BIN LADENS AND AL GORE TOGETHER AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY IN BOSTON

Terrorists list CIA agents bin Ladens' Boston condos as home, then hijacked 2 airliners from Boston airport, but US secret police insist bin Ladens are innocent and will never be investigated - Bush pulled FBI off case before Sept 11 and demoted those who disobeyed unlawful orders - Bin Laden at US hospital in July 2001

Bushes in business with Bin Ladens via Carlyle Group
BUSHWATCH.COM

Judicial Watch Blasts Bush's Business Connection with bin Laden's Family

Listen to BBC Newsnight on Bush in Business with bin Laden

London Times reports Bush orders US Air Force to rescue our "enemies" - the Taliban and Al Quieda (and where is Bin Laden?)

WARNING!!! TREASON BY BUSH WHITE HOUSE AND PENTAGON!!!

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,3-2002033128,00.html

MONDAY JANUARY 21 2002

US 'let Taleban men escape'

SUNDAY TIMES OF LONDON
FROM JAMES BONE IN NEW YORK

THE United States secretly approved rescue flights by Pakistan into Kunduz that let Taleban leaders and al-Qaeda fighters escape from the besieged northern Afghan city before its fall last year, New Yorker magazine reports today.

US intelligence officials and military officers said that the Bush Administration approved the flights and ordered US Central Command to set up a special air corridor to ensure their safety to allow evacuation of Pakistani soldiers and intelligence men stranded by Northern Alliance victories.

"What was supposed to be a limited evacuation apparently slipped out of control and, as an unintended consequence, an unknown number of Taleban and al-Qaeda fighters managed to join in the exodus," the magazine reports.

One senior US defence adviser said: "Everyone brought their friends with them. You're not going to leave them behind to get their throats cut."

Mysterious flights into Kunduz were reported by Northern Alliance officials in mid-November, but US and Pakistani officials denied an evacuation was under way.

Seymour Hersh, who wrote the report, said that President Musharraf of Pakistan won US support for the rescue by arguing that losing the men would risk his political survival.

A US supply helicopter crashed in Afghanistan, killing two Marines and injuring the other five aboard yesterday. The cause of the crash was not immediately known.

http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=103&row=0

Officials told to 'back off' on Saudis before September 11

The Guardian (London)
by Greg Palast and David Pallister
November 7, 2001

FBI and military intelligence officials in Washington say they were prevented for political reasons from carrying out full investigations into members of the Bin Laden family in the US before the terrorist attacks of September 11.

US intelligence agencies have come under criticism for their wholesale failure to predict the catastrophe at the World Trade Centre. But some are complaining that their hands were tied.

FBI documents shown on BBC Newsnight last night and obtained by the Guardian show that they had earlier sought to investigate two of Osama bin Laden's relatives in Washington and a Muslim organisation, the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), with which they were linked.

The FBI file, marked Secret and coded 199, which means a case involving national security, records that Abdullah bin Laden, who lived in Washington, had originally had a file opened on him "because of his relationship with the World Assembly of Muslim Youth - a suspected terrorist organisation".

WAMY members deny they have been involved with terrorist activities, and WAMY has not been placed on the latest list of terrorist organisations whose assets are being frozen.

Abdullah, who lived with his brother Omar at the time in Falls Church, a town just outside Washington, was the US director of WAMY, whose offices were in a basement nearby.

But the FBI files were closed in 1996 apparently before any conclusions could be reached on either the Bin Laden brothers or the organisation itself. High-placed intelligence sources in Washington told the Guardian this week: "There were always constraints on investigating the Saudis".

They said the restrictions became worse after the Bush administration took over this year. The intelligence agencies had been told to "back off" from investigations involving other members of the Bin Laden family, the Saudi royals, and possible Saudi links to the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Pakistan.

"There were particular investigations that were effectively killed."

Only after the September 11 attacks was the stance of political and commercial closeness reversed towards the other members of the large Bin Laden clan, who have classed Osama bin Laden as their "black sheep".

Yesterday, the head of the Saudi-based WAMY's London office, Nouredine Miladi, said the charity was totally against Bin Laden's violent methods. "We seek social change through education and cooperation, not force."

He said Abdullah bin Laden had ceased to run WAMY's US operation a year ago.

Neither Abdullah nor Omar bin Laden could be contacted in Saudi Arabia for comment.

WAMY was founded in 1972 in a Saudi effort to prevent the "corrupting" ideas of the west ern world influencing young Muslims. With official backing it grew to embrace 450 youth and student organisations with 34 offices worldwide.

Its aim was to encourage "concerned Muslims to take up the challenge by arming the youth with sound understanding of Islam, guarding them against destructive ideologies, and instilling in them level-headed wisdom".

In Britain it has 20 associated organisations, many highly respectable.

But as long as 10 years ago it was named as a discreet channel for public and private Saudi donations to hardline Islamic organisations. One of the recipients of its largesse has been the militant Students Islamic Movement of India, which has lent support to Pakistani-backed terrorists in Kashmir and seeks to set up an Islamic state in India.

Since September 11 WAMY has been investigated in the US along with a number of other Muslim charities. There have been several grand jury investigations but no findings have been made against any of them.

Current FBI interest in WAMY is shown in their agents' interrogation of a radiologist from San Antonio, Texas, Dr Al Badr al-Hazmi, who was arrested on September 12 and released without charge two weeks later. He had the same surname as two of the plane hijackers.

He was also questioned about his contacts with Abdullah bin Laden at the US WAMY office.

Mr Al-Hazmi said that he had made phone calls to Abdullah bin Laden in 1999 trying to obtain books and videotapes about Islamic teachings for the Islamic Centre of San Antonio.

To view the BBC television broadcast of the Palast investigation, go to http://www.GregPalast.com

http://infowars.com/saved%20pages/Prior_Knowledge/bin_laden_met_CIA.htm?in_review_id=470280&in_review_text_id=424130

CIA agent "met Bin Laden in July"

by Toby Rose
Associated Newspapers Ltd.
31 October 2001

Le Figaro today claimed that a CIA agent met Osama bin Laden in a Gulf hospital as recently as last July and received "precise information" about an imminent attack on the US.

According to the French daily, the agent met Bin Laden while he was being treated at the American Hospital in Dubai for a kidney infection. The agent was subsequently recalled to Washington.

The hospital today vigorously denied the report, which is based on a number of sources, including French secret services and a hospital administrator.

Bin Laden is said to have arrived in the UAE from the Pakistan city of Quetta, accompanied by his personal physician, four bodyguards and an Algerian nurse. He was visited by family members and leading Saudis. The paper claims he was treated in the urology department headed by Dr Terry Callaway.

Bin Laden is said to have severe medical problems and "the kidney infection has spread to his liver". Le Figaro claims a mobile dialysis machine was delivered to his Kandahar hideout in Afghanistan last year.

In a further twist, French secret service operatives are said to have met officials from the US embassy in Paris last August after the arrest of Algerian Djamel Beghal in the UAE.

A French secret service report on 7 September warned of possible attacks, and that the order to act would come from Afghanistan. Le Figaro says very precise information on targets for attack was communicated to the CIA.

http://infowars.com/saved%20pages/Prior_Knowledge/bush_twarted.htm

Bush thwarted FBI probe against bin Ladens

HINDUSTAN TIMES
London, November 7, 2001

FBI agents in the United States probing relatives of Saudi-born terror suspect Osama Bin Laden before September 11 were told to back off soon after George W Bush became president, the BBC has reported.

The BBC's Newsnight current affairs programme on Tuesday said that Bush at one point had a number of connections with Saudi Arabia's prominent Bin Laden family.

It added there was a suspicion that the US strategic interest in Saudi Arabia, which has the world's biggest oil reserve, blunted its inquiries into individuals with suspected terrorist connections -- so long as the US was safe.

Newsnight reported it had seen secret documents from an FBI probe into the September 11 terror attacks that showed that at least two other US-based members of the Bin Laden family are suspected to have links with a possible terrorist organisation.

The programme said it had obtained evidence that the FBI was on the trail of Bin Laden family members living in United States before, as well as after, the terrorist attacks.

Newsnight said Bush made his first million 20 years ago with an oil company partly funded by the chief US representative of Salem Bin Laden, Osama's brother.

Bush also received fees as director of a subsidiary of Carlyle Corporation, a little-known private company which in just a few years since its founding has become one of America's biggest defence contractors, and his father, George Bush Sr, is also a paid advisor, the programme said.

The connection became embarrassing when it was revealed that the Bin Ladens held a stake in Carlyle, sold just after September 11, it added.

http://infowars.com/saved%20pages/Prior_Knowledge/ananova_CIA_backoff.htm

Ananova:

US agents told to back off bin Ladens

The BBC says that America's special agents backed away from the bin Laden family soon after George W Bush became president.

Agents were also told to back off the Saudi royals - although that has all changed since September 11.

The findings come from documents obtained from the FBI investigation of the US terror attacks by the Newsnight programme.

The papers show that despite the myth that Osama is the black sheep of the family, at least two other American-based members of it are suspected of links with a possible terrorist organisation.

Newsnight says it has uncovered a long history of shadowy connections between the State Department, the CIA and the Saudis.

The former head of the American visa bureau in Jeddah from 1987 to 1989, Michael Springman, told the programme: "In Saudi Arabia I was repeatedly ordered by high-level State Department officials to issue visas to unqualified applicants.

"People who had no ties either to Saudi Arabia or to their own country. I complained there. I complained here in Washington to Main State, to the Inspector General and to Diplomatic Security and I was ignored."

He added: "What I was doing was giving visas to terrorists - recruited by the CIA and Osama bin Laden to come back to the United States for training to be used in the war in Afghanistan against the then Soviets."

The US allegedly wanted to keep the pro-American Saudi royal family in control of the world's biggest oil spigot, even at the price of turning a blind eye to any terrorist connection - so long as America was safe.

The programme said the younger George Bush made his first million with an oil company partly funded by the chief

US representative of Salem bin Laden, Osama's brother, who took over as head of the family after his father Mohammed's death in a plane crash in 1968.

Story filed: 03:10 Wednesday 7th November 2001

http://infowars.com/transcript_schippers.html

David Shippers, Special Prosecutor: "Government Had Prior Knowledge"

AJ: Now later you got it from FBI agents in Chicago and Minnesota that there was going to an attack on lower Manhattan.

DS: Yea - and that's what started me calling. I started calling out there. First of all, I tried to see if I could get a Congressman to go to bat for me and at least bring these people out there and listen to them. I sent them information and nobody cared. It was always, "We'll get back to you", "we'll get back to you", "we'll get back to you." Then I reached out and tried to get to the Attorney General, when finally we got an attorney general in there that I would be willing to talk to. And, again, I used people who were personal friends of John Ashcroft to try to get him. One of them called me back and said, "Alright I have talked to him. He will call you tomorrow morning." This was like a month before the bombing. The next morning I got a call. It wasn't from Ashcroft. It was from somebody in the Justice Dept.

AJ: One of his handlers.

DS: Yea, and I started telling him the situation and he said, "You know we don't start our investigations at the top." I said I would like to talk to the Attorney General because this is vital. He said, "We don't start our investigations at the top. Let me look into this and I will get back to you." As I sit here today, I have never heard from him.

AJ: Again, David Shippers, you are big in Washington, you were the top lawyer that got Clinton impeached, you are highly respected, you know the Senators, the Congressmen. You're calling up. You've got these FBI agents and others feeding you this information. They're being pulled off the cases, they're angry. That's even been in the news now, from Minnesota and Florida and Illinois. They know what's going to happen. The Sudanese in '96 and '98 tried to arrest Bin Laden for Clinton, tried to give us the names of Al Qaeda, Clinton wouldn't take it.

DS: Didn't want any part of it.

AJ: Wouldn't touch it. So we've got all this developing. We've got police officers and FBI on the ground who know who bombed Oklahoma City. They've got them in custody with blue jogging suits and bomb-making components. They are ordered to release them. All of this is unfolding - 3500 to 5000 Iraqi Republican Guard (living near OKC), we know there is a Saddam/Iraqi connection here - I mean they knew this. Why in the world, David Shippers, did they allow this to take place?

DS: I'll tell you something. This one of the things that, to me, it is almost inconceivable, inconceivable that with the knowledge they had that they would turn their back. Just assume that they had investigated and gone in after the Oklahoma City bombing, as they are doing now. There never would have been an attack on the Trade Towers. If they had done, 5 to 6 years ago what they are doing now, they probably would have had Bin Laden and that gang all stopped by now. But, I don't know, as a human being, as a former prosecutor, as a lawyer and a guy who represents police and agents all over the United States, it is inconceivable to me that those bureaucrats in Washington would turn their back on the obvious for their own purposes.

AJ: And now the World Trade Center Complex is absolutely destroyed.

DS: Yes, 6000 people are dead. And there is more coming. There is more coming.

AJ: Now you say, from your sources, I know you represent a bunch of FBI agents who are hopping mad, you probably can't talk about the specifics, you say you are representing them. Are they getting ready to sue or something?

DS: Well they are hoping to, but what do you sue for? What I'm trying to do is get the people in Washington - you see these agents can't come out. The only information that I have is information that is public knowledge. They can't tell me anything that is confidential or anything that is secret, or anything like that. I'm talking about what is public knowledge and these guys can't say anything unless they are subpoenaed.

AJ: That's why you want to get into a court.

DS: I don't want to get into a court. I want to get them into the intelligence committee. I want to get them to talk to the Attorney General, to Gov. Ridge, to General Downing or to somebody who has the ability or the authority to go to the FBI bureaucrats and say "Butt out!" - we are going to do this right.

http://infowars.com/saved%20pages/Prior_Knowledge/Bush_Took_CIA_off.htm?art_id=1030259305

Bush took FBI agents off Laden family trail

BY RASHMEE Z AHMED
THE TIMES OF INDIA
TIMES NEWS NETWORK
NOVEMBER 08, 2001

LONDON: America was itself to blame for the events of September 11 because the US administration was using "kid gloves" in tracking down Osama bin Laden and "other fanatics linked to Saudi Arabia", a special BBC investigation has alleged in a damning indictment of the two presidents Bush and American foreign policy.

The report, which the BBC claimed was based on a secret FBI document, numbered 199I WF213589 and emanating out of the FBI's Washington field office, alleged that the cynicism of the American establishment and "connections between the CIA and Saudi Arabia and the Bush men and bin Ladens" may have been the real cause of the deaths of thousands in the World Trade Centre attacks.

The investigation, which featured in the BBC's leading current affairs programme, Newsnight, said the FBI was told to "back off" investigating one of Osama bin Laden's brothers, Abdullah, who was linked to "the Saudi-funded World Association of Muslim Youth (WAMY), a suspected terrorist organisation," whose accounts have still not frozen by the US treasury despite "being banned by Pakistan some weeks ago and India claiming it was linked to an organisation involved in bombing in Kashmir".

Newsnight said there was a long history of "shadowy" American connections with Saudi Arabia, not least the two presidents Bush's "business dealings" with the bin Ladens and another more insidious link revealed by the former head of the American visa section in Jeddah.

The official said he had been concerned about visas issued to large numbers of "unqualified" men "with no family links or any links with America or Saudi Arabia", only to find out later that it "was not visa fraud" but part of a scheme in which young men "recruited by Osama bin Laden" were being sent for "terrorist training by the CIA" after which they were sent on to Afghanistan.

