WikiLeaks Threatens Its Own Leakers With $20 Million Penalty

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange now makes his associates sign a draconian nondisclosure agreement that, among other things, asserts that the organization’s huge trove of leaked material is “solely the property of WikiLeaks,” according to a report Wednesday.

“You accept and agree that the information disclosed, or to be disclosed to you pursuant to this agreement is, by its nature, valuable proprietary commercial information,” the agreement reads, “the misuse or unauthorized disclosure of which would be likely to cause us considerable damage.”

The confidentiality agreement (.pdf), revealed by the New Statesman, imposes a penalty of 12 million British pounds– nearly $20 million — on anyone responsible for a significant leak of the organization’s unpublished material. The figure is based on a “typical open-market valuation” of WikiLeaks’ collection, the agreement claims.

Interestingly, the agreement warns that any breach is likely to cause WikiLeaks to lose the “opportunity to sell the information to other news broadcasters and publishers.”

WikiLeaks is not known to have sold any of its leaked material, though Assange has discussed the possibility in the past. The organization announced in 2008 that it was auctioning off early access to thousands of e-mails belonging to a top aide to Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, but the auction ultimately fell apart.

Also protected by the agreement is “the fact and content of this agreement and all newsworthy information relating to the workings of WikiLeaks.”

The New Statesman’s copy is unsigned, so whoever leaked it might be safe from legal action by WikiLeaks.

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WikiLeaks: Julian Assange given peace prize

Julian Assange, the founder of whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks, has been awarded an award “for exceptional courage in pursuit of human rights”.

Mr Assange was given the Sydney Peace Medal at a ceremony at the Frontline Club in central London today.

The Sydney Peace Foundation said that it was making the award to recognise Mr in recognition of the need “for greater transparency and accountability of governments”.

Professor Stuart Rees, director of the foundation, said: “By challenging centuries old practices of government secrecy and by championing people’s right to know, WikiLeaks and Julian Assange have created the potential for a new order in journalism and in the free flow of information.”

Speaking at the event, Mr Assange referred to whistleblowers as "heroes" and said it appeared the website had played a "significant role" in the recent Arab uprisings in north Africa by releasing US diplomatic cables in December that were later translated into Arabic and French.

He said WikiLeaks was part of England's historic "free speech traditions, these go back in the UK to the time of the English Civil War of the 1640s". He said: “The real value of this award, and the Sydney Peace Foundation is that it makes explicit the link between peace and justice.

“It does not take the safe feel good option of shunning controversy by uttering platitudes. Instead it goes into difficult terrain by identifying organisations and individuals who are directly engaged in struggles of one kind or another.

“With WikiLeaks we are all engaged in a struggle, a generational struggle for a proposition that citizens have a right and a duty to scrutinise the state."

WikiLeaks has caused controversy over the past year by releasing secret US Government documents including reports about detainees held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and hundreds of thousands of US diplomatic cables.

Mr Assange is currently staying in Norfolk while he fights extradition to Sweden over allegations of sexual crimes, which he denies.

telegraph.co.uk

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Fear that U.S. could grab nuclear arsenal heightens Pakistani anger

Last week's U.S. raid into Pakistan is fueling one of the country's most enduring—and potentially dangerous—conspiracy theories: that the U.S. has designs on Pakistan's nuclear arsenal and is prepared to send highly trained commandos into the country to seize control of the weapons.

The pervasive Pakistani belief that the U.S. would be willing and able to effectively steal the country's nuclear weapons helps explain Islamabad's surprisingly aggressive official response to the Navy SEAL assault that killed Osama bin Laden, the world's most wanted terrorist.

Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, the head of Pakistan's armed forces, released a blistering public statement late last week condemning the U.S. assault and warning that he would order his troops to use armed force against any American troops who entered Pakistan in the future in pursuit of other wanted militants.

Kayani's statement also made explicit reference to his country's nuclear arsenal, which he promised to fully defend against any potential American-led efforts to take control of the weapons.

"As regards the possibility of similar hostile action against our strategic assets, the [Pakistani military] reaffirmed that, unlike an undefended civilian compound, our strategic assets are well protected and an elaborate defensive mechanism is in place," Kayani said in a statement put out by the military's official press office.

