I think some crimes should always apply, though. If somebody saw Osama bin Laden walking down the street even though it'd been a decade since he'd done anything, he'd still be arrested.
Would he though? It seems to me it's very convenient for our government to have an ambiguous threat like him hanging over our head. They (I think Rumsfield was in charge at the time) basically let him walk over the border to Pakistan during the invasion of Afghanistan and it's opium by sending a 400 man team of special ops while telling the army to stay out of their way (although I could be wrong on the whole re-routing the army away). Yeah, special ops sounds cool and are more badass then the average soldier, and makes it sound like your trying REALLY hard to catch the guy, but 400 guys even spread 50 yards apart looking for someone isn't going to cover much ground much less a whole border. It was either a totally moronic bit of planning or like I said, convenient.
If my facts (taken from yahoo news a few months back so I might be hazy) are wrong please feel free to correct me.
EDIT: Nevermind, I did it myself. Here's stuff.
This is an excellent article on what happened and includes the commander there. Apparently I was wrong and they only sent 90 American special forces, known as Delta Force. The main force of 2000 or so men were the thugs of two Warlords of questionable loyalty, one of which was a "wealthy drug smuggler" the US convinced for some unfathomable reason (hmm maybe to smuggle the drugs for them? I mean, what else are you going to do with the record breaking harvests year after year after freaking year?) to come back to Afghanistan from France. THE OTHER WAS A FORMER MEMBER OF THE TALIBAN WTF
Given the radio signals, Fury hoped his special operations forces were getting close to capture. They were not. The United States was relying on two relatively minor warlords from the Jalalabad area for Afghan support. Haji Hazarat Ali had a fourth-grade education and a reputation as a bully. He had fought the Soviets as a teenager in the 1980s and later joined the Taliban for a time. The other, Haji Zaman Ghamsharik, was a wealthy drug smuggler who had been persuaded by the United States to return from France. Together, they fielded a force of about 2,000 men, and there were questions from the outset about the competence and loyalties of the fighters. The two warlords and their men distrusted each other and both groups appeared to distrust their American allies.
Those concerns were underscored each time the Afghans insisted on retreating from the mountains as darkness fell. But the suspicions were confirmed by events that started on the afternoon of Dec. 11, a day U.S. forces heard bin Laden tell his men it was OK to surrender. Ghamsharik approached Fury and told him that al Qaeda fighters wanted to give up. He said all they needed to end the siege was a 12-hour ceasefire to allow the fighters to climb down the mountains and turn in their weapons. Intercepted radio chatter seemed to confirm that the fighters had lost their resolve under the relentless bombing, but Fury remained suspicious.
The U.S. Special Operations Command official history records that Centcom refused to back the ceasefire, suspecting a ruse, but it said the special ops forces agreed reluctantly to an overnight pause in the bombing to avoid killing any surrendering fighters. Ghamsharik negotiated by radio with representatives of al Qaeda. He initially told Fury that a large number of Algerians wanted to surrender. Then he said that he could turn over the entire al Qaeda leadership. Fury's suspicions increased with each bold promise. By the morning of Dec. 12, no al Qaeda fighters had appeared and the Delta Force commander concluded that the whole episode was a hoax. Intelligence estimates are that as many as 800 al Qaeda fighters escaped that night -- but not bin Laden.
Despite the unreliability of his Afghan allies, Fury refused to give up and started plotting ways his forces could go at bin Laden on their own. One plan was to corner bin Laden from a direction he wouldn't anticipate -- through the back door. The peaks to the south rose to 14,000 feet and the valleys and precipitous mountain passes were already deep in snow. "The original plan that we sent up through our higher headquarters, Delta Force wants to come in over the mountain with oxygen, coming from the Pakistan side," he explained. "Over the mountains and come in and get a drop on bin Laden from behind."
The audacious assault was nixed somewhere up the chain of command. Undeterred, Fury suggested dropping hundreds of landmines along the passes leading to Pakistan to block bin Laden's escape. "First guy blows his leg off, everybody else stops," he said. "That allows aircraft overhead to find them. They see all these heat sources out there. OK, there is a big large group of al Qaeda moving south. They can engage that." That proposal was rejected, too.
The ultimate fault for the failure to capture bin Laden lies not in the U.S. effort, but in the U.S. strategy. Franks and Rumsfeld decided to attempt to deliver a swift and economical knockout blow to the Taliban through airpower and the limited application of troops on the ground. Instead of employing the Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force, the Afghan model for Operation Enduring Freedom depended on airpower and on highly mobile paramilitary teams, working in concert with opposition warlords and tribal leaders. Franks capped the number of boots on the ground at 10,000.
