Word: osama
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Could the next chapter of our national nightmare be a nuclear one? How hard would it be for operatives of Osama bin Laden to deliver a "suitcase nuke" to our doorstep...
...aims of this campaign have been no big secret--decapitate the Taliban, eliminate al-Qaeda's terror apparatus and seize Osama bin Laden. Administration insiders call the strategy "Taliban plinking" (echoing the "tank plinking" of the Gulf War): special forces plan to pick off one individual at a time, starting with Mullah Omar and working down the command chain of Taliban leaders protecting bin Laden. The first wave of lightning special-ops strikes was, as much as anything else, a psychological weapon designed to boost American spirits and faith in the government, silence suspicions that the public might go wobbly...
Lodged, presumably, somewhere in the canyons and dugouts of an Afghan mountain range, Osama bin Laden waits for the reckoning. If he has heard by now that U.S. special forces are on the prowl, the news was delivered by a courier; Pentagon officials say they have cut off al-Qaeda's ability to communicate by phone. Last week U.S. pilots hit at least one bin Laden deputy: a bombing raid near Jalalabad killed Abu Baseer al-Masri, an Egyptian Islamic militant said to be close to bin Laden's right-hand man, Ayman al-Zawahiri...
This puts all the flaggery in an unflattering light. We have an awfully easy nation to be patriotic in. If you want to help the war effort, says the President, go out and spend money. Meanwhile he and the loyal opposition will decide whether defeating Osama bin Laden requires Americans to swallow a tax cut or suffer new infusions of federal spending. If this is what you can do for your country, then ask not what your country can do for you. It's hard to imagine how the government could coddle us more...
Members of the brigade have a guidebook--the 11-volume, Arabic-language Encyclopedia of Jihad. Its 6,000 pages, prefaced by lavish praise of Osama bin Laden, detail the practices of terror and urban-guerrilla warfare. There is even a CD-ROM version. The tome includes instruction in using various arms as well as Semtex--one of the most popular explosives among terrorists--and TNT. Graphics help explain how to rig an envelope with C4 explosive and how to turn an apartment-building door, a radio, a cigarette pack, a television set or a couch into a deadly, booby-trapped...