Free Republic

Osama bin Laden wants to buy a nuclear weapon on the Russian black market and detonate it in an American city, one of the CIA's top experts on the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks said Friday.

An account by a former CIA official reported by NBC News Tuesday night directly contradicts ex-President Bill Clinton's claim that he gave the CIA standing orders to kill 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden if the opportunity presented itself. Gary Schroen, a former CIA station chief in Pakistan, told NBC's Lisa Myers that the Clinton White House required the CIA to capture bin Laden alive rather than kill him. The directive "reduced the odds from, say, a 50 percent chance down to, say, 25 percent chance that we were going to be able to get him," said Schroen, who was responding...

A secret CIA videotape shows that the Clinton administration had pinpointed the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden a year before the 9/11 attacks, but declined to kill him because of White House orders that he should be taken alive. The video, obtained and broadcast by NBC News, "illustrates an enormous opportunity the Clinton administration had to kill or capture bin Laden," the network reported Tuesday. Images filmed in Afghanistan by CIA Predator Drones show a man clad in white robes who towers over his entourage. [Bin Laden is 6' 5" tall.] The film was shot over Tarnak Farm, the walled...

Using powerful software called Analyst's Notebook that helps to piece together data on criminal and terror networks, U.S. military and intelligence officials are increasingly confident they are narrowing Osama bin Laden's whereabouts, Newsweek reports in the March 15 issue. Key to the search is "accumulated humint," or human intelligence, says one insider. Other officials tell Newsweek that an increasing number of "data points" -- reports of sightings -- have created an ever-clearer picture of bin Laden's area of operation as he appears to shuttle between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Now they've focused that picture to the point where they have been...