bearing_burden

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Image: Afghanistan-ossama
Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden, seen in an undisclosed place inside Afghanistan.
 
Authorities launch
massive probe
 
Early speculation focuses
on Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden
 
By Robert Windrem and Jon Bonné
MSNBC
 
Sept. 12 —  Within hours of Tuesday’s devastating attack, investigators had launched a massive hunt for answers, with authorities turning up possible clues at Boston’s Logan airport and an FBI team serving a search warrant in Florida. The scope of the attack left little doubt in officials’ and experts’ minds, though, about one possible suspect: Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden, who has sought a role as the United States’ most hated enemy.

     
     

 
Interactive: Wanted: Osama bin Laden
       IN BOSTON, authorities identified at least five Arab men, including a trained pilot, as suspects and seized a Mitsubishi rental car at an airport parking garage, the Boston Herald reported.
       The Herald, quoting an unnamed source, reported that the car contained Arabic-language flight training manuals. At least two of the five men flew to Logan International Airport on Tuesday from Portland, Maine, the Herald said.
       The luggage of one of the men who flew to the airport Tuesday didn’t make his scheduled connection. The Boston Globe reported the luggage contained a copy of the Koran, an instructional video on flying commercial airliners and a fuel consumption calculator.
       In Florida, FBI agents reportedly searched a home in Broward County after a name on a flight manifest caught investigators’ attention.
       A federal law-enforcement official told NBC that the name of one of the passengers aboard one of the flights that crashed into the World Trade Center immediately triggered alarms at the FBI. The FBI obtained the name of the passenger from one of the flight manifests, entered it into the FBI computer database and came up with some sort of match.
       The FBI refused to comment on both reports.
       Still, much of the immediate speculation focused on bin Laden.
       One senior U.S. official told NBC News that investigators were “90 percent certain” that bin Laden was responsible, adding: “This is not just surmise. This is new information.”
       A Pakistani newspaper reported Wednesday, however, that bin Laden had issued a denial of responsibility for the attacks.
       “The terrorist act is the action of some American group. I have nothing to do with it,” the newspaper Khabrain quoted bin Laden as saying through “sources close to the Taliban.”
       The Urdu-language newspaper has a reputation for sensational reporting, and there was no independent confirmation of the claim.
       President Bush did not mention any possible suspects, but he was unequivocal in his early response to the attacks: “Make no mistake, the United States will hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts.”
       Presidential adviser Karen Hughes said federal authorities were working “to identify and bring to swift justice those responsible for these attacks.”
Osama bin Laden: FAQ

       Two senior Clinton administration counterterrorism officials told NBC that bin Laden’s al-Qaeda — a paramilitary set of terror cells spread across the globe — is the “only organization with motivation [and] capability to execute a mission like this.”
       “No one else but bin Laden has the capability to do this,” one said. “No one.”
       Private experts were similarly convinced that only one man could be responsible. It was “99.5 percent” likely that bin Laden’s organization was behind the strike, said terrorism expert Sean Anderson of Idaho State University.
       
WAR AGAINST U.S.

 

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       Bin Laden, the wealthy son of a Saudi construction magnate, has been credited with building al-Qaeda into a global network. He largely began espousing his fervent beliefs — and rabid anti-American rhetoric — after his work with the mujahedeen during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. He has repeatedly vowed to wage an all-out terrorist war against the United States and its allies.
       “It would be very surprising if it didn’t turn out to be bin Laden,” said Dr. Jerrold Post, director of the Political Psychology Program at George Washington University, who has interviewed dozens of terrorists.
       Afghanistan’s Taliban government quickly condemned Tuesday’s attack but insisted bin Laden was not involved.
       “We have tried our best in the past and we are willing in the future to assure the United States in any kind of way we can that Osama is not involved in these kinds of activities,” the Taliban’s foreign minister, Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, told reporters.
       Another Taliban spokesman, Abdul Hai Muttmain, echoed that sentiment. “Such a big conspiracy, to have infiltrated in such a major way, is impossible for Osama,” Muttmain told The Associated Press. He said bin Laden does not have the means to orchestrate such a major assault on the United States.
       But Abdel-Bari Atwan, editor of the London-based al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper, said bin Laden’s organization was “almost certainly” behind the attack.
       “Osama bin Laden warned three weeks ago that he would attack American interests in an unprecedented attack, a very big one,” Atwan told Reuters.
       
EXTENSIVE PLANNING
       Key to the bin Laden link was the complex but precise nature of the attack — hijackings, multiple airplane crashes into the World Trade Center and into the Pentagon, and another jet taken and crashed in Pennsylvania.

