Not sure I get your post. There’s nothing complicated about throwing a switch on a pole or dropping wire chaff on a substation. It was probably done by ground operatives.
[QUOTE=New York Times]
The C.I.A. had Bin Laden’s compound under surveillance for months before American commandos killed him in an assault on Monday, watching and photographing residents and visitors from a rented house nearby, according to several officials briefed on the operation.
[/QUOTE]
If the outage was intentional, the SEALS didn’t have to do it.
Reference for those who didn’t get it. That doesn’t have the “miscommunication” line in it, but he said that in a related response. It’s become a bit of a meme lately.
That was the point I was trying to make. The US spends a lot of money in Pakistan and not all of it goes to the military. Some of it ends up in the pockets of locals who can make things like power outages happen.
Power outages and the resulting sound of generators would be handy to mask the muted noise of approaching helicopters…
I guess the thing is that it is just as (or more) likely that the power just drops randomly, as it does in my experience in other subcontinental countries, as someone covertly fixed it. Also, the helicopters were noisy.
If you read the tweets I mentioned, it seems there were already severe and long lasting power issues for months beforehand. Can’t link to the relevant bits of the feed so am C&Ping selected posts from @ReallyVirtual, who tweeted from Abbottabad while it was all kicking off:
28 Feb
Abbottabad had power for 6/24 hours or so today, still waiting for the power brokers to have pity on us :-\
29 Apr
18 hours per day is not loadshedding, it is a load of bullshit 
1 May
Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event).
Go away helicopter - before I take out my giant swatter :-/
A huge window shaking bang here in Abbottabad Cantt. I hope its not the start of something nasty :-S
@m0hcin all silent after the blast, but a friend heard it 6 km away too… the helicopter is gone too.
@m0hcin the few people online at this time of the night are saying one of the copters was not Pakistani..
@raihak Funny, moving to Abbottabad was part of the ‘being safe’ strategy
Since taliban (probably) don’t have helicpoters, and since they’re saying it was not “ours”, so must be a complicated situation #abbottabad
@raihak yep, the mad power cuts have reached abbottabad - 14 hours daily - luckily I have a generator AND a UPS at the coffee shop
@tahirakram yea. hides his giant swatter
@smedica people are saying it was not a technical fault and it was shot down. I heard it CIRCLE 3-4 times above, sounded purposeful.
@tahirakram very likely - but it was too noisy to be a spy craft, or, a very poor spy craft it was.
@smedica It must have been more, I started noticing the helicpoter when the noise got irritating - which part of Abbottabd are you in?
and now I feel I must apologize to the pilot about the swatter tweets :-/
2 May
@raihak The day there is uninterrupted electricity in Lahore for a whole month, I will start packing my bags, until then, Abbottabad is home
@kursed Well, there were at least two copters last night, I heard one but a friend heard two, for 15-20 minutes.
@kursed Another rumor: two copters that followed the crashed one were foreign Cobras - and got away
@MahaRafiAtal lol not just you, and nothing to be sorry about (I think) 
I guess I’ll go drink a couple of espresso shots to keep me up
oh I forgot, one needs electricity to make coffee, which, we don’t have right now in Abbottabad. :-/
Time to turn on the generator
And? Then what happened? Did they hang an innocent man?
ahem
Post 14.
I believe I read that the SEAL team jammed the cell phone frequencies in the immediate area when they were there.
It could also have been a “naturally” occurring power outage, that they waited for and took advantage of when it happened.
On further reflection I think this is very likely. Per the tweets I posted, Abbotabad was experiencing 18 hours a day without power in both February and April. Not much of a stretch to think that the SEALs could count on a blackout.
$5000 cash, US money, to the local Chief Engineer.
How else? <shrugs>