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Al-Qaida leader Osama Bin Laden remains at large in eastern Afghanistan, U.S. officials have concluded.
U.S. and Pakistani forces along the Afghan-Pakistani border captured neither Bin Laden nor his chief aides in a series of raids last month. At one point, Pakistani military sources believed that a group of al-Qaida leaders had been captured and one of them was Bin Laden.
U.S. officials said al-Qaida has reorganized over the past six months and has begun the first of a series of attacks against U.S. and Western targets. While al-Qaida is considerably smaller than it was two years ago, it has replaced key operatives captured over the last year.
“There’s a lot of disinformation in reports from Pakistan regarding the search for Bin Laden,” a U.S. counterinsurgency official said. “Much of it is propaganda and some of it is simply wishful thinking.”
Pakistani efforts against al-Qaida remain insufficient, he said. Arrests of al-Qaida insurgents have usually been the result of U.S. intelligence and initiative.
Al-Qaida has been blamed for the suicide bombings in Morocco and Saudi Arabia over the last week. More than 70 people died in the two attacks.
On May 19, the Washington Post reported that al-Qaida obtained weapons from the Saudi National Guard. The newspaper said weapons from the National Guard were found in a May 6 raid on an al-Qaida safe house in Riyadh.
Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., a former chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and a candidate for president, claims the Bush administration has been concealing information on al-Qaida plans to attack the United States. Graham said al-Qaida has been revived by the war in Iraq and has placed a large number of agents in the U.S.
“In my judgment, we should have pursued the war on terrorism to victory before we moved to Iraq,” Graham said in a television interview last week.
“I think you could make the case that we are less secure as a result of the Iraq war because we have taken the focus off the international terrorists.”
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