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Intel - Terrorism
Osama bin Laden

"In God we trust.
All others we monitor."

• Osama bin Laden was born in Saudi Arabia in 1957
• Taunted by his half-brothers as a child as "son of slave" because his mother, his father's tenth wife, was reputed to have been of slave origins

• [source: Gods Terrorists, p. 280]

• [source: Gods Terrorists, p. 280]

• [source: Gods Terrorists, p. 280]

• [source: Gods Terrorists, p. 280]

• [source: Gods Terrorists, p. 280]

• [source: Gods Terrorists, p. 286]

• [source: Gods Terrorists, p. 281]

Bin Laden, dressed in combat fatigues, in Afghanistan during the 1980’s. (Note the image has been digitally altered the brighten the shadow on his face.)

• [source: Gods Terrorists, p. 281]

Bin Laden first works for Maktab al-Khidamat from this building in Peshawar, a former British government guesthouse.

• According to controversial author Gerald Posner, ex-CIA officials claim that Gen. Akhtar Abdul Rahman, Pakistani ISI’s head from 1980 to 1987, regularly meets bin Laden in Peshawar, Pakistan.

• [source: Gods Terrorists, p. 281]

• At the outset of the anti-Soviet Jihad, potential Arab warriors traveled to Pakistan where they resided in guesthouses. These hostels did not keep any records and not a single organization listed the names of the fighters, where they had gone to fight and if they had been injured or killed. This lack of vital information caused distress among the relatives. At that time, bin Laden was in charge of several guesthouses and was embarrassed by the hundreds of calls requesting information. Hence, he decided to keep track of whoever stayed at the hostels and that record came to be known as the Record of al-Qaeda. This is how Al Qaeda, which means the base or the scroll, was born.
  [source: Modern Jihad, p. 148]

• [source: Gods Terrorists, p. 283]

• The ISI and bin Laden form a partnership that forces Afghan tribal warlords to pay a “tax” on the opium trade.
• By 1985, bin Laden and the ISI are splitting annual profits of up to $100 million a year.
• Zia is leader of Pakistan during majority of Afghan War

• [source: Gods Terrorists, p. 283]

• [source: Gods Terrorists, pp. 286-287]

• It was only in 1988 that bin Laden began to toy with the idea of organizing Muslim volunteers into an army to fight the Jihad.
  [source: Modern Jihad, p. 148]

• [source: Gods Terrorists, p. 287]

• [source: Gods Terrorists, p. 286]

• [source: Gods Terrorists, p. 285]

• [source: Gods Terrorists, p. 285]

• Azzam is assassinated in a car bomb attack on November 24, 1989.
• Bin Laden soon takes over the organization, which effectively morphs into al-Qaeda.
• His followers take over the US offices and they become financial conduits for al-Qaeda operations.
• The Brooklyn office recruits Arab immigrants and Arab-Americans to go fight in Afghanistan, even after the Soviets withdraw in early 1989.

• As many as 200 are sent there from the office. Before they go, the office arranges training in the use of rifles, assault weapons, and handguns, and then helps them with visas, plane tickets, and contacts.
• They are generally sent to the MAK/Al-Kifah office in Peshawar, Pakistan, and then connected to either the radical Afghan faction led by Abdul Rasul Sayyaf or the equally radical one led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.
• see also
  [source: Gods Terrorists, p. 285]

• [source: Gods Terrorists, p. 287]

• [source: Gods Terrorists, p. 286]

• [source: Gods Terrorists, p. 286]

• Libya was another country on which Arab-Afghans had set their sights. In 1998, Gaddafi uncovered a plot to assassinate him by the al-Muqatila, an Islamist group founded in the early 1990s by Libyan veterans of the anti-Soviet Jihad. The strategy of the group was to infiltrate the territory and the population in order to engineer a coup. Like many similar Islamist organizations in the Arab world, the al-Muqatila had its headquarters in Sudan and was backed financially by Osama bin Laden.
  [source: Modern Jihad, p. 152]

• In the 1990s, bin Laden himself resided in Libya, in Jabala Larde, a village not far from Benghazi, in the eastern part of the country. The unpopularity of the Gaddafi regime was particularly appealing to the Saudi billionaire because it made Libya a perfect hideout.
  [source: Modern Jihad, p. 152]

