For Pacifica Radio, 90.7 FM in L.A., May the 4th, 2012.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Alright y'all, welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
My full archives are at antiwar.com/radio.
And all week long there's been this big political fight about the killing of Osama Bin Laden a year ago, between the president and the republicans, who's a tough guy, that kind of thing.
But Anti-War Radio's favorite reporter, Gareth Porter, has a very important story about the death of Bin Laden that came out this week at truthout.org and we're also running it today at antiwar.com/porter.
The truth behind the official story of finding Bin Laden.
Welcome back to the show, Gareth.
How the hell are you?
I'm fine.
Thanks again, Scott.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
Thanks very much for joining us.
Wow, what a story.
So you really got your hands on something here.
Now, there's a guy named Shaukat Qadir.
Tell us who he is.
Well, Shaukat Qadir is a brigadier general retired in the Pakistani army, who I met when I was in Pakistan last summer.
He was very friendly, he was very kind to me, and I really made a friend with Shaukat while I was there.
And he began working on the Bin Laden thing.
He hadn't told me about it when I was there, but he was continuing to work on it that summer and into the fall, and produced a very long manuscript, sort of a draft manuscript, that had all of his research findings in it.
And he shared that with me, and I expressed great interest and worked with him on nailing down a number of points, which I felt as a journalist I needed to get more detail on.
And he was very cooperative.
He gave me, he agreed to give me not only the names of his sources, but the dates on which he met with them.
So I think he's extremely credible.
I have no doubt that he's telling the truth about everything that he, all the information that he gathered.
And so I wove that into a narrative and combined it with information that I was able to develop based on the published sources on the finding of Bin Laden, basically identifying the inconsistencies, contradictions in the story.
And in the end, I think what we have here is a narrative that really holds up because it is consistent with, and in some ways confirmed by, some of the information that one can get independently.
All right, so let me stop you there just to say the book is, and it's just coming out, I guess.
The book came out today.
It's Operation Geronimo, the Betrayal and Assassination of Osama Bin Laden and its Aftermath by Shawkat Qadir.
Gareth got to see it early and got, as he just said, extra access to the notes and the information, all the sourcing and everything.
And so I'm not really sure where to begin.
I guess how about what was Osama Bin Laden doing in that house?
I mean, how was he spending his time?
I mean, why was he in that house in Abbottabad?
Was it because the ISI was keeping him there safely and protecting him?
Well, this is indeed the question that I think people need to understand much more clearly.
And I don't think news media has adequately covered this question at all, why was he in Abbottabad.
The reason that Bin Laden was there, which Shawkat Qadir is really responsible for giving us a clear picture of, is that he was essentially ousted from the leadership position of al-Qaeda as the founder of the organization.
He, of course, one might expect that he would have complete sway over the rest of the Shura, the rest of the leadership council of al-Qaeda, but in fact they were able to maneuver him out of the leadership position.
And the whole story, I won't go into all the details, but the story essentially revolves around the fact that not only had he been seriously, had serious health problems in late 2001-2002 after the battle in the Tora Bora mountains, he may have been wounded, I think it's probably the case that he was wounded and he had some complications, but in any case he was unable to walk, he had some serious health, physical health issues, and then even more difficult from the point of view of the rest of the al-Qaeda Shura, as it turns out, is that bin Laden was becoming really kind of just crazy about this whole notion that al-Qaeda should attack the Pakistani nuclear facility at Cahoota.
And this was a facility where there were no nuclear weapons, it was simply a nuclear reactor, but bin Laden had this idea, according to three independent sources who were couriers, served as couriers for the leading Masood tribal leader named Baitullah Masood in his contact with not the entire Shura, but with Zawahiri, the second in command, during this period of 2003-2004.
These Masood tribal sources told Qadir that the rest of the Shura was quite upset because they couldn't reason with Mustafa bin Laden, he seemed to be completely fixated on this notion that they had to attack and take over to occupy this facility.
They couldn't reason with him, he kept at it over and over again, and finally they got tired of this and they decided that they were better off if they could get rid of him, if they could move him out of his position of being the head of the Shura and essentially farm him out, put him out to pasture, as one source put it.
He essentially was tricked into accepting this proposal, which ostensibly it was a proposal for an attack on the facility, but it was only on condition that his mentor, that is, bin Laden's mentor, the person he apparently respected greatly, who had been with him when he originally founded al-Qaeda and then faded into the woodwork, would agree to this.
So what happened was that when the courier was sent to take this proposal to this mentor of bin Laden's, what actually happened was that the mentor was told the truth, that bin Laden had gone over the edge, around the bend, if you will, and that they needed to basically make a change.
