GREENFIELD AT LARGE - Cable News Network February 6, 2002
Where is Osama bin Laden?
KEITH OLBERMANN, HOST: President Bush today said again that America will find Osama bin Laden. What he did not say was how, when or where. Is the failure so far to find him, a failure of intelligence, diplomacy, military tactics? The search for bin Laden, how it's being conducted, prospects for success tonight on GREENFIELD AT LARGE.
I'm Keith Olbermann in for Jeff. After not a single mention of Osama bin Laden during the president's state of the union address, Mr. Bush was talking about him again today. Our attention may get diverted away from him on occasion. Enron, the economy, the Super Bowl, but for just under five months and for the foreseeable, perhaps the unimaginable future, the most focused on thing in the world is Osama bin Laden. So where the hell is he? And if the answer is we don't know, is it because the search results have been bad or because the search planning was bad?
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: There's an old poster out West, as I recall that said "Wanted, dead or alive."
DAVID LETTERMAN: It's the single biggest manhunt in the history of the world.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I don't think he has left Afghanistan.
BUSH: I hadn't heard much from his recently.
PERVEZ MUSHARRAF, PRESIDENT, PAKISTAN: I would give the first party that he's dead.
BUSH: He could be in a cave that has -- that doesn't have an opening to it anymore.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Bin Laden's been hiding in a cave, playing naked twister with Geraldo.
LETTERMAN: People said that they saw Osama bin Laden with some of his buddies have dinner at a restaurant.
BUSH: Don't know where he is.
COLIN POWELL, SECRETARY OF STATE: I assume he is alive because I have no evidence to suggest he is dead.
BUSH: But I will tell you this. We're going to find him.
OLBERMANN: The search may be relentless, but is it hopeless? Three months ago, intelligent sources were confident he was holed up in Kandahar, near the Taliban leader Mohammed Omar. About a week later it was Oruzgan, a central province of Afghanistan. On November 19, the Tora Bora cave complex was pinpointed. Early in December, bin Laden's voice was thought to be heard on short wave radio from there or was it just a tape of him?
Finally in January, he was believed to be at an al Qaeda training camp in Zawar Kili. It looks like we're going to need a bigger map. The ever-present intelligence sources suggested earlier in January in bin Laden had scuttled with two al Qaeda pockets of influence, perhaps in Africa or southeast Asia. And don't forget the transit Pakistan and back to the former head of Saudi intelligence had a statement about the chance that bin Laden stayed put, one that applies equally well to the chance that he didn't
TURKI AL FAISAL, PRINCE, SAUDI ARABIA: When he planned these operations against the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, I'm sure he laid plans for his escape somewhere in Afghanistan. He's had five years to do that.
OLBERMANN: The current operating assumption is he's not dead. And even that is based on extrapolation. "The New York Times" quotes an unnamed American official as saying that if he were, there'd be al Qaeda radio traffic. It would be hard for some of those guys to resist talking about it.
And just in case they contain themselves, we have not. Among the many onerous duties of the special ops groups in the Tora Bora mountains, looking for body parts in hopes of getting a DNA match or perhaps just finding the corpse, a 6 foot, 5 inch corpse.
BUSH: There's no cave deep enough for him to hide. He can run, and he thinks he can hide, but we're not going to give up.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
OLBERMANN: Unfortunately, just because you don't give up does not mean you automatically succeed. Ask Don Quixote. Better still, we're going to ask our panelists, who include tonight Jonathan Weisman, the Pentagon correspondent for "USA Today," who reported today on the difficulties of finding bin Laden. He joins us from Washington. Also joining us is Robert Baer, 21-year veteran of the CIA, author of "See No Evil: the True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA'S War on Terrorism." And also joining us, John Pike, director of Globalsecurity.org and former director military analysis and intelligence resource projects for the Federation of American Scientists.
Mr. Pike, let me start with you. Is it possible that bin Laden has not been found because it's just not an easy thing to do? In other words, it's failure as opposed to malfeasance in some way?
JOHN PIKE, GLOBALSECURITY.ORG: Yeah, I think that that's exactly right. I mean, after all, he's been on the run for nearly a decade now. Afghanistan is a large country. And you think about Afghanistan, well, I mean, the local economy there for the last decade has been predicated on smuggling drugs out, smuggling guns in. The notion that bin Laden would've been able to slip out of the country months ago, I think, is quite believable.
He clearly has friends, associates, scattered around the world. I think that this manhunt is going to prove to be at least as difficult as some of the other domestic manhunts that the FBI has had. You think about how long they looked for the Unabomber? We might be looking for bin Laden for a long time.
OLBERMANN: Mr. Baer, I assume you would agree with the term "failure," but you might attach the additional term "intelligence" before the word "failure?"
ROBERT BAER, FMR. CIA AGENT: It's partially an intelligence failure. The fact is that the CIA, the DIA, no one in the U.S. government had a source in al Qaeda, who could tell us where bin Laden was, which is by definition a failure.
OLBERMANN: Mr. Weisman, your reporting leads you to conclude that it was a mistake and may have contributed to the situation we're in now for the U.S. to have gone first after the Taliban and then after Al Qaeda and bin Laden. Why do you feel that way?
