THE EXILE tells the extraordinary story of the almost ten years that Osama Bin Laden evaded intelligence services and special forces units, drones and hunter killer squads. Through the eyes of those who witnessed it, Scott-Clark and Levy offer an insider’s account from bin Laden’s four wives and children, his deputies and military strategists, his spiritual advisor, the CIA, Pakistan’s ISI, and many others who have never before told their stories.

Having gained unique access to bin Laden’s inner circle, Scott-Clark and Levy, recount the flight of Al Qaeda’s forces and bin Laden’s innocent family members, the gradual formation of ISIS by bin Laden’s lieutenants, and bin Laden’s rising paranoia and eroding control over his organisation. They also reveal that the Bush White House knew the whereabouts of bin Laden’s family and Al Qaeda’s military and religious leaders, but rejected opportunities to capture them, pursuing war in the Persian Gulf instead, and offer insights into how Al Qaeda will attempt to regenerate itself in the coming years.

The sporadic release of documents by the Defence Department in recent years only represented about 1 percent of the million-plus document trove recovered in Abbottabad. “We need more detail and not less. We require more nuance and understanding if we are to ever tamp down a bloody conflict that threatens the globe,” write Scott-Clark and Levy, “And it is from this place— a desire for a contemporary, complex, untidy, knotted, verbal history, where no one is regular or consistent, and where allies are murderously betraying their friends, in which good men make poor choices, and switch sides, and wives become double agents—that this book begins.” While we think we know what happened in Abbottabad on May 2, 2011, we know little about the wilderness years that led to that shocking event.

Chair- Owen-Bennett Jones

Owen Bennett-Jones is a journalist for the BBC and one of the hosts of Newshour on the BBC World Service. He has reported from over 60 countries, including Pakistan. In this time he gained unprecedented access to interview members of Al Qaeda. In 2008 Bennett-Jones won the Sony journalist of the year award and in 2009 the Commonwealth journalist of the year. He is the author of ‘Pakistan: Eye of the Storm’ (2010) and a contributor to the Lonely Planet’s ‘Pakistan and the Karakoram Highway’. Bennett-Jones is a regular contributor to the Financial Times, the Guardian and the London Review of Books.

Speakers

CATHY SCOTT-CLARK

Is an award-winning journalist, author and film-maker, reporting over the past twenty five years for the Sunday Times, Guardian, BBC and Channel 4 from places as varied as Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Serbia, Russia,, China, Bangladesh, Burma, Vietnam, Thailand, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Iran.

ADRIAN LEVY

Is an internationally renowned and award-winning investigative journalist who worked as a staff writer and foreign correspondent for the Sunday Times for seven years before joining the Guardian as senior correspondent. He has reported from South Asia for more than a decade, and now lives in London.

After a decade long man hunt, in 2011 an elite group of US Navy SEALS stormed an enclosure in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad and killed Osama bin Laden. The story of what transpired was soon released and the news did much to boost President Obama’s re-election campaign.

Four years on investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published a controversial London Review of Books essay presenting a very different version of what happened on that night and in the lead-up.

Hersh will be joining us in conversation with David Loyn, freelance writer, journalist and former BBC foreign correspondent, to discuss his new book, The Killing of Osama Bin Laden, which expands on that essay and delves into the foreign policy decisions made by the White House under Obama’s leadership.

Seymour Hersh has written for The New Yorker and the London Review of Books, as well as serving as a Washington correspondent for The New York Times. He established himself at the forefront of investigative journalism more than four decades ago with an exposé of the massacre in My Lai, Vietnam, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize. Since then he has uncovered stories such as Kissinger’s role in extending the Vietnam War as well as the military torture regime at Abu Ghraib prison.

“How can you have a war on terror when terror is a tactic?” asks one of the American counter-terrorism analysts interviewed in Greg Barker‘s new film, Manhunt, about the decade-long hunt for Osama bin Laden, which was screened at the Frontline Club on Monday 24 November. Director Greg Barker joined the packed-out audience afterwards for a Q&A via Skype.

Greg Barker joins the Frontline Club audience for a Q&A via Skype from LA after the screening.

In the film, we see Barker conducting interviews with retired CIA analysts and operatives.

“We did ask for some current people inside the intelligence community and they were all denied,” said Barker. “There’s a certain healthy rivalry between analysts and field officers, but I think one of the things that was clear to a lot of people is that since 9/11 there’s been a real effort to integrate them more.”

Many of the analysts interviewed in the film were women who had been examining bin Laden and al-Qaeda since the mid-90s with little recognition from their superiors. One audience member asked whether the women felt that it was a culture of silence or a culture of sexism in the CIA which prevented their work from being recognised earlier.

