[Maria S]

"Still under wraps is the report "The New Islamist International", prepared by the U.S. House of Representaves, Task Force on Terrorism & Unconventional Warfare, House Republican Research Committee, February 1, 1993."

I'm pretty dumb on this stuff; is this something that WILL, eventually, come out? Why has it been under wraps? Thanks for any info; I'm just a little slow on the uptake.

[gaspar]

The House Task Force on Terrorism was chaired, as I recall, by McCollum of Florida. It continued its efforts through the 1990s. Its chief investigator was one Yussef Bodansky, a former Israeli air force intel officer who had moved to the USA. Bodansky had numerous contacts in intel, but had the unfortunate habit of not footnoting his information in his reports. In the intelligence community at large, the sadly diminished CIA denigrated the Task Force efforts, without doing much itself.

Bodansky himself did a couple of short books on the Islamist impact in the Balkans that were really quite interesting. Most recently he produced a biography of Bin Ladin that is also quite interesting, but, again, with no footnoting. (His material can be found on abebooks.com)

The tragedy of all this is that while OBLadin was active in Sudan the CIA was drastically reducing its presence in the Al Qaida home base. Equally, our knowledge of the Balkans was dependent on European sources, and on Chechnya and the "Stans" (Turmenistan, etc.,) the CIA was dependent on Russia. And though the USA was really at war with Saddam Hussein, reporting on Iraq was miserable. Likewise, Iran, which served as the home for the terrorist international after 1996, CIA reporting was execrable because it did not trust the Iranian exiles, anymore than it trusted the Iraqi exile groups.