French troops had bin Laden in sights (Yahoo)
PARIS (Reuters) – A documentary says French special forces had Osama bin Laden in their sights twice about three years ago but their U.S. superiors never ordered them to fire…
The documentary, due to air next year and seen by Reuters on Tuesday, says the troops could have killed the al Qaeda leader in Afghanistan but the order to shoot never came, possibly because it took too long to request it.
“In 2003 and 2004 we had bin Laden in our sights. The sniper said ‘I have bin Laden’,” an anonymous French soldier is quoted as saying.
The documentary ‘Bin Laden, the failings of a manhunt’ is by journalists Emmanuel Razavi and Eric de Lavarene, who have worked for several major French media outlets in Afghanistan. A cable television channel plans to air the documentary in March.
Razavi said the soldier told them it took roughly two hours for the request to reach the U.S. officers who could authorize it but the anonymous man is also quoted in the documentary as saying: “There was a hesitation in command.” Razavi told Reuters several sources told them the sightings were six months apart and they declined to be more specific.
French armed forces spokesman Christophe Prazuck said “that never happened” when asked about the bin Laden sightings.
Bin Laden, the mastermind behind the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, is believed to be hiding in the mountains along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
France has roughly 200 elite troops operating under U.S. command near Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan. Paris announced on Sunday it was withdrawing them at the start of 2007.
French soldiers say they identified Bin Laden both visually and audio (voice). The first time, they thought that not getting orders from the Americam command came from a communication problem. The second time, they started to wonder…
That raises some questions…
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DUBAI (Reuters) – Al Qaeda’s second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahri said in a video tape aired early Wednesday that Palestinian elections would not free Palestinian land and would deal a blow to holy war against Israeli occupation.
“Those who are trying to free Islamic land through elections that are based on secular constitutions … will not free a grain of Palestinian sand, but will choke jihad,” he said in the tape broadcast by Al Jazeera television.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.".
KABUL (AFP) Dec. 17, 2006 – French Defence Minister Michele Alliot-Marie announced that France would withdraw hundreds of its special forces from Afghanistan within the next few weeks.
France has deployed a total of 2,000 troops in Afghanistan, with the remainder serving in the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).
Seven members of the French special forces have been killed in action in the war-ravaged country, while 12 others have been wounded since their deployment. The French special forces contingent is currently based in eastern Nangarhar province.
Despite being ousted from power, remnants of Taliban and other Islamist allies, including those from Osama bin Laden ‘s Al-Qaeda network, are still waging a bloody insurgency in parts of the country.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."You would think that when deploying elite special forces in these kinds of operations — given the high probability of exactly this kind of communications difficulty even with in current satellite communications age when you’re in rugged territory, operating far from base camp, etc. — that there would be SOME contingency orders laid out in advance. Ie, if the situation comes up that you can accomplish “X” mission, this is where it falls in the list of priorities under your current orders. Contingency plans to cover possible (even if unlikely) alternate mission objectives should already be covered — and obviously if one of the possible mission plans is “take out bin Laden” then as soon as opportunity arises, those contingency plans should either fall into place or not, depending on what those orders would state.
You can’t do this with regular troops, and you obviously can’t cover ALL possible contingencies, but with special forces, who are trained to function in circumstances where original orders get FUBAR (as often happens in the field), it should be possible.
Unless, of course, your central command doesn’t know what the hell it’s doing either. Or the real objective isn’t to get bin Laden, but… uh… something else. In other words, don’t blame the communications gap… I’d look to see just how their mission was defined in the first place and what their orders were.
I always have thought that we let him get away in ToraBora. If we captured him, Bush would not have a boogeyman to instill fear into the sheeple.
This certainly does not bode well for the ABC program that aired just before the election concerning 9/11 now does it??
I heard from a couple of covert sources that we’d had the ability to pick up Bin Laden since shortly after 9/11, and that we deliberately aided his escape from our troops.
I also heard about a documentary filmmaker in Los Angeles who was approached by a guy from the CIA who wanted to make a documentary about the covert following of Bin Laden. Whether it was ever to be shown to the public or not I don’t know. I don’t know if he just wanted to film it for in-house purposes or to get the word out.
I mean, the guy’s on Dialysis. There’s a finite number of spots where you can get treated on the planet, and a much smaller subset where he’s likely to go. If we really wanted him, we could have gotten him by now. I can only assume they want him ‘out there’ for any number of reasons about which I refuse to speculate.
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Originates in Pakistan by Musharraf: two portable dialysis machines exported to Afghanistan.
The CIA knew Osama was at the American Hospital in Dubai.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."From your second link above, quoting a Le Figaro article from 10/2001:
I forgot – another covert guy I know told me in 2004 that one of his CIA buddies had just handed a lot of money to bin Laden. I asked, was that to not attack us again, or as payment for previous efforts? Of course he wouldn’t answer…!
bin-Laden. He is held up as the leader of all world wide terror to a degree more than in a Bond movie. If he is killed, how many will ask why terror has increased? If he is killed, our wonderful leaders will also have no big name to parade as the evil one, and it takes time to create a legend. How would they explain that terror has many different facets and heads and there are many disputes with us that give rise to this? How will they explain that our Middle east Policy and our pro-Israel policy specifically insure terror attacks on us….. etc
Nah it is better for them to leave bin-Laden alive and well. I wonder what they will do when he dies a natural death? Maybe they can keep his myth alive after his death to the grand old age of 130 or something.