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Whereabouts of Bin Laden Are Known - Interview with Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Brig.-Gen. Moshe Ya'alon

(Maariv-Hebrew) Amnon Dankner and Ron Leshem - Q: Oslo was a huge deception exercise by Arafat? A: I didn't see any indication with Arafat - either at Oslo or after Oslo - of any readiness to recognize our right to exist as a Jewish state. All I saw was the exact opposite. Also, the clauses in the PLO Charter were never cancelled. Already in 1995, as head of Israeli military intelligence, I began to ask a number of questions. How did Faisal al-Husseini say it?: "Oslo was a Trojan horse." I accept that that was their intention. Q: What will happen the day after disengagement? A: It is not yet clear, it cannot be decided if it is worth it for us or not worth it. Q: What about Iran? A: If Iran achieves a nuclear umbrella that will hover like a cloud over the entire region, then it will be more brazen and it could be that there will be regimes that will be swept along with it. Already today, Iran wants to export revolution, it wants Islamic states according to Sharia law. It is undermining the Jordanian regime, the Egyptian regime, the regimes in the Persian Gulf and Saudi Arabia. Q: Are the Iranians far from reaching a bomb? A: My assessment is that they are a year away, a year and a half away, from the point at which they can produce nuclear fuel by themselves. Just recently, it became clear to us that they received 12 cruise missiles - with a range of 3,000 kilometers - from the previous regime in Ukraine. Q: What do we know about the murder of [former Lebanese prime minister] Hariri? A: All the indications point to Syrian responsibility. Q: What about Osama bin Laden? How is it possible that intelligence organizations don't know where he is? A: No, that is not true. I don't think that they don't know where he is. There is an operational difficulty to grab him for many reasons. But it is not true that they don't know where he is.
2005-05-11 00:00:00
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