[rocklobster11]

Here's an interesting one. Note the highlighted info about Neo-Nazi's flying remote controlled miniature planes into the G8 summit, and how Time makes fun of it. Not quite what I've been lead to believe about terrorists flying airliners into the G8 summit

Bin Laden Rides Again: Myth vs. Reality
A 'plot' to assassinate President Bush and a second to attack the U.S. military in the Gulf -all in the same week.

TIME.com
BY TONY KARON
Wednesday, Jun. 20, 2001
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,131866,00.html

That It Boy of international terror, Osama Bin Laden, is back in the news. Headlines from just the past week: "Russians Reveal Bin Laden Plot to Kill Bush at G8 Meeting." "Bin Laden Video Claims Responsibility for Cole Bombing." "Yemen Foils Bin Laden Plot to Kill U.S. Investigators." "Bin Laden Group Planned to Blow Up U.S. Embassy in India..." And finally, at week's end, U.S. forces all over the Gulf confined to barracks and ships put to sea because of a "non-specific but credible threat" from Bin Laden's group. Vile acts and wretched conspiracies reported from all over the world, all carrying the imprimatur of the Saudi terror tycoon skulking in the hills of Afghanistan, his name now the globally recognizable shorthand for Islamist terror in the same way that "Xerox" has become for "photocopy."

In the language of advertising, Bin Laden has become a brand - a geopolitical Keyser Soze, an omnipresent menace whose very name invokes perils far beyond his capability. To be sure, his threat is very real. Bin Laden is a financier of considerable means who maintains a network of loyalists committed to a war of terror against the U.S. And he has put his money, connections and notoriety to work in attracting a far wider web of pre-existing Islamist groups to his jihad against Washington.

If Bin Laden didn't exist, we'd have to invent him

Still, the media's picture of Bin Laden sitting in a high-tech Batcave in the mountains around Kandahar ordering up global mayhem at the click of a mouse is more than a little ludicrous. Yes, the various networks of Islamist terror have made full use of the possibilities presented by technology and globalization. But few serious intelligence professionals believe Bin Laden is the puppet-master atop a pyramid structure of terror cells. It's really not that simple, but personalizing the threat - while it distorts both the nature of the problem and the remedy - is a time-honored tradition. Before Bin Laden, the face of the global terror threat against Americans belonged to the Palestinian radical Abu Nidal. Or was it Colonel Ghaddafi? Ayatolla Khomeini, perhaps? And does anyone even remember the chubby jowls of Carlos the Jackal, whose image drawn from an old passport picture was once the icon of global terror?

Personalizing makes it seem more manageable. Bin Laden may be out of reach right now, safe in the care of Afghanistan's Taliban rulers. But by making him the root of the problem, we hold out the possibility that his ultimate removal from the scene will make the world safe from Islamist terror. A comforting thought, but a delusion nonetheless.

The dangers are real. The Cole bombing, and this week's indictments handed down in the Khobar Towers attack, are brutal reminders of the vulnerability of U.S. personnel stationed in the Arab world to attack by extremists. Last Saturday, Indian police arrested a group of men allegedly planning to blow up the U.S. embassy in New Delhi and quickly turned up evidence linking the plot to Bin Laden. Two days later, an unrelated plan, involving suicide bombers killing U.S. agents investigating the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, was foiled in Yemen; their trail, too, leads back to Bin Laden. He was in the news again the following day after Western reporters were shown a Bin Laden promotional video in which he appeared to claim responsibility for the bombing of the Cole in a macabre poem.

Then there is the sublime: For sheer diabolical genius (of the Hollywood variety), nothing came close to the reports that European security services are preparing to counter a Bin Laden attempt to assassinate President Bush at next month's G8 summit in Genoa, Italy.

According to German intelligence sources, the plot involved Bin Laden paying German neo-Nazis to fly remote controlled-model aircraft packed with Semtex into the conference hall and blow the leaders of the industrialized world to smithereens. (Paging Jerry Bruckheimer...)

The Russians, who believe a Bin Laden attack in Genoa is more likely to be carried out by their old enemy, the Chechens, have sent an advance team of anti terrorism experts (armed, we hope, with small-scale anti-aircraft weapons).

