commitment to the NBPP. "I will always be a part of the New Black Panther Party," he said. "I am not going to deny my family for anybody."

In October 2007, about 100 NBPP members from across the country gathered in Atlanta for the national Black Power Summit, co-billed as The Attack on Black America. “Our rise is co-dependent on the white man’s demise,” Shabazz said in a scalding keynote address. “What do I mean when I say, ‘the white man’?” he asked. “Well, I mean the goddamn white man.” Arguing that overt signs of white racism like the Jena 6 case in Louisiana are just cause for black Americans to become militant, Shabazz discouraged the idea of “waiting” for racial tensions to ease, saying “that sounds like faggot talk, and I hate faggot talk.”

In 2011, Shabazz turned his ire on the first African-American president. A few months after the U.S. began supporting insurgents’ efforts to overthrow Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi, Shabazz called President Obama a “nigger” on camera.

“Whatever Barack Obama is doing, he represents the white man,” Shabazz shouted. “He represents the ideology of the white man, he represents the CIA set up, sabotage, lie on a African leader and bomb that man like he George Bush. He represents the white man. And his wife should leave the nigger tonight. She should walk out and his beautiful daughters should walk out on this bamboozling, buck-dancing Tom.”

“Only thing you see in Libya is just a big case of police brutality,” Shabazz continued. “We see the way they [police] team up on us and run us down all the time. … Sometimes it’s a nigger police chief that’s in the lead. This time it’s a nigger police chief in the lead named Barack Obama.” The NBPP leader’s rage over U.S. involvement in Qaddafi’s overthrow may have been related to the fact that the Libyan dictator was a financial patron of the NOI, which Shabazz continued to support, despite having cut his formal ties years ago.

The NBPP generated a great deal of media attention with its militant response to the death of Trayvon Martin, the black teenager whose February 2012 shooting death in Sanford, Fla., at the hands of a neighborhood watch volunteer caused waves of outrage across America. Shabazz’s group offered a $10,000 reward for the capture of Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman, and announced, but did not ultimately hold, an armed rally in Sanford with the New Black Liberation, a fellow black separatist group.

Shabazz wants to free "his people", and it's clear he's been watching to much t.v., as Barack Obama, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Eric Holder, Bill De Blasio and now Lynch will rack in millions of dollars like Hillary and Bill Clinton and their Clinton Foundation.  If you can get enough stupid poor people together you can create a street party, maybe call it the progressive socialist democratic party.

As the RICO scams grow and grow they mature in dead bodies, uranium shipments from the U.S. to Russia and Iran and a few hundred million dollars in some Clinton Safe buried under the house with computer servers.  Inside America this very day there is a growing Thug Culture, lawless and selfish, they grow their numbers because their too stupid to learn, too lazy to work and in one way or another you pay them to riot, shoot and burn down communities as taxpayers.  We all wonder about open borders, Soros, Riots, RICO, illegal aliens and wars across the world but Zulu worries about his wallet. 

Shabazz wants open conflict with street shootings and you can be confident that Lynch will handle it just like Obama and Holder, relax it's a black thing.  As the black youth in America destroys their own futures Shabazz cashes a lot of checks and you might think he doesn't pay all his taxes?  Shabazz also wants a Black National Rifle Association which might work if they can steal enough guns.  

The so-called leaders in the black community are all welfare babies so they want more and more without giving anything back.  Obama will always be the illegal foreign student that got everything free including changing his name to some idiotic Muslim name to reflect his heart felt connection to Islam, like the red line in Syria the truth has nothing to do with their words. 

Zulu compares his race to rabbits and he thinks the rabbits should have the guns.  As most rabbits hide in holes his plan might need some work?  Illegal aliens are taking billions in welfare dollars leaving the rabbit in the hole with little hope but of course the democrats always have the solution, more taxes, more rat and rabbit invested holes to live in and keep them dumbed down.

The economic failure of Baltimore is now very clear and has joined the club of Detroit and Chicago.

Hillary Rodham Clinton gets federal I.D. number and it's not from the I.R.S., Bill and Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation have been hit with a racketeering lawsuit in US District Court.

Hillary Rodham Clinton gets federal I.D. number and it's not from the I.R.S., Bill and Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation have been hit with a racketeering lawsuit in US District Court.

Baltimore Burns, dozens shot or killed, day after day,

Baltimore Burns, dozens shot or killed, day after day, Barack Obama says nothing, Michelle says nothing, Jesse Jackson nothing, Al Sharpton nothing as Baltimore burns like Chicago.  The great cities of Chicago and Baltimore are destroyed as people quickly pack up and leave for good.  Detroit is lost, Chicago and Baltimore gone. 

Rich Man Poor Man Riots Exposed. Black men with cash pay beggar rioters to burn, riot and steal. Money from Soros (friend of Clinton) used to bribe Negro youth to burn towns during race riots, even promise a minimum wage of $5,000 a month to cause havoc.

Rich Man Poor Man Riots Exposed.  Black men with cash pay beggar rioters to burn, riot and steal.  Money from Soros (friend of Clinton) used to bribe Negro youth to burn towns during race riots, even promise a minimum wage of $5,000 a month to cause havoc.  Money trail used to find and jail people who paid rioters.

The Clinton Guns for Cash Program, Hillary Clinton Exposed, Shell Company moves money to Bill

Hillary Clinton, State Department Cash Pile, Middle Eastern Countries have been paying Hillary Rodham Clinton (Clinton Foundation) to receive shipments of advanced weapons from the Pentagon.  The "Clinton Guns" have found their way all over the world to be used in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen, and other sunni-shia hot spots of war.  You had to pay Hillary Clinton to gain approval for arms deal.  NATO is moving, around the world, to show strength against Putin of Russia.  Saudi Arabia gathers arms and men.  Syria to fall within months, not by Obama.

Hillary Clinton Arms Deal Middle East Massive Arms moved to middle eastern countries after Hillary Rodham Clinton receive cash payments to the Clinton Foundation, more to follow.

Hillary Clinton Arms Deal Middle East Massive Arms moved to middle eastern countries after Hillary Rodham Clinton receive cash payments to the Clinton Foundation, more to follow.

Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton have a shell company, maybe more, to hide the cash trail to Bill.

Hillary Rodham Clinton Media Ponzi Scheme ABC Shuts Down Stephanopoulos Investigation Guess who just got a free pass from the liberal media elite?

Hillary Rodham Clinton Media Ponzi Scheme ABC Shuts Down Stephanopoulos Investigation.  The illegal Clinton Foundation carries on as the main stream media ducks for cover.

Guess who just got a free pass from the liberal media elite?

None other than George Stephanopoulos - ABC's chief anchor, chief political correspondent and "Good Morning America" host. 

Good ol' George was busted last Thursday when the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative leaning media outlet, began asking questions about his charitable donations.

Within 24 hours, an embarrassed Stephanopoulos was apologizing to America and his network for failing to disclose $75,000 in donations to the Clinton Foundation since 2011.

Why does this matter?

Because thousands of Americans are being informed by major news networks like ABC and never told about the deep-seated biases the hosts and interviewers!

And ABC doesn't care that Stephanopoulos has hidden his agenda from the American people. They just announced that they plan no further investigation into the scandal. 

Now ABC must admit that they pay a liar $105 Million dollars. Hillary Clinton is a liar and of course she is being supported by other liars. George Stephanopoulos is now a known liar that works for ABC News which means that ABC supports him as they pay him and plan to give him $105 million dollars.

Now ABC must admit that they pay a liar $105 Million dollars.  Hillary Clinton is a liar and of course she is being supported by other liars. 

George Stephanopoulos is now a known liar that works for ABC News which means that ABC supports him as they pay him and plan to give him $105 million dollars.

That is truly ABC paying Hillary Clinton through George Stephanopoulos which means he'' have direct access to the corrupt White House of the Clinton's.

The scandal at ABC is growing and it's going to be very expensive because viewers will turn off ABC.

Barack Obama does not go to McDonalds? (MCD) McDonald's Open Letter to CEO Steve Easterbrook.

Barack Obama does not go to McDonalds?

(MCD) McDonald's Open Letter to CEO Steve Easterbrook.

As a business consultant I see many things that can quickly help your business and improve not only the customer experience but the bottom line net profits.  McDonald's MCD is faltering in the market because Oak Brook, Ill upper management changed many things and lost sight of many others and don't forget, Barack Obama won't step foot in any McDonald's because of Michelle Obama and a Chicago Union connection. 

McDonald's doesn't have five years to change the customer experience and at some point the management must engage the business at every level.  Sitting over there writing five year plans does nothing for the street business of selling good food fast.  McDonald's has lost it way and is no longer a simple hamburger joint, they're almost nothing now. 

As is now very common upper management spends too much time with excel spread sheets, advertising and graphics and the financial folks squeezing cash to fund bonuses and prop up stock prices.  It takes many good lawyers to destroy such a giant as McDonalds but you're well on your way.  The problem remains that customers with cash in their pockets don't eat at McDonalds.  Today, my table was dirty.  A few days ago, my table was dirty so I would guess that McDonalds is now just a dirty place to eat so a customer must wonder about the kitchen area? 

Wall Street doesn't like your plan and the customers realize that you don't have a plan at all which means that you worked on the wrong things again, just like before.  You're trying to please Wall Street when you should be trying to please your customer base and wipe up your dirty tables.

 Install a formal learning, performance and development program for those youngsters to teach them retail food, customer services and give them that absolute sense of purpose. 

The Strategy should be about good food and good people and the rest will follow.  You can tell you spend 5 cents on training.  Look at your turnover rate, the union minimum wage trouble, falling sales dollars and dirty tables.    

The Strategy should be about respecting the customer.  The Strategy should be about making money, making food right.  Go back to your roots and forget about all the PC crap and start doing your job.  

The Strategy should be about McDonald's vs. worrying about  Chipotle (CMG), Shake Shack (SHAK), Panera Bread (PNRA) or Chick-fil-A because if you don't engage your customers they will overtake your market position and take all your customers.

Stop thinking about your competition and bonus for a year and start thinking about your customers that you force to eat sloppy food in dirty restaurants brought to the counter by rude children with poor work ethics.

What I've just described gets your regional people terminated so they will most likely keep their heads down while your work on forcing stores into private hands (franchise operators) to let them take the labor heat and take on the minimum wage war on the horizon.

You might find it interesting that I've studied and supported McDonald's my entire life as I lived in San Bernardino California just down the street from the original McDonald's.  Your organization is a process miracle that became world famous and has been studied across the globe but,  over the many years life-long fans, supporters and customers have seen you lose your way.

As a business consultant I remain a student of McDonald's but it seems that the teacher needs a great deal of help to energize the historical greatness of the McDonald's brand.

