candypreet
06-28-2005, 05:48 AM
Pakistani forces hiding Osama, says CIA
Source: By Daniel Sneider, IANS. Image Source: IS
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The first published interview with new US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director Porter Goss, which appeared this past week in Time magazine, contained a bombshell that exploded with barely any notice.
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To the ritual question - when will we get (Al Qaeda chief) Osama bin Laden? - Goss gave a far from ritual answer.
"That is a question that goes far deeper than you know," Goss began. "We have some weak links" that make it impossible for now to get bin Laden, he explained, pointing to "the very difficult question of dealing with sanctuaries in sovereign states".
Sounds like you know where he is, the interviewer pressed. "I have an excellent idea of where he is," Goss responded.
The CIA boss was delivering a clear message to the "weak link" - Pakistan and its military ruler Pervez Musharraf.
As he did two weeks ago in Australia, Musharraf claims to have Al Qaeda "on the run" in Pakistan, his forces having chased them out of cities into the mountains and then "occupied their sanctuaries".
That rhetoric draws derision inside the CIA.
According to sources familiar with the intelligence community discussion on this issue, there is mounting evidence that the Pakistani military - and its intelligence wing Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) - is nurturing its deep ties to Islamist extremists including those sheltering the Al Qaeda leadership and leaders of the Afghan Taliban.
Retired CIA officer Gary Schroen, who served for 20 years in that area, has just published a memoir of the war on terror in Afghanistan. In an interview with Pakistan's Daily Times, Schroen was even more explicit about bin Laden.
"He's hiding in Pakistan in the northern tribal areas above Peshawar... The US government and the US military are not authorised by the Musharraf government to enter there unilaterally," he said. Schroen speculated that some ISI officers know exactly where bin Laden is hiding.
The White House and the state department know this but are keeping a debate over how to handle the "Pakistan problem" behind closed doors. They argue that too much pressure could topple the relatively moderate Musharraf and bring Islamist extremists to power in a nuclear-armed Pakistan.
That dilemma is real. The administration shovelled in economic and military aid while soft-pedalling Musharraf's miserable record on democracy and human rights. But it is increasingly difficult to cover up evidence that Musharraf is no longer delivering his side of the bargain.
Consider just these few recent events:
On June 5, the FBI arrested a young Pakistani-American man and his father in Lodi. According to their affidavits, the men purportedly lied about the son being trained during the past two years in Al Qaeda-linked camps just outside Rawalpindi, home to the army's headquarters. The Pakistani government hurriedly denied that such camps existed.
The following week, a Pakistani TV network aired an interview with a senior Taliban commander in contact with Taliban leader Mullah Omar and bin Laden. Afghan officials and the outgoing US ambassador in Kabul Zalmay Khalilzad questioned how a TV crew could find a man whom Pakistani intelligence services say they can't locate.
On June 20, Afghan authorities arrested three Pakistanis for plotting to assassinate Khalilzad, a frequent critic of Islamabad's failure to curb the Taliban. Afghan officials see the hand of the ISI behind all this including a recent upsurge in Taliban violence.
CIA officers agree this is no rogue operation. The only question is whether it was authorised by Musharraf, and if so, why? There are no good answers to either question yet.
It is clear, however, that the ISI continues to protect the Taliban, which it has done since the Islamist group was created as an instrument of influence in Afghanistan. The Taliban, in turn, enjoys the protection of fellow Pashtun tribal leaders whose realms straddle the border. Bin Laden benefits from their sanctuary as well.
Behind this lies a deeper problem of the long and intimate ties between the Pakistani military and Islamists, a relationship explored in depth in an important new book "Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military" by veteran Pakistani journalist Husain Haqqani.
"Militarism in Pakistan feeds Islamism and Islamism feeds militarism," he told me, "and the two can't live without each other."
That is the true "weak link" in Pakistan. Until it is severed, the Pakistan problem will only get worse.
