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A new series of documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden released Monday show important gaps in the United States' official account of the raid which killed Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011.
The new documents show conflicting reports between U.S. intelligence agencies which contradict the official account on the Bin Laden raid.
For example, the U.S. government claimed they had been led to Bin Laden's hiding place by monitoring an al-Qaida courier. However, an interview published on the NSA’s newsletter SIDToday Jon Darby, the agency's then-associate deputy director for counter-terrorism, claims the U.S. was led to Bin Laden by the NSA's tracking through different operations, including cellphone tracking.
Other released documents show that the materials found inside Bin Laden's compound were not of actionable use. The U.S. government claimed, after the raid, that it had recover valuable highly useful information on al-Qaida's operations.
Finally, the leaks show that Pakistani-U.S. relations suffered a fallout after the raid, due to backlash from extremist organizations who felt Islamabad was complicit with western powers, and the portrayal made by U.S. officials portraying the Pakistanis as turning a blind eye to terrorist groups working on its soil.
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The leaks, published by The Intercept, are only a partial sample from the total of CIA-NSA documents regarding the incident.
However, many of the claims coincide with an article published earlier this month by Pullitzer Award Winner journalist Seymour Hersh.
According to Hersh – who has been criticized for relying on undisclosed intelligence sources – President Barack Obama decided to take action breaching an agreement between both the U.S. and Pakistan, which basically restricted the Washington from saying that a special ops troops were sent into the the Asian country, allowing them to say only that Bin Laden had been killed in a drone attack.
Islamabad feared a wave of attacks by extremist organizations as a result of Bin Laden's death, as he was being held in custody by the Pakistani government. Under the agreement, the announcement of Bin Laden's death would be made a week after the raid.
The official account of an Al Qaida courier leading the U.S. to find Bin Laden's compound was also challenged by Hersh's article, and its contradicted by the new leaked documents.
Hersh also claims in his lengthy piece that Bin Laden – who was ill and being kept in custody in the compound – did not play a significant part in Al Qaida's operations, and that the evidence retrieved inside the compound did not provide significantly new leads as to the group's plans.
A day after Hersh's article was published, the White House denied its veracity without providing any explanation. “There are too many inaccuracies and baseless assertions in this piece to fact check each one,” the White House spokesperson said.
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