In a reiteration of a now well-known claim by one of George W Bush's former business partners, the BBC said he made his first million 20 years ago on the back of a company financed by Osama's elder brother, Salem. But it added the more disturbing assertion that both presidents Bush had lucrative stakes along with the bin Ladens in Carlyle Corporation, a small private company which has gone on to become one of America's biggest defence contractors. The bin Ladens sold their stake in Carlyle soon after September 11, it said.

American politicians later told the BBC programme that they rejected the accusation that the establishment had called the dogs of the intelligence agencies off the bin Ladens and the royal House of Saud because of a strategic interest in Saudi Arabia, which has the world's biggest oil reserve.

http://infowars.com/saved%20pages/Prior_Knowledge/sitting_on_theFBI.htm

BBC News
Newsnight
6/11/01

This transcript is produced from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight. It has been checked against the programme as broadcast, however Newsnight can accept no responsibility for any factual inaccuracies. We will be happy to correct serious errors.

Has someone been sitting on the FBI?

GREG PALAST:
The CIA and Saudi Arabia, the Bushes and the Bin Ladens. Did their connections cause America to turn a blind eye to terrorism?

UNNAMED MAN:
There is a hidden agenda at the very highest levels of our government.

JOE TRENTO, (AUTHOR, "SECRET HISTORY OF THE CIA"):
The sad thing is that thousands of Americans had to die needlessly.

PETER ELSNER:
How can it be that the former President of the US and the current President of the US have business dealings with characters that need to be investigated?

PALAST:
In the eight weeks since the attacks, over 1,000 suspects and potential witnesses have been detained. Yet, just days after the hijackers took off from Boston aiming for the Twin Towers, a special charter flight out of the same airport whisked 11 members of Osama Bin Laden's family off to Saudi Arabia. That did not concern the White House.

Their official line is that the Bin Ladens are above suspicion - apart from Osama, the black sheep, who they say hijacked the family name. That's fortunate for the Bush family and the Saudi royal household, whose links with the Bin Ladens could otherwise prove embarrassing. But Newsnight has obtained evidence that the FBI was on the trail of other members of the] Bin Laden family for links to terrorist organisations before and after September 11th.

This document is marked "Secret". Case ID - 199-Eye WF 213 589. 199 is FBI code for case type. 9 would be murder. 65 would be espionage. 199 means national security. WF indicates Washington field office special agents were investigating ABL - because of it's relationship with the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, WAMY - a suspected terrorist organisation. ABL is Abdullah Bin Laden, president and treasurer of WAMY.

This is the sleepy Washington suburb of Falls Church, Virginia where almost every home displays the Stars and Stripes. On this unremarkable street, at 3411 Silver Maple Place, we located the former home of Abdullah and another brother, Omar, also an FBI suspect. It's conveniently close to WAMY. The World Assembly of Muslim Youth is in this building, in a little room in the basement at 5613 Leesburg Pike. And here, just a couple blocks down the road at 5913 Leesburg, is where four of the hijackers that attacked New York and Washington are listed as having lived.

The US Treasury has not frozen WAMY's assets, and when we talked to them, they insisted they are a charity. Yet, just weeks ago, Pakistan expelled WAMY operatives. And India claimed that WAMY was funding an organisation linked to bombings in Kashmir. And the Philippines military has accused WAMY of funding Muslim insurgency. The FBI did look into WAMY, but, for some reason, agents were pulled off the trail.

TRENTO:
The FBI wanted to investigate these guys. This is not something that they didn't want to do - they wanted to, they weren't permitted to.

PALAST:
The secret file fell into the hands of national security expert, Joe Trento. The Washington spook-tracker has been looking into the FBI's allegations about WAMY.

TRENTO:
They've had connections to Osama Bin Laden's people. They've had connections to Muslim cultural and financial aid groups that have terrorist connections. They fit the pattern of groups that the Saudi royal family and Saudi community of princes - the 20,000 princes - have funded who've engaged in terrorist activity. Now, do I know that WAMY has done anything that's illegal? No, I don't know that. Do I know that as far back as 1996 the FBI was very concerned about this organisation? I do.

PALAST:
Newsnight has uncovered a long history of shadowy connections between the State Department, the CIA and the Saudis. The former head of the American visa bureau in Jeddah is Michael Springman.

MICHAEL SPRINGMAN:
In Saudi Arabia I was repeatedly ordered by high level State Dept officials to issue visas to unqualified applicants. These were, essentially, people who had no ties either to Saudi Arabia or to their own country. I complained bitterly at the time there. I returned to the US, I complained to the State Dept here, to the General Accounting Office, to the Bureau of Diplomatic Security and to the Inspector General's office. I was met with silence.

PALAST:
By now, Bush Sr, once CIA director, was in the White House. Springman was shocked to find this wasn't visa fraud. Rather, State and CIA were playing "the Great Game".

SPRINGMAN:
What I was protesting was, in reality, an effort to bring recruits, rounded up by Osama Bin Laden, to the US for terrorist training by the CIA. They would then be returned to Afghanistan to fight against the then-Soviets. The attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 did not shake the State Department's faith in the Saudis, nor did the attack on American barracks at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia three years later, in which 19 Americans died. FBI agents began to feel their investigation was being obstructed. Would you be surprised to find out that FBI agents are a bit frustrated that they can't be looking into some Saudi connections?

MICHAEL WILDES, ( LAWYER)
I would never be surprised with that. They're cut off at the hip sometimes by supervisors or given shots that are being called from Washington at the highest levels.

PALAST:
I showed lawyer Michael Wildes our FBI documents. One of the Khobar Towers bombers was represented by Wildes, who thought he had useful intelligence for the US. He also represents a Saudi diplomat who defected to the USA with 14,000 documents which Wildes claims implicates Saudi citizens in financing terrorism and more. Wildes met with FBI men who told him they were not permitted to read all the documents. Nevertheless, he tried to give them to the agents.

WILDES:
"Take these with you. We're not going to charge for the copies. Keep them. Do something with them. Get some bad guys with them." They refused.

PALAST:
In the hall of mirrors that is the US intelligence community, Wildes, a former US federal attorney, said the FBI field agents wanted the documents, but they were told to "see no evil."

WILDES:
You see a difference between the rank-and-file counter-intelligence agents, who are regarded by some as the motor pool of the FBI, who drive following diplomats, and the people who are getting the shots called at the highest level of our government, who have a different agenda - it's unconscionable.

PALAST:
State wanted to keep the pro-American Saudi royal family in control of the world's biggest oil spigot, even at the price of turning a blind eye to any terrorist connection so long as America was safe. In recent years, CIA operatives had other reasons for not exposing Saudi-backed suspects.

TRENTO:
If you recruited somebody who is a member of a terrorist organisation, who happens to make his way here to the US, and even though you're not in touch with that person anymore but you have used him in the past, it would be unseemly if he were arrested by the FBI and word got back that he'd once been on the payroll of the CIA. What we're talking about is blow-back. What we're talking about is embarrassing, career-destroying blow-back for intelligence officials.

PALAST:
Does the Bush family also have to worry about political blow-back? The younger Bush made his first million 20 years ago with an oil company partly funded by Salem Bin Laden's chief US representative. Young George also received fees as director of a subsidiary of Carlyle Corporation, a little known private company which has, in just a few years of its founding, become one of Americas biggest defence contractors. His father, Bush Senior, is also a paid advisor. And what became embarrassing was the revelation that the Bin Ladens held a stake in Carlyle, sold just after September 11.

ELSNER:
You have a key relationship between the Saudis and the former President of the US who happens to be the father of the current President of the US. And you have all sorts of questions about where does policy begin and where does good business and good profits for the company, Carlyle, end?

PALAST:
I received a phone call from a high-placed member of a US intelligence agency. He tells me that while there's always been constraints on investigating Saudis, under George Bush it's gotten much worse. After the elections, the agencies were told to "back off" investigating the Bin Ladens and Saudi royals, and that angered agents. I'm told that since September 11th the policy has been reversed. FBI headquarters told us they could not comment on our findings. A spokesman said: "There are lots of things that only the intelligence community knows and that no-one else ought to know.

http://infowars.com/saved%20pages/Report%20bin%20Laden%20treated%20at%20US%20hospital%20--%20The%20Washington%20Times.htm

October 31, 2001

Report: bin Laden treated at US hospital

By Elizabeth Bryant
UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL

PARIS, Oct. 31 (UPI) -- A CIA agent allegedly met with suspected terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden in July, while the Saudi underwent treatment for kidney problems at an American hospital in Dubai, France's Le Figaro newspaper reported Wednesday.

Bin Laden reportedly checked into the American Hospital Dubai, a 100-bed, acute-care general hospital, July 4 and stayed until July 14. He arrived from Quetta, Pakistan, accompanied by his personal doctor and a close aide -- possibly Ayman el Zawahiri, a leader of Egypt's Islamic Jihad, now bin Laden's right hand man, the newspaper said.

Le Figaro cited a "professional partner" linked to the hospital's management as its source.

Besides a stream of local dignitaries and family members, bin Laden's visitors included a local CIA agent, the newspaper reported. The agent was widely recognized locally, Le Figaro said, and later told several friends of the meeting.

The alleged American spy was called back to the CIA's McLean, Va., headquarters July 15 -- a day after bin Laden checked out, Le Figaro reported, citing "authorized sources."

Why bin Laden would have met with a CIA officer -- or vice versa -- is unclear. Even before the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States, the Saudi millionaire figured among America's top terrorist suspects, blamed for several earlier plots against U.S. targets, including the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

But the French newspaper asserted CIA-bin Laden links stretched back years, and appeared to suggest bin Laden gave the agency information regarding future terrorist strikes.

"The Dubai meeting is therefore a logical follow to a "certain American policy," the newspaper said.

In particular, the newspaper noted that just two weeks after bin Laden checked out of the Dubai hospital, United Arab Emirates security agents arrested the alleged mastermind of a plot to blow up the American Embassy in Paris. The suspect, a French-Algerian named Djamel Beghal, earlier confessed to receiving his orders from bin Laden, according to French news media citing his written confession.

An American diplomat in Paris refused to comment on the Figaro article, or on reported allegations of an emergency meeting in Paris in August, between high level French and American intelligence officials.

"We're just not comment any of that stuff," he said. "We can't talk about meetings like that may or may not have happen."

Le Figaro said bin Laden had serious kidney problems, and reportedly had a dialysis machine imported to Afghanistan last year. Citing a March 2000 report by Asia Week, the newspaper said bin Laden's illness stemmed from "a renal infection that has spread to the liver, and needs specialized treatment."

The head of the Dubai hospital's urology department, Terry Callaway, reportedly refused to answer questions about bin Laden's alleged stay. Radio France reported Wednesday the American hospital has denied bin Laden was treated there.

http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=25142

Was Clinton pro-Taliban? Congressman charges Afghan extremists were coddled, oversight efforts 'belittled'

By Joseph Farah
� 2001 WorldNetDaily.com

President Clinton incubated the Taliban regime in Afghanistan for at least three years, despite the fact that it was harboring Osama bin Laden, was responsible for growing 60 percent of the world's heroin and denied basic human rights to the nation, a U.S. congressman charges.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., says he was belittled, stonewalled and ridiculed for three years for asserting the congressional oversight role in the formulation of foreign policy toward Afghanistan during the last term of the Clinton administration.

Using his seat on the House International Affairs Committee, Rohrabacher attempted, he says, for several years to secure communiqu�s, cables and other State Department documents that would reveal what was behind U.S. policy toward Kabul. He says he and his committee were "stonewalled" and "belittled" in all their attempts.

Rohrabacher renewed his requests for those documents in a committee hearing with Secretary of State Colin Powell last week. Powell pledged to look into the matter.

The congressman has some first-hand experience with Afghanistan, having traveled there during the Mujahedin's war with the Soviet Union invaders just prior to entering the House.

He blames Saudi Arabia and Pakistan for sponsoring the brutal Taliban regime, and U.S. neglect of Afghanistan following the Soviet withdrawal for its rise to power.

"The U.S. spent $1 billion a year aiding the Mujahedin during the war with the Russians," Rohrabacher says. "When the war was over, the U.S. walked away, leaving Afghanistan to its own fate after years of death and destruction. We didn't even help them clear the land mines we gave them to plant. Afghan children by the hundreds were still getting their arms and legs blown off by American land mines long after the war was over, because we did nothing to help them."

Rohrabacher blames the first Bush administration for this policy of neglect.

But he reserves more passion for criticism of the Clinton administration, which, he says, bailed out the Taliban in its most fateful days.

"In 1997, the Taliban overextended themselves," he says. "Thousands of troops were captured in the north. Much of their equipment was destroyed by the Northern Alliance. Nothing prevented the opposition from taking Kabul. The Taliban was more vulnerable than it ever was before."

But instead of seizing the opportunity to support the Northern Alliance, Rohrabacher says the Clinton administration imposed a ceasefire and arms embargo that was supposed to apply to both sides. Instead, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia took the opportunity to resupply and rebuild the Taliban army.

President Clinton, Rohrabacher maintains, knew about this but withheld information from Congress and the Northern Alliance.

Two years ago, Rohrabacher says, a friend very knowledgeable about Afghanistan called him to say he knew exactly where Osama bin Laden was in Afghanistan. If the U.S. wanted to take him out, this was the opportunity.

Rohrabacher contacted the Central Intelligence Agency and asked officials to talk to his friend. A week went by and nothing happened, he says. He called again. Another week went by with no contact. Rohrabacher got in touch with Rep. Porter Goss, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who set up a meeting with the Bin Laden Task Force, a group comprised of members of the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency. Rohrabacher met with the task force, which assured him it would get right on the matter.

"It took a month before anyone from the task force ever got in touch with my friend," he says. By then, bin Laden had moved.

Rohrabacher accuses the U.S. intelligence establishment of gross negligence and incompetence over what he calls the "biggest intelligence failure in the history of the country."

"Here we were paying hundreds of people to conduct a secret war against bin Laden for years, yet they allowed this attack against these buildings in New York," he says. "They were evidently more concerned about their own little turf wars than they were about protecting the lives of thousands of Americans."

Rohrabacher says people should be fired over this failure or Americans will pay an even bigger price in the future.

"I think this is evidence that our CIA and our intelligence apparatus are run by nincompoops and incompetents," he says. "People should lose their jobs over this."

Rohrabacher, a major supporter of the Afghan resistance during the Soviet invasion, says, contrary to popular opinion, the U.S. did not support bin Laden and his allies during the war. Bin Laden got his support from Saudi Arabia and the Taliban, which arose "seemingly from nowhere in 1996." It was a creation of the Pakistan ISI, that nation's equivalent of the CIA.

He says Pakistan wanted a regime it could control, while Saudi Arabia, which also supported the Taliban, wanted to block the development of an oil pipeline through Afghanistan that would drive down the price of oil. In addition, he says, the Pakistan ISI siphoned off money from the Afghan heroin trade, controlled by the Taliban.

Rohrabacher organized several humanitarian relief efforts on behalf of the Northern Alliance, but, he says, he could never interest the Clinton administration in helping. In fact, he says, the administration threw up roadblocks to his efforts on more than one occasion.

During the Clinton administration, the congressman says, Voice of America became known in Afghanistan as the "Voice of the Taliban."

"When I tell people that President Clinton supported the Taliban, they go berserk," he said. "But that is the truth."

If you'd like to sound off on this issue, please take part in the WorldNetDaily poll.

Joseph Farah is editor and chief executive officer of WorldNetDaily.com.

