He is arguably the most wanted fugitive in the history of the American justice system, the target of a multibillion-dollar global manhunt, a man with no country to call his own. Yet, Osama bin Laden, who committed murderous crimes against America, remains a free man.

Nearly two decades have passed since bin Laden’s terrorist network first attacked American interests abroad, more than 10 years since he declared war on all Americans, and eight years and counting since his followers rammed jetliners packed with fuel and innocent civilians into the towers of the World Trade Center in New York, the walls of the Pentagon outside of Washington, D.C., and, thwarted by passengers, an empty field in Pennsylvania.

“If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies,” President George W. Bush said of bin Laden in 2001, not long after America lost its inviolate sense of security on that September morning, “he will be sorely mistaken.”

But Bush’s eight-year tenure ran out. A new president, Barack Obama, has inherited the manhunt. Meanwhile, bin Laden remains hidden away, an “iconic figure” in the words of Army General Stanley A. McChrystal, who now leads the Afghan war that targets bin Laden. The al Qaeda leader is on the lam, possibly in the Pakistani tribal areas that border Afghanistan, U.S. officials say. Bin Laden persists in taunting his pursuers through regularly released video and audio recordings—36 since 2001 and four in 2009 alone—and continues to inspire thousands of new, anti-American jihad recruits around the world, including a handful in the United States itself.

Yet, when Americans see that it took only a few months to capture Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, who played no role in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and they see other suspected al Qaeda operatives imprisoned by the dozens at the Guantánamo Bay prison camp in Cuba, the question lingers: Why can’t the United States fulfill its promise to the families of the victims of 9/11, and Americans in general, to bring bin Laden to justice?

“He needs to be held accountable for the deaths of 3,000 people,” says Jamie S. Gorelick, a partner at WilmerHale LLP who served as deputy U.S. attorney general and who was a member of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, more commonly known as the 9/11 Commission. “President Bush said he needs to be brought to justice, and that has not changed.”

Chase Gone Cold
The search for individual fugitives often takes considerable time and resources. Even massive manhunts sometimes succeed only through a turn in luck. Luis Armando Peña Soltren, the longest missing fugitive in Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) history who hijacked an airliner and diverted it to Cuba in 1968, wasn’t caught until October 2009—and only after he turned himself in. Unabomber Theodore J. Kaczynski sent the first of his 16 mail bombs in 1978. He was caught 18 years later, after his brother told the FBI of Kaczynski’s whereabouts. Eric Rudolph, wanted for the 1996 Olympic Games bombing in Atlanta as well as attacks on abortion clinics in Alabama and Georgia, eluded federal authorities for five years, even though they knew he was hiding in the Nantahala National Forest in western North Carolina. Rudolph remained free until a rookie cop spotted him foraging for food in a dumpster not far from the woods in 2003.

The scope and expense of the global hunt for bin Laden is unprecedented. Yet, it has been impeded on a number of fronts, including pre-9/11 legal obstacles such as prohibition on the exchange of information between U.S. law enforcement agencies and intelligence services; international political entanglements among leaders of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the United States; and missed military opportunities such as America’s failure to capture or kill bin Laden in December 2001 at Tora Bora in Afghanistan, according to intelligence, military, and legal experts. The fundamental impediment to bringing bin Laden to justice, however, is that capturing him is no longer a top priority for the United States—and has not been for several years—even though bin Laden retains the U.S. government’s “High-Value Target No. 1” designation, those experts claim.

Bush, who once kept in his Oval Office desk a scorecard with pictures of al Qaeda terrorists on which he drew an X as each was captured or killed, began deemphasizing the importance of getting bin Laden, a man he claimed to want “dead or alive” only months after the war in Afghanistan began.

“And the idea of focusing on one person … really indicates to me people don’t understand the scope of the mission,” Bush said in March 2002. “Terror is bigger than one person. And he’s just … a person who’s now been marginalized….You know, I just don’t spend that much time on him … to be honest with you.”

Obama, who during the 2008 presidential campaign declared bin Laden “our biggest national security priority,” recently unveiled a war plan for Afghanistan that was silent on bin Laden. In announcing his plan to the cadets at West Point, Obama mentioned bin Laden only once and only in passing.

