CNN Live Today 10:00 AM December 19, 2001
Military Uses High-Tech Gadgets
JUDY WOODRUFF, CNN ANCHOR: Well, from animals helping to find land mines to high-tech. There are a great deal of high-tech gadgets that are being used by the military as it searches the cave network around Tora Bora, Afghanistan, for bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders. Among the gadgets they're using, devices that pick up traces of carbon dioxide. CNN's Steve Young tells us more.
STEVE YOUNG, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): U.S. forces expected to find 50 to 100 caves in Tora Bora. Instead, they found hundreds in which Osama bin Laden could be hiding.
DAVE FULGHUM, AVIATION WEEK & SPACE TECHNOLOGY: One of the things the CIA has said consistently to me since 1991 is that the sales of earth-boring equipment had just skyrocketed for the Middle East. As a matter of fact, that's one of the reasons why bin Laden was there initially, because as a contractor, he was contracting to build and expand that cave network.
YOUNG: Special forces on the ground, and the CIA, will likely be using carbon-dioxide sniffers. Caves don't breath. People breath.
JOHN PIKE, GLOBALSECURITY.ORG: You could be looking at carbon dioxide exhaled from breathing, ammonia and other chemicals from human waste. You might be looking for smoke, other things given off by things that they're using to try to keep warm. Possibly also looking for the cordite from guns that they might have been firing.
ROBERT SHERMAN, FED. OF AMERICAN SCIENTISTS: So the most important technology is probably infrared, that is, heat-sensing. Others are seismic, acoustic, chemical -- smellies, if you will -- possibly magnetic.
YOUNG: Experts say there's evidence that in using precision daisy cutter bombs, care was taken to avoid collapsing tunnel entrances to make it easier to enter and see who might be inside, dead or incapacitated. Bin Laden and top advisers of al Qaeda may or may not have perished underground.
Uncertainty is a long-standing problem of war. For quite some time, there were doubts about whether Hitler died at the end of the second world war. Search technology now being used in Afghanistan resembles the tech tools of the U.S. customs service, drug enforcement, and the border patrol.
(on camera): A lot of people get through with drugs, illegally cross the border. And security experts caution that bin Laden and his confederates might make it into Pakistan to lash out another day.
Steve Young, CNN Financial News, New York.
Copyright 2001 Cable News Network
