The Australian

September 10, 2006

FIVE years after the Sptember 11, 2001, attacks, the trail of their chief mastermind, Al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden, has gone cold, The Washington Post has reported on its website.

The newspaper said US commandos, whose job is to capture or kill bin Laden, have not received a credible lead in more than two years.

Nothing from the vast US intelligence world - no tips from informants, no snippets from electronic intercepts, no points on any satellite image - has led them anywhere near the Al-Qaeda leader, the report said, citing unnamed US and Pakistani officials.

“The handful of assets we have have given us nothing close to real-time intelligence” that could have led to his capture, The Post quotes one of the officials as saying.

Bin Laden is believed to be hiding in the northern reaches of the autonomous tribal region along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

Following a request from President George W. Bush to “flood the zone,” the CIA has sharply increased the number of intelligence officers and assets devoted to his pursuit, the newspaper reported.

The problem, former and current counterterrorism officials say, is that no one is certain where the “zone” is.

“Here you’ve got a guy who’s gone off the net and is hiding in some of the most formidable terrain in one of the most remote parts of the world surrounded by people he trusts implicitly,” the Post quoted T. McCreary, a spokesman for the National Counterterrorism Center, as saying. “And he stays off the net and is probably not mobile. That’s an extremely difficult problem.”

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Doin’ a heckuva job there Bushie…  I can see why that 30’something-percent can be so proud of you.