The remarks stunned and angered many senior Obama administration officials, who had expected Pakistan to apologize for the pervasive intelligence failures that allowed bin Laden to spend five years living in an affluent Islamabad suburb under the nose of thousands of Pakistani security officials. American officials also thought Pakistan would quickly ramp up its intelligence sharing about the whereabouts of bin Laden's likely successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, as part of a package of conciliatory gestures toward Washington, where anti-Pakistani sentiment is running at a fever pitch. Democratic Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said his staff would investigate whether elements of Pakistan's government, military, or intelligence service knew bin Laden was in their country or helped shelter him.

(U.S. and Pakistan play up ties amid popular distrust)

"I think at high levels—high levels being the intelligence service—at high levels they knew it," Levin told ABC News last week. "I can't prove it. I just think it's counterintuitive not to."

The Pakistani paranoia about the future of its nuclear arsenal is threatening to deal a new blow to the already troubled relationship between Washington and Islamabad.

Pakistan is a country consumed by conspiracy theories, mainly having to do with allegations of nefarious plots by Israel, the U.S., and India. Pakistani newspapers regularly publish breathless "scoops" about American plans to build large military bases inside the country or about so-called "Indo-Zionist" plots by Israel and India to damage Pakistan's fragile economy or weaken its currency.

But few of the purported plots have endured as long—or become as widely held across diverse swaths of Pakistani society—as the belief that the U.S. has been secretly preparing to fly commandos into Pakistan one day to seize its nuclear weapons. Pakistan is believed to have as many as 100 nuclear warheads, and the conspiracy theorists believe the U.S. will one day try to take the weapons to prevent them from falling into militant hands or being used against India.

"It's one of those conspiracy theories that has been around for a long, long time," Wendy Chamberlin, a former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, said in an interview. "My belief is that the Pakistani armed forces spread the rumor to drum up anti-American sentiment so they can gain leverage with the U.S. by saying, 'Look, our people hate you, and we're the only effective interlocutors you have.'"

Publicly, the Pakistani military has consistently told the U.S. that its nuclear weapons were safely out of the reach of the country's Islamic militants while assuring its own people that Pakistani forces could defend the weapons if American forces made any effort to capture them.

(Obama: Bin Laden likely had a 'support network')

But the ease with which elite U.S. forces jammed Pakistan's advanced air defense systems and mounted a precision operation deep inside Pakistani territory is eroding the Pakistani military's standing in the eyes of its own people and raising new questions there about whether the U.S. could one day mount a similar push to grab Pakistan's nuclear weapons.

"If Americans can attack here, they can do it anywhere," a 23-year-old medical student named Tahirullah told a reporter from The Dawn, an English-language Pakistani newspaper, last week. "This is a shameful incident for us. Our army should have shot down the U.S. choppers."

The leader of Pakistan's leading opposition party, meanwhile, said Pakistan's civilian government should resign for failing to protect the country's sovereignty from being breached by U.S. troops.

"Are we going to be the 52nd state of the U.S.?" Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan told reporters in Islamabad. "Is the world's seventh nuclear power so weak that it can't keep four helicopters from breaking the country's sovereignty?"

Chamberlin, who currently serves as the president of the Middle East Institute in Washington, said relations between the two countries were "at a crisis point" that would only improve if Pakistani leaders toned down their criticism of the U.S., pointing out that American drones had killed numerous high-ranking militants who regularly targeted Pakistani civilians.

"They need to start to change the narrative," she said. "We can't give them this kind of $3 billion a year and get this kind of crap in response."

But persuading Pakistanis to abandon their long-held mistrust of the U.S. is certain to be easier said than done. During a trip to Pakistan last summer, Defense Secretary Robert Gates faced hostile questioning from a journalist from the country's Express 24/7 television station, Quatrina Hosain, who said conspiracy theories about U.S. plots to seize Pakistan's nuclear weapons had taken "on the hue or the coloring of being real" because the American government hadn't formally shot them down. Gates told her there were no such plans and that rumors to the contrary were "all nonsense."

But the questions didn't go away then. The day after his TV interview, Gates told a crowd of stony-faced senior Pakistani military officers at the country's National Defence University that the he wanted to tell them "definitively" that the U.S. had "no desire to control Pakistan's nuclear weapons." Several of the officers shook their heads or rolled their eyes at the remark. With the U.S. demonstrating an ability to do precisely what those officers most feared—easily penetrate their country's allegedly sophisticated defenses without being spotted—the conspiracy theories about alleged American designs on Pakistan's nuclear weapons won't disappear anytime soon.

Visit National Journal for more political news.

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Bin Laden’s Secret Life in a Diminished, Dark World

WASHINGTON — The world’s most wanted terrorist lived his last five years imprisoned behind the barbed wire and high walls of his home in Abbottabad, Pakistan, his days consumed by dark arts and domesticity.

