[Bangla Daily Star] The administration of US President Barack B.O.Obama has demanded the identities of some of the top Pak intelligence operatives as the United States tries to determine whether any of them had contact with the late Osama bin Laden,
... who used to be alive but now he's not...
The New York Times
...which still proudly displays Walter Duranty's Pulitzer prize...
reported late Friday.
The officials provided new details of a tense discussion between Pak officials and an American envoy who travelled to Pakistain on Monday, as well as the growing suspicion among United States intelligence and diplomatic officials that someone in Pakistain's secret intelligence agency knew of Bin Laden's location, and helped shield him.
B.O. regime officials have stopped short of accusing the Pak government -- either privately or publicly -- of complicity in the hiding of bin Laden in the years after the Sept 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
One senior administration official privately acknowledged that the administration sees its relationship with Pakistain as too crucial to risk a wholesale break, even if it turned out that past or present Pak intelligence officials did know about Bin Laden's whereabouts.
Against the backdrop, ISI Chief Lt-Gen Shuja Pasha on Friday left for Washington to explain Pakistain's position on the presence of bin Laden in the country before he was killed in a US raid on May 2, reports the Dawn.
Uncorroborated reports suggest that before leaving for Washington Gen Pasha met CIA's station chief in Islamabad and reminded him about ISI's contributions in the war on terror and the lead about Osama's courier that eventually led the US to the al-Qaeda chief's hideout in Abbottabad.
But PTI says Lt Gen Pasha has embarked on a foreign trip to
However,
The all-purpose
However...
citing unnamed US officials, The New York Times said members of the US administration had expressed deep frustration with the Pak military and intelligence for their refusal to identify members of the agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, who were believed to have close ties to bin Laden.
In particular, US officials have demanded information on what is known as the ISI's S directorate, which has worked closely with faceless myrmidons since the days of the fight against the Soviet army in Afghanistan, the report said.
Bin Laden was killed in a May 2 raid by US special forces on a fortified compound located in Abbottabad, in the north of Pakistain.
Al-Qaeda and Islamic faceless myrmidons have vowed to avenge his killing, declaring him a "martyr" and calling on Mohammedans to rise up against the United States, reports AFP.
"It's hard to believe that Kayani
... four star general, current Chief of Army Staff of the Mighty Pak Army. Kayani is the former Director General of ISI...
and Pasha actually knew that bin Laden was there," a senior administration official said, referring to The Mighty Pak Army chief, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, and the ISI director-general, Lieutenant General Ahmad Shuja Pasha. But "there are degrees of knowing, and it wouldn't surprise me if we find out that someone close to Pasha knew."
Pak Sherlocks involved in piecing together Bin Laden's life during the past nine years said this week that he had been living in Pakistain's urban centres longer than previously believed.
Two Pak officials say that bin Laden's Yemeni wife, one of three wives now in Pak custody, told Sherlocks that before moving in 2005 to the mansion in Abbottabad where he was eventually killed, bin Laden had lived with his family for nearly two and a half years in a small village, Chak Shah Mohammad, a little more than a mile southeast of the town of Haripur, on the main Abbottabad highway, The Times said.
One of the officials said this means that bin Laden left Pakistain's rugged tribal region sometime in 2003 and had been living in northern urban regions since then, the report noted.