JONATHAN WEISMAN, USA TODAY: Well, let me -- this -- add this caveat, which is that if the United States forces had gone directly after al Qaeda forces, instead of going after the Taliban first, a lot of people think it would've been a much bloodier, much nastier battle. We might have lost a lot of people. And there's still no guarantee that U.S. forces would've gotten bin Laden.
But there's a lot of people now saying that the fact is it took us quite a few months before we actually started really focusing in on al Qaeda. Our first effort was to hook up with Afghan forces fighting the Taliban and get rid of the Taliban. The idea was to drain the swamp. But as one person I talked to said, once we drained the swamp, we found out that bin Laden had just walked away from it.
OLBERMANN: Mr. Pike, with that caveat, do you agree with Mr. Weisman's position? Did the U.S. misorder its priorities in retrospect?
PIKE: Well, I'd have to say in candor, we really don't know what the priorities were. I mean, there's been the war that's been on television, that's mainly been about special operations, green berets, working with local militias.
If you look at the size of the American military presence there, however, I think there's every reason to believe that there's been a war that hasn't been on television with American commandos, Delta teams, going out looking for al Qaeda on their own.
I don't think that it's so much that they put dismantling the Taliban first, as it is that that part of the strategy succeeded a lot more quickly than you might have anticipated. But this other part of the strategy, American forces going directly after al Qaeda, I think that's been going on from the beginning. And I think that they anticipated that was going to be the long frustrating process that it's turned out to be.
WEISMAN: Well, I'm sure that's true. But remember, at the very beginning of this conflict, between September 11 and October 7 when the bombs started falling in Afghanistan, there was some notion that we could negotiate with the Taliban, that the Bush administration could say, "Well, if you guys can turn over bin Laden, if you can help us, maybe we can leave you in power."
Even once the bombing began, there was some notion that there were some kind of moderate forces in the Taliban. Even people who, you know, who are just kind of along for the ride, who weren't exactly with the Taliban in spirit, that these people might be able to take -- to be peeled off.
But once the United States really threw in its lot with the Northern Alliance and really began fighting the Taliban, U.S forces also began fighting the Taliban from top to bottom, hitting as many Taliban installations and outputs as possible. And it really, at that point, became almost impossible to get Taliban sources or even possibly Pakistani sources who had been supporting the Taliban to help us.
And it turned out that the United States needed help.
OLBERMANN: Mr. Baer, come in on this for me. Is that possible that there was a period or an envelope or negotiation? It seemed like the negotiation was give us Osama bin Laden and then we'll talk?
BAER: I don't think there was any possibility for negotiation. These people have been supporting al Qaeda is a very fluid group. They've got support all over the region. And our mistake in starting the war is not putting in blocking forces on the Iranian border, on the Tajik border, and on the Pakistani border, which just left the whole place open for bin Laden and his associates to escape. There was no chance we could've ever caught the guy.
The terrain's too rough. The borders are barely demarcated. And it was doomed to failure from the beginning, especially without good intelligence.
OLBERMANN: Mr. Pike, let me widen this a little bit. There are conflicting views as to whether or not U.S. business is nearly concluded in Afghanistan. Do you think it is or are you hopeful it is or are you not hopeful that it is?
PIKE: Well, at the rate at which they're digging in over there, no. I think that the American presence in Afghanistan is going to continue well into this year. It looks like they're laying the groundwork for a military presence around Afghanistan for the next several years. No, I think that we're just at the beginning of this process very far from the end.
OLBERMANN: Mr. Baer, the Pentagon is now investigating what might be sort of parallel to friendly fire, if you will, at least regarding friendly Afghans and the possibility that misidentified some as harboring al Qaeda or Taliban and they were killed as a result of this.
How does the U.S. prevent getting into more situations like that, that obviously can't be down to anyone's benefit?
BAER: That's the problem. We've got ourselves, I think, into the beginning of a quagmire because we can't trust any of these people. We don't have any allies in Afghanistan. The British learned this in 1842. And it's continued on. These people simply -- Taliban went up in the mountains, changed their turbans and came back down and claimed that they were part of the Northern Alliance or whatever. And it's really going to be hard to sort this out. It's very -- it's a dangerous situation.
OLBERMANN: Mr. Weisman, let me move back to bin Laden. Why didn't the bounty work? It seemed like such an extraordinary offer in an area where money certainly does talk?
WEISMAN: Yes. You know, a lot of people have said that $25 million is actually just unfathomable to an Afghan, you know? And the fact of the matter is that getting al Qaeda was not going to be easy. I mean, these guys were well armed. They were fierce. They really wanted to fight. $25 million might not be enough to lay down your life. And you know, in the United States forces allied themselves with Afghan forces that weren't particularly interested in getting the al Qaeda. These guys wanted to take power from the Taliban. And once they did take power from the Taliban, hey, they gotten basically what they wanted, $25 million or not.
That just, perhaps, wasn't enough to go out and risk your neck for, especially if you don't quite know what $25 million is.
