While everyone seems to be shocked that Osama bin Laden was found in a compound that stuck out like a sore thumb and in a large city, it turns out that the bastard had been there for at least five years:
When asked whether officials in Pakistan’s military might have known about bin Laden’s presence in the compound, Brennan said it was possible.
“I think it would be premature to rule out the possibility that there were some individuals inside of Pakistan, including within the official Pakistani establishment, who might have been aware of this, but we’re not accusing anybody at this point.”
Brennan said it appeared that bin Laden had lived for the past five to six years in the compound in Abbottabad, the site of an important Pakistani military academy.
Bin Laden was living in neighboring Afghanistan at the time of the al Qaeda September 11 attacks on the United States and when a subsequent U.S.-led invasion helped topple the Taliban government.
“Well I think the latest information is that he was in this compound for the past five or six years and he had virtually no interaction with others outside that compound. But yet he seemed to be very active inside the compound,” Brennan said on the CBS Early Show program.
Yeah, it’s hard to believe that at least some in the Pakistani government weren’t aware of his presence. US officials had long suspected that an element, likely the ISI, had been tipping off targets, perhaps even bin Laden himself, to strikes.
Interestingly, a friend sent along a link to a summary of the interrogation from 2008 of Abu Faraj al-Libbi, once considered al-Qaeda’s third in command, that shows that he had moved to Abbottabad in 2003, the city in Pakistan where bin Laden was located. Now, this doesn’t mean that we had any prior knowledge of bin Laden’s whereabouts; but it does show a prior connection with the upper eschalon of al-Qaeda to the city.
Additionally, Jim Galloway points to this from Science Magazine:
Could Osama bin Laden have been found faster if the CIA had followed the advice of ecosystem geographers from the University of California, Los Angeles? Probably not, but the predictions of UCLA geographer Thomas Gillespie, who, along with colleague John Agnew and a class of undergraduates, authored a 2009 paper predicting the terrorist’s whereabouts, were none too shabby.
According to a probabilistic model they created, there was an 80.9% chance that bin Laden was hiding out in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where he was killed last night. And they correctly predicted that he would be in a large town, not a cave.
The bin Laden tracking idea began as a project in an undergraduate class on remote sensing that Gillespie, whose expertise is using remote sensing data from satellites to study ecosystems, taught in 2009. Based on information from satellites and other remote sensing systems, and reports on his movements since his last known location, the students created a probabilistic model of where he was likely to be.
Their prediction of a town was based on a geographical theory called “island biogeography”: basically, that a species on a large island is much less likely to go extinct following a catastrophic event than a species on a small one.
None of this is to say that we weren’t trying to find bin Laden. Hindsight is 20/20. You can go back and look at the intelligence prior to the bombing of Pearl Harbor and 9/11 attacks and see that crucial items were missed or merely drowned out before those events (that doesn’t mean there was a conspiracy), but it’s interesting to find out that he was essentially hiding in plain sight.
This doesn’t surprise me at all.