No, thank you for reading it.
Perhaps "bounty" fits better the reasoning of Paul:
It's tempting to give him the benefit of that doubt, but the State Department had already placed a $50M bounty on Bin Laden's head before Paul proposed this letters of marque notion.
As far as Paul's idea that Western intelligence is unable to penetrate Al-Qaeda, all I have to say is that an American teenager named John Walker Lindh was able to get from a high school in Marin County, CA to a madrassah in Yemen to a madrassah in Islamabad to a training camp near Kandahar where he physically came within yards of Bin Laden.
All in a space of about 20 months.
Lindh was a complete outsider before he got involved - there is no reason why a CIA operative shouldn't be able to do that.
I don’t know.
Lindh got close, but he believed in the jihad cause. Hard to fake that.
But even assuming you could fake the fervor, to kill Bin laden, you’d have to sacrifice your own life, probably.
That came later.
Apparently it was only at 20 million as of 10/10/2001:
MR. BOUCHER;...Now, we have received additional funding to pay those $5 million rewards. So we just got, I think, some $20 million to support this program out of the emergency funding. So if four people come forward, we can pay each of them up to $5 million. We have the money available.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_ponn/is_200110/ai_2984794109/pg_2
Your main point stands, though. Bin laden had at least a $5 million bounty on him for "information" going back to 1998. Paul should have addressed that, and argued for the superiority of LM&R vs bounties.