Chicago Tribune Review,
Feb 12, 2005
U.S. ad blitz targets bin Laden
Illinois lawmakers push $25 million bounty in Pakistan
BY RUDOLPH BUSH
STAFF REPORTER
WASHINGTON - Radio spots promoting a $25 million reward for information
leading to the capture of Osama bin Laden and another $25 million
for his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, are airing in the rural mountains
of northwest Pakistan for the first time this week.
Television ads promising that fortune in return for bin Laden
ran on two Pakistani stations last weekend, and will run regularly
on Pakistan's biggest station starting Tuesday.
And last month, newspaper ads appeared for the first time in
the country's major cities featuring the faces of bin Laden, al-Zawahiri
and other top al-Qaida lieutenants.
The ads are the result of legislation written by U.S. Rep. Mark
Kirk, R-Ill., and pushed into law late last year by fellow Illinois
Republican Rep. Henry Hyde, chairman of the House International
Relations Committee. The two took action after learning that little
had been done since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to publicize
the rewards program aimed at capturing al-Qaida's leaders where
they are believed to be hiding.
Kirk, who in late January returned from a trip to the Pakistani
tribal region of Waziristan, remembers the moment he realized
the trail to bin Laden had gone cold, he said.
On a trip to Islamabad in January 2004, he visited the U.S. Embassy
and asked then-Ambassador Nancy Powell who was overseeing the
publicity surrounding the rewards program.
"The ambassador said, `I don't know who is working the rewards
program,' which was stunning to me," Kirk said.
On the same trip, Kirk and a senior staff member on the International
Relations Committee noticed boxes of matchbooks with information
about the rewards gathering dust in the basement of the U.S. Embassy
in Kabul, Afghanistan.
There were no radio ads about the program, even on the Voice
of America station where they cost the government nothing, said
the staff member, who asked not to be named. "We came back
saying, `What a disaster,'" he said. A State Department spokesman
had no comment on why the rewards program was not being publicized
in Pakistan or Afghanistan in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks,
but he said the department's approach has changed.
As a congressional staffer on the International Relations Committee,
Kirk wrote the rewards legislation to include those charged with
war crimes. When he learned last year that the program was stalled,
he was livid and complained to then-Deputy Secretary of State
Richard Armitage. "I realized we needed to make some changes
in the priority the State Department put on it," he said.
Today, there is a new ambassador in Pakistan and the embassy
has hired an advertising agency to write the newspaper ads and
produce the radio and television spots that will air on Pakistani
stations, as well as on the BBC station that tribal leaders have
said their people prefer.
So far, the United States has spent $100,000 on the combined
advertising.
In the days after the first newspaper ads hit the streets in
January, two people provided tips about bin Laden's whereabouts
that are still being vetted, the International Relations Committee
staff member said.
The television ads got off to a rockier start. After running
briefly on two stations over the first weekend in February, they
were quickly pulled. And the country's largest station, GEO, initially
refused to run them for fear of a backlash over their content,
according to a U.S. Embassy document.
Last week, a mob broke into the station's headquarters in Karachi
after it aired a controversial program unrelated to the rewards
program. But after reviewing the ad, station officials agreed
to run them regularly beginning Tuesday.
The ads will increase the odds of finding bin Laden, said Vance
Serchuk, a research associate at the American Enterprise Institute.
"Is this going to be a magic bullet that nets bin Laden?
I'm not sure there is a magic bullet," he said. "Might
this benefit on the margins? Yes."
Kirk and Hyde's measure also enables President Bush to sweeten
the pot; it authorizes him to increase the bounty on bin Laden
to $50 million, although Bush has yet to exercise that power.
More important, Kirk believes, it also made the reward more flexible
and comprehensible to the rural Pakistani tribesmen he hopes will
one day turn over bin Laden: Payments can be in farm equipment
and livestock as well as new trucks and motorcycles.
"In some parts of the world people understand what a herd
of cattle or herd of goats means," the State Department spokesman
said. "That's more realistic to them than a number such as
$25 million."
The State Department agrees the rewards program has been successful
when publicized. So far, it has netted tips that led U.S. agents
or soldiers to the 1993 World Trade Center bomber, Ramzi Yousef,
as well as Saddam Hussein's sons, Uday and Qusay. The government
has paid out more than $57 million for the tips.
Kirk and Hyde hope now for a similar result in Pakistan.
Copyright © 2005, Chicago Tribune
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