Unlike most of al Qaeda’s top operatives, the two of them had been living mainly in Pakistan for most of a decade—Zubaydah in Peshawar in the northwest and KSM in Karachi in the south. Even before the attacks, they had organized a collection of dozens of safe houses throughout Pakistan (they had more than 20 in Karachi alone), many of them operated by jihadi groups like Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan, and Lashkar-e-Taiba.

The militant groups were a classic Pakistani creation. Most originated in the 1980s with full support and funding from the Pakistan spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, ISI, as frontline resistance to India in the disputed territory of Kashmir. Dozens of groups were supported by the ISI as they morphed and splintered over the years, and ISI officers established their training regimens and sat on councils to plan strategy and attacks. Within Pakistan’s urban areas the jihadi network was omnipresent. KSM had cultivated relationships throughout this underground.

After 9/11, the groups became indispensable in organizing the retreat from Afghanistan. KSM’s connections helped al Qaeda fighters regroup in Pakistan by providing money, logistics, safe havens, and a ready army of trustworthy foot soldiers. He was the bridge between the largely Arab al Qaeda leadership and its allies in Pakistan.

KSM was born and raised in Kuwait, but his family was from Pakistan. He spoke the local languages and moved easily among its citizens. His family were members of a tightly bound ethnic group called the Baluch, who live throughout southwestern Pakistan and eastern Iran. KSM used these blood ties to build his own network. Fellow Pakistanis, including some who had also grown up in Kuwait, became his trusted lieutenants and couriers. They transported men, money, and messages throughout the region. They helped operate dozens of safe houses, havens from which al Qaeda could bide its time for future attacks.

A day earlier U.S. President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani met on the sidelines of a nuclear summit in Seoul and pledged to restore ties that have yet to recover from last May’s U.S. raid on Pakistani soil, which resulted in bin Laden’s death. “I welcome the fact that the Parliament of Pakistan is reviewing, after some extensive study, the nature of this relationship,” Obama told journalists at the event. “I think it’s important to get it right. I think it’s important for us to have candid dialogue, to work through these issues.” Gilani seemed amenable to  that hope. “We want stability in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” the prime minister said. “We want to work together with you.”

That won’t be as easy as it might sound. Pakistan’s Parliamentary Committee on National Security is working to establish a new framework for relations between Pakistan and the United States. Today the committee’s head, Sen. Raza Rabbani, announced that the committee would present its recommendations to the National Assembly next week. The committee’s report is likely to  include a demand that America end all drone attacks inside Pakistan in exchange for reopening NATO’s main Afghan supply route, which was shut down in retaliation for the Salala incident. As unattainable as that deal may be, it’s far more realistic than the committee’s earlier demands, which included a civil-nuclear agreement and an arrangement to shift half of NATO’s supply transport to the beleaguered Pakistan Railways. In any case, analysts predict that the committee’s report—however unhelpful—will have little effect on the Pakistani-U.S. peace process.

But how will Washington deal with suspicions that Pakistani intelligence may have helped bin Laden escape justice for nearly 10 years? The belief that the ISI was complicit in hiding him is hardly new—Qadir’s words have been echoed by Pakistani lawmakers, analysts, former soldiers, and even retired CIA officials. Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow in the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center at the Brookings Institution and a regular contributor to The Daily Beast, has argued that the ISI was either complicit or clueless about bin Laden’s whereabouts. “His wives knew how to find him and he directed a global terror empire from his hideouts, ordering murder around the world,” he told me via email. “Until we know which it was—incompetence or partnership—U.S.-Pakistan relations will be haunted by this question.”

Or maybe they won’t. “It is very unlikely that the U.S. will pursue this issue,” says Hasan-Askari Rizvi, an independent political and defense analyst who travels between Pakistan and America. “The major concern right now is restoring the NATO supply lines—not worrying about something that is now ancient history.” Besides, he says, there’s no way to verify Fateh’s claims: “For all we know, she could be lying.” With regard to her testimony, he says it would be in Pakistan’s best interest just to close this chapter and move on. In fact, the police summary ends with an order that she and her five children be deported immediately, since they are residing in Pakistan illegally. In order to avoid further embarrassment and repair its U.S. ties, Islamabad could do worse than follow this advice.

In the weeks and months following 9/11, allegations that Saudi royals supported the suicide hijackers’ plot were investigated extensively by Newsweek and many other media outlets. In its final report, the 9/11 Commission, which is separate from the JICI, found “no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi individuals funded” the 9/11 terrorists.

