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Inside Al-Qaeda's Hard Drive

prostoalex writes "Alan Cullison covered the events in Afghanistan for Wall Street Journal in late 2001. On the day that Kabul fell Cullison was offered to buy a bunch of computers from a local al-Qaeda office. For $1100 Cullison purchased an IBM desktop and a Compaq laptop. Before giving the hard drives to CIA agents in Afghanistan, Cullison copied the contents and shares some of the electronic messages in September's Atlantic Monthly. Interesting insight on al-Qaeda's financial operations and their merger with Taliban movement. The letters include e-mail messages from Osama bin Laden himself."

4 of 714 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Insights by Grym · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    It's too bad there's no "incoherent leftist babble" mod, because this is ridiculous.

    To assume that you can understand terrorism without first living the life that these people lead is naive and ingenuous.

    This is ridiculous. I don't have to live as a Taliban fighter in Afghanistan to glean that their movement is a fascist, religiously intolerant temper tantrum against the modern world. All I have to do is LISTEN to what THEY THEMSELVES say about their movement and WATCH as they behead innocent civilians simply because they aren't muslim.

    "Terrorism" is not about "Them", or "A vs. B". Terrorism is a War against those whould define the terms of Terrorism, and those who would define the terms of Civilization.

    In other words, true terrorists are those who create a 'bad guy' in order to convince their fellow man to go to war ...

    And I guess that was a desperate attempt to paint President Bush and/or the United States as a terrorist, right? Gimme a break.

    Rather than redefining the word "terrorism" next time we want to push our own agendas, let's just call a spade a spade. Rather than terrorism, we're in a war against Fundamentalist Islam.

    -Grym

  2. Re:I smell a rat by LittleLebowskiUrbanA · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Whatever. Goo thing you know better than the rest of us about the CIA. Did you see the part where he copied one hard drive?

  3. Re:They never even thought of using..... by thejuggler · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    And opposing the murding of thousands of babies is a bad thing?

    Some of you people have a very twisted moral code if any moral code at all.

  4. No, he's thinking of the French Revolution... by leonbrooks · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    ...of 1789-94, AKA "The Reign of Terror", during which one of Paris' leading prostitutes was enthroned as "The Goddess of Reason" - which, when you think about it, doesn't sound too sexually repressed - and Atheism was declared to be the national religion.

    They did all manner of bizarre things, like trying a ten-day "decimal week" (monumental stuff-up that worked out to be, as you'd expect). It makes interesting if occasionally very blood-encrusted reading.

    The original trigger for the worst cycle of that Revolution was the Roman Catholics, who despite overt profession to the contrary (celibacy and all that, but see 1 Timothy 3:2) were not exactly the empitome of sexual repression themselves, but the Atheist revolutionaries got a bit carried away and massacred everyone of a religious bent - including what amounted the city's entire population of talented artisans (mostly Protestants of one kind or another) which drove French industry into the ditch fairly swiftly - not to mention massacring anyone they owed money to, whose sister or daughter they wanted to screw, whose house they envied... you get the idea.

    --
    Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing