Terra Incognita: The CIA’s jihad against ‘Zero Dark Thirty’

A detainee is escorted to his cell at Guantanamo

Πηγή: The Jerusalem Post
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
Jan 8 2013

It isn’t every day that members of the US Senate seek to interfere in a Hollywood production or other work of art.
In mid-December, US Senators Diane Feinstein and John McCain wrote a letter to Sony Pictures condemning the movie Zero Dark Thirty. The film was “grossly inaccurate and misleading in its suggestion that torture resulted in information that led to the location” of terror mastermind Osama bin Laden, they wrote.

It isn’t every day that members of the US Senate seek to interfere in a Hollywood production or other work of art. It isn’t every day that senators seek even to decide which history books are “grossly inaccurate and misleading” and which represent the “correct” narrative. In fact it would seem that not since the days of Joe McCarthy, has the US Senate shown such interest in the creative instincts of Hollywood. Those days it was Communists, now it seems to be the fear audiences might get the wrong message.

What prompted this outburst was the Kathryn Bigelow masterpiece Zero Dark Thirty, a well constructed film about the hunt for Bin Laden.

Bigelow was the toast of the town for her gritty portrayal of solders working on bomb disposal in The Hurt Locker. But in Zero Dark Thirty she sought to tell the story of the decade-long hunt for Bin Laden, focusing on a female CIA officer who kept the oil burning when all else seemed lost. In doing so Bigelow had to re-visit those controversial days when the US whisked men off to “black sites” and subjected them to “enhanced interrogation.”

These interrogations involved placing detainees in “stress positions,” some beatings, simulated drowning (known as waterboarding) and other less than kosher means of extracting information. Critics deemed it torture, and anyone watching it in Zero Dark Thirty will agree. But as George Bush is shown quipping in the Oliver Stone film W, “that reminds me of my fraternity days.” No one died or had their fingernails ripped out one by one.

And here Bigelow’s troubles began.

Because the film seemed to remain moralityneutral on the subject, without some character who says “I won’t stand for this” or “America doesn’t torture,” it is construed as condoning the actions.

Jesselyn Radack wrote at the Daily Kos, “I saw Zero Dark Thirty yesterday and it’s revolting – for its blatant propaganda, glorification of torture and false narrative that torture led to the demise of Bin Laden.”

Radack suggested that the movie must have a disclaimer that explains “torture does not work and was of no value in finding Osama bin Laden.”

In their letter to Sony the US senators asserted that the studio has an “obligation” to state that the film “is not based on facts, but rather part of the film’s narrative.”

The senators believe in the narrative presented by the Senate Intelligence Committee, a secret document, that supposedly shows “other means” were used to locate Bin Laden’s courier, not interrogation of a subject.

The senators are incensed that the film is “perpetuating the myth that torture is effective.”

But now things have taken an unusual turn. Jose Rodriguez, who supervised the interrogation program from 2002 to 2007, has claimed: “Sorry, Hollywood, what we did wasn’t torture,” and has noted that “no one was bloodied or beaten” on his watch.

Now the US Senate Intelligence Committee has sent the head of the CIA a letter demanding to know more about contacts between the CIA and the filmmakers and arguing that perhaps the CIA misled the Hollywood artists. For his part, the CIA director has sent around a letter to CIA employees explaining that “multiple streams of intelligence led CIA analysts to conclude that Bin Laden was hiding in Abbottabad. Some came from detainees subjected to enhanced techniques, but there were many other sources as well.”

What seems to bother everyone is that Zero Dark Thirty is about a true story. However, other movies based on real events, such as Oliver Stone’s Nixon, or Charlie Wilson’s War, have not been upbraided by the US government.

Films about the CIA have also never come in for such a complaint from the agency, whether it is The Quiet American, The Good Shepherd, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Spy Game or Russia House, to name a few. So why did this particular film strike so close to home? In the wake of the revelations about what the “enhanced interrogation” program entailed and after America had cooled off from the shock of 9/11, numerous people became unhappy with the apparent illegality of America whisking terror suspects off to “black sites” in foreign countries where they were denied rights they would have had under military law and civilian law in the US.

