From a list compiled by the UK newspaper, The Independent:
2,973 Total number of people killed (excluding the 19 hijackers) in the September 11, 2001 attacks
72,000 Estimated number of civilians killed worldwide since September 11, 2001 as a result of the war on terror
2 Number of years since US intelligence had any credible lead to Osama bin Laden's whereabouts
2,932 Total number of US servicemen and women killed in Afghanistan and Iraq since September 2001
0 Hours of intelligence training provided to new FBI agents before 9/11. Now they get 24.
91 per cent Terror cases from FBI and others that US Justice Dept declined to prosecute in first eight months of 2006.
1 Those charged in US with a crime in connection with 9/11.
(The entire list can be found here.)
One more important number can be found in a story in Sunday's Washington Post— zero, as in nobody. The story, “Bin Laden Trail 'Stone Cold'“, explains:
It has been so long since there has been anything like a real close call that some operatives have given bin Laden a nickname: “Elvis,” for all the wishful-thinking sightings that have substituted for anything real.
[…]
Bureaucratic battles slowed down the hunt for bin Laden for the first two or three years, according to officials in several agencies, with both the Pentagon and the CIA accusing each other of withholding information. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's sense of territoriality has become legendary, according to these officials.
In early November 2002, for example, a CIA drone armed with a Hellfire missile killed a top al-Qaeda leader traveling through the Yemeni desert. About a week later, Rumsfeld expressed anger that it was the CIA, not the Defense Department, that had carried out the successful strike.
“How did they get the intel?” he demanded of the intelligence and other military personnel in a high-level meeting, recalled one person knowledgeable about the meeting.
Gen. Michael V. Hayden, then director of the National Security Agency and technically part of the Defense Department, said he had given it to them.
“Why aren't you giving it to us?” Rumsfeld wanted to know.
Hayden, according to this source, told Rumsfeld that the information-sharing mechanism with the CIA was working well. Rumsfeld said it would have to stop.
A CIA spokesman said Hayden, now the CIA director, does not recall this conversation. Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said, “The notion that the department would do anything that would jeopardize the success of an operation to kill or capture bin Laden is ridiculous.” The NSA continues to share intelligence with the CIA and the Defense Department.
At that time, Rumsfeld was putting in place his own aggressive plan, led by the U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), to dominate the hunt for bin Laden and other terrorists. The overall special operations budget has grown by 60 percent since 2003 to $8 billion in fiscal year 2007.
Rows and rows of temporary buildings sprang up on SOCOM's parking lots in Tampa as Rumsfeld refocused the mission of a small group of counterterrorism experts from long-term planning for the war on terrorism to manhunting. The group “went from 20 years to 24-hour crisis-mode operations,” one former special operations officer said. “It went from planning to manhunting.”
In 2004, Rumsfeld finally won the president's approval to put SOCOM in charge of the “Global War on Terrorism.”
Today, however, no one person is in charge of the overall hunt for bin Laden with the authority to direct covert CIA operations to collect intelligence and to dispatch JSOC [Joint Special Operations Command of the U.S. military] units. Some counterterrorism officials find this absurd. “There's nobody in the United States government whose job it is to find Osama bin Laden!” one frustrated counterterrorism official shouted. “Nobody!”
And one last number to contemplate– number of years left in President Bush's term: 2