“I think there was definitely a culture of sexism in the mid-90s,” answered Barker. “But I also know from talking to some people who were not on camera, some of the men involved, even the guys overseeing that unit around 9/11, they all felt that they were crying wolf.”

Indeed what becomes apparent throughout the film is that the threat of bin Laden and al-Qaeda was not taken seriously by many of those working for American national security. As Barker pointed out: “The more they [the analysts] raised the alarm the less they were listened to. . . . At that point, the institutions in Washington were still in a mindset shaped by the Cold War so the idea that a group of fundamentalists somewhere off in Afghanistan could pose an existential threat to America’s national security was just kind of laughable actually.”

The conversation then turned to the topic of ISIS and whether there has been again a failure of the intelligence services to spot the warning signs.

“Our focus now has been shaped by the al-Qaeda threat and the bin Laden threat and that’s just not what ISIS is. There’s always a danger of fighting the last war,” said Barker.

One audience member asked whether a decade-long hunt for one man was viewed by those on the inside as a success or a failure. “There was a certain frustration that it hadn’t been done earlier,” said Barker.

He also spoke of his own frustrations at not being able to include a portion in the film detailing the detrimental effect that the Iraq War had had on the hunt for bin Laden: “It was a massive diversion in terms of resources.”

Barker also spoke about his motivation in making the film. “What I wanted to do was give a human face to the people who work in operations . . . so next time something happens we don’t necessarily believe all the rhetoric and we remember that there are these people inside who in many ways are a lot like us, just doing very unusual jobs.”

Manhunt premiered at The Sundance Festival at 2013 and is available for pre-order from HBO.

On 2 May 2011, America’s public enemy number one, Osama bin Laden, was killed by Navy SEALs in a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The raid only lasted 40 minutes, but the hunt for bin Laden took two decades.

For 20 years, a small team of female agents known as “The Sisterhood” tracked the activities of al-Qaeda. They were trying to take down bin Laden before most of us even knew his name. Piecing together scraps of intelligence, they uncovered a secret terrorist organisation, al-Qaeda, and warned Washington of this new impending threat. Their warnings were repeatedly ignored, until the 9/11 attacks, when all the rules changed.

In Manhunt, director Greg Barker takes the viewer through the process that eventually led to the discovery of the world’s most wanted terrorist, giving a peek into the hidden world of the US intelligence community, which turns out to be populated by ordinary people wondering whether waging war is really part of their job description.

Directed by Greg Barker
Duration: 103′
Year: 2013

Today, I’ve selected another five from among the bookmarks I labelled ‘Twitter’ in my delicious account. 

Enjoy!

1. ‘Visualising the New Arab Mind‘

Computational historian Kovas Boguta visualises the Twitter influence network around the revolution in Egypt.

2. ‘The man who tweeted the attack on Osama Bin Laden – without knowing it‘

"Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event)."

View in iTunes

After the tracking down and killing of Osama bin Laden by a U.S. special operations team the questions have come thick and fast. At our May First Wednesday we are hoping to throw light on some of them:

What impact will the death of Osama bin Laden have on Al Qaeda and on the people who support its cause? We will be bringing together a panel of experts to discuss what impact his death will have on extremist Islamic groups and to look at the implications for Pakistan now that it has emerged that the Al Qaeda leader was hiding in Abbotabad.

We will also be discussing what Osama bin Laden’s discovery so close to Pakistan’s capital means for Afghanistan where the ‘War on Terror’ was launched.

The operation to kill bin Laden will improve President Obama’s standing in the US and the West, but what does it mean for US foreign policy? How it will play out on the ground, particularly in Asia and the Middle East?

Chaired by Humphrey Hawksley, leading BBC foreign correspondent, author and commentator on world affairs.

With:

Lynne O’Donnell, former bureau chief in Kabul for AFP, and the author of High Tea in Mosul: The True Story of Two Englishwomen in War-torn Iraq. She is the recipient of a 2010 Human Rights Press Award for coverage of the plight of Afghan women;

Dr Farzana Shaikh, associate fellow of the Asia Programme, at Chatham House and author of Making Sense of Pakistan;

Aamer Ahmed Khan, head of BBC Urdu Service;

Rosemary Hollis, professor of Middle East policy studies and director of the Olive Tree Programme at City University;

Zaki Chehab, Arab journalist, editor-in-chief of ArabsToday.net, the largest Arabic-language news website and author of Iraq Ablaze: Inside the Insurgency and Inside Hamas: The Untold Story of the Militant Islamic Movement.

Rather than a usual ’round up’ style blog post, I thought I’d experiment with Storify to bring some of the strands together. I was impressed; it’s very easy to use and update. The result is embedded below but it might be better to view it here.