(Sneider is foreign-affairs writer for the Mercury News. He can be reached at dsneider@mercurynews.com)
candypreet
02-15-2006, 03:17 AM
Taliban said to get aid in Pakistan
By Carlotta Gall The New York Times
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2006
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan Several suspects held in connection with three months of suicide bombings in southern Afghanistan have said the attacks were organized in Pakistan by members of the former Taliban regime who relied on Pakistani bombers, according to Afghan authorities.
These officials also said the network had encountered little resistance from Pakistani authorities.
Two Afghans and three Pakistanis who had been among 21 people arrested described their roles in interviews that were videotaped by an Afghan interrogator. The tape was shown to a New York Times reporter by an Afghan official, who insisted that he not be identified because of the diplomatic implications of the contents.
The suspects described a chain of operations that began with the recruitment of young bombers in the sprawling port city of Karachi. The bombers were moved to safe houses in the border towns of Quetta and Chaman, and then into Afghanistan, where they were provided with cars and explosives and sent into the streets to find a target.
The attacks have killed at least 70 people, mostly civilians but also international peacekeepers, a Canadian diplomat and a dozen Afghan police officers and soldiers. There have been 15 attacks in Kandahar, a tense city that had been the base for the Taliban.
A Taliban spokesman, Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, dismissed the claims.
"This is a propaganda campaign of the government," he said, speaking by satellite telephone from an unknown location. "Our mujahedeen don't send one group to one area so they can be found and arrested. Our mujahedeen send different people to different areas at different times."
He added that there was no need to recruit Pakistanis for the attacks.
"They are all Afghans," he said of the suicide bombers.
But Afghan officials said breaking into the network gave them the proof to demand action from Pakistan.
"I think there is a factory for these bombers," said an Afghan government official, also speaking on the condition of anonymity and saying he had not been authorized to discuss the matter.
President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan is planning a trip to Pakistan to raise the issue with President Pervez Musharraf.
In a televised speech last week, Karzai asked the bombers rhetorically: "If you are the ones blowing yourselves up, why are you making the explosion in front of the police headquarters, where people like you are standing in front getting passports?"
He has spoken of the need to tackle the problem at the source.
Sentiment against Pakistan has been rising in Afghanistan and a popular refrain is that the Taliban could not function without Pakistan's help.
"Most of the attackers are non-Afghans," the governor of Kandahar Province, Asadullah Khaled, said Saturday at a memorial service for 14 victims of the latest bombing. "We have proof, we have prisoners." He added: "We have addresses, we have cassettes."
But Karzai, in his speech last week, also suggested that the recruitment of bombers did not end in Pakistan. He cited the arrest of a man from Mali who is a suspect in a planned attack on a northern provincial governor.
"Who is sending him?" Karzai said. "I don't think African countries are."
Last week, an Iraqi and three Pakistanis from Kashmir were apprehended in Nimruz, a province in the southwest that borders Iran, according to local Afghan officials. Pakistan is not the only country in the region, an American military official in Afghanistan said pointedly.
In the videotaped interviews, the three men who said they were Pakistanis, spoke in Urdu and said they were recruited as bombers. Two, who simply described themselves as Akhtar Ali and Sajjad, said they were recruited by a man named Jamal, who was working for the Taliban, and who they said owned a bookstore in Karachi.
Sajjad, who seemed to be the youngest of the three, said he was from northwestern Pakistan, but had been staying with his brother in Karachi. According to the interviews, Jamal had shown them video cassettes in which Muslim clerics urged listeners to fight a holy war to earn a sure way to paradise.
"I was doing nothing, walking around, playing cricket and football," Sajjad said. "The maulavi sahib," meaning the senior cleric, "talked to me and showed me a cassette, so I got involved. They were talking on the cassettes and telling us to do this and that, telling me to kill Americans."