When a customer pulls up to a local McDonald's and notices three teenagers in McDonald's uniform standing outside smoking believe me you have lost your edge.  These things have nothing to do with CMG, SHAK, PNRA, YUM with brands like KFC, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut or the Chicken House.

The McDonald's customers are leaving because you have left them so therefore you're left with the lowest class of customer that can accept slow service, slightly warm food, dirty tables, rude servers, loud shift managers, every tattoo known to mankind on display and a dirty parking lot.

You are giving the customer nothing to appreciate and enjoy any longer.  In fact you're quickly easing prices higher and higher and giving nothing in return.  The pressure you feel on your business was brought about by the management of the business and very poor field management which is running off your customers. 

Many years ago I was recognized as the manager with the lowest operating ratio out of 350 national facilities and I'm not even sure if excel was invented yet. 

You must return to basics.

You're in the people business.

You're in the business of food for people.

You need to travel a lot more and start wandering around without notice.

Return to your strict standards.

Start inspecting outside of regional management.

Start trusting your customers.

The customers pay for everything.

Thank you

strategic money

These people are directly tied to the Clinton Foundation. The Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation is a money funnel to influence the U.S. Government through the workings and corruption of Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton.

These people are directly tied to the Clinton Foundation.  The Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation is a money funnel to influence the U.S. Government through the workings and corruption of Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton.  The people listed below are supporters in one way or another and some of the names will surprise you.  Don't assume you know the truth, that book has not be written just yet, bigger than Clinton Cash.  

CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, Financial Times’ Lionel Barber, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, Fox Business Network anchor Maria Bartiromo, NBC’s Matt Lauer, The Economists’ Matthew Bishop, ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos, NBC’s Tom Brokaw, Fox News anchor Greta Van Susteren, CNN host Anderson Cooper, PBS correspondent Judy Woodruff, Yahoo’s Katie Couric and Fareed Zakaria.

The Wetback Army of Barack Obama.

The Wetback Army of Barack Obama. It has been uncovered that your government officials, many from the GOP, have tried their best to assure that illegal aliens are allowed full military training to fill up the U.S. military ranks of the Army, the Wetback Army.  The plan is to bump the American citizen out of the way to allow more and more illegal aliens to join the U.S.Army, which would guarantee the U.S. Citizenship, full combat training, life long V.A. benefits and a host of college programs, while the poor White kid works at McDonalds. 

ABC News Dumps George Stephanopoulos George Stephanopoulos had to be a part of what many may call the CLINTON MACHINE CRIMES FOR WHICH CONVICTIONS WERE OBTAINED Drug trafficking (3), racketeering, extortion, bribery (4), tax evasion, kickbacks, embezzlement (2), fraud (12), conspiracy (5), fraudulent loans, illegal gifts (1), illegal campaign contributions (5), money laundering (6), perjury, obstruction of justice. The real George Stephanopoulos is dishonest and that makes ABC dishonest and corrupt as his employer will stand by their little man, dishonest or not. Stephanopoulos had a great time drilling Schweizer, the author of "Clinton Cash" and now you can see how he was motivated by his love for the criminal family "the Clinton's".

George Stephanopoulos makes it very clear to his employer (ABC) and the American people that he truly feels being honest is about going the extra mile.  George Stephanopoulos ABC News and Clinton long time supporter gave $75,000 to the now underground Clinton Foundation.  

Being honest is so old fashioned it's now considered the extra mile by liars. 

As Stephanopoulos follows Clinton around like a puppy we can guess that he also had to pay for access with $75,000.  

The Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation will surely be uncovered as a criminal organization under RICO as foreign money pours in and political favors by Hillary follow. 

George Stephanopoulos had to be a part of what many may call 

the CLINTON MACHINE CRIMES 

FOR WHICH CONVICTIONS WERE OBTAINED

Drug trafficking (3), racketeering, extortion, bribery (4), tax evasion, kickbacks, embezzlement (2), fraud (12), conspiracy (5), fraudulent loans, illegal gifts (1), illegal campaign contributions (5), money laundering (6), perjury, obstruction of justice.

OTHER MATTERS INVESTIGATED BY SPECIAL PROSECUTORS

AND CONGRESS, OR REPORTED IN THE MEDIA

Bank and mail fraud, violations of campaign finance laws, illegal foreign campaign funding, improper exports of sensitive technology, physical violence and threats of violence, solicitation of perjury, intimidation of witnesses, bribery of witnesses, attempted intimidation of prosecutors, perjury before congressional committees, lying in statements to federal investigators and regulatory officials, flight of witnesses, obstruction of justice, bribery of cabinet members, real estate fraud, tax fraud, drug trafficking, failure to investigate drug trafficking, bribery of state officials, use of state police for personal purposes, exchange of promotions or benefits for sexual favors, using state police to provide false court testimony, laundering of drug money through a state agency, false reports by medical examiners and others investigating suspicious deaths, the firing of the RTC and FBI director when these agencies were investigating Clinton and his associates, failure to conduct autopsies in suspicious deaths, providing jobs in return for silence by witnesses, drug abuse, improper acquisition and use of 900 FBI files, improper futures trading, murder, sexual abuse of employees, false testimony before a federal judge, shredding of documents, withholding and concealment of subpoenaed documents, fabricated charges against (and improper firing of) White House employees, inviting drug traffickers, foreign agents and participants in organized crime to the White House.

Yes, George Stephanopoulos ABC should be terminated today.  The story had already been uncovered when George ran to Politico to beat the breaking news, making him dishonest to the bone.  George now thinks the cash to Clinton was a mistake like a bank robber caught seems to rethink his actions. 

The real George Stephanopoulos is dishonest and that makes ABC dishonest and corrupt as his employer will stand by their little man, dishonest or not.  Stephanopoulos had a great time drilling Schweizer, the author of "Clinton Cash" and now you can see how he was motivated by his love for the criminal family "the Clinton's".

You can be sure he'll work for Hillary inside the White House if the wicked witch can convince enough slow thinking people she's honest.  Hillary prey's on the uneducated, unmotivated, minority and progressive minded slow people for power, including George Stephanopoulos.

George is like a little pissy attack dog for the Clinton's.

Oh, George is sorry by the way. 

Jeb Bush will never be president. Jeb Bush thinks he knows the people but not so after Barack Obaama. Jeb Bush is just another guy, wanting to play ball with socialism.

Jeb Bush will never be president.  Jeb Bush thinks he knows the people but not so after Barack Obaama.  Jeb Bush is just another guy, wanting to play ball with socialism. 

Marilyn Mosby and Mayor Blake have Big Rat Thug Problem in Baltimore, The Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services has suspended two correctional officers without pay after they were caught on video allegedly looting a 7-Eleven store during violent riots in Baltimore last month.,

The Rat infested Baltimore came up with two really big rats, really. The Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services has suspended two correctional officers without pay after they were caught on video allegedly looting a 7-Eleven store during violent riots in Baltimore last month., the two officers, identified as Tamika Cobb and Kendra Richard, leaving the convenience store with merchandise.  You can be sure that Marilyn Mosby will throw the book at them unless their friends with Al Sharpton or Elijah Cummings.  The mayor of the jungle Stephanie Rawlings Blake may wonder why hundreds of negro's have not been arrested yet due to their rioting, burning and other criminal activities. 

Barack Obama has ended U.S. government’s Secure Communities program which tracks the number of illegal aliens deported out of the United States.

Barack Obama has ended U.S. government’s Secure Communities program which tracks the number of illegal aliens deported out of the United States.  The Radical Barack Obama did this by executive order and you won't hear about it on ABC,CBS,NBC, MSNBC or CNN because they support the socialist administration and other lawless actions.  The U.S. has an estimated 25 million illegal aliens roaming the streets due the Obama's lawlessness. 

The Black Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama, The Barack Hussein Obama Osama Bin Laden U.S. C.I.A. Seal Team Pakistan Military Hoax and Lie on the World comes to surface Firefight Airspace Nuclear Taliban USS Carl Vinson Burial at Sea Osama Bin Laden Captive Since 2006 Hillary Rodham Clinton Barack Obama ISI Guards White House CNN ABC CBS NBC MSNBC Kayania Pasha

The Hoax of the Century exposed;  Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, U.S. Military, C.I.A., D.O.D., D.I.A. Seal Team, Osama Bin Laden had been held in Pakistan for years as Obama waited for the political time to create his carnival sideshow for the world to see? 

Barack Obama is now known as the BLACK JIMMY CARTER inside the halls of the Pentagon and some circles in Washington D.C. for his part in the Hoax about the taking and killing of Osama Bin Laden which is now considered little more than a magic trick by the Pakistan Secret Services .. 

Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has uncovered one of the biggest lies in modern American history. 

It turns out that much of what the American public was told about the raid that killed Osama bin Laden was a blatant lie.  

According to Hersh, Osama bin Laden had been captured by Pakistan all the way back in 2006, and he was being held by the ISI as a prisoner at the Abbottabad compound that the Seals ultimately raided in 2011.  

In addition, Hersh says that the ISI and Pakistan’s military knew about the Seal raid in advance.  Arrangements were made so that the Black Hawk helicopters could travel through Pakistani airspace safely, and the ISI guards at Osama bin Laden’s compound were pulled away before the Seals got there.  

And by that time, Osama bin Laden was reportedly in such bad health that he was essentially a cripple.  

There was no “firefight” at all – only a turkey shoot.  

Afterwards, Osama bin Laden’s body never made it to the USS Carl Vinson for a “burial at sea."  That was all just part of the cover story according to Hersh.  

Of course the White House and Obama’s lackeys at CNN are strongly denying all of this, and they will continue to deny the truth for as long as they possibly can.  

But there are individuals in the U.S. military and in the U.S. intelligence community that can come forward and tell us what really happened.  Let us hope that at least some of those individuals still care enough about this country to do that.

According to Hersh, one of the biggest lies that Obama told was that Pakistani leadership had no idea that the Seals were coming in.  

Actually, the truth is that the head of the army, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, and the director general of the ISI, General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, were both heavily involved in the planning of the operation.  The following is an excerpt from Hersh’s article for the London Review of Books…

Pasha and Kayani were responsible for ensuring that Pakistan’s army and air defens e command would not track or engage with the US helicopters used on the mission. 

The American cell at Tarbela Ghazi was charged with co-ordinating communications between the ISI, the senior US officers at their command post in Afghanistan, and the two Black Hawk helicopters; the goal was to ensure that no stray Pakistani fighter plane on border patrol spotted the intruders and took action to stop them. 

The initial plan said that news of the raid shouldn’t be announced straightaway. 

All units in the Joint Special Operations Command operate under stringent secrecy and the JSOC leadership believed, as did Kayani and Pasha, that the killing of bin Laden would not be made public for as long as seven days, maybe longer. 

