Is Iran really this stupid? Iran Plot Questions Mounting

Mounting Questions on Iran Terror Plot:

Soon after Attorney General Eric Holder announced the arrest of Iranian-American Manssor Arbabsiar in connection with an alleged Iran-directed plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to the United States, administration officials had harsh words for Iran, but many experts voiced skepticism (NYT). Kenneth Katzman, an Iran expert at the Congressional Research Service, says he and many of his peers believe that elements of the plan--such as the alleged intent to use a Mexican drug cartel to carry out the killing--simply don't comport with what they know "about the way Iranians conduct terrorist attacks" and "the way they implement them." Katzman also notes that the attack, if it had succeeded, would have drawn a strong retaliatory U.S. response, which is something Iran "does not want."

Katzman's observations may be summed up thusly:

1. "The main element that falls apart dramatically is that the assassination of the Saudi ambassador in Washington was supposed to be carried out by Mexican drug cartel members. Iran has never used surrogates with whom they are unfamiliar. Non-Muslim proxy groups are never used."

2. "The second element that doesn't add up is the plot's origination with this Texas car salesman of Iranian origin. The Iranians almost always use active members of the Quds Force, or Iranian surrogate organizations. They do not go to ex-members or retired members, or relatives of members to carry out dedicated and organized plots."

3. "The third aspect is that this plot might have involved a fairly sizable bombing that could very well have killed a number of people in Washington. The Iranian regime would have known that had it happened, it would have triggered calls for immediate military action against Iran."

3. That the plot's ttarget was the Saudi ambassador to the United States: "That aspect of the alleged plot is actually the one that is most logical. Not specifically that they would go after Ambassador Adel Al Jubeir, but that they would be going after the Saudi regime and Saudi high officials. There's clearly strategic competition, or worse, between these two nations, so [for Iran to be] trying to hurt the Saudis is something that makes sense to us as experts."

But:

I can't comment on the administration's response, but I can say that certainly with more study and more analysis they may ultimately either walk back some of what they've said or soften it, or in some ways just simply drop it. The questions I have outlined are themes being put forward by other experts who know about Iranian terrorism and really know how Iran acts and operates. ...

My peers [and I] are all sort of shaking our heads saying: This just doesn't add up to what we know about Iranian terrorism, and we think we know Iranian terrorism because we've been writing on it and watching it for a very long time.

Reuters adds:

But many outside experts, and at least some officials inside the government, remain wary, with some expressing concern that the administration of President Barack Obama is inflating the significance of a questionable plot to score political and diplomatic points against Tehran.

A former U.S. intelligence official said it was unlikely that FBI Director Robert Mueller and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would publicly tout the alleged Iranian government angle if they had qualms about the intelligence.

"There are too many people who are defending it to think it's totally bogus," a former intelligence official said.

But the official added: "I'm having a real hard time believing it is as orchestrated and centrally run as they seem to be implying. If it weren't for the fact that there were so many people standing up and publicly talking about it who ought to know, then I would be even more skeptical."

Groundhog War | Foreign Affairs

Groundhog War | Foreign Affairs:

Bing West assesses the Afghanistan problem to the heart of the matter:

The platoons in Restrepo and Armadillo act as their own tribes, confident in their warrior skills and psychologically distant from their senior leaderships. Since 2001, not one person among the past nine successive U.S. commanding generals in Afghanistan and past two U.S. secretaries of defense has changed the war's five key premises: total domestic control for Afghan officials, billions of dollars for projects to woo the local tribes, a war of attrition to drive back the Taliban, toleration of Pakistan as a sanctuary for the enemy, and a slow buildup of Afghan forces to fight their own war. In essence, politicians and policymakers in Washington have handed the war over to those generals who have embraced nation building as a military mission.

U.S. President Barack Obama has pledged to steadily withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan and end the U.S. combat mission by 2014. Regardless of how the war turns out, the military lessons learned will be negative; the conflict has dragged on far too long to be considered a strategic success. Unlike in the years after World War II, the generals of this day will not gain in historical stature. The popularity of the idea of counterinsurgency as nation building reached its zenith when Iraq was stabilized in 2008. At the time, the U.S. military's counterinsurgency warriorintellectuals were in vogue. As happened to their predecessors after the Vietnam War, however, their concepts of war fighting will come to be rejected by the younger generation of company-grade officers who had to execute a flawed doctrine. No matter their skills and good intentions, foreign troops cannot persuade the people of another nation to reject insurgents in their midst. The people must convince themselves -- and be willing to sacrifice for that conviction.