Nov. 27, 2001. 02:00 AM
Toronto Star

Did bin Laden have help from U.S. friends?

Thomas Walkom
COLUMNIST

AN INTRIGUING new book, just published in France, details the curiously amicable relationship between the regime of U.S. President George W. Bush and Afghanistan's Taliban, a relationship that turned hostile only after the terror attacks of Sept. 11.

Ben Laden: La Verit� Interdite (Bin Laden: The Forbidden Truth) is written by former French spook Jean-Charles Brisard and journalist Guillaume Dasquie. Both are said to be plugged into the murky world of intelligence. During his time with French intelligence, Brisard was regarded as something of an expert on bin Laden's finances.

The nub of their argument is that the Bush regime's attitude toward the Taliban - and even to bin Laden - was driven by the new president's fixation on energy. A stable regime in Afghanistan would allow construction of an oil and gas pipeline from the former Soviet republics in Central Asia to Pakistan and the sea. And initially, Washington's best bet for a stable regime in Afghanistan was the Taliban.

From February, when the Taliban first offered to extradite bin Laden in exchange for U.S. recognition, until August when negotiations stalled, the Bush administration and the government it later labelled a terrorist regime got along just fine.

Indeed, the book quotes John O'Neill, a former director of anti-terrorism for the Federal Bureau of Investigation as complaining that American and Saudi oil interests acting through the U.S. State Department kept interfering with efforts to track down bin Laden.

In particular, the authors say, O'Neill was irked after the State Department refused to let his FBI team return to Yemen to investigate the terrorist bombing of the USS Cole there last year. Frustrated, he quit to take a private sector job.

Unfortunately for him, that job was as head of security in New York's World Trade Center. O'Neill was killed on Sept. 11.

Skeptics might argue that his death proved convenient for the authors. Now there is no one to dispute their account of what he said. Certainly, Bin Laden: The Forbidden Truth has the whiff of an old-fashioned conspiracy theory starring the usual panoply of villains.

Still, the details that Brisard and Dasquie provide (including the fact that the Taliban hired the niece of former CIA director Richard Helms to orchestrate their publicity) do not contradict what was already known about the relationship between Washington and its soon-to-be arch-enemy. In fact, they support it.

Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid's well-regarded book Taliban: Islam, Oil And The New Great Game in Central Asia outlines how oil politics has affected U.S. policy in Afghanistan. The Taliban's unprecedented offer to extradite bin Laden to a third country, well before the Sept. 11 attacks, was reported by the Times of London in February. In September, this newspaper reported on the often cozy relationship between Washington and the Taliban.

Last month, the Washington Post reported that Sudan had offered in 1996 to extradite bin Laden, who was wanted at that time for attacks on U.S. servicemen in Saudi Arabia.

However, the U.S. declined that offer. Instead, it agreed with Sudan's decision to deport bin Laden and his entourage to a place where he couldn't do any damage - Afghanistan. The official reason for U.S. reluctance was that it wasn't sure a case against him could stand up in court. Saudi Arabia, the other extradition destination proposed by the Sudanese, refused to take him

But there is a pattern. Earlier this month, the Guardian, a U.K. newspaper, reported that FBI agents had been told by the Bush administration to back off investigating members of the bin Laden clan living in the U.S. In September, the Wall Street Journal documented the lucrative business connections between the bin Laden family and senior U.S. Republicans, including the president's father, George Bush Sr.

What are we to make of all of this? One possible conclusion is that the bin Laden terror problem was allowed to get out of hand because bin Laden, himself, had powerful protectors in both Washington and Saudi Arabia. If that's true, no wonder the Bush administration prefers that he be killed rather than allowed to testify in open court.

The other conclusions - questions really - have to do with the justification for the war on Afghanistan. If the Taliban unilaterally offered in February to extradite bin Laden (an offer they repeated after Sept. 11), were they just kidding? If not, was the war necessary?

This question will become particularly important if the U.S. fails to find the terrorist it says started this war, the man it allowed to go to Afghanistan in the first place.

This weekend, Spain announced it would not extradite suspected Al Qaeda terrorists to the U.S. as long as Bush plans to try such people in military tribunals. We should recall that the Taliban imposed conditions on their extradition offer, too, conditions the U.S. deemed unacceptable. Will Madrid be the anti-terror coalition's next target?

Thomas Walkom's column appears on Tuesday. He can be reached at twalkom@thestar.ca

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=121518

Published on Friday, October 05, 2001

Media, Not Students, Question bin Laden Link

By LUKE SMITH

Crimson Staff Writer

Despite heavy media play of the University’s bin Laden fellowships, Harvard officials say they have barely heard from students and alumni since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Andy Tiedemann, a spokesperson in the development office, said no Harvard students have called to object to the bin Laden fellowships.

“I have yet to hear from a student, and I’ve heard from only a few alumni, as well as general public inquiries,” Tiedemann said.

He said most calls he had received about the fellowships were simply to clarify, rather than criticize.

“Most people just want to understand what the facts are,” Tiedemann said. “Some people have been given misinformation or misheard what the facts were.” He would not specify how the public may have been misinformed, saying “that the coverage in the media has been accurate.”

But the media, intrigued by the association of the bin Laden name and Harvard, have called University public relations officials repeatedly. University spokesperson Joe Wrinn said he has been called by “dozens and dozens of press agencies from all around the world,” including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Boston Globe.

“From the start, to me, it was just very understandable how someone might get a misimpression,” Wrinn said. “If you remember back to the barrage of images that were coming across and the quick bits of information, you were hearing bin Laden, bin Laden, Harvard, bin Laden, so I think it was understandable that people might draw the wrong message.”

Wrinn took issue with a Boston morning talk show which described Harvard as taking “blood money” from the bin Laden family.

“Where [the media] strayed,” Wrinn said, “was kind of first, second and third-hand type of retelling.”

The bin Laden family’s endowed fellowships totals $2 million, for use at Harvard’s law and design schools. Since the attacks, Harvard officials have stressed that the University would cease using the endowed funds if they found any explicit link with Osama bin Laden’s terrorist organization.

In the wake of the attacks, the University has removed the names of this year’s bin Laden fellows from the Harvard website for security concerns, however.

Last week, the University came under attack from the Cambridge City Council for its bin Laden fellowships, when Councillor Kenneth E. Reeves ’72 demanded that Harvard give the bin Laden endowment money to the victims of the terrorist attacks. The council’s ultimately voted for a resolution asking the University to donate $5 million to funds benefiting the victims, but did not explicitly tie the request to Harvard’s bin Laden connection.

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=121512

Published on Friday, October 05, 2001

Gore Praises Rescue Effort, Public Servants

By IMTIYAZ H. DELAWALA

Crimson Staff Writer

Before an overflowing crowd at the Kennedy School of Government, former Vice President Al Gore ’69 discussed the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States, praising the response of working-class Americans and public servants in recent weeks.

Nearly 800 people crowded into the ARCO Forum last night to hear Gore speak on “The Strength of America” at the 2001 Jerry Wurf Memorial Lecture, Gore’s second public address since he conceded the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush last December.

“Now more than ever, it’s abundantly clear that the strength of America is our people,” said Gore, who sported an American flag pin on his jacket, as well as the full beard he grew this summer.

Part of a lecture series in memory of a prominent union leader, Gore’s speech focused on the role of working Americans and unions in the country, with Gore saying the country should strengthen families and communities by lessening the burden on many working Americans and allowing them to “get off the treadmill a little more often.”

He stressed protecting the rights of workers through organized unions, while also giving his support for the living wage movement on campus.

“Right now, organizing is a very important thing,” Gore said. “There are a lot of people in America who are having a hard time.”

“I honor the students who were involved last spring [in the Mass. Hall occupation calling for a living wage],” he said. “I know the University that I love so much will find a way to come to an equitable solution.”

But while Gore’s speech focused on working Americans and the labor movement, the former vice president touched on the recent tragedy throughout his comments.

Gore told several anecdotes about his recent discussions with Americans on their feelings after the attacks that killed thousands in the World Trade Center and Pentagon, praising the unity he has seen accross the country.

“I hope that we maintain the degree of unity we have right now,” Gore said.

In praising public servants, Gore shared the well-publicized story of the Rev. Mychal F. Judge, a New York City friar who was killed by falling debris while administering the last rites to a fallen rescue worker outside the World Trade Center. Judge served as the chaplain for several New York City fire departments, and received the first registered death certificate stemming from the attacks.

“He was willing to go directly into harm’s way,” Gore said of Judge. “He exemplified both the scarifice and values of our coutnry in this time of peril.”

After his speech, Gore took several questions from students, most asking for Gore to explain his thoughts on the debates that have stemmed from the Sept. 11 attacks, such as how to uphold civil liberties and how to prevent descrimination and hate crimes against Middle Eastern and South Asian Americans.

Gore said the country must establish “mutual respect for differences,” and then work towards “transcendence of those differences” in order to avoid the recent upsurge in acts of violence against Americans because of their race.

Gore said the country’s current effort to eliminate the roots of terrorism around the world is key to safeguarding the nation’s democratic principles.

“The battle against terrorism is a battle for the value of human life and for freedom,” Gore said.

Gore also reiterated his support for any military action the Bush administration takes against those who carried out the attacks, saying the U.S. government will have to make difficult decisions in coming weeks.

“It is extremely difficult for President Bush to find the right path here,” Gore said. “Whoever is in the White House would face extreme difficulties here.”

And Gore openly criticized those who have held peace rallies calling for no military response.

“We have an obligation to protect our people. We have been attacked,” Gore said. “This isn’t complicated to me. It isn’t complicated, like Vietnam was.”

While last night’s event covered serious subject matter, Gore often spoke in a conversational manner in responding to students’ questions, walking around the stage without his suit jacket on.

Students with tickets lined up more than an hour-and-a-half before the event in order to secure seats. All available tickets for the event were given out Monday in a matter of minutes, with many students even watching a simulcast of the event in overflow rooms at the Kennedy School.

Gore began his remarks by making light of the controversial end to his run for the presidency last year.

“I’m Al Gore, and I used to be the next President of the United States,” Gore quipped after being introduced by University President Lawrence H. Summers.

“You win some, you lose some, and then there’s that little known third category,” Gore added, drawing laughs and cheers from the crowd.

But when one student asked him directly about what may have been flaws in his campaign, Gore said last year’s presidential contest was not currently an important issue.

“I just don’t feel like talking about politics right now,” Gore said. “After what happened Sept. 11, all of that seems so distant.”

�"Staff writer Imtiyaz H. Delawala can be reached at delawala@fas.harvard.edu.

http://www.msnbc.com/news/190144.asp?cp1=1

Kenya on Aug. 7 after a huge bomb planted next to the U.S. embassy there.

Bin Laden comes home to roost

His CIA ties are only the beginning of a woeful story

By Michael Moran
MSNBC

NEW YORK, Aug. 24, 1998 � At the CIA, it happens often enough to have a code name: Blowback. Simply defined, this is the term that describes an agent, an operative or an operation that has turned on its creators. Osama bin Laden, our new public enemy Number 1, is the personification of blowback. And the fact that he is viewed as a hero by millions in the Islamic world proves again the old adage: Reap what you sow.

BEFORE YOU CLICK on my face and call me naive, let me concede some points. Yes, the West needed Josef Stalin to defeat Hitler. Yes, there were times during the Cold War when supporting one villain (Cambodia's Lon Nol, for instance) would have been better than the alternative (Pol Pot). So yes, there are times when any nation must hold its nose and shake hands with the devil for the long-term good of the planet.

But just as surely, there are times when the United States, faced with such moral dilemmas, should have resisted the temptation to act. Arming a multi-national coalition of Islamic extremists in Afghanistan during the 1980s - well after the destruction of the Marine barracks in Beirut or the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 - was one of those times.

BIN LADEN'S BEGINNINGS

Terrorist backer?

Click here for a list of attacks that Bin Laden is suspected of financing

As anyone who has bothered to read this far certainly knows by now, bin Laden is the heir to Saudi construction fortune who, at least since the early 1990s, has used that money to finance countless attacks on U.S. interests and those of its Arab allies around the world.

As his unclassified CIA biography states, bin Laden left Saudi Arabia to fight the Soviet army in Afghanistan after Moscow's invasion in 1979. By 1984, he was running a front organization known as Maktab al-Khidamar - the MAK - which funneled money, arms and fighters from the outside world into the Afghan war.

What the CIA bio conveniently fails to specify (in its unclassified form, at least) is that the MAK was nurtured by Pakistan's state security services, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, the CIA's primary conduit for conducting the covert war against Moscow's occupation.

Taliban militiamen watch as one of their tanks light up an opposition position northeast of Kabul on Aug. 15.

By no means was Osama bin Laden the leader of Afghanistan's mujahedeen. His money gave him undue prominence in the Afghan struggle, but the vast majority of those who fought and died for Afghanistan's freedom - like the Taliban regime that now holds sway over most of that tortured nation - were Afghan nationals.

Yet the CIA, concerned about the factionalism of Afghanistan made famous by Rudyard Kipling, found that Arab zealots who flocked to aid the Afghans were easier to "read" than the rivalry-ridden natives. While the Arab volunteers might well prove troublesome later, the agency reasoned, they at least were one-dimensionally anti-Soviet for now. So bin Laden, along with a small group of Islamic militants from Egypt, Pakistan, Lebanon, Syria and Palestinian refugee camps all over the Middle East, became the "reliable" partners of the CIA in its war against Moscow.

WHAT'S 'INTELLIGENT' ABOUT THIS?

Though he has come to represent all that went wrong with the CIA's reckless strategy there, by the end of the Afghan war in 1989, bin Laden was still viewed by the agency as something of a dilettante - a rich Saudi boy gone to war and welcomed home by the Saudi monarchy he so hated as something of a hero.

In fact, while he returned to his family's construction business, bin Laden had split from the relatively conventional MAK in 1988 and established a new group, al-Qaida, that included many of the more extreme MAK members he had met in Afghanistan.

Exiled Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden is seen in this April, 1998 photo in Afghanistan.

Most of these Afghan vets, or Afghanis, as the Arabs who fought there became known, turned up later behind violent Islamic movements around the world. Among them: the GIA in Algeria, thought responsible for the massacres of tens of thousands of civilians; Egypt's Gamat Ismalia, which has massacred western tourists repeatedly in recent years; Saudi Arabia Shiite militants, responsible for the Khobar Towers and Riyadh bombings of 1996.

Indeed, to this day, those involved in the decision to give the Afghan rebels access to a fortune in covert funding and top-level combat weaponry continue to defend that move in the context of the Cold War. Sen. Orrin Hatch, a senior Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee making those decisions, told my colleague Robert Windrem that he would make the same call again today even knowing what bin Laden would do subsequently. "It was worth it," he said.

"Those were very important, pivotal matters that played an important role in the downfall of the Soviet Union," he said.

HINDSIGHT OR TUNNEL VISION

It should be pointed out that the evidence of bin Laden's connection to these activities is mostly classified, though its hard to imagine the CIA rushing to take credit for a Frankenstein's monster like this.

It is also worth acknowledging that it is easier now to oppose the CIA's Afghan adventures than it was when Hatch and company made them in the mid-1980s. After all, in 1998 we now know that far larger elements than Afghanistan were corroding the communist party's grip on power in Moscow.

