Word: ranstorp
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...tape's purpose? Professional bin Laden watchers- the sort who know how to read a loosely knotted turban- shrug off the conspiracy theorists who maintain that the recording must have had some mysterious ulterior motive. This was the Hindu Kush version of "What I did on my vacation." Magnus Ranstorp, an al-Qaeda expert at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, speculates that the visiting Saudi wanted to immortalize his meeting with bin Laden and was planning to keep the tape private. Mustafa Alani, a Middle East security scholar at London's Royal United Services Institute for Defense Studies...
...established was unbelievable. Only five or six people had a full picture of the whole operation." (They did not include bin Laden's "spokesman," the Kuwaiti Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, who- in a glimpse into the everyday life of a terrorist- turns out to be a soccer fan.) St. Andrews' Ranstorp thinks the tape suggests that the Sept. 11 attacks fit into a classic al-Qaeda pattern: an operation is conceived in the field (in this case, by Mohamed Atta, who is thought to have piloted American Airlines Flight 11, the first plane to hit the Twin Towers), then referred back...
...overt support offered to al-Qaeda by a network of radical and militant Saudi clergy; bin Laden and al-Ghamdi mention four other clerics approvingly. "That kind of sympathy with Islamic militancy and rationalization of terror," says Jacquard, "has become common in Saudi Arabia and the gulf states." Ranstorp thinks the poem bin Laden recited- "Our homes are flooded with blood...we will not stop our raids/Until you free our lands"- could mean that a new wave of attacks on the U.S. will be launched after Afghanistan has been pacified. "One of the worrying things," he says, "is that...
...relatively benign environment of Panama. "We're good at hitting big, immovable things," says an Air Force general. "We don't do so well when they move around and they're small." Both are true of bin Laden. "He is the hardest man ever to get to," says Magnus Ranstorp, a terrorism expert at St. Andrews University in Scotland. To avoid being spotted by satellites, bin Laden and his associates use human couriers to relay messages, who sometimes travel on foot rather than in cars. He has been extra careful since Chechen secessionist leader Dzhokar Dudayev was blown...
...head of the snake and let the body wither. "Terrorism is not bin Laden," says a senior U.S. intelligence official. "He's got lieutenants waiting to succeed him." The cellular, secretive structure of al-Qaeda--small groups of operatives acting almost independently--militates against a quick, decisive strike. Says Ranstorp: "Al-Qaeda is truly a multinational enterprise; they have made it into a decentralized organization that understands the power of asymmetric warfare in overcoming superpower supremacy...