After the United States and the United Nations handed full sovereignty to Karzai and his top officials in 2002, the U.S. military could only coax them to pursue, rather than directly institute itself, competent military and civilian leadership in Afghan institutions. Meanwhile, a strategy that rested on persuading the people to turn against the insurgents failed to win the commitment of the tribes. U.S. and NATO soldiers went on patrols until they were shot at and then returned fire discriminately. With Pakistan as their sanctuary, the Taliban controlled the tempo of the war.

Read the whole thing.

A 9/11 Memorial Video Reflection

Best viewed full screen.

Navy takes a hard body blow

Story.

I should point out for accuracy's sake that there is no confirmation that the same SEALs who raided bin Laden's compound were aboard this CH-47 when it went down. But the story says that 20 members of Seal Team 6 were killed in the shootdown. The Navy does not release the names of individual members of ST6, and may not even identify these KIA as having been members. A reputable report I saw is that when President Obama asked for the names of the ST6 members who killed bin Laden, he was told (tactfully, of course), "We don't release those names, not even to the Commander in Chief."

Abolish the TSA and adopt Archie Bunker security

Glenn Reynolds, perhaps only half tongue in cheek, says,

ABOLISH THE TSA. TELL PASSENGERS “IF SOMEONE TRIES TO HIJACK THE PLANE, BEAT THE CRAP OUT OF HIM.” WE’D BE BETTER OFF.

This was in response to Jeffrey Goldberg's column, "TSA’s Forced Indignities Don’t Make Us Safer." But maybe Archie Bunker had the right idea about 40 years ago.



Passengers are the first, and sometimes last, line of defense. Remember Richard Reid, a.k.a. the Shoe Bomber?

A few minutes later, Moutardier found Reid leaned over in his seat. Her attempts to get his attention failed. After asking "What are you doing?" Reid grabbed at her, revealing one shoe in his lap, a fuse which led into the shoe, and a lit match. She tried grabbing Reid twice, but he pushed her to the floor each time, and she yelled for help, and then ran to get water. When another flight attendant, Cristina Jones, arrived to try to subdue him, he fought her and bit her thumb and Moutardier threw water in his face. The 6 foot 4 inch (193 cm) tall, 200+ pound (90+ kg) Reid was next subdued by several passengers on the airliner, and then bound up using plastic handcuffs, seatbelt extensions, and headphone cords. A physician on board the airliner administered to Reid a tranquilizer that he found in the emergency medical kit of the airliner.

And how could you forget Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, popularly known as the Underwear Bomber who tried to blow up NWA 253 on Christmas Day, 2009?

Abdulmutallab spent about 20 minutes in the bathroom as the flight approached Detroit, and then covered himself with a blanket after returning to his seat. Other passengers then heard popping noises, smelled a foul odor, and some saw Abdulmutallab’s trouser leg and the wall of the plane on fire. Fellow passenger Jasper Schuringa, a Dutch film director, jumped on Abdulmutallab and subdued him as flight attendants used fire extinguishers to douse the flames.[121] Abdulmutallab was taken toward the front of the airplane cabin, was seen to have lost his trousers due to the fire, and had burns on his legs.[122] When asked by a flight attendant what he had in his pocket, he replied: “Explosive device.”

But surely we are safe now that the TSA strips 95-year-old, dying women of their Depends.

The problem is that their well just isn't very deep

JustOneMinute: Hope And Change Does Not Come To Al Qaeda

WASHINGTON — American counterterrorism officials all but welcomed the announcement on Thursday that Ayman al-Zawahriwould succeed Osama bin Laden as leader of Al Qaeda, arguing that his deep flaws are likely to weaken the core of the terrorist network.

The al Qaeda figures who could have been groomed for high leadership are dead. And Osama bin Laden never really believed that he'd be popped, anyway. But let us not mourn their organizational incompetence.

