Word: bins
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Those meant to see it must have been delighted at the tape's atmospherics- the air of relaxed enjoyment, the camaraderie and kissing, the excited praise by the sheik ("A plane crashing into a tall building was out of anyone's imagination. This was a great job"). Bin Laden seemed on top of the world. Abdul Bari Atwan, editor of the London-based newspaper al-Quds al-Arabi, has interviewed the al-Qaeda leader and noticed a change in the man he had met five years ago. "I was watching his body language," says Atwan...
...what was the tape's purpose? Professional bin Laden watchers- the sort who know how to read a loosely knotted turban- shrug off the conspiracy theorists who maintain that the recording must have had some mysterious ulterior motive. This was the Hindu Kush version of "What I did on my vacation." Magnus Ranstorp, an al-Qaeda expert at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, speculates that the visiting Saudi wanted to immortalize his meeting with bin Laden and was planning to keep the tape private. Mustafa Alani, a Middle East security scholar at London's Royal United Services Institute...
...analysts of terrorism, the tape held rich pickings. Bin Laden confirmed what has been suspected by law-enforcement officials: that there was a clear hierarchy among the Sept. 11 hijackers and that they operated under a strict need-to-know code. Though all those who died knew they were engaged in a "martyrdom operation," said bin Laden, most of them were ignorant of the precise target of their mission until the morning it took place. Alani says, "The degree of secrecy they established was unbelievable. Only five or six people had a full picture of the whole operation." (They...
...will have a huge impact on the Muslim world," says Atwan, the editor of al-Quds. "It's too late. It's like accusing somebody of murder and executing him, and then saying 'Now we found the evidence.'" For Atwan and many other commentators, the point is not bin Laden's responsibility for attacks like those of Sept. 11; that is a given. It is, rather, the actions the U.S. took to visit justice on the terrorists. "I want the U.S. to behave as a civilized superpower," says Atwan. "To take revenge, to send these bombers to kill innocent people...
...Victory justifies a lot, but experts on al-Qaeda warn that winning the war will not eliminate the organization. For Jacquard, a central significance of the tape was the overt support offered to al-Qaeda by a network of radical and militant Saudi clergy; bin Laden and al-Ghamdi mention four other clerics approvingly. "That kind of sympathy with Islamic militancy and rationalization of terror," says Jacquard, "has become common in Saudi Arabia and the gulf states." Ranstorp thinks the poem bin Laden recited- "Our homes are flooded with blood...we will not stop our raids/Until you free our lands...