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Taliban invalidates bin Laden's orders

June 18, 2001
By Arnaud de Borchgrave
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20010618-38746756.htm

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan -- Any holy decree or "fatwa" issued by Osama bin Laden declaring holy war against the United States and ordering Muslims to kill Americans is "null and void," according to the Taliban´s supreme leader.

Bin Laden, America´s most wanted terror suspect, "is not entitled to issue fatwas as he did not complete the mandatory 12 years of Quranic studies to qualify for the position of mufti," said Mullah Mohammad Omar Akhund, known to every Afghan as amir-ul-mumineen (supreme leader of the faithful).

Mullah Omar made clear that the Islamic Emirate, as the Taliban regime calls itself, would like to "resolve or dissolve" the bin Laden issue. In return, he expects the United States to establish a dialogue that would lead to "an easing and then lifting of U.N. sanctions that are strangling and killing the people of the Emirate."

The two issues are linked, both in Washington and in Kandahar, the nation´s sprawling, dust-choked religious center of 750,000 people where Mullah Omar and his 10-man ruling Shura, or council, have their headquarters.

Mullah Omar, 41, is a soft-spoken man of very few words. He relies on Rahmatullah Hashimi, a 24-year-old multilingual "ambassador-at-large," rumored to be Afghanistan´s next foreign minister, to translate and expand his short, staccato statements.

The one-eyed, 6-foot-6-inch, five-times wounded veteran of the war against the Soviet occupation in the 1980s was also the architect of the Taliban´s victory over the multiple warring factions that followed the Soviet withdrawal in 1989.

Sitting cross-legged on the carpeted mud floor of his spartan adobe house on the west end of town, Mullah Omar´s shrapnel-scarred face, topped by a black turban, shows no emotion as he answers in quick succession a military field telephone, walkie-talkies and a wideband radio.

"We´re still fighting a war," he says impatiently, referring to Ahmed Shah Masood´s guerrilla forces, which still hold 10 percent of Afghan territory in the northeastern part of the country.

According to U.S. intelligence reports, bin Laden has issued instructions that his followers have described as fatwas. But Mullah Omar said, "Only muftis can issue fatwas." Bin Laden "is not a mufti, and therefore any fatwas he may have issued are illegal and null and void."

The Afghan supreme leader also said bin Laden is not allowed any contact with the media or with foreign government representatives.

Afghanistan, according to the amir, has suggested to the United States and to the United Nations that international "monitors" keep bin Laden under observation pending a resolution of the case, "but so far we have received no reply."

Mr. Hashimi, in flawless English, added: "We also notified the United States we were putting bin Laden on trial last September for his alleged crimes and requested that relevant evidence be presented."

He said the court sat for 40 days, but the United States never presented any evidence of suspected crimes by bin Laden, including his suspected involvement in the bombing of two U.S. embassies in Africa, which Mullah Omar agreed were "criminal acts."

"Bin Laden, for his part, swore on the Quran he had nothing to do with those terrorist bombings and that he is not responsible for what others do who claim to know him," Mr. Hashimi said.

On Tuesday, a New York court sentenced one Saudi Arabian to life in prison in connection with the embassy bomb attacks; three more men -- a Tanzanian, a U.S. citizen and a Jordanian -- have also been found guilty and are awaiting sentencing. All claimed to have been acting on orders from bin Laden.

In March, Pakistani leader Gen. Pervez Musharraf told The Washington Times that by demonizing bin Laden, the United States had turned him into a cult figure among Muslim masses and "a hero among Islamist extremists."

Since then, the State Department has played down the importance of bin Laden. Mullah Omar clearly wishes to do the same. But politically, he cannot afford to deport him lest he arouse the wrath of his fellow extremists.

Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE are the only three countries that recognize the Taliban government. Saudi Arabia and the UAE secretly fund the Taliban by paying Pakistan for its logistical support to Afghanistan.

Mr. Hashemi, a highly intelligent high school dropout who toured the United States earlier this year, fielded other questions that Mullah Omar felt had been answered in recent months:

• On the lack of schools for girls: "We don´t even have enough schools for boys. Everything was destroyed in 20 years of fighting. The sooner U.N. sanctions are lifted, the sooner we can finish building schools for both boys and girls."

• On the treatment of women: "You forget that America and the rest of the world are centuries ahead of us. If you introduced your manners and mores suddenly in Afghanistan, society would implode and anarchy would ensue. We don´t interfere with what we consider your decadent lifestyle, so please refrain from interfering with ours."

• On the destruction of TV sets: "Try to imagine what would have happened in 18th- or even 19th-century America or Europe with the overnight introduction of television and all the sex that is now part of programs everywhere except Iran. We are not against television, but against the filth that pollutes the airwaves."

• Distributed by United Press International.

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Here's an interesting one. Note the highlighted info about Neo-Nazi's flying remote controlled miniature planes into the G8 summit, and how Time makes fun of it. Not quite what I've been lead to believe about terrorists flying airliners into the G8 summit

Bin Laden Rides Again: Myth vs. Reality
A 'plot' to assassinate President Bush and a second to attack the U.S. military in the Gulf -all in the same week.

TIME.com
BY TONY KARON
Wednesday, Jun. 20, 2001
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,131866,00.html

That It Boy of international terror, Osama Bin Laden, is back in the news. Headlines from just the past week: "Russians Reveal Bin Laden Plot to Kill Bush at G8 Meeting." "Bin Laden Video Claims Responsibility for Cole Bombing." "Yemen Foils Bin Laden Plot to Kill U.S. Investigators." "Bin Laden Group Planned to Blow Up U.S. Embassy in India..." And finally, at week's end, U.S. forces all over the Gulf confined to barracks and ships put to sea because of a "non-specific but credible threat" from Bin Laden's group. Vile acts and wretched conspiracies reported from all over the world, all carrying the imprimatur of the Saudi terror tycoon skulking in the hills of Afghanistan, his name now the globally recognizable shorthand for Islamist terror in the same way that "Xerox" has become for "photocopy."

