--- Begin Message ---
IN THIS MESSAGE: Portrait of bin Laden; Following the Bucks Could
Embarrass US; US Unfairness Erodes Gulf State Support
September 30, 2001
IN PROFILE Bin Laden's Journey From Rich Pious Lad to the Mask of
Evil By ROBERT D. McFADDEN
(AFP) The myths and realities of Osama bin Laden swirl together
like the smoke over the ruins of the World Trade Center and its
thousands of dead. Who is this man?
Bin Laden's Network: Al Qaeda Is a Sprawling, Hard-to-Spot Web of
Terrorists-in-Waiting (September 30, 2001)
The Streets: Hatred of U.S. Burns in Pakistan's Biggest City
(September 30, 2001)
Issue in Depth: Osama bin Laden (September 26, 2001)
Agence France-Presse Osama Bin Laden raised money and brought in
his family's heavy equipment in the 1980's to help fortify the
Afghan resistance. Some mountain camps were later available to him
as training grounds for his recruits.
Agence France-Presse The taped lectures of Abdullah Azzam helped
to deepen the commitment of Osama bin Laden, shown above in a
photograph from a video believed to have been made by him and his
followers and released in June.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
His face is everywhere and nowhere. He was born fabulously rich
but is thought to live in desert caves. He seems a soft-spoken
ascetic yet he could be the instigator of mass murder. He is an
outcast from family, country and religion yet is beloved by millions
for his holy war against America.
The myths and realities of Osama bin Laden swirl together like the
smoke over the ruins of the World Trade Center and its thousands
of dead. Who is this man?
To the United States government, the 44-year-old Saudi exile is
the most wanted fugitive in history, the founder and leader of a
terrorist network known as Al Qaeda (The Base), which has in a
decade trained 5,000 or more militants in Sudan and Afghanistan
and posted them to perhaps 50 countries to await their turn to
strike. And strike they have, American officials assert, with bin
Laden plans, money or inspiration behind the bombings of the trade
center in 1993 (6 dead), two American embassies in Africa in 1998
(224 dead) and the destroyer Cole in Yemen in 2000 (17 dead), and
the jetliners that collapsed the trade center towers, damaged the
Pentagon and crashed in Pennsylvania on Sept. 11 (more than 6,500
feared dead).
To millions of Americans, who have seen his face on television
daily and on the magazine covers and front pages of newspapers,
Mr. bin Laden is the mask of evil; in many minds he is already
guilty of killing thousands, although he has not been found, let
alone tried, and no evidence directly linking him with murder has
been made public.
To millions in the Islamic world who hate America for what they
regard as its decadent culture and imperial government, he is a
hero who shunned the easy life to battle the infidels for Allah,
who has justified killings with arcane interpretations of the Koran,
and carried them out with encrypted e-mail, and plots stored on
CD-ROM's.
A Guest Under a War Cloud
To the Taliban, the extremist Islamic clerics who have ruled
Afghanistan and given him haven since 1996, he is a a spiritual
and political ally and a source of money, but one whose presence
has become a growing liability.
And to those closest to him, there is yet another man the family
man who takes his 3 wives and 15 children from cave to cave, moving
every night or two, with dozens of bodyguards one a bin Laden
double in a desert-roving caravan of land cruisers armed with
missiles.
Mr. bin Laden went from a childhood of lofty privilege and education
in Saudi Arabia to being galvanized by the war against the Soviets
in Afghanistan in the 1980's. Investigators say he went to Sudan
for five years in the early 1990's to build his network and multiply
his fortune, then to Afghanistan, to wage war.
Along the way, the young man one of 52 children of an immigrant
Yemeni bricklayer who became Saudi Arabia's richest building
contractor moved from boyish piety to youthful carousing in the
bars of Beirut, then back to Islamic fervor.
Inherited wealth and religious zeal were his formative early pillars.
Later there would be harsh emotions: outrage at Soviet invaders in
Afghanistan, indignation over American support for Israel, anger
at what he saw as Western imperialism, and finally a hatred of an
America that, as he saw it, had used its power to oppress the people
of Islam.
Investigators and intelligence officials say that those beliefs
were the basis for his decisions to oppose the Russians, to make
alliances with radicals from Egypt and Pakistan, to rally young
men from across the Islamic world to camps in Afghanistan, and
there to train them to use weapons, explosives, kidnapping,
counterintelligence and other tactics, even flirting with chemical,
biological and nuclear weapons.
