Newsweek Splashes "Hunt For Bin Laden" Expose

[rodeodance]

Newsweek Splashes "Hunt For Bin Laden" Expose

Newsweek | August 26, 2007 at 01:11 PM
Read More: Osama bin Laden

The Americans were getting close. It was early in the winter of 2004-05, and Osama bin Laden and his entourage were holed up in a mountain hideaway along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Suddenly, a sentry, posted several kilometers away, spotted a patrol of U.S. soldiers who seemed to be heading straight for bin Laden's redoubt. The sentry radioed an alert, and word quickly passed among the Qaeda leader's 40-odd bodyguards to prepare to remove "the Sheik," as bin Laden is known to his followers, to a fallback position. As Sheik Said, a senior Egyptian Qaeda operative, later told the story, the anxiety level was so high that the bodyguards were close to using the code word to kill bin Laden and commit suicide. According to Said, bin Laden had decreed that he would never be captured. "If there's a 99 percent risk of the Sheik's being captured, he told his men that they should all die and martyr him as well," Said told Omar Farooqi, a Taliban liaison officer to Al Qaeda who spoke to a NEWSWEEK reporter in Afghanistan.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thenewswire/
The secret word was never given. As the Qaeda sentry watched the U.S. troops, the patrol started moving in a different direction. Bin Laden's men later concluded that the soldiers had nearly stumbled on their hideout by accident. (One former U.S. intelligence officer told NEWSWEEK that he was aware of official reporting on this incident.)

And so it has gone for six years. American intelligence officials interviewed by NEWSWEEK ruefully agree that the hunt to find bin Laden has been more a game of chance than good or "actionable" intelligence. Since bin Laden slipped away from Tora Bora in December 2001, U.S. intelligence has never had better than a 50-50 certainty about his whereabouts. "There hasn't been a serious lead on Osama bin Laden since early 2002," says Bruce Riedel, who recently retired as a South Asia expert at the CIA. "What we're doing now is shooting in the dark in outer space. The chances of hitting anything are zero."

* Read Whole Story
* Read or Add Comments

[ck4829]

1. And Republicans say "Catching Osama won't do anything to Al Qaeda"

"As Sheik Said, a senior Egyptian Qaeda operative, later told the story, the anxiety level was so high that the bodyguards were close to using the code word to kill bin Laden and commit suicide."

IF Osama was caught alive by US forces, that may have been the end of Al Qaeda as an organization right there.

[alfredo]

2. There's so many who could take his place, but he is a symbol

to many and will remain so after he dies. Many potential leaders now defer to him instead of taking the helm.

[gratuitous]

3. Wouldn't it have been nice to hear this . . .

Gee, wouldn't it have been nice to hear something about this, some kind of relentless reporting, on the hunt for bin Laden? Instead of the sycophantic echo chamber crap we heard about all during the 2004 and the nonstop crap about what one swift boat veteran who wasn't even on John Kerry's boats had to say about event 35 years previous?

But Americans don't care about or understand all that "political" stuff. They want to be treated to the entertaining horse race and hear Tim and George and Christ and the rest tell us all who they'd rather have a beer with.