American officials believe that Osama bin Laden spent many hours on the computer, relying on couriers to bring him thumb drives packed with information from the outside world.

Videos seized from Bin Laden’s compound and released by the Obama administration on Saturday showed him wrapped in an old blanket watching himself on TV, like an aging actor imagining a comeback. A senior intelligence official said other videos showed him practicing and flubbing his lines in front of a camera. He was interested enough in his image, the official said, to dye his white beard black for the recordings.

His once-large entourage of Arab bodyguards was down to one trusted Pakistani courier and the courier’s brother, who also had the job of buying goats, sheep and Coca-Cola for the household. While his physical world had shrunk to two indoor rooms and daily pacing in his courtyard, Bin Laden was still revered at home — by his three wives, by his children and by the tight, interconnected circle of loyalists in the compound.

He did not do chores or tend to the cows and water buffalo on the south side of the compound like the other men. The household, American officials figure, knew how important it was for him to devote his time to Al Qaeda, the terrorist organization he founded and was still actively running at the time of his death.

American officials say there is much they do not know about the last years of Bin Laden, who was shot dead by Navy Seal commandos last Monday in his third-floor bedroom, and the peculiar life of the compound. But what has emerged so far, in interviews with United States and Pakistani military and intelligence officials and Bin Laden’s neighbors in the middle-class hamlet where he had been hiding, is a portrait of an isolated man, perhaps a little bored, presiding over family life while plotting mayhem — still desperate to be heard, intent on outsize influence, musing in his handwritten notebooks about killing more Americans.

“My father would not look forward to staying indoors month after month, because he is a man who loves everything about nature,” Omar bin Laden, a son of Bin Laden, said in an e-mail message in 2009. “But if I were to say what he would need to survive, I would say food and water. He would go inward and occupy himself with his mind.”

Abbottabad, a scenic hill cantonment for the British Raj and later home to the elite military academy that is Pakistan’s West Point, became the Bin Laden family base in late 2005. Their large compound, in a new neighborhood on the outskirts of town, is now the most photographed house in the country, with stories spilling forth from astonished neighbors. Bin Laden, who was the tall man C.I.A. officers watched pacing the courtyard from a surveillance post nearby, never went out. The neighbors knew the family as Arshad Khan and Tariq Khan, the aliases of the trusted courier and his brother. The courier also went by the name Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti.

The Khans seemed pleasant enough, but they kept to themselves behind their 12-foot concrete walls and barbed wire, neighbors said. They never invited anyone in or went to others’ homes, although they did go to prayers in the mosque and funerals in the neighborhood. The women left the compound only with their husbands in a car, and covered in black burqas. The children rarely played outside. When neighborhood boys playing in the fields let a ball fly into the compound by mistake, the Khans gave them 50 rupees, less than a dollar, to buy a new one rather than let them in to retrieve it.

“We thought maybe they had killed someone back in their village or something like that and were therefore very cautious,” said a neighbor, an engineer who identified himself as Zaheer.

The brothers, both in their 30s, had two cars, a red Suzuki van and a white Suzuki jeep, and paid double the daily wage (about $2.40) to laborers who worked on the house as it was being built in 2004. They offered various explanations to the neighbors about their comparative wealth, once saying they had a hotel in Dubai or that they worked in the money-changing business. They were Pashtuns from Charsadda, in Pakistan’s northwest frontier.

“They never told us why they came here,” said Naheed Abassi, 21, a driver and farm laborer who said he had worked on construction of the house. The courier and his brother, both killed in the raid, were sons of a man Bin Laden had known for decades. A Bin Laden son, Khalid, who lived in the home and was also killed, was married to a sister of the Khans, Pakistani officials said.

Little is known about how Bin Laden, believed to be 54, managed his relationships with his three wives. (Islam traditionally allows a man to have four wives.) On the night he was killed, Bin Laden was in his bedroom with his youngest wife, Amal Ahmed Abdulfattah, whose Yemeni passport shows her to be 29, a quarter-century Bin Laden’s junior.

This wife was apparently the one shot by commandos in the leg as she rushed them in an effort to protect her husband. American officials said there were also children in the bedroom; Pakistani intelligence officers, in reports that have not been verified by American officials, said a 12-year-old girl told them that she was a daughter of Bin Laden and that she saw the Americans shoot him. There was one woman killed in the raid, caught in cross-fire when the commandos killed the courier. A retired Pakistani intelligence officer, Brig. Asa Munir, said the woman was an Arab doctor. 

