The U.S. government is running a full-court press to prevent Osama bin Laden from becoming a hallowed martyr by by means of what are essentially out-takes of videos made by bin Laden to paint him instead as a unsuccessful, pathetic old man, experts said today.
Of the five videos made public by the White House this weekend, perhaps the most outstanding shows bin Laden huddled under a blanket, inspection himself on television with a remote control in his supply, changing the channels whenever he sees pictures of president Obama. "He's always been very careful about controlling his image and here was nurturing his image, watching himself on television in what was the nearly everyone revealing, most human, least proscribed moment of his entire career," Lawrence Wright, Osama bin Laden expert and author of "The Looming Tower," said.
Since the death of Osama bin Laden Sunday, administration officials have repeatedly said that the task to kill him complied with domestic and international law. "Let me make something very clear," Attorney General Eric Holder told Congress on Wednesday, "the operation in which Osama bin Laden was killed was legalized. He was the head of al Qaeda, an organization that conducted the attacks of Sept. 11. He admitted his involvement."
But as new details of the operation emerge, and some Pakistani leaders protest the U.S. incursion into their state, legal experts say the administration must more forcefully lay out its case. Law lecturer Kenneth Anderson, who specializes in legal issues related to war and terrorism, said that differing management accounts as to whether bin Laden was armed or invite to surrender or even involved in a firefight have muddled the legal discuss and left the administration open to international criticism.
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He was a man of many names. Arshad, Ahmed, Abu Ahmed to name a few. To his neighbors within Abbottabad, Pakistan, he was a friendly man from the country's tribal areas who worked as a money changer and built 12-foot walls to keep out the "many enemies" he'd acquired in the course of doing industry.
What no one who lived near him in the sleepy, semi-rural enclave knew was that Arshad Khan was really al Qaeda operative Abu Ahmed al Kuwaiti, Osama bin Laden's most trusted courier, and his identity additionally location became the key to killing bin Laden. Little is known about al Kuwaiti, but interviews with neighbors, Pakistani officials and U.S. officials make clear that the Kuwaiti-born Pakistani was for several existence the second most-wanted terrorist during the world, if only because the CIA had become convinced he could led them in the direction of the al Qaeda leader.
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U.S. intelligence officials have been forced to reconsider many of their assumptions about Osama storage bin weighed down and his terror network with the discovery that he was living in relative luxury not far from Pakistan's capital in a house full of children. By the time bin Laden moved to his sprawling compound in Abbottabad, he was down to only one of this five wives. He had divorced one and three others have moved to Syria.
"He married very young, first a cousin from Syria," said Steve Coll. author of the book "The Bin Ladens." "Then a couple of very knowledgeable women from Saudi Arabia." The youngest and his supposed favorite, Amal Ahmed Abdul Fatah stayed with him. Pakistani says her passpoprt was found in the compound before the raid. She be 29 and had been given to bin Laden as a gift by a Yemeni family when she was only a teenager.
As elated crowds celebrated the death of Osama bin Laden after Navy SEALs killed the al-Qaida chief in a weekend raid in Pakistan some are asking, "Where's the proof?" Photos depicting a bloodied and bruised face appearing to be that of bin Laden began appearing on Twitter and Face manuscript last night soon after intelligence of his death spread across the Internet. According to Reuters, an archive photo of bin Laden at a news conference proves that image was a fake. Now people are asking to see the evidence proving bin Laden is dead.
"We have released a tremendous amount of information to date," Obama's top counter terrorism adviser John Brennan said. "At the same time we don't want to do anything with the intention of is going to compromise our aptitude to be as successful the next time one of these guys needs to be taken off the battlefield."
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President Obama heralded Osama bin Laden's death as a major milestone in the war against al Qaeda, and "justice" for family of the nearly 3,000 victims of the Sept. 11 attacks.Obama said the operation carried out Sunday afternoon in northwest Pakistan resulted from "years of meticulous work" by intelligence agency that yielded clues to bin Laden's whereabouts starting last summer.
"I met repeatedly with my National Security team as we developed more information about the possibility that we had located Bin Laden thrashing within a compound deep inside Pakistan," Obama said in an address from the East Room of the White House Sunday night."in conclusion, last week I determined that we had enough cleverness to take action and authorized an operation to get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice," Obama said.
