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Article by Mansoor Ijaz regarding Bin Laden (2 page article)

Al Qaeda's Nightmare Scenario Emerges

Does Osama bin Laden plan to become the ultimate suicide bomber?

by Mansoor Ijaz

02/19/2003 12:00:00 AM

OSAMA BIN LADEN, or some good likeness of him, spoke from the ether again on two occasions last week, releasing two undated audiotapes as Muslims completed their pilgrimages to Mecca. His call to Jihad did not stop at tying himself to Iraq's people, by which he had clearly hoped to provoke Washington into immediate unilateral military action against Saddam Hussein. Nor did it end with his messianic recitation of verses in the Koran that clearly demonstrated he knows the end game is near. Predicting his martyrdom this year, he vowed to die in "the belly of the Eagle," an Islamist reference to ending his life in a final act of terror against the United States on our soil. The man, put simply, is on the run.

Bin Laden's cowardice shines through his rhetoric. For the first time since the September 11 attacks against the United States, bin Laden demonstrated fear through his choice of words. In setting forth plans for his suicide, he probably came to the conclusion that al Qaeda's retaliation infrastructure around the world had been so effectively and systematically dismantled by western intelligence that his terrorists may not be able to mount a credible response to any planned U.S. military action in Iraq in the near future. Like many Mafia bosses before him, he appears to have decided that when the going looks tough--the poison network in Europe, for example, has been decimated by defections and confessions--it's better to exit stage left.

While bin Laden's vision of dividing the West
and driving a wedge between the United States and her.....(snipped, 2 page article)

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/002/263corhl.asp

from post 4132 (Mansoor Ijaz article):

"What's missing? Plutonium, and the scientific expertise to build a crude but highly explosive nuclear bomb. (Plutonium is more easily transported without detection and offers a bigger bang for the buck than typical enriched uranium devices.) Who's supplying the material and expertise? North Korea, and, surprisingly, our ally in the war against al Qaeda, Pakistan. . . .According to my intelligence sources in the Far East, the outlying renegade provinces of Indonesia (Aceh, for example) and the Philippines (where al Qaeda affiliate Abu Sayyaf rules) are infested with senior al Qaeda leaders. Each one is financially empowered to purchase North Korea's plutonium the moment it is reprocessed. Ayman Zawahiri, al Qaeda's number two, was reportedly in Indonesia last September, a month before the Bali bomb blast that killed 200 mostly Australian tourists. He could easily be there again. We also know from published--and so far undisputed--reports that from February 2000 until July 2002, eight senior Pakistani nuclear scientists left their country without obtaining the required No Objection Certificates needed for travel abroad. They remain unaccounted for and at least some are reported to have traveled to Australia and Indonesia."

If you want to understand who sponsors the terrorists, "follow the weapons".

To understand the weapons flow is to understand the dynamics of state sponsorship.

(The Axis)

The Khan network is a geographical overlay of the Al Qaeda network.
AQ is not only a *terror* network it is a *weapons* network.
It is not just a global nuclear black market . . . it is a "nuclear e-bay"
Afghanistan did not just have terror training camps. It had *WMD* facilities.

AQ has its own motivations (more precisely the different factions that remain), but they act in concert with their sponsors. It is only a subcontractor.

AQ did not grow in a vacuuum. AQ would be nothing without the states that support them. The most dangerous sponsors are the WMD hubs.

One is gone but two remain. They are cornered, and they are exceedingly dangerous.