Intruders at al-Qaida sites hamper hunt for clues

WASHINGTON -- The safe houses and camps where Osama bin Laden's network did business in Afghanistan are the focus of U.S. teams looking for clues to his whereabouts and how his al-Qaida organization worked.

But the abandoned sites also are being overrun -- by Northern Alliance fighters hunting for souvenirs, by curious Afghans and by reporters -- and that is raising questions about how much evidence, undisturbed and useful, will be left.

Americans are "on the chase now," but al-Qaida seems "awfully good at covering tracks," said Richard Murphy, a former assistant secretary of state now with the private Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

After the Kosovo conflict, the United States sent dozens of FBI forensic experts to look for physical evidence that Serbian forces had committed atrocities. The region essentially became a giant crime scene.

This time, the United States does not need such evidence to bring before military courts; it already has plenty, many legal experts say, including bin Laden's own words urging attacks on Americans.

Instead, U.S. special operations teams are after information about how bin Laden operated, whether he sought weapons of mass destruction, and especially where bin Laden, his al-Qaida fighters and Taliban protectors have gone.

Intelligence officials say the most current information about bin Laden's whereabouts more likely will come from defectors.

The American teams are searching and taking samples from sites where bin Laden or his followers may have been making chemical or biological weapons.

On the ground, Afghans say there seem to be few systematic efforts to protect such sites to keep evidence undisturbed.

Journalists have found documents relating to deadly chemicals and bacteria in houses abandoned by al-Qaida in Kabul, the capital. Material in Arabic, Urdu, Russian and English indicates al-Qaida was studying chemical, biological and even nuclear weapons.

At a training base on the southern edge of the city, reporters found a letter home from a recruit that indicated al-Qaida trainees were there this month.

Two journalists, one Spanish and one Italian, who visited a site in the eastern village of Farmada said they found a vial with Cyrillic letters reading "sarin," a nerve gas. But reporters who later visited the same compound, where bin Laden reportedly lived, said it had been cleaned out since then.

Bin Laden has said his group has chemical, biological and even nuclear weapons. U.S. officials have said al-Qaida probably has crude chemical or biological weapons but not a nuclear bomb.

After the fighting in Kosovo, the FBI teams gathered physical evidence that was used to corroborate witness statements alleging that Serbian forces committed war crimes against ethnic Albanian civilians.

Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic was indicted by the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, on charges of committing war crimes in Kosovo based in part on that evidence. Just last week, the tribunal also accused Milosevic of genocide in Bosnia.

In Afghanistan, in contrast, the United States probably only has to show bin Laden's own fatwas, or religious rulings, that call for attacks on Americans, and prove that someone was a member of al-Qaida, to convict under a military tribunal, said Ruth Wedgwood, an international law professor at Yale University and Johns Hopkins University.

"Bin Laden has simplified the job of any prosecutors by issuing his indiscreet fatwas," Wedgwood said.

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