It has emerged Osama bin Laden was not armed when he was shot dead by US commandos at his compound in Pakistan.

Bin Laden was shot above his left eye, reportedly blowing away a section of his skull.

White House spokesman Jay Carney says commandos would have tried to take the terrorist mastermind alive if possible, but he resisted and was therefore shot.

The revelation, likely to stoke anger in parts of the Muslim world, came from Mr Carney as he provided the most detailed account yet of the raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

"In the room with bin Laden, a woman - bin Laden's wife - rushed the US assaulter and was shot in the leg but not killed. Bin Laden was then shot and killed. He was not armed," he said.

After media reports quoting officials describing it as a "kill operation", the White House spokesman was pressed hard to explain the apparent contradiction that bin Laden was unarmed but also resisted.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/05/04/3207020.htm

High-profile Australian QC and human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson says the killing of Osama bin Laden is a perversion of justice that has effectively given the terrorist mastermind what he craved.

In the days since bin Laden's death, the US has been forced to backtrack and clarify details of the killing, with a picture now emerging of a targeted assassination.

This morning, White House spokesman Jay Carney confirmed bin Laden was unarmed when US commandos raided his compound in Pakistan and shot him above his left eye, reportedly blowing away a section of his skull.

Mr Robertson has told ABC News Breakfast bin Laden should have been brought to trial and his death has made him look like a martyr.

"The way to demystify this man is not to kill him and have the iconic picture of his body," he said.

"The way to demystify him, rather than to these soulful pictures of the tall man on the mountain, is to put him on trial, to see him as a hateful and hate-filled old man screaming from the dock or lying in the witness box.

"That way the true inhumanity of the man is exposed."

Mr Robertson says US president Barack Obama has been sloppy with his use of the word "justice" and questions need to be answered about whether there was an explicit order to kill bin Laden.

"It's not justice. It's a perversion of the term. Justice means taking someone to court, finding them guilty upon evidence and sentencing them," he said.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/05/04/3207266.htm?site=sydney

The death of Osama Bin Laden may have been carried out by American special forces, but they were helped by a miracle performed by the late Pope John Paul II, according to the president of Peru, Alan Garcia.

The 61-year-old, currently serving his second stint as leader of the South American country, believes it was no coincidence that the al-Qaeda leader was found and killed on the same day that the former pope, who died in 2005, was beatified in a ceremony at the Vatican.

Garcia, who has been president since 2006, told a TV station in Peru: "I have said that his first miracle has been to remove from the earth this demonic incarnation of crime, evil and hatred."

John Paul's successor, Pope Benedict XVI, personally declared him "blessed" - one step below sainthood - on Sunday. His beatification, just six years after his death, is one of the quickest in centuries and came after he was credited with a miracle by the Catholic Church, which decreed that soon after his death he cured a French nun of Parkinson's disease.

Despite performing that miracle, John Paul cannot be elevated to the sainthood until he performs a second one. However, Garcia says the former pope has wasted no time in doing so and delivered Bin Laden into the hands of the Americans within hours of his beatification.

Garcia added: "I think that's great news that should please Mr Obama." But presumably, as a good Catholic, Garcia will not rejoice in Bin Laden's death.

WASHINGTON — Intelligence garnered from waterboarded detainees was used to track down al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and kill him, CIA Chief Leon Panetta told NBC News on Tuesday.

"Enhanced interrogation techniques" were used to extract information that led to the mission's success, Panetta said during an interview with anchor Brian Williams. Those techniques included waterboarding, he acknowledged.

Panetta, who in a 2009 CIA confirmation hearing declared "waterboarding is torture and it's wrong," said Tuesday that debate about its use will continue.

"Whether we would have gotten the same information through other approaches I think is always gonna be an open question," Panetta said.

"In the intelligence business you work from a lot of sources of information and that was true here," Panetta said. "We had a multiple source — a multiple series of sources — that provided information with regards to the situation. Clearly some of it came from detainees and the interrogation of detainees but we also had information from other sources as well."

Panetta's comments hours after Attorney General Eric Holder defended as lawful Tuesday the intelligence gathering and raid that resulted in the death of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.