Then a carefully constructed cover story would be issued: Obama would announce that DNA analysis confirmed that bin Laden had been killed in a drone raid in the Hindu Kush, on Afghanistan’s side of the border. 

The Americans who planned the mission assured Kayani and Pasha that their co-operation would never be made public. 

It was understood by all that if the Pakistani role became known, there would be violent protests – bin Laden was considered a hero by many Pakistanis – and Pasha and Kayani and their families would be in danger, and the Pakistani army publicly disgraced.

When the Seals got to the compound in Abbottabad, bin Laden and his family were completely unguarded.  That is because the ISI guards had already been pulled back.

Here is more from Hersh…

At the Abbottabad compound ISI guards were posted around the clock to keep watch over bin Laden and his wives and children. 

They were under orders to leave as soon as they heard the rotors of the US helicopters. 

The town was dark: the electricity supply had been cut off on the orders of the ISI hours before the raid began. 

One of the Black Hawks crashed inside the walls of the compound, injuring many on board.

 ‘The guys knew the TOT [time on target] had to be tight because they would wake up the whole town going in,’ the retired official said. 

The cockpit of the crashed Black Hawk, with its communication and navigational gear, had to be destroyed by concussion grenades, and this would create a series of explosions and a fire visible for miles. 

Two Chinook helicopters had flown from Afghanistan to a nearby Pakistani intelligence base to provide logistical support, and one of them was immediately dispatched to Abbottabad. 

But because the helicopter had been equipped with a bladder loaded with extra fuel for the two Black Hawks, it first had to be reconfigured as a troop carrier. 

The crash of the Black Hawk and the need to fly in a replacement were nerve-wracking and time-consuming setbacks, but the Seals continued with their mission. 

There was no firefight as they moved into the compound; the ISI guards had gone.

 ‘Everyone in Pakistan has a gun and high-profile, wealthy folks like those who live in Abbottabad have armed bodyguards, and yet there were no weapons in the compound,’ the retired official pointed out. 

Had there been any opposition, the team would have been highly vulnerable. Instead, the retired official said, an ISI liaison officer flying with the Seals guided them into the darkened house and up a staircase to bin Laden’s quarters. 

The Seals had been warned by the Pakistanis that heavy steel doors blocked the stairwell on the first and second-floor landings; bin Laden’s rooms were on the third floor. 

The Seal squad used explosives to blow the doors open, without injuring anyone. 

One of bin Laden’s wives was screaming hysterically and a bullet – perhaps a stray round – struck her knee. 

Aside from those that hit bin Laden, no other shots were fired. (The Obama administration’s account would hold otherwise.)

After the raid, Obama was never supposed to go public with what had happened.  

Instead, about a week later a cover story about how bin Laden had been killed in a drone strike was supposed to be released to the public.  Obama betrayed the Pakistanis for his own political gain.  And the highly touted “burial at sea” of bin Laden never took place either…

Within weeks of the raid, I had been told by two longtime consultants to Special Operations Command, who have access to current intelligence, that the funeral aboard the Carl Vinson didn’t take place. 

One consultant told me that bin Laden’s remains were photographed and identified after being flown back to Afghanistan. 

The consultant added: ‘At that point, the CIA took control of the body. 

The cover story was that it had been flown to the Carl Vinson.’ The second consultant agreed that there had been ‘no burial at sea’. 

He added that ‘the killing of bin Laden was political theater designed to burnish Obama’s military credentials … 

The Seals should have expected the political grandstanding. It’s irresistible to a politician.

 Bin Laden became a working asset.’ Early this year, speaking again to the second consultant, I returned to the burial at sea. The consultant laughed and said: ‘You mean, he didn’t make it to the water?’

The retired official said there had been another complication: some members of the Seal team had bragged to colleagues and others that they had torn bin Laden’s body to pieces with rifle fire. 

The remains, including his head, which had only a few bullet holes in it, were thrown into a body bag and, during the helicopter flight back to Jalalabad, some body parts were tossed out over the Hindu Kush mountains – or so the Seals claimed. 

At the time, the retired official said, the Seals did not think their mission would be made public by Obama within a few hours: ‘If the president had gone ahead with the cover story, there would have been no need to have a funeral within hours of the killing. Once the cover story was blown, and the death was made public, the White House had a serious “Where’s the body?” problem.

Obviously the Seals could blow up the whole story by coming back and talking to the media.  That is why the Obama administration has gone to extraordinary lengths to silence them…

The White House’s solution was to silence the Seals. 

On 5 May, every member of the Seal hit team – they had returned to their base in southern Virginia – and some members of the Joint Special Operations Command leadership were presented with a nondisclosure form drafted by the White House’s legal office; 

it promised civil penalties and a lawsuit for anyone who discussed the mission, in public or private. ‘The Seals were not happy,’ the retired official said. 

But most of them kept quiet, as did Admiral William McRaven, who was then in charge of JSOC. ‘McRaven was apoplectic. He knew he was ****** by the White House, but he’s a dyed-in-the-wool Seal, and not then a political operator, and he knew there’s no glory in blowing the whistle on the president. 

When Obama went public with bin Laden’s death, everyone had to scramble around for a new story that made sense, and the planners were stuck holding the bag.’

There is so much more in Hersh’s article, and you can read the rest of it right here.  The following is how Business Insider summarized some of the main points…

The White House’s “most blatant” lie was that Pakistan’s two most senior military officials were never informed of the mission, Hersh says.

While US officials say they found bin Laden by tracking his trusted courier, Hersh says they discovered his whereabouts from a former Pakistani intelligence officer who wanted the $25 million reward the US was offering.

The government claimed bin Laden was hiding out, but Hersh says the Pakistani intelligence agency had actually been holding him captive since 2006 to use him as leverage against Taliban and Al Qaeda activities in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

While the White House has said it would have taken bin Laden alive if it could have and that he was killed in a firefight, Hersh says that wasn’t the case. “There was no firefight as they moved into the compound; the ISI guards had gone,” Hersh wrote.

The article also takes issue with the White House’s claim that bin Laden was buried at sea in a service that followed Islamic practices. “The remains, including his head, which had only a few bullet holes in it, were thrown into a body bag and, during the helicopter flight back to Jalalabad, some body parts were tossed out over the Hindu Kush mountains — or so the Seals claimed,” Hersh reported, citing his senior US intelligence official.

If these things are true, Barack Obama and much of his inner circle should immediately resign.  They purposely and maliciously lied to the American people over and over for their own political gain.  But of course so far they are choosing to deny everything…

“There are too many inaccuracies and baseless assertions in this piece to fact check each one,” White House National Security Council spokesman Ned Price said in a statement shared with The Hill.

“Every sentence I was reading was wrong,” former acting CIA Director Michael Morell added Monday on “CBS This Morning.”

“The source that Hersh talked to has no idea what he’s talking about. The person obviously was not close to what happened,” he added. “The Pakistanis did not know. The president made a decision not to tell the Pakistanis. The Pakistanis were furious with us. The president sent me to Pakistan after the raids to start smoothing things over.”

So what we need are people that know what really happened to step forward and tell the American people the truth.

Without a doubt, there are individuals in the U.S. military and in the U.S. intelligence community that can expose the lies of the Obama administration if they have the courage to act.

If you are one of those individuals and you choose to remain silent, you are betraying this country just like the Obama administration has.  The time has come to tell the truth, and it is your duty as an American to do so.


..

It’s been four years since a group of US Navy Seals assassinated Osama bin Laden in a night raid on a high-walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The killing was the high point of Obama’s first term, and a major factor in his re-election. The White House still maintains that the mission was an all-American affair, and that the senior generals of Pakistan’s army and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) were not told of the raid in advance. This is false, as are many other elements of the Obama administration’s account. The White House’s story might have been written by Lewis Carroll: would bin Laden, target of a massive international manhunt, really decide that a resort town forty miles from Islamabad would be the safest place to live and command al-Qaida’s operations? He was hiding in the open. So America said.

The most blatant lie was that Pakistan’s two most senior military leaders – General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, chief of the army staff, and General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, director general of the ISI – were never informed of the US mission. This remains the White House position despite an array of reports that have raised questions, including one by Carlotta Gall in the New York Times Magazine of 19 March 2014. Gall, who spent 12 years as the Times correspondent in Afghanistan, wrote that she’d been told by a ‘Pakistani official’ that Pasha had known before the raid that bin Laden was in Abbottabad. The story was denied by US and Pakistani officials, and went no further. In his book Pakistan: Before and after Osama (2012), Imtiaz Gul, executive director of the Centre for Research and Security Studies, a think tank in Islamabad, wrote that he’d spoken to four undercover intelligence officers who – reflecting a widely held local view – asserted that the Pakistani military must have had knowledge of the operation. The issue was raised again in February, when a retired general, Asad Durrani, who was head of the ISI in the early 1990s, told an al-Jazeera interviewer that it was ‘quite possible’ that the senior officers of the ISI did not know where bin Laden had been hiding, ‘but it was more probable that they did [know]. And the idea was that, at the right time, his location would be revealed. And the right time would have been when you can get the necessary quid pro quo – if you have someone like Osama bin Laden, you are not going to simply hand him over to the United States.’

This spring I contacted Durrani and told him in detail what I had learned about the bin Laden assault from American sources: that bin Laden had been a prisoner of the ISI at the Abbottabad compound since 2006; that Kayani and Pasha knew of the raid in advance and had made sure that the two helicopters delivering the Seals to Abbottabad could cross Pakistani airspace without triggering any alarms; that the CIA did not learn of bin Laden’s whereabouts by tracking his couriers, as the White House has claimed since May 2011, but from a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer who betrayed the secret in return for much of the $25 million reward offered by the US, and that, while Obama did order the raid and the Seal team did carry it out, many other aspects of the administration’s account were false.

‘When your version comes out – if you do it – people in Pakistan will be tremendously grateful,’ Durrani told me. ‘For a long time people have stopped trusting what comes out about bin Laden from the official mouths. There will be some negative political comment and some anger, but people like to be told the truth, and what you’ve told me is essentially what I have heard from former colleagues who have been on a fact-finding mission since this episode.’ As a former ISI head, he said, he had been told shortly after the raid by ‘people in the “strategic community” who would know’ that there had been an informant who had alerted the US to bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad, and that after his killing the US’s betrayed promises left Kayani and Pasha exposed.

The major US source for the account that follows is a retired senior intelligence official who was knowledgeable about the initial intelligence about bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad. He also was privy to many aspects of the Seals’ training for the raid, and to the various after-action reports. Two other US sources, who had access to corroborating information, have been longtime consultants to the Special Operations Command. I also received information from inside Pakistan about widespread dismay among the senior ISI and military leadership – echoed later by Durrani – over Obama’s decision to go public immediately with news of bin Laden’s death. The White House did not respond to requests for comment.

