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BLITZER: Are you still inclined to believe it’s ETA, the Basque separatist movement? PERLE: It could very well be a joint venture. It seems clearly intended to affect the Spanish elections. And both ETA and al Qaeda have an interest in seeing the current government defeated. BLITZER: How unusual would that be, Peter, for al […]

-While the Spanish government is blaming ETA for the attacks on the trains on Madrid, and ETA may well be to blame for these attacks, al Qaeda can also not be ruled out as a suspect.-In October 2003 bin Laden released an audiotape calling for attacks on countries supplying coalition forces for the Iraq war […]

Host: Al-Qaida and terrorism. Next On The Line.

Host: In recent days, suicide bombings have killed scores of Iraqis. More than forty people were killed in a Baghdad explosion. And more than fifty were killed in the city of Iskandariya. Many of the victims were Iraqis applying for jobs. An Al-Qaida-affiliated terrorist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, is suspected of plotting dozens of suicide bombings in Iraq. Al-Qaida also continues to target civilians in many other countries: Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkey, Morocco, Kenya, and Indonesia.

I have just started reading Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars which tells the story of the CIA’s involvement in Afghanistan from the invasion of the Soviets in 1979 up until the 9/11 attacks. I could not recommend it more highly. The Soviet war in Afghanistan was arguably the most important conflict in the post World War […]

What Would Osama Think?

Dateline: An undisclosed location somewhere on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border.

It’s been more than two years since Mohammed Atta and my eighteen other holy warriors inflicted so much damage on the Crusaders in New York and Washington, so it’s time to take stock of how my jihad is going. Certainly there have been losses: my friend and military commander Mohammed Atef was martyred in Afghanistan and many of my top aides have been captured or killed since 9/11.

KAGAN: Today, the top American commander in Afghanistan said there are no certainties that Osama bin Laden will be caught, but that U.S.-led forces are turning to new tactics to catch him, recruiting Pakistanis’ forces to help flush out extremists on its border with Afghanistan. And Lieutenant General David Barno said that the sand in […]

I posted this commentary on my website back in August 2003. It accurately predicts what is now coming out about al Qaeda’s activities in Iraq. (By a process of deduction it was clear that al Qaeda affilated groups were behind the major suicide attacks in Iraq. No one martyrs themselves to bring back Saddam. The […]

Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, “L’islam revolutionnaire”, (Editions du Rocher, Paris 2003.) Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal, the notorious terrorist and mass murderer, has weighed in on the war on terrorism from his Paris prison cell. In what must surely qualify as one of the more tasteless exercises in publishing history, Carlos holds forth windily about how the United States got what it deserved on 9/11 because of its imperialist policies.

Well, as promised, Peter Bergen joins us now from Washington. He’s a professor at Johns Hopkins University in Washington and author of the book “Holy War Inc., Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden.” Well, when you listen to that latest tape, what does it tell you? You’ve heard many of these in the past; what does this one tell you?

PETER BERGEN (JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY):

It seems, on some levels, a simple question. After all, “al Qaeda” is a term much bandied about by the public, politicians and commentators. Indeed, it’s now one of the best-known organizations in the world.

Yet there is a great deal of ambiguity about what exactly constitutes al Qaeda. Is it a terrorist organization run in a regimented top-down fashion by its CEO, Osama bin Laden? Or is it a loose-knit group of Islamist militants around the world whose only common link is that many of them trained in Afghanistan? Or has al Qaeda, the organization, morphed into something best described as al Qaeda, the movement — a movement defined by adherence to bin Laden’s virulent anti-Westernism/anti-Semitism and propensity for violence? Is “al Qaeda” all of the above?