Stardate 20011127.1358 (On Screen): Baleen whales (like the Blue Whale) often eat krill, a miniature crustacean which is a bit like a tiny shrimp. Krill tend to swim in large groups, and the whale gets below them, opens its mouth, swims up and engulfs as many as it can along with the water they're swimming in. It then closes its mouth and uses its baleen to filter the water out, leaving just the yummy krill behind to swallow. Of course, the krill are rather spread out, and the whale wants to get as many of them as it can because doing this will scatter the school. So the whales do something crafty: after finding a school of krill, they swim around and below them and blow air out, which forms a sort of net of bubbles. This causes the krill to concentrate in the middle, which means that when the whale finally does its thing, there are a lot more krill in there. I wonder if our military planners are doing something like that to bin Laden and the top leadership of al Qaeda.
Local militia leaders in eastern Afghanistan suspect bin Laden may be holed up in a mountain base called Tora Bora that veteran Afghan guerrillas describe as an impregnable fortress.
Built with U.S. aid during the Soviet occupation, Tora Bora sits about 35 miles south of Jalalabad, atop a 13,000-foot mountain, three hours by foot from the nearest road. Carved 1,150 feet into the mountain are a series of rooms and tunnels that reportedly can house some 1,000 people.
Ali, who used the base to launch attacks against the Soviet army in the 1980s, said Tora Bora was almost impossible to take by force. The Soviets bombed and attacked it repeatedly for a decade with little effect, he said.
So the idea would be to bomb all sorts of other places, and to let Special Forces snipers take out guards outside other cave complexes, but to leave this one alone. And with its reputation from the war with the USSR, they might decide that it is indeed invulnerable. So over time, more and more of their important assets (especially top people) would concentrate there -- and once they're all set (or set up), the entire area would be hit with weapons which the USSR didn't have, which would bring the place down. This complex cannot be a mystery to our military planners; I'm sure they know all about it. There's got to be a reason it hasn't been bombed yet, whether it's actually being used or not, and I think that's the reason. (discuss)
Update: Of course, if you really want to be tricky, then you bomb ineffectually a couple of times to convince them that you tried to destroy it and failed.