*

It began with a walk-in. In August 2010 a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer approached Jonathan Bank, then the CIA’s station chief at the US embassy in Islamabad. He offered to tell the CIA where to find bin Laden in return for the reward that Washington had offered in 2001. Walk-ins are assumed by the CIA to be unreliable, and the response from the agency’s headquarters was to fly in a polygraph team. The walk-in passed the test. ‘So now we’ve got a lead on bin Laden living in a compound in Abbottabad, but how do we really know who it is?’ was the CIA’s worry at the time, the retired senior US intelligence official told me.

The US initially kept what it knew from the Pakistanis. ‘The fear was that if the existence of the source was made known, the Pakistanis themselves would move bin Laden to another location. So only a very small number of people were read into the source and his story,’ the retired official said. ‘The CIA’s first goal was to check out the quality of the informant’s information.’ The compound was put under satellite surveillance. The CIA rented a house in Abbottabad to use as a forward observation base and staffed it with Pakistani employees and foreign nationals. Later on, the base would serve as a contact point with the ISI; it attracted little attention because Abbottabad is a holiday spot full of houses rented on short leases. A psychological profile of the informant was prepared. (The informant and his family were smuggled out of Pakistan and relocated in the Washington area. He is now a consultant for the CIA.)

‘By October the military and intelligence community were discussing the possible military options. Do we drop a bunker buster on the compound or take him out with a drone strike? Perhaps send someone to kill him, single assassin style? But then we’d have no proof of who he was,’ the retired official said. ‘We could see some guy is walking around at night, but we have no intercepts because there’s no commo coming from the compound.’

In October, Obama was briefed on the intelligence. His response was cautious, the retired official said. ‘It just made no sense that bin Laden was living in Abbottabad. It was just too crazy. The president’s position was emphatic: “Don’t talk to me about this any more unless you have proof that it really is bin Laden.”’ The immediate goal of the CIA leadership and the Joint Special Operations Command was to get Obama’s support. They believed they would get this if they got DNA evidence, and if they could assure him that a night assault of the compound would carry no risk. The only way to accomplish both things, the retired official said, ‘was to get the Pakistanis on board’.

During the late autumn of 2010, the US continued to keep quiet about the walk-in, and Kayani and Pasha continued to insist to their American counterparts that they had no information about bin Laden’s whereabouts. ‘The next step was to figure out how to ease Kayani and Pasha into it – to tell them that we’ve got intelligence showing that there is a high-value target in the compound, and to ask them what they know about the target,’ the retired official said. ‘The compound was not an armed enclave – no machine guns around, because it was under ISI control.’ The walk-in had told the US that bin Laden had lived undetected from 2001 to 2006 with some of his wives and children in the Hindu Kush mountains, and that ‘the ISI got to him by paying some of the local tribal people to betray him.’ (Reports after the raid placed him elsewhere in Pakistan during this period.) Bank was also told by the walk-in that bin Laden was very ill, and that early on in his confinement at Abbottabad, the ISI had ordered Amir Aziz, a doctor and a major in the Pakistani army, to move nearby to provide treatment. ‘The truth is that bin Laden was an invalid, but we cannot say that,’ the retired official said. ‘“You mean you guys shot a cripple? Who was about to grab his AK-47?”’

‘It didn’t take long to get the co-operation we needed, because the Pakistanis wanted to ensure the continued release of American military aid, a good percentage of which was anti-terrorism funding that finances personal security, such as bullet-proof limousines and security guards and housing for the ISI leadership,’ the retired official said. He added that there were also under-the-table personal ‘incentives’ that were financed by off-the-books Pentagon contingency funds. ‘The intelligence community knew what the Pakistanis needed to agree – there was the carrot. And they chose the carrot. It was a win-win. We also did a little blackmail. We told them we would leak the fact that you’ve got bin Laden in your backyard. We knew their friends and enemies’ – the Taliban and jihadist groups in Pakistan and Afghanistan – ‘would not like it.’

A worrying factor at this early point, according to the retired official, was Saudi Arabia, which had been financing bin Laden’s upkeep since his seizure by the Pakistanis. ‘The Saudis didn’t want bin Laden’s presence revealed to us because he was a Saudi, and so they told the Pakistanis to keep him out of the picture. The Saudis feared if we knew we would pressure the Pakistanis to let bin Laden start talking to us about what the Saudis had been doing with al-Qaida. And they were dropping money – lots of it. The Pakistanis, in turn, were concerned that the Saudis might spill the beans about their control of bin Laden. The fear was that if the US found out about bin Laden from Riyadh, all hell would break out. The Americans learning about bin Laden’s imprisonment from a walk-in was not the worst thing.’

Despite their constant public feuding, American and Pakistani military and intelligence services have worked together closely for decades on counterterrorism in South Asia. Both services often find it useful to engage in public feuds ‘to cover their asses’, as the retired official put it, but they continually share intelligence used for drone attacks, and co-operate on covert operations. At the same time, it’s understood in Washington that elements of the ISI believe that maintaining a relationship with the Taliban leadership inside Afghanistan is essential to national security. The ISI’s strategic aim is to balance Indian influence in Kabul; the Taliban is also seen in Pakistan as a source of jihadist shock troops who would back Pakistan against India in a confrontation over Kashmir.

Adding to the tension was the Pakistani nuclear arsenal, often depicted in the Western press as an ‘Islamic bomb’ that might be transferred by Pakistan to an embattled nation in the Middle East in the event of a crisis with Israel. The US looked the other way when Pakistan began building its weapons system in the 1970s and it’s widely believed it now has more than a hundred nuclear warheads. It’s understood in Washington that US security depends on the maintenance of strong military and intelligence ties to Pakistan. The belief is mirrored in Pakistan.

‘The Pakistani army sees itself as family,’ the retired official said. ‘Officers call soldiers their sons and all officers are “brothers”. The attitude is different in the American military. The senior Pakistani officers believe they are the elite and have got to look out for all of the people, as keepers of the flame against Muslim fundamentalism. The Pakistanis also know that their trump card against aggression from India is a strong relationship with the United States. They will never cut their person-to-person ties with us.’

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Like all CIA station chiefs, Bank was working undercover, but that ended in early December 2010 when he was publicly accused of murder in a criminal complaint filed in Islamabad by Karim Khan, a Pakistani journalist whose son and brother, according to local news reports, had been killed by a US drone strike. Allowing Bank to be named was a violation of diplomatic protocol on the part of the Pakistani authorities, and it brought a wave of unwanted publicity. Bank was ordered to leave Pakistan by the CIA, whose officials subsequently told the Associated Press he was transferred because of concerns for his safety. The New York Times reported that there was ‘strong suspicion’ the ISI had played a role in leaking Bank’s name to Khan. There was speculation that he was outed as payback for the publication in a New York lawsuit a month earlier of the names of ISI chiefs in connection with the Mumbai terrorist attacks of 2008. But there was a collateral reason, the retired official said, for the CIA’s willingness to send Bank back to America. The Pakistanis needed cover in case their co-operation with the Americans in getting rid of bin Laden became known. The Pakistanis could say: “You’re talking about me? We just kicked out your station chief.”’

*

The bin Laden compound was less than two miles from the Pakistan Military Academy, and a Pakistani army combat battalion headquarters was another mile or so away. Abbottabad is less than 15 minutes by helicopter from Tarbela Ghazi, an important base for ISI covert operations and the facility where those who guard Pakistan’s nuclear weapons arsenal are trained. ‘Ghazi is why the ISI put bin Laden in Abbottabad in the first place,’ the retired official said, ‘to keep him under constant supervision.’

The risks for Obama were high at this early stage, especially because there was a troubling precedent: the failed 1980 attempt to rescue the American hostages in Tehran. That failure was a factor in Jimmy Carter’s loss to Ronald Reagan. Obama’s worries were realistic, the retired official said. ‘Was bin Laden ever there? Was the whole story a product of Pakistani deception? What about political blowback in case of failure?’ After all, as the retired official said, ‘If the mission fails, Obama’s just a black Jimmy Carter and it’s all over for re-election.’

Obama was anxious for reassurance that the US was going to get the right man. The proof was to come in the form of bin Laden’s DNA. The planners turned for help to Kayani and Pasha, who asked Aziz to obtain the specimens. Soon after the raid the press found out that Aziz had been living in a house near the bin Laden compound: local reporters discovered his name in Urdu on a plate on the door. Pakistani officials denied that Aziz had any connection to bin Laden, but the retired official told me that Aziz had been rewarded with a share of the $25 million reward the US had put up because the DNA sample had showed conclusively that it was bin Laden in Abbottabad. (In his subsequent testimony to a Pakistani commission investigating the bin Laden raid, Aziz said that he had witnessed the attack on Abbottabad, but had no knowledge of who was living in the compound and had been ordered by a superior officer to stay away from the scene.)

Bargaining continued over the way the mission would be executed. ‘Kayani eventually tells us yes, but he says you can’t have a big strike force. You have to come in lean and mean. And you have to kill him, or there is no deal,’ the retired official said. The agreement was struck by the end of January 2011, and Joint Special Operations Command prepared a list of questions to be answered by the Pakistanis: ‘How can we be assured of no outside intervention? What are the defences inside the compound and its exact dimensions? Where are bin Laden’s rooms and exactly how big are they? How many steps in the stairway? Where are the doors to his rooms, and are they reinforced with steel? How thick?’ The Pakistanis agreed to permit a four-man American cell – a Navy Seal, a CIA case officer and two communications specialists – to set up a liaison office at Tarbela Ghazi for the coming assault. By then, the military had constructed a mock-up of the compound in Abbottabad at a secret former nuclear test site in Nevada, and an elite Seal team had begun rehearsing for the attack.

The US had begun to cut back on aid to Pakistan – to ‘turn off the spigot’, in the retired official’s words. The provision of 18 new F-16 fighter aircraft was delayed, and under-the-table cash payments to the senior leaders were suspended. In April 2011 Pasha met the CIA director, Leon Panetta, at agency headquarters. ‘Pasha got a commitment that the United States would turn the money back on, and we got a guarantee that there would be no Pakistani opposition during the mission,’ the retired official said. ‘Pasha also insisted that Washington stop complaining about Pakistan’s lack of co-operation with the American war on terrorism.’ At one point that spring, Pasha offered the Americans a blunt explanation of the reason Pakistan kept bin Laden’s capture a secret, and why it was imperative for the ISI role to remain secret: ‘We needed a hostage to keep tabs on al-Qaida and the Taliban,’ Pasha said, according to the retired official. ‘The ISI was using bin Laden as leverage against Taliban and al-Qaida activities inside Afghanistan and Pakistan. They let the Taliban and al-Qaida leadership know that if they ran operations that clashed with the interests of the ISI, they would turn bin Laden over to us. So if it became known that the Pakistanis had worked with us to get bin Laden at Abbottabad, there would be hell to pay.’