“He fell by the wayside years ago,” Andrew J. Bacevich, a former Army colonel who now teaches at Boston University, says of bin Laden. “It was the Bush administration that chose to remove bin Laden’s capture from its list of priorities, and my sense is the Obama administration has seen fit to endorse that.”

The White House is unlikely to acknowledge it directly, but former intelligence officials say bringing bin Laden to justice has become less relevant strategically for the United States. No one is suggesting the United States abandon its search for bin Laden, but those officials say bin Laden’s forced isolation and his refusal to use telephones or radios that can be tracked by U.S. technology have robbed him of his control over al Qaeda’s operations. Targeting others who are now actively planning future attacks against the United States is, by necessity, a higher priority, they claim. Moreover, those officials say, al Qaeda itself has changed. Washington now views the group more as an amorphous member of a broader “syndicate” of terrorist groups, loosely connected by shared resources, personnel, and training facilities, rather than a more easily targeted cohesive set of operatives.

“Given that reality, it’s wise for the [Obama] administration to not say getting Osama bin Laden is our No. 1 priority because the odds do not favor accomplishing that,” says Bruce O. Riedel, a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy. Riedel has worked for the Pentagon, National Security Council, and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and advised the Obama administration during its transition into the White House. “But I think it remains very high on the intelligence community’s list to get some information about him. The truth is, we don’t have a clue where this guy is,” Riedel adds.

Botched Mission at Tora Bora
Defense Secretary Robert Gates acknowledged as much in December 2009 when he said it had been “years” since the United States had any idea where bin Laden was. “Well, we don’t know for a fact where Osama bin Laden is,” Gates said. “If we did, we’d go get him.” While it may be “undeniably difficult,” the United States must bring bin Laden to justice, McChrystal, the man leading the Afghan war, later told a Senate committee.

“I believe he is an iconic figure at this point, whose survival emboldens al Qaeda as a franchising organization across the world,” McChrystal said. “It would not defeat al Qaeda to have him captured or killed, but I don’t think we can finally defeat al Qaeda until he is finally captured or killed.”

The last time the U.S. government knew bin Laden’s location for certain was in December 2001 at Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan. At Tora Bora, where its jagged peaks reach up to 14,000 feet, bin Laden had built a heavily fortified and well-stocked complex of caves and tunnels carved deep into the mountain by heavy equipment borrowed from his father’s construction company. The United States knew of the fortification because the CIA had helped bin Laden build the fortress two decades earlier, when bin Laden and the mujahideen were fending off invading Soviet forces. The United States expected bin Laden to eventually make his way to Tora Bora once U.S. troops started invading Afghanistan. Two months after the invasion began, bin Laden and hundreds of his fighters arrived.

When the time came to act, however, fewer than 100 Special Forces personnel were sent in. Requests for thousands of additional U.S. troops were rejected by then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who said he was worried about sparking anti-American backlash in the region. The U.S. government did provide air strikes, including a 15,000-pound bomb dubbed “Daisy Cutter,” so massive it was delivered not by a bomber but by a heavy-lift cargo plane and shoved out the back. But the task of actually pursuing bin Laden was left to two Afghan warlords of questionable loyalty and ability who not only distrusted each other, but shared a distrust of their U.S. handlers.

Rumsfeld, General Tommy Franks (who was leading the war in Afghanistan at the time), and then-Vice President Dick Cheney would later claim that the United States was never certain bin Laden was at Tora Bora, but their claims were contradicted by a variety of sources with first-hand knowledge. The U.S. Special Operations Command, then headed by McChrystal, detailed in a 2007 history of the battle the lack of troops, supplies, and air lift needed to capture or kill bin Laden who, according to the report, was “squarely at Tora Bora” at the time. “All source reporting corroborated his presence on several days from 9–14 December,” the report said.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Senator John Kerry (D–Mass.), a Bush critic, released another report in November 2009,[1] also concluding that bin Laden was “within our grasp” at Tora Bora. The report went on to say the Bush administration mishandled the mission because it was already distracted by its secret planning of the invasion of Iraq, which began on Bush’s orders just weeks before bin Laden arrived at Tora Bora.

Bin Laden—apparently so convinced he would make his last stand at Tora Bora that he wrote his last will—escaped, walking about 20 miles down the other side of the mountain and across the Pakistan border.

