Senator: bin Laden's 'noose' tightening
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WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts said Sunday the noose was tightening around both al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
Roberts, who receives regular briefings on terror threats, said bin Laden apparently was hiding in a mountainous tribal region with peaks reaching 14,000 feet on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
"But that noose is tightening as well, as is the noose in regards to Saddam Hussein," said Roberts, a Kansas Republican.
Roberts, speaking on CNN's Late Edition, said bin Laden was using couriers and other low-tech communications methods to evade U.S. signal-tracking technology.
The United States blames bin Laden, a Saudi exile, for the 1988 bombings of two embassies in East Africa, the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden, and the September 11, 2001, attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center that killed about 3,000 people.
Saddam has been sought since U.S.-led forces invaded Iraq in March.
Roberts hailed what he described as growing counter-terrorism cooperation from Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and Thailand, where Southeast Asia's most-wanted terror suspect, Hambali, was captured early last week.
Hambali had been hunted as a suspect in bombings at a Bali nightclub strip last year and a hotel bombing in Jakarta this month before his capture in Ayutthaya, about 50 miles north of Bangkok.
"We are seeing the realization of many countries, the value of really cooperating with the United States, whether it's Afghanistan or Pakistan, or whether it's in the Mideast or whether it's in Southeast Asia," Roberts said.
"And so, basically, we're making a lot of progress," Roberts said. Probably 60 percent of the al Qaeda leadership had been "taken down," he said.
Roberts gave Saudi Arabia relatively high marks for its intelligence-sharing since a bombing attack on Western residential compounds in Riyadh in May killed 35 people, including nine attackers.
"Ever since the Riyadh attacks and ever since they came to realize that their own government was threatened, I think they've been working much better with us," he said.
