Word: ladens
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...soon-to-be-released congressional report on 9/11 is expected to detail U.S. knowledge of Saudi financial backing for terrorists. The fact that Osama bin Laden and 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi citizens has focused attention on the kingdom's role as a breeding ground for religious extremism. So former CIA agent Robert Baer's new book, Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude (Crown; 226 pages), is nothing if not timely. It offers a picture of the Saudi royal family as degenerate, dangerous and doomed...
...Baer, the clan is "as violent and vengeful as any Mafia family," and the monarchy is "hanging on by a thread." There are alleged kickbacks by bin Laden family businesses to Saudi overlords and princes living large as the kingdom's 23 million people endure a steady decline in their living standard. Baer cites data indicating that the Saudis funneled half a billion dollars to al-Qaeda over a decade, while Wahhabi-controlled religious schools indoctrinated a new generation of fanatics...
History keeps repeating itself in Afghanistan. In December 2001, when the allies encircled al-Qaeda's craggy mountain retreat of Tora Bora, Osama bin Laden and his cronies slipped away, leaving foot soldiers as decoys for the bunker busters and special-ops bullets. Last month another opportunity to round up al-Qaeda terrorists was botched--this time by fighting among U.S. allies. Afghan fighters and some 2,000 Pakistani troops deployed to help hunt down al-Qaeda holdovers not far from Tora Bora instead turned their weapons on one another. By the time things calmed down, two weeks later...
...challenged by former U.S. intelligence officials. Powell handled those carefully, avoiding some of the sweeping generalities of other administration officials. He focused narrowly on Abu Mussab Al Zarqawi, a Jordanian terrorist who had received medical treatment in Baghdad. Powell described Zarqawi as "an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda lieutenants." But European intelligence gathered through interrogating some of Zarqawi's own lieutenants suggests that Zarqawi was more of a rival to bin Laden than an associate...
...Singapore-based al-Qaeda expert Rohan Gunaratna asserts that the two groups are much more closely linked, that bin Laden himself oversaw the formation of their alliance "soon after U.S. troops entered Afghanistan. But now this understanding has become very deep. There's integration between the organizations." It amounts to a division of labor: the Taliban focus on southern Afghanistan and Hizb-i-Islami on the east, which frees al-Qaeda "to use its limited strength for operations overseas," explains Gunaratna. (Several U.S. and Afghan intelligence sources, however, suspect al-Qaeda engineered a June 7 suicide bombing in Kabul that...