Detainee Claims He Saw Bin Laden Earlier This Year

The BBC is reporting that a Taliban detainee in Pakistan claims to have information about Osama Bin Laden’s whereabouts earlier this year. Although  his claims cannot be verified, a leading American expert says his account should be investigated.

The detainee claims to have met Osama Bin Laden numerous times before 9/11.

He says that earlier this year he met a trusted contact who had seen Bin Laden 15 to 20 days earlier across the border in Afghanistan.

“In 2009, in January or February I met this friend of mine. He said he had come from meeting Sheikh Osama, and he could arrange for me to meet him,” he said.

According to the detainee, his contact is a Mehsud tribesman, responsible for getting al-Qaeda operatives based abroad to meetings with Bin Laden.

“He helps al-Qaeda people coming from other countries to get to the sheikh, so he can advise them on whatever they are planning for Europe or other places.

“The sheikh doesn’t stay in any one place. That guy came from Ghazni, so I think that’s where the sheikh was.”

via Source.

Gordon Brown Tells Pakistan, Find Bin Laden

Gordon Brown told Pakistan to “take out” Osama bin Laden yesterday as Western frustration at its failure to capture the al-Qaeda leader burst into the public glare.

With America and Britain seeking support for their decisions in the next two days to send tens of thousands more troops to Afghanistan, Mr Brown told the Pakistani leadership that it had not done enough to catch the men — believed to be hiding in the north of the country — responsible for the September 11 attacks.

His criticism was aimed at the ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence service, which the West has long believed to be too close to extremist groups harbouring bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Mr Brown told President Asif Ali Zardari in a telephone call on Saturday that he intended to press home the message on Thursday when Yousuf Raza Gilani, the Pakistani Prime Minister, visits London.

via You’ve had eight years, now get us bin Laden, Brown urges Pakistan – Times Online.

A Former CIA Agent’s Hunt For bin Laden in Pakistan

Art Keller, a blond, blue-eyed CIA agent, sits inside a decrepit building deep inside al-Qaeda territory, staring at his computer screen. He is forbidden by his Pakistani minders from venturing out into the badlands of Waziristan to help to find and kill the world’s most wanted man.

He is sick and exhausted, and suffering from food poisoning. Back home in the US his father is dying of cancer. The plumbing is basic, the heat intense — the generator has failed again. He pores over cables looking for any scrap of information — an intercepted phone call, an aerial photograph — that might finally end the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

The fruitless search has essentially been outsourced by the US to a network of Pashtun spies run by the Pakistani intelligence services.

Mr Keller was one of an estimated 50 to 100 CIA agents and special operations officers whose mission for the past eight years has been to find and kill bin Laden and other top al-Qaeda leaders in the hostile and forbidding Pakistani border region, where he is believed to be hiding.

Mr Keller, 39, volunteered for the bin Laden team and was sent in 2006 to become acting chief of one of the CIA’s bases in the heart of al-Qaeda and Taleban territory in Waziristan. It was an experience that leaves him wondering today if the al-Qaeda leader will ever be found.

Mr Keller was not an obvious choice for the job — he spoke no Middle Eastern languages, and was not an expert on al-Qaeda or Pakistan. Yet in 2006, with many resources diverted to Iraq, the CIA was desperate for agents to join the hunt.

Today this is changing. The agency is bringing back CIA retirees — a group known as The Cadre — many of whom are veterans who worked with the Afghan Mujahidin during the Soviet occupation in the 1980s.

Mr Keller’s replacement when he left Shawshank — the nickname given to his base in Waziristan because it resembled the prison life depicted in The Shawshank Redemption — was one such man, a grey-haired, CIA veteran, 65, who speaks Pashtu.

“Some of these guys have been hunting bin Laden for years,” Mr Keller says. His replacement, whom Mr Keller believes is still in Pakistan, has spent eight months a year since the September 11 attacks working out of these CIA safe houses looking for the top al-Qaeda leadership.

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