Bin Laden

In speeches leading up to the fifth anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush focused on the dangers of Islamic fascism and the efforts, at home and abroad, to combat it. In response, his election-year rivals fired back that we are no safer than we were five years ago. According to them, we are mired in Afghanistan and Iraq and have sacrificed our civil liberties while exaggerating the global terrorist threat. But al-Qaida is not so conflicted. While American politicians tore into each other, Al Jazeera calmly released a video of Osama bin Laden from before 9/11.

NEW YORK - The trial in the bombings of two American embassies in East Africa is to begin this morning in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, and indications are that the government's first witness will be an informer who worked for the Saudi exile Osama bin Laden until 1996, when he agreed to cooperate with the American authorities. The witness could take the stand as early as tomorrow, after both sides finish their opening statements. The government has been concealing the identity of the witness, a convicted terrorist known only as "CS-1," for almost five years and has resisted all attempts by defense lawyers to learn his identity.

None of us will ever forget where we were and what we were doing that fateful morning eight years ago today, when the hijacked airliners flew into the World Trade Center towers in Manhattan. I was just leaving the house for work when my wife called out for me to come back inside. The first plane had just struck its target, and for a moment we didn't know if it was an accident. All doubts disappeared seconds later when we saw, live on television, the second tower struck by another plane.

LONDON - It was a quiet, jittery morning, one that had become all too common. Six thousand police officers blanketed the city yesterday, four weeks after blasts shattered subway cars and a bus, two weeks since a second attempt to bomb the Underground. Commuters streamed past bomb-sniffing dogs. They hurried beneath sniper scopes and studied the faces of people around them. They wriggled in their seats, and some swallowed hard when trains clattered away from platforms and roared through tunnels toward the next stop.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Pakistani troops backed by helicopter gunships detained 20 people yesterday in raids against suspected al-Qaida hide-outs in a remote tribal region bordering Afghanistan. On a day when two Arab television stations aired messages attributed to Osama bin Laden's top deputy, Pakistani officials said that no known operatives of bin Laden's network were among those captured. Most were local tribesmen suspected of harboring al-Qaida fighters, though officials said there might have been "a few foreigners" among them, a reference to al-Qaida fighters possibly hiding in the area.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Senior Pakistani officials sharply denied reports yesterday that U.S. forces were carrying out aggressive operations in this country's rugged border region to capture Osama bin Laden. Rumors and disputed reports, including one that U.S. forces just across the border in southeastern Afghanistan had arrested two of bin Laden's 14 sons, followed the arrest of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, al-Qaida's alleged operations chief, who was captured in Pakistan in a predawn raid last Saturday.

WASHINGTON - A new audiotape attributed to al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden praises the attack on a U.S. consulate in Saudi Arabia this month and encourages holy warriors to mount attacks aimed at preventing the United States from obtaining Middle Eastern oil. Within hours after the recording was posted on an Islamic Web site, the CIA concluded that there is "a high degree of confidence" that the speaker is bin Laden, a U.S. intelligence official said...

WASHINGTON - In a world of cloak and dagger, one of the CIA's most secret campaigns was called simply "The Plan." For two years before the Sept. 11 attacks, it was the official operational strategy that the CIA, the FBI and other U.S. agencies jointly adopted for their clandestine - and still largely unsuccessful - campaign to capture terrorist Osama bin Laden and his chief aides. CIA Director George J. Tenet described the Plan publicly for the first time Thursday during hearings in which he battled with members of Congress over his agency's effectiveness leading up to the Sept.

WASHINGTON - After weeks of uncertainty about the fate of Osama bin Laden, senior administration officials said last week that they had fresh indications he had survived the bombing assault on the Tora Bora region of Afghanistan and is probably still moving through the mountains that straddle the border between that nation and Pakistan. The administration is not claiming to have bin Laden cornered. Some senior administration officials say the evidence suggests that the search has "bounded his whereabouts," as one put it. But capturing or killing bin Laden looks like "a long-term proposition," the official said, and defense officials noted that none of the information has been specific enough for the United States to attack suspected hideouts.

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration has come under pressure to intensify its pursuit of Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaida leaders because U.S. analysts say that a new audiotape likely contains bin Laden's voice. The tape, aired this week on the Qatar-based satellite TV channel Al-Jazeera, could foreshadow a major terrorist attack, officials and analysts said. Past attacks against U.S. or allied targets have often followed a public threat from bin Laden or one of his lieutenants. The broadcast coincided with intelligence reports of increased "noise" among suspected terrorist groups.