The raid was "lawful, legitimate and appropriate in every way. The people who were responsible for that action, both in the decision making and the effecting of that decision, handled themselves I think quite well,'' Holder told the House Judiciary Committee.

Barack Obama has described Bin Laden's death as a form of justice for the 9/11 victims. This is pernicious bullshit. The New York Post was more accurate and certainly more honest than Obama in its triumphant headline 'Vengeance at Last'.

Justice does not spring from a bullet in the head administered by some counter-terrorist version of Magnum Force, even when the victim happens to be the terrorist Public Enemy number 1.

Justice depends on those quaint and old-fashioned concepts and procedures such as courts, juries, evidence, public examination and cross-examination in order to produce as wide and as truthful an account as possible of a particular crime and the motives, intentions and methods of its perpetrators.

Osama bin Laden's 12-year-old daughter watched as her father was shot dead by American special forces, a senior Pakistani intelligence official has told the Guardian.

The girl, who was found at the scene of the raid by Pakistani security services, is being cared for at a military hospital having been wounded in the attack. She has been questioned about the sequence of events during the raid last weekend.

The official said Pakistani intelligence services, who are holding 11 other survivors of the deadly raid on Bin Laden's Pakistani hiding place, would not allow their interrogation by US officials.

"That would occur only if there was written assent from their country of origin. We are yet to receive any request to my knowledge, but given the [critical] statements coming out of Washington and the fact that [the raid] was not an operation we were involved in, we would not accept," he said.

At least 10 people were left alive at the end of the attack, which saw Bin Laden killed in an upstairs room of the three-storey house where he had been living. Hamza, one of the al-Qaida leader's sons, was killed. His body was removed with that of his father by the assault teams.

The survivors include eight children and two adults, both women. One is Bin Laden's fifth wife, a 29-year-old Yemeni, Amal Ahmed Abdul Fatah who married the al-Qaida leader around 11 years ago in Afghanistan. The other is understood to be a Yemeni doctor in her 30s whose passport indicates that she arrived by legal means in the region sometime between 2000 and 2006, when the document expired.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/04/osama-bin-laden-daughter-held

The killing of Osama bin Laden provoked a host of reactions from Americans: celebration, triumph, relief, closure and renewed grief. One reaction, however, was both cynical and disturbing: crowing by the apologists and practitioners of torture that Bin Laden’s death vindicated their immoral and illegal behavior after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Jose Rodriguez Jr. was the leader of counterterrorism for the C.I.A. from 2002-2005 when Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and other Al Qaeda leaders were captured. He told Time magazine that the recent events show that President Obama should not have banned so-called enhanced interrogation techniques. (Mr. Rodriguez, you may remember, ordered the destruction of interrogation videos.)

John Yoo, the former Bush Justice Department lawyer who twisted the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions into an unrecognizable mess to excuse torture, wrote in The Wall Street Journal that the killing of Bin Laden proved that waterboarding and other abuses were proper. Donald Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary, said at first that no coerced evidence played a role in tracking down Bin Laden, but by Tuesday he was reciting the talking points about the virtues of prisoner abuse.

There is no final answer to whether any of the prisoners tortured in President George W. Bush’s illegal camps gave up information that eventually proved useful in finding Bin Laden. A detailed account in The Times on Wednesday by Scott Shane and Charlie Savage concluded that torture “played a small role at most” in the years and years of painstaking intelligence and detective work that led a Navy Seals team to Bin Laden’s hideout in Pakistan.

That squares with the frequent testimony over the past decade from many other interrogators and officials. They have said repeatedly, and said again this week, that the best information came from prisoners who were not tortured. The Times article said Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times, fed false information to his captors during torture.

Even if it were true that some tidbit was blurted out by a prisoner while being tormented by C.I.A. interrogators, that does not remotely justify Mr. Bush’s decision to violate the law and any acceptable moral standard.

This was not the “ticking time bomb” scenario that Bush-era officials often invoked to rationalize abusive interrogations. If, as Representative Peter King, the Long Island Republican, said, information from abused prisoners “directly led” to the redoubt, why didn’t the Bush administration follow that trail years ago?

