Allright! That is good news for their morale as well. Sorry for Portugal, of course.
Osama prefers donkeys to mobiles
AP[ THURSDAY, AUGUST 12, 2004 09:40:30 PM ]
ISLAMABAD: If Osama bin Laden is directing plans for an attack on the United States — as Washington intelligence officials suspect — his instructions are likely coming out of the craggy mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan on the back of a donkey or under the shawl of a villager.
After the arrests of several top lieutenants, bin Laden and his right hand man, Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahri, have learned their lessons well, Pakistani intelligence officials and international terrorism experts say. They don't use satellite or cellular phones, don't trust anyone outside their innermost circle and never come up for air.
Messages from the men likely pass through the hands of many couriers, most of whom have no idea where they originated, before they are turned into e-mails or conveyed by phone calls to other militants.
"If bin Laden wants to convey something, he gives a letter to someone in his circle, who takes it a certain distance and then hands it to someone else, and then someone else until it reaches its final destination.
“Nobody knows who the letter is from except the first person who is one of bin Laden's most trusted men," said a senior Pakistani intelligence official who has been in on his nation's most sensitive counterterror operations.
The US government believes plans for a terror attack are being directed at the most senior levels of the al-Qaida leadership, including bin Laden, a US intelligence official said in July.
How much input the top men have is open to question, but a Pakistani government official said that several captured al-Qaida men have told authorities they received instructions from bin Laden.
"Probably he is alive, and some al-Qaida suspects captured in Pakistan have talked about receiving verbal messages from him through different channels," he said of bin Laden.
The American and Pakistani officials spoke on condition of anonymity. There has been no firm intelligence on bin Laden and al-Zawahri's whereabouts since they slipped away during a US Afghan assault on their mountain hideouts in Tora Bora in late 2001, but they are believed to be hiding in the mountainous no man's land between Pakistan and Afghanistan, protected by deeply conservative tribesmen who share their beliefs.
With the exception of about a half-dozen audio taped messages that the CIA has authenticated as being his voice, there has been virtually no sign of bin Laden since shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
That silence has lent him almost a mythic quality, especially among his followers, but officials say he is still very real, and very dangerous.
The Pakistani intelligence official said one of the best leads came with the arrest of al-Qaida's No. 3 man, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who had a letter on him that he told interrogators he got directly from bin Laden, and which experts authenticated as being in bin Laden's handwriting.
The letter was apparently personal and destined for several of bin Laden's relatives in Iran, the official said.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-812600,curpg-2.cms
Gun lover ping! I see Myrddin already found the thread!
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New Smith&Wesson Revolver
American Handgunner | TEXASPROUD
Posted on 08/12/2004 2:00:36 PM EDT by TEXASPROUD
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1190276/posts?q=1&&page=1#1