Pakistan Arrests C.I.A. Informants in Bin Laden Raid
By ERIC SCHMITT and MARK MAZZETTI
The New York Times
June 14, 2011
WASHINGTON — Pakistan’s top military spy agency has arrested some of the Pakistani informants who fed information to the Central Intelligence Agency in the months leading up to the raid that led to the death of Osama bin Laden, according to American officials.
A casualty of the recent tension between the countries is an ambitious Pentagon program to train Pakistani paramilitary troops to fight Al Qaeda and the Taliban in the northwestern tribal areas.
Pakistan’s detention of five C.I.A. informants, including a Pakistani Army major who officials said copied the license plates of cars visiting Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in the weeks before the raid, is the latest evidence of the fractured relationship between the United States and Pakistan. It comes at a time when the Obama administration is seeking Pakistan’s support in brokering an endgame in the war in neighboring Afghanistan.
At a closed briefing last week, members of the Senate Intelligence Committee asked Michael J. Morell, the deputy C.I.A. director, to rate Pakistan’s cooperation with the United States on counterterrorism operations, on a scale of 1 to 10.
“Three,” Mr. Morell replied, according to officials familiar with the exchange.
The fate of the C.I.A. informants arrested in Pakistan is unclear, but American officials said that the C.I.A. director, Leon E. Panetta, raised the issue when he travelled to Islamabad last week to meet with Pakistani military and intelligence officers.
Some in Washington see the arrests as illustrative of the disconnect between Pakistani and American priorities at a time when they are supposed to be allies in the fight against Al Qaeda — instead of hunting down the support network that allowed Bin Laden to live comfortably for years, the Pakistani authorities are arresting those who assisted in the raid that killed the world’s most wanted man.
[To read the entire story, click on the link above]
So .... how did they find this military major/colonel/general guy? A lot of intelligence work. And how did they know he took license plates of cars entering the compound - he knew it was being used and if he knew it, other Pakistani ISI / military had to have known ... seems like a lot of work to track down the military guy. Why not spend it hunting bin Laden. More reason why these people are not our friend nor an ally. They are pathological liars.
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