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/05/opinion/05thu1.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print

My Pakistani security intelligence sources told me five years ago that Osama bin Laden was hiding in an urban area in Pakistan.

If I, a humble journalist, had a good idea where OBL was, why did it take CIA so long to find one elderly man who had brazenly set out to defeat the mighty American Imperium?

The whole Osama bin Laden saga keeps getting more and more bizarre and incredible. I am reminded of the ending of the film the Wizard of Oz, wherein the fearsome wizard is revealed as a frightened old man with fake scenery and a terrifying noise box.

Just when we thought US-Pakistani relations could not get more poisonous, America's most hated was finally discovered in lovely, downtown Abbottabad, Pakistan, a mere stroll from that nation's military academy. The Saudi Dr. Fu Manchu was living in a run-down villa, not the "luxury mansion" described by over-excited reports.

Furious US government officials and legislators accuse Pakistan of duplicity, treachery, and betrayal. Ordinary Americans are enraged against Pakistan, a staunch ally since the 1950's.

In a recent WikiLeak, a US diplomat actually branded Pakistan's intelligence service, ISI, "a terrorist organization."

The same ISI that was our comrade in arms during the 1980's war against the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Pakistan is well and truly in the dog house. The feeble Zardari government in Islamabad and Pakistan's military face charges they were either incompetent or duplicitous over bin Laden. A tough choice.

India, Pakistan's bitter foe, is crowing; so are the Afghan Communists and drug lords.

Those American yahoos we saw cavorting with joy in the streets at the news of bin Laden's assassination seem totally unaware the almost decade-long US jihad against him cost American taxpayers a staggering $1,283 trillion, and left the US stuck in 2.5 wars.

Interestingly, that $1,283 trillion is roughly what the US currently owes China. Annual interest on the US debt alone runs around $450 billion.

The Osama Tale: Stranger and Stranger

yes John...

Weirder and weirder... The lesson here is that no-one can trust anybody... Everyone is double-dealing, including the US.
It would have been much simpler should the US had left Afghanistan stay in communist's hands... till it would evolved into a more democratic civilised space — which I believe it would have by now... But the US (via the CIA) paid the Pakistani ISI (secret service) huge amount (I believe more than 1.5 billion dollars — though small potatoes compared to the US debt to the rest of the world) of money to pass on to the "freedom fighters" in Afghanistan — including the Taliban, the Northern Alliance and the training grounds (some disguised as Madrasas) for soldiers, some set up by Bin Laden... As well I believe the US facilitated access routes to weapons. I am prepared to bet Bin Laden got taken out not so much because of 9/11 but because a) he was obsolete as a boogeyman despite claims he was planning more attacks on US soil, and b) he could have and would have in an international court case revealed to which extent the US had financed some of the operations against the Russians and then used some of the Yankee money to chase the US out of the Muslim world— especially Saudi Arabia, which the US got out of anyhow, to set up "non-permanent" bases in Iraq. All this footwork to keep an eye on the flow of oil... (the US consumes a quarter of the world's oil reserves while being only 2.5 per cent of the world population — any change in the dynamic of this would lead to some serious trouble overthere)... Note too: I believe the US control more than 90 per cent of the world's oil market.

Yet Pakistan has more than 70 per cent of its population against the concept of US dictating what their country should do. Pakistan is a powder keg. Should India be a bit too cocky, I don't dare think what could happen. Kashmir is still a hot bed of contention and mercenaries are being trained in Pakistan and in Afghanistan daily to "fight the Indians"... Though the fighting there in Kashmir has taken a weird "ritualistic" approach.

One of the things which has also left me perplexed is that Bin Laden's "luxury" compound did not have any real "security". For example in simple Sydney every one is encouraged to have solid bars on doors and windows... Some of us have security cameras all around as well as back to base alarms with screamers. Nothing unusual, even if one does not have anything to hide. Furthermore Bin Laden's home comforts reminded me of the times 40 years ago when I had to sleep on an old stained mattress on someone's kitchen floor because that was the only way to survive as a new migrant then...