Pakistan’s Lingering Distrust
Former CIA officer Arthur Keller knows first-hand the frustrations the United States has faced in its hunt for bin Laden and al Qaeda in the years that followed the Tora Bora mission. Keller was part of a special CIA team sent to Waziristan, in the lawless tribal areas of Pakistan, to hunt down al Qaeda operatives who fled Tora Bora that December day in 2001 only to find that Pakistan, America’s chief ally in the Afghan war, harbored a deep distrust of America. The Pakistanis also maintained connections to some of the terrorists who, for years before, enjoyed the covert support of Pakistan’s chief intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which saw the terrorist groups as a strategic asset in challenging India over rights to Kashmir.

“We were so restricted in our movements—the Pakistanis wouldn’t let us get out—that a lot of times [details of the hunt] had to be relayed via computer,” says Keller, who remained confined to a compound nicknamed “Shawshank” while Pashtun operatives recruited by the CIA conducted the search for al Qaeda. “Usually, there was no face-to-face with the people you were running. You had to do everything with your computer. You’re physically in the area, but you don’t get a whole lot of benefit from that because you don’t get to meet most of the people that you’re running. We would operate second- or third-hand.”

The relationship between the United States and Pakistan has always been a tempestuous one, replete with serial separations and followed by desperate but tenuous reunions, Riedel, the expert on South Asian issues at Brookings, notes. Over seven decades, the United States has embraced Pakistan and gave it billions of dollars in aid and military assistance only to break ties again when Pakistan, feeling perpetually insecure in its relationship with India, began supporting anti-Indian terrorist groups and building its own nuclear arsenal, both of which, the Pakistanis insist, are critical to their national defense. Pakistan was America’s gateway to diplomatic relations with China in the 1970s, its covert ally against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and then a nuclear weapons-seeking pariah in the eyes of America in the 1990s. Then came the 9/11 attacks.

Immediately after the attacks, Pakistan, an Islamic state, agreed to assist the American invasion of Afghanistan despite Pakistan’s past support for Afghanistan’s Taliban government, which the United States was bent on removing. However, when the Taliban and al Qaeda shifted their base of operations from Afghanistan to Pakistan to escape U.S. forces, Pakistan’s relations with the United States once again chilled.

“The Pakistanis don’t believe we’re reliable,” Riedel says. “Many Pakistanis, particularly in the army, believe we’re a bigger threat to their sovereignty than India is. That kind of argument resonates very powerfully across a wide section of Pakistani opinion and particularly a very large percentage of the Pakistani officer corps. Changing that is not something you’re going to do in months or years.”

Indeed, former ISI chief Hamid Gul claimed in December 2009 that bin Laden and the Taliban left the region and that the United States remained in Pakistan only because it was working with Israel to dismantle Pakistan’s nuclear capabilities.[2] In light of such conspiratorial perceptions, Pakistan insists that its own forces—backed by billions of dollars in American aid—lead the hunt for terrorists within its own borders, severely hampering efforts to capture bin Laden, U.S. intelligence officials say.

“The Pakistani population was completely against any kind of action,” Keller says. “They regarded the Taliban and al Qaeda largely as American problems. ‘Why are we fighting America’s war? Why are we doing this?’ They didn’t see homegrown militancy as a problem…. They would shell things [in the tribal areas] with artillery and they would send in helicopter gunships and they would call that an operation. But they wouldn’t send in troops, they wouldn’t aggressively patrol, they wouldn’t conduct raids. Airpower can’t win or hold territory. Only troops can do that, and they weren’t willing to engage the troops.”

Pakistan helped the United States capture more than 550 terrorists since 2001, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the reputed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, but U.S. officials continue to complain that Pakistan is not doing enough to help destroy the Taliban and capture bin Laden. The Pakistanis respond angrily, insisting they simply don’t know where bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders are.

“They know where the people are. They’re not stupid. They’re just pretending to be stupid,” Keller says. “If they wanted to, they could go round up a half-dozen Taliban leaders. But they don’t want to do that because some of them still see those guys as strategic assets to keep India from gaining control. The only way to really get them to go full bore against these targets would be to convince them, somehow, that their Indian worries are gone. But how would you do that? It would have to be a generational, attitudinal shift, and I don’t see that attitude going away any time soon.”