At one of his meetings with Panetta, according to the retired official and a source within the CIA, Pasha was asked by a senior CIA official whether he saw himself as acting in essence as an agent for al-Qaida and the Taliban. ‘He answered no, but said the ISI needed to have some control.’ The message, as the CIA saw it, according to the retired official, was that Kayani and Pasha viewed bin Laden ‘as a resource, and they were more interested in their [own] survival than they were in the United States’.

A Pakistani with close ties to the senior leadership of the ISI told me that ‘there was a deal with your top guys. We were very reluctant, but it had to be done – not because of personal enrichment, but because all of the American aid programmes would be cut off. Your guys said we will starve you out if you don’t do it, and the okay was given while Pasha was in Washington. The deal was not only to keep the taps open, but Pasha was told there would be more goodies for us.’ The Pakistani said that Pasha’s visit also resulted in a commitment from the US to give Pakistan ‘a freer hand’ in Afghanistan as it began its military draw-down there. ‘And so our top dogs justified the deal by saying this is for our country.’

*

Pasha and Kayani were responsible for ensuring that Pakistan’s army and air defence command would not track or engage with the US helicopters used on the mission. The American cell at Tarbela Ghazi was charged with co-ordinating communications between the ISI, the senior US officers at their command post in Afghanistan, and the two Black Hawk helicopters; the goal was to ensure that no stray Pakistani fighter plane on border patrol spotted the intruders and took action to stop them. The initial plan said that news of the raid shouldn’t be announced straightaway. All units in the Joint Special Operations Command operate under stringent secrecy and the JSOC leadership believed, as did Kayani and Pasha, that the killing of bin Laden would not be made public for as long as seven days, maybe longer. Then a carefully constructed cover story would be issued: Obama would announce that DNA analysis confirmed that bin Laden had been killed in a drone raid in the Hindu Kush, on Afghanistan’s side of the border. The Americans who planned the mission assured Kayani and Pasha that their co-operation would never be made public. It was understood by all that if the Pakistani role became known, there would be violent protests – bin Laden was considered a hero by many Pakistanis – and Pasha and Kayani and their families would be in danger, and the Pakistani army publicly disgraced.

It was clear to all by this point, the retired official said, that bin Laden would not survive: ‘Pasha told us at a meeting in April that he could not risk leaving bin Laden in the compound now that we know he’s there. Too many people in the Pakistani chain of command know about the mission. He and Kayani had to tell the whole story to the directors of the air defence command and to a few local commanders.

‘Of course the guys knew the target was bin Laden and he was there under Pakistani control,’ the retired official said. ‘Otherwise, they would not have done the mission without air cover. It was clearly and absolutely a premeditated murder.’ A former Seal commander, who has led and participated in dozens of similar missions over the past decade, assured me that ‘we were not going to keep bin Laden alive – to allow the terrorist to live. By law, we know what we’re doing inside Pakistan is a homicide. We’ve come to grips with that. Each one of us, when we do these missions, say to ourselves, “Let’s face it. We’re going to commit a murder.”’ The White House’s initial account claimed that bin Laden had been brandishing a weapon; the story was aimed at deflecting those who questioned the legality of the US administration’s targeted assassination programme. The US has consistently maintained, despite widely reported remarks by people involved with the mission, that bin Laden would have been taken alive if he had immediately surrendered.

*

At the Abbottabad compound ISI guards were posted around the clock to keep watch over bin Laden and his wives and children. They were under orders to leave as soon as they heard the rotors of the US helicopters. The town was dark: the electricity supply had been cut off on the orders of the ISI hours before the raid began. One of the Black Hawks crashed inside the walls of the compound, injuring many on board. ‘The guys knew the TOT [time on target] had to be tight because they would wake up the whole town going in,’ the retired official said. The cockpit of the crashed Black Hawk, with its communication and navigational gear, had to be destroyed by concussion grenades, and this would create a series of explosions and a fire visible for miles. Two Chinook helicopters had flown from Afghanistan to a nearby Pakistani intelligence base to provide logistical support, and one of them was immediately dispatched to Abbottabad. But because the helicopter had been equipped with a bladder loaded with extra fuel for the two Black Hawks, it first had to be reconfigured as a troop carrier. The crash of the Black Hawk and the need to fly in a replacement were nerve-wracking and time-consuming setbacks, but the Seals continued with their mission. There was no firefight as they moved into the compound; the ISI guards had gone. ‘Everyone in Pakistan has a gun and high-profile, wealthy folks like those who live in Abbottabad have armed bodyguards, and yet there were no weapons in the compound,’ the retired official pointed out. Had there been any opposition, the team would have been highly vulnerable. Instead, the retired official said, an ISI liaison officer flying with the Seals guided them into the darkened house and up a staircase to bin Laden’s quarters. The Seals had been warned by the Pakistanis that heavy steel doors blocked the stairwell on the first and second-floor landings; bin Laden’s rooms were on the third floor. The Seal squad used explosives to blow the doors open, without injuring anyone. One of bin Laden’s wives was screaming hysterically and a bullet – perhaps a stray round – struck her knee. Aside from those that hit bin Laden, no other shots were fired. (The Obama administration’s account would hold otherwise.)

‘They knew where the target was – third floor, second door on the right,’ the retired official said. ‘Go straight there. Osama was cowering and retreated into the bedroom. Two shooters followed him and opened up. Very simple, very straightforward, very professional hit.’ Some of the Seals were appalled later at the White House’s initial insistence that they had shot bin Laden in self-defence, the retired official said. ‘Six of the Seals’ finest, most experienced NCOs, faced with an unarmed elderly civilian, had to kill him in self-defence? The house was shabby and bin Laden was living in a cell with bars on the window and barbed wire on the roof. The rules of engagement were that if bin Laden put up any opposition they were authorised to take lethal action. But if they suspected he might have some means of opposition, like an explosive vest under his robe, they could also kill him. So here’s this guy in a mystery robe and they shot him. It’s not because he was reaching for a weapon. The rules gave them absolute authority to kill the guy.’ The later White House claim that only one or two bullets were fired into his head was ‘bullshit’, the retired official said. ‘The squad came through the door and obliterated him. As the Seals say, “We kicked his ass and took his gas.”’

After they killed bin Laden, ‘the Seals were just there, some with physical injuries from the crash, waiting for the relief chopper,’ the retired official said. ‘Twenty tense minutes. The Black Hawk is still burning. There are no city lights. No electricity. No police. No fire trucks. They have no prisoners.’ Bin Laden’s wives and children were left for the ISI to interrogate and relocate. ‘Despite all the talk,’ the retired official continued, there were ‘no garbage bags full of computers and storage devices. The guys just stuffed some books and papers they found in his room in their backpacks. The Seals weren’t there because they thought bin Laden was running a command centre for al-Qaida operations, as the White House would later tell the media. And they were not intelligence experts gathering information inside that house.’

On a normal assault mission, the retired official said, there would be no waiting around if a chopper went down. ‘The Seals would have finished the mission, thrown off their guns and gear, and jammed into the remaining Black Hawk and di-di-maued’ – Vietnamese slang for leaving in a rush – ‘out of there, with guys hanging out of the doors. They would not have blown the chopper – no commo gear is worth a dozen lives – unless they knew they were safe. Instead they stood around outside the compound, waiting for the bus to arrive.’ Pasha and Kayani had delivered on all their promises.

*

The backroom argument inside the White House began as soon as it was clear that the mission had succeeded. Bin Laden’s body was presumed to be on its way to Afghanistan. Should Obama stand by the agreement with Kayani and Pasha and pretend a week or so later that bin Laden had been killed in a drone attack in the mountains, or should he go public immediately? The downed helicopter made it easy for Obama’s political advisers to urge the latter plan. The explosion and fireball would be impossible to hide, and word of what had happened was bound to leak. Obama had to ‘get out in front of the story’ before someone in the Pentagon did: waiting would diminish the political impact.

Not everyone agreed. Robert Gates, the secretary of defence, was the most outspoken of those who insisted that the agreements with Pakistan had to be honoured. In his memoir, Duty, Gates did not mask his anger:

Before we broke up and the president headed upstairs to tell the American people what had just happened, I reminded everyone that the techniques, tactics and procedures the Seals had used in the bin Laden operation were used every night in Afghanistan … it was therefore essential that we agree not to release any operational details of the raid. That we killed him, I said, is all we needed to say. Everybody in that room agreed to keep mum on details. That commitment lasted about five hours. The initial leaks came from the White House and CIA. They just couldn’t wait to brag and to claim credit. The facts were often wrong … Nonetheless the information just kept pouring out. I was outraged and at one point, told [the national security adviser, Tom] Donilon, ‘Why doesn’t everybody just shut the fuck up?’ To no avail.

Obama’s speech was put together in a rush, the retired official said, and was viewed by his advisers as a political document, not a message that needed to be submitted for clearance to the national security bureaucracy. This series of self-serving and inaccurate statements would create chaos in the weeks following. Obama said that his administration had discovered that bin Laden was in Pakistan through ‘a possible lead’ the previous August; to many in the CIA the statement suggested a specific event, such as a walk-in. The remark led to a new cover story claiming that the CIA’s brilliant analysts had unmasked a courier network handling bin Laden’s continuing flow of operational orders to al-Qaida. Obama also praised ‘a small team of Americans’ for their care in avoiding civilian deaths and said: ‘After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.’ Two more details now had to be supplied for the cover story: a description of the firefight that never happened, and a story about what happened to the corpse. Obama went on to praise the Pakistanis: ‘It’s important to note that our counterterrorism co-operation with Pakistan helped lead us to bin Laden and the compound where he was hiding.’ That statement risked exposing Kayani and Pasha. The White House’s solution was to ignore what Obama had said and order anyone talking to the press to insist that the Pakistanis had played no role in killing bin Laden. Obama left the clear impression that he and his advisers hadn’t known for sure that bin Laden was in Abbottabad, but only had information ‘about the possibility’. This led first to the story that the Seals had determined they’d killed the right man by having a six-foot-tall Seal lie next to the corpse for comparison (bin Laden was known to be six foot four); and then to the claim that a DNA test had been performed on the corpse and demonstrated conclusively that the Seals had killed bin Laden. But, according to the retired official, it wasn’t clear from the Seals’ early reports whether all of bin Laden’s body, or any of it, made it back to Afghanistan.

