US: We won't catch Osama soon

2005-06-19 18:42

New York - "Weak links" in Washington's war on terror make it unlikely that Osama bin Laden will be apprehended in the near future, CIA director Porter Goss said in a magazine interview released on Sunday, although he has an "excellent idea" of the Al-Qaeda leader's whereabouts.

"I have an excellent idea of where (Osama bin Laden) is," Goss told Time in an interview set to hit newsstands Monday.

But he added: "In the chain that you need to successfully wrap up the war on terror, we have some weak links. And I find that until we strengthen all the links, we're probably not going to be able to bring Mr bin Laden to justice."

Goss said however that "we are making very good progress on it," especially in the area of human intelligence.

"We're fixing it with quantity and quality. We're changing methods. We're changing systems. We're changing it from the beginning to the end, from the recruitment - the types of people we are trying to attract - to the way we bring them in, to the experience we give them in training, to the ways we get them on station or in places where they are of use to us," Goss said.

"We are focused very much on finding ways to get our eyes and ears out and about on a global basis," he told Time.

- AFP