Even Hatch can't be blamed completely. The CIA, ever mindful of the need to justify its "mission," had conclusive evidence by the mid-1980s of the deepening crisis of infrastructure within the Soviet Union. The CIA, as its deputy director Robert Gates acknowledged under congressional questioning in 1992, had decided to keep that evidence from President Reagan and his top advisors and instead continued to grossly exaggerate Soviet military and technological capabilities in its annual "Soviet Military Power" report right up to 1990.

Given that context, a decision was made to provide America's potential enemies with the arms, money - and most importantly - the knowledge of how to run a war of attrition violent and well-organized enough to humble a superpower.

That decision is coming home to roost.

Michael Moran is MSNBC's International Editor

Date: Wed Sep 19, 2001 6:46 pm

Noam Chomsky on the Twin Towers/Pentagon assault

Chomsky interview on Radio B92, Belgrade

Why do you think these attacks happened?

To answer the question we must first identify the perpetrators of the crimes. It is generally assumed, plausibly, that their origin is the Middle East region, and that the attacks probably trace back to the Osama Bin Laden network, a widespread and complex organization, doubtless inspired by Bin Laden but not necessarily acting under his control. Let us assume that this is true. Then to answer your question a sensible person would try to ascertain Bin Laden's views, and the sentiments of the large reservoir of supporters he has throughout the region. About all of this, we have a great deal of information.

Bin Laden has been interviewed extensively over the years by highly reliable Middle East specialists, notably the most eminent correspondent in the region, Robert Fisk (London _Independent_), who has intimate knowledge of the entire region and direct experience over decades. A Saudi Arabian millionaire, Bin Laden became a militant Islamic leader in the war to drive the Russians out of Afghanistan. He was one of the many religious fundamentalist extremists recruited, armed, and financed by the CIA and their allies in Pakistani intelligence to cause maximal harm to the Russians -- quite possibly delaying their withdrawal, many analysts suspect -- though whether he personally happened to have direct contact with the CIA is unclear, and not particularly important.

Not surprisingly, the CIA preferred the most fanatic and cruel fighters they could mobilize. The end result was to "destroy a moderate regime and create a fanatical one, from groups recklessly financed by the Americans" (_London Times_ correspondent Simon Jenkins, also a specialist on the region). These "Afghanis" as they are called (many, like Bin Laden, not from Afghanistan) carried out terror operations across the border in Russia, but they terminated these after Russia withdrew. Their war was not against Russia, which they despise, but against the Russian occupation and Russia's crimes against Muslims.

The "Afghanis" did not terminate their activities, however. They joined Bosnian Muslim forces in the Balkan Wars; the US did not object, just as it tolerated Iranian support for them, for complex reasons that we need not pursue here, apart from noting that concern for the grim fate of the Bosnians was not prominent among them. The "Afghanis" are also fighting the Russians in Chechnya, and, quite possibly, are involved in carrying out terrorist attacks in Moscow and elsewhere in Russian territory. Bin Laden and his "Afghanis" turned against the US in 1990 when they established permanent bases in Saudi Arabia -- from his point of view, a counterpart to the Russian occupation of Afghanistan, but far more significant because of Saudi Arabia's special status as the guardian of the holiest shrines.

Bin Laden is also bitterly opposed to the corrupt and repressive regimes of the region, which he regards as "un-Islamic," including the Saudi Arabian regime, the most extreme Islamic fundamentalist regime in the world, apart from the Taliban, and a close US ally since its origins. Bin Laden despises the US for its support of these regimes. Like others in the region, he is also outraged by long-standing US support for Israel's brutal military occupation, now in its 35th year: Washington's decisive diplomatic, military, and economic intervention in support of the killings, the harsh and destructive siege over many years, the daily humiliation to which Palestinians are subjected, the expanding settlements designed to break the occupied territories into Bantustan-like cantons and take control of the resources, the gross violation of the Geneva Conventions, and other actions that are recognized as crimes throughout most of the world, apart from the US, which has prime responsibility for them.

And like others, he contrasts Washington's dedicated support for these crimes with the decade-long US-British assault against the civilian population of Iraq, which has devastated the society and caused hundreds of thousands of deaths while strengthening Saddam Hussein -- who was a favored friend and ally of the US and Britain right through his worst atrocities, including the gassing of the Kurds, as people of the region also remember well, even if Westerners prefer to forget the facts.

These sentiments are very widely shared. The _Wall Street Journal_ (Sept. 14) published a survey of opinions of wealthy and privileged Muslims in the Gulf region (bankers, professionals, businessmen with close links to the U.S.). They expressed much the same views: resentment of the U.S. policies of supporting Israeli crimes and blocking the international consensus on a diplomatic settlement for many years while devastating Iraqi civilian society, supporting harsh and repressive anti-democratic regimes throughout the region, and imposing barriers against economic development by "propping up oppressive regimes." Among the great majority of people suffering deep poverty and oppression, similar sentiments are far more bitter, and are the source of the fury and despair that has led to suicide bombings, as commonly understood by those who are interested in the facts.

The U.S., and much of the West, prefers a more comforting story. To quote the lead analysis in the _New York Times_ (Sept. 16), the perpetrators acted out of "hatred for the values cherished in the West as freedom, tolerance, prosperity, religious pluralism and universal suffrage." U.S. actions are irrelevant, and therefore need not even be mentioned (Serge Schmemann). This is a convenient picture, and the general stance is not unfamiliar in intellectual history; in fact, it is close to the norm. It happens to be completely at variance with everything we know, but has all the merits of self-adulation and uncritical support for power.

It is also widely recognized that Bin Laden and others like him are praying for "a great assault on Muslim states," which will cause "fanatics to flock to his cause" (Jenkins, and many others.). That too is familiar. The escalating cycle of violence is typically welcomed by the harshest and most brutal elements on both sides, a fact evident enough from the recent history of the Balkans, to cite only one of many cases.

What consequences will they have on US inner policy and to the American self reception?

US policy has already been officially announced. The world is being offered a "stark choice": join us, or "face the certain prospect of death and destruction." Congress has authorized the use of force against any individuals or countries the President determines to be involved in the attacks, a doctrine that every supporter regards as ultra-criminal. That is easily demonstrated. Simply ask how the same people would have reacted if Nicaragua had adopted this doctrine after the U.S. had rejected the orders of the World Court to terminate its "unlawful use of force" against Nicaragua and had vetoed a Security Council resolution calling on all states to observe international law. And that terrorist attack was far more severe and destructive even than this atrocity.

As for how these matters are perceived here, that is far more complex. One should bear in mind that the media and the intellectual elites generally have their particular agendas. Furthermore, the answer to this question is, in significant measure, a matter of decision: as in many other cases, with sufficient dedication and energy, efforts to stimulate fanaticism, blind hatred, and submission to authority can be reversed. We all know that very well.

Do you expect U.S. to profoundly change their policy to the rest of the world?

The initial response was to call for intensifying the policies that led to the fury and resentment that provides the background of support for the terrorist attack, and to pursue more intensively the agenda of the most hard line elements of the leadership: increased militarization, domestic regimentation, attack on social programs. That is all to be expected. Again, terror attacks, and the escalating cycle of violence they often engender, tend to reinforce the authority and prestige of the most harsh and repressive elements of a society. But there is nothing inevitable about submission to this course.

After the first shock, came fear of what the U.S. answer is going to be. Are you afraid, too?

Every sane person should be afraid of the likely reaction -- the one that has already been announced, the one that probably answers Bin Laden's prayers. It is highly likely to escalate the cycle of violence, in the familiar way, but in this case on a far greater scale.

The U.S. has already demanded that Pakistan terminate the food and other supplies that are keeping at least some of the starving and suffering people of Afghanistan alive. If that demand is implemented, unknown numbers of people who have not the remotest connection to terrorism will die, possibly millions. Let me repeat: the U.S. has demanded that Pakistan kill possibly millions of people who are themselves victims of the Taliban. This has nothing to do even with revenge. It is at a far lower moral level even than that. The significance is heightened by the fact that this is mentioned in passing, with no comment, and probably will hardly be noticed. We can learn a great deal about the moral level of the reigning intellectual culture of the West by observing the reaction to this demand. I think we can be reasonably confident that if the American population had the slightest idea of what is being done in their name, they would be utterly appalled. It would be instructive to seek historical precedents.

If Pakistan does not agree to this and other U.S. demands, it may come under direct attack as well -- with unknown consequences. If Pakistan does submit to U.S. demands, it is not impossible that the government will be overthrown by forces much like the Taliban -- who in this case will have nuclear weapons. That could have an effect throughout the region, including the oil producing states. At this point we are considering the possibility of a war that may destroy much of human society.

Even without pursuing such possibilities, the likelihood is that an attack on Afghans will have pretty much the effect that most analysts expect: it will enlist great numbers of others to support of Bin Laden, as he hopes. Even if he is killed, it will make little difference. His voice will be heard on cassettes that are distributed throughout the Islamic world, and he is likely to be revered as a martyr, inspiring others. It is worth bearing in mind that one suicide bombing -- a truck driven into a U.S. military base -- drove the world's major military force out of Lebanon 20 years ago. The opportunities for such attacks are endless. And suicide attacks are very hard to prevent.

"The world will never be the same after 11.09.01". Do you think so? The horrendous terrorist attacks on Tuesday are something quite new in world affairs, not in their scale and character, but in the target. For the US, this is the first time since the War of 1812 that its national territory has been under attack, even threat. It's colonies have been attacked, but not the national territory itself. During these years the US virtually exterminated the indigenous population, conquered half of Mexico, intervened violently in the surrounding region, conquered Hawaii and the Philippines (killing hundreds of thousands of Filipinos), and in the past half century particularly, extended its resort to force throughout much of the world. The number of victims is colossal.

For the first time, the guns have been directed the other way. The same is true, even more dramatically, of Europe. Europe has suffered murderous destruction, but from internal wars, meanwhile conquering much of the world with extreme brutality. It has not been under attack by its victims outside, with rare exceptions (the IRA in England, for example). It is therefore natural that NATO should rally to the support of the US; hundreds of years of imperial violence have an enormous impact on the intellectual and moral culture.

It is correct to say that this is a novel event in world history, not because of the scale of the atrocity -- regrettably -- but because of the target. How the West chooses to react is a matter of supreme importance. If the rich and powerful choose to keep to their traditions of hundreds of years and resort to extreme violence, they will contribute to the escalation of a cycle of violence, in a familiar dynamic, with long-term consequences that could be awesome. Of course, that is by no means inevitable. An aroused public within the more free and democratic societies can direct policies towards a much more humane and honorable course.

Note from MN: Reading Chomsky's comment on the CIA-organized "Afghanis" in Chechnya, it occurred to me to look back at the campaign of terror bombings in Russia attributed to the Chechen rebels in 1999. One such report follows.

I remember at the time that the widespread attitude in the US seemed to be something like "The Russians brought it on themselves, or maybe did it to themselves," since the Russian military was playing a brutal role in Chechnya (which was considered a part of Russia). Those bombings in the run-up to the Russian elections ushered in the current Putin regime in a hand-off of power from Yeltsin.--MN

http://www.tv.cbc.ca/national/pgminfo/russia/index.html

http://infowars.com/saved%20pages/terrorists/IHT_sudan.html

In '96, Sudan Offered to Arrest bin Laden

Barton Gellman Washington Post Service
Thursday, October 4, 2001

Saudis Balked at Accepting U.S. Plan

WASHINGTON The government of Sudan, using a back channel direct from its president to the Central Intelligence Agency in the United States, offered in the early spring of 1996 to arrest Osama bin Laden and place him in custody in Saudi Arabia, according to officials and former officials in all three countries.

The Clinton administration struggled to find a way to accept the offer in secret contacts that stretched from a meeting at hotel in Arlington, Virginia, on March 3, 1996, to a fax that closed the door on the effort 10 weeks later.

Unable to persuade the Saudis to accept Mr. bin Laden, and lacking a case to indict him in U.S. courts, the Clinton administration finally gave up on the capture.

Sudan expelled Mr. bin Laden on May 18, 1996, to Afghanistan. From there, he is thought to have planned and financed the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the near-destruction of the American destroyer Cole in Yemen last year and the devastation in New York and Washington on Sept. 11.

"Had we been able to roll up bin Laden then, it would have made a significant difference," said a U.S. government official with responsibilities, then and now, in counterterrorism.

"We probably never would have seen a Sept. 11. We would still have had networks of Sunni Islamic extremists of the sort we're dealing with here, and there would still have been terrorist attacks fomented by those folks. But there would not have been as many resources devoted to their activities, and there would not have been a single voice that so effectively articulated grievances and won support for violence."

Clinton administration officials maintain emphatically that they had no such option against Mr. bin Laden in 1996. In the legal, political and intelligence environment then, they said, there was no choice but to allow him to leave Sudan unmolested.

"In the United States, we have this thing called the Constitution, so to bring him here is to bring him into the justice system," said Samuel Berger, who was deputy national security adviser then. "I don't think that was our first choice. Our first choice was to send him some place where justice is more" - he paused a moment, then continued - "streamlined."

Three officials in the Clinton administration said they hoped - one described it as "a fantasy" - that the Saudi monarch, King Fahd, would order Mr. bin Laden's swift beheading, as he had done for four conspirators after a June 1995 bombing in Riyadh.

But Mr. Berger and Steven Simon, then director for counterterrorism for the National Security Council, said the White House considered it valuable in itself to force Mr. bin Laden out of Sudan, thus tearing him away from his extensive network of businesses, investments and training camps.

Conflicting policy agendas on several other fronts contributed to the missed opportunity to capture Mr. bin Laden, according to a dozen participants.

The Clinton administration was riven by differences on whether to engage Sudan's government or isolate it, a situation that influenced judgments about the sincerity of the offer. In the Saudi-American relationship, policymakers diverged on how much priority to give to counterterrorism over other interests, such as support for the ailing Israeli-Palestinian talks and enforcement of the no-flight zone in Iraq.

And there were the beginnings of debate, intensified lately, on whether the United States wanted to indict and try Mr. bin Laden or to treat him as a combatant in an underground war.

The Sudanese offer had its roots in a dinner at the Khartoum home of Sudan's foreign minister, Ali Othman Taha. It was Feb. 6, 1996, the last night in the country for the U.S. ambassador, Timothy Carney, before evacuating the U.S. Embassy on orders from Washington. Paul Quaglia, then the CIA station chief in Khartoum, had led a campaign to pull out all Americans after he and his staff came under aggressive surveillance and twice had to fend off attacks, one with a knife and one with claw hammers.

Mr. Carney and David Shinn, then chief of the State Department's East Africa desk, considered the security threat "bogus," as Mr. Shinn described it. Washington's dominant decision-makers on Sudan had lost interest in engagement, preparing plans to isolate and undermine the regime.

One factor in Washington's hostility was an intelligence tip that Sudan planned to assassinate President Bill Clinton's national security adviser, Anthony Lake, the most visible administration critic of Khartoum. Most U.S. analysts came to believe later that it had been a false alarm.

On Feb. 6, 1996, Mr. Taha, the foreign minister, asked Mr. Carney and Mr. Shinn what his country could do to dissuade Washington from the view, expressed not long before by Madeleine Albright, then the chief U.S. delegate to the United Nations, that Sudan was responsible for "continued sponsorship of international terror."

