Posted on 01/01/2002 9:20:15 AM PST by KQQL
Intercepted phone call: keep sickly Osama off the air.
An intercepted phone call from Iran suggests that Osama bin Laden (news - web sites) is still alive - if not in the best of health.
A senior military official told ABCNEWS the communications, intercepted over the past few days, used a code word for the accused terrorist mastermind, and suggested "you should keep [bin Laden] off of the television. He looks bad, he looks sick and it is demoralizing to his people."
Additional information also indicates that people close to bin Laden are behaving in a way that shows he is still in very much in charge, a U.S. intelligence official said. However, his location is not known. Some reports suggest he fled the Tora Bora mountains during the U.S. bombing campaign of his stronghold there for Pakistan. ABCNEWS has learned that U.S. troops will soon be searching a cave complex north of Tora Bora, on the border with Pakistan, where there are reportedly numerous dead bodies.
But other reports say he is still inside Afghanistan (news - web sites) — and may be hiding with deposed Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar in a mountainous area near Kandahar, where the U.S. troops and Afghan forces were believed to be headed.
Looking for Omar
As revelers rung in the new year, U.S. Marines were launching a mission apparently intended to capture Omar.
In full battle gear, the Marines and at least 4,000 Afghan fighters left Kandahar Monday for the mountains of central Afghanistan, where Omar and up to 3,000 of his die-hard supporters may be holed up.
Interim Afghan Prime Minister Hamid Karzai and Pentagon (news - web sites) officials have confirmed that the mission is under way.
However, Admiral Craig Quigley from Central Command denied reports that Marines are in a hunt for Omar, and said he could not account for pictures of U.S. troops leaving Kandahar on Monday.
Today, however, several hundred Marines "exploited" several locations north of Kandahar, searching compounds they knew were empty for possible intelligence.
Earlier, Afghan sources in the governor's office and the office of the local intelligence chief in Kandahar told ABCNEWS that the governor called together all the local chieftains and commanders, asking each to supply 60 to 100 fighters for the campaign.
His possible location is near the town of Baghran, about 100 miles northwest of Kandahar, in rough, nearly inaccessible mountain country. The area could take several days to reach on foot.
Kandahar intelligence chief Haji Gullalai told Reuters he has asked villagers in neighboring Helmand province to surrender Omar, and that 2,000 fighters were ready to attack the area if he was not turned over.
More Friendly Fire?
In other developments:
Iran refuted a New York Times report that Osama bin Laden had made contact with its agents in the mid-1990s to form an anti-American alliance. "Iran's clear position on the phenomenon of terrorism, the Taliban and the al Qaeda group indisputably proves that such claims and reports are baseless and false," Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told the daily Iran News .
At some 200 vaccination centers across Afghanistan, U.N. officials began an effort to immunize nine million Afghan children against measles in a project it hopes will prevent 35,000 deaths from the disease each year.
Afghan villagers accused the United States of targeting civilians in a second instance, after three bombers hit a village in Paktia province, killing 100 people. However, a military spokesman said the target was a compound used by Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda fighters and their Taliban allies, and that two surface-to-air missiles were fired at the planes during the raid.
President George W. Bush (news - web sites) has appointed Afghan-born Zalmay Khalilzad, a top-ranking Muslim in the U.S. government, as special envoy to Afghanistan.
One U.S. special operation soldier was wounded in the leg after the convoy he was traveling in outside Jalalabad faced gunfire from unspecified assailants, U.S. military officials said.
ABCNEWS' Bill Blakemore in Kandahar, Afghanistan, and Martha Raddatz in Washington contributed to this report.
Two scenarios come to mind.
1. Rumsfeld will have his head on a platter today for leaking this info.
2. Rumsfeld will thank him for a job well done on the disinfo campaign.
When I was a kid it meant "Kiss My A** Hole"
From a current Tejano ;o)
Speaking of "crude PsyOps". :)
WELL PUT! Sums up precisely my behavior, hadn't really noticed it until now. These are sad times, it would be so nice if evil scum such as Osama and Clinton didn't exist, let alone clutter up the bandwidth.
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