Word: bins
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Then there is the sublime: For sheer diabolical genius (of the Hollywood variety), nothing came close to the reports that European security services are preparing to counter a Bin Laden attempt to assassinate President Bush at next month's G8 summit in Genoa, Italy. According to German intelligence sources, the plot involved Bin Laden paying German neo-Nazis to fly remote controlled-model aircraft packed with Semtex into the conference hall and blow the leaders of the industrialized world to smithereens. (Paging Jerry Bruckheimer?) The Russians, who believe a Bin Laden attack in Genoa is more likely to be carried...
...Bin Laden's role has always been that of facilitator. That was his function in the 'Islamist International' formed, with the active encouragement of the CIA and Egyptian and Saudi intelligence, to recruit volunteers to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. His considerable wealth (and ability to raise funds from others) and his organizational expertise played a key role in helping the "Arab Afghans," as the volunteers became known, play a creditable role in the war against the Soviets. And once that war was won, he continued to play the same role, keeping its veterans together and maintaining an infrastructure...
...Having come under the influence of radical Egyptian Islamists in Afghanistan, Bin Laden found himself in conflict with the pro-Western regime in his native Saudi Arabia. The Gulf War proved to be his breaking point with the Saudi royal family. Driven by a desire to expel the U.S. from the Gulf region and overthrow a royal family he denounced as corrupt apostates, he turned his fire increasingly against America. The World Trade Center bombers may have been motivated by similar concerns - and they may have been inspired by some of the same militant teachings of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman...
...Bin Laden subsequently claimed his men were behind the 1993 debacle in Mogadishu, where 17 U.S. servicemen were killed in a botched raid on a local warlord. Whether or not there's any basis to the claim, Bin Laden wants to be held responsible for that and any other attack for which the media is prepared to blame him. The reason he has spent the past decade offering assistance to a wide range of pre-existing Islamist groups is precisely because he wants to paint himself as the personification of the considerable anti-American sentiment inflaming much of the Arab...
...Even when groups involved in malfeasance around the world have had dealings with Bin Laden or those close to him, intelligence experts don't believe that the Saudi financier is necessarily pulling the strings when they act. What Bin Laden may in fact personify is the coming together of diverse Islamist groups during the Afghan war, and their identification of the U.S. as their primary enemy during the decade that followed. So lop off the head, and the body continues to function, because it remains a diverse and diffuse set of groups and cells with their own internal structures, driven...