30 years after, scars of Falklands war remain visible

tant, was given rare access to transcripts of Pakistani intelligence’s interrogation of al-sada and access to other documents on Bin-laden’s movements. He provided the AP with details in a recent interview.

The details of Bin Laden’s life as a fugitive—which were first published by the Pakistani newspaper Dawn—raise fresh questions over how Bin Laden was able to remain undetected for so long in Pakistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, despite being the subject of a massive international manhunt.

Yet a senior US official, who is familiar with the contents recovered in Bin Laden’s Abbot- tabad house, said there was no evidence that Pakistani officials were aware of Bin Laden’s presence. “There was no smoking gun. We didn’t find anything,” he said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the contents of the Abbottabad house

According to the interrogation report, Bin Laden lived in five safe houses and fathered four children—the two youngest born in a public hospital in Abbotabad. But investigators have only located the houses in Abbottabad and Haripur.

Al-sada’s descriptions of the homes have been vague and the Haripur house was found only after a series of hits and misses.

She knew only that it was located on the edge of Haripur, it was two stories and it had a basement. It apparently was used by Bin Laden while he waited for construction crews to finish his new home Abbottabad, a garrison town just 30 kilometers away.

Investigators scoured the area looking for properties until they found the Haripur house in Naseem Town, a chaotic suburb where relatively affluent houses bump up against sun-baked mud huts that belong to nomadic Afghans. STANLEY, Falkland Islands— Thirty years after Argentina and Britain spilled blood over these remote islands in the South Atlantic, the scars of war are still being scratched raw.

Argentina’s occupation of the islands it claims as “Las Malvinas” lasted just 74 days, but the trauma extends well beyond the families of the 907 people killed.

Islanders still live among land mines the Argentines planted; only light-footed penguins can step onto the beautiful white-sand beach just outside town where troops came ashore on April 2, 1982. Islanders still feel they need an extensive military garrison, with warships and a nuclear submarine circling somewhere in the deep, to protect them from their Latin American neighbor.

Arriving planes and cruise ships make some islanders worry whether Argentines on board will make trouble. Each day they steel themselves for news of another attempt to isolate them economically and diplomatically, part of the Argentine government’s intensifying campaign to pressure Britain to concede sovereignty.

Islanders will turn out for a march by the Falkland Islands Defense Force on Sunday, re- membering the day their local militia mobilized just ahead of the invasion, while Argentines hold vigil at their Monument to the Fallen, in Ushuaia, capital of the country’s southernmost province. On Monday, President Cristina Fernandez will be in Ushuaia as well, leading rallies nationwide that honor the veterans as heroes and press her country’s claim.

“Although 30 years is quite a while, on the other hand it’s yesterday. As soon as you start making threats all that comes back again. It makes people nervous, it puts people on edge. We don’t believe they’ll use military force, but the other things they are doing aren’t helpful,” said Tony Smith, an islander who gives tours and laments the hardening positions on both sides. “Nearly every Argentine I’ve met has been perfectly all right,” he says.

Argentines also see themselves as victims. Many focus their anger on Britain’s historical role as the world’s leading colonial power, even though the islands are no longer a colony, and blame the 1982 war on the military junta that led Argentina at the time, even though taking the islands by force had considerable popular support.

Polls show most remain convinced that “Las Malvinas” have always been Argentine, and are cheered by President Cristina Fernandez’s current campaign. But looking deeper can be painful because her nationalist speeches only seem to push the islands farther from reach.

“It’s a very emotional subject for us. We still teach our children that the Malvinas are Argentine. I still hope they will be,” said Marcelo Pozzo, 49, who was a 19-year-old conscript sailor when he survived the sinking of the Argentine Navy’s light cruiser General Belgrano by British torpedoes.

“We don’t know what the presidency is trying to accom- plish,” said Pozzo. “It should be trying to build ties, but the islanders don’t want to be close to Argentina. They want to live in peace.”

For Pozzo and other Argentine war veterans, emotions are even more complicated because they were drafted by a military focused on eliminating leftist “subversives” at home, then sent into a war they were unprepared for. Soldiers were abused by their own officers during the occupation, sometimes left nearly starving as supplies rotted on the docks, or freezing in foxholes in clothes meant for northern Argentina’s subtropics.