Yale law professor: bin Laden killing was legal

Jed Rubenfeld, professor of law at Yale Law School and a former U.S. representative to the Council of Europe, in "U.S. justified in killing Osama Bin Laden:"

An "extrajudicial execution," that's what many in the international community are now calling the killing of Osama bin Laden. The U.N.'s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has called for an investigation. According to a U.N. special rapporteur, if the U.S. commandos were under shoot-to-kill orders and did so without offering Bin Laden a "meaningful prospect of surrender," his killing could have been a "cold-blooded execution." ...

What Prof. Rubenfeld surely realizes, though he didn't write, is that the intention of the U.N.'s "investigation" is not actually to determine whether double tapping OBL met some legal criteria. It is to hamstring American might and hamper our efforts against Islamist terrorists. It is to put the United States into a box.

As Prof. Rubenfeld points out, there is no existing international treaty or Convention on warfare that says that an enemy combatant must be given a "meaningful prospect of surrender," or any opportunity at all. Says the professor,

It is pure foolishness to suggest that by going in on the ground, the U.S. turned its soldiers into policemen required to give Bin Laden "due process," place him "under arrest" and read him his Miranda rights.

I remember very well an incident during 1991's Gulf War in which American media excoriated US forces who observed Iraqi tanks heading toward their position and destroyed them with anti-tank missiles. Why the media fury? Because in the breathless words of a reporter whose face I remember well but can't put a name to it, the tanks were moving toward the American position "with their turrets reversed," that is, pointing toward the tanks' rear. So, the reporter continued, "the tanks were surrendering!" She claimed as well that a reversed tank's turret was a recognized sign of surrender.

Which is just stuck on stupid. First, tanks cannot surrender at all, turrets reversed or not. Only soldiers can surrender. If the crews wanted to surrender, all they had to do was dismount their tanks, casts away arms and raise a white flag (an undershirt would do - so many Iraqis used white undershirts to surrender during that war that Saddam finally made it a capital offense in the army even to possess one). Second, because tanks cannot surrender, it does not matter where the main gun is pointing. You just shoot the tank.

There was a later incident involving Saudi troops who accepted the surrender of a small group of Iraqi soldiers, including a handful of Iraqi officers, who did raise a white ensign and proceed on foot toward Saudi soldiers. When the Saudis went out to meet them, the Iraqis raised weapons and shot the Saudis down. Other Saudis immediately gunned down the Iraqis, of course, but several Saudi men lost their lives. From that day on, that unit of Saudis took no prisoners - any Iraqi showing a white flag was shot. And that was both entirely reasonable and legal. Perfidy of surrender is explicitly forbidden in the international conventions, and once perfidy is done, it is justifiable to expect it will be practiced again.

As Prof. Rubenfeld explains, perfidy has been the hallmark of bin Laden's acolytes. They are,

... enemies who flagrantly violate the laws of war, targeting civilians for death, hiding bombs behind burkas, using children as shields or — yes — faking a Red Cross, upraised hands or other symbolic white flags to perpetrate lethal attacks. ... Even if we imagine Bin Laden actually waving a little white sock on a stick in Abbottabad, there would have been no reason for our soldiers to credit these statements. No soldier had a duty to take the slightest risk to his own life because Osama bin Laden promised to be good from now on.

The SEALs were never under any obligation to do anything to bin Laden except shoot him on sight. As Prof. Rubenfeld points out, "If Bin Laden wanted to surrender, he could and should have done it sometime in the last decade. He could not do it by raising his hands during an attack on his compound."

How the bin Laden raid went down

DETAILED ACCOUNT OF THE BIN LADEN RAID Reveals How It Nearly Ended In Disaster:

Admiral Yamamoto and the Justification of Targeted Killing

The Volokh Conspiracy » Admiral Yamamoto and the Justification of Targeted Killing

Ilya Somin, a professor at George Mason University’s School of Law, echoed Greenberg’s argument that “targeting individual enemy combatants in war is perfectly legal and moral”.

Somin points at US targeting of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the commander of the Japanese fleet during World War II, and the British and the Czechs’ killing of German SS General Reinhard Heydrick [sic] in 1942, as precedents.

“Surely international law does not give terrorist leaders greater protection than that enjoyed by uniformed soldiers such as Admiral Yamamoto.”