Gates wasn’t the only official who was distressed by Obama’s decision to speak without clearing his remarks in advance, the retired official said, ‘but he was the only one protesting. Obama didn’t just double-cross Gates, he double-crossed everyone. This was not the fog of war. The fact that there was an agreement with the Pakistanis and no contingency analysis of what was to be disclosed if something went wrong – that wasn’t even discussed. And once it went wrong, they had to make up a new cover story on the fly.’ There was a legitimate reason for some deception: the role of the Pakistani walk-in had to be protected.

SCIENCE MUSEUM - CHURCHILL'S SCIENTISTS

The White House press corps was told in a briefing shortly after Obama’s announcement that the death of bin Laden was ‘the culmination of years of careful and highly advanced intelligence work’ that focused on tracking a group of couriers, including one who was known to be close to bin Laden. Reporters were told that a team of specially assembled CIA and National Security Agency analysts had traced the courier to a highly secure million-dollar compound in Abbottabad. After months of observation, the American intelligence community had ‘high confidence’ that a high-value target was living in the compound, and it was ‘assessed that there was a strong probability that [it] was Osama bin Laden’. The US assault team ran into a firefight on entering the compound and three adult males – two of them believed to be the couriers – were slain, along with bin Laden. Asked if bin Laden had defended himself, one of the briefers said yes: ‘He did resist the assault force. And he was killed in a firefight.’

The next day John Brennan, then Obama’s senior adviser for counterterrorism, had the task of talking up Obama’s valour while trying to smooth over the misstatements in his speech. He provided a more detailed but equally misleading account of the raid and its planning. Speaking on the record, which he rarely does, Brennan said that the mission was carried out by a group of Navy Seals who had been instructed to take bin Laden alive, if possible. He said the US had no information suggesting that anyone in the Pakistani government or military knew bin Laden’s whereabouts: ‘We didn’t contact the Pakistanis until after all of our people, all of our aircraft were out of Pakistani airspace.’ He emphasised the courage of Obama’s decision to order the strike, and said that the White House had no information ‘that confirmed that bin Laden was at the compound’ before the raid began. Obama, he said, ‘made what I believe was one of the gutsiest calls of any president in recent memory’. Brennan increased the number killed by the Seals inside the compound to five: bin Laden, a courier, his brother, a bin Laden son, and one of the women said to be shielding bin Laden.

Asked whether bin Laden had fired on the Seals, as some reporters had been told, Brennan repeated what would become a White House mantra: ‘He was engaged in a firefight with those that entered the area of the house he was in. And whether or not he got off any rounds, I quite frankly don’t know … Here is bin Laden, who has been calling for these attacks … living in an area that is far removed from the front, hiding behind women who were put in front of him as a shield … [It] just speaks to I think the nature of the individual he was.’

Gates also objected to the idea, pushed by Brennan and Leon Panetta, that US intelligence had learned of bin Laden’s whereabouts from information acquired by waterboarding and other forms of torture. ‘All of this is going on as the Seals are flying home from their mission. The agency guys know the whole story,’ the retired official said. ‘It was a group of annuitants who did it.’ (Annuitants are retired CIA officers who remain active on contract.) ‘They had been called in by some of the mission planners in the agency to help with the cover story. So the old-timers come in and say why not admit that we got some of the information about bin Laden from enhanced interrogation?’ At the time, there was still talk in Washington about the possible prosecution of CIA agents who had conducted torture.

‘Gates told them this was not going to work,’ the retired official said. ‘He was never on the team. He knew at the eleventh hour of his career not to be a party to this nonsense. But State, the agency and the Pentagon had bought in on the cover story. None of the Seals thought that Obama was going to get on national TV and announce the raid. The Special Forces command was apoplectic. They prided themselves on keeping operational security.’ There was fear in Special Operations, the retired official said, that ‘if the true story of the missions leaked out, the White House bureaucracy was going to blame it on the Seals.’

The White House’s solution was to silence the Seals. On 5 May, every member of the Seal hit team – they had returned to their base in southern Virginia – and some members of the Joint Special Operations Command leadership were presented with a nondisclosure form drafted by the White House’s legal office; it promised civil penalties and a lawsuit for anyone who discussed the mission, in public or private. ‘The Seals were not happy,’ the retired official said. But most of them kept quiet, as did Admiral William McRaven, who was then in charge of JSOC. ‘McRaven was apoplectic. He knew he was fucked by the White House, but he’s a dyed-in-the-wool Seal, and not then a political operator, and he knew there’s no glory in blowing the whistle on the president. When Obama went public with bin Laden’s death, everyone had to scramble around for a new story that made sense, and the planners were stuck holding the bag.’

Within days, some of the early exaggerations and distortions had become obvious and the Pentagon issued a series of clarifying statements. No, bin Laden was not armed when he was shot and killed. And no, bin Laden did not use one of his wives as a shield. The press by and large accepted the explanation that the errors were the inevitable by-product of the White House’s desire to accommodate reporters frantic for details of the mission.

One lie that has endured is that the Seals had to fight their way to their target. Only two Seals have made any public statement: No Easy Day, a first-hand account of the raid by Matt Bissonnette, was published in September 2012; and two years later Rob O’Neill was interviewed by Fox News. Both men had resigned from the navy; both had fired at bin Laden. Their accounts contradicted each other on many details, but their stories generally supported the White House version, especially when it came to the need to kill or be killed as the Seals fought their way to bin Laden. O’Neill even told Fox News that he and his fellow Seals thought ‘We were going to die.’ ‘The more we trained on it, the more we realised … this is going to be a one-way mission.’

But the retired official told me that in their initial debriefings the Seals made no mention of a firefight, or indeed of any opposition. The drama and danger portrayed by Bissonnette and O’Neill met a deep-seated need, the retired official said: ‘Seals cannot live with the fact that they killed bin Laden totally unopposed, and so there has to be an account of their courage in the face of danger. The guys are going to sit around the bar and say it was an easy day? That’s not going to happen.’

There was another reason to claim there had been a firefight inside the compound, the retired official said: to avoid the inevitable question that would arise from an uncontested assault. Where were bin Laden’s guards? Surely, the most sought-after terrorist in the world would have around-the-clock protection. ‘And one of those killed had to be the courier, because he didn’t exist and we couldn’t produce him. The Pakistanis had no choice but to play along with it.’ (Two days after the raid, Reuters published photographs of three dead men that it said it had purchased from an ISI official. Two of the men were later identified by an ISI spokesman as being the alleged courier and his brother.)

*

Five days after the raid the Pentagon press corps was provided with a series of videotapes that were said by US officials to have been taken from a large collection the Seals had removed from the compound, along with as many as 15 computers. Snippets from one of the videos showed a solitary bin Laden looking wan and wrapped in a blanket, watching what appeared to be a video of himself on television. An unnamed official told reporters that the raid produced a ‘treasure trove … the single largest collection of senior terrorist materials ever’, which would provide vital insights into al-Qaida’s plans. The official said the material showed that bin Laden ‘remained an active leader in al-Qaida, providing strategic, operational and tactical instructions to the group … He was far from a figurehead [and] continued to direct even tactical details of the group’s management and to encourage plotting’ from what was described as a command-and-control centre in Abbottabad. ‘He was an active player, making the recent operation even more essential for our nation’s security,’ the official said. The information was so vital, he added, that the administration was setting up an inter-agency task force to process it: ‘He was not simply someone who was penning al-Qaida strategy. He was throwing operational ideas out there and he was also specifically directing other al-Qaida members.’

These claims were fabrications: there wasn’t much activity for bin Laden to exercise command and control over. The retired intelligence official said that the CIA’s internal reporting shows that since bin Laden moved to Abbottabad in 2006 only a handful of terrorist attacks could be linked to the remnants of bin Laden’s al-Qaida. ‘We were told at first,’ the retired official said, ‘that the Seals produced garbage bags of stuff and that the community is generating daily intelligence reports out of this stuff. And then we were told that the community is gathering everything together and needs to translate it. But nothing has come of it. Every single thing they have created turns out not to be true. It’s a great hoax – like the Piltdown man.’ The retired official said that most of the materials from Abbottabad were turned over to the US by the Pakistanis, who later razed the building. The ISI took responsibility for the wives and children of bin Laden, none of whom was made available to the US for questioning.

‘Why create the treasure trove story?’ the retired official said. ‘The White House had to give the impression that bin Laden was still operationally important. Otherwise, why kill him? A cover story was created – that there was a network of couriers coming and going with memory sticks and instructions. All to show that bin Laden remained important.’

In July 2011, the Washington Post published what purported to be a summary of some of these materials. The story’s contradictions were glaring. It said the documents had resulted in more than four hundred intelligence reports within six weeks; it warned of unspecified al-Qaida plots; and it mentioned arrests of suspects ‘who are named or described in emails that bin Laden received’. The Post didn’t identify the suspects or reconcile that detail with the administration’s previous assertions that the Abbottabad compound had no internet connection. Despite their claims that the documents had produced hundreds of reports, the Post also quoted officials saying that their main value wasn’t the actionable intelligence they contained, but that they enabled ‘analysts to construct a more comprehensive portrait of al-Qaida’.

In May 2012, the Combating Terrorism Centre at West Point, a private research group, released translations it had made under a federal government contract of 175 pages of bin Laden documents. Reporters found none of the drama that had been touted in the days after the raid. Patrick Cockburn wrote about the contrast between the administration’s initial claims that bin Laden was the ‘spider at the centre of a conspiratorial web’ and what the translations actually showed: that bin Laden was ‘delusional’ and had ‘limited contact with the outside world outside his compound’.

The retired official disputed the authenticity of the West Point materials: ‘There is no linkage between these documents and the counterterrorism centre at the agency. No intelligence community analysis. When was the last time the CIA: 1) announced it had a significant intelligence find; 2) revealed the source; 3) described the method for processing the materials; 4) revealed the time-line for production; 5) described by whom and where the analysis was taking place, and 6) published the sensitive results before the information had been acted on? No agency professional would support this fairy tale.’

*

In June 2011, it was reported in the New York Times, the Washington Post and all over the Pakistani press that Amir Aziz had been held for questioning in Pakistan; he was, it was said, a CIA informant who had been spying on the comings and goings at the bin Laden compound. Aziz was released, but the retired official said that US intelligence was unable to learn who leaked the highly classified information about his involvement with the mission. Officials in Washington decided they ‘could not take a chance that Aziz’s role in obtaining bin Laden’s DNA also would become known’. A sacrificial lamb was needed, and the one chosen was Shakil Afridi, a 48-year-old Pakistani doctor and sometime CIA asset, who had been arrested by the Pakistanis in late May and accused of assisting the agency. ‘We went to the Pakistanis and said go after Afridi,’ the retired official said. ‘We had to cover the whole issue of how we got the DNA.’ It was soon reported that the CIA had organised a fake vaccination programme in Abbottabad with Afridi’s help in a failed attempt to obtain bin Laden’s DNA. Afridi’s legitimate medical operation was run independently of local health authorities, was well financed and offered free vaccinations against hepatitis B. Posters advertising the programme were displayed throughout the area. Afridi was later accused of treason and sentenced to 33 years in prison because of his ties to an extremist. News of the CIA-sponsored programme created widespread anger in Pakistan, and led to the cancellation of other international vaccination programmes that were now seen as cover for American spying.