BAER: Let me add something. I was in the CIA for 21 years. And I spent 15 of those years with a $5 million on a Lebanese. And no one ever came forward with a single lead. The money just didn't matter. Those people -- these tight terrorist groups are believers. And money doesn't mean anything to them.
WEISMAN: Mohammed Farrah Aidid in Somalia had quite a big bounty on his head. And remember, in Somalia, the United States had a very large military base in the city of Mogadishu, trying to get a target who was in the city of Mogadishu. And we couldn't do it.
In this case, we had forces, you know, off outside of Afghanistan, trying to get one man in an entire country. This was always going to be an extremely difficult thing to do.
OLBERMANN: All right, gentlemen, stand by. We have to take a break. When we come back, how do Iran and Iraq figure into this equation? And later, what had been an annual, yet almost trivial New York City tradition today suddenly took on great meaning and symbolism.
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(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
RUMSFELD: He's either dead in some tunnel or he's alive. And if he's alive, he's either in Afghanistan or he isn't. And it does not matter. We'll find him one day. And we'll know what's happened.
OLBERMANN: And as we continue to explore the difficulties in finding Osama bin Laden, we're getting help from Washington, where we find "USA Today" Pentagon correspondent Jonathan Weisman, CIA veteran Robert Baer, and John Pike of Globalsecurity.org.
Mr. Baer, you think that bin Laden might be in Pakistan or might be in Iran? Does Iran -- do we sort of back announce why Iran was mentioned in the state of the union address, if that's the case?
BAER: I think the administration is well aware, as has been reported in the newspaper as well, that Iran set up a strategic alliance with bin Laden in the mid 90's. And there's no reason for us to believe this is not continued and that it's in Iran's interest to hide him. So Iran is a definite possibility.
And as far as I've seen, we've seen no cooperation from the Iranians. They're just not helping. They're not inclined to, either.
OLBERMANN: Mr. Pike, they sure seem to have been surprised when President Bush mentioned him in the state of the union address. Is that disingenuousness or have they been caught at something? Or where do you see Iran fitting into this?
PIKE: No, I don't -- I think that that's diplomatic surprise. No, the Clinton administration was certainly taking a hard-line towards Iran. They were trying to, I think, basically divide the Iranian government between the hard-line clerics, which control a lot of the security and foreign policy apparatus from the elected government, which tries -- has tried to take a more moderate tack.
And I think that the big problem that we have in dealing with Iran right now is that the government genuinely divided, that there are different institutions that have different political agendas there. And it's very easy to imagine part -- a segment of the clerics backing some of these terrorist organizations in a way that the elected government wouldn't countenance.
OLBERMANN: Mr. Weisman, Iran said today that if al Qaeda members actually slipped into their country through the soft and porous borders, as Mr. Rumsfeld has suggested might be the case, they would send them back to their native lands, as opposed to turning them over to the coalition or the U.S.
You know, do we have a chicken and an egg thing? Is this an example of state that sponsors terrorism acting or is it being an example of a state that has been accused of sponsoring terrorism, sort of reacting, as opposed to acting?
WEISMAN: Well, I don't think anybody doubts that Iran sponsors terrorism. I mean, Iran backs terrorists and guerrillas in Lebanon and was pretty much caught red handed shipping arms to the Palestinians, just a few weeks ago.
The question is whether or not they back al Qaeda. I mean, one of your guests saying yes. Now the Pentagon, the CIA, everybody says that towards the beginning of the conflict in Afghanistan, a lot of al Qaeda folks got out through Iran. They were smuggling routes through -- outside of western Afghanistan that went right through Iran. There were very old smuggling routes.
But the Bush administration's biggest problem right now in Iran isn't so much al Qaeda, it's that Iran is backing -- is making a lot of mischief in Western Afghanistan, backing warlords who aren't exactly being elite -- pledging allegiance to the central government in Kabul. And you know, creating another situation where Afghanistan might break down into just basic lawlessness and chaos.
That's what happened through much of the 90's, where Iran was backing a lot of the very bloodiest insurgents going after whoever happened to be in power in Kabul. You know, a lot of people have pointed to Iran as an escape route. I have not heard anyone say that the very, very most senior leaders of al Qaeda, like bin Laden, like Ayman Zawahiri, got out that direction.
OLBERMANN: Mr. Baer, let's switch over to Iraq, as we have analyzed Iran's role in this situation. When you were in the CIA, you had a plan. And we certainly had, as a nation, hopes throughout the 90's regarding Saddam Hussein and something to do with him. What was your plan? What was the CIA's hope? And is something still doable there?
BAER: Our hope was to a military coup would occur against Saddam, that would remove him fairly quickly and with avoiding chaos. We came close in 1995. There were some mixed signals. Support from Washington was withdrawn. I think right now it's going to be very difficult to remove Saddam without direct U.S. military intervention. And it's going to have to be in a massive way, which will be much expensive at this point, than it was in 1995.
OLBERMANN: Gentlemen, we're out of time, but the insight has been exceptional. And we thank you all. Jonathan Weisman, Robert Baer, John Pike, thanks to each of you and good night.
Copyright 2002 Cable News Network