• On 15 April, following the failed assassination attempt on his person, Gaddafi issued a warrant for bin Laden's arrest via the Interpol. It was the first of many. Until then, the most wanted man in the world was technically free.
  [source: Modern Jihad, p. 152]

• A month later, Interpol recognizved its validity and issued an international warrant for his arrest.
  [source: Modern Jihad, p. 152]

• Throughout Osama's stay in Afghanistan, the US intelligence community received reports of Al Qaeda's attempts to develop an unconventional warfare capability in Sudan.
  [source: Inside Al Qaeda p. 65]

• These indicated that the Sudanese had provided assistance with laboratory facilities but little else.
  [source: Inside Al Qaeda p. 65]

• Back in 1996, the Sudanese Minister of Defence, Major General Elfaith Erwa, had also offered to extradite Osama bin Laden, then resident in Sudan, to the US. American officials declined that offer at that time as well. Instead, they told General Erwa to ask Bin Laden to leave the country. "Just don't let him go to Somalia," they added...When Erwa disclosed that he was going to Afghanistan, the American answer was "let him go." Is it possible they did not want to brng bin Laden to "justice"? Is it possible because he has too many tales to tell?
  [source: Modern Jihad, p. 193]

• "If liberating my land is called terrorism, this is a great honour for me." Osama bin Laden during an interview with Robert Fisk in 1996
  [source: Modern Jihad, p. 158]

• Unlike other terrorist leaders, who concealed their hand, Osama was quite explicit
  [source: Inside Al Qaeda p. 65]

• Acquiring weapons for the defense of Muslims is a religious duty. If I have indeed acquired these weapons, I am carrying out a duty. It would be a sin for Muslims not to try to possess the weapons that would prevent the infidels from inflicting harm on Muslims.
  [source: Inside Al Qaeda p. 65]

• [source: Gods Terrorists, p. 214]

• America supports apostate Islamic governments in Kuwait, the UAE, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere. The regimes are corrupt, ruled by man-made not God's law, and oppress Muslims trying to install shariah law. Muslims view these police states as being approved of and protected by the American democracy. "The overwhelming evidence is that the majority of our terrorist enemies come from purportedly friendly countries, and their main grievance against us is that, in their eyes, we are responsible for maintaining the tyrannical regimes that rule over them - an accusation that has, to say the very least, some plausibility."
  [source: Imperial Hubris, p. 12]

• But another required step in preparing the Muslim world for an attack on the United States with a weapon of mass destruction (WMD) fell outside his bailiwick and required the assistance of an established, well-qualified, and respected Islamic scholar. Until May 2003, al Qaeda did not have sufficient Islamic grounding on which to convincingly justify a WMD attack. In that month, however, a young Saudi cleric named Shaykh Nasir bin Hamid al-Fahd published "A Treatise on the Legal Status of Using Weapons of Mass Destruction Against Infidels." The treatise is exactly what al Qaeda needed, and it may have even asked Shaykh al-Fahd to prepare the work. The study is a lucidly written, comprehensive, and well-documented justification and authorization for using weapons of mass destruction against infidels - in this case, against the United States...Shaykh al-Fahd carries this discussion for twenty-five closely reasoned, scripturally documented pages. Al-Fahd's conclusions...satisfactorily justify bin Laden's intention to stage a WMD attack in the United States.
  [source: Imperial Hubris, pp. 154-155]

• ...as Shaykh al-Fahd wrote..."Scholars have agreed that it is permissable to bombard an enemy with a catapult and similar things. As everyone knows, a catapult stone does not distinguish between women, children, and others; it destroys anything that it hits, buildings or otherwise. This proves that the principle of destroying the infidels' lands and killing them if the jihad requires it and those in authority over the jihad decide so is legitimate; for the Muslims bombarded these countries until they were conquered. No one [i.e., the Prophet, scholars, or historians] reports that they ceased for fear of annitilating the infidels or for fear of destroying their territory. God alone knows best."
  [source: Imperial Hubris, pp. 158]

• As special-operations military troops prepared for a firefight about 7,000 miles away, President Barack Obama entered a room in the Washington area early in the afternoon on Sunday to follow along.
• Like a page plucked from a Hollywood screenplay, Obama and other principal coordinators for the mission that killed Osama bin Laden convened in order to remotely monitor the situation, John Brennan, the U.S. counterterrorism chief, said in a White House news briefing on Monday.