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Bin Laden's trail growing cold, US daily says

Five years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the trail of their chief mastermind, al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden, has gone cold, the Washington Post reported on its Web site on Saturday.

However, his henchman Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the "brains" behind the attacks, is a step closer to justice.

Despite a thunderous bombardment of bin Laden's Tora Bora mountain hideout in 2001, a US$27 million bounty and a huge manhunt, Washington has failed to flush out the Saudi millionaire turned al-Qaeda terror mastermind.

Bin Laden's most recent tweak at US pride came on Thursday, when the al-Jazeera network broadcast previously unseen footage of him with several of the Sept. 11 suicide hijackers filmed before the attacks.

His continuing liberty -- possibly in mountainous, lawless areas along the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan, has forced the Bush administration to answer embarrassing questions of how bin Laden evaded the world's most powerful military.

"Well, because he hides," Sec-retary of State Condoleezza Rice said Friday, in an interview with Tribune Broadcasting.

"It's difficult to find a single person if they intend to hide. But from the very beginning, we've understood that the search for Osama Bin Laden was important, but breaking up al-Qaeda was also critical to making this country safer," she said.

On Saturday, the Washington Post said US commandos, whose job is to capture or kill bin Laden, have not received a credible lead in more than two years.

Nothing from the vast US intelligence world -- no tips from informants, no snippets from electronic intercepts, no points on any satellite image -- has led them anywhere near the al-Qaeda leader, the report said, citing unnamed US and Pakistani officials.

"The handful of assets we have have given us nothing close to real-time intelligence" that could have led to his capture, the Post quotes one of the officials as saying.

But Washington said it has captured or killed more than three-quarters of al-Qaeda's leaders and backroom plotters in the Sept. 11 attacks.

Among those the US says are dead is Mohammed Atef, bin Laden's field commander, killed in the US onslaught on Afghanistan after Sept. 11.

The man believed to have choreographed the attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, was arrested in Pakistan, and spent more than three years in a secret CIA prison.

Bush announced this week that KSM, as he is known, and other top al-Qaeda suspects had been transferred to the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and would eventually face some kind of military trial.

Ramzi bin al-Shibh, another Sept. 11 conspirator was among them, along with Abu Zubaydah, described by US officials after his capture in 2002 as a key facilitator for al-Qaeda.

No. 2 on the FBI's wanted list is Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's second-in-command, and an occasional co-star in video propaganda.

Also on the run is Taliban leader Mullah Omar, who late last year called for a new jihad in Afghanistan, and is wanted for harboring al-Qaeda in the months leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks.

But the US celebrated the killing, in an air strike on June 7, of al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, blamed for inciting much of the country's raging insurgency.

Around 450 prisoners are being held at Guantanamo -- some without charges being brought.

Rights lawyers have brought suit on behalf of detainees, many of them picked up as suspected al-Qaeda or Taliban fighters on Afghanistan's battlefields.

Washington has also funneled some al-Qaeda suspects through its legal system.

They include Briton Richard Reid, detained in the US in December 2001, after trying to blow up a transatlantic jet with a bomb hidden in his shoe.

Reid is serving life in prison in a "supermax" security prison in Colorado, also home to would-be al-Qaeda suicide pilot Zacarias Moussaoui, jailed for life in May over the Sept. 11 conspiracy.

Accused al-Qaeda operative Jose Padilla, whom authorities say conspired to detonate a "dirty bomb" on US soil, is in civilian custody, after years in a military brig.

He is charged with conspiracy to murder.
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