Readers like you keep news free for everyone.
More than 5,000 readers have already pitched in to keep free access to The Journal.
For the price of one cup of coffee each week you can help keep paywalls away.
Readers like you keep news free for everyone.
More than 5,000 readers have already pitched in to keep free access to The Journal.
For the price of one cup of coffee each week you can help keep paywalls away.
HE WORE A cowboy hat, supervised his grandchildren’s playtime and ate chocolate and apples when he needed energy.
The description doesn’t immediately seem to fit but those were some of the daily activities of the world’s most wanted man in the years before he was captured and killed by the US.
A leaked document from Pakistan, published by Al Jazeera, provides a timeline of Osama Bin Laden’s post-9/11 life, as well as minute details of his everyday existence from the day he moved into the ‘Big House’ in Abbottabad.
The Abbottabad Commission was set up by the Pakistani government to examine how American forces could have violated the country’s sovereignty without repercussion and to probe how the Al Qaeda leader was able to live, unnoticed, within its borders for so long.
Here’s just a few things we learned about the man through the report:
The Commission’s report found that a mix of negligence and incompetence by several departments allowed Bin Laden to remain in Pakistan undetected for so many years.
“Either OBL was extremely fortunate to not run into anyone [c]ommitted to doing his job honestly, or there was a complete collapse of local governance,” the document says, adding that there was no excuse for intelligence services.
“Over a period of time, an effective intelligence agency should have been able to contact, infiltrate or co-opt [his support network], and to develop a whole case load of information. Apparently, this was not the case.”
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site