He boasts of this knowledge in a silly interview with Time:
WHEN WILL WE GET OSAMA BIN LADEN? That is a question that goes far deeper than you know. In the chain that you need to successfully wrap up the war on terror, we have some weak links. And I find that until we strengthen all the links, we're probably not going to be able to bring Mr. bin Laden to justice. We are making very good progress on it. But when you go to the very difficult question of dealing with sanctuaries in sovereign states, you're dealing with a problem of our sense of international obligation, fair play. We have to find a way to work in a conventional world in unconventional ways that are acceptable to the international community.
IT SOUNDS LIKE YOU HAVE A PRETTY GOOD IDEA OF WHERE HE IS. WHERE? I have an excellent idea of where he is. What's the next question?
I thought we already found an unconventional way of coping with those awkward international obligations. It's called pre-emptive war, though so far it hasn't been used against Al Qaeida.
The whole bin Laden question drives me nuts. Yes, he's just a symbol, and catching him would not kill the organization. But to ignore him so completely? He is a symbol for the other side, too, you know, and right now it looks like bin Laden is invincible.
Porter Goss says this about Iraq in the same interview:
COULD THE U.S. GO TO WAR AGAIN BASED ON FALSE INTELLIGENCE? I would not agree to surmise that America has gone to war based on false intelligence. I would say that the right question is: Should America be checking out threats to America? The answer is yes. And will we find some threats were more talk than real? Yes, we will.
Goss has been taking speech lessons from Rumsfeld. This doesn't hide the fact that he thinks facts are checked by riding roughshod over people who are most likely totally innocent. A drastic way of finding that a threat was just talk.