Lee Hamilton, the former Indiana congressman and vice chairman of the 9/11 Commission, tells The Daily Beast, “We looked quite carefully at [possible Saudi involvement] and even sent investigators over there, and we found no hard evidence of any linkage to the hijackers. At the end of the day, you have to have hard evidence. Having said that, I will also say that despite our thorough investigation, a lot of questions about 9/11 remain unanswered.”

In an interview with The Daily Beast, Graham says, “The three primary questions that remain for me are: what was the extent of involvement by Saudi officials in 9/11, what was their motivation, and why has the U.S. government gone to such lengths to cover it up?”

Graham believes Washington should launch a new investigation that would attempt to answer these questions. He says the 9/11 Commission’s final report does not exonerate the Saudis, and insists that neither the media nor federal law enforcement ever got to the bottom of the plot.

Amal also claims he had a kidney transplant in 2002. The story is vague as to where the operation took place, some accounts say Karachi, others suggest outside of Pakistan. So he was in a hospital somewhere in Pakistan or traveling abroad right when the ISI was supposed to be hot on the chase. Amal suggests that life in the house became more difficult in early 2011, when bin Laden’s eldest wife, a Saudi named Khairiah Saber, arrived in the compound after living in Iran since 2001. Khairiah, along with one of bin Laden’s sons and several of his closest lieutenants, had gone west into Iran after the fall of Kandahar instead of east into Pakistan like most of al Qaeda. After a decade of house arrest, the Iranians let the al Qaeda exiles go in late 2010 under mysterious circumstances. Their release may have been an exchange for an Iranian diplomat al Qaeda had kidnapped or it may have been part of a gradual rapprochement between Tehran and al Qaeda (or both). Apparently, the two ladies did not get along.

The picture that emerges is of a busy household and of a hideout that was well known to the al Qaeda core leadership, enough that the boss’s lost wife could find her way to it.  Other information that has come out in the last month also shows that bin Laden communicated from the hideout with the leadership of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the so-called Army of the Pure that terrorized Mumbai in November 2008, killing six Americans, and with Mullah Omar, the head of the Afghan Taliban, NATO’s main enemy in Afghanistan. Both are very close to the ISI. The head of Lashkar-e-Taiba openly mourned bin Laden after his death and has been traveling around Pakistan since late last year holding massive rallies calling for jihad against America and India. The ISI is sponsoring his campaign. The Taliban also mourned bin Laden’s death last May.

Abbottabad is not your normal Pakistani city. It was founded by Sir James Abbott in January 1853 to be a garrison city for the British East India Co.’s army. It is still a military town. Three regiments call it home, as does Pakistan’s equivalent of West Point, the Kakul Military Academy, which is less than a kilometer from bin Laden’s hideout. It is so well guarded that in 2009 Pakistan held its first ever counterterrorism training exercise with China in Abbottabad because it was super secure. The head of Afghan intelligence has said he told then–Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf in 2006 that his sources believed bin Laden was somewhere near Abbottabad. Musharraf brushed him off. 

In 2007, a former Pakistani ambassador and I were attending a conference in Doha. I asked where the ambassador thought bin Laden was hiding. The ambassador said probably in a safe house built by the ISI inside a military compound. After the SEALs found bin Laden, the country’s biggest English-language newspaper published an op-ed that said that the Army knew he was there for years. So many Pakistanis have suspected ISI complicity for years.

By dusk on April 12—Easter Sunday—SEAL snipers on the fantail of the USS Bainbridge were in position to shoot the pirates. But with the covered lifeboat bobbing on the water, it was still difficult to get clean shots. They attached night-vision scopes to their rifles and waited. At one point, two of the pirates came into plain sight. The sharpshooters could see a third pirate through a window pointing his gun at Captain Phillips. Each sniper fired a single round, and it was over. Three shots, three dead pirates. A SEAL assault team boarded the lifeboat and took Phillips to safety.

Back in the White House, officials quietly celebrated. So much could have gone wrong. For a young president with little experience overseeing military operations, a botched job would have invited charges of fecklessness from Republicans and drawn inevitable comparisons to Jimmy Carter. The generals also expressed relief. “Mr. President, it worked out. But if it hadn’t, it would have been my ass,” one military adviser told Obama. “It would have been our ass,” the president responded.