And so the mentor insisted in his response that bin Laden had to be moved to a safe location, and that's where Abbottabad came in.
That's the story in a nutshell.
And I think it's important to hear a couple of these quotes.
Nobody listened to his rantings anymore.
He was considered to be going mad.
He'd become an object of ridicule.
So they were really kicking him way upstairs up to the third floor of that house out there.
That's right, and apparently it was all done with great finesse.
He was not being told what was happening.
He was still under the impression that he was going to be the boss, but in fact what they were doing was moving him to a place where it would take so long to communicate between him and the Shura, which was still, by the way, in the Tora Bora mountain area of Afghanistan.
So it was quite a ways between the two, particularly on foot, of course, for a courier to navigate.
And so what happened was that he essentially became isolated from the rest of the leadership, and he would pass these ideas on and nothing would happen.
And even the documents which have been passed on to, have been made public now, clearly make it clear that Osama bin Laden was frustrated by the fact that he wasn't being listened to.
And this really gives a deeper explanation for what we're seeing in those documents.
All right, we're talking with Gareth Porter.
He's got this piece at Truthout.org, exclusive investigation, the truth behind the official story of finding bin Laden.
Talking about Shoukak Hadir and his new book, Operation Geronimo, the betrayal and assassination of bin Laden and its aftermath.
And he's about to debunk two lies.
The first lie is, you know, like Newt Gingrich likes to say, those dastardly Pakistanis, they pretend to be our friends, but really they're no good two-bit backstabbing traitors.
They were hiding Osama bin Laden from us all along.
It's so obvious.
And then the other one, of course, is it took torturing the truth out of somebody to find out where he was and to finally get him after all that time after they let him go at Tora Bora.
So go ahead with your wonderful debunking, Gareth Porter.
Those are two huge lies that are quite important to be understood and debunked for sure.
So the first one, which is that the ISI, the Pakistani military, knew all along where bin Laden was and was holding out in the United States.
I think the way that this can be easily debunked is that what we now know from not only Shoukak Hadir, and this is based on his own personal knowledge, he was a commander in a Qorum agency, one of the tribal areas of Pakistan years and years ago, and under his command was a young lieutenant who eventually went on to become a key field officer of the ISI.
And he learned from this field officer, he was his initial contact on the investigation of the bin Laden raid and what came before it.
And so Shoukak Hadir was able to get the full story of what the ISI actually knew from its investigation.
And what he learned is that the ISI had been looking at the compound in Abbottabad since 2008, not because they believed or knew that bin Laden was there or that his courier was there, but because the owner, person who had bought the land and constructed the building, the compound, had been letting it be known in circles in Abbottabad that he had made a lot of money in Abu Dhabi and that he was a money changer in Peshawar.
And obviously this was a story aimed at covering the fact that he went to Peshawar roughly once a month.
But ISI, being a very thorough intelligence agency, just routinely checked out the story to make sure that this guy was telling the truth.
So they basically asked their detachment in Peshawar to check this story to see whether somebody with the name Arshad Khan, who is the name that he actually used when he built the compound in Abbottabad, whether he was in fact a money changer who resided in Abbottabad.
And after some months, this was a routine check that took a while, and after some months the answer came back, no, nobody with that name, although there are a number of Arshad Khans, nobody resides in Abbottabad.
So then, being as thorough as they are, ISI said to all the detachments around the country and all the cities, do your own check, let's make sure that the story wasn't just kind of screwed up and they didn't get the wrong city.
So more months passed, more than a year passed, and in fact they finally had all of the cities report back that there was nothing indicating that there was anybody by that name who was a money changer in Peshawar who resided in Abbottabad.
So basically at that point they had already learned that Arshad Khan had traveled to Peshawar once a month and that he had been buying large quantities of prescription drugs while he was in Peshawar every time.
So they were beginning to get suspicious here that something else was going on.
So according to five different ISI sources and five different conversations that Shaukat Qadir had with him, the story is that the Counterterrorism Office of, the Counterterrorism Wing, excuse me, of ISI, which had been working closely with the CIA over the years on al-Qaeda and other al-Qaeda related groups in Pakistan, requested that the CIA do a routine check, that they start surveillance on the house, which would mean essentially both aerial surveillance and surveillance of all the cell phones in the house.
So they made that request according to these sources.
Now the interesting thing is that at higher levels of the ISI what Qadir was being told was, no, we don't remember that, or even a denial that they'd made the request.
And this makes it even more credible precisely because the ISI leadership did not want to be identified as cooperating with the CIA in any way, shape, or form in the finding of bin Laden because it was so unpopular.