Ali, who is from Karachi and who looked to be in his mid-20s, sighed as he described how he had received training in fighting five years ago, when the Taliban were in power, by one of the militant Pakistani parties, Harakat ul-Mujahedeen. He did not go to Afghanistan at the time, and the militant parties have greatly restricted their activities now because the Pakistani government has cracked down on them, he said.
It was the Muslim clerics speaking on the cassettes who persuaded him to go, he said.
"I came to Afghanistan to fight jihad,
to be a suicide attacker because I heard from the clerics there that if you fight jihad you would go to paradise," he said. "There are cassettes there and they say: 'There, there is jihad against non-Muslims.'"
The third man, who gave his name as Abdullah, said he came from Peshawar, Pakistan, but was working in Karachi and was recruited by a co-worker named Iqbal.
"Iqbal was talking of fighting against Americans, he was talking of going to fight jihad there," Abdullah said in his interview. "I said I cannot do it. Iqbal persuaded me."
Separately, the three were sent to Quetta, they said in the tapes, and put in touch with an Afghan member of the Taliban, identified as Abdul Hadi.
Sajjad, who made two attempts at a suicide attack, said he stayed in Quetta each time with a man called Farrouqi.
His first attempt was supposed to be in Kabul but was aborted when the man preparing the car with explosives accidentally blew himself up. Before his second trip, he said, a mullah at Farrouqi's house made a video of him saying he was going on a suicide mission.
Sajjad and Akhtar Ali were said to have been arrested in Kandahar, with their Afghan facilitator, Nur ul Baqi, before they reached their safe house.
Abdullah, who seemed a hard man with a direct gaze, said he traveled into Afghanistan and was given shelter for two days and provided with a car filled with explosives and two gas cylinders.
"My other friend told me which button to press," he said.
He was caught by police in a car laden with explosives and tried to detonate the vehicle as police stopped him, the interrogator said on the tape. Abdullah denied trying to detonate the explosives and said he had changed his mind about carrying out the suicide mission after failing to catch up with an American convoy on a bumpy road.
Wearing glasses, a white prayer cap and thin beard, Hafiz Bismillah was the last man to speak on the tape. He said nervously that he was from outside Kandahar, and had brought the bomber, Imran, to his house.
"We knew he was going to do a suicide mission," Bismillah said. "We gave him a place to stay."
The police found 80 mines inside large blue plastic barrels at his house, he said.
Baqi, the Afghan arrested with two of the Pakistani would-be bombers, said on the tapes that he brought four would-be bombers into the country.
"Most of the attackers are Pakistanis - I can tell you 99 percent are Pakistani," he said. He said he had not seen any Arabs coming through.
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan Several suspects held in connection with three months of suicide bombings in southern Afghanistan have said the attacks were organized in Pakistan by members of the former Taliban regime who relied on Pakistani bombers, according to Afghan authorities.
These officials also said the network had encountered little resistance from Pakistani authorities.
Two Afghans and three Pakistanis who had been among 21 people arrested described their roles in interviews that were videotaped by an Afghan interrogator. The tape was shown to a New York Times reporter by an Afghan official, who insisted that he not be identified because of the diplomatic implications of the contents.
The suspects described a chain of operations that began with the recruitment of young bombers in the sprawling port city of Karachi. The bombers were moved to safe houses in the border towns of Quetta and Chaman, and then into Afghanistan, where they were provided with cars and explosives and sent into the streets to find a target.
The attacks have killed at least 70 people, mostly civilians but also international peacekeepers, a Canadian diplomat and a dozen Afghan police officers and soldiers. There have been 15 attacks in Kandahar, a tense city that had been the base for the Taliban.
A Taliban spokesman, Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, dismissed the claims.
"This is a propaganda campaign of the government," he said, speaking by satellite telephone from an unknown location. "Our mujahedeen don't send one group to one area so they can be found and arrested. Our mujahedeen send different people to different areas at different times."
He added that there was no need to recruit Pakistanis for the attacks.
"They are all Afghans," he said of the suicide bombers.
