Osama, oracles and opportunities

"Watch out if you are over six feet tall. The CIA's Predator aircraft have been programmed to kill all those above six feet, hoping one of them would turn out to be bin Laden." ...reflecting the extent to which the US hunt for bin Laden has become a butt of ridicule among the tribals. ..Offers of rewards of millions of dollars have not helped. Naturally, said an American intelligence analyst. The tribals are so poor and illiterate that they don't know what is a million dollar reward. If one offered them instead a plot of land or a few dozen goats..But without results....Why?..Osama is nowhere in the tribal belt..

President General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's military dictator, has sent the Americans on a wild goose chase in the forbidding tribal land...A spin a day is Musharraf's forte. Bin Laden is alive, he admits, but in the no-go land of the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), where no British soldier had ever gone and come back alive..."We Pakistanis..will go where no British dared...The Americans were duly impressed. Gave him another $3 billion..Hasn't he already delivered nearly 500 al-Qaeda types?

What he did was to round up many poor Arabs living in Pakistan who had become a social pest and make them a charge on the US tax-payers' money....And in Karachi was harbored the injured bin Laden until August last year. In the Binori madrassa..And that was one place where he did not search for him. Why? Because he knew bin Laden was there...Is bin Laden still alive? If alive, where is he? There are only three who know the answers to these questions definitively. Allah, Musharraf and Lieutenant- General Ehsanul Haq...Why doesn't tricky Mush arrest and hand him over to the US and get a few more billion dollars? Because of a fear that he might spill the beans about his links with the ISI....And an equally strong fear that Musharraf may lose his importance in the eyes of the US, if bin Laden and al-Qaeda were no longer there....

And since last November, an oracle has been disseminating one tape after another...Are the voices authentic? Most probably, says the US intelligence. But other voice experts in countries such as Switzerland doubt it. Al-Jazeera itself has admitted that at least some of the tapes were handed over to its representative in Pakistan by unknown persons or transmitted from Pakistan through telephone. Surprising that US intelligence, which taps all telephone communications in Pakistan, did not tap these. ..A tape of February attacked Pakistan for the first time, but not Musharraf, though a printed version of it denounced Musharraf, too..Two more tapes in September have not only lambasted him personally, but also called for his overthrow....personal attacks on Musharraf started appearing only after an increasing number of opinion-makers in the US began expressing their misgivings about Musharraf's sincerity...Are these tapes - at least some of them - being fabricated and disseminated by the ISI at Musharraf's instance to warn the US that if it exercised too much pressure on him to act against the terrorists, he might be overthrown?

This is a suspicion, which is getting stronger and stronger.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/EJ04Df05.html