NYU Press - Plucked - Rebecca M. Herzig

The retired official said that Afridi had been recruited long before the bin Laden mission as part of a separate intelligence effort to get information about suspected terrorists in Abbottabad and the surrounding area. ‘The plan was to use vaccinations as a way to get the blood of terrorism suspects in the villages.’ Afridi made no attempt to obtain DNA from the residents of the bin Laden compound. The report that he did so was a hurriedly put together ‘CIA cover story creating “facts”’ in a clumsy attempt to protect Aziz and his real mission. ‘Now we have the consequences,’ the retired official said. ‘A great humanitarian project to do something meaningful for the peasants has been compromised as a cynical hoax.’ Afridi’s conviction was overturned, but he remains in prison on a murder charge.

*

In his address announcing the raid, Obama said that after killing bin Laden the Seals ‘took custody of his body’. The statement created a problem. In the initial plan it was to be announced a week or so after the fact that bin Laden was killed in a drone strike somewhere in the mountains on the Pakistan/Afghanistan border and that his remains had been identified by DNA testing. But with Obama’s announcement of his killing by the Seals everyone now expected a body to be produced. Instead, reporters were told that bin Laden’s body had been flown by the Seals to an American military airfield in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, and then straight to the USS Carl Vinson, a supercarrier on routine patrol in the North Arabian Sea. Bin Laden had then been buried at sea, just hours after his death. The press corps’s only sceptical moments at John Brennan’s briefing on 2 May were to do with the burial. The questions were short, to the point, and rarely answered. ‘When was the decision made that he would be buried at sea if killed?’ ‘Was this part of the plan all along?’ ‘Can you just tell us why that was a good idea?’ ‘John, did you consult a Muslim expert on that?’ ‘Is there a visual recording of this burial?’ When this last question was asked, Jay Carney, Obama’s press secretary, came to Brennan’s rescue: ‘We’ve got to give other people a chance here.’

‘We thought the best way to ensure that his body was given an appropriate Islamic burial,’ Brennan said, ‘was to take those actions that would allow us to do that burial at sea.’ He said ‘appropriate specialists and experts’ were consulted, and that the US military was fully capable of carrying out the burial ‘consistent with Islamic law’. Brennan didn’t mention that Muslim law calls for the burial service to be conducted in the presence of an imam, and there was no suggestion that one happened to be on board the Carl Vinson.

In a reconstruction of the bin Laden operation for Vanity Fair, Mark Bowden, who spoke to many senior administration officials, wrote that bin Laden’s body was cleaned and photographed at Jalalabad. Further procedures necessary for a Muslim burial were performed on the carrier, he wrote, ‘with bin Laden’s body being washed again and wrapped in a white shroud. A navy photographer recorded the burial in full sunlight, Monday morning, May 2.’ Bowden described the photos:

One frame shows the body wrapped in a weighted shroud. The next shows it lying diagonally on a chute, feet overboard. In the next frame the body is hitting the water. In the next it is visible just below the surface, ripples spreading outward. In the last frame there are only circular ripples on the surface. The mortal remains of Osama bin Laden were gone for good.

Bowden was careful not to claim that he had actually seen the photographs he described, and he recently told me he hadn’t seen them: ‘I’m always disappointed when I can’t look at something myself, but I spoke with someone I trusted who said he had seen them himself and described them in detail.’ Bowden’s statement adds to the questions about the alleged burial at sea, which has provoked a flood of Freedom of Information Act requests, most of which produced no information. One of them sought access to the photographs. The Pentagon responded that a search of all available records had found no evidence that any photographs had been taken of the burial. Requests on other issues related to the raid were equally unproductive. The reason for the lack of response became clear after the Pentagon held an inquiry into allegations that the Obama administration had provided access to classified materials to the makers of the film Zero Dark Thirty. The Pentagon report, which was put online in June 2013, noted that Admiral McRaven had ordered the files on the raid to be deleted from all military computers and moved to the CIA, where they would be shielded from FOIA requests by the agency’s ‘operational exemption’.

McRaven’s action meant that outsiders could not get access to the Carl Vinson’s unclassified logs. Logs are sacrosanct in the navy, and separate ones are kept for air operations, the deck, the engineering department, the medical office, and for command information and control. They show the sequence of events day by day aboard the ship; if there has been a burial at sea aboard the Carl Vinson, it would have been recorded.

There wasn’t any gossip about a burial among the Carl Vinson’s sailors. The carrier concluded its six-month deployment in June 2011. When the ship docked at its home base in Coronado, California, Rear Admiral Samuel Perez, commander of the Carl Vinson carrier strike group, told reporters that the crew had been ordered not to talk about the burial. Captain Bruce Lindsey, skipper of the Carl Vinson, told reporters he was unable to discuss it. Cameron Short, one of the crew of the Carl Vinson, told the Commercial-News of Danville, Illinois, that the crew had not been told anything about the burial. ‘All he knows is what he’s seen on the news,’ the newspaper reported.

The Pentagon did release a series of emails to the Associated Press. In one of them, Rear Admiral Charles Gaouette reported that the service followed ‘traditional procedures for Islamic burial’, and said none of the sailors on board had been permitted to observe the proceedings. But there was no indication of who washed and wrapped the body, or of which Arabic speaker conducted the service.

Within weeks of the raid, I had been told by two longtime consultants to Special Operations Command, who have access to current intelligence, that the funeral aboard the Carl Vinson didn’t take place. One consultant told me that bin Laden’s remains were photographed and identified after being flown back to Afghanistan. The consultant added: ‘At that point, the CIA took control of the body. The cover story was that it had been flown to the Carl Vinson.’ The second consultant agreed that there had been ‘no burial at sea’. He added that ‘the killing of bin Laden was political theatre designed to burnish Obama’s military credentials … The Seals should have expected the political grandstanding. It’s irresistible to a politician. Bin Laden became a working asset.’ Early this year, speaking again to the second consultant, I returned to the burial at sea. The consultant laughed and said: ‘You mean, he didn’t make it to the water?’

The retired official said there had been another complication: some members of the Seal team had bragged to colleagues and others that they had torn bin Laden’s body to pieces with rifle fire. The remains, including his head, which had only a few bullet holes in it, were thrown into a body bag and, during the helicopter flight back to Jalalabad, some body parts were tossed out over the Hindu Kush mountains – or so the Seals claimed. At the time, the retired official said, the Seals did not think their mission would be made public by Obama within a few hours: ‘If the president had gone ahead with the cover story, there would have been no need to have a funeral within hours of the killing. Once the cover story was blown, and the death was made public, the White House had a serious “Where’s the body?” problem. The world knew US forces had killed bin Laden in Abbottabad. Panic city. What to do? We need a “functional body” because we have to be able to say we identified bin Laden via a DNA analysis. It would be navy officers who came up with the “burial at sea” idea. Perfect. No body. Honourable burial following sharia law. Burial is made public in great detail, but Freedom of Information documents confirming the burial are denied for reasons of “national security”. It’s the classic unravelling of a poorly constructed cover story – it solves an immediate problem but, given the slightest inspection, there is no back-up support. There never was a plan, initially, to take the body to sea, and no burial of bin Laden at sea took place.’ The retired official said that if the Seals’ first accounts are to be believed, there wouldn’t have been much left of bin Laden to put into the sea in any case.

*

It was inevitable that the Obama administration’s lies, misstatements and betrayals would create a backlash. ‘We’ve had a four-year lapse in co-operation,’ the retired official said. ‘It’s taken that long for the Pakistanis to trust us again in the military-to-military counterterrorism relationship – while terrorism was rising all over the world … They felt Obama sold them down the river. They’re just now coming back because the threat from Isis, which is now showing up there, is a lot greater and the bin Laden event is far enough away to enable someone like General Durrani to come out and talk about it.’ Generals Pasha and Kayani have retired and both are reported to be under investigation for corruption during their time in office.

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s long-delayed report on CIA torture, released last December, documented repeated instances of official lying, and suggested that the CIA’s knowledge of bin Laden’s courier was sketchy at best and predated its use of waterboarding and other forms of torture. The report led to international headlines about brutality and waterboarding, along with gruesome details about rectal feeding tubes, ice baths and threats to rape or murder family members of detainees who were believed to be withholding information. Despite the bad publicity, the report was a victory for the CIA. Its major finding – that the use of torture didn’t lead to discovering the truth – had already been the subject of public debate for more than a decade. Another key finding – that the torture conducted was more brutal than Congress had been told – was risible, given the extent of public reporting and published exposés by former interrogators and retired CIA officers. The report depicted tortures that were obviously contrary to international law as violations of rules or ‘inappropriate activities’ or, in some cases, ‘management failures’. Whether the actions described constitute war crimes was not discussed, and the report did not suggest that any of the CIA interrogators or their superiors should be investigated for criminal activity. The agency faced no meaningful consequences as a result of the report.

The retired official told me that the CIA leadership had become experts in derailing serious threats from Congress: ‘They create something that is horrible but not that bad. Give them something that sounds terrible. “Oh my God, we were shoving food up a prisoner’s ass!” Meanwhile, they’re not telling the committee about murders, other war crimes, and secret prisons like we still have in Diego Garcia. The goal also was to stall it as long as possible, which they did.’

The main theme of the committee’s 499-page executive summary is that the CIA lied systematically about the effectiveness of its torture programme in gaining intelligence that would stop future terrorist attacks in the US. The lies included some vital details about the uncovering of an al-Qaida operative called Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, who was said to be the key al-Qaida courier, and the subsequent tracking of him to Abbottabad in early 2011. The agency’s alleged intelligence, patience and skill in finding al-Kuwaiti became legend after it was dramatised in Zero Dark Thirty.

The Senate report repeatedly raised questions about the quality and reliability of the CIA’s intelligence about al-Kuwaiti. In 2005 an internal CIA report on the hunt for bin Laden noted that ‘detainees provide few actionable leads, and we have to consider the possibility that they are creating fictitious characters to distract us or to absolve themselves of direct knowledge about bin Ladin [sic].’ A CIA cable a year later stated that ‘we have had no success in eliciting actionable intelligence on bin Laden’s location from any detainees.’ The report also highlighted several instances of CIA officers, including Panetta, making false statements to Congress and the public about the value of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ in the search for bin Laden’s couriers.

