Fox News: It was
the Obama administration that sealed the fate of the Pakistani doctor jailed
for helping nail Usama Bin Laden, by divulging key details after the fact and
dooming any chance Shakil Afridi’s cover story could win his freedom, according
to a confidential Pakistani report.
When former Secretary of Defense and ex-CIA Director Leon
Panetta publicly acknowledged Afridi’s role in the ruse which helped the CIA
pinpoint Bin Laden’s presence in an Abbottabad compound, any chance that
Pakistani authorities could help him get out of the country vanished, according
to what some have called Pakistan’s version of the 9/11 Commission, a 357-page
report from an independent body set up to probe the aftermath of the 2011 raid
by Navy SEALs in which the Al Qaeda leader was killed.
“The statement by the U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta,
who was the CIA Director when May 2 happened, confirming the role of Dr. Afridi
in making the U.S. assassination mission a success, rendered much of what
Afridi told the Commission very questionable if not outright lies,” states the
report, which has not been released, but which FoxNews.com has viewed.
Indeed, Panetta and others in the Obama administration were
sharply criticized domestically for discussing the raid and efforts involving Afridi
to obtain DNA from the compound’s occupants by posing as a medical team
offering vaccinations. Nearly five months before Afridi’s sentencing, while the
doctor was being held and interrogated by Pakistan’s shadowy intelligence
agency , Panetta spoke on record in an interview to CBS “60 Minutes” confirming
Afridi’s role in late January 2012. The statements came after Afridi had
testified to the commission, and sharply contradicted his story.
“This was an individual, in fact that helped provide
intelligence, that was very helpful in regards to this operation and he was not
in any way treasonous towards Pakistan,” Panetta told the program in January,
2012, in the first acknowledgement of Afridi’s role.
That prompted the Pakistani commission to conclude in its
report that “Dr. Afridi had been cultivated by the CIA and ultimately used in
its project to assassinate Usama Bin Laden.”
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