“And if it is legal to individually target the commander of a uniformed military force, it is surely equally legal to target the leader of a terrorist organisation, including Osama bin Laden,” he told Al Jazeera.

I made the same point commenting on another Volokh post by Kenneth Anderson on May 6.

By any standard, OBL was commanding officer of al Qaeda. Why was it okay for the president to order the assassination of Admiral Isoruku Yamamoto in 1943, but not of Osama bin laden in 2011? Is it just that Yamamoto wore a uniform and OBL did not?

Related to the claims, such as the UN's, that the bin Laden raid was of dubious legality if not outright illegality, just consider that the SEALs' could not be less legal than a domestic no-knock raid. These are frequently lethal.

Dressed in black and carrying assault rifles, members of a local multi-jurisdiction police unit burst into a dark home in Ogden, Utah, one night in September shouting, "Police! Search warrant!" ...

A video of the incident made by the Weber-Morgan counties Narcotics Strike Force and the federal Drug Enforcement Agency shows a man suddenly appearing in a hallway holding a shiny object that an officer thought was a sword, but was really a golf club, according to Weber County Attorney Dee Smith.
In the instant he appeared, the video shows, three shots rang out and the man, Todd Blair, 45, fell to the floor, dead. ...

[Police] Sgt. Troy Burnett was found to have handled the situation appropriately, Smith says. "This was a split-second decision. He acted according to his training."

And now the Indiana Supreme Court has ruled thus:

In a 3-2 decision, Justice Steven David writing for the court said if a police officer wants to enter a home for any reason or no reason at all, a homeowner cannot do anything to block the officer’s entry.

So how can it possibly be legal for a police officer to break down the door to your home and shoot you dead for practicing your putting on your carpet, but not be legal to attack and kill an enenmy combatant (and an unlawful enemy combatant at that)?

Osama bin Laden mission was Bush's fault!

Osama bin Laden mission agreed in secret 10 years ago by US and Pakistan | World news | The Guardian

The US and Pakistan struck a secret deal almost a decade ago permitting a US operation against Osama bin Laden on Pakistani soil similar to last week's raid that killed the al-Qaida leader, the Guardian has learned.

The deal was struck between the military leader General Pervez Musharraf and President George Bush after Bin Laden escaped US forces in the mountains of Tora Bora in late 2001, according to serving and retired Pakistani and US officials.

Under its terms, Pakistan would allow US forces to conduct a unilateral raid inside Pakistan in search of Bin Laden, his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and the al-Qaida No3. Afterwards, both sides agreed, Pakistan would vociferously protest the incursion.

"There was an agreement between Bush and Musharraf that if we knew where Osama was, we were going to come and get him," said a former senior US official with knowledge of counterterrorism operations. "The Pakistanis would put up a hue and cry, but they wouldn't stop us."

Brilliant leak! Now if the net outcome of the raid turns negative, Obama can blame it all on
Bush!

Al Qaeda, Islamism and the months to come

As coincidental companion pieces to my "Perspective" column in Sunday's Knoxville News-Sentinel, here are some read-worthy essays. (Don't you love it when a plan comes together? My deadline to Knoxville was Tuesday even and these articles all cam out before the end of the week.)

1. "Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Will Muslim Brotherhood succeed where Osama bin Laden failed? Osama bin Laden is dead. Al Qaeda may soon follow him to the grave. But the doctrine of jihad – exemplified by the Muslim Brotherhood – lives on."

Unlike Al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood has evolved and learned the hard way that the use of violence will be met with superior violence by state actors. The clever thing to do, it now turns out, was to be patient and invest in a bottom-up movement rather than a commando structure that risked being wiped out by stronger forces. Besides, the gradualist approach is far more likely to win the prize of state power. All that Khomeini did before he came to power in Iran was to preach the merits of a society based on Islamic law. He did not engage in terrorism. Yet he and his followers took over Iran – a feat far greater than bin Laden ever achieved. In Iran the violence came later.

2. Reuel Marc Gerecht: "Whither Jihad? Islamic militancy preceded Osama bin Laden. Unfortunately, it will probably outlast him, too."