Ijaz Shah is a colorful character. He has been closely linked to Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, a British-born Kashmiri terrorist who was imprisoned in India in 1994 for kidnapping three British citizens and an American. Saeed was freed when Pakistani terrorists hijacked an Indian airliner to Kandahar, Afghanistan, in December 2000, a plot masterminded by bin Laden and assisted by the ISI and the Afghan Taliban. Saeed was part of the plot two years later to kidnap Daniel Pearl and turned himself in to Brigadier Shah. Musharraf nominated Shah to be ambassador to Australia, but Canberra said no thanks. So he got the intelligence-bureau job.

Former prime minister Benazir Bhutto accused Shah of being behind the attempt to murder her when she returned from exile in late 2007. She was, of course, killed in another attempt later that year. Shah fled to Australia for a time while the situation cooled off.

Without a doubt, Ziauddin has an ax to grind. But he is also well tied in to the Pakistani intelligence world. When he was DG/ISI, he set up a special commando team to find and capture bin Laden with U.S. help. Elite commandos from the Special Services Group, Pakistan’s SEALs, were put on the hunt. Musharraf disbanded the group after he took power.  Ziauddin’s successor at the ISI, Gen. Mahmud Ahmad, refused American requests to go after bin Laden right up to 9/11. Then Musharraf had to fire him because, even after 9/11, he did not want to do anything to bring bin Laden to justice.

We don’t know who was helping hide bin Laden, but we need to track them down. If Mush, as many call him in Pakistan, knew, he should be questioned by the authorities the next time he sets foot in America. The explosive story about him, which was first reported in the must-read Militant Leadership Monitor, is more than an academic issue. If we can find who hid bin Laden, we will probably know who is hiding his successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and the rest of the al Qaeda gang.

Wouldn’t you love to know that someone as solid as Newt Gingrich was behind you when you charged up those stairs? That it was his shifty, pudgy little face under a helmet watching your back? Newt has so many “out of the box” ideas he’d probably call the SEALs back halfway up to canvass a better plan. The panic of the GOP that someone as volatile and unprincipled as Newt might actually get the nomination and take the whole Republican Party down has turned into a full-scale political drama.

The irony is that Mitt Romney would likely be a far more steady president of the right than its fake standard-bearer, Newt. If Romney wins the nomination, he’ll have had to fight his own side so hard he’ll be a captive of the Tea Party for the whole of his first term. “It is possible to imagine,” Peter Boyer writes, “that, if Romney somehow survives the primary battles and defeats Obama in November, the Massachusetts Moderate will govern more closely to the Reagan model than the conservatives now hoping to undo him would ever imagine.”

According to Somalia Report, a Nairobi-based online news service, 11 to 12 aircraft arrived at that airport right about midnight Tuesday, local time. U.S. Special Operations forces secured the airport, with plans to launch the raid between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m. local time. Residents near the site of the attack reported that around 3:30 a.m, U.S. helicopters began engaging the pirates in a gun battle.

U.S. commandos captured six pirates and killed nine others, among them a pirate called Osman Alcohol, though a leading pirate commander was not counted among the dead or captured. No U.S. casualties have been reported.

Circumstances leading to the raid and rescue remain in debate. Danish government officials told Somalia Report that the timing had to do with an illness Ms. Buchanan was suffering, which doctors said they had to treat. Other sources suggest the raid was planned when the pirates moved the hostages and presented an opportunity.

Local sources told Somalia Report that the pirates initially moved the hostages offshore to a ship, the MV Albedo—a Malaysian tanker another group of pirates had seized. The vessel was already holding the two female Spanish aid workers with Medicin Sans Frontiers who Al Shabab reportedly had admitted to kidnapping from Kenya's Dadaab refugee camp, in November, 2011, and sold on to pirates. In addition, the pirates held hostage the ship’s crew of 23.

But many SEALs and other Special Forces types have what is called a metronomic heartbeat, meaning the heart thumps like a metronome, with the beats evenly spaced, not speeding up or slowing down.

And no, we’re not cyborgs.

Our hearts do this, it turns out, because our brains release a higher level of a neurotransmitter called neuropeptide Y (NPY) than most people’s brains do. NPY works as a natural tranquilizer that controls anxiety and buffers the effects of stress hormones like norepinephrine.

Dr. Morgan found that those with metronomic heartbeats perform better than others in survival school, underwater-navigation testing, and close-quarters battle because their systems are able to manage a very elevated degree of stress. Today, HRV is one of the factors used in the selection of SEALs.