But Afghan officials said breaking into the network gave them the proof to demand action from Pakistan.
"I think there is a factory for these bombers," said an Afghan government official, also speaking on the condition of anonymity and saying he had not been authorized to discuss the matter.
President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan is planning a trip to Pakistan to raise the issue with President Pervez Musharraf.
In a televised speech last week, Karzai asked the bombers rhetorically: "If you are the ones blowing yourselves up, why are you making the explosion in front of the police headquarters, where people like you are standing in front getting passports?"
He has spoken of the need to tackle the problem at the source.
Sentiment against Pakistan has been rising in Afghanistan and a popular refrain is that the Taliban could not function without Pakistan's help.
"Most of the attackers are non-Afghans," the governor of Kandahar Province, Asadullah Khaled, said Saturday at a memorial service for 14 victims of the latest bombing. "We have proof, we have prisoners." He added: "We have addresses, we have cassettes."
But Karzai, in his speech last week, also suggested that the recruitment of bombers did not end in Pakistan. He cited the arrest of a man from Mali who is a suspect in a planned attack on a northern provincial governor.
"Who is sending him?" Karzai said. "I don't think African countries are."
Last week, an Iraqi and three Pakistanis from Kashmir were apprehended in Nimruz, a province in the southwest that borders Iran, according to local Afghan officials. Pakistan is not the only country in the region, an American military official in Afghanistan said pointedly.
In the videotaped interviews, the three men who said they were Pakistanis, spoke in Urdu and said they were recruited as bombers. Two, who simply described themselves as Akhtar Ali and Sajjad, said they were recruited by a man named Jamal, who was working for the Taliban, and who they said owned a bookstore in Karachi.
Sajjad, who seemed to be the youngest of the three, said he was from northwestern Pakistan, but had been staying with his brother in Karachi. According to the interviews, Jamal had shown them video cassettes in which Muslim clerics urged listeners to fight a holy war to earn a sure way to paradise.
"I was doing nothing, walking around, playing cricket and football," Sajjad said. "The maulavi sahib," meaning the senior cleric, "talked to me and showed me a cassette, so I got involved. They were talking on the cassettes and telling us to do this and that, telling me to kill Americans."
Ali, who is from Karachi and who looked to be in his mid-20s, sighed as he described how he had received training in fighting five years ago, when the Taliban were in power, by one of the militant Pakistani parties, Harakat ul-Mujahedeen. He did not go to Afghanistan at the time, and the militant parties have greatly restricted their activities now because the Pakistani government has cracked down on them, he said.
It was the Muslim clerics speaking on the cassettes who persuaded him to go, he said.
"I came to Afghanistan to fight jihad,
to be a suicide attacker because I heard from the clerics there that if you fight jihad you would go to paradise," he said. "There are cassettes there and they say: 'There, there is jihad against non-Muslims.'"
The third man, who gave his name as Abdullah, said he came from Peshawar, Pakistan, but was working in Karachi and was recruited by a co-worker named Iqbal.
"Iqbal was talking of fighting against Americans, he was talking of going to fight jihad there," Abdullah said in his interview. "I said I cannot do it. Iqbal persuaded me."
Separately, the three were sent to Quetta, they said in the tapes, and put in touch with an Afghan member of the Taliban, identified as Abdul Hadi.
Sajjad, who made two attempts at a suicide attack, said he stayed in Quetta each time with a man called Farrouqi.
His first attempt was supposed to be in Kabul but was aborted when the man preparing the car with explosives accidentally blew himself up. Before his second trip, he said, a mullah at Farrouqi's house made a video of him saying he was going on a suicide mission.
Sajjad and Akhtar Ali were said to have been arrested in Kandahar, with their Afghan facilitator, Nur ul Baqi, before they reached their safe house.
Abdullah, who seemed a hard man with a direct gaze, said he traveled into Afghanistan and was given shelter for two days and provided with a car filled with explosives and two gas cylinders.