But Bin Laden's role has always been that of facilitator. That was his function in the 'Islamist International' formed, with the active encouragement of the CIA and Egyptian and Saudi intelligence, to recruit volunteers to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. His considerable wealth (and ability to raise funds from others) and his organizational expertise played a key role in helping the "Arab Afghans," as the volunteers became known, play a creditable role in the war against the Soviets. And once that war was won, he continued to play the same role, keeping its veterans together and maintaining an infrastructure to arm, train and fund Islamist warriors for deployment in Muslim armies in places as diverse as Bosnia, Chechnya, Western China and the Philippines.

He's not ducking blame, he's demanding it

Having come under the influence of radical Egyptian Islamists in Afghanistan, Bin Laden found himself in conflict with the pro-Western regime in his native Saudi Arabia. The Gulf War proved to be his breaking point with the Saudi royal family. Driven by a desire to expel the U.S. from the Gulf region and overthrow a royal family he denounced as corrupt apostates, he turned his fire increasingly against America. The World Trade Center bombers may have been motivated by similar concerns - and they may have been inspired by some of the same militant teachings of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman - but the two don't appear to have been directly linked.

Bin Laden subsequently claimed his men were behind the 1993 debacle in Mogadishu, where 17 U.S. servicemen were killed in a botched raid on a local warlord. Whether or not there's any basis to the claim, Bin Laden wants to be held responsible for that and any other attack for which the media is prepared to blame him. The reason he has spent the past decade offering assistance to a wide range of pre-existing Islamist groups is precisely because he wants to paint himself as the personification of the considerable anti-American sentiment inflaming much of the Arab world, a latter-day Salah el Din driving out the imagined Crusaders. The Western need to personalize the terrorist menace plays into his hands. Indeed, most experts agreed that President Clinton's 1998 cruise missile strikes on Bin Laden were probably the single most important PR boost in the Saudi's career. And the fact that his name is cited by way of explanation for the fact that the world's most powerful military has moved into defensive positions all over the Gulf certainly doesn't do his carefully cultivated image any harm.

Even when groups involved in malfeasance around the world have had dealings with Bin Laden or those close to him, intelligence experts don't believe that the Saudi financier is necessarily pulling the strings when they act. What Bin Laden may in fact personify is the coming together of diverse Islamist groups during the Afghan war, and their identification of the U.S. as their primary enemy during the decade that followed. So lop off the head, and the body continues to function, because it remains a diverse and diffuse set of groups and cells with their own internal structures, driven by a common sense of implacable grievance. That menace will remain, even if Bin Laden is removed. We may simply have to find a new name and face for it.

----

[rocklobster11]

Perhaps this is why we were concerned whether Iraq was in some way involved in 9-11

Iraq Says It Will 'Punish' Allies

By Sameer N. Yacoub
Associated Press Writer
Thursday, June 21, 2001; 3:17 p.m. EDT
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20010621/aponline151711_000.htm

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Iraq warned that an alleged U.S.-British airstrike on a soccer field "will not go unpunished," the official Iraqi News Agency reported Thursday.

Iraq claimed that an allied airstrike Tuesday killed 23 people in Tall Afar, 275 miles northwest of Baghdad, but Washington said if there were deaths, they were likely caused by Iraq's own "misdirected ground fire."

"Iraqis will not be terrorized by such criminal acts," Iraq's ambassador to the United Nations, Mohammed al-Douri, told the agency.

U.S. and British defense officials said a mission was flown over Iraq's no-fly zone Tuesday, but denied warplanes fired on any positions.

The Pentagon said Iraqi forces had fired several surface-to-air missiles at allied planes and it appeared that part of at least one of the Iraqi missiles malfunctioned and landed on the soccer field.

"How do the U.S. officials know the missile malfunctioned?" an Iraqi Foreign Ministry official, speaking on condition of anonymity, asked The Associated Press. "Do they have representatives working with our anti-aircraft missiles units?"

Lauren Cannon, the leader of visiting American and British activists currently visiting Iraq, said the group will travel to Tall Afar "to see for ourselves who was behind the deaths."

The newspaper of Iraq's ruling Baath party, Al-Thawra, accused the U.N. Security Council on Thursday of "turning a blind eye to U.S. and British aggression because it is dominated by the United States."

The Security Council imposed sanctions on Iraq after its 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

"This new aggression is more proof of America's political and moral bankruptcy," the paper said in an editorial.

Allied aircraft patrol zones over southern and northern Iraq, which were established after the 1991 Persian Gulf War to protect Shiite Muslims rebels in the south and Kurds in the north. British and American jets enforcing the northern zone are based in Turkey.

Iraq does not recognize the no-fly zones and has challenged allied aircraft since December 1998.

----