The excesses of al Qaeda and allied Islamic groups in spilling blood in Muslim lands since 9/11—especially in Iraq—have created considerable unease and sometimes even fire-and-brimstone disgust among Muslims. The Great Arab Revolt is altering how Arabs see themselves. It’s still much too early to know where this awakening is going—whether it will lead to democracy or back to dictatorship—but it’s not too early to see how the turbulence that started in Tunisia has discombobulated the holy-warrior set. Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri fell silent when these popular pro-democracy eruptions started. Both Iran’s ruling elite and al Qaeda finally described the Arab Revolt, surreally, as an Islamic movement that mirrored their most cherished principles.

3. "Egypt’s Other Extremists - While the Muslim Brotherhood gets all the ink, the Salafists go on a rampage." Salafism is Islamism of Saudi Arabian ancestry, while the Muslim Brotherhood is an Egyptian product. A joke in the Middle East is that a Muslim Brother is a Salafist who has learned how to read and write. In Egypt recently,

Some Salafists joined the demonstrations in Tahrir Square, and others have said they will enter politics—in many cases by supporting the Brotherhood. Often the two groups have been opposed to one another, with the Salafists accusing the Brotherhood of compromise, but in the March 19 constitutional referendum, Salafi clerics urged their followers to support the Brotherhood in campaigning for a “yes” vote.

Perhaps thinking that these more extreme Islamist currents make it appear relatively moderate, the Brother-hood condemned the killing of Osama bin Laden. Already before that, it had become more outspoken about its own desire for an Islamic state.

On April 14, at a forum in Cairo, the Brotherhood’s deputy supreme guide, Mahmoud Ezzat, said his group wanted to establish an Islamic state when they achieved sufficient support through their Freedom and Justice party. At the same forum, another Brotherhood leader, Saad al-Husseiny, stated that they aimed to apply Islamic law and establish Islamic rule. On April 22, a senior spokesman, Sobhi Saleh, said the Brotherhood wished to apply “Islamic legislation.”

4. Muslim author Irshad Manji: "Islam Needs Reformists, Not 'Moderates' - Bin Laden's followers represent a real interpretation of Islam. Why don't more Muslims challenge it?" Manji's point is the "moderate" Muslims are the problem, not the solution.

in announcing bin Laden's demise, the president fudged a vital fact. Echoing George W. Bush, he insisted that al Qaeda's icon "was not a Muslim leader."

But this is untrue. Bin Laden and his followers represent a real interpretation of Islam that begs to be challenged relentlessly and visibly. Why does this happen so rarely?

"Moderate" Muslims are part of the problem. As Martin Luther King Jr. taught many white Americans, in times of moral crisis, moderation cements the status quo. Today, what Islam needs is not more "moderates" but more self-conscious "reformists." It is reformists who will bring to my faith the debate, dissent and reinterpretation that have carried Judaism and Christianity into the modern world. ...

It is time for those who love liberal democracy to join hands with Islam's reformists. Here is a clue to who's who: Moderate Muslims denounce violence committed in the name of Islam but insist that religion has nothing to do with it; reformist Muslims, by contrast, not only deplore Islamist violence but admit that our religion is used to incite it.

What's next for al Qaeda

My piece on this topic for the Knoxville News-Sentinel is now online on the paper's web site.

"Suddenly there came a tapping ..."

Commenter Susan at Ann Althouse's Osama bin Laden poetry contest:

Once upon a midnight dreary, Osama pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While he plotted, clearly scheming, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some SEAL gently rapping, rapping at his chamber door.
"'Tis some visitor," he muttered, "tapping at my chamber door -
Only this, and nothing more."

Read the whole thing - it is actually quite literate and ends with a bang.

Bin Laden, you're so vain, you probably think this raid was about you

SEAL Team 6 captured a number of Osama bin Laden's home videos, among stores of what is described as, "the single largest collection of senior terrorist materials ever," according to "a senior intelligence official," quoted by ABC News.

The government today released five videos found in Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, showing the al Qaeda leader preparing a message to the United States and watching himself on television. ...

The second video, which runs over a minute long, shows bin Laden watching himself on television and holding the remote control to change the channels between what appear to be Arabic news channels.