"My other friend told me which button to press," he said.
He was caught by police in a car laden with explosives and tried to detonate the vehicle as police stopped him, the interrogator said on the tape. Abdullah denied trying to detonate the explosives and said he had changed his mind about carrying out the suicide mission after failing to catch up with an American convoy on a bumpy road.
Wearing glasses, a white prayer cap and thin beard, Hafiz Bismillah was the last man to speak on the tape. He said nervously that he was from outside Kandahar, and had brought the bomber, Imran, to his house.
"We knew he was going to do a suicide mission," Bismillah said. "We gave him a place to stay."
The police found 80 mines inside large blue plastic barrels at his house, he said.
Baqi, the Afghan arrested with two of the Pakistani would-be bombers, said on the tapes that he brought four would-be bombers into the country.
"Most of the attackers are Pakistanis - I can tell you 99 percent are Pakistani," he said. He said he had not seen any Arabs coming through.
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan Several suspects held in connection with three months of suicide bombings in southern Afghanistan have said the attacks were organized in Pakistan by members of the former Taliban regime who relied on Pakistani bombers, according to Afghan authorities.
These officials also said the network had encountered little resistance from Pakistani authorities.
Two Afghans and three Pakistanis who had been among 21 people arrested described their roles in interviews that were videotaped by an Afghan interrogator. The tape was shown to a New York Times reporter by an Afghan official, who insisted that he not be identified because of the diplomatic implications of the contents.
The suspects described a chain of operations that began with the recruitment of young bombers in the sprawling port city of Karachi. The bombers were moved to safe houses in the border towns of Quetta and Chaman, and then into Afghanistan, where they were provided with cars and explosives and sent into the streets to find a target.
The attacks have killed at least 70 people, mostly civilians but also international peacekeepers, a Canadian diplomat and a dozen Afghan police officers and soldiers. There have been 15 attacks in Kandahar, a tense city that had been the base for the Taliban.
A Taliban spokesman, Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, dismissed the claims.
"This is a propaganda campaign of the government," he said, speaking by satellite telephone from an unknown location. "Our mujahedeen don't send one group to one area so they can be found and arrested. Our mujahedeen send different people to different areas at different times."
He added that there was no need to recruit Pakistanis for the attacks.
"They are all Afghans," he said of the suicide bombers.
But Afghan officials said breaking into the network gave them the proof to demand action from Pakistan.
"I think there is a factory for these bombers," said an Afghan government official, also speaking on the condition of anonymity and saying he had not been authorized to discuss the matter.
President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan is planning a trip to Pakistan to raise the issue with President Pervez Musharraf.
In a televised speech last week, Karzai asked the bombers rhetorically: "If you are the ones blowing yourselves up, why are you making the explosion in front of the police headquarters, where people like you are standing in front getting passports?"
He has spoken of the need to tackle the problem at the source.
Sentiment against Pakistan has been rising in Afghanistan and a popular refrain is that the Taliban could not function without Pakistan's help.
"Most of the attackers are non-Afghans," the governor of Kandahar Province, Asadullah Khaled, said Saturday at a memorial service for 14 victims of the latest bombing. "We have proof, we have prisoners." He added: "We have addresses, we have cassettes."
But Karzai, in his speech last week, also suggested that the recruitment of bombers did not end in Pakistan. He cited the arrest of a man from Mali who is a suspect in a planned attack on a northern provincial governor.
"Who is sending him?" Karzai said. "I don't think African countries are."
Last week, an Iraqi and three Pakistanis from Kashmir were apprehended in Nimruz, a province in the southwest that borders Iran, according to local Afghan officials. Pakistan is not the only country in the region, an American military official in Afghanistan said pointedly.
In the videotaped interviews, the three men who said they were Pakistanis, spoke in Urdu and said they were recruited as bombers. Two, who simply described themselves as Akhtar Ali and Sajjad, said they were recruited by a man named Jamal, who was working for the Taliban, and who they said owned a bookstore in Karachi.