The discomfort bred a narrative that “torture doesn’t work” as a response to those who maintained the need for torture in the “ticking bomb scenario” where a terrorist is caught and a bomb he knows about will explode in several hours. This was the subject of the 2010 film Unthinkable, in which Samuel L. Jackson must torture a terrorist to find a nuclear bomb that is about to explode.

The idea behind the “it doesn’t work” argument is that it defangs the critics who want to torture and also gives the anti-torture people an argument that seems hard-nosed and intelligent. Of course it ignores the moral issue of torture; if torture did work, would it be justified? The US Constitution has said no, in denying “cruel and unusual punishment” and providing a host of rights to defendants. The senators and others cling to the “it doesn’t work” argument out of fear that people know, in the back of their minds, that maybe it does work.

They are afraid that Zero Dark Thirty is an accurate depiction of events. But since when were people so worried about moviegoers getting the “wrong message” from a movie?

Top CIA Spy Accused of Being a Mafia Hitman

The cover for Evan Wright’s How to Get Away With Murder, available at Byliner. Illustration: Byliner

Πηγή: Wired
By Robert Beckhusen
June 27 2012

Enrique “Ricky” Prado’s resume reads like the ultimate CIA officer: veteran of the Central American wars, running the CIA’s operations in Korea, a top spy in America’s espionage programs against China, and deputy to counter-terrorist chief Cofer Black — and then a stint at Blackwater. But he’s also alleged to have started out a career as a hitman for a notorious Miami mobster, and kept working for the mob even after joining the CIA. Finally, he went on to serve as the head of the CIA’s secret assassination squad against Al-Qaida.

That’s according to journalist Evan Wright’s blockbuster story How to Get Away With Murder in America, distributed by Byliner. In it, Wright — who authored Generation Kill, the seminal story of the Iraq invasion — compiles lengthy, years-long investigations by state and federal police into a sector of Miami’s criminal underworld that ended nowhere, were sidelined by higher-ups, or cut short by light sentences. It tracks the history of Prado’s alleged Miami patron and notorious cocaine trafficker, Alberto San Pedro, and suspicions that Prado moved a secret death squad from the CIA to Blackwater.

“In protecting Prado, the CIA arguably allowed a new type of mole — an agent not of a foreign government but of American criminal interests — to penetrate command,” Wright writes.

In this sense, there are two stories that blur into each other: Prado the CIA officer, and Prado the alleged killer. The latter begins when Prado met his alleged future mob patron, Alberto San Pedro, as a high school student in Miami after their families had fled Cuba following the revolution. Prado would later join the Air Force, though he never saw service in Vietnam, and returned to Miami to work as a firefighter. But he kept moonlighting as a hitman for San Pedro, who had emerged into one of Miami’s most formidable cocaine traffickers, according to Wright.

San Pedro hosted parties for the city’s elite, lost a testicle in a drive-by shooting outside of his house, rebuilt his house into a fortress, tortured guard dogs for sport, and imported tens of millions of dollars’ worth of cocaine into the United States per year, Wright adds. His ties reportedly included an aide to former Florida Governor Bob Graham, numerous judges, lobbyists and a state prosecutor. His ties also included a friendship with former CNN anchor Rick Sanchez, then a local TV reporter.

Prado, meanwhile, was dropping bodies, alleges Wright. Investigators from the Miami-Dade Police Department’s organized crime squad suspected him of participating in at least seven murders and one attempted murder. He attempted to join the CIA, but returned to Miami after not completing the background check (due to his apparent concern over his family ties). But was admitted after the Reagan administration opened up a covert offensive against leftist Central American militants, where he reportedly served training the Contras.

More startling, the Miami murders allegedly continued after Prado joined the CIA. One target included a cocaine distributor in Colorado who was killed by a car bomb. Investigators believed he was killed over concerns he would talk to the police.

Years later, in 1996, Prado was a senior manager inside the CIA’s Bin Laden Issue Station, before the Al-Qaida mastermind was a well-known name. Two years later, the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania elevated Prado to become the chief of operations inside the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center, headed by then-chief Cofer Black, later an executive for the notorious merc firm Blackwater. “As the title implied, the job made Prado responsible for all the moving pieces at the CTC — supervising field offices on surveillance, rendition, or other missions, and making sure that logistics were in order, that personnel were in place,” according to Wright.

