Articles

Saturday, Sep 23, 2006 OBL not dead
PARIS, France (CNN) — A report that Osama bin Laden is dead has set off a flurry of denials from U.S., French and Pakistani officials, who say the newspaper report citing French intelligence cannot be independently confirmed.

A Saudi intelligence official, however, told CNN on Saturday that the al Qaeda leader is suffering from a waterborne illness. There have been credible reports that the most wanted man in the world is ill, but there is no intelligence indicating he is dead, the source said.

Tuesday, Sep 19, 2006 Lady Killer

Their arrest last month hit front pages around the world. Married for only three years and with an eight-month-old baby, they are now in British police custody, suspected of plotting to bring down several U.S. passenger jets over the Atlantic–a plan that, had it succeeded, could have killed thousands.

Saturday, Sep 09, 2006 Mullah Omar in Pakistan

KABUL, Afghanistan (CNN) — The one-eyed Taliban leader Mullah Omar, who heads the religious militia fighting U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, is living in Pakistan, though not in the same area where al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is thought to be, according to a U.S. intelligence source.

Saturday, Sep 09, 2006 The Taliban, Regrouped and Rearmed

The interpreter’s hand-held radio crackled with the sound of intercepted Taliban transmissions, and he signaled the infantry patrol to wait while he translated. At 7 a.m. one morning late in the summer, peasants were already out scything wheat, with their children tending fields of pink and white poppies that would soon add to Afghanistan’s record-setting opium and heroin supplies. We were 9,000 feet up, in the hamlet of Larzab, in a remote part of Zabul province — the heart of Talibanland.

Could It Happen Again? Given the scale of the damage caused to the United States, the 9/11 attacks neither required much money to execute, nor did they take a large number of plotters. Terrorism is a cheap form of warfare–the first World Trade Center attack in 1993, for instance, only cost a few thousand dollars. […]

Thursday, Aug 31, 2006 Kashmir-on-Thames

On New Year’s Eve in 1999, Islamist militants had plenty to celebrate. At the Taliban-controlled Kandahar airport, a planeload of hostages was being swapped for terrorists held in India. The hijackers–Kashmiri militants–had managed to secure the freedom of three key allies. Two, Maulana Masood Azhar and Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar, were Pakistani; but the third, a man named Omar Sheikh, was the scion of a wealthy British Pakistani family and had studied at the London School of Economics.

Friday, Aug 25, 2006 The Real Causes of 9/11

No event in recent times has produced as many explanations as the 11th September attacks five years ago. Within the space of an hour, al Qaeda inflicted more direct damage on the US than the Soviet Union had done throughout the cold war, a cataclysm seen by more people than any other event in history. Yet it took only 19 men armed with small knives to destroy the World Trade Centre, demolish a wing of the Pentagon and kill 3,000 people. This mismatch has led some—especially in the Muslim world—to seek a deus ex machina to explain what otherwise appears inexplicable. The usual suspects have been assembled on 9/11’s grassy knoll: the Jews were behind the attacks; the US government engineered them; the “Cheney-Bush energy junta” planned them so that they could grab the oil fields of central Asia, and so on.

Wednesday, Aug 23, 2006 Does bin laden trail lead to Pakistan

WASHINGTON (CNN) — U.S. intelligence officials say Osama bin Laden is likely hiding in Pakistan, and the former head of the CIA’s bin Laden unit says the United States will have to be “extraordinarily lucky” to get the al Qaeda leader. “Sometimes you get lucky,” Michael Scheuer, who headed the CIA’s bin Laden unit from 1996-1999, told CNN. “But looking for Osama bin Laden in the Hindu Kush is not like looking for Eric Rudolph in North Carolina.”

Wednesday, Aug 16, 2006 Bin Laden, CIA links Hogwash

CNN terrorism analyst Peter Bergen says the notion that Osama bin Laden once worked for the CIA is “simply a folk myth” and that there’s no shred of evidence to support such theories.

CNN.com asked users to send questions to Bergen as part of an upcoming documentary, “In the Footsteps of bin Laden,” which premieres on August 23 at 9 p.m. ET. Here are his answers:

The announcement in London yesterday of the dismantling of a major terror plot against American passenger flights between Britain and the U.S. provided fresh evidence that the threat of terrorism — whether inflicted by the militant jihadist movement al Qaeda or inspired by it — is still very much with us.