There were nine children in the household, but it remained unclear how many belonged to Bin Laden and his son and how many to the courier and his brother. Neighbors say the courier and his brother had seven children between them, and so there was no great surprise when Pakistanis found remedies for children’s ear infections, colds and coughs. According to NBC News, the Pakistanis also found Avena syrup, an extract of wild oats that can be taken for an upset stomach but is also sold as an aphrodisiac.

Contrary to a widely held belief that Bin Laden was on dialysis to treat a kidney ailment, Pakistani investigators said last week that his youngest wife told them he was healthy. “He was neither weak nor frail,” one of the investigator quoted the wife as saying. She told them, they said, that Bin Laden had recovered from two kidney operations a decade or more ago in southern Afghanistan, in part by using homemade remedies, including watermelon.

¶ Although American intelligence analysts are just beginning to pore over a huge trove of computer files, storage devices and cellphones that the commandos recovered from the compound, they were eager to release the new videos, five in all, on Saturday. They said they did not know when the video of Bin Laden watching himself on television had been recorded, but since there is a brief image of President Obama flickering on the screen, it appears to have been made in the compound sometime after January 2009, when Mr. Obama was inaugurated.

¶ Another of the videos, all of which were provided without sound, showed what an intelligence official said was Bin Laden speaking in a “message to the American people” that condemned the United States and capitalism. The official said the video had been recorded between Oct. 9 and Nov. 5, 2010.

¶ American officials assume that during the last five years, Bin Laden recorded about a half-dozen audio messages a year from inside the house. The messages were meant for dissemination to the outside world, but to avoid detection, Bin Laden had no Internet, e-mail or phone lines that he could use to send them.

¶ Instead, the audio files were evidently stored on a CD or tiny thumb drive and passed from courier to courier until they reached As Sahab, Al Qaeda’s media arm. There they would usually be combined with still images of Bin Laden, subtitled translations, quotations from the Koran and other embellishments. The finished product would be uploaded to jihadist Web forums and occasionally delivered to Al Jazeera or other broadcasters.

¶ The messages, the only glimpse the world had of Bin Laden’s thinking while he lived inside the compound, suggest not just a firebrand calling for mass murder — a staple of most of the recordings — but a man, perhaps stifled by monotony, attuned to the news and sometimes attracted to unexpected subjects. It is not known if he had a radio in the house, but his son Omar, who lived with him in Afghanistan until 1999, described his father as constantly listening to the BBC.

¶ In October, when American intelligence was close on the trail of the courier and spy satellites were taking detailed photographs of the house, Bin Laden issued two audio statements urging help for victims of floods in Pakistan. “We are in need of a big change in the method of relief work because the number of victims is great due to climate changes in modern times,” he said.

¶ In 2007, he complained that Democratic control of Congress had not ended the war in Iraq, a fact he attributed to the pernicious influence of “big corporations.” In other messages he commented on the writings of Noam Chomsky, the leftist professor at M.I.T., and praised former President Jimmy Carter’s book supporting Palestinian rights.

¶ Although the couriers who handed off the thumb drives were outside electronic detection, that did not extend to Al Qaeda’s No. 3, who needed a cellphone and e-mail to carry out plans and give orders to more than one person. As a result, Al Qaeda’s third-in-commands had short life expectancies, the fodder of wry jokes in the counterterrorism field. Two No. 3s were killed around the time Bin Laden lived in the compound — Hamza Rabia in December 2005 and Mustafa Abu al-Yazid in 2010.

¶ Congressional officials said they were struck by how Bin Laden’s low-profile, low-tech lifestyle protected him but might have also hastened his death. Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat who serves on the Armed Services Committee, said that the lack of a large entourage was obviously intended to attract as little attention as possible.

¶ “If you had 25 18-year-olds with guns, then not only would the C.I.A. notice, but so would the Pakistani military,” Mr. Reed said.

¶ But he said he was also struck that Bin Laden was not prepared for the kind of attack the commandos carried out. “There was no escape route, no tunnels, not even false rooms in the house in which to hide,” he said. “It makes you wonder: at what point did that extra degree of vigilance he had get dulled by routine?”

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Anwar Al-Awlaki Targeted In United States Drone Strike

The U.S. launched a drone strike in Yemen on Thursday aimed at killing Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born radical cleric suspected of orchestrating terrorist attacks in the U.S, but he evaded the missile, Yemeni and U.S. officials said.

The attack came days after a U.S. Navy SEALs team killed Osama bin Laden at a compound in Pakistan. Had Thursday's strike succeeded, the U.S. would have killed two of the most-wanted terrorists in a week.

Mr. Awlaki has emerged as a leading charismatic front-man of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a group the U.S. considers the world's most active terror organization. With bin Laden's death, some officials believe Mr. Awlaki and the Yemen-based group now represent the gravest threat to the U.S. 

He has been linked to at least three major incidents: the Ft. Hood shootings, the Christmas 2009 plot to blow up a U.S.-bound passenger plane and a plan to blow up cargo planes.

The attack appears to be unrelated to intelligence information taken in the raid that killed bin Laden, whose death was confirmed by al Qaeda Friday in a statement that vowed to continue attacks on Americans. 

The Central Intelligence Agency has been ramping up its intelligence collection in Yemen in recent months and works closely with Saudi intelligence.

Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh has been more forthcoming with information on Mr. Awlaki since the president has faced major protests in his country, a U.S. official said. Mr. Saleh has sought to use that information in an effort to gain more U.S. support, the official added. The White House has backed an Arab proposal that would ease Mr. Saleh from office.

The Yemen strike sends a clear message that despite turmoil in the Middle East and the success of the bin Laden operation, the U.S. is resolved to ratchet up a campaign against Mr. Awlaki and other members of his group.

The attempt to kill Mr. Awlaki was the first known U.S. military strike inside Yemen since May 2010, when U.S. missiles mistakenly killed one of Mr. Saleh's envoys and an unknown number of other people. That soured relations and prompted the administration to pull back.

U.S. strikes between December 2009 and May 2010 were carried out by U.S. military aircraft and cruise missiles, not the kind of armed drones used in Thursday's attack. The last known strike by an unmanned aircraft in Yemen was conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency in 2002.

According to a Yemeni account of Thursday's strike, the U.S. launched two separate attacks within 45 minutes aimed at Mr. Awlaki in the southern province of Shebwa, which is considered an AQAP stronghold.

The strike was conducted by the U.S. military, but the operation—like the bin Laden raid—appears to have benefitted from close cooperation between the Department of Defense, the CIA and Yemeni officials.

In the first strike, the U.S. fired three rockets at a pickup truck in which Mr. Awlaki and a Saudi national and suspected al Qaeda member were traveling outside the village of Jahwa, located some 20 miles away from the Shebwa provincial capital, said local residents and the Yemeni security official. Those missiles didn't hit their target.

Two Yemeni brothers, who were known by local residents for giving shelter to al Qaeda militants, rushed to the scene of the attack. Mr. Awlaki switched vehicles with them, leaving the two Yemenis in the pickup. A single drone then hit the pickup truck, killing the Yemenis inside.

Mr. Awlaki escaped in the other vehicle along with the Saudi. A Yemeni defense ministry official identified the two dead men as Musaid Mubarak Al-Daghari and his brother Abdullah.Unlike the bin Laden raid, which was carried out without Pakistani knowledge, the Yemeni government was a participant.

"The Yemeni government gave the U.S. authorities vital details of Awlaki's whereabouts in Shabwa days ago," said a senior Yemeni security official. The official said the Yemeni government had full knowledge of the attack ahead of the U.S. strike.

U.S. counterterrorism officials have been worried in recent weeks that the unrest in Yemen, and Mr. Saleh's increasingly weak position, had given a free hand to AQAP to plot fresh attacks against the West.

In the past several weeks, more than half of the U.S.-trained and funded Yemeni counter-terrorism forces assigned to Shebwa have left their posts. Many have been ordered to redploy in the capital, where Mr. Saleh has been besieged by thousands of protesters and army units which have defected from his command.

The timing of the Awlaki attack appears to be a calculated move by the Yemeni president to prove his counter-terrorism credentials to international allies like America and Saudi Arabia, which have been involved in intense diplomatic negotiations to get him to step down from office.

Mr. Awlaki has been on the run from Yemeni authorities since the failed Christmas 2009 underwear bomber attempted to blow up a U.S.-bound passenger plane. He was living under the protection of his extended tribe and regional intelligence officials have criticized what they have seen as a lack of resolve by Yemeni security officials to pursue Mr. Awlaki.

The Yemeni security official said Friday that his government believed that Awlaki had been hiding in Abdan village for approximately two weeks. The official said that the Yemeni government shared this intelligence with their U.S. counterparts on Wednesday.

