Thursday, November 14, 2002

As New Tape Is Evaluated, Bush Calls Qaeda Threat Real

The C.I.A. got the last hard evidence that he was alive in December 2001, when a radio transmission from Tora Bora was intercepted. American analysts said they believed they heard him issuing orders to Qaeda fighters over the radio.

As time had gone by since then without proof that he had escaped the Tora Bora battle, some American counterterrorism experts had begun to conclude that he was dead. Dale Watson, then the F.B.I.'s chief of counterterrorism, said in July he thought Mr. bin Laden was dead; some officers in the military's Special Operations Command also concluded that he had died in Tora Bora.

Even so, C.I.A. officials say the agency has continued to operate on the assumption that he is alive, largely because it has received a series of fragmentary intelligence reports about him. American intelligence officials also say that if other Qaeda leaders and Mr. bin Laden's family knew he was dead, they would betray that knowledge through differences in behavior.

One intelligence official said earlier this year that if Mr. bin Laden was dead, very few people inside Al Qaeda knew it, because the United States was not picking up any credible discussions among Qaeda operatives pointing to his death.

Intelligence officials said today that the C.I.A. still believed he was most likely hiding somewhere along the Afghan-Pakistani border. Officials said they did not believe he had fled to one of Pakistan's major cities. He is believed to be too easily recognizable to risk trying to pass undetected in a major city — especially with a $25 million price on his head.

If it is determined that he is alive, his ability to elude a huge American dragnet for the past year could raise new questions about the effectiveness of the administration's campaign against terrorism. Critics of the military operation in Afghanistan have already complained that American commanders failed to block potential escape routes into Pakistan, thus allowing thousands of Qaeda fighters bottled up in Tora Bora and at other battlefields to flee.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/14/international/14TAPE.html?pagewanted=all&position=top

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