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Politics : Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Kerry -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: H-Man who wrote (8037)	3/17/2004 5:55:47 PM
From: The Philosopher	Respond to of 81568

Agree. And agree.

To: H-Man who wrote (8037)	3/17/2004 5:59:32 PM
From: American Spirit	Respond to of 81568

CIA Video Shows U.S. Had Eye on Bin Laden in 2000 By Tabassum Zakaria WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A CIA (news - web sites) video believed to show Osama bin Laden (news - web sites) at an al Qaeda camp has revealed how close the United States got to him long before the Sept. 11 attacks, but the unmanned and unarmed spy plane that shot the film was unable to kill him, a U.S. official said on Wednesday. The videotape of an al Qaeda compound in Afghanistan (news - web sites) known as Tarnak Farms was filmed around September 2000, and shows a very tall, white-clad figure surrounded by several others dressed in darker clothes. The group is too distant to make out faces, but the U.S. government is convinced the man in white was bin Laden. "It was widely believed that that was UBL (bin Laden), believed then, believed now," a U.S. official told Reuters. The video, which was kept secret until it was broadcast by NBC on Tuesday, was made about a year before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on America that killed about 3,000 people and were blamed on al Qaeda. U.S. forces recently have stepped up the hunt for bin Laden, who is believed to be hiding in the rugged and remote border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Clashes this week near Wana, Pakistan, were aimed at al Qaeda and Taliban guerrillas but not because of any evidence that bin Laden was nearby, U.S. officials said. "Those strikes were not aimed at him, they were aimed at other lower level (al Qaeda members)," one U.S. official said. "To my knowledge he's not in anybody's sights," said another. Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity. Predator drones like the pilotless spy plane that shot the film had not been outfitted with missiles at the time the video was taken, but the film played a major role in accelerating the process to arm the drones, a U.S. official said. The U.S. government was testing Predators armed with missiles during the summer of 2001, and after the Sept. 11 attacks the armed drones were used by the CIA in Afghanistan to strike targets for the first time. In February 2002 on a mountain in eastern Afghanistan, a CIA Predator fired on a small group of men that included a very tall figure being treated with deference by the others. The strike led to speculation, later proved wrong, that bin Laden, who is about 6 feet 5 inches tall, had been killed. The capture of bin Laden is a huge political issue ahead of November's presidential elections. Republicans are implying that President Bill Clinton (news - web sites)'s administration dropped the ball by not trying hard enough to catch him, while Democrats say President Bush (news - web sites) diverted crucial resources from the hunt for bin Laden by taking the United States to war in Iraq (news - web sites). In investigation is now under way in Washington to find out who leaked the highly classified video to the news media. In the fall of 2000, when the videotape was made, there were no guarantees that a successful U.S. strike on bin Laden could have been launched quickly enough. Cruise missiles would have taken several hours to reach the target and an air bombing that required flying over reticent countries would also have taken time to organize, U.S. officials and experts said. The United States responded to the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa with a cruise missile strike on al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan. But by the time the missiles arrived, bin Laden was gone. "In 1998 we had good information about where he might be, launched cruise missiles, but by the time the missiles got there he had moved on somewhere," a U.S. official said. Even if bin Laden had been killed at the time the video was taken, there was no way to know whether the Sept. 11 plot a year later could have been disrupted, experts said. "I would guess that the plot may well have gone forward," said Christopher Preble, director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. "I think by the summer of 2000 we were past the magic bullet stage, past the stage where bin Laden's death all by itself would have punctured al Qaeda."