Mr. bin Laden has denied ordering the deaths of anyone, although
he had applauded attacks that have taken American lives as the work
of dedicated soldiers of jihad.
Much of what is known about Mr. bin Laden has come from documents
captured in raids on suspected terrorist operations, from Western
agents who knew him in Pakistan in the 1980's when America aided
the Afghan fight against the Soviets, and from testimony by former
bin Laden associates, some defectors from his cause, others defendants
on trial for terrorism in the United States, all of them seeking
leniency or new identities in witness protection programs.
It is an unfinished portrait. As some trial testimony indicated,
the image of Mr. bin Laden that has loomed in the American psyche
of an enemy possessing a sophisticated global reach and followers
willing to die for the cause was far from complete. Indeed, the
testimony showed a group torn by strife, greed and banalities, and
a leader who had cronies, quibbled over pay scales, lacked political
and organizational skills and may have profited from opium. And
much evidence suggested a loose organization of terrorists who may
have no idea who the leader is or where the plans come from.
Osama bin Laden (rhymes with sadden) was born in 1957 in Saudi
Arabia, the 17th of 24 sons in a family of immigrants. His mother
was Syrian or Palestinian, one of many wives of Mohammed bin Oud
bin Laden, who came from neighboring Yemen in 1932 and, through
friendship with the country's founder, King Abdel Aziz al-Saud,
won contracts to build the infrastructure of roads and refurbish
the shrines at Mecca and Medina, Islam's holiest places. The Saudi
Binladen Group today has 35,000 employees worldwide and $5 billion
in assets.
Osama was 11 or 12 when his father died in a plane crash near San
Antonio in 1968. It is unclear how much he inherited reports vary
from $20 million or $80 million to as high as $300 million but he
was wealthy beyond dreams as a boy. He grew tall and lean eventually
reaching 6 feet 5 inches and towered over classmates and friends.
Like most Saudis, the bin Laden family belonged to the puritanical
Wahhabi sect of Sunni Muslims. By most accounts, Osama was a pious
boy, attending Islamic classes and private school, although he was
never an incisive Islamic scholar. As a teenager, he is said to
have flown often to Beirut, where he partied in casinos and
nightclubs, chased women and got into occasional brawls.
At 18, he enrolled in King Abdel Aziz University in Jidda and
studied civil engineering with the idea of joining his family
business. He also listened to taped lectures of an influential
teacher, Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian major figure in the Muslim
Brotherhood, which is dedicated to resurgent Islamic faith, and
the experience deepened Mr. bin Laden's religious commitment.
In 1979, the year he graduated, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan,
and the 22-year-old Mr. bin Laden took his first step into the
realm of holy war. Like thousands of young Arabs, he joined in
spirit with the Afghan resistance, in outrage at the invasion as
a violation of Islamic territory.
It was, to Mr. bin Laden and others, an offense against God.
Mr. bin Laden did not take up a rifle. Instead, he raised money
and supplies for Afghan fighters, known as mujahedeen. He raised
huge sums from oil-rich Arabs in Persian Gulf states, contributed
millions from his own fortune and even brought in heavy equipment
from his family's company to help build camps, tunnels, military
depots and roads for the Afghan forces.
"He's not very sophisticated politically or organizationally," said
a former bin Laden associate whose nom de guerre was Abdullah Anas.
"But he's an activist with great imagination. He ate very little.
He slept very little. He'd give you his clothes. He'd give you his
money."
A Man the West Could Use
In 1984, Mr. bin Laden moved to Peshawar, Pakistan, where he was
known to some of the American and French agents who were intriguing
to manipulate the Afghan cause to their countries' advantage. He
also joined Abdullah Azzam, whose taped lectures had influenced
him at the university, in forming Makhtab al Khadimat, a group that
recruited and trained Muslim volunteers from Egypt, Algeria and
other countries to fight in the Afghan war.
The Central Intelligence Agency was funneling arms and money to
the mujahedeen, and some of the aid may have gone to the Makhtab
al Khadimat.
It was to play a major role in raising the concept of global holy
war to a reality over the next decade, eventually becoming the
organization known as Al Qaeda.