As the reporter points out, the value of the documents and other materials captured during the raid is astounding. In this war their value can be compared to the breaking of Japan's naval codes during World War II or the Enigma machine that enabled the Allies to read Hitler's signal in near real time. These materials are an intelligence dissection of al Qaeda.

As I have said before, the materials brought from bin Laden's compound are so valuable that they make his death almost incidental to the raid's success. Almost, that is.

Update: Another ABC report:

U.S. intelligence is now in possession of a veritable "playbook" of al Qaeda operations -- from potential terror attack targets to information on international safe houses and top commanders -- thanks to the Navy SEAL raid that took down Osama bin Laden Sunday, officials told ABC News today.

The cache of electronic and handwritten materials obtained by the SEALs includes numerous hallmark al Qaeda plots including attacks on infrastructure targets such as water supply and transportation including rail and air, in what one official described as a "strategic guide for how to attack the U.S." In the past, al Qaeda planned for attacks on water supplies have included an interest in mining dams and in poisoning water supply. Intelligence experts have also have found what appears to be information about safe houses around the world and about al Qaeda leadership.

Courtesy my son:

Let there be - conspiracy theories!

Ding, dong, Osama's dead - or is he, really?

Via American Digest, I find this post by Cobb, "Because he's not dead yet:"

C'mon. You don't get your mitts on Bin Laden just to kill him, and you don't have 40 SEALs who are too slow to tackle the dude. There's is no picture because he's not dead yet. They're twisting him on a spit and slow roasting him until he's so tender the secrets just drip of the bones. They've got him simmering in pentathol. ...

He's certainly not free or missing, that's for sure. He's never going to see the light of day. But is he dead at this very moment? You will never know.

Which makes me wonder about the bogus death photos that got shown to some members of Congress.

A day after the White House said it will not release the official photo of Usama bin Laden’s body, many are wondering how a handful of lawmakers were duped into believing they saw it. ...

The announcement came after at least three U.S. lawmakers claimed to have seen what they believed was an authentic photograph of Bin Laden, shot in the face and chest during a CIA-led Navy SEALs operation Sunday at a secret compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
But those photos appear to have been doctored images sent by an undisclosed source or sources to members of Congress, including Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., who admitted Wednesday he’d been fooled into thinking the picture was real.
After telling reporters he had seen an image that confirmed Usama is "definitely dead," Brown later said "the photo that I saw and that a lot of other people saw is not authentic.

Let us take Cobb's conspiracy theory to its logical limit! I can conspiracy conspire with the best of 'em:

Q: Why did the White house dither so long on whether to release photos of bin Laden's corpse and then announce there would be no release?
A: There are no photos of bin Laden's corpse because bin Laden is not a corpse. He was snatched, not killed. The bogus photos that some Members received came from the CIA. They were trial balloons of deliberately faked photos. The "leak" was actually a test of the photos' credibility. It was only after they had been quickly debunked that the White House pulled the plug on using them as "official" photos.

Q: What about the burial at sea?
A: There was no burial at sea off USS Carl Vinson, some of whose officers and crew, including the captain, are part of the conspiracy. As for the SEALs and crews of the Army's 160th SOAR who flew the mission, they won't even tell you what they had for breakfast this morning, much less the respiratory status of a body brought out of a mission objective.

Q: So why the elaborate cover story that OBL was killed?
A: We don't want his successors in al Qaeda to know that OBL, having been waterboarded before 24 hours passed, has spilled his guts just as fully as 9/11's mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed did after he was captured.

Q: Wait! Bin Laden was water boarded? I thought that Obama outlawed that!
A: Yeah, right. Remember, there's an election coming up in only, what 550 days or so. You think that not water boarding OBL is going to stand in the way of a second term? Just wait until the three months before November when we are incrementally fed through a thoroughly compliant media story after story of terrorist plots stopped by analyzing the intel info grabbed during the raid.

And stipulating that all Cobb proposes is true ... does the president know? Or does he really think that OBL is chatting it up right now with Luca Brazzi?

Think it couldn't happen? Remember that naval intelligence actually removed FDR from the distribution list of intercepted, decoded Japanese signals in the months before Pearl Harbor.

The problem with all this, of course, is that "three may keep a secret if two of them are dead." As Chuck Colson, who did prison time for being part of the Watergate coverup, put it, a conspiracy always gets blown, and the more people there are in it, the quicker.

