The News | By Rahimullah Yusufzai | 30 July 2010

WikiLeaks falsehood

Rahimullah Yusufzai

It was the first time that one heard this story about bin Laden dying in an unspecified hospital in Peshawar. It appears that the US military authorities also didn’t take this report seriously as it came from Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security (NDS), the Afghan intelligence service whose performance has left much to be desired. It seems the NDS passed on the unsubstantiated report about bin Laden’s death in a Peshawar hospital to the Americans without crosschecking the facts.

An almost similar report about bin Laden having received treatment in a military hospital in Rawalpindi had also hit the headlines some years ago but was soon forgotten, as it too was unbelievable.

There aren’t many reports concerning bin Laden in the US military files leaked to Wikileaks, which could mean that the US civil and military officials are right when they say that they have lost the trail of the world’s most wanted man. However, the fact that there were so few reports in a log of 90,000 files about the al-Qaeda leader led many people to believe that he is dead.

Two other references to bin Laden in the Afghan war log leaked to Wikileaks are interesting even if both appear to be far-fetched. One says that bin Laden was so pleased with the skills of an Afghan fighter Abdullah in making remote-controlled improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that he presented him with an Arab wife. The report mentions that bin Laden gifted the Arab bride to Abdullah in the northern Kunduz province in July 2007, which means this happened one month after the al-Qaeda leader was supposed to have died in a Peshawar hospital.

The reports mentions Abdullah as a brother of one Qari Najimullah, who was reported to have come with Taliban fighters to Kunduz to start operations against the foreign and Afghan forces after receiving training in Pakistan. Efforts by this scribe to seek information about Abdullah and his Arab wife from Taliban sources failed to make any headway. It seems not many Taliban were aware of this intelligence report even if this was true.

The second interesting reference to bin Laden said that his financial and security adviser named Dr Aminul Haq flew to North Korea in December 2005 where he “confirmed a deal with the North Korean government for remote-controlled rockets for use against American and coalition aircraft.” The report said the deal was closed for an “undetermined amount of money.”

Dr Aminul Haq’s name hasn’t figured much in the past as someone close to bin Laden. Many people were surprised by these leaked intelligence reports that he was bin Laden’s financial and security adviser.

All the above US military intelligence reports about the al-Qaeda leader with $25 million as head money seem incredible and sometimes hard to believe. If this is the quality of American intelligence on bin Laden, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that he is still a free man even after the biggest manhunt for him in history.

Source: The News