Something like 15% of the population of Pakistan thought that it was a good thing or a legal thing for the United States to assassinate bin Laden in their country.
So it was very clear that the ISI politically had an interest in wanting to stay completely clear of it.
Well they had a conflicting interest too, which is not having a war waged against them.
And I'm not saying we were quite at the brink of it or anything like that, but it became a major horrible talking point over here that the Pakistanis, rather than working very closely with the CIA and the American government this whole time, as you just said, are really these backstabbing enemies.
And this became a terrible talking point of the war party.
Well they did, and of course the Pakistani military was caught in the middle here between the pressure from the United States on one hand, and using that argument that the Pakistanis were supporting the other side, although primarily, let's face it, they were talking about supporting the Haqqani group and the Afghan Taliban essentially.
That was the main thing that was being argued in Washington.
But in any case, between that on one hand and the very strong hostility and even hatred of the United States attacking and killing bin Laden on the other.
So in the end, they decided clearly, the ISI leadership and the Pakistani military leadership decided that they were going to basically plead ignorance that they'd done a poor job of keeping track and didn't know anything about this.
So they had nothing to do with it.
Now what was really going on was that they didn't know, but they had suspicions by the middle of 2010 that this target in Abbottabad had something to do with terrorism.
And so they did in fact tip off the CIA.
Which is why it debunks the torture angle as well.
Well, of course.
I mean, because the CIA at that point, from everything we know, it's clear the CIA still didn't know that bin Laden's courier was living in that compound.
It was the ISI tip that really got them started focusing on it intensively.
They had noticed that there was a compound here which had high walls, and it was a bit unusual for that neighborhood or for that city, although in a Pashtun city, and this was clearly a Pashtun family living there, this was common to have privacy walls like that in Pashtun neighborhoods.
So anyway, the U.S. intelligence had noticed it, they were interested in it, but they had not focused on it the way they did after the ISI tip off.
And what's interesting to me is that if you read the briefing, the transcript of the briefing by so-called senior intelligence official on May 7th of 2011, the official actually admits that they had not focused on this Abbottabad compound in a very intensive way until after they were tipped off by ISI.
Nobody had paid any attention to that.
It was never covered in the press.
And so instead what you got was all these people on camera saying, well, you know, people wonder how could it be that the ISI didn't know, or the Pakistani military didn't know that bin Laden was in this compound all these years.
Well, you know, it's funny the way they've had this selective release of documents to celebrate the anniversary of his killing or whatever, and they're portraying him actually a lot like you are, as very outside of the loop at this point.
And in fact very upset, and I wonder what you think about this, very upset supposedly at the drastic actions of the acclaimed al-Qaeda affiliates around the world, I guess.
I don't know specifically, but I'm thinking maybe he's talking about Zarqawi and bombing marketplaces and killing so many civilians in Iraq or the bombings in Saudi Arabia that killed civilians and made al-Qaeda look real bad, that kind of thing.
On one hand, they're saying, of course, that basically any non-state group with a gun that they want to go to war with from Nigeria to the Philippines is all al-Qaeda.
On the other hand, they're saying that bin Laden actually was just some idiot on the third floor of his house watching old videos and wishing he was somebody.
Well, I think that is what emerges below the surface of these documents, and some news coverage now is even saying that quite openly, that it appears that Osama bin Laden was very frustrated by the fact that he wasn't being listened to, that they were not really responding to his ideas for what ought to be done.
But what is really important to recall here is that at the time, that is May 2nd and the days following that, the news media were full of the official line, which was Osama bin Laden is the guy who is running things not just as a theorist, not just as the idea man, he's the tactical leader, the tactical director of al-Qaeda.
They were insisting that he ran the show and ran a tight ship.
It was all a lie, and I think they knew it.
I think they knew it at the time.
I think the CIA has known for years that in fact bin Laden was no longer really controlling things day to day, that at best he just had ideas and that maybe they'd do something about them, maybe they wouldn't.
Yeah, they had Iran was in their way.
That was the problem.
They could put out a communication every once in a while to get the Iraqis, to get the Iraqi al-Qaeda guys to try to listen to them, but that was about as good as they could do.
They were still in exile over there, no man's land on the Durand line between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Well, I mean, if you're talking about the rest of the Shura, yes.
I mean, the rest of the Shura did not have control over the people in Iraq.
They didn't have control over anybody outside their own little circle.