Mr. Carney and Mr. Shinn had a long list. Mr. bin Laden, as they both recalled, was near the top. Mr. Taha mostly listened. He raised no objection to the request for Mr. bin Laden's expulsion, though he did not agree to it that night. On March 3, 1996, Sudan's defense minister, Major General Elfatih Erwa, arrived at the Hyatt Arlington. Mr. Carney and Mr. Shinn were waiting for him, but the meeting was run by covert operatives from the CIA's Africa division. In a document dated March 8, 1996, the Americans spelled out their demands. Titled "Measures Sudan Can Take to Improve Relations with the United States," it asked for six things. Second on the list - just after an angry enumeration of attacks on the CIA station in Khartoum - was Osama bin Laden.

"Provide us with names, dates of arrival, departure and destination and passport data on mujahidin that Usama Bin Laden has brought into Sudan," the document demanded.

During the next several weeks, General Erwa raised the stakes. The Sudanese security services, he said, would happily keep close watch on Mr. bin Laden for the United States. But if that would not suffice, the government was prepared to place him in custody and hand him over, though to whom was ambiguous.

Susan Rice, then senior director for Africa on the National Security Council, remembers being intrigued with but deeply skeptical of the Sudanese offer. And unlike Mr. Berger and Mr. Simon, Ms. Rice argued that mere expulsion from Sudan was not enough.

"We wanted them to hand him over to a responsible external authority," she said. "We didn't want them to just let him disappear into the ether."

Mr. Lake and Secretary of State Warren Christopher were briefed, colleagues said, on efforts to persuade the Saudi government to take Mr. bin Laden.

The Saudi idea had some logic, since Mr. bin Laden had issued a fatwa, or religious edict, denouncing the House of Saud as corrupt. Riyadh had expelled Mr. bin Laden in 1991 and stripped him of his citizenship in 1994, but it wanted no part of jailing or executing him, apparently fearing a backlash from militant opponents of the government.

Some American diplomats said the White House did not press the Saudis very hard.

Resigned to Mr. bin Laden's departure from Sudan, some officials raised the possibility of shooting down his chartered aircraft, but the idea was never seriously pursued because Mr. bin Laden had not been linked to a dead American, and it was inconceivable that Mr. Clinton would sign the "lethal finding" necessary under the circumstances.

"In the end they said, 'Just ask him to leave the country. Just don't let him go to Somalia,'" General Erwa said in an interview. "We said he will go to Afghanistan, and they said, 'Let him.'" On May 15, 1996, Mr. Taha, the foreign minister, sent a fax to Mr. Carney in Nairobi, giving up on the transfer of custody. Sudan's government had asked Mr. bin Laden to leave the country, Mr. Taha wrote, and he would be free to go.

Mr. Carney faxed back a question: Would Mr. bin Laden retain his access and control to the millions of dollars of assets he had built up in Sudan?

Mr. Taha gave no reply before Mr. bin Laden chartered a plane three days later for his trip to Afghanistan.

Subsequent analysis by U.S. intelligence suggests that Mr. bin Laden managed to access the Sudanese assets from his new redoubt in Afghanistan.

Bin Laden: A savage harvest for US

Abheek Barman

NEW DELHI

"FROM this day," US President George W Bush told the Congress, "Any nation that continues to harbour or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime."

Fine words, but is the Prez going to put a gun to his own head? For he needn’t look any further than Langley, Virginia, across the Potomac river from the Congress, to find the folks that supported, financed and built up Osama bin Laden.

It all began with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and US fears that the old Czarist dream of a Russian opening to the Indian Ocean was about to come true.

To counteract the possibility, the US government funded and facilitated the movement of nearly 25,000 Islamic militants from nearly 30 countries �" including Palestine, Egypt, the Philippines, Sudan and Turkmenistan �" to Peshawar and then to Afghanistan.

“They came without passports and without names,” wrote the New Yorker’s Mary Anne Weaver. This cosmopolitan army of ideologically fired jehadis, as Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak found out during a 1993 talk with Nawaz Sharif, stayed on in Peshawar and Afghanistan as ungovernable states within states.

In 1986, CIA director William Casey took some decisions to step up America’s proxy war against the Soviets. He got US Congress to supply Afghan Mujahedeen with sophisticated weapons and to allow American personnel to train Afghans in covert warfare.

Casey also got Britain’s MI6 and Pakistan’s ISI to agree to launch guerrilla attacks in Soviet-occupied Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

Finally, Casey got the CIA to support a long-term plan drawn up by the ISI in 1982, to recruit Islamic radicals from all over the world to go to Afghanistan via Pakistan to join the fight against occupying Soviet forces. One of those radicals was a wealthy, 6 feet 5 inch-tall young Saudi, Osama bin Laden.

Osama, the 17th of 57 children of Mohammed bin Laden, a Yemeni who had built a successful construction business in Saudi Arabia, fitted the CIA-ISI bill perfectly. The ISI wanted a Saudi royal to join the campaign to dislodge the Soviets.

Prince Turki bin Faisal, who headed the Saudi intelligence agency was its first choice. But bin Laden, who wasn’t royalty, also fit the bill. Osama was a close friend of Prince Faisal and his family was close to Sheikh Faisal.

His father had backed the Afghan cause and Osama began travelling back and forth to Afghanistan from 1980, carrying Saudi donations for the cause.

Though he claims to have taken part in mujaheddin ambushes, bin Laden’s main involvement with the Afghan resistance movement was restricted to planning, financing and executing projects, rather than fighting on the ground.

In 1982, he decided to settle down in Peshawar, bringing in construction crews and heavy machinery to build storage depots, roads and tunnels for the Mujahedeen.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/south_asia/newsid_155000/155236.stm

Tuesday, 18 September, 2001, 16:31 GMT 17:31 UK

Who is Osama Bin Laden?

Osama Bin Laden: Has called for a holy war against the US

Osama Bin Laden is both one of the CIA's most wanted men and a hero to many young people in the Arab world.

He and his associates were already being sought by the US on charges of international terrorism, including in connection with the 1998 bombing of American embassies in Africa and last year's attack on the USS Cole in Yemen.

In May this year a US jury convicted four men believed to be linked with Bin Laden of plotting the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

Bin Laden, an immensely wealthy and private man, has been granted a safe haven by Afghanistan's ruling Taleban movement.

During his time in hiding, he has called for a holy war against the US, and for the killing of Americans and Jews. He is reported to be able to rally around him up to 3,000 fighters.

He is also suspected of helping to set up Islamic training centres to prepare soldiers to fight in Chechnya and other parts of the former Soviet Union.

Sponsored by US and Pakistan

His power is founded on a personal fortune earned by his family's construction business in Saudi Arabia.

Born in Saudi Arabia to a Yemeni family, Bin Laden left Saudi Arabia in 1979 to fight against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

The Afghan jihad was backed with American dollars and had the blessing of the governments of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

He received security training from the CIA itself, according to Middle Eastern analyst Hazhir Teimourian.

While in Afghanistan, he founded the Maktab al-Khidimat (MAK), which recruited fighters from around the world and imported equipment to aid the Afghan resistance against the Soviet army.

Egyptians, Lebanese, Turks and others - numbering thousands in Bin Laden's estimate - joined their Afghan Muslim brothers in the struggle against an ideology that spurned religion.

Turned against the US

After the Soviet withdrawal, the "Arab Afghans", as Bin Laden's faction came to be called, turned their fire against the US and its allies in the Middle East.

Bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia to work in the family construction business, but was expelled in 1991 because of his anti-government activities there.

He spent the next five years in Sudan until US pressure prompted the Sudanese Government to expel him, whereupon Bin Laden returned to Afghanistan.

Terrorism experts say Bin Laden has been using his millions to fund attacks against the US.

The US State Department calls him "one of the most significant sponsors of Islamic extremist activities in the world today".

According to the US, Bin Laden was involved in at least three major attacks - the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1996 killing of 19 US soldiers in Saudi Arabia, and the 1998 bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

Islamic front

BBC correspondent James Robbins says Bin Laden had "all but admitted involvement" in the Saudi Arabia killings.

Some experts say he is part of an international Islamic front, bringing together Saudi, Egyptian and other groups.

Their rallying cry is the liberation of Islam's three holiest places - Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem.

Analysts say Bin Laden's organisation is very different from the groups that carried out bombings and hijackings in the past in that it is not a tightly knit group with a clear command structure but a loose coalition of groups operating across continents.

American officials believe Bin Laden's associates may operate in over forty countries - in Europe and North America, as well as in the Middle East and Asia.

The few outsiders who have met Bin Laden describe him as modest, almost shy. He rarely gives interviews.

He is believed to be in his 40s, and to have at least three wives.

Click here to watch Panorama's profile of Osama Bin Laden in full

Osama Bin Laden's early background

Bin Laden's time in Saudi Arabia and how his anger towards America started

Details about his time in Sudan and where his money is invested

http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/cta/progs/panorama/01/laden_clip1.ram

REALPLAYER

http://www.msnbc.com/news/629380.asp

No evidence of bin Laden windfall

NBC NEWS AND WIRE REPORTS

Sept. 17 �" Responding to news reports, a spokesman for the German stock exchange Sunday said an investigation had found no evidence that Osama bin Laden or others profited from advance knowledge about Tuesday’s terror attacks through stock trades.

THE COMMENTS BY the spokesman for the Deutsche Bourse, the Frankfurt stock market, came after NBC News and newspapers in the United States and Europe reported that investigators were checking stock movements of three big European reinsurance companies to see if there were evidence that bin Laden reaped a financial windfall.

“The market supervision of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange has looked into the trading data of some stocks but didn’t find any irregularities on the basis of this data,” said the spokesman, who spoke with Reuters on condition of anonymity.

He said the investigators looked at share trading on Sept. 11, the day of the attack �" which occurred at about 3 p.m. Frankfurt time. He declined to say which stocks were checked or whether other days were investigated.

NBC News reported Saturday that German officials had asked the FBI and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to look into whether bin Laden’s associates may have “sold short” stock in a Munich company that holds secondary insurance on the World Trade Center.

A report in the New York Times indicated that investigators were also checking whether airline stocks may have been sold short.

Short selling can produce huge profits when a stock plummets because of unanticipated bad news �" unanticipated, that is, by all except those involved in a conspiracy to cause that bad news.

In a short sale, an investor would borrow a certain number of shares from a broker, immediately sell them, and then once the stock price had fallen, buy shares to return to the broker.

Those who reaped profits from the European short sales may have deposited their profits in American banks, giving U.S. law enforcement agencies jurisdiction.

The Italian newspaper Corriere della Serra reported Saturday that the FBI is looking into possible short selling of the stocks of reinsurance companies in the four trading days before the terrorist attacks on the United States on Tuesday. Reinsurance firms assume risk by providing backup insurance for insurance companies.

The stocks of the three reinsurance companies �" AXA in France, Munich Re in Germany and Swiss Re in Switzerland �" dropped 13 percent to 15 percent in the week before the attack.

Analysts suggested at the time that the drops were anomalous �" unexplained �" since the reinsurance business was healthy and premium payments were on the way up.

In fact, before the terrorist attacks, the Financial Times on Tuesday published a positive report on the industry.

Munich Re spokesman Rainer Kueppers said Sunday the legal department of his company knew nothing about an investigation by German authorities into suspicious trades in its shares.

At Swiss Re, spokesman Johann Thinnhof declined to comment.

In France, AXA officials couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.

NBC’s Robert Windrem and Andrea Mitchell and Reuters contributed to this story.

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=121359

published on Thursday, September 27, 2001

Local Company Distances Itself From bin Laden

By GEORGE BRADT

Crimson Staff Writer

A half-brother of Osama bin Laden and a relative of a family suspected of funding his operations were identified Tuesday as investors in Hybridon Inc., a Cambridge-based biomedical company. But yesterday, the company’s CEO quickly distanced Hybridon from links to the suspected terrorist mastermind.

Both Yahia M.A. bin Laden and Abdelah bin Mahfouz own small shares of the company.

Bin Mahfouz is a relative of Khalid bin Mahfouz, a former president of Saudi Arabia’s National Commercial Bank (NCB) who has been accused of trying to wire funds to front organizations for Osama bin Laden, the prime suspect in the recent terrorist strikes on the U.S.

“On a fully diluted basis, Yahia now owns about 6 percent,” Hybridon CEO Stephen R. Seiler said yesterday.

Seiler said that Yahia bin Laden, as with the majority of bin Laden’s 51 siblings, has officially denounced his brother’s actions, and pointed to news reports which have said that the family does not fund Osama bin Laden’s activities.

Seiler also defended Hybridon’s bin Mafhouz connection. Medical Science Partners, which specializes in early-stage life sciences investments, was founded in 1988 in association with Harvard University, and formed Hybridon in 1991.

“[Mafhouz] is from a part of the family different from that which funds bin Laden,” Seiler said, adding, “Mahfouz was a 1993 investor in Medical Science Partners and bought stock through them and directly.”

Seiler was quick to say that the Boston Herald was “using outdated numbers” when it reported on Tuesday a 16 percent holding for bin Laden and a nearly 12 percent holding for bin Mahfouz in the company.

Last year bin Laden owned 13.5 percent of Hybridon and bin Mahfouz owned 13.3 percent, according to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Bin Mahfouz currently owns about 3 percent of the company, according to the Associated Press.

Hybridon, one of many biomedical companies which have emerged in Cambridge in the last decade, is developing medicine to combat cancer and bolster the human immune system, including “antisense” technology, which involves the design of synthetic DNA material to inhibit the body’s production of disease-causing protein.

Former NCB New York senior vice president and general manager Camille Chebeir is also on Hybridon’s board of directors, though Seiler said that Chebeir stopped working for the bank six years before it was linked to Osama bin Laden.

Chebeir is currently president of Sedco Securities Inc., “a company which manages investments of the bin Mafouz Saudi Arabian family,” according to the Hybridon website.

Stephen M. Walt, Belfer Professor of International Politics at the Kennedy School of Government, said there was no reason to assume other bin Laden family members were terrorists, and that the issue of where funds go was a tricky one produced by the new global economy.

“This whole problem shows how difficult it is to trace and cut off the covert money flows that help support the global terrorist organizations,” he said.

Bin Laden has other family connections to Boston.

One bin Laden brother, Sheik Bakr Mohammed bin Laden, in 1994 made two large scholarship donations to Harvard, while another relative, Mohammed M. bin Laden, owns six condominiums in the ritzy Flagship Wharf condominium complex in Charlestown.

�"The Associated Press contributed to this report.

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=121090 Published on Thursday, September 13, 2001

Bin Laden Ties to Harvard

By THE CRIMSON STAFF

With federal authorities investigating Osama bin Laden, Harvard has come under fire as a recipient of bin Laden family money.

Sheik Bakr Mohammed bin Laden, Osama bin Laden’s brother, made two gifts to the University in 1993 and 1994 to fund fellowships for advanced study in Islamic culture. One such fellowship, at the Harvard Law School, provides funds for “research on the history of legal institutions in Islamic states past and present, particularly insofar as they uphold or apply the Islamic shari’a.” Another, at the Harvard Design School, provides money for “advanced studies in Islamic architecture...and appropriate building technologies as they pertain to Islamic built environments.”

Yesterday, University officials quickly distanced themselves from Osama bin Laden, saying the gifts are “in no way connected” to the terrorist.

“The bin Laden family is very large, with dozens of siblings and half siblings who bear the bin Laden name,” read a statement released by the University.

Harvard’s ties to bin Laden money have come into question before. In 1998, after Osama bin Laden was accused of the embassy bombings in Africa, then-University spokespeson Alex S. Huppé said, “It’s clear the Saudi bin Laden money is being put to good use here.”

