Word: armed
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...approached them with the idea of detonating a "dirty bomb" in a U.S. city, and they obliged by teaching him to wire a bomb. The impression, in the government's own account, is of a former street hoodlum desperate to join a new gang - and being kept at arm's length. An outsider taught to build a bomb (what's not to like, for al-Qaeda, about a U.S. passport holder asking to be taught how to kill his countrymen?) but not necessarily integrated into the organization he was desperate to join. The fact that the authorities arrested Padilla immediately...
...There are plenty of reasons to suspect that al-Qaeda keeps men like Padilla and Reid at arm's length: Ex-convicts from Western prisons are inherently unreliable as recruits, not only because of their dubious past (Bin Laden's men tend to be repressed puritans rather than penitent sinners) but also because they'd be prime candidates for recruitment by Western intelligence agencies. And because Western volunteers are generally converts, al-Qaeda would not have the community and kinship networks available to them in the Arab world to verify the credentials of men like Padilla. That would dictate that...
...rather of an eager volunteer with easy access to the U.S. Both the al Muhajir instance and the case of shoe-bomber Richard Reid suggest that some of the volunteers who found their way to al-Qaeda from Western countries after brushes with the law were kept at arm's length from the organization's deepest networks. U.S. officials told the Washington Post that al Muhajir was not part of Zubaydah's inner circle, and that they were able to find him even though the Bin Laden lieutenant had alluded to the American only in "generic terms" - although, presumably, there...
...have an identifiable goal, which may be precisely that of mainstream politicians. "Millenarian" terrorists are different. They have no political agenda and owe their allegiance not to any institutions or geographical expressions on earth but to a higher authority in heaven. The classic examples of the first are the armed wings of national liberation movements, like the Irish Republican Army, Israel's Stern Gang and Umkhonto We Sizwe, the military arm of the African National Congress. It is quite possible to support the aims of such groups while deploring their means. The classic example of the second category, of course...
...Merchant expounded, he ticked off a list of Tyson's misadventures - the notorious ear-biting incident in Tyson's second loss to Evander Holyfield, his evident attempts to break the arm of another opponent, South African heavyweight Frans Botha, and finally the disturbance Tyson backers caused in the Vegas venue after the ear-biting fight...