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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."
Anything that would have been useful to CIA before wouldn't be know that all this has been made public - any financial information would be useless, since with this online, they would have taken the money out. Intel is really only useful if not everyone knows it.
That's either incredibly crazy, or scary, or both.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
The funny thing is the notes on the computer indicate they never even thought of using chemical weapons because they thought it would be too complicated. It wasn't until the American government began making public statements about how easy it would be for certain rouge nations to make simple but deadly chemical weapons, like mustard gas, they they started working on these projects!
I think you mean "All your Qaeda are belong to us" because Al Qaeda means "The Base" in their language. Isn't that fucking funny? All your Qaeda. ROFL.
Bin Ladin is succeeding in his propaganda war, in large part due to the actions of Bush. Their main aim is to draw the Islamic world and the West into a clash of civilisations. Invading Afghanistan was seen as reasonable by most of the Islamic world - thousands of innocent Americans had just died, there was enormous sympathy and the direct perpetrators were in Afghanistan - that and Afghanistan has no real special religious significance for Muslims, unlike Saudi Arabia or Iraq (The Shrine of Iman Ali, Najaf in general, Baghdad, former capital of the Islamic Caliphate).
By invading Iraq, Bush has done more to forward Osama bin Ladin's propaganda than any other action he could have taken. Osama bin Ladin said, that the US will invade your country, the US will take your oil, the US is ruled by Jews and is acting to protect Israel, the US talk about "freedom" but they will crush you under their boots, they will rape your women and torture your men, they will desecrate your holy shrines. So Bush goes and invades one of the most holy Islamic nations which is oil rich, guards the oil ministry while the rest of Baghdad descends into chaos, the neo-cons are well known to be behind the invasion and the original neo-cons were Jews (not the ones now - but they still have very strong ties with Israel's Likud party and Sharon), then there was the torture scandal with reports of rape and torture by American forces, they attack the shrine of Iman Ali and the one of the Sayyids (al Sadr) ie. descendants of The Prophet, which is something only Saddam Hussein and most importantly the caliph Yazid (the worse villain in Shi'ite history) did. Even better, before Iraq only Sunnis formed the Islamic terrorist groups directly attacking the US. Most of the Shi'ite population are as wary of bin Ladin as the US as he considers them heretics. Now by doing a Yazid and attacking the shrine of Iman Ali, all the Shi'ites in the world hate the US as well. For example recently, an elder in one of the Shi'ite strongholds in India warned Americans not to enter the area as he could not guarantee their safety. In Iraq we are seeing Sunni hardliners and Shi'ite hardliners unite for the first time since the war of independence against the British.
Honestly could Bush do anything more to *help* bin Ladin win his propaganda war? Oh, and also because all man-power has been diverted to Iraq, the hunt for bin Ladin has effectively been outsourced to Pakistan (divided loyalties, military dictatorship and all) and the N. Korean threat is being ignored as troops (and White House attention) is rushed from Korea to Iraq.
Personally I think history will see Bush's invasion of Iraq in the same way we currently see the actions taken immediately preceding WWI where a heinous (but not disastrous event like an invasion) led a huge superpower to try to crush a country related to but not directly involved in the event for pre-existing reasons not related to the heinous event in question which led to other countries intervening in a complex system of alliances and ethnic loyalties that cascaded out of control into a war to end all wars. Except this time, a war to end all wars is what bin Ladin actually wants.
"If Western civil society had simply condemned the act, given the Taliban 30 days to deliver the criminals"
... Or by the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, or by the Shia in Iraq, or...
Was a week not long enough? What about the requests for extradition for acts before September 2001, such as the bombing of the African embassies?
"And been very careful to not kill a single innocent civilian, Al Quaeda would have been ostracised by their own support base."
Why? Because we bent over backwards to suit their double standard? It is not enough to try our best to prevent those innocent deaths, even when compared to the al Qaeda tactics that deliberately target civillians? And this is before we get into the nasty details over disagreements over just who was a civillian and who was not (such as "devout worshippers" at a holy cite that were operating a piece of equipment that "just happened" to look and operate like an anti-aircraft battery...)
And what reason is there to believe that, even if we did meet that double standard, al Qaeda would loose support?
"Western civil society has guaranteed Al Quaeda a place in history and guaranteed a generation or two of on-going fighting that will cause the deaths of many, many more people."
And what if Western inaction would have caused the deaths of many more? Which was worse for Afghanistan, outside military intervention in 2001, or a decade under the Taliban? Is it better that those people die by the hands of their countrymen, even if more people die and in far uglier ways?
"I think every country faced with local terrorists has learnt through bitter experience that force does not solve this kind of problem. Dialogue and negotiation are always, finally, the only way to end the cycle of violence."
So, instead of giving Timothy McVeigh a lethal injection we should simply have had a talk with him and then let him go about his business?
"This lesson has been learnt by the British in Northern Ireland, by the Spanish in the Basque Country, by the French in Sardinia, the Sri Lankans"
"Nothing short of genocide - and even that is not certain - will stop more embittered and manipulated youths growing up to fill the gaps left by arrest, detention, assassination."
Even if those doing the manipulations are wrong? Is the majority always right?