U.S. officials say finding Mr. Awlaki and other senior AQAP leaders has proven difficult. The U.S. lacks a robust intelligence network on the ground and the U.S.-born cleric has ditched electronic communications in favor of hard-to-track couriers to relay messages, officials said.

The U.S. campaign in Yemen has been led by the U.S. military's Central Command, but the CIA has been providing intelligence and other support.

Mr. Awlaki came to prominence in 2009 due to his role as Internet-based spiritual guide aiding the radicalization of a new generation of Islamist extremists.

He isn't the head of AQAP, but U.S. officials say Mr. Awlaki has assumed an operational leadership role in the terror group. Army Maj. Nidal Hasan, who is accused of killing 13 people in a November 2009 shooting rampage at Fort Hood Texas, corresponded with Mr. Awlaki before his attack.

The U.S. added Mr. Awlaki to the CIA's target list after AQAP's failed attempt a month later to blow up a U.S.-bound passenger airliner.

Part of Mr. Awlaki's appeal, say U.S. officials and terrorism experts, is his ability to act as a bridge between the mainly Arab leaders of al Qaeda and willing potential jihadists in the West.

Born in New Mexico, he preached at a mosque in Northern Virginia until 2002, when he left the U.S. to spend time building a following in the U.K., before returning to Yemen in 2004.

Yemen authorities, at the behest of the U.S. arrested him, but then released him in December 2007 saying they did not have enough evidence to hold him.

—Siobhan Gorman contributed to this article.

The Yemen strike sends a clear message that despite turmoil in the Middle East and the success of the bin Laden operation, the U.S. is resolved to ratchet up a campaign against Mr. Awlaki and other members of his group.

The attempt to kill Mr. Awlaki was the first known U.S. military strike inside Yemen since May 2010, when U.S. missiles mistakenly killed one of Mr. Saleh's envoys and an unknown number of other people. That soured relations and prompted the administration to pull back.

U.S. strikes between December 2009 and May 2010 were carried out by U.S. military aircraft and cruise missiles, not the kind of armed drones used in Thursday's attack. The last known strike by an unmanned aircraft in Yemen was conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency in 2002.

According to a Yemeni account of Thursday's strike, the U.S. launched two separate attacks within 45 minutes aimed at Mr. Awlaki in the southern province of Shebwa, which is considered an AQAP stronghold.

The strike was conducted by the U.S. military, but the operation—like the bin Laden raid—appears to have benefitted from close cooperation between the Department of Defense, the CIA and Yemeni officials.

In the first strike, the U.S. fired three rockets at a pickup truck in which Mr. Awlaki and a Saudi national and suspected al Qaeda member were traveling outside the village of Jahwa, located some 20 miles away from the Shebwa provincial capital, said local residents and the Yemeni security official. Those missiles didn't hit their target.

Two Yemeni brothers, who were known by local residents for giving shelter to al Qaeda militants, rushed to the scene of the attack. Mr. Awlaki switched vehicles with them, leaving the two Yemenis in the pickup. A single drone then hit the pickup truck, killing the Yemenis inside.

Mr. Awlaki escaped in the other vehicle along with the Saudi. A Yemeni defense ministry official identified the two dead men as Musaid Mubarak Al-Daghari and his brother Abdullah.Unlike the bin Laden raid, which was carried out without Pakistani knowledge, the Yemeni government was a participant.

"The Yemeni government gave the U.S. authorities vital details of Awlaki's whereabouts in Shabwa days ago," said a senior Yemeni security official. The official said the Yemeni government had full knowledge of the attack ahead of the U.S. strike.

U.S. counterterrorism officials have been worried in recent weeks that the unrest in Yemen, and Mr. Saleh's increasingly weak position, had given a free hand to AQAP to plot fresh attacks against the West.

In the past several weeks, more than half of the U.S.-trained and funded Yemeni counter-terrorism forces assigned to Shebwa have left their posts. Many have been ordered to redploy in the capital, where Mr. Saleh has been besieged by thousands of protesters and army units which have defected from his command.

The timing of the Awlaki attack appears to be a calculated move by the Yemeni president to prove his counter-terrorism credentials to international allies like America and Saudi Arabia, which have been involved in intense diplomatic negotiations to get him to step down from office.

Mr. Awlaki has been on the run from Yemeni authorities since the failed Christmas 2009 underwear bomber attempted to blow up a U.S.-bound passenger plane. He was living under the protection of his extended tribe and regional intelligence officials have criticized what they have seen as a lack of resolve by Yemeni security officials to pursue Mr. Awlaki.