Mr. Azzam wanted the organization to support the Afghan cause
exclusively, but Mr. bin Laden sympathized with many Muslims who
saw Western perils in their homelands and embraced the idea of
wider jihad, or holy war.
Among those courting him were a group of radicals belonging to the
Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which helped to assassinate President Anwar
el-Sadat of Egypt in 1981. The group advocated the overthrow of
governments by terrorism and violence, and one of its key figures,
Ayman al-Zawahiri, became Mr. bin Laden's chief associate.
Business and Bioweapons
In 1986, according to intelligence officials, Mr. bin Laden began
to chart an independent course, setting up his own training camp
for 50 Persian Gulf Arabs who lived in separate tents. He called
the camp Al Masadah, The Lion's Den. A year later, the Afghan-support
organization divided and in 1988 Mr. bin Laden and the Egyptians
formed Al Qaeda.
By 1989, Afghanistan had become a deadly quagmire for Moscow, which
was forced to withdraw. Intoxicated by their triumph in Afghanistan,
Mr. bin Laden and other volunteers returned to their homelands,
eager to apply the principles of jihad wherever they seemed needed.
The Koran sets strict limits on holy war, but the Afghan veterans
were guided by their own radical interpretations.
Back in Saudi Arabia, Mr. bin Laden was indignant with corruption
in the government and became enraged when King Fahd let American
forces, with their rock music and Christian and Jewish troops, wage
the Persian Gulf war from Saudi soil in early 1991. After the
conflict he moved back to Afghanistan, but did not stay long. He
told associates that Saudi Arabia had hired Pakistani operatives
to kill him.
Still, Mr. bin Laden moved in 1991 to Sudan, where a militant
Islamic government had taken power. Over the next five years, he
may have multiplied his fortune and built a group that combined
business with holy war under the umbrella of Al Qaeda.
Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl, who described himself as Mr. bin Laden's
paymaster, told a federal court in Manhattan last February that Al
Qaeda was comparable to a modern corporation, with a finance
committee, investments, and a network of profitable ventures.
American agents first came upon the global ambitions of Mr. bin
Laden in 1993 while investigating the World Trade Center bombing,
though evidence of his direct involvement is not conclusive.
In 1994, Saudi Arabia revoked his citizenship and his family disowned
him.
Islamic leaders in other countries, offended that he used Islam to
justify murder, disavowed him.
By then, American officials regarded Mr. bin Laden as a stateless
sponsor of terrorism. Washington pressed Sudan to expel him, and
in 1996 succeeded.
He went back to Afghanistan. Before long, the Taliban was letting
him use the country as what Mr. Anas called a "jihad camp for the
world."
Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company
=====================================
October 2, 2001
Special Report: Aftermath of Terror In Targeting Terrorists' Drug
Money, U.S. Puts Itself in an Awkward Situation Analysts Say
Taliban's Foes -- Bush's Likely Allies -- Are Using Opium and Other
Drugs for Funds as Well By ALAN CULLISON and JAMES M. DORSEY Staff
Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
DUSHANBE, Tajikistan -- In its assault on terrorism, the U.S. may
seek to choke off profits from the Central Asian drug trade that
are used to buy arms and explosives. But some important potential
allies in Washington's struggle with Afghanistan are also believed
to be reaping the rewards of the nation's burgeoning heroin trade.
Nowhere is the problem clearer than along Afghanistan's northern
border with Tajikistan, a sworn ally in President Bush's antiterrorist
efforts -- and a major conduit for heroin and opium on its way to
consumers in Europe.
United Nations officials say as much as half of Afghanistan's opium
and heroin flows across the 800-mile border with Tajikistan before
finding its way to Russia and points west. For most of the past
five years, the narcotics have come from areas almost entirely
controlled by the Northern Alliance, the main rival of Afghanistan's
Taliban regime, say drug-enforcement officials. An aggressive
Taliban offensive that has driven Northern Alliance forces out of
some border regions hasn't affected the trade much.
The trade creates an awkward situation for the U.S., which hopes
to enlist the help of the Northern Alliance fighters, who know the
dizzying mountains and deserts of Afghanistan and could help in
the effort to track down Osama bin Laden, Washington's chief suspect
in last month's terrorist attacks in the U.S. Mr. Bush has demanded
that the Taliban, who claim to know Mr. bin Laden's whereabouts,
turn him over.
