Afghanistan recaptures 65 inmates; hundreds at large after escape
Monday's breakout was the second at the prison in the past three years: As many as 1,000 inmates escaped in 2008.
April 26th, 2011
10:40 AM ET

Afghanistan recaptures 65 inmates; hundreds at large after escape

Afghan authorities said Tuesday they have recaptured 65 of the more than 400 inmates who slipped out of a southern Afghanistan prison a day earlier through a nearly quarter-mile tunnel dug beneath the compound.

A massive search operation continues to find the others - many of them insurgent fighters, said the Kandahar governor's office.

The Taliban issued a statement taking responsibility for the escape from the prison in Kandahar, the Taliban's birthplace. Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahed said digging the tunnel took five months. The escape took four and a half hours, he said.

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Filed under: Daily Developments • Taliban
April 26th, 2011
09:12 AM ET

What the latest WikiLeaks release reveals about bin Laden

WikiLeaks' latest release is classified military documents that detail information obtained from Guantanamo detainees. What do they reveal about Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda?

Documents describe bin Laden's moves

MoreĀ about WikiLeaks

CNN's national security analyst Peter Bergen, author of "The Longest War," weighs in on what the WikiLeaks documents reveal about bin Laden that the world didn't know a few days ago. Here's an edited transcript:

I think we have a little bit better sense of where he was in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.

I think overall, these WikiLeaks documents about Guantanamo remind me a little bit of the WikiLeaks documents we had about Afghanistan and Pakistan from the U.S. military. They don't really add anything seismic to our general understanding of what happened. They're filling in details. They will be very interesting for future historians.

These are not top-secret documents. They're secret. So they're not the crown jewels. The fact that bin Laden was hard up for cash I think is pretty interesting, but that sort of accords with something we already knew, that bin Laden didn't have millions of dollars when he was in Afghanistan. Even though he's the son of a billionaire, money was tight during this time period.

It's interesting now we have confirmation that the operational commander of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was watching these events unfold live on TV in Karachi, Pakistan. But again I think that's something, if we didn't know for a fact, we certainly probably thought was true already.


Filed under: Osama bin Laden • WikiLeaks