How hard is it to find the most wanted man in the world - Osama

[Ozarks]

Not to mention all kinds of neat guns and rockets that the Mujahadeen received from their good friend George H. W. Bush.

Actually neither Bush gave weapons to the Mujahadeen, Regan stopped the funding when the Russians announced they were going home.

All the Russians were gone by February of 89, 2 weeks after Bush (41) took office.

[Bong30]

I think he died.....before that he was in deep hiding.....caves and such

what is 25 mill to these people...they rat they are dead.

pic at link

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.../17/wafg17.xml
Hold fire at Taliban fighters: they are attending a funeral
By Philip Sherwell in New York


(Filed: 17/09/2006)



The American intelligence officers monitoring the satellite feed from an unmanned spy plane at their base in Afghanistan could hardly believe their eyes.

An estimated 190 Taliban fighters were lined up in tightly packed formation, captured in the crosshairs of a gun sight â?? as the picture shows.


The Predator drone traps 190 men in its sights before they disperse
Rarely in the mountainous terrain of Afghanistan are so many Taliban fighters gathered together on open land. The target was too tempting to ignore: all it required was authorisation for the Predator drone to launch an air strike.

"We were so excited. I came rushing in with the picture," an army officer told an NBC television journalist who obtained the grainy black-and-white photograph taken in July. But then, to his frustration, they were told that the United States military's rules of engagement made an attack impossible because the men were attending a funeral in a cemetery.

The officers then watched the satellite footage of the fighters splintering into small groups â?? not big enough for the drone to target â?? and heading back to their mountain redoubts. They were convinced that prominent Taliban leaders had been present.

At a time when British-led Nato forces are incurring heavy casualties as the resurgent Taliban pursues a guerrilla war on several fronts, the decision has caused amazement in America and been criticised by relatives of US troops killed in Afghanistan.

For many, it also brought back memories of the decision not to order an air strike when a Predator drone tracked Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader and Osama bin Laden ally, as he left Kabul in a convoy in late 2001 and took cover in a building with 100 fighters.

The disbelief was heightened as the picture of the assembled Taliban fighters appeared on an NBC news blog just two days after a suicide bomber killed six people at the funeral of the governor of Paktia province, who was assassinated by the Taliban.

The US military did not give a reason for the decision and does not discuss its rules of engagement. But it noted in a statement that while the Taliban had killed civilians during a funeral, coalition forces "hold themselves to a higher moral and ethical standard than their enemies".

The intelligence officers monitoring the footage were in no doubt that the men were Taliban fighters. Nonetheless, the military remains extremely wary of hitting culturally sensitive targets, even with apparently credible information, as was the case when US aircraft mistakenly bombed a wedding party in Afghanistan in 2002, killing several dozen civilians.

But American caution has also proved expensive at times. When Mullah Omar was located in 2001, the Central Intelligence Agency requested permission from Central Command in Florida to destroy the building. The response from Gen Tommy R Franks, the military commander, was that his legal officer "doesn't like this, so we're not going to fire". The mullah escaped unscathed.

Yesterday thousands of Afghan and foreign security forces kicked off a big new offensive against the Taliban in eastern Afghanistan as a Nato-led operation wound down in the south. About 4,000 Afghan police and soldiers and 3,000 troops with the US-led coalition launched Operation Mountain Fury in five provinces, three of them on the Pakistan border.