Prado was also reportedly put in charge of a “targeted assassination unit,” that was never put into operation. (The CIA shifted to drones.) But according to Wright, the CIA handed over its hit squad operation to Blackwater, now called Academi, as a way “to kill people with precision, without getting caught.” Prado is said to have negotiated the deal to transfer the unit, which Wright wrote “marked the first time the U.S. government outsourced a covert assassination service to private enterprise.” As to whether the unit was then put into operation, two Blackwater contractors tell Wright the unit began “whacking people like crazy” beginning in 2008. Prado also popped up two years ago in a report by Jeremy Scahill of The Nation, in which the now ex-CIA Prado was discovered to have built up a network of foreign shell companies to hide Blackwater operations, beginning in 2004. The Nation also revealed that Prado pitched an e-mail in 2007 to the DEA, explaining that Blackwater could “do everything from everything from surveillance to ground truth to disruption operations,” carried out by foreign nationals, “so deniability is built in and should be a big plus.”

But it’s hard to say where Prado’s alleged criminal ties end. It’s possibly his ties dried up, or moved on. Even mobsters, like Alberto San Pedro, retire. Another theory has it that Prado wanted to break his ties to the Miami underworld — and San Pedro — all along, and sought out legitimate employment in the military, in firefighting and the CIA as an escape. But, the theory goes, he stayed in because he still owed a debt to his patrons.

The other question involves the CIA itself. It’s no secret the agency has associated with dubious types, but the agency is also “notoriously risk averse,” Wright writes. Yet the agency is also protective. And letting Prado on board wouldn’t be the agency’s first intelligence failure.

Pakistan hands 33-year sentence to doctor who helped CIA track bin Laden

Dr Shakil Afridi sentenced for US spying. 

Πηγή: The State
By SAEED SHAH
May 23 2012

ISLAMABAD — The Pakistani doctor who helped the CIA in the hunt for Osama bin Laden was sentenced to 33 years in prison for treason Wednesday, officials said, in a further blow to relations between Islamabad and Washington.

The United States had been negotiating behind the scenes to win freedom for Dr. Shakil Afridi, who was detained by Pakistani intelligence agents after the May 2, 2011, U.S. special forces raid that found and killed the al-Qaida founder in the northern town of Abbottabad.

Word that Afridi had been tried in a tribal court, rather than in a regular Pakistani one, came just after Pakistan and the United States failed to come to an agreement at the NATO summit held in Chicago on reopening a land route through Pakistan for supplies to coalition troops in landlocked Afghanistan.

The Afridi case illustrates the stark differences between the two countries on anti-terrorism issues. Afridi is regarded as a hero by American officials but as a traitor in Pakistan.

McClatchy Newspapers revealed in July last year that Afridi had set up a fake health program in Abbottabad, sending health workers door to door to vaccinate residents for Hepatitis B, in an effort to get DNA samples from the house where the CIA suspected that bin Laden lived.

American officials were never sure that bin Laden was present in the home, to which they had traced a key al-Qaida courier. The work by Afridi was carried out in the weeks leading up to the raid and was an important part of the CIA's attempts to verify that bin Laden was in the Abbottabad house before mounting a risky operation in another country's territory to kill him. It remains unclear whether Afridi's efforts gained any useful information.

After the bin Laden raid, Afridi remained in Pakistan, where he was arrested three weeks later by agents of the military's Inter-Services Intelligence agency. U.S. officials believe he has been tortured in custody, a claim angrily denied by Pakistani military officials.

Afridi's case was heard under colonial-era tribal laws that give the local administration in Pakistan's tribal area sweeping powers to jail people, even though his alleged offense was committed in Abbottabad, where tribal laws do not apply. However, Afridi officially was employed to work in the tribal area, in the part known as Khyber agency. He is also a member of one of the tribes of the area.

News reports in Pakistan said Afridi was sent Wednesday to the central jail in Peshawar, the main city in the northwest of the country. The local nurses and other health officials in Abbottabad who cooperated unwittingly with Afridi have been fired.

