The US does not know where al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is and has lacked reliable information on his whereabouts for years, US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates says.
The revelation from Gates, speaking in an interview with ABC News’ This Week program to be aired yesterday, comes days after US President Barack Obama announced he would send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan.
Asked if Pakistan was doing enough to apprehend bin Laden, Gates answered: “Well, we don’t know for a fact where Osama bin Laden is. If we did, we’d go get him.”
Referring to the last time US intelligence had a fix on bin Laden’s whereabouts, Gates said: “I think it’s been years.”
Bin Laden is believed to have escaped from Afghanistan into Pakistan in late 2001.
In excerpts of the interview released ahead of the broadcast, Gates could not confirm reports about a detainee in Pakistan who claimed he had information on where bin Laden was earlier this year.
Part of the US’ reason for going to war more than eight years ago in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks was to kill or capture bin Laden.
The al-Qaeda leader is seen as the chief mastermind of the 2001 attacks in the US that killed nearly 3,000 people.
Immediately after the attacks, US government officials named bin Laden and the al-Qaeda network as the prime suspects and offered a reward of US$25 million for information leading to his capture or death.
In 2007, this figure was doubled to US$50 million. But so far, the al-Qaeda founder has eluded capture.
A US Senate report released last week said bin Laden was “within the grasp” of US forces in late 2001 but escaped because then-defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld rejected calls for reinforcements.
The hard-hitting study points the finger directly at Rumsfeld for turning down requests for reinforcements as bin Laden was trapped in December 2001 in caves and tunnels in a mountainous area of eastern Afghanistan known as Tora Bora.
“The vast array of American military power, from sniper teams to the most mobile divisions of the marine corps and the army, was kept on the sidelines,” the report says. “Instead, the US command chose to rely on airstrikes and untrained Afghan militias to attack bin Laden and on Pakistan’s loosely organized Frontier Corps to seal his escape routes.”
The report, commissioned by Senator John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, says bin Laden expected to die and had even written a will.
“But the al-Qaeda leader would live to fight another day. Fewer than 100 American commandos were on the scene with their Afghan allies and calls for reinforcements to launch an assault were rejected,” it says. “Requests were also turned down for US troops to block the mountain paths leading to sanctuary a few miles away in Pakistan.”
“The decision not to deploy American forces to go after bin Laden or block his escape was made by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his top commander, General Tommy Franks,” the report says.
Taiwan has arranged for about 8 million barrels of crude oil, or about one-third of its monthly needs, to be shipped from the Red Sea this month to bypass the Strait of Hormuz and ease domestic supply pressures, CPC Corp, Taiwan (CPC, 台灣中油) said yesterday. The state-run oil company has worked with Middle Eastern suppliers to secure routes other than the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20 percent of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas typically passes, CPC chairman Fang Jeng-zen (方振仁) said at a meeting of the legislature’s Economics Committee in Taipei. Suppliers in Saudi Arabia have indicated they
A global survey showed that 60 percent of Taiwanese had attained higher education, second only to Canada, the Ministry of the Interior said. Taiwan easily surpassed the global average of 43 percent and ranked ahead of major economies, including Japan, South Korea and the US, data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) for 2024 showed. Taiwan has a high literacy rate, data released by the ministry showed. As of the end of last year, Taiwan had 20.617 million people aged 15 or older, accounting for 88.5 percent of the total population, with a literacy rate of 99.4 percent, the data
CCP ‘PAWN’? Beijing could use the KMT chairwoman’s visit to signal to the world that many people in Taiwan support the ‘one China’ principle, an academic said Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) yesterday arrived in China for a “peace” mission and potential meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), while a Taiwanese minister detailed the number of Chinese warships currently deployed around the nation. Cheng is visiting at a time of increased Chinese military pressure on Taiwan, as the opposition-dominated Legislative Yuan stalls a government plan for US$40 billion in extra defense spending. Speaking to reporters before going to the airport, Cheng said she was going on a “historic journey for peace,” but added that some people felt uneasy about her trip. “If you truly love Taiwan,
NEW LOW: The council in 2024 based predictions on a pessimistic estimate for the nation’s total fertility rate of 0.84, but last year that rate was 0.69, 17 percent lower An expected National Development Council (NDC) report expects the nation’s population to drop below 12 million by 2065, with the old-age dependency ratio to top 100 percent sooner than 2070, sources said yesterday. The council is slated to release its latest population projections in August, using an ultra-low fertility model, the sources said. The previous report projected that Taiwan’s population would fall to 14.37 million by 2070, but based on a new estimate of the total fertility rate (TFR) — the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime — the population is expected to reach 12 million by
RSS