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Col. Jack Jacobs Explains Osama bin Laden Raid And Its Effects On Travel Security

Locations in this article:  London, England Madison, WI

Police SUV - Post-Osama bin Laden Travel Safety & Travel AlertsThe news of Osama bin Laden’s death and the subsequent worldwide travel alert has many wondering if it’s safe to travel.

Always the contrarian traveler, Peter got on the phone with Colonel Jack Jacobs, NBC News military analyst, Medal of Honor recipient, and author of If Not Now, When?, to learn more about the covert operation and the reprocussions for travelers today.

Peter Greenberg: We were all glued to the TV when we learned that the United States Navy SEALS killed Osama bin Laden. Of course, the U.S. Department of State immediately issued a worldwide travel alert. The real question is how does it impact you? First, let’s talk about the operation itself.

Colonel Jack Jacobs: We’ve known that bin Laden has been an object of interest since the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. You’re talking almost 20 years.

PG: We’ve had three presidents who have been looking for him: Clinton, Bush and Obama.

TSA Logo - Bin Laden's Death & The Travel IndustryJJ: Everyone is focusing attention on a wide variety of things, but very few people are talking about the actual decision to do it. It was a pretty gusty decision. There were a quite a few people who recommended to the president, knowing that Osama bin Laden was located where he was, that they just bomb the heck out of it. You could use 2,000-pound bunker busters and sufficient fire power and actually obliterate the area. His concern was less about the collateral damage and more that we wouldn’t have a chance to get the intelligence information. In the end the decision was made to go in there with a team not only to get bin Laden, but primarily to get all this intelligence information. It’s a  goldmine of information.

PG: Right after 9/11, I called up one of my best sources who just retired from the FBI, and asked where he was. He said he was in Delray, Florida. That’s where some of the terrorists from 9/11 were renting apartments. He was one of those cyber guys who got right into the computers and launched an amazing investigation. They were practicing on Microsoft Flight Simulator 2000, and that’s how we were able to figure out how they flew into the buildings.

JJ: Given the ability of information to be distributed in such an efficient way and the glut of information that’s available, smart people can take advantage of it as they did. But this is going to be the downfall of a lot of people who are involved with al-Qaida. You’re going to see a lot of people scrambling for the exits and when they move we’re going to target them. This is going to have the ramifications beyond just getting Osama bin Laden.

PG: The good news is the treasure trove of data that was more than they thought they were going to get.

Learn the latest on travel safety & security with Analyzing Post-9/11 Safety, Security: Airports, Hotels, Trains & Beyond

Greek Riot PoliceJJ: The whole operation took a little more than 40 minutes. A building of that size can be totally cleared in between 2 and 4 minutes. That means about 35 to 40 minutes was spent doing something else. And that something else was taking all that material out of the building: all the hard drives, thumb drives, towers. They got all that stuff out and into the helicopters.

PG: They even had to think so far ahead in terms of what to do with him. I thought it was brilliant that they actually thought this one through. They didn’t want this guy to be a martyr, so they buried him at sea.

JJ: Muslim requirement is that you be buried immediately in ground deep enough so that scavengers won’t get to the body. If, for some reason, it is impossible to get in on the ground, you can bury at sea. You have to be properly shrouded, and you must be weighted down so that he goes all the way to the bottom. There’s video that will probably will eventually be released that will show most of that stuff.

PG: Something tells me they were able to easily find enough weights. What do you think?

JJ: I believe so. The concrete blocks were a dead giveaway. They were prepared for all of this.

PG: They left nothing to chance. I mean they were really detail oriented and they had enough time to literally clean up after themselves.

JJ: This kind of training takes place all the time among special operations people and special forces. You would be astonished at how quickly these organizations can infiltrate a building, quickly take it over, and dispatch anybody inside who is a combatant. They practice this over and over again. In this particular raid, they knew exactly the layout of the building, so they had months to practice its execution.

