MR. OCTOBER:

Bin Laden hiding in Pakistan: US general (Ashwin Honawar, 9/5/2004, The Peninsula)

A senior US Central Command official yesterday said that Saudi dissident and head of the Al Qaeda terror network, Osama bin Laden, was hiding in the Federally Administered Tribal Area (Fata) of Pakistan along the Afghan border and it was only a matter of time before he was nabbed or killed in military operations.

Speaking to reporters at Camp Assailiyah near Doha, Lieutenant General Lance L Smith, who is the second in command of the Centcom said: “He is hiding in a sovereign country, Pakistan, where we have no freedom of movement. We have to rely on the Pakistani military to go after them. President Pervez Musharraf is doing a good job and we hope that the Pakistani operations will cause movement, which it already has, that will give them the opportunity to catch Bin Laden, Ayman Al Zawahiri and other senior Al Qaeda leaders,” he added.

Smith, however, emphasised that there could be no predictions about when Bin Laden, who had masterminded the Septermber 11 terror attacks on New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington DC with hijacked civilian airliners, would be nabbed or killed.

As a result of the manhunt, he said, the Al Qaeda terror network had lost its central command structure and other cadres of the organisation were now more or less operating autonomously. He said that the US believed in capabilities of the Pakistan military in flushing out Al Qaeda and Taleban cadres hiding in the Fata. The US-led coalition, he said, would continue to target and hunt Jordanian-born Abu Musab Al Zarqawi and his Al Qaeda-linked terror organisation, which is currently operating in and around Fallujah in Iraq.

Democrats are so paranoid they're predicting that the President will show up at one of the debates with a hatbox and pull Osama's head out of it midway through.

MORE:
Saddam Hussein's 2nd in command arrested (The Associated Press, Sept. 5, 2004)

Saddam Hussein's former second-in-command, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, was arrested in northern Iraq, an Iraqi Defense Ministry spokesman told al-Hurra television.

Saleh Sarhan said al-Douri was captured while in a clinic where he was receiving medical treatment.

"There was a major operation around Tikrit and al-Dour and American forces supported by Iraqi civil defense corps members were able to capture Izzat al-Douri," he told the U.S. government-funded Arabic-language station in a live telephone interview. Saddam was captured at a safehouse near al-Dour in December. [...]

Al-Douri, who had a U.S. bounty of $10 million on his head, was the highest-ranking member of Saddam's government who was still at large. Once the vice chairman of the Baath Party's Revolutionary Command Council, he was a longtime confidant of Saddam.

He is No. 6 on the U.S. military's list of 55 most wanted figures from Saddam's regime. Forty-four on the list had been captured or killed.

U.S. military officials have said they believe al-Douri is playing an organizing role in the 16-month-old insurgency against U.S. forces.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 5, 2004 8:29 AM