Delta Force Commander’s Account of The Hunt For Osama bin Laden

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

Task Force Black Kills Hundreds of Al Qaeda Terrorists In Black Ops Campaign

More than 3,500 insurgents have been “taken off the streets of Baghdad” by the elite British force in a series of audacious “Black Ops” over the past two years.

It is understood that while the majority of the terrorists were captured, several hundred, who were mainly members of the organization known as “al-Qa’eda in Iraq” have been killed by the SAS.

The SAS is part of a highly secretive unit called “Task Force Black” which also includes Delta Force, the US equivalent of the SAS. Read more