For this reason -- the relative scarcity of U.S. soldiers -- Franks and Rumsfeld refused to send more troops to Tora Bora to block, capture, or kill bin Laden. But soldiers and scholars alike have since argued that there were sufficient troops available in Afghanistan and nearby Uzbekistan to mount a genuine assault on bin Laden's position at Tora Bora. And they could have been augmented within about a week by reinforcements from the Persian Gulf and the United States.
Peter Krause provides the most detailed description of this untaken option -- a "block and sweep" -- in an article in Security Studies, "The Last Good Chance: A Reassessment of U.S. Operations at Tora Bora." The plan is simple enough: One group of American forces would have blocked the likely exit avenues to Pakistan on the south side of Tora Bora. A second contingent would have moved against al Qaeda's positions from the north. The assault would not have required thousands of conventional forces; in fact, a large number of troops would have taken too long to deploy and alerted al Qaeda to the approaching attack. The preferred choice would have been a small, agile force capable of deploying quickly and quietly and trained to operate in difficult terrain against unconventional enemies. The U.S. military has large numbers of soldiers and Marines who meet those criteria: Delta Forces, Green Berets, Navy Seals, Marine special operations units, Army Rangers, and paratroopers.
In all, an initial force of roughly 2,000 to 3,000 troops would have been sufficient to begin the block-and-sweep mission, with reinforcements following as time and circumstances allowed. Franks had set the ceiling of 10,000 U.S. troops to maintain a light footprint. Still, within that number there were enough ready and willing to go after bin Laden. In late November, about the time U.S. intelligence placed bin Laden squarely at Tora Bora, more than 1,000 members of the 15th and 26th Marine Expeditionary Units, among the military's most mobile arms, established a base southwest of Kandahar, only a few hours flight away. They were primarily interdicting traffic and supporting the special operations teams working with Afghan militias. Another 1,000 troops from the Army's 10th Mountain Division were split between a base in southern Uzbekistan and Bagram Air Base, a short helicopter flight from Tora Bora. The Army troops were engaged mainly in military police functions, according to reports at the time.
This is kinda scary too, at least someone higher up stopped this idea. Landmines scattered in the only passes between two countries? What was he thinking? They do have those new anti-vehicle landmines that self destruct after a while, that would be the only way I could see this plan having worked without massive civilian casualties unless the guy who volunteered it also planned on removing them somehow. But from the way it sounds these were anti-personal mines which I'm unsure if they have self-destruct capability. Perhaps air burst explosives to set them off or something similar, I know they have bombs that will take out minefields to an extent. Also, if they had time to lay down mines why couldn't they bring in more troops, other then a failed strategy? I suppose they must have airdropped mines now judging from the wording of the article though he may have meant dropped as in a supply drop. Who knows what they can do now, what with all that money going to the military while Hawaii has a four day schoolweek because they can't afford the fifth day. It seems to me the mines scattered sitting in plain view or the parachute if there is one would be a give away if they were airdropped.
"The audacious assault was nixed somewhere up the chain of command. Undeterred, Fury suggested dropping hundreds of landmines along the passes leading to Pakistan to block bin Laden's escape. "First guy blows his leg off, everybody else stops," he said. "That allows aircraft overhead to find them. They see all these heat sources out there. OK, there is a big large group of al Qaeda moving south. They can engage that." That proposal was rejected, too."
Here is another article from the NY times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/world/asia/29torabora.htmlHere is a more conservative piece. Basically it's all a bunch of Obama lies being told by John Kerry according to them. I apologize for the poor quality of this piece, it's the best I could find after a few pages of results on Google. I'd imagine the Conservatives would like nothing better then to have this talked about as little as possible. Notice how little in the article is actually about the incident in question, just a short paragraph, one sentence that gives an extremely basic report of the situation, yet somehow without evidence we are met with an attempt to persuade us it's all political hogwash by those damned liberal extremists. Most of the story is about the report itself and the (actually bipartisan if I remember correctly) Senate Foreign Relations Committee that made the finding and about how it's some sort of plot by Obama carried out by Sen. John Kerry, who happens to lead the Committee. Good thing too, or else we never would have heard another thing about it. It's not so much a plot in my opinion as much as someone actually looked into it finally.
http://sweetness-light.com/archive/dems-claims-bush-let-bin-laden-escape
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Topic: Massive heat generation (Read 7299 times)