The documents show that Nasiruddin asked the Saudi ambassador to convey to the Saudi king his father's wish for treatment in a Saudi hospital, and mentions that Jalaluddin Haqqani holds a Saudi passport. Another document shows that a senior Saudi foreign ministry official then recommended that the treatment go ahead"--"although it remains unclear whether it actually did.
Previous US diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks confirmed US intelligence has been well aware for years that Taliban and Haqqani network fundraisers and associates were routinely residing in or travelling to Saudi Arabia, where they engaged in fundraising activities.
While documenting apparent Saudi cooperation with the US to disrupt terror support activities inside Saudi Arabia, the new leaked Saudi cables show that Saudi officials at the highest level are still courting the same militant networks abroad.
In other words, senior Saudi and Pakistani government officials until well after the bin Laden raid have retained close ties to the Haqqani network"--"the same network which under ISI purview facilitated bin Laden's escape from Tora Bora in 2001, and with which bin Laden met just months before the May 2011 raid.
But despite bin Laden's ongoing involvement in directing militant activity, often in liaison with groups supportive of al-Qaeda like the Haqqani network, there can be little doubt that his role in al-Qaeda had significantly reduced.
According to Pakistani tribal sources cited by Gareth Porter who were familiar with bin Laden's presence in South Waziristan shortly after 9/11, bin Laden had been increasingly sidelined by other al-Qaeda leaders, including his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri.
But Porter vastly overstates his case in arguing that bin Laden's role in al-Qaeda had become virtually mute"--"an idea put forward by the US West Point Military Academy's Counter Terrorism Center which released the bin Laden files.
The latest detailed analysis of the documents from the Abbottabad compound show that bin Laden had overseen the dispatch of al-Qaeda forces across the Middle East from Yemen to Libya, where for instance one of his deputies informed him of "an active Jihadist Islamic renaissance underway in Eastern Libya (Benghazi, Derna, Bayda and that area)."
The Abbottabad documents also confirmed that in the months before bin Laden's death, al-Qaeda's leadership and sponsors in the Pakistani ISI were"--"as with Hekmatyar"--"actively seeking some sort of accommodation with the Americans.
The documents recorded former ISI chief Hamid Gul telling his al-Qaeda contacts: "We are putting pressure on them [America] to negotiate with al-Qaeda . . . [and] that negotiating with the Taliban separate from al-Qaeda is pointless."
But the most intriguing revelation is that Bin Laden's deputy, Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, told bin Laden in early 2011 that UK security services were in contact with Libyan al-Qaeda operatives in Britain:
"British Intelligence spoke to them (these Libyan brothers in England), and asked them to try to contact the people they knew in al Qaeda to inform them of and find out what they think about the following idea: England is ready to leave Afghanistan [if] al Qaeda would explicitly commit to not moving against England or her interests."
This proposal had been relayed through an al-Qaeda operative in Libya, then in hiding in Iran, who was in contact with "some Libyan brothers in England."
It should be noted that in 2007, documents leaked by Snowden showed that the NSA had acknowledged tracking a "communications path" from Osama bin Laden in Pakistan to al-Qaeda leaders in Iraq and Iran.
The new proposal offered a repeat of what British security officials have described as an informal 'covenant of security' with Islamists that had been in place during the Cold War and through the 1990s.
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