Word: masterminding
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Other Muslims who had studied in the Philippines maintained links there. It was from Manila that Ramzi Yousef, the convicted mastermind behind the first World Trade Center bombing, hatched a plan to blow up 12 American airliners as they flew over the Pacific. In the mid-1990s, Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, married to one of bin Laden's sisters, allegedly funded Islamic schools in the south of the country, where Muslim insurgents have been fighting for years. The Filipino government has long claimed that Abu Sayyaf, the most bloodthirsty of the groups--its specialty is beheadings--has been supported...
...terrorist mastermind could insert plans for blowing up a nuclear reactor in, say, the nose of a puppy on a pet-adoption website. Operatives in the field, told which nose to look at, could then check for their marching orders. Steganography is a fast, cheap, safe way of delivering murderous instructions. "It avoids the operational security issues that exist anytime conspirators have a physical meeting," says Matthew Devost of the Terrorism Research Center. Terrorist watchers suspect al-Qaeda may be hiding its plans on online porn sites because there are so many of them, and they're the last place...
...Other Muslims who had studied in the Philippines maintained links there. It was from Manila that Ramzi Yousef, the convicted mastermind behind the first World Trade Center bombing, hatched a plan to blow up 12 American airliners as they flew over the Pacific. In the mid-1990s, Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, married to one of bin Laden's sisters, allegedly funded Islamic schools in the south of the country, where Muslim insurgents have been fighting for years. The Filipino government has long claimed that Abu Sayyaf, the most bloodthirsty of the groups-its specialty is beheadings-has been supported...
Where would bin Laden get the material? Again, the most common answer is Russia, with its reputation as a fissile flea market. And a bin Laden associate has told authorities that the mastermind is shopping for nuclear ingredients. Adds Leventhal: "My feeling is that the prudent assumption is that bin Laden is nuclear capable in some fashion." Other experts are less certain that any terrorist group could pull off a nuke. A 1999 Rand study on terrorism noted somewhat reassuringly that "building a nuclear device capable of producing mass destruction presents Herculean challenges for terrorists and indeed even for states...
...When General Pervez Musharraf announced that Pakistan would cooperate with the U.S., he knew that radicals and sympathizers of accused mastermind Osama bin Laden and his Taliban host would take to the streets in protest. But it was, Pakistan's President calculated, what had to be done: one-part realpolitik, one-part leap of faith. There are risks, of course. He is courting chaos and possibly violence, but the rewards?the end of international sanctions, debt relief, millions of dollars in aid for refugees?could mean legitimacy abroad and perhaps, eventually, something approaching stability at home. Musharraf's acquiescence...