Sajjad, who seemed to be the youngest of the three, said he was from northwestern Pakistan, but had been staying with his brother in Karachi. According to the interviews, Jamal had shown them video cassettes in which Muslim clerics urged listeners to fight a holy war to earn a sure way to paradise.
"I was doing nothing, walking around, playing cricket and football," Sajjad said. "The maulavi sahib," meaning the senior cleric, "talked to me and showed me a cassette, so I got involved. They were talking on the cassettes and telling us to do this and that, telling me to kill Americans."
Ali, who is from Karachi and who looked to be in his mid-20s, sighed as he described how he had received training in fighting five years ago, when the Taliban were in power, by one of the militant Pakistani parties, Harakat ul-Mujahedeen. He did not go to Afghanistan at the time, and the militant parties have greatly restricted their activities now because the Pakistani government has cracked down on them, he said.
It was the Muslim clerics speaking on the cassettes who persuaded him to go, he said.
"I came to Afghanistan to fight jihad,
to be a suicide attacker because I heard from the clerics there that if you fight jihad you would go to paradise," he said. "There are cassettes there and they say: 'There, there is jihad against non-Muslims.'"
The third man, who gave his name as Abdullah, said he came from Peshawar, Pakistan, but was working in Karachi and was recruited by a co-worker named Iqbal.
"Iqbal was talking of fighting against Americans, he was talking of going to fight jihad there," Abdullah said in his interview. "I said I cannot do it. Iqbal persuaded me."
Separately, the three were sent to Quetta, they said in the tapes, and put in touch with an Afghan member of the Taliban, identified as Abdul Hadi.
Sajjad, who made two attempts at a suicide attack, said he stayed in Quetta each time with a man called Farrouqi.
His first attempt was supposed to be in Kabul but was aborted when the man preparing the car with explosives accidentally blew himself up. Before his second trip, he said, a mullah at Farrouqi's house made a video of him saying he was going on a suicide mission.
Sajjad and Akhtar Ali were said to have been arrested in Kandahar, with their Afghan facilitator, Nur ul Baqi, before they reached their safe house.
Abdullah, who seemed a hard man with a direct gaze, said he traveled into Afghanistan and was given shelter for two days and provided with a car filled with explosives and two gas cylinders.
"My other friend told me which button to press," he said.
He was caught by police in a car laden with explosives and tried to detonate the vehicle as police stopped him, the interrogator said on the tape. Abdullah denied trying to detonate the explosives and said he had changed his mind about carrying out the suicide mission after failing to catch up with an American convoy on a bumpy road.
Wearing glasses, a white prayer cap and thin beard, Hafiz Bismillah was the last man to speak on the tape. He said nervously that he was from outside Kandahar, and had brought the bomber, Imran, to his house.
"We knew he was going to do a suicide mission," Bismillah said. "We gave him a place to stay."
The police found 80 mines inside large blue plastic barrels at his house, he said.
Baqi, the Afghan arrested with two of the Pakistani would-be bombers, said on the tapes that he brought four would-be bombers into the country.
"Most of the attackers are Pakistanis - I can tell you 99 percent are Pakistani," he said. He said he had not seen any Arabs coming through.
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan Several suspects held in connection with three months of suicide bombings in southern Afghanistan have said the attacks were organized in Pakistan by members of the former Taliban regime who relied on Pakistani bombers, according to Afghan authorities.
These officials also said the network had encountered little resistance from Pakistani authorities.
Two Afghans and three Pakistanis who had been among 21 people arrested described their roles in interviews that were videotaped by an Afghan interrogator. The tape was shown to a New York Times reporter by an Afghan official, who insisted that he not be identified because of the diplomatic implications of the contents.
The suspects described a chain of operations that began with the recruitment of young bombers in the sprawling port city of Karachi. The bombers were moved to safe houses in the border towns of Quetta and Chaman, and then into Afghanistan, where they were provided with cars and explosives and sent into the streets to find a target.