The Taliban, invoking Islam, has largely stamped out opium production
in most of Afghanistan. Northern Alliance leaders, for their part,
deny any connection to drug trafficking but concede that it does
take place on their territory.
"All the leaders on both sides in Afghanistan are fed by drugs,"
says Muzaffar Olimov, director of the Center for Oriental Studies,
a Dushanbe think tank. "It is of course not open or official, and
nobody confirms it.
But people can't buy all the weapons that they have with gems
alone."
U.N. officials hesitate to guess which side has been making more
from the drug trade in Afghanistan, which produces about 75% of
the world's heroin.
But they do think the anticipated U.S. retaliation against terrorists
in Afghanistan, and perhaps the Taliban government itself, has
sparked selling. The officials say Afghan drug dealers, expecting
a Western strike, appear to be selling off their narcotic stockpiles
for cash.
Meanwhile, across the Stans and the Caspian Sea, in Lebanon's Bekaa
Valley, some pray for a speedy U.S. attack on Afghanistan. "It's
good for business," says Muhammed, standing in a garage full of
cannabis, a pistol tucked in his belt. He is just back from harvesting
this year's cannabis crop. "It'll drive up hashish prices," he
explains.
Muhammed assures a prospective client that transport of 2,500
kilograms (5,500 pounds) to Amsterdam from the Bekaa -- controlled
by Syrian troops as well as Syrian- and Iranian-backed Shiite Muslim
Hezbollah fighters -- can be arranged. Like most farmers in this
remote region, he has returned to his time-honored crop for the
first time in almost a decade. The revival of Lebanon's drug trade
symbolizes the failure of Western attempts to persuade farmers to
switch from high-value cannabis and poppy seeds to unprofitable
potatoes and vegetables.
There is a standard transport route here as well. The Bekaa's
farmers say an Istanbul-based company moves the hashish from eastern
Lebanon to Istanbul aboard Turkish trucks. In Istanbul, the hashish
is switched to German-made trucks, with German license plates,
headed for Bologna, in Italy. "Transportation is no issue," says
Muhammed. "I spoke to our transporters in Turkey this morning. The
government isn't a problem either.
We can deal with them."
Back in Central Asia, Russian and Tajik border troops have pounced
on more than three tons of pure heroin in the past few months --
about three times the amount they had discovered by this time last
year. The heroin, they say, is often high-quality, neatly tied in
one-kilogram loaves and stamped with trademarks by its manufacturers,
like care packages with designer labels. Any serious cleanup,
however, could send tremors through Tajikistan, which would be a
valuable jumping-off point for military operations against the
Taliban but is itself badly addicted to the drug trade.
Drug money, in fact, has proved a lubricant for a peace agreement
signed in 1997 that ended Tajikistan's civil war, analysts say. To
persuade the country's competing warlords to lay down their arms,
military leaders and their followers were given posts in the
government. Now former warlords and their troops control portions
of the Tajik border, regional police and customs. Says a Western
diplomat: "Government people are up to their eyeballs in the drug
business."
Officials say Russian police last year seized one shipment of heroin
that was sent to Moscow in a diplomatic pouch. And Tajikistan was
forced to recall its ambassador from Kazakstan last year after
police in Almaty searched his car and a garage and found 62 kilograms
of heroin and $54,000 in cash. The ambassador blamed the incident
on his trade representative, who he said had borrowed the car.
Write to Alan Cullison at [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Copyright ) 2001 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved
========================================
October 2, 2001 A Sense of American Unfairness Erodes Support in
Gulf States
By WARREN HOGE
KUWAIT, Sept. 30 The prosperous, pro-Western Arab states in the
Persian Gulf are not countries where people take their protests
into the street. So the general dismay about perceived American
tolerance of violence against Palestinians, and the resulting lack
of faith in American leadership, are scarcely visible.
They are, however, audible in many conversations outside the
entrenched and often autocratic royal families that have declared
their solidarity with the American-led struggle against terrorism.
"It's amazing," said Saud Alanezi, a Kuwaiti businessman, confessed
computer nerd and college lecturer who, like many people in this
region, received his higher education in the United States. "No
matter what the issue is these days, if the U.S. is on one side,
everyone else wants to be on the other.