This is exactly why I still insist that proof of OBLs' death must be made public. Not only will it dampen some (not all) of the conspiracy theories already abounding in Muslim lands, failure to do so will make it more likely that similar conpsiracy theories will start to gain credibility here. This must not happen.

For the record: I believe that the SOF operators went into the compound knowing that there was a high likelihood that OBL was there - but that killing or capturing him was not the highest priority of the mission, though high indeed it was. To repeat myself,

The real value of this raid is less the death of bin Laden, as emotionally satisfying as Americans find it, than the trove of materials gathered. ... What the raid did was retrieve enormously important al Qaeda hard drives and documents from Osama bin Laden's house, incidentally killing bin Laden as they did so.

Even if bin Laden had not been there, the raid would have been a smashing success because of the intelligence goldmine, the capture of which was surely of no lower priority than confronting bin Laden. But OBL was there. The SEALs killed him. Could they have captured him instead? We'll never know. But dead he is at the close-up hands of the US military. And what's even better, the US Congress authorized it.

Little gunfire during bin Laden raid

I speculated earlier today that there was probably not a lot of gunfire during the SEALs' raid on Osama bin Laden's Abottabad compound last Sunday.

There was not near the kind of firefight that we were told took place for the first 20 minutes of the raid. Since the official account of the sequence during the raid is about on it ninety-eleventh version, we do not know how much gunfire there actually was. Was there only one of the compound's residents armed, as one report says? Whatever, the compound was not an armed camp. While there might well have been 20 minutes elapse from the first to the last shot, it's hardly likely that firing was continuous or even frequent during that time. SEALs don't shoot a lot; they don't need to.

Just a few minutes ago, NBC Nightly News reported that there was only a little shooting inside the compound and almost all of it done by the SEALs. The only man who shot at the SEALs was a bodyguard, who promptly went to meet his 72 virgins.

The report also said that the SEALs encountered bin Laden's 19-year-old son on an interior stair and shot him dead. Osama himself peered down the stairs, saw the SEALs and ran back into his room, barely dodging a burst from a SEAL. The SEALs charged into the bedroom, where one shot bin Laden's wife in the leg. Another SEAL shot bin Laden once in the chest and once in the head. That was all the shooting. The rest of the 40 minutes the SEALs spent on the ground was taken up by piling as much material of intelligence value as possible into their grab bags.

The real value of this raid is less the death of bin Laden, as emotionally satisfying as Americans find it, than the trove of materials gathered. That's why I earlier wrote that what the raid did was retrieve "enormously important al Qaeda hard drives and documents from Osama bin Laden's house, incidentally killing bin Laden as they did so."

Did US shut down Pak electrical and comms in Abbottabad to raid bin Laden?

A very titillating tidbit is found in this ABC report:

Residents near the bin Laden compound told ABC News that just before the stealth helicopters arrived, all electricity and cellphone service was knocked out and then came back on right after the choppers left.

If true, this is a stunning report. It would indicate that US Special Operations Command has the ability to do something like an EMP - electromagnetic pulse - that is not a pulse, but a continuous, disabling stream of EM energy that can be turned on and off at will. Frankly, I'm skeptical because the power and transmission requirements for such a device would be enormous. Jamming cellphone frequencies would be of little challenge to signals specialists, but shutting down even part of an electrical grid by non-destructive, non-invasive means would be incredibly daunting.

But there are some interesting other sources: "Making sense of the Osama op through tweets."

There are also references in the tweets of a blackout in the town, roads being blocked, telephones going dead and sirens being sounded. It is not clear whether these things happened during the raid or after the US choppers had left with bin Laden's body.

Even so, the question is begged just why there was not even a Pakistani police response during the 40 minutes that US special ops were on the ground. The answer would seem to lead down two divergent trails:

1. There was secret Pakistani involvement in the raid who stopped Abbottabad authorities from responding. Regardless of what the Pak government's official, public stance is toward OBL or the raid, it may be that there was a level of cooperation that no one wants to talk about. In fact, to take this conspiracy theory all the way, might there have been a "rogue" cell within the Pak military of intelligence service that cooperated with no knowledge by, much less sanction of, the Pak government?