Obama today is not facing re-election as he was in the spring of 2011. His principled stand on behalf of the proposed nuclear agreement with Iran says much, as does his decision to operate without the support of the conservative Republicans in Congress. High-level lying nevertheless remains the modus operandi of US policy, along with secret prisons, drone attacks, Special Forces night raids, bypassing the chain of command, and cutting out those who might say no.

Seymour Hersh is one of the giants of investigative journalism. Early in his career he broke the story of the My Lai massacre during which hundreds of unarmed civilians were killed by U.S. soldiers in Vietnam in 1968.

Hersh was still going strong after 9/11, breaking (along with "60 Minutes") the story of the prisoner abuses by U.S. soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq for The New Yorker in 2004.

Now comes another blockbuster from Hersh in which he asserts, "The White House's story (about the 2011 U.S. Navy SEAL raid in Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden) might have been written by Lewis Carroll."

Because of Hersh's stature his article about the bin Laden raid attracted so much attention Sunday when it first appeared that the London Review of Books' website crashed.

Journalist says White House concealed truth in bin Laden killing

Allegations of massive cover-up

Hersh's major argument in his new report is that quite contrary to what Obama administration officials claimed in the wake of the bin Laden raid, U.S. and Pakistani officials were fully conversant about bin Laden's whereabouts in the northern city of Abbottabad, cooperated in his capture and then engaged in a massive cover-up of all this, involving officials at many different levels of government in both nations.

Vice President Joe Biden, left, President Barack Obama, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, second from right, watch the mission to capture Osama bin Laden from the Situation Room in the White House on May 1, 2011

The principal claims that Hersh's article makes, which largely rely on the assertions of a single, unnamed, retired senior U.S. intelligence official, are:

• That the 2011 U.S. Navy SEAL raid on the Abbottabad compound where bin Laden was hiding in northern Pakistan was not a firefight in which SEALs went into a dangerous and unknown situation, but a setup in which Pakistan's military had been holding bin Laden prisoner in Abbottabad for five years and simply made him available to the SEALs who flew in helicopters to the compound on the night of the raid.

• An officer from Pakistan's powerful military intelligence agency ISI accompanied the SEALs on the raid and showed them around the Abbottabad compound, and the only shots fired that night were the ones that the SEALs fired to kill bin Laden.

• A "walk in" to the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad tipped off the CIA that bin Laden was living in the Abbottabad compound, and it was not true -- despite the statements of multiple U.S. officials after the raid -- that the CIA had traced back one of bin Laden's couriers to the Abbottabad compound and built a circumstantial case that bin Laden was living there.

• Saudi Arabia was financing bin Laden's upkeep in his Abbottabad compound.

• A Pakistani army doctor obtained DNA from bin Laden that proved he was in Abbottabad, proof that was provided to the States so that all the supposed uncertainty -- cited by Obama administration officials after the raid -- about whether bin Laden was actually living in the compound was a lie.

• The "most blatant lie," according to Hersh, was that "Pakistan's two most senior military leaders -- General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, chief of the army staff, and General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, director general of the ISI -- were never informed" in advance of the U.S. raid on the bin Laden compound.

In short, according to Hersh's account, President Barack Obama and many of his top advisers lied about pretty much everything concerning what is considered one of the President's signal accomplishments: authorizing the raid in which bin Laden was killed.

The evidence

Hersh's account of the bin Laden raid is a farrago of nonsense that is contravened by a multitude of eyewitness accounts, inconvenient facts and simple common sense.

Let's start with the claim that the only shots fired at the Abbottabad compound were the ones that killed bin Laden. That ignores the fact that two SEALs on the mission, Matt Bissonnette, author of "No Easy Day," and Robert O'Neill have publicly said that there were a number of other people killed that night, including bin Laden's two bodyguards, one of his sons and one of the bodyguard's wives. Their account is supplemented by many other U.S. officials who have spoken on the record to myself or to other journalists.

I was the only outsider to visit the Abbottabad compound where bin Laden lived before the Pakistani military demolished it. The compound was trashed, littered almost everywhere with broken glass and several areas of it were sprayed with bullet holes where the SEALS had fired at members of bin Laden's entourage and family, or in one case exchanged fire with one of his bodyguards. The evidence at the compound showed that many bullets were fired the night of bin Laden's death.

Common sense would tell you that the idea that Saudi Arabia was paying for bin Laden's expenses while he was living in Abbottabad is simply risible. Bin Laden's principal goal was the overthrow of the Saudi royal family as a result of which his Saudi citizenship was revoked as far back as 1994.

Why would the Saudis pay for the upkeep of their most mortal enemy? Indeed, why wouldn't they get their close allies, the Pakistanis, to look the other way as they sent their assassins into Pakistan to finish him off?

Common sense would also tell you that if the Pakistanis were holding bin Laden and the U.S. government had found out this fact, the easiest path for both countries would not be to launch a U.S. military raid into Pakistan but would have been to hand bin Laden over quietly to the Americans.

Indeed, the Pakistanis have done this on several occasions with a number of other al Qaeda leaders such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the operational commander of 9/11, who was handed over to U.S. custody after a raid in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi in 2003. So too was Abu Faraj al-Libi, another key al Qaeda leader who was similarly handed over by the Pakistanis to U.S. custody two years later.

Why cover it up?

Common sense would also tell you that if U.S. officials had found out that the Pakistani officials were hiding bin Laden there is no reason the Americans would have covered this up. After all, around the time of the bin Laden raid, relations between the United States and Pakistan were at an all-time low because the Pakistanis had recently imprisoned Raymond Davis, a CIA contractor who had killed two Pakistanis. What did U.S. officials have to lose by saying that bin Laden was being protected by the Pakistanis, if it were true?

The fact is that the senior Pakistani officials Hersh alleges were harboring bin Laden were as surprised as the rest of the world that al Qaeda's leader was living in Abbottabad. The night of the bin Laden raid, U.S. officials were monitoring the communications of Pakistan's top military officials such as Kayani and Pasha and their bewildered reactions confirmed that the Pakistanis had not had a clue about bin Laden's presence there, according to a number of U.S. officials I spoke to in the course of reporting "Manhunt," a book about the hunt for bin Laden.

In his article, Hersh correctly points out that in the immediate aftermath of the bin Laden raid, White House officials initially made some false statements about the raid -- for instance, that bin Laden was using his wives as human shields during the raid -- but these were quickly corrected.

The only source Hersh refers to by name in his 10,000-word piece is Assad Durrani, who was the head of ISI during the early 1990s, around two decades before the bin Laden raid occurred. Hersh portrays Durrani as generally supportive of Hersh's various conclusions.

an alleged al Qaeda propagandist from California, was indicted in 2006 on charges of treason and offering material support for terrorism. He was believed to be killed in January in a U.S. counterterrorism operation.

When I emailed Durrani after the Hersh piece appeared, Durrani said he had "no evidence of any kind" that the ISI knew that bin Laden was hiding in Abbottabad but he still could "make an assessment that this could be plausible." This is hardly a strong endorsement of one of the principal claims of Hersh's piece.

Durrani added that he believed that the bin Laden "operation could not have been carried out without our cooperation." This glosses over the fact that the SEALs were flying in stealth helicopters through blind spots in Pakistan's radar defense and the Pakistani air force had virtually no capacity to fly at night when the raid took place, so in fact the bin Laden raid was relatively easily accomplished without Pakistani cooperation, according to multiple U.S. officials with knowledge of the bin Laden operation.

All sorts of things are, of course, plausible, but in both journalism and in the writing of history one looks for evidence, not plausibility.

Hersh has had a storied career. One hopes that he won't end it with a story about the Obama administration and the bin Laden raid that reads like Frank Underwood from "House of Cards" has made an unholy alliance with Carrie Mathison from "Homeland" to produce a Pakistani version of Watergate.

Both the New York Times and NBC News are backing up parts of the recent story by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh that accuses President Barack Obama of lying about the killing of Osama bin Laden.

The key assertion of the Hersh piece, published in the London Review of Books, is that the Pakistani government knew the whereabouts of the world’s most wanted terrorist. The White House strongly denied the story, calling it filled with “inaccuracies and baseless assertions.”

Osama bin Laden

AP

However, a New York Times correspondent Carlotta Gall wrote in a first-person account that some of Hersh’s reporting checks out [emphasis added]:

Among other things, Hersh contends that the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, Pakistan’s military-intelligence agency, held Bin Laden prisoner in the Abbottabad compound since 2006, and that “the C.I.A. did not learn of Bin Laden’s whereabouts by tracking his couriers, as the White House has claimed since May 2011, but from a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer who betrayed the secret in return for much of the $25 million reward offered by the U.S.”

On this count, my own reporting tracks with Hersh’s. Beginning in 2001, I spent nearly 12 years covering Pakistan and Afghanistan for The Times. (In his article, Hersh cites an article I wrote for The Times Magazine last year, an excerpt from a book drawn from this reporting.) The story of the Pakistani informer was circulating in the rumor mill within days of the Abbottabad raid, but at the time, no one could or would corroborate the claim. Such is the difficulty of reporting on covert operations and intelligence matters; there are no official documents to draw on, few officials who will talk and few ways to check the details they give you when they do.

Two years later, when I was researching my book, I learned from a high-level member of the Pakistani intelligence service that the ISI had been hiding Bin Laden and ran a desk specifically to handle him as an intelligence asset. After the book came out, I learned more: that it was indeed a Pakistani Army brigadier — all the senior officers of the ISI are in the military — who told the C.I.A. where Bin Laden was hiding, and that Bin Laden was living there with the knowledge and protection of the ISI.

Separately, NBC News reported that sources confirmed to them that Pakistani intelligence officials were aware of bin Laden’s whereabouts [emphasis added]:

The NBC News sources that confirm that a former Pakistani military intelligence official became a U.S. intelligence asset include a special operations officer and a CIA officer who had served in Pakistan. These two sources and a third source, a very senior former U.S. intelligence official, also say that elements of the ISI were aware of bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad. The former official was emphatic about the ISI’s awareness, saying twice, “They knew.”

Another top official acknowledged to NBC News that the U.S. government had long harbored “deep suspicions” that ISI and al Qaeda were “cooperating.” And a book by former acting CIA director Mike Morrell that will be published tomorrow says that U.S. officials could not dismiss the possibility of such cooperation.

None of the sources characterized how high up in ISI the knowledge might have gone. Said one former senior official, “We were suspicious that someone inside ISI … knew where bin Laden was, but we did not have intelligence about specific individuals having specific knowledge.”

The NBC story includes an editor’s note that said:

This story has been updated since it was first published. The original version of this story said that a Pakistani asset told the U.S. where bin Laden was hiding. Sources say that while the asset provided information vital to the hunt for bin Laden, he was not the source of his whereabouts.