Kerry: Pakistan Will Return Stealth Helicopter

Sen. John Kerry announced Pakistan will return the tail-section wreckage from the U.S. stealth helicopter used in the raid on Osama bin Laden's Abbottabad compound in a sign that Islambad wants to repair its soiled image with the United States.

Playing the role of "God cop," the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee disclosed the offer after a day of meetings with Pakistan's military and civilian leaders, The Guardian reported.

The U.S. and Pakistan had “agreed on a specific series of steps that will be implemented in order to get the relationship on track," Kerry said, according to The Washington Post.

Relations have soured since the U.S. stormed bin Laden's lair. Pakistan says the U.S. action ignored its sovereignty, while the U.S. wants to know how bin Laden was hiding out under the noses of the Pakistani military and intelligence service.

“I’ll say again and again: The make or break is real,” Kerry said. “There are members of Congress who aren’t confident that [the relationship] can be patched back together again. That is why actions, not words, are going to be critical to earning their votes.”

One in five Americans think bin Laden is still alive. Los Angeles Times blogger Andrew Malcolm asks, Ah, what?

Osama's Journal, Other Docs Show He Was Still Terror Kingpin

More evidence that Osama Bin Laden remained active atop the Al Qaeda terror syndicate is trickling out in what increasingly looks like a concerted effort to play mind games with the fractured Islamist militant group.

Bin Laden's handwritten journal and other documents show the deceased terror leader was in contact with Al Qaeda cells or individuals not only in Middle East, but as far away as London, calling on them to strike at U.S. railroads on key dates and add Los Angeles to their list of targets.

No specific plots have been discovered, according to reports, but there is still renewed concern.

"The latest trove of intelligence should be a wake-up call to Americans that this threat has always been real," Michael Downing, commanding officer of the Los Angeles Police Department's counter-terrorism and special operations bureau, told The Los Angeles Times.

Bin Laden saved his communications on small, easy-to-circulate flash drives that couriers would get in the hands of Al Qaeda members. The Navy Seals who raided his Abbottabad compound snatched handfuls of the thumb-sized drives. Arab language experts and intelligence officials are now combing over the information cache.

"In one particularly macabre bit of mathematics, bin Laden’s writings show him musing over just how many Americans he must kill to force the U.S. to withdraw from the Arab world," the Associated Press reported.

"He concludes that the smaller, scattered attacks since the 9/11 attacks had not been enough. He tells his disciples that only a body count of thousands, something on the scale of 9/11, would shift U.S. policy," AP reported.

The unprecedented leak of what routinely would be considered classified information is part of what has become an almost daily distribution of information meant to inform the free world of Bin Laden's thoughts and plans and the potential threats they posed.

There is also a degree of psychological warfare at play. The leaks might be getting into the heads of Al Qaeda operatives, some of whom have to be wondering if bin Laden included enough details in his records to put terrorist-hunters on their trail. Counterterrorism experts think it could cause Al Qaeda to slip up.

Night Stalkers Share Spotlight With SEALS

SEAL Team Six earned most of the post-Osama bin Laden attention this week, but as the days wore on most of the world also discovered the existence of the "Night Stalkers," the black ops pilots who flew the super-secret stealth helicopters into Abbottabad without detection (sort of).

President Obama met up yesterday with the crews of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment at their base at Fort Campbell, Ky., thanking them "for their extraordinary service."

 If you take to heart Obama's off-handed comment after the mission was completed last Sunday quoted by Bob Woodward of The Washington Post, the stealthy Black Hawk helicopters that the Night Stalkers flew run about $60 million apiece.

Those stealth helicopters are said to contain technology that reduces noise and deflects radar and heat detection. They either fooled the Pakistanis or the Pakistanis were indeed on board with the mission, contrary to what both Washington and Islamabad has since said.

Though not known as well as some of the black ops units of the U.S. military, the Night Stalkers have been around for a while, according to the U.S. Army. They were born out of the failed 1980 raid to rescue the hostages at the U.S. embassy in Tehran.

One of the lessons learned from that mission was a need for pilots who were trained and focused on night flying and were special operators in their own right, similar to the SEALS, Delta Force, Green Berets and Marine reconnaissance teams.

Originally culled from the 101st Airborne Division, known as The Screaming Eagles and based at Fort Campbell, the unit's unofficial motto is, "Death Waits in the Dark." That pretty much says it all. The official and more family-friendly motto is, "Night Stalkers Don't Quit."

One of the Night Stalkers' best-known and most-devastating missions came in 1993 in Mogadishu, Somalia, which inspired the book and film "Black Hawk Down." Two Black Hawks flown by the Night Stalkers,  Super 6-1 and Super 6-4, were lost in the battle of Mogadishu along with five members of the 160th.