Safe Haven in Tribal Lands
There is no law in what is now the land of bin Laden. The Federally Administered Tribal Areas is part of Pakistan, but not subject to its government’s laws or courts. The ruling clans, which a century ago foiled the British Empire’s efforts to annex the tribal areas, make their own rules. It is the epitome of sanctuary for anyone fleeing the laws of the outside world, though the presence of bin Laden and the Taliban are now taking a toll on the clans.

The Taliban has established a shadow government to enforce its version of Islamic law, and the presence of Taliban and al Qaeda fighters has drawn U.S. missile attacks, leaving scores dead and unleashing a new wave of terrorist attacks inside Pakistan itself. Since 2006, more than 20,000 Pakistanis have been killed or injured in terrorist attacks on hotels, mosques, and shopping districts, according to reports from the Pakistani government and nongovernmental organizations operating in the region. The Pakistani government responded to the violence with its most robust military offensives in the tribal lands, only to spark further terrorist attacks near Pakistani court, intelligence, and military facilities. Amid the violence, Taliban and al Qaeda fighters continue to cross into Afghanistan to attack U.S.-led troops, and then flee back into the tribal areas where American forces, in deference to Pakistan, cannot cross.

“There’s a difference between the violation of Pakistani sovereignty by a drone that operates 60,000 feet in the air and Marines on the ground,” says Riedel of Brookings. “In the second case, I think the Pakistani reaction would be very, very serious.”

Intelligence sources and international law experts agree that the United States would willingly breech the Afghan–
Pakistan border if it knew for sure that bin Laden was within striking distance. The world community, they say, would understand. But invading Pakistan to capture less important targets risks alienating America’s most important ally in the region.

“One of the myths out there is that somehow there are international laws that would have prevented” the United States from pursuing bin Laden into the tribal areas, says John N. Moore, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for National Security Law. “We’ve been attacked by Osama bin Laden … and it’s an ongoing series of attacks and we have every right under international law to arrest him if we can, or to target him as a combatant in an ongoing defensive effort against continuing attacks on the United States and our allies. There are, however, a variety of political relationships and issues with Pakistan that are very important and very serious because the Afghan war—and success in that war—have really related to the success of preventing the Taliban from taking over in Pakistan and getting, finally, control over the tribal areas. So working with the government of Pakistan is very important for us.”

While the diplomatic push and pull between the United States and Pakistan continues, complicated by nation–state considerations bin Laden is free to ignore, the al Qaeda leader remains at large. And while bin Laden is more isolated than ever before, his enduring freedom has enhanced his already mythical reputation, U.S. officials say, inspiring wannabe terrorists not only in places such as Somalia and Yemen, but right inside the United States.

Hunt for Homegrown Terrorists
Investigations into terrorist bombings in Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005 turned up evidence of al Qaeda connections. Al Qaeda claimed credit for the 2007 bombings in Algeria as well as two attacks in 2008 against the U.S. Embassy in Yemen and the Danish Embassy in Pakistan. A classified U.S. intelligence report, leaked to the media in 2007, concluded that al Qaeda, coordinating with extremists in Pakistan, is now stronger than at any time since 2001.[3]

Inside the United States, law enforcement agencies have uncovered a variety of homegrown terrorists in Boston, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, and Miami, and in smaller towns in Colorado, New Jersey, North Carolina, and elsewhere. José Padilla, a New York native and Muslim, was arrested in 2002 on suspicions that he was planning a bombing attack and sentenced to 17 years in prison on terrorism charges. David C. Headley of Chicago was arrested in October 2009 for plotting an attack against a Danish newspaper. Seven men in Miami were arrested in 2006 for plotting to bomb the Sears tower in Chicago. Fourteen people were arrested in 2009 for trying to recruit Somali Americans to fight in Somalia. When Major Nidal M. Hasan, a Virginia-born Muslim in the U.S. Army, shot and killed 13 people last November in Fort Hood, Texas, fears that he was part of a terrorist network gained credence when e-mail he exchanged with a radical cleric, who the FBI believes is an al Qaeda recruiter, were found.

The U.S. fight against bin Laden and al Qaeda has morphed over the years, and the debate continues over whether terrorism should be addressed as a crime, with law enforcement agencies and civilian courts taking the lead, or as an act of war, with the U.S. military in control of the strategy and responsible for detaining and trying any suspected terrorists it captures.