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=121298

published on Tuesday, September 25, 2001

City Urges Harvard to Pay Victims

By LAUREN R. DORGAN

Crimson Staff Writer

Usually the Cambridge City Council demands that Harvard donate to local interests, but last night, the council passed an extraordinary order urging Harvard to compensate the victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, widely believed to have been the work of international terrorist Osama bin Laden.

Initially, the order suggested a figure of $5 million, and implied that as the recipient of bin Laden family money, through Osama bin Laden’s half brother Baker bin Laden, the University is obligated to donate that amount to victims.

Councillor Kenneth E. Reeves ’72 sponsored the order, which was amended during the meeting to remove the bin Laden language.

All reports have shown that the bin Laden donations to Harvard have come exclusively from members of the family not affiliated with terrorism. So, while other councillors supported the notion that Harvard give to victims, they rejected Reeves’ grounds for the order.

In his public comment, Reeves said he got the idea for the order when reading two articles in a newspaper�"one about Harvard’s bin Laden scholarships and one about how many families of those killed in the Sept. 11 crashes would not have insurance benefits.

“I do believe there is a connection�"no matter how tangential. It’s all symbolism. That Harvard would be strengthened by the bin Laden family fortune is an odd connection,” Reeves said.

Councillor Jim Braude asserted that he would vote against the resolution with the bin Laden language.

“What troubles me is the suggestion that the family, the siblings, might have some culpability in this,” Braude said.

Councillor Kathleen L. Born�" whose name, due to a miscommunication, had originally appeared with Reeves’s on top of the order�" withdrew support from the originally worded resolution.

“I think, like Councillor Braude, because some members of the bin Laden family have been generous in funding American educational institutions, that shouldn’t be a reason to cast aspersion on either the institution or the family,” Born said.

But after Vice Mayor David P. Maher suggested the bin Laden section of the order be removed, the resolution passed quickly.

Mayor Anthony C. Galluccio alone voted against the measure.

“I just did not feel like that was an appropriate way to communicate our feelings to our neighbors,” Galluccio said.

Harvard’s Office of Government, Community and Public Affairs responded to the order by faxing information about the bin Laden scholarships and the non-terrorist members of the family to City Hall.

“What we’ve done is we’re sending around to the city councillors the same background factual material that we sent to the media,” said Travis McCready, director of community affairs, just before the meeting.

Aside from the order on Harvard, the council also passed a motion which would ensure full paychecks to city employees if they are called up to serve in the military.fortune is an odd connection,” Reeves said.

Councillor Jim Braude asserted that he would vote against the resolution with the bin Laden language.

“What troubles me is the suggestion that the family, the siblings, might have some culpability in this,” Braude said.

Councillor Kathleen L. Born�" whose name, due to a miscommunication, had originally appeared with Reeves’ on top of the order�"withdrew support from the originally worded resolution.

“I think, like Councillor Braude, because some members of the bin Laden family have been generous in funding American educational institutions, that shouldn’t be a reason to cast aspersion on either the institution or the family,” Born said.

But after Vice Mayor David P. Maher suggested removing the bin Laden section of the order, the resolution passed quickly.

Mayor Anthony C. Galluccio alone voted against the measure. “I just did not feel like that was an appropriate way to communicate our feelings to our neighbors,” Galluccio said.

Harvard’s Office of Government, Community and Public Affairs responded to the order by faxing information about the bin Laden scholarships and the non-terrorist members of the family to City Hall. “What we’ve done is we’re sending around to the city councillors the same background factual material that we sent to the media,” said Travis McCready, director of community affairs, just before the meeting.

Aside from the order on Harvard, the council also passed a motion which would ensure full paychecks to city employees if they are called up to serve in the military.

�"Staff writer Lauren R. Dorgan can be reached at dorgan@fas.harvard.edu.

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=121389

Published on Monday, October 01, 2001

Posturing at City Hall

By THE CRIMSON STAFF

Crimson Staff Writer

The Cambridge City Council has been trying to get money out of Harvard for years. Last week, however, they went too far. In its Sept. 24 meeting, the Council considered an order urging Harvard to donate as much as $5 million to the victims of the Sept. 11 attack because the bin Laden family has given money to the University. While the language referring to the family was eventually removed, the decision by the council to pass the amended order was highly inappropriate in the current political atmosphere, especially given that Harvard has already showed its generosity.

The sponsor of the order, Councillor Kenneth E. Reeves ’72, based his demands on two newspaper articles: one reporting that Harvard had received money from the bin Laden family, and the other stating that some victims’ families would not be covered by insurance. Reeves, notorious for his grandstanding, simply put two and two together.

However, while Osama bin Laden’s half-brother Baker bin Laden has donated to the University, neither he nor any University donors have in any way been associated with terrorist acts. The bin Laden family is quite large, with Osama one of 52 children, and the family has condemned the mass murder that Osama appears to have perpetrated. The bin Laden scholarships go to deserving law and design students, and the assumption that a donor with the same name�"or family, or appearance�"must be a terrorist is a dangerous one.

Cambridge Mayor Anthony D. Galluccio, the man whom this page supported in the last elections, also showed his true colors during the debate. Galluccio was the only councillor who did not support the order. In a statement marked by justice and generosity, Galluccio said, “I just did not feel like that was an appropriate way to communicate our feelings to our neighbors.”

Indeed, at a time like this, it would have been fitting to see the Council make a gesture of solidarity with the University and its students, many of whom hail from New York. Instead, the Council engaged in the kind of pettiness which too often overwhelms its proceedings.

Harvard has already donated $1 million to a project appropriate for its role as a university: the funding of higher education for the children and spouses of the Sept. 11 victims. Harvard’s gift was generous, and it should feel no moral qualms about accepting donations from individuals with no connection to terrorism or terrorists save the unfortunate coincidence of family or name.

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=121444

Published on Wednesday, October 03, 2001

What We Should Have Done

By NADER R. HASAN

Crimson Staff Writer

As America moves from shock, to grief, to revenge, there is an ever-increasing onus on our leaders and experts to explain the tragic events of Sept. 11. While everyone seems to have a slightly different version about why disaster struck and what might have been done to prevent it, most of these explanations fall squarely into one of two camps. Elements of the right argue that Islam is a violent religion whose followers are bent on destroying America. They hold up CNN footage of a small cheering group of hooligans in the West Bank as proof that all Arabs are waging war on America.

The left’s explanation is less racist, but also misguided. It argues that Washington’s abysmal foreign policy record is responsible for the events of Sept. 11. It points to the sanctions that are responsible for the deaths of 1.5 million Iraqi children, as well as our government’s unwavering support for Israel, which has caused decades of unnecessary suffering for the Palestinians. They suppose that if Washington had pursued more humane policies towards Iraq and Palestine, then maybe there would not be so many angry terrorists.

Admittedly, the sanctions against Iraq ought to be regarded as a crime against humanity. And yes, America’s unconditional support for Israel’s apartheid policies has angered many people around the world. But Osama bin Laden is not a champion of Palestinian rights, nor is he concerned with the children of Iraq. Osama bin Laden is not fighting on behalf of oppressed Muslims around the world. Instead, he fights to validate an interpretation of Islam that is offensive to most Muslims. Ask him why he wages war on America and he will tell you what he told an ABC News correspondent in 1998�"that he declared war on America because U.S. soldiers are occupying the Muslim holy lands of Saudi Arabia.

If America had been a fairer broker in the Middle East peace process or if America had lifted sanctions against Iraq, the world would be a better place, but Osama bin Laden would still be waging war on America. And if there were no U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, Osama bin Laden and his band of fanatics would find some other reason to justify their attacks.

Those who wish to understand the tragic events of Sept. 11 should look no further than the mountainous war-zone where Osama bin Laden makes his home today. It is Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban that has provided a safe haven for Osama bin Laden and allowed him to set up his terrorist training camps. And although there was probably very little America could have done to curb Osama bin Laden’s fanatical beliefs, Washington had a plethora of opportunities to rein in Afghanistan from the fringes of global isolation and prevent terrorism from taking root in this war-ravaged country.

The Taliban did not come to power overnight, nor were they always our enemies. At the height of the Cold War, they were heroes in the eyes of the West. They belonged to the Afghan mujahideen (freedom fighters) who�"with the help of $3 billion dollars worth of U.S. weapons, CIA intelligence and logistical support�"succeeded in forcing the Soviets out of Afghanistan. But when the Cold War ended, the factions that made up the mujahideen turned against themselves in a struggle for power. Common sense suggested that we stay in Afghanistan to clean up the mess we created, but our policymakers in Washington told us that Afghanistan was no longer our problem. As a result, the Taliban emerged triumphant from this civil war and continues to rule Afghanistan with a heavy hand.

Still, there were a number of occasions over the past decade when Washington could have redeemed itself and prevented the Taliban from solidifying their hold on power. By 1996, the world had already learned of the Taliban’s viciousness�"how it beat women for showing their faces in public and how it stoned to death even petty criminals. Back then, the so-called Northern Alliance was still a force to be reckoned with and still controlled the capital city of Kabul. But support for the Taliban continued to grow and the two sides fought fiercely. Everyone knew that the Northern Alliance needed outside support in order to repel Taliban attacks. Yet once again, the Washington turned the other cheek, and Kabul fell to the Taliban in September 1996.

Fast-forward to October 1999. Osama bin Laden is already on the FBI’s “Most Wanted” list for bombing U.S. embassies in Africa and U.S. intelligence knows that he is hiding in Afghanistan. When the Taliban refuses to turn over bin Laden, the U.S. takes its case to the United Nations Security Council and pleads for sanctions. Still smarting from their Cold War defeat, the Russians are eager to isolate Afghanistan from the international community and throw their support behind the U.S. initiative. The resolution passes and Afghanistan is effectively cut off from the rest of the world.

Under sanctions, the Taliban could not get the supplies it needed to maintain control over Afghanistan. So it turned to its old friend who had been such a faithful ally during the Cold War�"Osama bin Laden. U.N. sanctions made bin Laden the second biggest benefactor of the Taliban (second only to Pakistan). Not only does he provide substantial financial support to the Taliban, but he also provides thousands of loyal war veterans�"both of which have been essential as the Taliban continues to battle Afghan rebels in the northern part of the country. It is no wonder that the Taliban have been loyal to bin Laden despite intense international pressure�"when the world turned its back on the Taliban, he was the only one willing to offer a helping hand.

We should have had the foresight to realize that a marriage between a fanatical government and a fanatical multimillionaire would spell disaster for the rest of the world. But we should have had the foresight to address the Taliban problem long before Osama bin Laden came into the picture. We should have helped Afghanistan recover from the Cold War. Having missed that chance, we should have utilized diplomatic channels to bring Afghanistan back into the fold of the international community. Instead, we isolated it with economic sanctions, forcing it to rely on a millionaire terrorist for help. Nobody in Washington wanted to take responsibility for destroying a country and our callousness has come back to haunt us.

Nader R. Hasan ’02 is a government concentrator in Lowell House. His column appears on alternate Wednesdays.

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=121083

Published on Wednesday, September 12, 2001

Two Hijacked Planes Took Off From Logan

By IMTIYAZ H. DELAWALA and DANIELA J. LAMAS

Crimson Staff Writer

BOSTON--In the most deadly and horrific attack on the United States in its 225-year history, terrorists crashed two hijacked passenger jets into the World Trade Center towers in New York City, toppling the 110-story structures in a cloud of smoke and ash yesterday morning. Less than an hour later, another passenger jet crashed into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. in an unprecedented attack upon the U.S. government.

221 passengers aboard the jets used in the attacks were killed, with an unknown number--most likely ranging in the thousands--killed in the three targeted buildings. A fourth hijacked jet crashed near Pittsburgh, Penn., killing an additional 45 people.

“Today we’ve had a national tragedy,” President George W. Bush said from Sarasota, Fla. yesterday morning as reports of the attacks began filtering in.

At 8:45 a.m. EST, American Airlines Flight 11, carrying 92 people from Boston’s Logan Airport, crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center, igniting the top stories of the building in a ball of fire. Eighteen minutes later, United Airlines Flight 175, carrying 65 people bound for Los Angeles, crashed into the south tower of the center. The two crashes covered the New York City skyline in billowing smoke and flames, as hundreds of New Yorkers began streaming out of the twin steel and glass structures.

But before all of the nearly 50,000 World Trade Center employees could evacuate, the two towers collapsed to the ground in a scene similar to a staged building implosion, covering the downtown business district in ash and debris less than 90 minutes after the initial plane impacts.

Ten minutes before the south tower collapsed, an apparently coordinated strike occurred in the nation’s capital, as American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into a wall of the Pentagon, the headquarters for the U.S. Department of Defense.

And in Shanksville, Penn., United Airlines Flight 93 traveling from Newark to San Francisco crashed, in an apparently failed attempt to target Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland, located 85 miles southeast of the crash site.

The series of attacks sent the nation into a state of emergency: within minutes of the Pentagon crash, officials evacuated the White House and U.S. Capitol, and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) grounded all airplane takeoffs nationwide, the first such safety measure in U.S. history. All international flights were diverted to Canada, and U.S. borders were closed. There were no indications of when airports would reopen.

Ground Zero in Boston

Since two of the four passenger jets hijacked yesterday took off from Boston’s Logan International Airport, the airport and surrounding hotels were transformed into an emergency command center as a reeling Massachusetts Port Authority responded to questions from panicked family members and both local and national media outlets.

The airport shut down at 9:06 a.m. and was eerily quiet an hour later. Stranded travelers searched for rental cars and hotel reservations as all airports across the country closed their gates.

The move left many passengers in disbelief.

Markas Muller, who was scheduled to fly home to Hanover, Germany yesterday, said he could not comprehend the images broadcast out of New York.

“I thought it was an advertisement for a movie or something,” he said slowly. “I didn’t think it could be real.”

Massport opened the Exchange Center on the Boston Fish Pier and outfitted the space with cots and food to help passengers like Muller, who were unable to find accomodations in the city’s overbooked hotels for the night.

About 50 would-be travelers spent the day at the makeshift center.

Massport also opened a family assistance center at the airport’s Hilton Hotel in conjunction with the airlines and American Red Cross. The center offered counseling to victims’ families.

At about 2 p.m. yesterday, police cars and Emergency Medical Services (EMS) trucks lined the entrance to the Hilton, while about a dozen state police officers guarded the doors.

“Our top priority right now is the families and the needs of these families,” said Massport Director of Public Safety Joseph Lawless. “We need to provide for the needs of the families and make sure we have a safe, secure airport.”

Nearly 50 reporters crowded into the lushly carpeted Grand Ballroom of the nearby Hyatt�"turned into a media center�"to await statements from Massport officials, trading notes and speculation as television reports played in the background.

At about 2:30 p.m., Lawless approached the podium, appearing worn and fatigued as he prepared for his brief address. He gave few specific answers, instead deferring to the ongoing FBI investigation.

Lawless said the airport had not been aware the passenger jets were hijacked before the crash was reported.

“Everything seemed normal when they left Logan,” he said.

When asked whether Logan Airport had suffered a breach of security, Lawless could not provide a definite response.

“I’m shocked�"like everyone else is,” Lawless said. “We have a very high security standard here.”

America Responds

As a tense nation waited for answers, President Bush, who had been transported to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana shortly after the attacks, condemned the terrorist actions as the work of “faceless cowards.”

“Make no mistake, the United States will hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts,” President Bush said. “The resolve of our great nation is being tested...we will show the world that we will pass this test.”