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       “What we see here is a very sophisticated operation,” said Cassady Craft, a national security expert at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “That probably helps out out in some sense. There’s only a certain number of groups who can pull off such a thing.”
       Indeed — only one, according to U.S. intelligence, which has said many of bin Laden’s reported plans involve multiple strikes over multiple days, including a planned attempt to disrupt U.S. millennium celebrations. Algerian native Ahmed Ressam was caught and convicted of trying to plant explosives on targets in Los Angeles and offered prosecutors evidence of a bin Laden link in the case.
       Officials have said the millennium attacks had three components, a strike in Los Angeles and two in the Middle East — one in Yemen and one in Jordan. A later terror strike in Yemen succeeded in October 2000 when a boat filled with explosives rammed the USS Cole, killing 17 sailors. That attack was also reportedly linked to bin Laden.
       In 1998, two U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were blown up — again by associates of bin Laden. U.S. intelligence reported that other blasts were planned for the same time in Uganda and Albania. Some 224 people died in the embassy attacks. In response, the Clinton administration used cruise missiles to destroy the site believed to be bin Laden’s camp in Afghanistan, as well as a chemical factory in Sudan. Bin Laden escaped.
       “You’ve got an undeclared major war ... by an unknown, unidentified and unlocated enemy,” said Post, who testified in trials of bin Laden associates for the 1998 embassy bombings.
       
COORDINATED STRIKES
       A Clinton administration official said it appeared “nothing on this scale” was ever discussed by U.S. intelligence in recent years.
       Intelligence officials have described other attempted attacks by al-Qaeda, including a January 1995 effort to plant bombs on 11 U.S. jetliners flying over the Pacific.
       And according to testimony at the World Trade Center trial, bin Laden associates in 1993 contemplated flying a small plane into CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. — going so far as to train a pilot in San Antonio, Texas.
       Anderson noted that bin Laden, in issuing a fatwa — or holy war edict — against the United States, said he saw no difference between military and civilian targets; as he told a reporter in 1998, “We do not differentiate between those dressed in military uniforms and civilians.”
       “I think he’s carrying this out, and it’s his idea of carrying on a holy war with the United States and Israel,” Anderson said.

Saudi exile Osama bin Laden has been indicted in the United States for his alleged involvement in the 1998 bombing of U.S. embassies in West Africa. But the Afghanistan-based terror kingpin has failed more often than he has succeeded, according to U.S. officials.
Use the drop down above to learn more about such operations.

Source: Compiled from U.S. official sources by NBC investigative reporter Robert Windrem

       
       
‘WORST ... FAILURE’
       If security officials had no advance notice of an impending strike, it could be what one official described to NBC News as “the worst intelligence failure since Pearl Harbor.” The official noted such attacks take “months, if not years” to plan.
       Since the 1993 World Trade Center bombing that killed six — also tied to bin Laden — and the 1996 strike by Timothy McVeigh on a federal building in Oklahoma City, U.S. officials have been driven to shore up what has become known as homeland security, a broad rubric covering everything from nuclear defenses to eco-terrorism.
       But most official efforts have been directed at so-called weapons of mass destruction, such as nuclear devices, or biological and chemical attacks. Though cities across the nation trained their emergency services to handle a strike similar to Oklahoma City’s, there has been a growing concern that more conventional methods of attack were disregarded.

 Terror attacks on U.S. targets
Major attacks on U.S. targets in recent years
 |  1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Oct. 12, 2000
Terrorist bombing kills 17 U.S. sailors aboard the USS Cole as it refueled in Yemen’s port of Aden. The United States says Saudi exile Osama bin Laden prime suspect.
Aug. 7, 1998
Car bombs explode outside U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, within minutes of each other, killing 224 people and wounding thousands. Bin Laden is again blamed.
June 25, 1996
Truck bomb explodes outside the Khobar Towers in Dharan, Saudi Arabia, killing 19 American servicemen and wounding hundreds of other people. Members of a little-known Saudi militant group, Hezbollah, were indicted for the attack.
Nov. 13, 1995
Car bomb detonates at a U.S. military headquarters in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, killing five American service personnel.

Source: The Associated Press
Printable version
       “A lot of our attention was directed toward weapons of mass destruction,” Anderson said, “so that we just ignored things under our nose.”
       Security at the World Trade Center has tightened enormously since the 1993 attack. But there is, quite simply, no way to protect a building against the sort of attack witnessed Tuesday. Still, it’s possible that the conventional nature of the attack will refocus attention on more traditional security issues, especially safety at airports.
       “I hope that this will encourage us to think in new ways about the nature of our security threats,” former National Security Adviser Anthony Lake told NBC’s Tom Brokaw.
       
       The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
       
       
 
       
   
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