Word: osama
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...Egypt is a good illustration of President Bush's point that the absence of channels for democratic political participation in Arab states has helped foster terrorism, which has eventually been exported. Osama Bin Laden may be Saudi, but most of the top-tier al-Qaeda leadership at the time of 9/11 were veterans of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a militant offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood that turned to terrorism in response to the Sadat regime's peace treaty with Israel, and found hundreds of willing recruits in Egypt's middle class and in its officer corps. The Brotherhood, of course...
...argument against the U.S. simply leaving Iraq is based on the notion that to do so would just encourage more terrorism. Hasty retreats from Lebanon in 1985 and Somalia in 1993 are Exhibit A and B in Osama bin Laden's argument that despite its overwhelming military power, the U.S. runs when its nose is bloodied. The converse, however, may also be true: That the continued presence of U.S. occupation forces in Iraq fuels an anti-American insurgency there and swells the ranks of Islamist terror networks worldwide. Or, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld put in his internal Defense Department...
...fleets of armored humvees and a communications network that lets them call in air strikes within minutes. These days they focus too on how not to offend local sensibilities, no longer searching veiled women, for example. ("But if I find an Afghan woman who is 6 ft. 5 in."--Osama bin Laden's height--"I'm sure as hell going to have her searched," says Sergeant Vernon Story.) Soldiers are also learning to be more wary regarding tips about al-Qaeda suspects; the U.S. has often been duped into taking sides in tribal feuds...
...SENTENCED. IYMAN FARIS, 34, Ohio truck driver, to 20 years in prison for supporting al-Qaeda and plotting to attack the Brooklyn Bridge; by a federal court in Alexandria, Virginia. U.S. officials said Faris, a Kashmir-born naturalized U.S. citizen, admitted to meeting Osama bin Laden at a camp in Afghanistan in 2000 and later talked with an al-Qaeda leader in Karachi, Pakistan about severing the suspension cables of the Brooklyn Bridge. In 2003 he sent a coded message to an al-Qaeda operative that "the weather is too hot," meaning he didn't expect the plot to succeed...
...comforting to blame the violence in Iraq on foreign fighters inspired by the likes of Osama bin Laden, but it could also be self-deluding. To be sure, bin Laden has urged his followers to head for Iraq to wage jihad, and hundreds may have answered his call. It may well be that some of the suicide terror strikes on soft targets are the work of foreigners, the Baathists being a secular lot who prefer to live to fight another day (as their surrender of Baghdad six months ago amply illustrates). Nobody really knows precisely who is behind the terror...