President Bill Clinton handled the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 and the two embassy bombings in 1998 as law enforcement matters, leaving it to the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice to capture and prosecute the bombers, even as the CIA hunted bin Laden covertly.

Bush, arguing that Clinton’s approach was inadequate in the face of the 9/11 attacks, militarized the fight, dispatching U.S. forces overseas to dismantle al Qaeda and capture or kill bin Laden, and weighing whether to deploy troops within the United States as well. An October 2001 Department of Justice memo assured Bush that he had the constitutional authority to deploy troops on U.S. soil in his “war on terrorism” despite a 131-year ban on such deployments under the Posse Comitatus Act, and without regard for Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights to unreasonable search and seizure. (When Cheney urged Bush to send U.S. troops to capture six suspected al Qaeda members in 2002 in Buffalo, New York, however, Bush refused. The “Lackawanna Six,” as they became known, were arrested by the FBI and local police and jailed after pleading guilty in federal court.)

Fighting the War in Courts
Obama so far appears to be searching for a balance between Clinton’s approach and Bush’s tactics, which led to two wars in Islamic countries and many of which are now being restructured by Congress and the courts. In one illustrative act, the Obama administration announced that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks who has been held at Guantánamo Bay since 2003 and repeatedly subjected to interrogation techniques many liken to torture, will be moved to New York to stand trial in civilian court in 2010. It was a positive sign for legal experts who believe the Bush administration went too far in trying to create a separate judicial process for detainees, one which failed to provide routine protections to defendants and ignited a legal feud that delayed the trials of many.

“This was not a tough-minded decision that, in the end, worked to bring justice to those who needed to be tried by the military commissions or otherwise, but rather it slowed down the process very dramatically. This is something that’s very clear,” says Moore of the University of Virginia’s Center for National Security Law. “There were several mistakes made by the George W. Bush administration as [it] began to figure out what is the paradigm and how are we going to deal with this after 9/11 and, in fairness, this was a very difficult, tough setting.

“What we need to do is balance a little more effectively the application of both the criminal justice and the military paradigm,” Moore adds. “Those who went fully to the military paradigm have a point that prior to 9/11, we had erred on the side of thinking about these issues as solely criminal justice issues. We need to deal with the problem of terrorism across both the war-fighting and criminal-justice paradigm. But you need to choose very carefully which elements go where.”

Joe McMillan, a partner at Perkins Coie LLP in Seattle, experienced the Bush-era military tribunals when he flew to Guantánamo Bay in 2008 to help defend Salim Ahmed Hamdan, the man who once served as bin Laden’s $200-a-month driver and the first detainee to formally face charges in court—seven years after he was first apprehended in Afghanistan. McMillan had trouble just getting access to his client and to information relevant to the case. National security protection measures seemed extreme. When McMillan and his team attempted to quote from The 9/11 Commission Report,[4] a public report that, in book form, made The New York Times Best Sellers List in 2004, the U.S. government objected, insisting that quoting from the report could endanger national security.

“That’s an example of how the national security privilege can, in my view, be abused in military commissions that would be far less likely to happen, in my opinion, if there was a U.S. federal district judge in a U.S. civilian court,” McMillan says. McMillan’s fight against the tribunals resulted in the 2006 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld,[5] which shot down Bush’s proposed military commissions on the grounds that they violated the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Geneva Conventions. Congress has since revamped the way the commissions would operate.

“It’s been a system that’s been cobbled together in a manner that has been subject to constant criticism and challenge, revised as decisions from courts have come down, and all in a very unnecessary way,” McMillan says. “We have both civilian courts and courts martial that have a long tradition of administering justice in a manner that we think lives up to the concepts of due process that we recognize as essential guarantees of integrity of the judicial process. The need for these military commissions, these archaic institutions, to be dusted off and retrieved from the scrap heap of history is highly questionable.”

U.S. courts have, in fact, handled hundreds of terrorism-related cases since 9/11. Of the 828 defendants indicted in the United States on terrorism-related charges, 593 have been processed through the civilian court system, according to the New York University School of Law’s Center on Law and Security in its Highlights From the Terrorist Trial Report Card 2001–2009: Lessons Learned.[6] Of the 593 defendants, 523 have been imprisoned, which translates to an 88.2 percent conviction rate, according to the report.