"Even here in Kuwait," he added, alluding to the American role in
ridding Kuwait of its Iraqi invaders in 1991. "Just a while ago,
you were our liberators."
The Palestinian cause has not always been appreciated in Kuwait.
Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, appeared to some Kuwaitis to
back Saddam Hussein's invasion in 1990, and most of the 400,000
Palestinians who lived here until February 1991 left under suspicion
of collaborating.
There is widespread revulsion for the Sept. 11 attacks on the United
States and for the methods of the prime suspect, Osama bin Laden.
The feelings for Palestinians, however, are at least as strong.
"The story is not bin Laden," said Ghanim Alnajjar, director of
Kuwait University's Center for Strategic and Future Studies. "The
story is the injustice to the Palestinian people."
Public concern is strong enough that the gulf's rulers are taking
note whether out of fear for their power, or reluctance to wage an
all-out struggle against fellow Muslims.
If Israeli killings of Palestinians continue, said Sheik Abdullah
bin Zaid al-Nahayan, information minister of the United Arab
Emirates, "most of us will certainly have to reconsider our role
in the coalition."
At an emergency meeting in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, on Sept. 23, the
six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council Saudi Arabia and its
five small neighbors, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait,
Oman and Qatar coupled their support for the coalition against
terrorism with condemnation of what they called terror acts by
Israel.
The oil wealth of the gulf states has produced standards of living
that blunt both dissent and the tangible dissonance between
traditional ways of life and the glassy futuristic skyscrapers of
gulf cities.
Yet a Saturday night discussion at Kuwait University suggested
surprisingly little concern with suspected terrorists who target
modernization. The name of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel
came up with far greater frequency than that of Mr. bin Laden.
Questioners peppered four senior faculty members with comments
casting doubt on the identification of Mr. bin Laden as the man
responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks and expressing fear of a "clash
of civilizations" between the West and Islam.
"Who stood to profit from the attacks?" asked Ibrahim A. L. Hadban,
a bearded political science professor. "Israel, of course," he
said, answering his own question. "This is how we feel here." He
was the only speaker in the hourlong session to draw applause.
Abdulnabi Mansour, head of the Bahrain Research and Study Center
in Manama, said there was a general mood among residents that the
United States "has directed its efforts at only one aspect gangs
of terrorists who are Muslim while ignoring the state terrorism
of Israel," adding, "There is a general conviction that the U.S.
is unfair."
Saif Almaskari, a former under secretary for political affairs at
the Gulf Cooperation Council, now runs a consultancy firm in Muscat,
capital of his native Oman. There too, he said, people are not
happy. "They wait in vain for the U.S. to say to Sharon, `Enough
is enough.' "
All the gulf states are socially conservative, banning drinking
and censoring media to eliminate both prurient and awkward political
items. Yet all face indigenous Islamic movements that press for
conservative reforms like the segregation of boys and girls in
schools and colleges and imposition of harsh Shariah laws.
Also of concern to the ruling families are the large numbers of
expatriate workers in their countries, often from poorer Muslim
lands, who are thought to be more susceptible to radical interpretations
of Islam. The United Arab Emirates is less than 20 percent native-born;
Kuwait, 35 percent.
Two gulf countries have a sizable American military presence:
Bahrain, the headquarters of the United States Navy's Fifth Fleet,
and Kuwait, where up to 5,000 American troops, scores of fighter
and support planes and a stockpile of equipment have been based
since 1991.
The American troops and planes in Kuwait keep watch on Iraq and
are not expected to play a role in any action in Afghanistan. The
United States is eager, however, to use a new command and control
center in Saudi Arabia to track aircraft.
As yet, the gulf governments seem able to keep emotions against
the United States in check. "In the gulf," Mr. Alnajjar said with
a smile, "governments will always be able to withstand. They will
be totally with the U.S. regardless and will furnish whatever bases
and resources the U.S.
needs."
Not everyone is so sanguine. Abdul Khaleg Abdullah, a public policy
professor at Emirates University in Dubai, reported what he called
surprising tolerance for Mr. bin Laden. "A lot of people here view
Osama bin Laden as a stand-in for the right cause but not using
the right method," he said. "Remember, he appears to be standing
up to America and to American policy in Palestine, and that's a
popular stance here now."
Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company
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