I'm sure you've all heard the facts on the news, but for anyone just emerging from under a rock: - Osama's house was 8 times the size of its neighbors, with 12+ foot high walls topped with barbed wire - Despite being a million dollar compound in an upper middle class suburb, the house had no internet connection, no phone line, and the residents burned their trash rather than putting it out for collection - It was in a town containing Pakistani military bases and training grounds, and was within walking distance of the Pakistani equivalent of West Point. Many retired Pakistani military officials, including generals, live in the town Look here: Did Pakistan help hide bin Laden? - The Week So, do you think the Pakistani government (or elements within) was hiding him? Is it even possible that Pakistan could have missed this hiding place? If they legitimately didn't know bin Laden was hiding under their noses, does this imply that Pakistani intelligence is incompetent, and that we should exert more autonomy when searching for terrorists in the region? Or is this all 20/20 hindsight? I'll start with my opinion: somebody in the Pakistani government, most likely in the military and/or intelligence community, was protecting bin Laden. I don't think it was necessarily a high-ranking person, certainly nobody whose name we've heard yet in the west, but nobody would be ballsy enough to build that compound smack in the middle of a Pakistani military town without some assurance that the government wouldn't look into suspicious activity there.
if this story is true, and since there is ZERO evidence thats a big if, then they more than likely knew. Could you imagine a bank robber hiding across the street from the police department?
yeah.. in a giant house with 12' walls LOL maybe if he lived in a normal place.. then maybe.. but they had to have been suspicious of that place.
Of course Pakistan knew, but I think what they didn't know, was that the US Government would break international law and just go in and assassinate him. I think they naively thought that the US would follow the law when it came to these types of things, and clearly they were wrong.
Think of the average income of a pakistani, think of the income of osama . Its like bill gates building his mansion in your neighborhood and trying to keep it a secret.
^^^ Lmao man1 They apparently missed it in 2008 when Obama said "If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will". That was before he was even president. Apparently it was a pretty nice neighborhood, it just so happened that someone built an incredibly conspicuous fortress right in the middle of it. Here's a weird scenario to think about: local children sometimes hit their cricket balls over the fence into bin Laden's yard, and rather than giving the balls back his aides would pay the kids off. Living near bin Laden Can you imagine hitting a ball into your creepy neighbor's yard, only later to discover it was Osama bin Laden's house?
There are a ton of people who have absolutely no money to their name in Pakistan and the US government was offering 50 MILLION dollars for information leading to his capture. There were plenty of people who didn't support Bin Laden in Pakistan, and even those who did would second guess themselves for 50 million dollars.
yeah but what do you do with 50 million dollars when you cant go anywhere because every terrorist in the world is now looking for the 50( i thought it was 27) million dollar man.
Even if they didnt actually know, we give them billions per year.. give me a frickin break... The only thing they do for us is not supply their ample amounts of terrorists with weapons, and even then i'm not so sure...
There's no way in hell they didn't know. Why would the world's most wanted man build his giant, incredibly obvious compound right next to such a significant military facility in the middle of a neighborhood if he really thought he needed to be hiding from them?
To be fair most rich people had compounds, Pakistan's pretty scary, dont you watch the main stream media?
Of course they knew. They had to know. Pakistan is a police state. Building a house like that and living in it in the manner he lived, only invites the police to investigate.
I am sure of it. Osama was a RICH motherfucker. He probably bribed military officials that were in charge of Abbottabad's security to keep quiet. As far as the whole Pakistan government, well that's another story. I really don't have any theories on that, but if the government did know about him there, it would not surprise me.
Either bin laden bribed the military, or it could have been done by Paki officials who were getting a piece of the money that we paid for cooperation in the fight against al aqaeda. I remember when we first allied ourselves with Pakistan, everybody knew that the place was rife with corruption from top to bottom. The capture or death of bin laden was not in their interests.
I'm wondering if it was about money though (assuming Pakistani officials were involved in protecting OBL). They were getting plenty of money from the US, and the reward on bin Laden's head was enormous. I doubt al-Qaeda was able to pony up more than $50 million to bribe the right people, so anyone after money would have been on our side. Maybe bin Laden was an asset to the Pakistani intelligence service. Our CIA has gotten in bed with some vile human beings, including Nazis, when it served our interests. Maybe Pakistan had some kind of deal with Osama, where he helped them in exchange for protection. Think about how unstable Pakistan was a few years ago (and still is), and the influence of extremists like al-Qaeda and the Taliban in the remote tribal areas by the Afghan border. Hiding bin Laden may have been part of a cooperation deal to keep Pakistan from descending into all-out civil war. I mean, sure there were attacks against Pakistan, but how much control does al-Qaeda's central command really have over its affiliate cells? Idk, just a theory, but in my mind it makes more sense than OBL just straight bribing people because if the people hiding him only wanted money, they could have turned him in and become multimillionaires. (or maybe no one in the government was hiding him, lol who knows with this shit)