"U.S. spy agencies have had little luck recruiting well-placed informants... according to U.S. and European intelligence officials."

I'm having a great of difficulty imagining a scenario in which the above question could be answered in the affirmative.

If the CIA had managed to infiltrate al Qaeda, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't be telling the press.

Maybe our spies can't penetrate religious extremist groups for the same reason the FBi couldn't really penetrate the supposed network of crime and drugs that were destroying our youth in the 60's...dude, it's the wig, headband, granny glasses and brown wingtips...it's the entire idea...it's the idea that torture can work..it's making a graduate of a bible college and former ice cream truck driver the guy in charge of fixing baghdad's broken infrastructure...it's making a former professional judge of arabian horses the guy in charge of FEMA..it's electing a guy you think you'd like to have at your barbeque in stead of a guy who could read the instruction on how to store the food so you don't get food poisoning...it's strangling the goose that lays the golden egg, it's peeing in the soup, it's what makes humans so damn frustrating...it's called stupidity. Without stupidity the Babylonians would still rule the world, without stupidity the old an corrupt would always be in power, without stupidity new ideas could never arise..thank goondness for stupidity. I'm glad I had a chance to see the USA at the heighth of its power but now it's begun to believe its own BS...and that is the ultimate stupidity. I hear the US Peso is still valued in Zimbabwe..Oh, no! Mugabe is going to be elected out of office...maybe they'd like our alfred e. neuman lookalike..he's gonna be available soon and I suspect he might just want to leave the country to avoid proscecution..after all, that too would be a "mission to keep"...out of jail.

When you're in this type of war, you play by their rules, not yours. Their rules say kill the relatives of your enemy and you defeat your enemy. When we start killing the old men and women, and the young boys and girls, then we will start winning the war. It's a sick way to fight a war, but it's their rules we're going to have to start using. Ours will keep us there for another 100 years.

How do you infiltrate an organization that requests you kill Americans or others to prove your loyalty?I'm sure Al Qaeda would allow anyone to join and use them as they see fit and I doubt anyone would rise in ranking until they had a sufficient bodycount.Why do you need experts for such an obvious thought process?Direct engagement with known Al Qaeda members and engagement through friends and relatives of known members is probably the only method available,but I wouldn't call that infiltration on a high level either.

Look, the reason 'thay' ca'nt penetrate the networks is that every time their data mining, eavesdropping or simply good field work of agents raises flags, they are tol to ignore it or hold for more evidence, Just ask Mohammed Atta. Somehow, elements within FBI/CIA protected hem because it would lead to solid information that the 9/11 gang were simply patsys in a larger, totally illigal network within the US government. This goes all the way back to Lansdale and Lemnitzer.

I swear the anglo/american fincial, Oil and defence elite is the conroller of certain black operations. Sad as that is...

There are many truths in the world.

It just depends on the one telling the tail

Al Queda is hard to infiltrate for two reasons. First, it's members are fanatical assholes and Two, the vast majority of Muslims consider these assholes "Brothers in Faith." How sad and pathetic.

Then you have the "The Jackal" (Al Jazeera) network, that salivates every time bin laden or one of his lesser nut-jobs has a "message" to relay. What a bunch of crap!!

Because they're too small, a few thousand, and have no structure.

The answer is arrogance, xenophobia and a plethora of intelligence agencies and a diplomatic corps that are repositories for the denizens of cronyism, patronisim and nepotism as well as racism and bigotry.

Sorry, typo that should have read "hard to infiltrate Al Queda" not "9/11"

If its so hard to infliltrate 9/11, why was John Walker Lindh -- a mixed up white boy from up scale Marin county north of San Francisco -- able to just walk on in and enlist? The book "Road to 9/11" by Peter Dale Scott describes the real reason the CIA "can't" get people inside Al Queda. They aren't really trying. Scott interviews several people who were in the agency and they all give more or less the same story. The CIA has grown fat and lazy. The agents are all tied to embassies and spend most of their time going to coctail parties making "contacts" and waiting to be approached. That worked fairly well for the cold war since we had embassies in the USSR but not so much when the enemy is in caves in Afghanastan and Pakistan.

Republicans = Military Failure

NO THEY CAN'T and the real reason why is BECAUSE there really is NO "al Qaeda"!!!

In fact al Qaeda is a fictional "Boogey Man" created by the CIA at the request of the Bush Regime to help in its quest to establish a Corporate/Fascist Govt in America and Europe!

Yeah, and that's why you can't walk into Norte or Sureno areas either....geesh.

"Ya gotta know the territory!"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZ9U4Cbb4wg

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say it might have something to do with not having any allies left to provide a back story for agents in the areas where al Qaeda recruits. The guy who appeared out of nowhere with an American accent six months ago is not going to be a first draft choice. Being a fanatic doesn't equate with being stupid, look at Dick Cheney. Fanatic - yes. dumb - no.