Forget Pakistan, US Knew Bin Laden’s Location All Along
US intelligence pinpointed terror leader’s precise location on numerous occasions and let him escape every time
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
The notion that the US was only aware of Bin Laden’s precise location for a matter of months before they executed their alleged raid of his compound in Pakistan is an insult to the truth, which is that the US knew the Al-Qaeda leader’s precise whereabouts before 9/11 and also protected him from capture on numerous occasions afterwards.
A year after the FBI had issued a global arrest warrant for Bin Laden following his alleged involvement in the 1998 Nairobi and Kenya embassy attacks, British tourists Alan and Cindy Thompson were traveling through Pakistan when they stopped off at a town called Zhob.
After driving for 11 hours on dirt roads they came to a checkpoint and were detained by armed Pakistani guards. The Thompsons later discovered that they were stopped because they had discovered the secret lair of Osama Bin Laden, before being told by American aid workers that the location had been visited by US consulate officers, British, Australian, and Swiss ambassadors, and that it was guarded by a team of US commandoes.
The aid workers also told them that they had been forced to move their offices because of a similar experience in Kandahar, where they ended up stationed right next door to Bin Laden.
After the couple were picked up by the British embassy they were invited to a garden party where all the British ambassadors and aid workers were bragging that they were stationed in the same area as bin Laden’s secret hideout.
The Thompsons tried to alert the FBI and Scotland Yard to the astounding information, but were completely ignored.
“We were gobsmacked,” said Cindy Thompson. “We found it incredible that we were offering to give first hand true information about the most wanted man in the world and the US embassy couldn’t even be bothered to get off their butts…it is about time that this story is told to the world to let the people know the truth…the hunt for bin Laden is a farce.”
The account was reported on at the time by Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper and the Thompsons later confirmed it to author Kenyon Gibson, who related the story in his book,
Common Sense: A Study of the Bushes, the CIA and the Suspicions Regarding 9/11.
The account is important because it correlates with
several instances where the U.S. had Bin Laden in their sights and deliberately ordered special forces soldiers to stand down or refused to launch air strikes.
In December 1998, Bin Laden was located in Kandahar but Bill Clinton refused to authorize military action.
In February 1999, Bin Laden stayed at a hunting camp in Afghanistan’s Helmand province for more than a week, but after US intelligence pinpointed the exact location, authorization for an assault never came.
US intelligence again located Bin Laden’s location in Kandahar in May 1999 but took no action.
According to the U.S. Senate, Bin Laden was
“within the grasp” of the U.S. military in Afghanistan in December 2001, but that then-secretary of defense Rumsfeld refused to provide the soldiers necessary to capture him.
In January 2004,
Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty told the Associated Press that the US military was “sure” that they would catch Bin Laden that year, clearly indicating they knew his location.
In October 2004, the
San Bernadino Sun reported that, “The Pentagon knows exactly where Osama bin Laden is hiding in Pakistan,” according to 9/11 Commission member John Lehman, who said that his capture was being delayed because there were too many Taliban fighters in the area.
“There is an American presence in the area, but we can’t just send in troops. If we did, we could have another Vietnam, and the United States cannot afford that right now,” said Lehman.
“Look,” he said, “Musharraf already has had three assassination attempts on his life. He is trying to comply, but he is surrounded by people who do not agree with him. This is not like Afghanistan, where there was no compliance, and we had to go in.”
“We’ll get (bin Laden) eventually, just not now,” concluded Lehman.
In 2006, a French documentary also claimed that French soldiers had Bin Laden in their sights on two occasions in 2003, but authorization to kill or capture the leader was not forthcoming from US authorities.
Colonel Hunt subsequently wrote an article for Fox News in which he stated, “We know, with a 70 percent level of certainty — which is huge in the world of intelligence — that in August of 2007, bin Laden was in a convoy headed south from Tora Bora. We had his butt, on camera, on satellite. We were listening to his conversations. We had the world’s best hunters/killers — Seal Team 6 — nearby. We had the world class Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) coordinating with the CIA and other agencies. We had unmanned drones overhead with missiles on their wings; we had the best Air Force on the planet, begging to drop one on the terrorist. We had him in our sights; we had done it. Nice job again guys — now, pull the damn trigger.”
“Unbelievably, and in my opinion, criminally, we did not kill Usama bin Laden.”
Democrat Rep. Maurice Hinchey later told MSNBC that the Bush administration deliberately allowed Bin Laden to get away in order to justify the attack on Iraq.
Despite the fact that US intelligence knew Bin Laden’s precise location in Pakistan more than a decade ago and deliberately failed to apprehend the terror leader on numerous occasions in the years since, Pakistan itself is now being targeted with threats for that very same reason.
Bin Laden was allegedly shot dead in his compound at Abbottabad, which is virtually a stone’s throw away from an important Pakistani military academy. President Barack Obama’s counterterrorism adviser
John Brennan told NPR that it was “possible” that members of Pakistan’s military knew Bin Laden was hiding in the compound.
Pakistan’s ISI intelligence agency is tied at the hip with the CIA, to the extent where it is basically a branch of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Bin Laden’s shocked neighbors have told the media of their disbelief that Bin Laden or his aides could have lived in the town without being noticed. Indeed, one man who lived next door to the compound raided by US Navy SEALS
told Al Jazeera that residents in the area carry documents because they are constantly asked to identify themselves by military forces.
Talking points centering around the notion that Pakistan knew all along that they were sheltering Bin Laden are likely the culmination of a blackmailing process and in retaliation to
massive unrest in Pakistan over the US Predator drone strikes which have killed hundreds. Saudi Arabia is also being blackmailed in light of the contrived “Arab Spring,” which has been hijacked by globalist interests and is now being used as a threat to destabilize the Saudi Kingdom.
The globalists could quickly isolate Pakistan and make them the next target of the ‘war on terror’ by claiming they were in league with Osama Bin Laden, when in reality Bin Laden’s whereabouts were well known to US intelligence all along
because he was their prize asset.
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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show.
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