In January, U.S. Defense Secretary, Leon Panetta, had gone public with Washington's concerns about Afridi.

"I am very concerned about what the Pakistanis did with this individual. This was an individual who, in fact, helped provide intelligence that was very helpful with regard to this operation," Panetta said during an interview aired by CBS's "60 Minutes." "He was not in any way treasonous towards Pakistan. He was not in any way doing anything that would have undermined Pakistan."

However, Pakistan regarded the bin Laden raid as a national humiliation, and the cooperation of one of its citizens angered many here. Panetta's remarks had confirmed on the record that Afridi had worked for the CIA. Under the laws in Pakistan, and many other countries, including the United States, working for a foreign intelligence agency is a crime.

U.S-Pakistan relations disintegrated last year over a series of clashes, including the bin Laden raid, culminating in a "friendly fire" episode in November in which American aircraft attacked two Pakistani border outposts, killing 24 soldiers. In response, Pakistan stopped NATO supplies to Afghanistan passing through its territory.

Leaked: Bin Laden not buried at sea, body moved on CIA plane to US

Πηγή: RT
March 6 2012

The body of Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden was not buried at sea, according to leaked emails of intelligence firm Stratfor, as revealed by WikiLeaks.

Stratfor’s vice-president for intelligence, Fred Burton, believes the body was “bound for Dover, [Delaware] on [a] CIA plane” and then “onward to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Bethesda [Maryland],” an email says.

The official version is that the body of Al-Qaeda’s top man, who was killed by a US raid in Pakistan on May 2, 2011, was buried at an undisclosed location at sea in a proper Muslim ceremony.

"If body dumped at sea, which I doubt, the touch is very Adolph Eichman like. The Tribe did the same thing with the Nazi's ashes," Burton commented in another email. Eichman was one of the masterminds of the Holocaust by Nazi Germany. He was captured by Mossad agents in Argentina and, tried in Israel, found guilty and executed in 1962. His body was cremated and his ashes were scattered at sea over the Mediterranean.

"Eichmann was seen alive for many months on trial before being sentenced to death and executed. No one wanted a monument to him so they cremated him. But i dont know anyone who claimed he wasnt eicjhman [sic]. No comparison with suddenly burying him at sea without any chance to view him which i doubt happened [sic]," Stratfor CEO George Friedman replied.

"The US Govt needs to make body pics available like the MX's do, with OBL's pants pulled down, to shout down the lunatics like Alex Jones and Glenn Beck," Burton says in another message.

In another missive Burton says Osama’s body “is a crime scene and I don’t see the FBI nor DOJ letting that happen.”

WikiLeaks began publishing Stratfor emails in late February. The archive was obtained by the hacker group Anonymous, which successfully attacked one of the firm’s servers. More than 5 million emails were apparently stolen.

Stratfor is a US-based intelligence firm called the “shadow CIA” by some media. Among its clients are several US agencies and many big companies. The company relies on paid tips from informants placed in high circles of business, government and security all around the world.

Osama bin Laden doctor was CIA agent, says US

Πηγή: Belfast Telegraph
By David Randall
Jan 30 2012

Imprisoned Pakistani ran fake health scheme to get DNA evidence that al-Qa'ida leader was in house

The United States has confirmed publicly for the first time that a Pakistani doctor long suspected of collecting vital evidence before the assassination of Osama bin Laden was indeed working for them.


Defence Secretary Leon Panetta told 60 Minutes on CBS, in a profile to broadcast yesterday, that Shakil Afridi helped provide proof that the compound in Abbottabad to which they had tracked a Bin Laden courier, was indeed sheltering the al-Qa'ida leader.

Armed with this information, President Barack Obama swiftly authorised last May's assault by a US Navy Seals team. Bin Laden was killed, and a much-embarrassed Pakistan arrested Dr Afridi for acting for a foreign intelligence service. He has been in jail since, on suspicion of treason. Mr Panetta said he is "very concerned" for the doctor.

Mr Panetta gave no further details, but previous off-the-record briefings, both in the US and Pakistan, have provided details of just how US officials verified that the tall bearded figure seen walking in the compound was indeed Bin Laden. They could not confirm identification from long-range photographs, but strongly suspected they had found their man.

