Senior al Qaeda member surrenders to Saudi authorities
US drone kills two in attack on Saudi Qaeda chief
Yes.
I’m sure more of this is coming. As if all those hard drives and flash drives weren’t enough, I’m amazed at the report that two phone numbers were sown into bin Laden’s clothes. Talk about striking gold! About the only thing missing was a Post-It note with addresses for Ayman al-Zawahiri and Mullah Omar.
That’s the first I’ve heard about the phone numbers.
Sure, you’d check his pockets, but I probably wouldn’t have thought to look for stuff actually sewn into his clothes.
But we don’t know that that was missing, do we? 
That seems odd. I wonder what he was offered in return.
I think he figured that he might be next and he’d rather deal with Saudi authorities than a Seal team or a cruise missile.
This shows how willing this guy was to martyr himself for the cause.
That sort of thing is generally for the low level cannon fodder. Whether it’s terrorists or conventional military forces, the older men give the orders and the younger die.
Don’t forget that it’s not “just” the intel they captured at the mansion. They have apparently been tracing his trusted courier for months. They’ve probably also followed information back down through the network. Chances are they are going to have developed a ton of information in that time that they won’t have dared use until now.
In particular, they might well have a lot more information regarding who Bin Laden has been working with in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.
That said they could easily be overstating their intelligence gains in order to try and panic some of their targets into revealing themselves.
Looks like it worked in at least one case!
Those older men in our military began their careers as younger men risking their lives while they gained the experience and knowledge necessary to give orders. Colin Powell, for instance, was injured during the Vietnam War. Many of today’s young officers will go on to be senior officers, giving orders. Please don’t suggest that they are generally easy about sending young men (and women, today) into harm’s way.
The only reasons I can think of for mentioning the intelligence they found are, as **enigmatic ** said, to panic some into revealing themselves, and to sow panic in general and make people afraid to stay where they are and afraid to stay in contact with others in their network.
The whole thing seems to be being handled brilliantly. And no, I’m not saying that’s necessarily Obama’s doing, there are seasoned intelligence people involved in this, but the decision to put boots on the ground makes this kind of follow up possible.
Agreed. I don’t think we should be comparing Al Qeada leadership with our military leadership. Al Qeada leaders send people to their certain death on missions that mostly require little or no skill and could be done by old men just as easily as young men.
I’d credit the Administration with actually listening to the seasoned intelligence people. The Bush Administration was notorious for only listening to what they wanted to hear, “stove-piping” raw intel, rather than allowing the pros to do their job and sift the wheat from the chaff.
It isn’t the military that ultimately gives the orders though. And at any rate, historically plenty of such experienced military leaders have been willing to spend the lives of their soldiers like so many bullets. It’s quite clear that just having been in the military a long time doesn’t make someone care about the lives of the soldiers he controls.
If they have any sense, the phone numbers were for prepaid cellphones that were destroyed as soon as the news broke about Osama being killed.
I wonder if they actually have a good informant within the Al Qaeda network that has given them a lot of info that is now being dressed up as being found with OBL. Given the previous difficulty of cracking information about them the amount they are said to have obtained from an undefended safe house seems staggering.
Why do people use easily traceable methods? I find it impossible to believe criminals and others don’t realize how easily cell phones are traceable. What haven’t they heard this?
I guess people get complacent but still when you got an entire nation chasing you
Well like I said, they have probably developed a ton of other information during the course of this that they haven’t been able to use until now.
But Bin Laden had less motivation to follow good procedures, it’s not like he has a boss who will punish him if he doesn’t follow the procedures. He might have be arrogant enough to presume that they wouldn’t find him, or his buddies would warn him, or that he was so important that this stuff wouldn’t matter if he is caught.
Consider as well that the protection offered by encryption and security procedures as they are supposed to be performed is much stronger than the protection they tend to apply when used by actual human beings. People get lazy, or don’t really understand the protections that they are putting in place, or don’t consider how cutting corners with the less important things can compromise the other stuff.
If you look back at the history of decryption, the telling thing isn’t that the breakthroughs almost always come from people screwing up, it’s how often these screw ups occur. If you walk around the average office building you will probably see dozens of security procedures being violated, because people don’t generally consider that it’s important in that specific instance, and 99.99% of the time they are right. People don’t tend to worry about the .01% stuff unless it’s on Fox.
Not surprisingly, Family Circus already covered this.
Seriously though, I’m having trouble reconciling all the talk that Osama had been out of the loop/inconsequential for years and him having all this awesome secret info on his computer.