Bin Laden

CAIRO, Egypt -- Osama bin Laden denounced what he called a "Zionist crusaders' war on Islam" in an audiotape broadcast yesterday, pointing to the isolation of the Hamas-led Palestinian government, talk of a Western peacekeeping force in Sudan and the Muslim outrage over Danish cartoons mocking the Prophet Muhammad as new evidence of a clash of civilizations. His voice sounding strong and combative, bin Laden implied that killing American civilians was justified, beseeched Muslims to fight any Sudan peacekeeping force and called for the creators of the offensive cartoons to be turned over to al-Qaida for punishment.

One thinks of that scene from "The Wizard of Oz" where Toto pulls back the curtain and the "great and powerful Oz" is revealed to be only an old man manipulating a smoke and fire machine. "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!" bellows the Wizard as the man tries to pull the covering back into place. One suspects that if he were not reposing in a watery grave just now, Osama bin Laden would be doing something very similar. After all, in the two months since Navy SEALs killed him in a raid, American officials have released a series of revelations deeply unflattering to his image as a terrorist mastermind.

WASHINGTON - Public support for Osama bin Laden and militant violence has declined markedly in several Muslim countries, although it remains substantial, a new poll shows. The poll by the Pew Global Attitudes Survey found that confidence in the al-Qaida leader "to do the right thing regarding world affairs" fell in four of six sampled countries in the past two years. Support for violence against civilian targets has fallen in five of the six countries. Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, said the results suggested that "people are tiring of terrorism in these places," perhaps because the countries have themselves suffered attacks.

WASHINGTON - The White House has asked U.S. networks to limit broadcasts of statements by Osama bin Laden. I wish that instead of censorship, the president would respond to him. Here's what Mr. Bush could say: Dear bin Laden: I've listened to the statement you released through Al Jazeera TV. Since I know that no Arab or Muslim leader will dare answer you, I thought I would do it. Let me be blunt: Your statement was pathetic. It's obvious from what you said that you don't have a clue why we're so strong or why the Arab regimes you despise are so weak.

KABUL, Afghanistan -- A Pakistani Taliban leader who is waging a government-backed campaign to evict Central Asian militants from Pakistan's tribal regions said yesterday that he would give Osama bin Laden sanctuary in his area if he sought it. "Bin Laden has never come to this area, but if he comes here and seeks our protection, then according to tribal laws and customs we will protect him," the Taliban commander, Mullah Muhammad Nazir, 32, told journalists...

ATLANTA -- We just don't believe them anymore. We no longer take seriously the warnings of terrorist threats coming from White House functionaries. So, this month, when Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told the Chicago Tribune about his "gut feeling" that the nation faces an increased risk of a terrorist attack this summer, nobody paid much attention. They've frightened us so many times before with false alarms and phony threats and hyped intelligence that we've stopped paying attention.

WASHINGTON - An analysis of suspected radioactive substances seized in Afghanistan has found nothing to prove that Osama bin Laden reached his decade-long goal of acquiring nuclear materials for a bomb, administration officials say. The analysis of suspicious canisters, computer disks and documents conducted by the government suggests, in fact, that bin Laden and al-Qaida were duped by black-market weapons swindlers selling crude containers hand-painted with...

WASHINGTON -- There is something about the word "war" that is almost irresistible in confronting the incomprehensible. Within hours of the explosions in Washington and New York, calls for a declaration of war came from politicians, commentators and citizens across the country. War represents a total commitment and in recent decades has become a popular way for expressing our common cause against modern scourges. Starting with Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty," we have declared wars on everything from inflation to illiteracy to drugs.

WASHINGTON -- A country that has been unable to find the anti-abortion fugitive Eric Rudolph in the hills of North Carolina is unlikely to find Osama bin Laden in the rugged terrain of Afghanistan -- half a world away and hidden among some of the most inhospitable mountain ranges on the planet. For nearly two years, hundreds of federal, state and local law enforcement officials searched in vain for Mr. Rudolph, using the latest in high-tech equipment. Now the allied coalition will try to do the same in an area nearly five times as large as North Carolina using specialized units of British and American commandos.

PROVIDENCE - The United States risks a severe miscalculation in dealing with the destruction of the World Trade Center and the attack on the Pentagon. This event is not an isolated instance of violence. This is not an "act of war." It is one symptom of a cancer that threatens to metastasize. The root cause is not terrorist activity, as has been widely stated. It is the relationship between the United States and the Islamic world. Until this central cancerous problem is treated, Americans will never be free from fear.