Posted on 09/15/2001 3:05:13 PM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Osama bin Laden was a 24-year-old scion of a super-rich Saudi Arabian family when the Saudi CIA recruited him in 1979 to fight Soviet invaders in Afghanistan, with weapons provided by the American Central Intelligence Agency.
Today, bin Laden is the world's most wanted terrorist, the CEO of ``Islamic Terror Inc.,'' a loose-knit network of groups with tentacles in Asia, Europe, Africa and the United States -- even South Florida -- dedicated to attacking U.S. targets and moderate Arab governments.
Though he may not directly control the groups, he is widely believed to be the driving force and chief financier of a dozen murderous assaults in the past decade, including Tuesday's devastating attacks.
``Think of these groups as grapes from the same bunch,'' said an Egyptian counter-terrorism expert. ``They are separate, distinct groups yet all their vital links flow back to one common root: Osama bin Laden.''
Some terrorism experts believe that the U.S. government has demonized bin Laden to the point of turning one in many thousand Islamic radicals into the devil himself, blaming him for any and all terror attacks.
``This isn't the politically correct thing to say while they're digging bodies out of the World Trade Center, but he is just a figurehead for a broad and diverse movement,'' said a U.S. terror expert who asked for anonymity.
But anyway one cuts it, bin Laden has been linked to a wave of attacks since 1993 designed to reestablish a Caliphate, an Islamic concept that harks back to the time when Muslims ruled from India to Spain.
According to the CIA's declassified biography of bin Laden, he was born in 1955 in the port city of Jeddah, the youngest son of an ethnic Yemenite businessman who built the Bin Laden Construction Group into a $5 billion firm based on his friendship and contracts with the Saudi government.
Ironically, the firm built the main base for U.S. Air Force units stationed in Saudi Arabia since the Gulf War, the Prince Sultan Air Force Base in the desert, 50 miles southeast of the Saudi capital of Riyadh.
Bin Laden studied economy and religion at the King Abdul Aziz University but, according to friends quoted in published profiles, he was always critical of his country's ruling Al Saud family, widely accused of corruption and un-Islamic behavior such as drinking alcohol.
IN SAUDI CIA
What the CIA biography does not mention are published reports that he was recruited in 1979 by Saudi CIA chief Prince Turk Bin Faisal into the Islamic Legion, a group of volunteers from around the Arab world organized by bin Faisal to fight the Soviet troops that invaded Afghanistan that year.
That's how bin Laden came to know thousands of Islamic radicals, and in the mid-1980s founded the Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK), or Services Office, to help channel volunteers from some 50 countries to Afghanistan.
While bin Laden is now praised by admirers as a valiant combat commander, CIA agents who worked with the Afghan rebels at the time have said he was more of a rear-echelon organizer and religious leader.
Although he is often photographed holding an AK-47 assault rifle, a 1999 video clip of bin Laden at a firing range showed him awkwardly aiming and firing his rifle. But sometime in the mid-1980's bin Laden began preaching a broader sort of war -- not just military struggle against the Soviets, but an anything-goes war on moderate Arab governments, Israel and its main backer, America.
MORE POLITICAL
Although he bases his call for a Jihad on the Muslim holy book, the Koran, his followers tend to be more politically than religiously radical.
Two of the suspects in Tuesday's attacks drank vodka at a South Florida bar shortly before they embarked on their suicide missions. Muslims prohibit the consumption of alcohol.
``In today's wars, there are no morals,'' he said in a 1998 interview with ABC-TV reporter John Miller in one of his Afghan hideouts.
``The terrorism we practice is of the commendable kind, for it is directed at the tyrants and the aggressors and the enemies of Allah. . . who commit acts of treason against their own country and their own faith,'' he declared.
He broke with MAK co-founder Abdallah Azzam, a Palestinian killed in 1989, in the mid-1980s and in 1988 created al Qaeda, Arabic for the military base, reflecting his vision of a network of far-flung groups tenuously linked to a central coordinating body.
``Senior leaders in the organization are also senior leaders in other Islamic terrorist organizations,'' said the CIA biography, made public after the 1998 bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
Bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia after the Soviet troops left Afghanistan in 1989, but was expelled in 1991 for plotting against the Riyadh government and moved to Sudan, where his family firm has several branches.
BLASTED SAUDIS
That same year, the Saudi government allowed hundreds of thousands of U.S., British, French and other troops into the Arab peninsula to fight Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.
Bin Laden thundered against the Al Saud family, calling its members ``whores'' and charging that it had violated Muslim precepts by allowing infidel troops near the cities of Mecca and Medina, Islam's two holiest sites.
``They rip us of our wealth, resources and oil. . . . They kill, murder our brothers. They compromise our honor and our dignity, and dare we utter a single word of protest, we are called terrorists,'' he told ABC.
The real terrorists, he said, are the Israelis and their U.S. backers, who rule over Palestinians and want to weaken Islam everywhere so they can impose Western values on Islamic nations.