Find out what might happen to bin Laden’s compound: Could Osama bin Laden’s Pakistani Compound Become Tourist Hotspot?

Help Button - Proper Training Is KeyPG: Do you think in a sense they almost built their own mock-up somewhere else and practiced on that?

JJ: Absolutely. As a matter of fact, you can go down to places like Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and find the mock-ups of similar kinds of buildings that are almost identical to those in Afghanistan. These guys had actual mock-ups of the buildings that they took over.

PG: In this situation, I thought was it quite convenient for the Navy SEALS that this building almost came complete with its own landing zone.

JJ: It certainly did. They were very lucky. If there were no landing zone anywhere near the compound they would have landed and then infiltrated under the cover of darkness and gotten to the building in any case. I have to say it was a very gutsy call on the part of the president to select this surgical but extremely dangerous way to get bin Laden and recover that information. He very easily have selected just to blow it to smithereens, which would have been much safer because you would not have had any troops on the ground. But there wouldn’t have been any intelligence to recover.

PG: It may take a couple of weeks to disseminate just because they got so much information, right?

JJ: There’s tons of it. It has to be translated and then decoded, in many cases. They have to align one bit of information, one hard drive, one thumb drive, with another with data on another. This is going to take quite some time.  It will take months and months before all the information will be organized and digested.

Get the latest updates in our Terrorism & Security section

PG: The State Department, of course, issued new alerts worldwide for Americans traveling abroad. I’m one of those people who believes that as long as you practice some common sense. Approach every country like you would at a railroad crossing—stop, look and listen— and you really shouldn’t be denied your opportunity and your right to travel.

State Department - US Embassy SealJJ: I think there’s no problem traveling anywhere unless the State Department suggest that you don’t travel there. During the first Gulf War, everybody assumed that Saddam Hussein was going to shoot down all the commercial airliners that went anywhere near Southwest Asia. I was with Bankers Trust at the time in London and had a number of clients in the Middle East. I decided that was the perfect time to visit them. I went down to Heathrow, nobody was on the planes, and visited my clients who were all astonished that I would come. I said it was the best time to come. There is more security in places that normally don’t have this level of security.

PG: I totally agree with you. Right after the disruptions in Egypt, so many of my friends said they were going to cancel their trips. I had to use an industrial-strength spatula to drag them to the airport. Four days later they called me, ecstatic. They were having the best time of our lives, they were the only ones at the pyramids, and everyone was happy to see them.

JJ: This is the best time in the world to be traveling around, quite honestly.

PG: To be fair about this there will be some attempts. It’s inevitable for al-Qaida, or someone in al-Qaida’s name, to try another retaliatory event. But the odds are so firmly in your favor you should still go.

Find out: What State Department Travel Advisories Really Mean

JJ: You’re much more likely to get hit by a piano falling on top of you while walking down Madison Avenue. I mean, don’t go hiking in the Hindu Kush, but there are lots of other places that you should go to.

PG: And not only that Jack, I haven’t been getting a lot of phone calls from the Minister of Tourism to Waziristan, in northwest Pakistan.

JJ: I’m not surprised. They need the money.

PG: There are only about four places in the world I wouldn’t go, and those are the places where no one is in control: Somalia, parts of the Congo, some isolated parts of Chechnya, and maybe some parts of New Jersey. I’m kidding. But bottom line if you, who are so close to the intelligence, are telling people they should go, I’m going with you.

JJ: Don’t forget, these attempts would have been made in any case. These guys are not sitting around saying, “We’re not going to do anything until somebody takes out bin Laden.” They’re trying constantly to do things and we’re disrupting them constantly. I don’t think there should be restrictions other than those the State Department talks about.

By Peter Greenberg for Peter Greenberg Worldwide Radio. Check out Colonel Jack Jacob’s book, If Not Now, When? Duty and Sacrifice in America’s Time of Need.

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