After a morning of chaos and confusion, speculation over who was responsible for the worst instances of terrorism ever committed on American soil quickly centered on Osama bin Laden, the Saudi millionaire exile who has been accused of masterminding past acts of terrorism against the U.S., including last year’s bombing of a U.S. navy ship near Yemen, as well as the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa. Islamic terrorists targeted the World Trade Center in 1993, killing six and injuring more than 1,000 others.

But while terrorists in the Middle East were the immediate focus of speculation, several groups�"including bin Laden’s Al Quaida group and officials of the Taliban government in Afghanistan�"denied taking any part in the attacks, saying they do not have the ability to mastermind such a large-scale operation.

Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban’s supreme leader, issued a denial through a spokesperson, Abdul Hai Mutmain, who said, “Mullah Omar condemns this act. Mullah Omar says Osama is not responsible. We have brought peace to this country and we want peace in all countries.”

U.S. officials have said the full force of the U.S. military will be used to punish those responsible for yesterday’s attacks, as well as those who countries who have protected terrorists, such as Afghanistan. Early last night, explosions were reported in Kabul, Afghanistan, but the U.S. government has denied any role in those incidents.

After returning to Washington, President Bush addressed the country from the Oval Office at 8:30 p.m., providing a strong statement that America would seek retribution.

“The search is under way for those who are behind these evil acts,” Bush said. “I’ve directed the full resources for our intelligence and law enforcement communities to find those responsible and bring them to justice. We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.”

While the country’s attention will now turn to rescuing and caring for those who survived the New York and Washington attacks, as well as grieving for those who lost their lives yesterday, President Bush said that the U.S. would not let the attacks “frighten our nation into chaos and retreat.”

“This is a day when all Americans from every walk of life unite in our resolve for justice and peace. America has stood down enemies before, and we will do so this time,” Bush said. “None of us will ever forget this day. Yet we go forward to defend freedom and all that is good and just in our world.”

�"Staff writers Lauren R. Dorgan and Zachary R. Heineman and the Associated Press contributed to the reporting of this story.

�"Staff writer Imtiyaz H. Delawala can be reached at delawala@fas.harvard.edu. Staff writer Daniela J. Lamas can be reached at lamas@fas.harvard.edu.

http://www.msnbc.com/news/630857.asp?cp1=1

‘Black sheep’ of a blue-chip family

[Webmaster's note: this artivle reports that NBC News is in business partnership with bin Laden.]

Terror suspect a thorn in side of business empire, its partners

This image from Qatar's Al-Jazeera TV is said to show the wedding of Mohammed bin Laden, center, the son of Osama bin Laden, right, Jan. 9 in Afghanistan. At left is Abu Hafas al-Masri, the bride's father.

By Daniel Golden, James Bandler and Steve Levine

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Sept. 19 �" Osama bin Laden’s family has long disavowed him. He is the only bin Laden on the U.S. Treasury Department’s list of foreign companies and individuals engaging in undesirable activities. And no evidence has surfaced linking any of his more than 50 siblings to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

BUT AS PRESIDENT Bush denounces bin Laden in ever-stronger terms, the Saudi exile’s notoriety is proving to be an embarrassment for his family’s far-flung business empire and its trading partners in Europe and the U.S. Some of those partners are distancing themselves from or reviewing their relationships with the family business, the Saudi Binladin Group.

Based in Jeddah and favored by Saudi Arabia’s royal family, Saudi Binladin Group derives an estimated $5 billion in annual revenue from a wide range of enterprises, including mosque construction, telecommunications and selling Snapple soft drinks in Saudi Arabia. Although the family’s U.S. spokesman says Saudi Binladin Group is wholly owned by the extended bin Laden family, not including Osama, he said he could provide no information on exactly which members have an equity interest in the company.

Following bin Laden’s money trail September 19, 2001 �" Financial investigators are probing the possibility that Osama bin Laden profited from prior knowledge of last weeks attacks. NBC’s Andrea Mitchell reports.

British paging company Multitone Electronics PLC said it was shocked to learn that its reseller in Saudi Arabia, Baud Telecommunications Ltd., is owned by the Binladin Group. “You’re joking,” chief executive Michael Walker said. “Oh bloody! I didn’t know. I thought it was just Baud Telecom.”

Shortly afterward, Multitone, of Basingstoke, England, said it was suspending its business relationship with Baud until it was certain there was no connection between the Saudi company and terrorist activity. “There are probably hundreds of Binladins that are great guys,” Walker says, adding that Multitone’s dealings with Baud were small. “But I think what we’ll do is investigate.”

Dutch bank ABN Amro says it plans to discuss its links with the Binladin family, a longstanding client of Saudi Hollandi Bank, which is 40 percent owned by ABN Amro. “Simply having the name ‘Binladin’ is a reputation risk,” bank spokesman Jochem van de Laarschot says, adding that the bank is confident that the client has no terrorist ties.

The degree of the rift between bin Laden and his family is also coming under scrutiny. Last week, the FBI arrested an unidentified man at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport who was described in news reports as an associate of one of bin Laden’s brothers. Federal agents have also visited the Boston residences of several relatives.

In a statement issued Friday night, the head of the Binladin family, Abdullah Awad Obood bin Laden, Osama’s uncle, reiterated that the family “has no connection with his works and activities” and expressed “the strongest denunciation and condemnation of this sad event, which resulted in the loss of many innocent men, women and children and which contradicts our Islamic faith.”

Nevertheless, U.S. specialists believe there are personal contacts between bin Laden and some family members. “Some of the brothers keep in touch” with bin Laden, says Yossef Bodansky, staff director of a congressional task force on terrorism. “After all, they’re family.”

However, Bodansky says, siblings don’t fund bin Laden, nor do they abet his alleged terrorist activities. The brothers “have no security- or loyalty-related problems” in Saudi Arabia, Bodansky says.

“The vast bulk of the family hate him with quite a passion right now,” says Adil Najam, an assistant professor of international relations at Boston University. “But it’s a very big clan, and there may well be some who have maintained some contact with him, either familial or ideological.”

Bin Laden’s brother-in-law Mohammed Jamaal Khalifa funded the Islamic Army of Aden, which took credit for the bombing of the USS Cole, according to Vincent Cannistraro, former chief of counterterrorism for the Central Intelligence Agency. Khalid Al-Midhar, one of the hijackers on the airliner that crashed into the Pentagon, has ties to the Army of Aden, Cannistraro says.

The connections between the Binladin Group and U.S. corporations are raising the hackles of conservative groups. Any companies doing business with the Binladin Group “are disloyal to the interests of the United States and should be held accountable,” says Larry Klayman, chairman of Washington-based Judicial Watch.

A spokeswoman for Citigroup Inc. confirms the Saudi family is a client. “We provide typical banking services to the Saudi Binladin Group, which denounced and completely disowned Osama bin Laden,” she says.

General Electric Co. [parent of NBC News] says it holds a minority stake in Jeddah Electrical Distribution Assemblies Co., a power-equipment maker in Saudia Arabia that GE says is majority-owned by the Binladin family. GE also has supplied equipment to several Saudi power plants built by the Binladin Group. A spokesman says, “We are satisfied the Saudi Binladin Group is fully separated from Osama bin Laden.”

(MSNBC is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC, which is owned by General Electric.)

The Binladin Group also is a minority owner of the Saudi Arabian distributor of Snapple beverages. Cadbury Schweppes PLC, which owns Snapple, says it plans to end its relationship with the Binladin Group soon, due to declining sales rather than negative publicity. A spokeswoman calls the separation “amicable.”

The Binladin Group closed its U.S. business development office at the end of 1999. Philip Griffin, its former representative, says the decision wasn’t related to image problems arising from the family surname.

Founded in 1931 by Osama bin Laden’s father, Mohammed, a Yemenite immigrant, the Saudi Binladin Group grew to become one of Saudi Arabia’s largest construction firms, building and maintaining mosques, roads, hotels and airports. The company grew through the good graces of both the Saudi royal family, which bestowed lucrative government contracts, and also of foreign corporations, for whom it became the local partner of choice. The ties were cemented during the Gulf War and after, when the group built an airstrip and barracks for U.S. troops.

Osama bin Laden, now in his mid-40s, worked in the family business as a college student. Later, his opposition to the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War alienated the royal family and threatened the family business. The family disowned bin Laden, and he moved to Sudan and then Afghanistan. A family spokesman says Mr. bin Laden inherited between $50 million and $60 million from his father, who died in 1968, but has never held an equity stake in the group.

In recent years, Saudi Binladin Group has increasingly diversified its businesses and geography. Its Baud unit resells sophisticated telecommunications equipment purchased from Canada-based Nortel Networks Corp., PictureTel Corp. of Andover, Mass., Tellabs Inc. of Lisle, Ill., and other companies. One brother, Hasan M., was a director of Iridium LLC, a now-defunct satellite phone company backed by the family group and Motorola Inc., among others.

Motorola acknowledged that it sells equipment, including wireless networks and cell phones, to the Binladin family group. “The U.S. government has not limited” such sales, a spokeswoman notes. “Motorola has been carefully following all of the U.S. government prohibitions against dealing with known terrorists and takes this matter very seriously.”

The family also sells granite to closely held Canaren Inc. of Canada and buys construction material from it. From 1994 to 1997, it was in a joint venture with H.C. Price Co. of Dallas in bidding on Middle Eastern pipeline contracts.

Data: CNBC on MSN Money and S&P Comstock 20 min.delay

“I would be very surprised if the family had any support of Osama,” says Robert Bell, an H.C. Price vice president who was general manager of the joint venture. “They were very professional. I never overheard any discussion about the U.S. except in very favorable terms.”

Nortel confirms Saudi Binladin Group was a reseller of Nortel equipment and says it understands there is no link between the group and the activities of Osama bin Laden. “If we had any reason to believe this company had or could have any link to terrorist activities, we would cease doing business with them immediately,” a Nortel spokeswoman says.

Picturetel’s president, Lewis Jaffe, says it does less than $100,000 a year of business with Baud. A Tellabs spokeswoman says Baud Telecom is its Saudi distributor and it isn’t aware of any ties to Osama bin Laden. A Canaren spokesman says the Binladin family is a “very huge family and very respected in the Middle East.”

Kevin Taecker, a former Treasury Department official and banker in Saudia Arabia, recalls a meeting in 1999 with Yahya bin Laden, the head of the family construction business and a half-brother of Osama. “As I was getting up to leave, he blocked the door and wouldn’t let me out. He took me by the hand and said, ‘Listen, you’re an American. On behalf of my family, I really want to apologize,’” the businessman recalled.

The family has donated to colleges, Islamic organizations and other nonprofit causes in both England and the U.S. Abdullah, one of bin Laden’s brothers, received a master’s degree in law from Harvard Law School in 1992.

Two years later, on a fund-raising trip to the Middle East, the law school’s dean made a pitch to another brother, Sheik Bakr Mohammed bin Laden, chairman of the family group. Bakr and the group subsequently donated $1 million to the law school, half for a visiting scholars program and half for financial aid for law students from the Muslim world. The family also gave $1 million to Harvard’s Graduate School of Design in 1993.

Robert Clark, the law school dean, said the gift was intended “to promote mutual understanding between scholars trained in Islamic legal systems and those trained in Western legal systems. We need that more than ever.”

Still, outside the Arab world, the Binladin name has become an increasing liability. Until a year and a half ago, the group had a prominent storefront on the main street of Astana in the new Kazakhstan, with a contract to create the city’s master plan. Then, although the Kazak government believed the company’s assurances that it was not linked to Osama bin Laden, President Nursultan Nazarbayev dropped the company just in case someone got the wrong idea, a government official said.

In 1999, the group changed the name of its telecommunications division from Binladin to Baud. John Dickson, a Baud manager, says the switch reflects a desire to choose a more modern name. Baud means distance in Arabic, and in English it is a measurement of speed.

In the Arab world, Dickson says, the Binladin name is looked upon with “absolute reverence �" like IBM.” He adds that every family “has its black sheep. Only he went a little bit too far.”

Matt Murray, John McKinnon and Maureen Tkacik contributed to this article.

Copyright © 2001 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

http://msnbc.com/news/627355.asp?cp1=1

NBC NEWS

NEW YORK �" Osama bin Laden, one-time ally of the CIA in the war against the Soviet army in Afghanistan, is now the primary suspect in the most deadly terrorist attack on the United States in the nation’s history. The Saudi-born millionaire has been sheltered by Afghanistan’s radical Taliban regime since 1996. NBC News investigative producer Robert Windrem has tracked bin Laden’s rise to the top of America’s Most Wanted list. Here are some questions and answers about bin Laden:

Where is Osama bin Laden?

Most recently, he has been seen near Jalalabad, a city in eastern Afghanistan. He moves three or more times weekly, living in mud huts, tent cities, caves, etc. Bin Laden is accompanied by a security entourage, including heavily armed bodyguards and anti-aircraft guns mounted on trucks. Often, multiple sites are set up for his use and he will choose a site at the last minute. He is believed to have a network of some 400 operatives in Afghanistan, most having arrived with him from Sudan in 1996.

How often does U.S. intelligence know where he is?

In recent months, U.S. intelligence has gotten a better grasp on how he operates and where. “We are getting better at finding him. There are days and days where we don’t know where he is,” said one U.S. official. On other days, the United States has “different degrees of specificity as to where he is. Does he move every night? Not every night ... but he moves a lot.” At the time of the embassy bombings, the United States had no idea where he was.

How does bin Laden disguise his movements?

Bin Laden regularly varies the details of his movements. He will vary not only the number of vehicles in his convoys, for example, but also the type of vehicle as well. On some travels, he will give his entourage hours’ notice of his departure. At other times, he will leave at a moment’s notice. He will also have several locations prepared, with only a few of his aides knowing which he will ultimately choose. While he does not change locations every night, he changes about twice a week.

How does he communicate?

His biggest problem remains communications, which the United States has successfully compromised. Another official said, “He’s stopped using satellite phones, although we’ve caught many of his couriers, it only takes 50 bucks to buy someone in Afghanistan.” Bin Laden previously used Inmarsat phones until he discovered that the United States was intercepting his communications off the Inmarsat-3 satellite over the Indian Ocean. For years, the National Security Agency would distribute verbatim transcripts of calls bin Laden made to subordinates. One of the biggest breaks in the embassy bombing investigation was interception of a congratulatory phone call in the days after the bombings.

Other officials note the clever combination of 19th and 20th century means of communications bin Laden has adapted. Bin Laden’s couriers often carry encrypted floppy disks and meet in third countries. Once in the hands of the target nation’s cell, the disk is de-encrypted. He has also used faxes from remote locations and in some cases, Internet-based e-mail. In addition to encryption, al-Qaeda has used various code words and aliases to disguise identities. Bin Laden has been described in al-Qaeda communications as “the Sheikh,” “Hajj,” “Abu Abdullah” and “the Director.” Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, mastermind of the embassy bombings, used at least three aliases. Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the World Trade Center, used 15, as well as 11 passports. One law enforcement source said al-Qaeda has been trying to recruit Americans as couriers, knowing an American passport is easier to use worldwide.

Can he travel outside Afghanistan?

Bin Laden is believed to have access to “several planes,” the ownership of which is “a bit cloudy ... but there are certainly enough aircraft to move a rather tall terrorist,” one senior U.S. intelligence official said. Bin Laden traveled around the Muslim world in charter jets for years prior to his exile in Afghanistan. He also owns a private jet, said an intelligence official.

