never, never maintain links with a known associate.
We always knew where he was. The Indian intelligence agency said, that he was in Abbottabad since 2007. It depends on who you believe.
And of course regular readers of the Family Circus knew the answer LONG before anyone else.
“One cannot be betrayed if one has no people” -Mr. Kobayashi
Except to run any organization you need people, including some people you know you can trust. bin Laden couldn’t just invite any random person to be his personal courier, he had to use people he was confident wouldn’t turn him in for $25 million. That was not a good enough standard - he needed people who would not themselves be betrayed, identified, or tailed. Luckily for us there is no such person, although it took a while to prove.
This is not true. It may be a practise among Pakistanis but it is not a “Muslim” practise.
While that could be true, I don’t think that can be considered factual information.
First, yes, in countries where you cannot trust the police or th government, a lot of people live behind walls. You can find such houses from Mexico to Pakistan to China to Pompeii. In South Africa, they put up 10-foot chain link fences. It’s only in a fools’ paradise like North America (or Europe) that we have nice deserted houses on open lawns with large glass windows and expect to come home and find everything as we left it that morning. There are probably tens of thousands of equivalent houses all over Pakistan.
The courier put out the story that he and his brother were a money changers from Waziristan, the tribal areas, Pakistan’s equivalent of the lawless wild west. He said he had made enemies and needed the walls. That was not too abnormal for that country. Weirdos run around with guns and settle scores in the streets.
What they did NOT do was use a fancy car, frequent comings or goings, have 50 armed guards, or hassle the locals. Nothing to raise suspicions.
While the lack of guards is odd, in hindsight it all makes sense. When 20 people know a secret, it will come out. The fewer people that knew the details, the easier the secret was kept. As a result - I think that nobody except those in the compound knew where OBL was; maybe 20 people knew the courier knew and visited OBL - surprise, that’s how the USA eventually found him.
If I were OBL, I would not trust the ISI (Pakistani CIA) with my location, eventually one of them would talk for money (BIG money). They may have suspected some certain areas - but I seriously doubt anyone in the government there knew any details at all. After all, it took years to find who the courier was; OBL never left the place, nothing really suspsicious was visible there… Why would anyone suspect?
As a side note - There was no phone or internet connection into there. Bin Laden was hiding there with his wife and had 8 young children. Now we know what people do when they have no internet.
Ok, a few things need to be cleared up.
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Abbottabad is NOT a “suburb” of Islamabad, it is in a separate province altogether. It is anywhere from two the five hours drive, depending on the snow, landslides etc, (while Abbottabad itself is just hilly, in between Islamabad and it you have mountain ranges with peaks about 10,000 feet high).
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The house is most certainly not a mansion. Land and building costs are fairly cheap in that particular area, it is a large ungainly structure built in what was at the time a fairly isolated place. Its not a slum, but places like that are very very very common especially in rural areas.
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Police cannot enter a house sans a warrant from a magistrate, and “there might be terrorists in there” is not a ground to getting one.
It is most certainly not a Pakistani practice.
I am pretty sure most regional intelligence agencies knew the general location of where he was for quite some time. I do know that from 2004 onwards OBL would have been very low on the Pak Government priority list, people such as Abdullah Mehsud, Baitullah Masud, Maulana Fazalullah, Mangal Bagh, they ones who were busy spreading militancy in Pak and terror in cities would have rightly garnered a lot more attention and resources.
Just in the last few days I’ve read some articles by people who have lived in Pakistan, and they say that big compounds surrounded by high protective walls are actually very common. The appearance of OBL’s house was not nearly as unusual as reports make it out to be.
As others in this thread have said, this isn’t unusual in countries with large rich/poor disparities.
FWIW, shots of the Compound without knowing Bin Laden lived there do not make one think that the owner is wealthy.
Looking at the area on Google Earth, the compound is generally larger than most in the area, but not hugely so. It certainly doesn’t stand out as unique in any great way.
The Family Circus cartoon reminds me of the late and personally lamented Rubicon TV series.
This. Enough with the “mansion” talk. What I’ve seen of it looks like cheap housing, inside and out. Whether it cost $100 million (I actually heard that figure in one of the earliest news reports), $1 million, or $200k, I’d bet that 99% of the money went into building the walls.
It’s too bad that OBL wasn’t freezing in some cave, but at least he was self-confined to a shabby spread inside prison walls that kept him IN as much they kept everyone else out.
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Very good, it is then only a ficiton, there is a habit here of making up ‘facts’ about Muslims.
I agree.
yes, having cheap cement block walls around properties is quite common and those pictures show to me a very ordinary kind of house.
According to today’s reports, the CIA had an observation post near the house for months prior to the raid. Everyone coming and going was monitored. Even with all the resources, they never could positively identify OBL in the house. And interviews with neighbors and people near by indicated that the residents did come out on occasion. The women were always veiled and the men polite and quiet. Nothing to raise anyone’s suspicions.
It seems that this house was noticed years ago by at least the Afgan, the Pakastani, and the US intelligence services. It was apparent that the house was important. It just took a while to figure out who was inside.
Thank you.
We appreciate the informed information. Hearing from someone who actually lives in the country and understands the real problems/difficulties is a tremendous help in understanding what is really going on.
I doubt there have been many similar raids. It was a major affront to Pakistani sovereignty. The idea we would go in, kill a bunch of people, and say, aw shucks, it wasn’t bin Laden after all. I don’t think we could have kept such an unsuccessful raid quiet.
A question. Did bin Laden have security videos, and if so, how soon can I view them on Utube?
Other raids wouldn’t necessarily be in Pakistan. I understand we do things like this pretty frequently in Yemen, f’rinstance.
Sorry to divert the thread but I consider it my duty to fight potential ignorance wherever it rears its head. 
A recent study of the disparity between rich and poor shows that the U.S.A. is more disparate than most reporting African countries, and most S.E. Asian and South Asian countries; and in particular much more disparate than Pakistan.
Eh. That does not capture wealth, which in Pakistan is well known to be monopolised by the big families, although your link is neither to a recent study nor to a study, but to a wiki graphic basing off of the CIA factbook 2009 summation of data.