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You ask a lot of good questions, and I am grateful to say that I am not in a position to be able to provide authoritative answers to any of them. However, there are some general principles you can apply when attempting to understand how intelligence operations, and the War on Terrorism in general, are run.

First and foremost, you never let your enemy know how much you know. If they know that, they can effectively predict what you'll do next, and that usually means you'll be defeated. It is best to have your enemy think you're incompetent and stupid, because they will then take actions, based on that assumption, that will fail. That's the reason why most people think the CIA is incompetent: because the CIA wants us to think they're incompetent. Our President's enemies think he's an idiot, and he deliberately cultivates that sentiment, to their eternal dismay. In fact, the CIA and President Bush are very far from being incompetent, but the illusion holds, to their continuing advantage.

Second, you don't let your enemy know what you're doing. That means not issuing a press release when you conduct operations. If you have Al Jazeera staked out, their mail being intercepted, their phones tapped, sniffers on their networks, tracking devices on their cars and bicycles, keystroke loggers in their computers, bugs and cameras in their offices, all these things in their homes and restaurants where they eat, your own personnel in their staff, etc, YOU DON'T ADVERTISE IT. If you and I knew about these things, then Al Jazeera and Al Qaeda would as well, and would take steps to remove these assets. That is one reason why we will let some terrorists get away, rather than compromise "sources and methods". The cost should never exceed the benefit

Which brings us to why we haven't caught some terrorists (and sympathizers), and even let some others go "back into the wild". Think of a terrorist group like an ant colony. If you just kill some ants, more will replace them. But if you kill the queen, the colony dies. So you follow the ant trail back to the nest, but the queen is deeply concealed (perhaps inside a kitchen wall behind your custom cabinets) and hard to kill directly. So you give the worker ants some poisoned bait, and let them carry it into the nest.

It may take more time and patience to do this than to just kill some workers, and all the while they're rummaging through your kitchen cabinets, but the end result is no more queen, no more ant colony, and no more ants. An alternative, tearing out the cabinets and the wall to get the queen, may be quicker, but not necessarily a better solution.

The truth is that if the leaders of Al Qaeda, its affiliated groups and its spiritual and financial sponsors actually knew what they were up against, they would know true despair. As it is, they are not enjoying care-free lives. They are in constant fear -- terror, if you will -- and know that betrayal, capture or death can come at any time, from any direction.

Also, don't make the mistake of thinking Osama is our ultimate target. He's just one part of a much larger problem. There are many terrorist colonies, each with their own queens. We want them all, including their oil-rich benefactors and spiritual leaders, and we will get them all, too.

Have faith. We will win, but only if we're more patient and persistent than our enemies. And they are very patient, and very persistent.