Dr Afridi, the medic in charge of health in the Khyber, was recruited by the CIA to collect DNA evidence from the children inside the compound to confirm that they were Bin Laden's – he rarely went anywhere without them for long. The plan was to mount a local hepatitis vaccination programme; ostensibly a public health initiative, its real purpose was to establish the genetics of the people inside the compound.

A nurse was duly allowed in. Either through collecting blood samples, through DNA traces on syringe needles or via an electronic device she reportedly carried in her handbag, the necessary proof was obtained. Operation Geronimo was launched, and President Obama was soon able to announce that the world's most wanted man was dead.

Pakistan was embarrassed on several levels. First, that the US was able to mount such an operation on its soil. Second, that it did not inform Pakistan until it was over. Third, by the implication that Pakistan's participation in the hunt for the al-Qa'ida leader was less than whole-hearted.

Mr Panetta told CBS: "Don't forget, this compound had 18ft walls ... It was the largest compound in the area. So you would have thought that somebody would have asked the question: 'What the hell's going on there?'"

He said he remains convinced that someone in the Pakistani government "must have had some sense" that a person of interest was in the compound, but added that he has no proof that Pakistan knew it was Bin Laden.

Of the accusation of treason against Dr Afridi, he said: "He was not in any way treasonous ... Pakistan and the United States have a common cause here against terrorism ... and for them to take this kind of action against somebody who was helping to go after terrorism, I think is a real mistake."

Associated Press reported that Pakistan had hoped to resolve the matter quietly, perhaps releasing Dr Afridi to US custody, according to two Pakistani officials. They requested anonymity because the investigation into charges that the doctor behaved treasonously was ongoing.

Bin Laden not at Qaeda helm before raid: US

Πηγή: Khaleej Times
By AFP
Dec 8 2011

WASHINGTON — Documents found in the Pakistan home where Osama bin Laden was killed in May show the Al-Qaeda leader no longer had any role in operations, a US expert who reviewed the evidence said on Wednesday.

The expert, who asked not to be named, said the 200 pieces of evidence — notebooks, files, computers and USB drives — recovered by the US commandos who staged the raid in which he died, showed “it had been quite a while since he was involved in the day-to-day management of the organization.”

“The writings we recovered are mostly general position papers, along the lines of ‘We must continue to attack the US’ or ‘Can the Somali Shebab be trusted?” the source said.

“In one small blue notebook from February 2010, he wonders if one member should be promoted, who should be named to replace another killed in a drone raid. But nothing about operational management of the organization,” the source added.

About a third of the items confiscated were about personal family matters including efforts by one of his wives to find a husband for one of their daughters, the source added.

“In any event, for security reasons, he only received messages one or two times a month. How can you run a network in those conditions?” the expert said.

US Navy SEALs killed Bin Laden on May 2 in a raid on a compound in the Pakistani garrison town of Abbottabad, north of the capital Islamabad, and later buried the 9/11 mastermind at sea.

Spanish MP to sue FBI over OBL images

Πηγή: The Nation
By AFP
Oct 12 2011

MADRID - A Spanish lawmaker has vowed to sue the FBI for using an image of his face to create a digitally enhanced picture of slain Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

The scandal erupted in January 2010 over the use of Gaspar Llamazares’ image to create a computer-generated picture of an aged bin Laden who was then being hunted by US forces.

“I am going to sue the FBI because they have not corrected that image in any way except for a small, insincere apology,” Llamazares told Spanish radio Cadena Ser on Monday.

Llamazares, a member of parliament for the United Left coalition, said parts of an image of his face had been used to create digitally enhanced pictures of two people who had since been “assassinated”. He did not identify the second person.

When the bin Laden photo dispute broke out last year US ambassador to Spain Alan Solomont told the Spanish government he was “sorry and dismayed” about the incident.

At the time, an FBI spokesman said a technician had taken the image off the Internet and used the Spanish politician’s hair and forehead to re-create the bin Laden picture.

US Navy SEALs killed bin Laden and flew off with his body from the Pakistani town of Abbottabad on May 2.

