Rambo Lives!

[shygye]

An American detained in Pakistan while on a mission to kill Osama bin Laden has been moved to Islamabad and will get dialysis for his failing kidneys, a family spokesman said Thursday.

 

Gary Brooks Faulkner, 50, a construction worker from Greeley, Colo., was detained Sunday in northern Pakistan. Police say he had a pistol, a sword and other gear, and claimed he was out to kill the al-Qaida leader.

[dave32]

Sword? Whaaaaaa??

He's old enough to have seen Indiana Jones. No excuse.

 

pMeooVB3olE

[unit731]

 

Leave it to a Yank !

 

On Tuesday, Pakistan detained an American citizen armed with a dagger, pistol, and night vision goggles. He was allegedly trying to sneak into Afghanistan to hunt and kill al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

 

Californian construction worker Gary Faulkner was caught in the Brumboret Valley near the border of Afghanistan's Nuristan Province.

 

He arrived on June 3rd and went missing from his hotel room last Sunday night.

 

Police said he was detained for roaming in the security zone in a suspicious manner.

 

Two soldiers from the border police found Faulkner sitting on a small boulder in the forest late in the evening.

 

[Fazle Rabi, Border Police Soldier]:

"When we reached this place, he was sitting here (on the boulder). He stood up and did this (making lunging gesture towards boulder). We rushed towards him and saw the dagger and the sword lying there. I tried to grab the sword and he looked at me with great anger.â€Â

 

Faulkner had visited the region seven times in the past few years.

 

[Musa Shahideen, Hotel Owner’s Son]:

“He stayed here until the 8th of June and then went to Peshawar for treatment. He came back after getting treatment in hospital there. He had a problem with both kidneys and had become very weak."

 

A senior police investigator says Faulkner was hunting bin Laden because he suffered personal losses in the September 11, 2001 attacks.

 

The Daily Dawn newspaper says Faulkner acknowledged to police that he wanted to (quote), "decapitate Osama bin Laden."

 

If confirmed, this would mark one of the first instances of an American entering Pakistan and Afghanistan on his own to fight against al Qaeda and other militants.

 

[USVirgin]

I love these wannabe American heroes! I really do...the world needs more of them.

 

Not the same one who swam across a lake to reach Suu Kyi, is it?

[Nervous God]

<>

 

Against how many who joined?

[chuckwoww]

Getting OBL is a job for professionals. Dog the Bounty Hunter would be the man to send. His wife would look great in a burqa.

[dave32]

Catching Bin Laden is moot. He's already set as a hero to the extremists that wish for the decline of the West and his power seems to have become more symbolic than literal. Perhaps his growing impotence is worth more than making him a martyr. Maybe not.

 

Personally, I don't think our guys should be in Afghanistan. I respect those that feel otherwise, but I can't see anything good long-term coming from it.

[shygye]

... a secure opium supply for our addicts.

[unit731]

Look, without real nut cases, where would this board be?

[dave32]

Interesting.

Link

 

Inside Gary Faulkner's Hunt for Osama Bin Laden

 

By TIM MCGIRK – Sun Jun 20, 1:10 am ET

 

How close did Gary Faulkner, the shaggy Colorado construction worker arrested in Pakistan on Sunday, come to tracking down his prey, Osama bin Laden in the mountains along the Afghan border? Very close, according to his brother, Scott, a physician in Fort Morgan, Col. Scott says that during his last two visits to Pakistan, wanna-be bounty hunter Faulkner had located a cave on an 18,000 ft mountain where he saw "a bearded man in a white robe speaking on a walkie-talkie".

 

The 52-year old American was arrested in a forest in northwestern Pakistan while trying to cross into Afghanistan's wooded Nuristan province, a known lair of Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters. Police thought he was joking about hunting bin-Laden until they searched Faulkner and found a pistol, a 40-inch sword, a dagger, a pair of handcuffs, a small chunk of hashish, and Christian literature (presumably for his own inspiration rather than to convert the al-Qaeda leader). "I was surprised to hear that Gary had been caught in a forest," his brother told TIME. "Everything Gary had told me about this cave was that it was on a barren, high mountain with no trees. Maybe he found out that bin-Laden had moved on."

 

Having spent from 2001-2006 in the region as TIME's Bureau Chief hunting for bin-Laden like thousands of other soldiers, mercenaries and reporters, I have to admit: I was impressed by Faulkner's ingenuity. Here was a self-taught terrorist tracker, a backwoods MacGyver. He had no military training, no knowledge of spycraft, and no language skills other than a few words in Urdu. He had a criminal record. And Faulkner was no indestructible Rambo: He also had a kidney disease and needs regular dialysis.(His target, bin Laden is also rumored to be suffering from a kidney ailment, though this has never been proven.) Still, Faulkner claims to have managed six journeys to Pakistan, eluding the secret police and the thousands of jihadis who would have happily lopped off the American's head with his own over-sized sword. There are, of course, grounds for skepticism about his story.

 

Even wearing the traditional Pakistani salwar kameez tunic and baggy trousers and sporting his prodigiously woolly beard, there are a thousand things that would have tipped off Pashtun tribesmen that Faulkner was no local on walkabout in the Hindu Kush. His faulty Urdu would have been a give-away since the tribesmen in these mountains speak a complex language known as Pashtu. His trendy glasses, his sturdy American boots in a land where men wear sandals, and the fact that he ignores the Muslim call to prayer would have all exposed him in an instant.

 

Had Faulkner confided to anyone that his mission was capturing bin-Laden, he would have been immediately beset by a horde of rascals and con-men either eager to turn him over to the Pakistani secret police or to fleece him out of his cash in a wild goose chase. That has happened several times to me, and to every other reporter I know who has tried to penetrate the tribal borderlands, which the Pakistani government has declared off-limits to foreigners unless they have special permits - which are seldom granted.

 

If it is, in fact, true that on a previous visit Faulkner did see a man with a walkie-talkie in a cave on top of some 18,000 ft mountain in Pakistan, why didn't he just notify the CIA or the Pentagon and collect the $50 million reward? "No way," says his brother. "They would have told him to cease and desist, and Gary wasn't going to do that. He had this passion about finding Osama. And Gary isn't like you or me. Because of his faith, he lived in a spirit free from fear."

 

Scott drove his brother to the airport on May 30, fully aware of his quixotic mission and that he might not see Faulkner again. "I needed to know if this was a suicide mission," he says. "Gary told me that no, he didn't want to die, but he was prepared to." His brother showed him a pair of plastic handcuffs, proof, says Scott, that Faulkner had every intention of catching bin Laden alive, if he could.

 

When the phone rang in the physician's Fort Morgan home at 4am on June 6, Scott expected it to be from the U.S. embassy in Islamabad telling him that his brother was dead and being shipped home in a body bag. "I was ecstatic to hear that he was alive and okay," Scott told TIME.

 

Faulkner has been quizzed by Pakistani authorities and by medical doctors to determine his mental state. Although Faulkner's solo mission to hunt down bin-Laden may have been hare-brained, there does appear to have been some method to it: If his story pans out, he was at least canny enough to go looking for the al-Qaeda leader in the right places - without being killed or kidnapped.