perfidy

They tried electronic bugging in Vietnam and it was a huge failure. The Viet Cong would find the sensors and instead of destroying them, would spoof them. Need a regiment at point A? Pile dirty clothes on top of the 'sniffer' sensors. After a while, when every sensor is overloaded, you don't trust any of them.

Also, I imagine that a lot of these assets were being used in Iraq. The capture of Saddam and his murderous spawn has no doubt freed a lot of special forces and intelligence types for duty in the Afghan/Pakistan theater.

Buckethead, that's exactly my point. I was afraid from the start that taking down Saddam would divert resources and attention from the manhunt for bin Laden and his cadre of terrorist cretins.

They're all terrorist cretins.

Fine. His [em]particular[/em] cadre of terrorist cretins. But why is that OK? It speaks to a certain intellectual dishonesty among those DoD folks who insisted we had the manpower to fight several wars at once. Moreover, it shoots in the butt the assertion that some (not you) made that Iraq would not, in fact, divert much-needed attention from the reconstruction of Iraq and the cranio-pikification of Osama bin Laden himself. Clearly Iraq did divert resources and attention, and it really pisses me off.

As long as bin Laden is not able to effectively control a viable Al Qaida, we have him in a holding pattern. Our libervasion of Afghanistan achieved that, destroyed his training camps, and put his organization on the run. While we never completely stopped looking for the rat bastard, his difficult strategic situation did free up forces for operations in other areas. By using those troops and other assets in Iraq, we were able to track down and kill Saddam's sons, and then capture the man himself. This is arguably more important than the (immediate) capture of bin Laden - because it strengthens our hand in Iraq, where we have hopes of creating a civil soceity to really confound on a much larger scale than mere death the terrorist/islamofascist/mother#$%^ers who *as a group* present a real danger to us. Now that Saddam is in the bag, we can go back to hunting bin Laden. Two thirds of his organization is supposedly dead or in cuba, so capturing the man himself is more of a heads on pike kind of victory. I'm looking forward to it - but strategically the capture of one man who is not in control of much of anything is not (quite) as crucial to our long range goals as what we were doing in Iraq.

I thought I posted this response, but maybe not- if it shows up twice I apologize in advance.

J,
Just because "CNN has learned" doesn't mean it just happened. I have no doubt that alot of assets were supporting the Iraq mission, but it doesn't mean there were none available in Afghanistan.

I thought it was really freaky, and funny in an unfunny way, when I left the service and read about stuff in the press, as news, that intelligence agencies knew years before.

I believe about half of what I read in the Times or Globe; CNN less than that.