CIA agent was ordered to ‘cut off Osama’s head’: Report

Πηγή: The Nation
Oct 9 2011


WASHINGTON (INP) - Central Intelligence Agency’s Gary Schroen, who had led an operation to hunt Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan following the 9/11 terror attacks, has said that he was ordered to “cut off the killed Al Qaeda chief’s head”.

On October 7, 2001, the US military began bombing targets in Afghanistan in retaliation for the September 11 attacks.

By the time bombing started, Schroen said he had been on the ground for nearly two weeks, and remembered how “everybody in the United States wanted to be the first person to go after bin Laden and get this hunt going, and they had given me that role.” Schroen, who had spent 32 years as a covert operator, was to lead a small team of Americans, after the CIA’s chief of counterterrorism gave him explicit orders to kill, CBS News reports. “I want you to cut bin Laden’s head off, put it on dry ice and send it back to me so I can show the president,” Schroen said, remembering the order.

On being asked if his boss was serious, Schroen said, “Yeah, I think so.”

He also said that the CIA and military now work closely together in operations like the bin Laden raid, which wasn’t like that at the beginning.

Bin Laden was finally killed in May this year in his Abbottabad compound in Pakistan.

The Geneva Conventions and the Death of Osama Bin Laden

Πηγή: Jurist

By Chibli Mallat

Aug. 4, 2011

JURIST Guest Columnist Chibli Mallat of Harvard Law School says that recent reports of the operation resulting in the death of Osama Bin Laden have revealed that his killing violated longstanding doctrines of international law prohibiting killing outside the context of hostilities...

I never had the slightest sympathy for Osama Bin Laden, who was the product of a Saudi governance system monstrous to basic humanity. It is the women of Saudi Arabia who affirm—at daily risk of being beaten, incarcerated and humiliated—that nonviolence is the right way to speak to the tyranny of the Saudi system. Killing three thousand civilians in New York is not.

On the evening of September 11, 2001, I appeared on a popular television talk show in the Arab world, Kalam al-Nas, to discuss the tragedy that had taken place that day. The magnitude of the attack was evident, and I had to think quickly about what to say on television, amidst news that celebrations had broken out in some Palestinian refugee camps. It had been a few weeks since the start of a case against the Israeli officials involved in the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre in the Palestinian refugee camps of Beirut. On September 11, it was of paramount importance to show that these crimes were in the same category, and that the Palestinian victims would lose all moral ground if they did not see the horror of the 9/11 massacre in a similar light. This reinforced the long held notion that how we perceive the impact of an event is essential to the way the world will remember it for decades to come.

One mistake in this perception and the case veers off to a defeating logic. It was clear that what had happened that day in New York and Pennsylvania was a crime against humanity, and the message I wanted to convey immediately on live television was two-fold. In an initial reaction, caution was needed as it was not yet clear that Bin Laden was responsible for the massacre. More importantly for my Palestinian and wider Arab audience, it was essential to underline the similarity between the crimes perpetrated at Sabra and Shatila in 1982 and those in the US in 2001. Eventually, all signs of celebration ceased in the camps, and the Sabra and Shatila victims won their case in February 2003, though the law on universal jurisdiction was later modified to retroactively halt the Belgian proceedings.

The killing of Osama Bin Laden on May 1, 2011 is an event with a similar historic importance, feeding back on the world trauma that began ten years earlier. Rules must be applied evenhandedly, and in the absence of details on the operation, I had held back my initial unease towards the snippets of news reported in the press. The question was simple: what were the exact instructions to the team? Were they told to arrest Bin Laden if they could without risk to their lives, or were they told to kill him regardless? The former would conform to the laws of war; the latter would be in open breach of an established principle. Killing an enemy hors de combat, or "outside the fight," is a war crime.