The attacks have killed at least 70 people, mostly civilians but also international peacekeepers, a Canadian diplomat and a dozen Afghan police officers and soldiers. There have been 15 attacks in Kandahar, a tense city that had been the base for the Taliban.
A Taliban spokesman, Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, dismissed the claims.
"This is a propaganda campaign of the government," he said, speaking by satellite telephone from an unknown location. "Our mujahedeen don't send one group to one area so they can be found and arrested. Our mujahedeen send different people to different areas at different times."
He added that there was no need to recruit Pakistanis for the attacks.
"They are all Afghans," he said of the suicide bombers.
But Afghan officials said breaking into the network gave them the proof to demand action from Pakistan.
"I think there is a factory for these bombers," said an Afghan government
Thursday, 16 February, 2012
Musharraf Knew Osama Was In Abbottabad, Says Former ISI Chief
Islamabad, Feb 16: Former president Pervez Musharraf knew that Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden was hiding in the garrison town of Abbottabad and the Pakistani intelligence itself had made the safe house that sheltered him, a former ISI chief has alleged, according to a media report.
Former CIA official Bruce Riedel quoted ex-ISI chief Gen (retired) Ziauddin Khwaja alias Ziauddin Butt, as saying that Musharraf "knew bin Laden was in Abbottabad".
In an article for The Daily Beast website, Riedel further quoted Butt as saying that bin Laden's safe house in Abbottabad "was made to order" by Brig Ijaz Shah, a former head of the Intelligence Bureau.
"Ziauddin says Ijaz Shah was responsible for setting up bin Laden in Abbottabad, ensuring his safety and keeping him hidden from the outside. And Ziauddin says Musharraf knew all about it," Riedel wrote in the article.
However, Butt told the Geo News channel on Wednesday that he had been misquoted in the article. He did not give details.
US Special Forces killed Osama in a pre-dawn raid on a compound in Abbottabad, located a short distance from the elite Pakistan Military Academy, in May 2011.
Since then, American officials have questioned whether elements in Pakistan's security establishment were aware of bin Laden's presence in the country.
Bin Laden reportedly lived in the walled compound in Abbottabad for five years.
Riedel referred to US suspicions in his article, writing: "Ever since the Navy SEALs found Osama bin Laden hiding in Abbottabad, Pakistan, less than a mile from the country's national military academy, the question haunting American relations with Pakistan has been: who knew he was there?"
Butt was made head of the ISI by former premier Nawaz Sharif and served in the post during 1997-99.
He was the first head of the army's Strategic Plans Division, which controls the nuclear arsenal.
Sharif promoted Butt to the post of army chief in October 1999 when he tried to fire Musharraf. Musharraf then launched a coup that deposed Sharif's government.
Butt spent two years in solitary confinement, was discharged from the army and had his property confiscated. Riedel noted that he thus had "a motive to speak harshly about Musharraf".
Brig (retired) Ijaz Shah, a former ISI bureau head in Lahore, served as chief of the Intelligence Bureau when former premier Benazir Bhutto returned to Pakistan from self-exile in 2007.
Bhutto linked him to an attempt to assassinate her but he denied the charges.
Shah has been closely linked to Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, a British-born Kashmiri terrorist who was imprisoned in India in 1994 for kidnapping three Britons and an American.
Saeed was freed when Pakistani terrorists hijacked an Indian airliner to Kandahar in December 2000. Saeed was part of the plot to kidnap journalist Daniel Pearl and turned himself in to Shah.
Riedel further wrote, "We don't know who was helping hide bin Laden but we need to track them down. If (Musharraf) knew, then he should be questioned by the authorities the next time he sets foot in America".
He added that if American authorities can find who hid bin Laden, "we will probably know who is hiding his successor, Ayman Zawahiri, and the rest of the Al Qaeda gang".
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