Long Wait for Justice
There are those who speculate about the possibilities of putting bin Laden on trial for his crimes. Obama suggested during the 2008 campaign that an international tribunal, similar to the Nazi-era trials at Nuremberg, would be an appropriate forum “to assure that the United States government is abiding by the basic conventions that would strengthen our hand in the broader battle against terrorism.” International tribunals were convened in 1993 to prosecute war crimes in the former Republic of Yugoslavia and in 1994 to address genocide in Rwanda, although they dragged on for years and cost millions of dollars. Others say that trying bin Laden in a U.S. courtroom would help reestablish America’s global reputation, which they consider as having been weakened by Bush administration policies.

Intelligence and military sources, however, consider the capture of bin Laden unlikely, even if the United States finds him. It is far more likely he will be killed—or take his own life—in a quest for martyrdom rather than be taken alive, they say.

Either way, one group that fully expects the United States to eventually bring bin Laden to justice is the families of the 9/11 victims. Family members over the years have spoken out on a variety of issues—from the formation of the 9/11 Commission to illegal immigration—and opinion varies widely among them.

“I can’t imagine, though, a family member who would feel that [the hunt for bin Laden] should just be dropped,” says Brian Richardson of the New York-based group Families of September 11. “I can’t imagine that there would be a family member who wouldn’t want to see him apprehended and either put on trial or go before a military tribunal.”

Carie Lemack’s mother, Judy Larocque, boarded American Airlines Flight 11 at Boston’s Logan International Airport to attend a business meeting in California on September 11, 2001, when, 15 minutes into the flight, a man named Mohamed Atta and four others seized control of the jetliner. At 8:46 a.m., the hijackers rammed the plane into the World Trade Center’s North Tower, killing Larocque and 91 other passengers instantly. Seventeen minutes passed until a second jetliner hit the South Tower, confirming to the world that America was under attack.

Larocque’s foot was found amid the rubble of the Twin Towers, though it would take more than five years to identify it as hers. Pieces of her bones were found blocks away. Lemack does not believe the amorphous term “terrorism” adequately explains what happened to her mother. She sees it, pure and simple, as murder.

“It’s very difficult. Each family and each family member has their own journey they’re going through in terms of dealing with it. It is not an easy process. A lot of times, people seem to forget that these are murderers,” says Lemack, who has spent the past eight years tirelessly organizing the victims’ families, pushing for the formation of a special commission to investigate what happened, and then lobbying Congress to implement antiterrorist laws recommended by the commission.

Lemack has formed a new group, Global Survivors Network, which includes people who have suffered at the hands of terrorists on six continents, and travels the world reminding those who may feel a kinship with terrorists that innocent people are being killed and families devastated.

“You use the word ‘terrorist’ and people forget that there are human beings on the other side of that. My mother was murdered. And to not have been able to have some of the same resources that most murder victims get is very difficult,” Lemack says. “As the family of any murder victim would, we want to see those who plotted murder against a loved one, my mother, to be brought to justice, to be held accountable for their actions.”

Perhaps bin Laden will be. An indictment against bin Laden that includes 238 criminal counts—none of them directly related to 9/11—has been pending in U.S. courts since 1998. He has been at the top of the FBI’s Most Wanted list since 1999.

Freelance writer Bob Kemper wrote about the state secrets privilege in the November 2009 issue of Washington Lawyer.

Notes
[1] A report to members of the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, Tora Bora Revisited: How We Failed to Get Bin Laden and Why It Matters Today, available at www.foreign.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Tora_Bora_Report.pdf.
[2] Ex-ISI Chief Slams U.S. Military Agenda in Pakistan, available at www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=112832&sectionid=351020401.
[3] National Counterterrorism Center report, Al-Qaeda Better Positioned to Strike the West. See also, Spencer S. Hsu and Walter Pincus, U.S. Warns of Stronger Al-Qaeda: Administration Report Cites Havens in Pakistan, Wash. Post, Jul. 12, 2007.
[4] 9/11 Commission Report, available at http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/report/911Report.pdf.
[5] See Hamdan v. Rumsfeld 548 U.S. 557 (2006).
[6] Center on Law and Security, New York University School of Law report, Highlights From the Terrorist Trial Report Card 2001–2009: Lessons Learned, available at www.lawandsecurity.org/publications/TTRCHighlights Sept25th.pdf.