2. There was not near the kind of firefight that we were told took place for the first 20 minutes of the raid. Since the official account of the sequence during the raid is about on it ninety-eleventh version, we do not know how much gunfire there actually was. Was there only one of the compound's residents armed, as one report says? Whatever, the compound was not an armed camp. While there might well have been 20 minutes elapse from the first to the last shot, it's hardly likely that firing was continuous or even frequent during that time. SEALs don't shoot a lot; they don't need to. For that matter, special operators have silenced weapons that are not publicized. (In World War II, the OSS developed a pistol so silent that OSS Director Bill Donovan took it into the the Oval Office and fired several rounds into a small sandbag he had brought with him. Roosevelt, who was looking away while he dictated a letter, did not even turn around. This according to Donovan's deputy, Stanley Lovell, in his book Of Spies and Stratagems.)

The tweets from Abbottabad refer to how much noise the helicopters made in and over bin Laden's compound, although the choppers' approaches seem not to have been perceived very much. What gunfire sounds did come from the compound may have been overwhelmed by the machine noise.

Still, the lack or emergency response is more than a little curious. Forty minutes is quite enough time for at least a few police patrols to have reached the compound. Why didn't they? The US government is not asking, and the Pakistanis aren't saying.

Curiouser and curiouser.

Stealth helicopter? What stealth helicopter?

We know that the SOF team that retrieved enormously important al Qaeda hard drives and documents from Osama bin Laden's house, incidentally killing bin Laden as they did so, flew out of Abbottabad with one fewer helicopters than they went in with.

We also know that the helicopters belonged to the US Army's 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, based at Fort Campbell, Ky.

The 160th specializes in airborne special operations missions. It falls under the U.S. Army Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, N.C., and includes about 1,400 soldiers, most of whom are based at Fort Campbell.

The 160th has become known as the Night Stalkers because of its capability to strike undetected during darkness.

Tail boom of the US helicopter left behind
at bin Laden's compound

The circumstances of the crash are unclear. It has been reported that the tail boom of the downed chopper, reportedly a specialized UH-60 Black Hawk, struck the wall around bin Laden's compound as it came into land. Photos appearing on ABCNews' site support this conclusion - the photo at right shows the tail boom next to the wall. The SOFs destroyed the rest of the helicopter, leaving it a charred pile of ashes and molten aluminum.

Queries to the Defense Department on the identity and nature of the aircraft are rebuffed with a polite version of, "no comment." Nonetheless, other photos from the compound reveal interesting details of the bird. One of them shows the tail rotor closeup.

Tail boom closeup

The disk at the lower right of the photo is what intrigues. It covers the central hub the tail rotor (the boom is lying sideways) and speculation is all over the place about what it reveals about the rest of the aircraft.

Most analysts say that the disk is mainly intended to suppress rotor noise. ABCNews reports,

But photos of what survived the explosion -- the tail section of the craft with curious modifications -- has sent military analysts buzzing about a stealth helicopter program that was only rumored to exist. From a modified tail boom to a noise reducing covering on the rear rotors and a special high-tech material similar to that used in stealth fighters, former Department of Defense official and vice president of the Lexington Institute Dan Goure said the bird is like nothing he's ever seen before.

There are undoubtedly many other stealthy characteristics of the aircraft. But for nighttime flying, noise suppression is most crucial. The choppers would be flying dark, of course, and very, very low, making their detection by radar extremely difficult. But typical helicopters can be heard coming from kilometers away. Not these, though.

Neighbors of bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, told ABC News they didn't hear the helicopters the night of the Sunday raid until they were directly overhead. The rotor covering, along with a special rotor design, suppressed the choppers noise while inbound, Bill Sweetman, editor and chief of Defense Technology International, said.

Pakistan and China have close military ties. That this tail boom and most of the burned wreckage will wind up in Beijing seems a foregone conclusion. That is not a good thing.

Bin Laden's benediction

Ever wonder what the last words were from the officer in charge of dumping him overboard? After much diligent searching, I found a whole WSJ article about it.

The last thing that went through bin Laden's mind

What was the last thing that went through Osama bin Laden's mind when the SEALs burst into his house?

This.