This week the most precise answer to date emerged. In an article by Nicholas Schmidle in The New Yorker, the critical moment is recounted in the following terms:
A second SEAL stepped into the room and trained the infrared laser of his M4 on bin Laden's chest. The Al Qaeda chief, who was wearing a tan shalwar kameez and a prayer cap on his head, froze; he was unarmed. "There was never any question of detaining or capturing him—it wasn't a split-second decision. No one wanted detainees," the special-operations officer told me. (The Administration maintains that had bin Laden immediately surrendered he could have been taken alive.) Nine years, seven months, and twenty days after September 11th, an American was a trigger pull from ending bin Laden's life. The first round, a 5.56-mm. bullet, struck bin Laden in the chest. As he fell backward, the SEAL fired a second round into his head, just above his left eye. On his radio, he reported, "For God and country—Geronimo, Geronimo, Geronimo." After a pause, he added, "Geronimo E.K.I.A."—"enemy killed in action.""Enemy killed" is correct. The enemy category is the right one, but it does not matter here whether Bin Laden was a common criminal, an enemy combatant or an enemy soldier. The rule taught to our law students is that it is forbidden to kill an enemy hors de combat. This French phrase included in Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions is a simple and clear term of art. It is not just a matter of whether he "immediately surrendered"—"clearly expressing an intention to surrender" is only one of three conditions under this rule. The other two are whether he is "in the power of an adverse Party," or has "been rendered unconscious or is otherwise incapacitated by wounds or sickness, and therefore is incapable of defending himself."

One is accustomed to constant paradoxes in teaching the laws of war, replete with dilemmas as masterfully shown in Michael Walzer's Just and Unjust Wars. Paul Kahn has pointed out another powerful paradox of the modern use of violence: the state, as well as the individual, may kill but not torture. Here there is no grey. Objective circumstances are important, and they point significantly to the fact that Bin Laden, at this particular moment of the battle, was hors de combat. While his courier and his sons had carried arms and tried to shoot at the Navy SEALs, Bin Laden had no weapons, his wives who had tried to intercede had been removed from the scene, and he froze.

The account leaves no doubt as to what happened, and what the orders were: "There was never any question of detaining or capturing him—it wasn't a split-second decision. No one wanted detainees." The US government ordered Bin Laden killed, regardless of the circumstances.

The information in The New Yorker article comes as a great disappointment. Decisions on the Abbottabad operation came from the top: the Navy SEAL who shot Bin Laden is liable, but the command he received carries a far heavier responsibility, and it rests squarely with the US president.

Reading through the article, one can only be awed by the amount of wisdom and responsibility carried by President Barack Obama in the days preceding the raid: no rush through decisions, he once said he wanted to "sleep on it." No use of air raids or of drones to flatten Bin Laden's suspected residence, in part to avoid collateral damage. American soldiers' lives were put at risk despite this much easier alternative. No children were killed in the compound, and Bin Laden's wife who threw herself at the soldiers was not killed but shot in the calf; she and another wife were removed from the scene by a SEAL despite the risk to his own life.

Yet, it is plain that Obama was on the wrong side of the laws of war. Bin Laden froze, and was shot twice: once in the chest then once again to be sure. The shoot to kill order was absolute. That order is in plain breach of international law.

Chibli Mallat is the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques Visiting Professor of Islamic Legal Studies at Harvard Law School. He is also the Presidential Professor of Law at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law. Mallat has litigated several international criminal law cases, and has advised governments, corporations and individuals in Middle Eastern and international law.

Osama bin Laden's posthumous audio message praises Arab revolutions

The picture on the left is a file photo from Reuters. The center image was sent in by a number of readers as an email attachment--it's initial provenance is unknown. The image on the right is a blend of the two others we made here at msnbc.com.
Πηγή: The Telegraph

In the message said to be recorded a week before his death, bin Laden praises the revolutions taking place in Egypt and Tunisia.

The 12-minute, 37-second audio message posted on jihadist forums by al-Qaeda's media arm As-Sahab addresses Muslims on the revolutions sweeping the Middle East and North Africa, said US monitoring service, SITE Intelligence.

Speaking from beyond the grave, Osama bin Laden recommended setting up a council to offer revolutionary advice and decide the best timing to spread revolt across the Muslim world.

"A delay may cause the opportunity to be lost, and carrying it out before the right time will increase the number of casualties," bin Laden says in the audio message, according to SITE's translation."I think that the winds of change will blow over the entire Muslim world, with permission from Allah."