How is bin Laden’s terror network, al-Qaeda, structured?

Bin Laden is the undisputed leader, called “emir” or “prince” by his followers, who must take a sworn oath to him, violation of which is punishable by death. Beneath him is the “shura al-majlis” or “consultative council,” which includes his top lieutenants. His two aides are Egyptians: Ayman al-Zawahiri, a physician and leader of al-Jihad, the violent Egyptian group responsible for the Luxor tourist massacre in 1995. Muhammed Atef, his military commander, also served in al-Jihad.

A “fatwah” committee of the council makes the decisions to carry out terrorist attacks.

Where does al-Qaeda operate?

Al-Qaeda is believed to have operations in 60 countries, active cells in 20, including the United States. It is also believed to operate training centers in both Afghanistan and Sudan, the first beginning operations in 1994 with representatives from Egyptian, Algerian, Tunisian and Palestinian extremist groups. Among the countries or regions identified as having active cells of al-Qaeda are Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Chechnya, Philippines, Egypt, Tunisia.

How does al-Qaeda network operate? Its operations are meticulous, with some plans in the works for months if not years. They are also clever, and bin Laden himself is very much hands-on.

Some examples:

The 1993 World Trade Center bombers cased the twin towers multiple times, looking not just at security but the points under the trade center where an explosion could do the most damage.

The East Africa embassy bombers phoned in credible threats to the embassy and then observed the embassy response.

The 1995 assassination attempt of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, was based on surveillance of Mubarak’s security arrangements in Ethiopia two years earlier. Similarly, bin Laden operatives videotaped security arrangements at President Clinton’s 1994 visit to Manila, knowing he had already committed to visiting the Philippine capital for an Asian-Pacific summit two years later. The tapes were sent to bin Laden, then living in Sudan.

“He may have begun as a venture capitalist for terrorism,” said one high-ranking intelligence officer of his evolution as a terrorist. “But there is no doubt now that he is operating like a CEO.”

How long is an operation in the planning stages?

The minimum appears to be four to six months, with some plans evolving over years. The surveillance of the East Africa embassy bombings began in 1993, five years before the bombing was carried out.

How are operational responsibilities divided?

Each operation has a planning cell and an execution cell, with the execution cell arriving on the scene in some cases only weeks before the attack is carried out.

In most cases, like the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the embassy bombings, an outsider recruits local country nationals to operate as a cell. Cells rarely number more than 10 people. In rare cases are the bombers �" either the planners or the operators �" older than 30. At the time of the two bombings, the masterminds were both 25.

Plans are made in one location, then the bomb is made in another. In the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the planning took place in a Jersey City, N.J., apartment, the materials were stored in a self-storage facility and the bomb was put together in a garage. Similarly in Nairobi, the planning was done at a run-down hotel in downtown, while the bomb was put together in a suburban villa.

How much do these operations cost? Bin Laden has enormous resources. Is he using up most of his money?

“Terrorism is not an expensive sport,” said one senior Treasury Department official who tracks terrorists’ money. The total cost of the 1993 World Trade Center attack amounted to around $18,000, including purchase of equipment, rental of the van used in the bombing, purchase of a car, rental of two apartments, a garage and the self-storage space as well as plane tickets. Not included in the cost: $6,000 in unpaid phone bills.

Although at the time of the embassy bombings, the CIA and others pegged bin Laden’s wealth at $300 million, subsequent intelligence gathering has resulted in a significant reduction of the estimate, although the number is still in the tens of millions.

Does he focus on one target at a time or simultaneously plan various attacks?

Said one official of his recent planning, “He is planning several hits, and at some point he’s going to break through.” U.S. officials note that the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania were to be accompanied by other, near-simultaneous bombings in other world capitals. One in Tirana, Albania, was foiled days before it took place, so a series of coordinated attacks is well within his operational capabilities.

How important is operational security to al-Qaeda?

Very, say officials. They have seen repeated instances where if operatives encounter something unexpected, they will “go back to square one” out of fear that operational security has been breached. There is little autonomy, little spontaneity in operational matters and changes in plans must be approved at higher levels. The cell leader on the scene can call off an operation without consulting anyone higher, said a senior intelligence official.

Said one counter-terror official: “They have one idea ... alter it for them, then they go back to the drawing board. They are not agile. They have to reload, and that takes months ... about four to six months.”

“They are very willing to trade time for operational security.”

Has the United States had any success against his operations?

Without providing details, CIA Director George Tenet has publicly testified that the CIA has disrupted “several” terrorist attacks against Americans. U.S. officials confirm those disruptions have involved planned attacks by bin Laden.

More than 100 of his operatives have been arrested worldwide since the embassy bombings in August 1998 on every continent but Australia and Antarctica. Five men accused of conspiring in the embassy bombings are in U.S. custody, awaiting trial in New York. Another is awaiting extradition in London. Among operations believed to have been thwarted: a planned attack on U.S. facilities in London early this year and an attack on FBI headquarters in Washington this past summer.

“We keep stopping him; he keeps coming back,” said one Pentagon official. “You cannot overestimate the danger this man poses to the United States,” said a senior White House official.

“He has regenerated some cells and started new ones,” said a Pentagon official involved in tracking bin Laden. “We will be dealing with him for a long time because his organizational capability continues to improve. Does it suck being UBL [the common shorthand in U.S. intelligence community for bin Laden]? Yes. He is on the road all the time. It is hard to conduct business. He can’t touch a phone. He is constantly on the run. But he is still out there.”

Are his operations limited to bombings or does he have aspirations in the nuclear, biological and chemical areas?

Officials from intelligence, military, emergency management and national security agencies say bin Laden is branching out: planning assassinations using “contact poisons,” obtaining “rudimentary” chemical and biological materials, trying to acquire radioactive material.

The newest information, which one official called “fascinating,” is that bin Laden may be returning to an old strategy: assassination. One Pentagon official involved in tracking bin Laden says the man officials call “the terrorist prince” has been obtaining “contact poisons ... KGB-like pellets” that would be used in assassinations and in some cases are difficult or impossible to detect in an autopsy. The official noted that in the early 1990s bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network were involved in assassination attempts on Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and Jordanian Crown Prince �" now King �" Abdullah as well as planning to kill Pope John Paul and President Clinton.

He added that public U.S. intelligence reports on bin Laden’s training camps have noted the network has instructed terrorists in assassination and kidnapping.

The contact poisons are among “rudimentary chemical and biological stuff” bin Laden has obtained recently. However, one official said the network’s efforts to obtain such materials is “scattershot and unfocused ... all over the board” without a pattern to indicate what he might be planning.

“He is looking for all sorts of stuff,” adding that twice bin Laden operatives tried to obtain nuclear materials. Bin Laden’s German operation was the victim of a sting operation in 1993 when it tried to buy highly enriched uranium on the Soviet black market. A year later, another similar attempt failed. The bin Laden operatives in charge of those attempts, Mamdouh Salim and Ramzi Yousef, are in U.S. custody. Moreover, Russian intelligence has told the United States that it believes bin Laden has been working with Chechen rebels to obtain radioactive material for a “radiological dispersal device” or “dirty bomb” that would spray the potentially deadly material over a small area. An official involved in planning emergency response to a terrorist attack says the United States has taken the intelligence seriously.

However, officials cautioned that there is “no sense of a technical sophistication” in bin Laden’s camp and that “this stuff is much more difficult to use than people think.

“After all, Saddam Hussein spent $8 billion on nuclear weapons and came away with (nothing). He doesn’t know how to do this. He is spending every night in a different mud hut, so we’re not too worried that he is reprocessing plutonium.”

On the other hand, the official added, “if he is stumbling onto something, there is no doubt he will use it.”

Why haven’t we tried to grab him?

“We are serious about going after him,” said one senior administration official. “He is serious about going after us. If we can nail his ass, we will. But it is going to be action and reaction for a long time.”

Doing a “snatch-and-grab” operation from “time to time looks appealing,” said a Pentagon official. Has the United States planned such a mission? Yes, said the official. Has the United States put Delta Force personnel on planes in preparation for such a mission? “Not recently.” The big problem remains the need for real-time information on his whereabouts.

How is his health? A few months ago, there were reports he was terminally ill. What became of those reports?

A senior counter-terrorism official said the latest CIA analysis is that he is “a hypochondriac ... but then he has chosen a stressful lifestyle and that can manifest itself in strange ways ...”

Nevertheless, he is known to have an enlarged heart, chronically low blood pressure and is missing toes on one foot from a battle wound suffered in Afghanistan. He is regularly attended by a physician.

Is there any indication he works with governments in the Middle East?

Aside from Afghanistan, where bin Laden has long-standing ties �" including some possible family ties �" with the ruling Taliban, there are indications bin Laden has some contacts with both the governments of Iran and Pakistan.

The connections with Iran are described in recent Justice Department papers filed in the embassy bombing case. The United States alleges that on two different occasions in the early 1990s, a senior religious leader from Iran met with bin Laden’s representatives in Khartoum to discuss putting aside religious differences �" bin Laden is a Wahabi Muslim, Iran is Shiite �" and cooperating against Western interests. However, there is no information to suggest any joint operations were ever planned or carried out.

The link with Pakistan is more current. One issue that distresses U.S. officials is intelligence that bin Laden, Kashmiri Muslim rebels in India and Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence [ISI], its quasi-autonomous military intelligence agency, are involved in “monkey business” together. The United States used the ISI in the 1980s to fund, train and arm the Afghan mujahedin, including bin Laden, in its fight against the Soviet Red Army.

Calling it a “stew,” a “crazy soup” and a “cozy relationship,” two officials noted that the key to the relationship is Pakistan’s use of rebel insurgents in Kashmir, the troubled region that has been the subject of three wars between Pakistan and India. Muslim fighters, financed by the ISI but trained by bin Laden, have been operating in the Indian part of Kashmir.

“The Pakistanis have interest in working with people who can help them in Kashmir. Bin Laden has an interest in helping Muslim fighters. It is a cozy relationship.”

In fact, said the officials, the United States now believes that most of those killed in last August’s attack on bin Laden camps in Afghanistan were Kashmiri insurgents training to kill Indians. And that linkage, they note, is critical to understanding both bin Laden’s network and the future of religious terrorism. Bin Laden, they note, has had connections over the years with other terrorist groups in Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Egypt, Chechnya, Bosnia, Albania, Algeria, Uruguay and Ecuador.

Why did bin Laden declare a “fatwah,” or holy war, on the United States?

U.S. intelligence officials believe bin Laden began to turn against the United States in the mid-1980s �" a time when he still took aid and training from the CIA, which was then helping bin Laden and other Islamic groups fight the Soviet Army in Afghanistan. The CIA funneled its aid through the Pakistani secret service, the ISI, to various cells in Afghanistan, one of them known as the MAK. In 1984, bin Laden broke with the MAK and formed a separate, more radical splinter group that espoused a harsh, fundamentalist version of Islam that was dedicated to the liberation of Islamic nations from any foreign influences, from Israel to the United States to the Soviet Union. Particularly infuriating to him is America’s coziness with the Saudi Royal family since the Gulf War. But bin Laden’s first public “fatwah” came only after the Gulf War. Specifically, he railed against the presence of American and European troops on the soil of the Arabian peninsula, site of Islam’s holiest cities, Mecca and Medina. Since then, U.S. intelligence officials say, bin Laden has been behind an unprecedented campaign of attacks on U.S., European, Israeli, Russian and other interests around the planet. In 1998, he broadened his “fatwah” to specifically include civilian targets:

The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies �" civilians and military �" is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Asqa Mosque [in Jerusalem] and the holy mosque [in Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim. This is in accordance with the words of Almighty God, “and with the pagans all together as they fight you all together” and “fight them until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in God.”

It adds, “We with God’s help call on every Muslim who believes in God and wishes to be rewarded to comply with God’s order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it. We also call on Muslim ulema, leaders, youths and soldiers to launch the raid on Satan’s U.S. troops and the devil’s supporters allying with them, and to displace those who are behind them so that they may learn a lesson.”

http://www.timesofindia.com/articleshow.asp?art_id=1042701731

Osama bin Laden had strong ties with Boston

OSTON: Suspected terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden has strong family ties and a group of supporters in Boston, where the two hijacked airliners that demolished the World Trade Center took off.

One of bin Laden's brothers set up scholarship funds at Harvard, while another relative owns six condominiums in an expensive complex in Charlestown, just outside Boston. Two bin Laden associates once worked as Boston cab drivers, including one who was jailed in Jordan on charges of plotting to blow up a hotel full of Americans and Israelis.

Bin Laden's ties with Boston are now being closely scrutinised as authorities focus their investigation on terrorist cells with possible ties to him, said Robert Fitzpatrick, the former second-in-command at the FBI's Boston office.

"The activity of this group here is obviously significant," Fitzpatrick said Wednesday.

Investigators are interviewing drivers from Boston Cab Co., where two known associates of bin Laden once worked, to see if they had ties to baggage handlers, who in turn may have supplied weapons to the hijackers, Fitzpatrick said.

"They are going to look at the cab drivers again - since they are predominantly Middle Eastern - and they are going to look at a possible link between them and the baggage handlers," Fitzpatrick said, based on his information from law enforcement colleagues.

"They could thwart the security by having a baggage handler put the material aboard the plane. That link is being investigated."

Last year, the FBI investigated the Boston activities of the two cab drivers, Bassam A. Kanj, a Lebanese native, and Raed M. Hijazi, a Palestinian. The men were tied by investigators to separate military and terrorist plots allegedly financed by bin Laden.

Both men lived for years in Boston and Everett, a suburb north of Boston.

Kanj, 35, was killed in Lebanon last year in an attack against the Lebanese army. Hijazi was charged in Jordan with plotting a New Year's Day 2000 hotel bombing.

Bin Laden, a rich Saudi exile who is believed to be living in Afghanistan, also has had family members living in the Boston area for the past decade.

In 1994, one of his brothers, Sheik Bakr Mohammed bin Laden, made a large donation to Harvard Law School to fund visiting scholars to do research in Islamic legal studies.

Harvard Law spokesman Michael Armini would not disclose the amount of the gift, but typically it takes about dlrs 1 million to establish a research fellowship. The sheik established a second scholarship at the Harvard School of Design.

Harvard officials were quick to distance the school from Osama bin Laden, emphasising that he has no role in the scholarship programs.

"This is in no way connected to Osama bin Laden, who has been ostracised from his family and from Saudi Arabia," Armini said. "The purpose of this gift was to foster mutual understanding between the western and Islamic legal worlds."

Stephen Walt, a professor of international politics at the JFK School of Government at Harvard, likened the relationship of the bin Laden brothers to that of University of Massachusetts President William Bulger and his brother, reputed mobster James "Whitey" Bulger, who is among the FBI's 10 Most Wanted.

"I think that bin Laden is responsible for his action, but his brother is not responsible for Osama's actions, and vice versa," Walt said.

Another relative, Mohammed M. bin Laden, owns six condominiums in the ritzy Flagship Wharp condominium complex in Charlestown. His relation to bin Laden could not immediately be determined. A woman who answered the telephone at the management company for the complex refused to answer questions.

Juliette Kayyem, a former member of the National Commission on Terrorism, said Boston has several factors that may have attracted bin Laden's supporters.

"Our proximity to the Canadian border and Boston being a big city where people can hide is likely why Boston became the center," Kayyem said. "Also being on the Eastern Seaboard, we have wide-bodied jets with large fuel tanks. When you don't have other weapons, that's your weapon." ( AP )

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