Word: bin
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...Osama bin Laden has claimed responsibility for the failed bombing of a Northwest airliner on Christmas. That's not surprising, but what should be is that it took him nearly a month to do so. Either it took all of that time for news of the plan to reach him, or he's lying. And if he's lying, we need to consider that the man is completely irrelevant...
...would bin Laden claim credit for a failed attack? The point of terrorism is to carry out your threats - that's what terrifies people. Take Lebanon's Hizballah, an organization whose early days were steeped in terrorism: it made a point of never botching an attack, bombing or kidnapping. So when Hizballah said it was not going to stop until it drove the West out of Lebanon, that threat carried a lot of weight. And the credibility of Hizballah's threat convinced U.S. President Ronald Reagan that Lebanon was lost, which prompted him to withdraw the Marines who were stationed...
...same is true for the Northwest Airlines bombing attempt: there's not a shred of evidence that bin Laden's al-Qaeda had anything to do with it. And the fact that bin Laden in his statement provided no inside detail of the attack pretty much says he wasn't involved. The Northwest attempt was homegrown, the would-be suicide bomber recruited in either Nigeria or Britain, the explosive device made in Yemen. His handlers call themselves al-Qaeda in Yemen, but there's no evidence that this group takes orders from the al-Qaeda leadership in Pakistan's tribal...
...attack failed, the entire operation wouldn't. On 9/11, the network deployed 19 hijackers on four planes; on 12/25, by contrast, it managed only one. Second, the underwear attack failed because Abdulmutallab wasn't particularly well trained. The 19 Sept. 11 hijackers were personally selected by Osama bin Laden from the tens of thousands of potential killers who went through al-Qaeda's Afghan training camps in the 1990s. The ringleaders got extensive training on the design of airplanes and the behavior of aircraft crews, even before they enrolled in U.S. flight schools. The grunts were made to slit...
...took a passive, or even indulgent, view of al-Qaeda have been frightened into action by jihadist attacks on their soil. Al-Qaeda's butchery has wrecked its image among ordinary Muslims. After jihadists bombed a wedding in Amman in 2005, the percentage of Jordanians who said they trusted bin Laden to "do the right thing" dropped from 25% to less than 1%. In Pakistan, the site of repeated attacks, support for al-Qaeda fell from 25% in 2008 to 9% the next year. In 2007, the Pew Research Center found that in Pakistan, Lebanon, Indonesia and Bangladesh, support...