Quote from AAAintheBeltway:
Like a lot of things in the intelligence community, it's hard to tell how much of this is true. It seems very likely that the crux oif it is true however.
First, it always seemed to me that he was under some form of house arrest. His living conditions were not conducive to running al qaeda. He apparently had little in the way of communications gear. This could have been the result of pakistan capturing him and not knowing what to do with him, him having some sort of medical emergency that required going to them for assistance or a saudi plot.
It's no secret that plenty of rich saudis finance al qaeda. How high it went in the government is problematic. Since he was trying ultimately to overthrow the royal family, it seems hard to understand why they would shelter him, but arab politics are impenetrable.
A payoff to pakistani military brass to clear the way for the snatch and grab seems reasonable. Either that or they are beyond incompetent, which is also plausible.
One thing that always perplexed me was why they killed him on the spot, rather than interrogating him. Obama's squeemishness about enhanced interrogation, the threat of reprisals or no tknowing what to do with him all seem to lack much substance, balanced against the chance to grill the world's number one terrorist. Maybe the pakistanis insisted on it as a condition of their help. They didn't want bin ladin spilling the beans about their deal with the saudis.