Bin Laden soon began forging tight links with radical Islamic groups, especially Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood and Al Jihad but also the Lebanese-based Hezbollah and other groups in Algeria, Pakistan, Indonesia and several predominantly Muslim nations in the former Soviet region of Central Asia.
And the attacks began:
1993 -- Veterans of the Afghanistan resistance set off a truck bomb in the basement of the World Trade Center, hoping to topple one 110-story tower onto the other. Six people die.
1994 -- A bomb goes off in a Philippines Airline jetliner, killing one person.
1995 -- A car bomb destroys a Saudi National Guard barracks in Royadh, killing six.
1995 -- Bin Laden and Sudan are accused of complicity in an attempt to assassinate Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak during a trip to neighboring Ethiopia.
Sudan expelled bin Laden in May 1996, under intense pressure from Western governments as a result of the plot against Mubarak. Bin Laden returned to Afghanistan, now under the protection of the ruling Taliban.
`ORDINARY MAN'
``He is a good Muslim. Osama is just an ordinary man and he could not have organized'' the New York and Washington attacks, the Taliban's religious leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, said in a nationally broadcast speech Friday.
Bin Laden's move to Afghanistan only emboldened him, allowing him to set up terrorist training camps in rugged hills near the southern city of Jalalabad and host visiting delegations from other terror groups.
And in August of 1996 he issued a public ``Declaration of War'' against America. ``If someone can kill an American soldier, it is better than wasting time on other matters,'' he said the next year.
He sent fighters into Bosnia, Chechnya, Tajikistan, Somalia, Yemen and Kosovo -- virtually any place where Muslims were fighting, according to the CIA biography.
And the attacks continued.
1996 -- A suicide truck bomb at a U.S. military barracks in the Saudi city of Dahran kills 19 American soldiers.
In early 1998, bin Laden proclaimed a new group, the International Islamic Front for Jihad against the Jews and Crusaders, his terminology for Israel and Western nations that sent troops to fight in the Middle East.
And the attacks grew even more deadly.
1998 -- Suicide bombers blow up the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224, including a dozen Americans.
2000 -- A small boat packed with explosives pulls up next to the USS Cole warship in the Yemeni port of Aden and blows up, killing 17 sailors.
2001 -- Suicide hijackers slam three jetliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. A fourth crashes in Pennsylvania. Some 5,000 people are reported dead or missing.
`NO SHAME'
``America has no shame,'' he told ABC. ``We believe that the worst thieves in the world today and the worst terrorists are the Americans. Nothing could stop you, except perhaps retaliation in kind.''
Asked if he feared the Clinton Administration's decision in 1998 to put a $5 million price on his head following the embassy bombings, bin Laden shrugged it off.
``We as Muslims believe that our years on this earth are finite and predetermined,'' he said. ''If the whole world gets together to kill us before it is our time to go, they will not succeed.''
This just goes to show that appeasement only perpetuates ideals, and makes the beneficiary even more determined to carry out their goals. If he was plotting against the government, he should have been executed for treason.
I don't think we're ignoring anyone.
Looked more like an AK-74.
It is insanity to attack a superior force and strike him in a militarily insignificant manner. What Bin Laden accomplished, militarily, was the equivalent of soaping Humvee windows or writing graffiti on the wall of an army base. He attacked and greatly angered a superior foe, without dealing him a decisive blow. Sun Tzu is one of many strategic thinkers over the milennia to call this sort of thing insanity. The Japanese sank a good part of our Pacific Fleet, and set us back some years in the ability to counter-strike against their empire as a result. Even at that Tojo feared that they had just "awakened the sleeping giant", even that was not a decisive blow. Bin Laden "awakened a sleeping giant" as well, but militarily, he blew up a some office buildings and a few Pentagon bureaucratic offices. He made show, not war.
Strategically, he is now faced with a war at a level of which he is not capable of fighting. He has "special forces", he does not have armored divisions, infantry divisions, artillery, air forces, etc. etc. etc. He can fight a war at this level only if the superior force does not strike back utilizing all of its various and many capabilities. There are dimensions and dimensions of warfare that we are capable of fighting which he has capability or resources for.
Nor can he think strategically, he has proven that. If he had any understanding of war on a strategic level he would understand that to strike a superior foe a less than crippling blow would be suicide. His only hope was to fight us in such a way that we did not have the resolve or will to fight back. His method of attack merely assured that we would have such resolve -- with all of our military capabilities still intact. Among the many things that Bin Laden is, he is also an idiot in his chosen field of endeavor.
I believe Bin Laden does these acts to show the haters of the United States he can so he can rally more malcontents and fanatics to his "cause."
Terrorism can't be fought conventionally.
Our response as a people has neutralized the effect he had hoped for, which was a cowering nation.
Now we go in and get him and his gang.
I don't know which is accurate.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.