Osama bin Laden is so hounded by U.S. forces that he no longer controls al-Qaida, a top American counterterrorism official said Thursday. "The sense is no, he's not [in charge] in the way that we think of it," said Ambassador Cofer Black, the State Department's counterterror coordinator. Bin Laden -- who the CIA believes is hiding in the mountainous border area between Pakistan and Afghanistan -- is unable to meet with his lieutenants to plot new attacks and relies instead on other terror groups to strike, Black told the House International Relations Committee. "This guy spends most of his time trying to figure out how they're going to come for [him] and is this going to be the day?" said Black, former chief of the CIA's counterterrorism center.
Black said al-Qaida remains a "potent force" that has been put under "catastrophic stress" by the U.S. global war on terror, forcing bin Laden's henchmen to "evolve in ways not entirely by its own choosing. They're reaching out, trying to co-opt the missions of other terrorist groups -- particularly local ones and others -- and try and cement their determination . . . to destroy the United States." Black said there are "scores" of such groups, and al-Qaida's reliance on less-disciplined groups not under its control could blow up on the radical movement. "They have made fundamental operational mistakes. They're likely to continue to do that." |