Dalton Fury is the nom de plume of a Delta Force commander who led U.S. troops in Afghanistan’s Tora Bora mountains in the end of 2001, when Osama a bin Laden was in full flight. Fury’s new book, Kill Bin Laden: A Delta Force Commander’s Account of the Hunt for the World’s Most Wanted Man, is a riveting account of one of the most important — but also least understood — battles in the war on terror.
TIME: When you hear a U.S. Presidential candidate saying. “I promise we’ll kill Osama Bin Laden,” what runs through your mind?
Dalton Fury: What runs through my mind is that it doesn’t really matter who is going to go in the White House next year. If there’s no intelligence on where [bin Laden is] located, then you can have Mickey Mouse in the White House. If they had good actual intelligence now, they would have hit him a Hellfire missile, or even potentially sent a special team in there. But it’s just not as easy as saying, “When I get elected, I’ll kill him,” because if we knew where he was now, we would have already made the attempt.
Are we getting better intelligence now?
I think we’re always improving, We’re trying to build a better mousetrap, but you know, it’s hard to fight [al-Qaeda] with conventional weaponry. The answer isn’t always money. You can buy a thousand more Predator drones, and put them over there and clog the airspace, but they’re not stupid — they know when the Predators are up there. So yeah we’re going to make them fly higher and have more powerful cameras and all that stuff, but I think that because [al-Qaeda leaders] live in mud huts and they’re barely washing and bathing themselves… that we somehow treat them as if they are inferior human beings.
How aware were they of your abilities, the abilities of the Delta Force?
I’d be naive to say that they weren’t aware of it. I think they’re smart enough and have shown a propensity to understand how the Internet works and how to get around being discovered by using various means.
The view that exists in the U.S., is that bin Laden’s living in a cave somewhere, that he’s cut off from the rest of the world.
What a Top Terror Tracker Learned About Osama bin Laden – TIME
If I had Bin Laden’s millions I’d be hiding in the lifestyle of the rich and famous and not in the proverbial mudhut/cave.
Cocooned by well dressed lawyers and well heeled security the rich can live in quiet isolation sure in the privilege and privacy of the monied.
Mega yachts and darkened limos ply the world and who intrudes? Mansion compounds of the rich and famous are gated fenced bastions of isolation and seclusion and security.
Certainly the mudhuts of the Pakistan, Afghanistan hinterlands offer the deeply layered security of family, tribes, and clans. The US has long demonstrated its ability to continually intrude here electronically from space or the skies. Any gathering or activity human or technological stands out and gets attention.
I don’t know but suspect that a mega yacht enjoys varying amounts of scrutiny depending on the port and is free to have guests, send and recieve broadcasts and go about business.