I’ve heard that bin laden uses couriers and so forth and rarely uses cell phones. Now it’s one thing for terrorists to be trained in arms and high tech weaponry and so forth, but how can they go up against the intel of the US? How do they even know what we are capable of to avoid doing things that will get them caught? Of course one might say, look at the mafia vs. the FBI. But this is all of the nations best intel systems against a mountain guerilla. This leads to my second question. Can osama bin laden be at all effective as a leader of the terrorist movement during this hideout? The CIA must be monitoring patterns of movement of vehicles that would surely give telltale signs that there is a hub of information coming from/to somewhere.
That mountain guerilla was trained by the CIA. He probably knows at least a couple of things about avoiding disclosure of his location.
I knew i shouldnt have said mountain guerilla
All he has to do is watch CNN or one of the other news networks, “Today, Rangers landed in [name of Afghan town], seizing control … before pushing to the NNE tomorrow night … 14 BlackHawk helos will be used … according to source who does not wish to be named …”
Don’t these news people have ANY concience?
On the other hand… It’s not rocket science. First, we have no human intelligence inside the Taliban. There are two reasons for that - the first was a CIA directive to never recruit agents who had ‘dirty’ backgrounds, and you can thank the American Left for that, because they put immense pressure on the CIA in the last couple of decades.
Second, we can’t install our own agents into the Taliban because it is largely made up of people who already know each other, or are relatives, or are in some other way linked to the people. Also, it’s really hard to convince Americans to take on an incredibly dangerous job that entails living in caves like an animal for a few years.
So without human intelligence, you have to rely on electronic intelligence, and infra-red imaging to locate things. That’s impossible when the communications are done by hand, and the people are living in deep caves.
Then there is the terrain in Afghanistan - imagine the Rocky Mountains, and a handful of men intentionally hiding in it. Hell, when aircraft go down in the rockies we often NEVER find them, even with full search patterns being flown at low altitude by dozens of aircraft (which we can’t do in Afghanistan because of the threat of small arms fire and/or Stinger Missiles).
Finally, terrorist ‘cells’ are designed to isolate the people in them if they are compromised. A leader of one cell might only know the leader of the cell directly above him, and that person only knows the person below him and sometimes not even who the members of his cell are. So if you find and ‘turn’ one of them into a U.S. agent (or torture him or whatever), there’s a limit to how much damage he can do.
Finally, Bin Laden has had seven years to plan a hiding/exit strategy, because he surely knew that the U.S. would come looking for him once those planes hit.
And, he has been on most wanted list for a number of years, and we haven’t been able to find him. And the Russians were unable to find him when he was fighting them. He has a lot of experience and success at avoiding detection.
If anything, I think we underestimate the difficulty of finding this guy. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s still at large 2 years from now.
It certainly didn’t stop them from funding Osama in the 80s.
Who do you think the “sources who do not wish to be named” are? They are Pentagon and/or White House officials, almost certainly. They tell the press exactly what will NOT be harmful to the missions. As an example, nobody in the press knew for sure that ground troops had been used until the Pentagon stated that certain special forces units were beginning to conduct raids, and even then they didn’t tell them where.
The Pentagon is very good at controlling the media and using it as a medium for distribution of misinformation. They got a lot of practice during the Gulf War.