Like the failed mission in Iran that created the Night Stalkers, many lessons were learned from the Black Hawk Down episode, shoring up the unit's capability and ensuring that no lives were lost in vain.

White House: 'No Question' Osama's Death Was Lawful

The White House said today that it "acted in the nation's self-defense" and insisted Osama Bin Laden would have been taken into custody if it had been "feasible," answering questions over the disclosure the Al Qaeda leader was unarmed when Navy SEALS confronted him Sunday in his sprawling compound in Pakistan.

White House press secretary Jay Carney suggested Bin Laden did not acquiesce to rules "consistent with the laws of war."

"The team had the authority to kill Osama bin Laden unless he offered to surrender, in which case the team was required to accept his surrender if the team could do so safely. The operation was conducted in a manner fully consistent with the laws of war. The operation was planned so that the team was prepared and had the means to take bin Laden into custody," Carney said reading from his notes.

"There is simply no question that this operation was lawful. Bin Laden was the head of al Qaeda, the organization that conducted the attacks of September 11, 2001. And al Qaeda and bin Laden himself had continued to plot attacks against the United States. We acted in the nation's self-defense. The operation was conducted in a way designed to minimize and avoid all together, if possible, civilian casualties. And if I might add, that was done at great risk to Americans. Furthermore, consistent with the laws of war, bin Laden's surrender would have been accepted, if feasible. That's my response," Carney added.

Obama Declines to Release Dead bin Laden Photos

It was just a little too much in-your-face for President Obama, as he explained his reasons today behind declining to release a photo of a dead Osama bin Laden.

Obama handed down his decision on whether the picture should go public in an interview this afternoon with  Steve Kroft CBS' "60 Minutes." White House press secretary Jay Carney read part of the transcript from that interview at his daily briefing. Here is a transcript of that segment of the briefing:

Carney: The President was asked about how they knew it was him. And he said:

The President: When they landed, we had very strong confirmation at that point that it was him.  Photographs had been taken. Facial analysis indicated that, in fact, it was him. We hadn't yet done DNA testing, but at that point we were 95-percent sure.

Question: Did you see the pictures?

 The President: Yes.

 Question: What was your reaction when you saw them?

 The President: It was him.

 Question: Why didn't you release them?

 The President: We discussed this internally. Keep in mind that we are absolutely certain that this was him. We've done DNA sampling and testing, and so there is no doubt that we killed Osama bin Laden. It is important for us to make sure that very graphic photos of somebody who was shot in the head are not floating around as an incitement to additional violence or as a propaganda tool. That's not who we are. We don't trot out this stuff as trophies. The fact of the matter is, this was somebody who was deserving of the -- of the justice that he received, and I think Americans and people around the world are glad that he is gone. But we don't need to spike the football. And I think that given the graphic nature of these photos, it would create some national security risk. And I've discussed this with Bob Gates and Hillary Clinton and my intelligence teams, and they all agree.

Question: There are people in Pakistan for example, who say, look, this is all a lie.  Obama, this is another American trick. Osama is not dead. 

The President: The truth is that we were monitoring world -- that we are monitoring world -- that we are monitoring -- we were monitoring, rather, worldwide reaction. There is no doubt that Osama bin Laden is dead. Certainly there is doubt -- no doubt among al Qaeda members that he is dead. And so we don't think that a photograph in and of itself is going to make any difference. There are going to be some folks who deny it. The fact of the matter is, you will not see bin Laden walking on this Earth again.

SEAL Team Six Adds to Legend With Bin Laden Kill

SEAL Team Six is one of those invisible entities that many people like to know is there, but would prefer not to have to think too deeply about how they exist in a free society's parallel world of black ops -- until now.

It isn't even the commando unit's real name, but SEAL Team Six, as they are known, are the rock stars of the U.S. military: They are the guys who got Osama bin Laden.

"When the U.S. Navy sends their elite, they send the SEALS. When the SEALS send their elite, they send SEAL Team Six, the Navy's equivalent to the Army's Delta force -- tasked with counterterrorism and counterinsurgency, and occasionally working with the CIA," Howard Wasdin writes in his new book, "SEAL Team Six: Memoirs of an Elite Navy SEAL Sniper."

SEAL Team Six officially is called the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, or DevGru, and its members call themselves "the quiet professionals," according The Guardian of London.

Richard Sisk, a decorated Marine veteran who served in Vietnam and is longtime Pentagon reporter and war correspondent, affectionately calls the SEALs "the snake-eaters," while another ex-Marine officer who served in Vietnam describes them as "guys who like to travel light so they can go in fast and get out even faster."

