US Official Says al-Qaeda Near Defeat

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US Official Says al-Qaeda Near Defeat
January 07, 2009
Military.com|by Christian Lowe

The head of counterterrorism operations for the U.S. Department of State said the al-Qaeda network is largely broken and has lost the ability to conduct large-scale terrorist operations.

While the U.S. has still been unable to kill or capture the organization's top leaders, they have nevertheless been "beaten back into a hole" by relentless pressure from special operations, law enforcement and drone attacks.

"They are scratching their heads, realizing they took on a pretty savvy opponent who went after them kinetically very fast, pulled out the rug from underneath them, put them on the run, put them in a area where they didn't have the assets they had before," said former Army special operations commander, Amb. Dell Dailey, who now heads the State Department's counterterrorism office. "Bin Laden can't get an operational effort off the ground without it being detected ahead of time and being thwarted."

Dailey cited the foiled terror plot to bring down as many as 10 U.S.-bound commercial jets in 2006 as an example of al-Qaeda's diminished capability to launch dramatic attacks.

"Their ability to reach is non-existent," Dailey told military reporters during a Jan. 6 breakfast meeting in Washington, D.C.


Rest of article at: http://www.military.com/news/article/us-official-says-al-qaeda-near-defeat.html

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