Word: masterminding
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Afghan soldiers claimed that a U.S. raid early last week may have killed al-Qaeda's strategic mastermind, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and its financial adviser, Ali Mahmood. The wife and children of al-Zawahiri were confirmed dead. The Afghan fighters slowly widened their forays, capturing low-elevation hollows used by al-Qaeda to store ammunition. The Pentagon said the proxy forces last week drove some of the 1,500 al-Qaeda troops higher into the Khyber Pass, forcing them to break into smaller units that U.S. bombers could then pick...
Israel has tried and failed to decapitate Hamas, and that task, should he take it on, would be no easier for Arafat. There is no mastermind without whom the military apparatus falls apart. After all, its actions are cheap and simple and take no special genius: hit-and-run attacks on Israeli soldiers, suicide bombings. So whenever one set of leaders is assassinated or rounded up, it's easy for another to take its place. In the past few months, Hamas has instituted a multitiered system of automatic replacements, borrowed from the communist underground of the 1950s. In each city...
...terrorist mastermind's own movements are likely to depend on his game plan - if he'd always intended to go down fighting in Afghanistan, there's a good chance his end is nigh. On the other hand, al Qaeda meticulously plans its operations years in advance, and the recent sequence of events has been quite predictable, particularly to someone who knows the Taliban's limits and capabilities as well as bin Laden does. If the Saudi terrorist wasn't fixing to die in Afghanistan, it's unlikely that he'd have waited this long before slipping away...
Above all, critics of the tribunal idea question why these cases cannot be brought and won in regular federal courts. When the World Trade Center was attacked in 1993, federal prosecutors convicted the bombers, including mastermind Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, in a regular federal court in Manhattan. Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind Egyptian cleric who plotted to blow up the United Nations and New York City-area bridges and tunnels, was also convicted in a regular federal court...
Swank seems a little lost among them. There's something slightly mousy in her presence; she seems more a victim than a mastermind, a character actress trying to command a star part. Her cohorts pip-pip merrily through the historical flummery, letting their accents do their acting for them. Swank doesn't quite get the joke. Charles Shyer, the director, does. He understands that we're mostly there for the drollery and the decolletage. Every movie season requires a handsomely appointed irrelevance, and his movie fills that need admirably...