The unit trained hard and was well-prepared for any contingencies, as the loss of one of their helicopters in the mission demonstrated, the Deseret News notes. They reportedly cheered when they heard it was Bin Laden who they were going after.

SEAL Team Six has hunted several “high-value targets” in Afghanistan (there are around 40 SEALS believed to be in Afghanistan right now) and Iraq, but the fruits of their labor in the Abbottabad mission may well extend beyond the death of the Al Qaeda leader. The intelligence obtained during the 40 minutes the SEALS spent on the ground could offer more opportunities to destroy the remnants of Al Qaeda's evil overloads, an idea  The Chicago Tribune likes.

A team member snapped a photo of Bin Laden after he was dead and uploaded it to commanders for facial recognition and confirmation, The New York Times said.


SEAL Team Six operates clandestinely just along the border of polite modern warfare, as The Nation sharply reminds. The ninja-like existence of SEAL Team Six provides the United States with a lighting quick strike force, along with plausible deniability for its overseers, who sometimes prefer to look the other way.

SEAL Team Six is based out of Virginia Beach, according to The Washington Post. No one can apply to join, reports the The Telegraph of London. They have evolved into the elite unit, The Week details. The weapons and the means by which they deploy are diverse, ABC News reports.

Military scholars and strategists have learned much about deploying commandos like the SEALS and the Army's Delta Force since the failed raid in the desert to rescue the Iran hostages some 30 years ago, the Christian Science Monitor notes.

SEAL Team Six is made up of athletes, quick-thinkers, patient, disciplined and results-oriented sailors. They are trained in the use of  multiple weapons, hand-to-hand combat and the art of interrogation, on the latter, both how to give and how to receive. They swim out of submarines, zip along in rubber landing craft, jump out of planes at both low and high altitudes and they repel or storm out of near-silent helicopters.

They like for folks not to know when they are around, because when they are around, the plan usually calls for them to extract or shoot someone. SEAL Team Six is who the U.S. calls in when the fight is with the bogeyman.

"The guys behind this mission [to capture or kill bin Laden] have never given anyone a reason to doubt that they are trustworthy and very focused," Brandon Tyler Webb, a former SEAL who ran the sniper program at the Navy Special Warfare Command, told CNN. "They are the best of the best."

Unarmed Osama Watched Wife Storm SEAL

White House spokesman Jay Carney today read a statement setting the record straight on details on the secret raid by the Special Operations Command's SEAL Team Six on Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Here are Carney's own words, correcting some earlier information that turned out to be erroneous:

"What is true is that we provided a great deal of information with great haste in order to inform you, and through you the American public, about the operation and how it transpired and the events that took place there in Pakistan. And obviously some of the information came in piece by piece and is being reviewed and updated and elaborated on. So what I can tell you, I have a narrative that I can provide to you on the raid itself on the bin Laden compound in Pakistan:

"On orders of the President, a small U.S. team assaulted a secure compound in an affluent suburb of Islamabad to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. The raid was conducted with U.S. military personnel assaulting on two helicopters. The team methodically cleared the compound, moving from room to room, in an operation lasting nearly 40 minutes. They were engaged in a firefight throughout the operation, and Osama bin Laden was killed by the assaulting force.

"In addition to the bin Laden family, two other families resided in the compound, one family on the first floor of the bin Laden building and one family in a second building. One team began the operation on the first floor of the bin Laden house and worked their way to the third floor. A second team cleared the separate building.

"On the first floor of bin Laden's building, two al Qaeda couriers were killed, along with a woman who was killed in crossfire. Bin Laden and his family were found on the second and third floor of the building. There was concern that bin Laden would oppose the capture operation, rather, and indeed he did resist. In the room with bin Laden, a woman, bin Laden's -- a woman, rather, bin Laden's wife, rushed the U.S. assaulter and was shot in the leg, but not killed. Bin Laden was then shot and killed. He was not armed.

"Following the firefight, the non-combatants were moved to a safe location as the damaged helicopter was detonated. The team departed the scene via helicopter to the USS Carl Vinson in the north Arabian Sea.

"Aboard the USS Carl Vinson, the burial of bin Laden was done in conformance with Islamic precepts and practices. The deceased's body was washed and then placed in a white sheet. The body was placed in a weighted bag. A military officer read prepared religious remarks which were translated into Arabic by a native speaker. After the words were complete, the body was placed on a prepared flat board, tipped up, and the deceased body eased into the sea.

"That's the narrative that I can provide to you today."