The Yemeni security official said Friday that his government believed that Awlaki had been hiding in Abdan village for approximately two weeks. The official said that the Yemeni government shared this intelligence with their U.S. counterparts on Wednesday.

U.S. officials say finding Mr. Awlaki and other senior AQAP leaders has proven difficult. The U.S. lacks a robust intelligence network on the ground and the U.S.-born cleric has ditched electronic communications in favor of hard-to-track couriers to relay messages, officials said.

The U.S. campaign in Yemen has been led by the U.S. military's Central Command, but the CIA has been providing intelligence and other support.

Mr. Awlaki came to prominence in 2009 due to his role as Internet-based spiritual guide aiding the radicalization of a new generation of Islamist extremists.

He isn't the head of AQAP, but U.S. officials say Mr. Awlaki has assumed an operational leadership role in the terror group. Army Maj. Nidal Hasan, who is accused of killing 13 people in a November 2009 shooting rampage at Fort Hood Texas, corresponded with Mr. Awlaki before his attack.

The U.S. added Mr. Awlaki to the CIA's target list after AQAP's failed attempt a month later to blow up a U.S.-bound passenger airliner.

Part of Mr. Awlaki's appeal, say U.S. officials and terrorism experts, is his ability to act as a bridge between the mainly Arab leaders of al Qaeda and willing potential jihadists in the West.

Born in New Mexico, he preached at a mosque in Northern Virginia until 2002, when he left the U.S. to spend time building a following in the U.K., before returning to Yemen in 2004.

Yemen authorities, at the behest of the U.S. arrested him, but then released him in December 2007 saying they did not have enough evidence to hold him.

—Siobhan Gorman contributed to this article.

online.wsj.com

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Taliban unmoved by death of bin Laden

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — The world, and the United States in particular, has breathed its sigh of relief. Osama bin Laden is dead.

But victory can be fleeting. And as such, still looming over the heads of American military leaders is what might be an even bigger challenge — the Taliban.

Security analysts said that the death of the world’s most-wanted man would have little effect on the Taliban in either Pakistan or neighboring Afghanistan, where the United States has been fighting the Taliban for more than a decade.

And although bin Laden’s death might help smooth the way for an eventual diplomatic solution and a quicker withdrawal of foreign troops, analysts said that such a reality remains a long way off, which is evident by the spring offensive that both the United States and the Taliban are now gearing up for.

“Bin Laden’s death is a big blow to global terrorism, and it will certainly damage Al Qaeda’s spirit. But there are dim chances of any kind of negative impact on the Taliban insurgency,” said Rahimullah Yusufzai, a Peshawar-based expert on Afghanistan who interviewed the slain Al Qaeda leader twice.

Besides deep roots in rural Afghanistan, there are various other factors — which Al Qaeda has always lacked — that have helped the Taliban belittle the world’s largest military for more than a decade.

“The Taliban insurgency is an indigenous movement that did not depend on Al Qaeda. In fact, Al Qaeda was, and still is, dependent on the Taliban in Afghanistan,” he said.

The Taliban itself, although skeptical that bin Laden was actually killed, shrugged off the idea that his death would have any effect on their fight against the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan.

Zabiullah Mojahed, a Taliban spokesman, said that the insurgency never relied on bin Laden or Al Qaeda.

“We still have no reason to believe that bin Laden is dead because America has not provided any cogent proof to prove its claim,” Zabiullah told GlobalPost. But, he said, even if bin Laden was dead, there would be no negative impact “because our struggle is a national struggle, which will continue until the ouster of the occupying forces from the Islamic Emirates of Afghanistan.”

Zabiullah said that thousands of Taliban fighters were ready to launch “Operation Badr,” the planned summer offensive by the Taliban against U.S.-led forces.

“Karzai and U.S. officials, instead of warning us, should get ready to face Operation Badr,” Zabiullah said, referring to Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s earlier warning to Taliban leader Mullah Omar that he should learn from bin Laden’s demise and stop fighting.

Despite all the rhetoric, some analysts said the death of bin Laden could eventually help set the stage for the two parties to reach a peace agreement.

“Bin Laden was a big hurdle in any kind of settlement between the U.S. and the Taliban,” Yusufzai said, referring to the U.S. condition for peace that the Taliban disassociate itself from Al Qaeda.

Reaching any diplomatic solution, however, is unlikely to be easy or happen in the near future. The Taliban have ratcheted up their attacks in recent weeks and appear to have infiltrated the Afghan security forces that the United States has been spending so much time and money to train to ensure the future stability of the country.

