What would the turnips spit out if they catch OBL?
U.S., Pakistan Intensify the Search for Bin Laden
The Debate: To Kill or Capture
"If he's alive and he's moving a lot, we'll get him," Lt. Gen. Daniel K. McNeill, commander of U.S. forces in the Afghanistan, said. (B.k. Bangash -- AP)
By Barton Gellman and Susan Schmidt
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, March 7, 2003; Page A01
U.S. and Pakistani forces have launched a substantial new operation to flush Osama bin Laden from hiding in northwest Pakistan after gleaning fresh leads from Saturday's capture of al Qaeda lieutenant Khalid Sheik Mohammed, according to security officials in Washington and two allied capitals. The intensified hunt, after months of quiet, has revived discussions in the Bush administration on whether to capture or kill the al Qaeda leader if given the choice.
Participants in the pursuit tell the White House they have tantalizing prospects of reaching the goal -- "wanted: dead or alive" -- that President Bush set for bin Laden in the first days after Sept. 11, 2001. It is possible, they said, that Bush may be called upon to choose between those alternatives.
U.S. officials disclosed late yesterday that special operations forces poured into Pakistan's northwest border province Wednesday. One of them said the commanders "think they've got a good lead" and "rushed up there" because of evidence accumulated during and shortly after Mohammed's capture in the Islamabad suburb of Rawalpindi. Though the officials differed on some particulars, they agreed that documentary materials seized in the raid, when collated with previous intelligence, gave fresh impetus to the bin Laden hunt despite Mohammed's best efforts to obscure the trail.
Intelligence analysts have long believed bin Laden is concealed among Pashtun tribal allies along the seam between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The chief of an allied intelligence agency said in an interview that bin Laden and his al Qaeda co-founder, Ayman Zawahiri, "have a lot of money still, and they are spending money" in the border areas, adding: "We have tracked this sometimes. Sometimes bin Laden and Zawahiri are together, sometimes not."
Many officials believe it unlikely that either man can be taken alive. Unlike Mohammed and other al Qaeda lieutenants who were surprised with little protection in private homes, bin Laden travels with well-armed and competent security teams. An authoritative source said the operations orders for a bin Laden takedown call for going in "guns blazing, no restraint -- you're going to blow the security away and blow the protection away."
Attorney General John D. Ashcroft and Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet, among others, oppose any attempt to capture bin Laden alive, according to participants in meetings where they have said so. Among their arguments is that bin Laden is unlikely to know, much less reveal, significant operational details. They predict that his eventual trial and execution, in a military or civilian tribunal, would discomfit Arab and Islamic allies and transform some al Qaeda sympathizers into active recruits.
"They'd rather have a flash event where he's killed rather than a drawn-out event where he's tried," said one person who agrees with the two men and has firsthand knowledge of their views. Two others said the ideal result would be what one of them called a "fade away," a euphemism for killing bin Laden without announcing either his death or those responsible for it. Any disposition of bin Laden risks martyring him in the eyes of supporters, but a second official said that "for our safety, the best thing overall would be if he disappeared."
Dissenters maintain that any such secrecy is implausible and that bin Laden could be more useful alive than dead. "Catching him doesn't end the war on terrorism," an official said. And the United States ought not to foreclose the possibility that under "lengthy interrogation" bin Laden might have "much greater value as a source of intelligence."
In that case, the official said, Bush would have to decide whether and where to prosecute bin Laden. There are available charges in federal court arising from Sept. 11, 2001, and bin Laden has been indicted on murder and other charges in the August 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa. But the Bush administration has made clear for months that it does not intend to bring al Qaeda's leaders to criminal court.
"He'd be the quintessential candidate for a military tribunal," said one advocate of that result. "What is al Qaeda going to do, try to kill us? I do not buy the argument that having him in custody and then trying and executing him is going to lead to more terror than we already have."
The Memorandum of Notification that Bush signed just after Sept. 11, 2001, a top-secret document required when granting authority for covert action, gave the CIA permission to kill bin Laden "but did not preclude his capture," said one person who reviewed it and others who corroborated that account. If Bush has since expressed a preference, or has given explicit orders one way or the other, his directions are not known to participants in the hunt who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Bush has carefully avoided any display of personal interest in bin Laden since the al Qaeda leader's escape from Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan in December 2001. Reviews in and out of the uniformed military described the escape as the most significant failure of the war on terrorism. But a top-ranking adviser said the president's overriding goal is to "cut the head off the snake," and Bush asks for constant updates on the "high value target" lists of terrorists on which bin Laden is first of about 36 men named.
Hundreds of U.S. analysts and operatives at the CIA's Counterterrorism Center have devoted themselves to bin Laden and Zawahiri since Sept. 11, 2001. According to U.S., European and Pakistani intelligence officials, the hunters were far from declaring defeat but had repeatedly been frustrated by information that came too little and too late to exploit.
After 18 months of effort, the search for al Qaeda's top leaders has yielded uneven results. Six have been captured and two killed. It remains controversial among counterterrorism officials whether al Qaeda is replacing its leaders as fast as they are lost, though all of those interviewed exulted in Mohammed's capture.
The house where he was found in Rawalpindi has yielded an "intelligence windfall," an official said. Nearly all of its contents, apparently even innocuous objects, were flown to the United States for forensic analysis by experts from the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and the FBI.
"It's still not apparent how much of what we picked up belonged to him, because it wasn't his house," an official said. But even tiny clues, such as phone numbers and false names, have become meaningful when placed into an al Qaeda database that is among the most voluminous gathered by U.S. intelligence.
The security officials denied recent published reports about Mohammed. The al Qaeda operative's two children, ages 7 and 9, were taken into custody along with all the adults present in a September raid that captured Ramzi Binalshibh, a Mohammed cohort who claims he coordinated the September 2001 attacks. But contrary to one widely disseminated claim, they have not been used as leverage against Mohammed or his family, officials said. "We just gave them to somebody who would take care of them," a U.S. official said.
The officials also denied reports that they have evidence that Mohammed spoke directly to bin Laden in recent days, either by telephone or in person. But they have learned more about his methods of indirect communication, they said.
Though full of praise for Pakistani cooperation, some U.S. officials expressed regret that Pakistan announced Mohammed's capture immediately. "It was somewhat confounding, frankly," a senior security official said. It is good to alarm bin Laden into moving -- to "flush the birds and see what flies," he said, using a duck-hunting analogy. But it would have been better to sift the new evidence in secret first, he said, in order to know where to point the guns.
Before Mohammed's capture, the bin Laden hunt appeared to have stalled. In a recent interview at the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Daniel K. McNeill, who commands U.S. forces in the country, said he could not say with confidence whether bin Laden was in the border region.
"If he's alive and he's moving a lot, we'll get him," he said. "But my view is, if indeed he is alive, he is not moving a sufficient amount to create a signature."
Staff writers Dana Priest, Walter Pincus and Mike Allen in Washington and correspondent Marc Kaufman at Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan, contributed to this report.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
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