In the language of advertising, Bin Laden has become a brand - a geopolitical Keyser Soze, an omnipresent menace whose very name invokes perils far beyond his capability. To be sure, his threat is very real. Bin Laden is a financier of considerable means who maintains a network of loyalists committed to a war of terror against the U.S. And he has put his money, connections and notoriety to work in attracting a far wider web of pre-existing Islamist groups to his jihad against Washington.

If Bin Laden didn't exist, we'd have to invent him

Still, the media's picture of Bin Laden sitting in a high-tech Batcave in the mountains around Kandahar ordering up global mayhem at the click of a mouse is more than a little ludicrous. Yes, the various networks of Islamist terror have made full use of the possibilities presented by technology and globalization. But few serious intelligence professionals believe Bin Laden is the puppet-master atop a pyramid structure of terror cells. It's really not that simple, but personalizing the threat - while it distorts both the nature of the problem and the remedy - is a time-honored tradition. Before Bin Laden, the face of the global terror threat against Americans belonged to the Palestinian radical Abu Nidal. Or was it Colonel Ghaddafi? Ayatolla Khomeini, perhaps? And does anyone even remember the chubby jowls of Carlos the Jackal, whose image drawn from an old passport picture was once the icon of global terror?

Personalizing makes it seem more manageable. Bin Laden may be out of reach right now, safe in the care of Afghanistan's Taliban rulers. But by making him the root of the problem, we hold out the possibility that his ultimate removal from the scene will make the world safe from Islamist terror. A comforting thought, but a delusion nonetheless.

The dangers are real. The Cole bombing, and this week's indictments handed down in the Khobar Towers attack, are brutal reminders of the vulnerability of U.S. personnel stationed in the Arab world to attack by extremists. Last Saturday, Indian police arrested a group of men allegedly planning to blow up the U.S. embassy in New Delhi and quickly turned up evidence linking the plot to Bin Laden. Two days later, an unrelated plan, involving suicide bombers killing U.S. agents investigating the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, was foiled in Yemen; their trail, too, leads back to Bin Laden. He was in the news again the following day after Western reporters were shown a Bin Laden promotional video in which he appeared to claim responsibility for the bombing of the Cole in a macabre poem.

Then there is the sublime: For sheer diabolical genius (of the Hollywood variety), nothing came close to the reports that European security services are preparing to counter a Bin Laden attempt to assassinate President Bush at next month's G8 summit in Genoa, Italy.

According to German intelligence sources, the plot involved Bin Laden paying German neo-Nazis to fly remote controlled-model aircraft packed with Semtex into the conference hall and blow the leaders of the industrialized world to smithereens. (Paging Jerry Bruckheimer...)

The Russians, who believe a Bin Laden attack in Genoa is more likely to be carried out by their old enemy, the Chechens, have sent an advance team of anti terrorism experts (armed, we hope, with small-scale anti-aircraft weapons).

But Bin Laden's role has always been that of facilitator. That was his function in the 'Islamist International' formed, with the active encouragement of the CIA and Egyptian and Saudi intelligence, to recruit volunteers to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. His considerable wealth (and ability to raise funds from others) and his organizational expertise played a key role in helping the "Arab Afghans," as the volunteers became known, play a creditable role in the war against the Soviets. And once that war was won, he continued to play the same role, keeping its veterans together and maintaining an infrastructure to arm, train and fund Islamist warriors for deployment in Muslim armies in places as diverse as Bosnia, Chechnya, Western China and the Philippines.

He's not ducking blame, he's demanding it

Having come under the influence of radical Egyptian Islamists in Afghanistan, Bin Laden found himself in conflict with the pro-Western regime in his native Saudi Arabia. The Gulf War proved to be his breaking point with the Saudi royal family. Driven by a desire to expel the U.S. from the Gulf region and overthrow a royal family he denounced as corrupt apostates, he turned his fire increasingly against America. The World Trade Center bombers may have been motivated by similar concerns - and they may have been inspired by some of the same militant teachings of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman - but the two don't appear to have been directly linked.

Bin Laden subsequently claimed his men were behind the 1993 debacle in Mogadishu, where 17 U.S. servicemen were killed in a botched raid on a local warlord. Whether or not there's any basis to the claim, Bin Laden wants to be held responsible for that and any other attack for which the media is prepared to blame him. The reason he has spent the past decade offering assistance to a wide range of pre-existing Islamist groups is precisely because he wants to paint himself as the personification of the considerable anti-American sentiment inflaming much of the Arab world, a latter-day Salah el Din driving out the imagined Crusaders. The Western need to personalize the terrorist menace plays into his hands. Indeed, most experts agreed that President Clinton's 1998 cruise missile strikes on Bin Laden were probably the single most important PR boost in the Saudi's career. And the fact that his name is cited by way of explanation for the fact that the world's most powerful military has moved into defensive positions all over the Gulf certainly doesn't do his carefully cultivated image any harm.

Even when groups involved in malfeasance around the world have had dealings with Bin Laden or those close to him, intelligence experts don't believe that the Saudi financier is necessarily pulling the strings when they act. What Bin Laden may in fact personify is the coming together of diverse Islamist groups during the Afghan war, and their identification of the U.S. as their primary enemy during the decade that followed. So lop off the head, and the body continues to function, because it remains a diverse and diffuse set of groups and cells with their own internal structures, driven by a common sense of implacable grievance. That menace will remain, even if Bin Laden is removed. We may simply have to find a new name and face for it.

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