You know, Robert Dreyfuss wrote this piece for The Nation back in probably 2006, maybe 2005 or 2006, and it was called The Bogus War on Terrorism, and he talked about how al-Qaeda was only a couple of hundred guys, maybe two or three hundred guys, and then maybe he estimates a little higher than that, four or five hundred or something, but then the CIA with their laser designators and the Air Force with their daisy cutters and JDAM bombs, etc., they just obliterated these guys.
They killed almost all of them.
It was just a couple of dozen who escaped from Tora Bora into Pakistan with bin Laden.
Well, I think it was more than a couple of dozen.
I think it was a couple of dozen higher-level people plus, you know, a lot of lower-level followers.
So, I mean, there's a distinction there that has to be recalled.
But yes, I mean, there's no doubt that they suffered losses in that battle, and it took them a while to recover in Pakistan.
But what is the untold story here, the story that the U.S. media has completely missed, is that what happened in Pakistan is really the central development in the jihadist movement worldwide.
That is to say that the al-Qaeda people succeeded in building up a cadre of Pakistani jihadists, which then organized on a very wide scale in the tribal areas of northwest Pakistan.
And they really created a very large movement there that hadn't existed before.
And it was primarily because of their ability to, that is to say, al-Qaeda's ability to exploit the U.S. presence in Afghanistan and the very strong Pashtun affinity for their fellow Pashtuns in Afghanistan, which were suffering under the boot of U.S. occupation in 2003, 2004, 2005.
It was during that period that really this development occurred.
But now what is interesting is that we hear, you know, we, I think, get a pretty interesting account here of the view from certainly bin Laden's perspective that essentially the group of leaders of the so-called Tariqi Taliban, the Taliban, the Pakistani Taliban movement, were extremists.
I mean, they were not observing what bin Laden believed were proper Islamic rules of conduct.
And so he was not happy at all with the Tariqi Taliban movement.
And I think it's probably the case that the al-Qaeda shura back in Afghanistan was not happy about that either.
Yeah.
Well, and it's not like, you know, bin Laden, he was a wannabe politician anyway.
It's not that he cared about dead innocents.
He just cared about how it looked, you know.
Well, I mean, you know, I think we have to take seriously, he was a very, I don't want to say rigid, but very strongly, has strong views about how Islam should shape politics.
And, you know, he was apparently consistent about that.
So, I mean, this was...
So Muslim civilians might count, whereas September 11 victims don't.
Well, that's right, of course.
Of course, he made that distinction.
And again, I would just recall that their greatest triumph of anywhere in the world, by far the most important accomplishment of al-Qaeda has been to build up this very strong organization, a jihadist organization in Pakistan.
You're talking about like in Salim Shahzad's book, where al-Qaeda has really al-Qaedaized all the local insurgencies in Pakistan.
Exactly.
I mean, that, of course, has to do with the combination of the U.S. war in Afghanistan and, of course, our continued drone war in Pakistan itself.
Well, I think people hopefully remember Salim Shahzad.
He's the guy that was murdered, apparently, the reporter, Pakistani journalist, who was apparently murdered by the ISI.
At least he said, the ISI is trying to kill me.
And then he was murdered very quickly after that.
It doesn't look very good, I admit.
Right.
And it was because he had been reporting in the Asia Times about al-Qaeda infiltrating the Pakistani Navy.
Yeah, that was apparently the thing that got him into serious trouble with the ISI or with people in the Pakistani military, because they were extremely sensitive about the reporting that the Navy had been compromised.
And really, would you argue that if we just left Afghanistan on their own devices, even granted the initial invasion, but if we just stayed with light and fast and get the hell out of there and never mind that this never would have happened, that this was really, as you said, the result of the war lasting into 04 and 05?
There is no doubt in my mind that the jihadization of the al-Qaedaization, if you will, of that part of Pakistan never would have happened.
You simply would not have had the readiness on the part of hundreds of thousands of people in that population to respond to al-Qaeda appeals.
Maybe hundreds of thousands is too high, tens of thousands, certainly.
All right, well, we're all out of time, so everybody will have to go to www.antiwar.com.
Go back through your archives, find all the great writing about Salim Shahzad and his story of the al-Qaedaization, as he called it, of all the various Pakistani insurgencies.
We've got to go.
Thanks very much for your time on the show.
As always, Gareth.
Thanks for having me again, Scott.
And that will be it for the show tonight.
Again, that's the great Gareth Porter, independent historian and journalist.
The piece at Truthout and at www.antiwar.com is called The Truth Behind the Official Story of Finding Bin Laden.
We'll be back here next week from 6.30 to 7 on KPFK, 90.7 FM in LA.
My full archives are at www.antiwar.com/radio.
Thanks for listening.