Most recently a gunman opened fire in Kabul’s airport, killing nine people on April 27. The Taliban immediately said the act was carried out by one of their own, a sleeper agent named Azizullah.

This was only the latest in a series of incidents where men in military uniform have opened fire on NATO personnel. Five troops were killed in Jalalabad on April 16, another two in Faryab at the beginning of the month.

The Defense Ministry was attacked on April 18 by another would-be assassin dressed in army fatigues and the Kandahar police chief was assassinated by a suicide bomber in a police uniform on April 15. On April 25, the Taliban staged a brazen escape from Sarposa prison, in Kandahar, in what many say could only have been a plot planned and executed with high-level government or military involvement.

And so the situation on the ground appears to be steadily deteriorating. The Taliban claim that they have dozens of sleeper agents inside the armed forces which, true or not, is sowing fear and suspicion among military men and women, both Afghan and international.

“Although peace seems more possible after bin Laden’s elimination, the realities on the ground suggest something very different,” said Hamid Mir, an Islamabad-based analyst, and incidentally the last journalist to interview bin Laden in 2001 in Jalalabad.

Mir, however, agreed that bin Laden’s death could be a good step in the direction toward peace and toward U.S. President Barack Obama’s plan to withdraw troops.

“The Taliban are upset about bin Laden’s death, particularly that the United States threw his body into the sea, which they consider un-Islamic and humiliating,” he said. “But they do not seem to be overly shattered.”

READ MORE - Taliban unmoved by death of bin Laden

Canada Liberal leader Ignatieff quits after election

PM Stephen Harper's Conservative Party took 167 seats to win a majority government in Monday's election.

The New Democratic Party (NDP) became the official opposition by claiming 102 seats, while the Liberals took 34.

The election marks the worst defeat in the history of the Liberal Party.

Mr Ignatieff said on Tuesday that Conservative attack ads, which made use of the more than 30 years Mr Ignatieff lived in Europe and the US, had a large impact on the outcome of the election.

"My attachment to the country, my patriotism were questioned, my motivations were questioned and that had a political effect, there's no doubt about that, but I have to also take my responsibilities," Mr Ignatieff said.

The Liberal Party dropped from 77 seats to 34 in the House of Commons, with Mr Ignatieff even losing his own seat in a suburb of the city of Toronto.

The election marks the first time in Canadian history the Liberal Party did not finish either first or second.

Mr Harper, meanwhile, pledged he would not shift his party to the right in light of it having won its first parliamentary majority.

"We got that mandate because the way we have governed and Canadians expect us to continue to move forward in the same way," he said.

Conservatives won 167 of the 308 electoral districts, earning 40% of the vote and 54% of the seats in parliament, Elections Canada reported.

US President Barack Obama called Mr Harper to congratulate him on the victory, the White House said.

"The president said he looked forward to continuing his close cooperation with the prime minister," the White House said in a statement.

Mr Obama renewed his commitment to cross-border co-operation on trade, customs enforcement and security, the White House said.

Mr Harper, who took office in 2006, has previously won two elections but never before led a majority government.

Monday's vote was Canada's fourth general election in seven years.

Mr Harper went into the election having headed two successive minority Conservative governments since 2006. His party held 143 seats in the House of Commons prior to the dissolution of the last government.

Analysts say the prime minister has slowly nudged the country further to the right during his five-year tenure.

He has lowered sales and corporate taxes, avoided signing climate change legislation and become a stark advocate of Arctic sovereignty.

He has also increased military spending and extended Canada's military mission in Afghanistan.
New Democratic gains

NDP leader Jack Layton jubilantly greeted his supporters in Toronto on Monday evening.

"Spring is here, my friends, and a new chapter begins," Mr Layton said.

The NDP went into the election with 36 seats, compared with 77 for the Liberals and 143 for the Conservatives.

The separatist Bloc Quebecois, which seeks independence for the predominantly French-speaking Canadian province of Quebec, suffered heavy losses, retaining only four seats out of the 47 seats it previously held.

Its leader, Giles Duceppe, lost his own seat and resigned as party head.

In a historic first, Green Party leader Elizabeth May won her seat in British Columbia, becoming the first Green to be elected to the House of Commons.

Mr Harper's government was forced into an election after a no-confidence vote in parliament.

It was found to be in contempt of parliament because of its failure to disclose the full costs of anti-crime programmes, corporate tax cuts and plans to purchase stealth fighter jets from the US.

READ MORE - Canada Liberal leader Ignatieff quits after election