Don’t expect this to make too many headlines…
It was al-Qaida facilitator Hassan Ghul, a terrorist captured in Iraq, who gave US officials information on the courier’s identity.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (above) provided the CIA with the name of bin Laden’s personal courier. So did Iraqi terrorist Hassan Gul.
The Telegraph reported:
For the past two years, American spies had been monitoring the courier, known as Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, after learning his name four years ago, according to US officials.
When al-Kuwaiti made a phone call in 2010, he unknowingly led the Americans to the doorstep of the world’s most wanted terrorist. He was said to have been among those killed alongside Osama bin Laden in yesterday’s dramatic raid.
Secret American military files from Guantanamo Bay, leaked to Wikileaks and seen by The Daily Telegraph, suggest that al-Kuwaiti may have been with bin Laden ever since he disappeared from the Tora Bora mountains in Afghanistan in 2001…
…The file suggests that the courier’s identity was provided to the US by another key source, the al-Qaida facilitator Hassan Ghul, who was captured in Iraq in 2004 and interrogated by the CIA. Ghul was never sent to Guantanamo but was believed to have been taken to a prison in Pakistan.
He told the Americans that al-Kuwaiti travelled with bin Laden. The file states:
“Al-Kuwaiti was seen in Tora Bora and it is possible al-Kuwaiti was one of the individuals [al-Qahtani] reported accompanying UBL [bin Laden] in Tora Bora prior to UBL’s disappearance.”
The picture that emerges from al-Qahtani’s Guantanamo file supports statements given in the last 24 hours by US officials, who named Ghul as the “linchpin” in the intelligence operation to find bin Laden.
UPDATE: Ace of Spades put together the string of events that occurred during the Bush years that led to Osama’s death on Sunday.
