And Libya goes on...

[Presley Cannady]

on one hand, U.S. finds no organized Al Qaeda presence in Libya opposition, officials say (on p.1):



But, on the other hand (on p.2):

How would anyone know? It took a year or two for the Coalitions to take anything approaching a full measure of the enemy's irregular strength in pre-insurgent Iraq. The Arab "republics" in generally are notoriously poor at tracking even basic crime statistics; something tells me that Libya's peculiar form of government is even worse than Egypt's. Counting irregulars, gangbangers and Trekkies is a hard problem; they don't line up like tanks, they do without a small army of meticulous book-keepers, and they lie--a lot, and especially to one another. I'd be surprised if intelligence analysts had any better means of estimation than the police or paparazzi--you extrapolate based on a small samples of the bastards congregating. Usually in detainee holds, or prisons, or convention centers.