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Sam Hill has done great things in a short time!

Think I will e-m the article, and the following, to this Larry, and begin with , "Hey, Stupid!!"

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/binladen/interviews/newjohnson.html

Interview 9/12/2001

'A former CIA officer, Johnson was deputy director of the U.S. State Department Office of Counterterrorism from 1989 to 1993. In this interview, conducted September 12, 2001, he explains why our perception of Osama bin Laden and his organization may be wrong, what we know about bin Laden's involvement in the 1998 embassy bombings and the 2000 USS Cole attack, and the degree of warnings leading up to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the U.S.

Leading up to January 2000, the millennium, everybody's expecting the possibility of a big terrorist attack. Tell me what happens, and how it affects in any way how we think about Osama bin Laden.

We've got to avoid personalizing this too much. Bin Laden is a symbolic head of a movement of religious fanatics who want to purge the world of evil. And the United States is the symbol of that evil. That said, they do not have the global reach of General Motors. And they do not have the political sophistication that you would associate with a major political movement in the world. They tend to be very ideological and very crude.

Consequently, in the face of security measures [on the eve of the millennium] and the cooperation of other governments, their attempts to launch attacks at certain targets were thwarted. What we've seen, looking back [from] the World Trade Center bombing [in 1993] up through yesterday's World Trade Center disaster, we now know things about bin Laden that we didn't two or three years ago.

We now know, for example, bin Laden was meeting with Imad Mughniyah, Hezbollah security chief. Mughniyah, until yesterday, had killed more Americans than bin Laden, had wounded more Americans than bin Laden. Mughniyah was involved with the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, the takeover of TWA 847, and the murder of Navy diver Robert Stethem, the apprehension of several Americans who were held hostage in Beirut, Lebanon.

So this is an individual who has been aggressive in his attacks against America. And we now know through testimony that came out in the trial in New York City on the bombing of the U.S. embassy, that Mughniyah was the mentor, the ideological inspiration, for Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden saw Mughniyah as one who used violence to force the United States to retreat from Lebanon. And he believed that that same model could be used against the United States to force it out of Saudi Arabia and to punish it.

Let's break that down. How does that lesson get learned? It starts, as you say, earlier, circa the millennium?

In the millennium we still did not know that.

So, at the millennium, what do we know?

Well, at the millennium, we know that [bin Laden is] holed up in Afghanistan. He is working with ideological sympathizers, some who have their roots with the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, some who have their roots with the armed Islamic group of Algeria. They've sort of merged together. Because although they come from different countries, they share a common vision of destroying the United States, eradicating the stain of U.S. influence that they view as sinful. And you've got to confront the sin by destroying it. '
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too long to paste it all, but it is fascinating.