Kenneth Timmerman: This Man Wants You Dead [1998 article about Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda]

In July 1998, Reader's Digest published Kenneth Timmerman's report, "This Man Wants You Dead." Three weeks later -- with more than 200 innocent civilians torn to bits by al-Qaeda bombs in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam -- bin Laden's face was plastered in newspapers around the world.

The notice appeared in an Arabic newspaper in London last February. "The ruling to kill Americans and their allies -- civilians and military is a duty for every Muslim. We -- with God's help -- call on every Muslim to kill the Americans." Islamic extremists make outrageous statements every day in the Arabic-language press, most of which go unnoticed. But this one, a fatwa (religious order), alarmed government officials around the world. Within days U.S. embassies in the Middle East and Pakistan were threatened with attack. Government buildings in Washington, D.C., went on a rare "high security alert." Vehicles entering the Pentagon were searched.

Financier of Terror
U.S. officials took the death threat seriously, sources tell Reader's Digest, because of the reputation of the main signatory: Osama bin Laden. This former Saudi businessman was virtually unknown to Western intelligence agencies until just a few years ago, but today the U.S. State Department considers him a significant sponsor of world terrorism. Evidence points to his connection to persons suspected of numerous acts of violence, including:

Bin Laden is a pariah in many Islamic countries, but he operates with impunity from a base in Afghanistan. Using huge financial resources, he supports international terrorist networks, encouraging others to act while never pulling a trigger or detonating a bomb himself. Tall and thin, with a full beard, Osama bin Laden wears long, flowing Arab robes fringed with gold, and wraps his head in a traditional red-and-white checkered headdress. Those who have met him say he is soft-spoken and extremely courteous. Despite his apparent humility, he has become an almost mythic figure in the Islamic world because he has dared to stand up to two superpowers.

Bin Laden, now about 43 years old, is one of some 65 children of a Saudi construction magnate. When family patriarch Mohammad bin Laden died in the late 1960s, his children inherited a financial empire that today is worth an estimated $10 billion. The Saudi bin Laden Group is now run by Osama's family, which has publicly said it does not condone his reported activities.

In November 1996 Palestinian journalist Abdelbari Atwan visited bin Laden in the mountains of Afghanistan, expecting to find the lavish camp of a man of wealth. Instead, he spent two nights sleeping next to bin Laden in a cave. "It was freezing," Atwan says. "I reached under my camp bed hoping to find an extra blanket. Instead, it was crammed with Kalashnikov rifles and mortar bombs." What drove bin Laden to take up arms? Those who know him agree: a burning faith that sees the world in simplistic terms as a struggle between righteous Islam and a doomed West. It is a worldview taught to many young Saudis. But the teachings struck a particular chord in bin Laden, reverberating with his seeming passion for danger.

Afghan Arabs
Enraged when the Soviet Union invaded Muslim Afghanistan in December 1979, bin Laden went there to aid the mujahedin freedom fighters, providing food and weapons, much of it with family money. A Saudi official says bin Laden helped to recruit thousands of Arabs who volunteered for the jihad (holy war) against the Soviets. Early in the war the mujahedin were getting slaughtered by Soviet helicopter gunships as they tried to bring in supplies on mules across the mountain passes of northern Afghanistan. bin Laden volunteered the services of the family construction firm to blast new roads through the mountains. "He brought huge bulldozers," says London-based Khaled Fuawaz, a former bin Laden associate. According to Fuawaz, when bin Laden could not find drivers willing to face the Soviet gunships, he drove the bulldozers himself. One time he was attacked by Soviet helicopters and wounded. Bin Laden poured millions of dollars of his family's cash into the war, with the blessing of the Saudi government. He also personally led a contingent of Arab troops, winning a key victory against the Soviets in 1986. By the time the Soviet Union had pulled out of Afghanistan in February 1989, bin Laden was leading a fighting force known as Afghan Arabs, which numbered nearly 20,000. "Bin Laden was like a head of state," says a Saudi dissident. "The Afghan Arabs had a romantic image of him."

Hero to Outlaw
Bin Laden viewed any Western presence in the Middle East as a threat to Islam. After Iraq's August 1990 invasion of Kuwait, Reader's Digest has learned, bin Laden met with Saudi Defense Minister Prince Sultan to offer his services to the Desert Storm operation—but only if the United States were not involved. "Bin Laden spread out maps in front of Prince Sultan," a Saudi official says. "He had all kinds of plans for how to defeat the Iraqis without American help. Prince Sultan asked what he planned to do about the Iraqi tanks, aircraft and chemical and biological weapons. bin Laden said, 'We will defeat them with our faith.' " The Saudi government declined his offer, and bin Laden later moved to Sudan—but not before he cashed out of the family business, receiving an estimated $260 million. It is this fortune that he uses today to prime the terrorist pump.

In 1992 bin Laden's attention appears to have been directed against Egypt. That year, Reader's Digest has been told, an extremist group with financial ties to bin Laden sent a fax to Egypt threatening the government of President Hosni Mubarak, America's closest Arab ally.

"Bin Laden focused on Egypt," says a former spokesman for President Mubarak, Mohammad Abdul Moneim, "because he knew that if Egypt fell to the Islamists, the whole Arab world would fall." bin Laden, says the U.S. State Department, was the key financier behind a camp providing terrorist training to the Egyptian group. Its members, whose spiritual leader was the blind Egyptian cleric Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, opposed not only Mubarak but also Westerners—particularly Americans.

Members of the group slaughtered 58 foreign tourists visiting a temple at Luxor in November 1997. A U.S. diplomat in Cairo told Reader's Digest that the planner of the attack "would have loved to get Americans" but failed. Most of those killed were Swiss. Bin Laden hasn't limited his efforts to the Middle East. There is evidence linking him to Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and to other terrorists who planned attacks on American soil. Sources tell Reader's Digest that the federal government is investigating bin Laden's involvement.

Making Connections
Edwin Angeles, a leader of a radical Islamic group in the Philippines who became a government informant, says that Yousef and bin Laden were linked at least as long ago as 1989. In that year, Yousef went to the Philippines and introduced himself as an emissary of Osama bin Laden, sent to support that country's radical Islamic movement. One of Yousef's main contacts in Manila, according to Angeles, was Saudi businessman Mohammad Jamal Khalifah, bin Laden's brother-in-law. After participating in the Trade Center bombing, Yousef returned to the Philippines, where he plotted to plant bombs aboard U.S. passenger airliners in 1995.

In New York City, Sheik Rahman and others plotted attacks on major bridges and tunnels. During Rahman's 1995 trial, prosecutors included bin Laden on a list of nonindicted persons who "may be alleged as co-conspirators," though bin Laden has not been charged.

While living in Sudan, bin Laden established a construction company employing many of his former Afghan fighters. In the spring of 1996, according to Pakistani government officials, one of bin Laden's bodyguards attempted to assassinate him. After the attempt failed, bin Laden flew to Afghanistan on board his unmarked, private C-130 military transport plane. There, according to Pakistani officials, bin Laden established a base southwest of Jalalabad, under the protection of the Afghan government. A few weeks after the attempt on bin Laden's life, a powerful explosion ripped through the Khobar Towers complex near Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killing 19 U.S. servicemen. bin Laden, who called this "a laudable kind of terrorism," publicly denied participating. But a knowledgeable Saudi dissident in London has told Reader's Digest that the six men whom the Saudi government arrested for the bombing all trained in Afghanistan. "If they trained there," declared the dissident, "they have a connection to bin Laden." In August 1996, and later in November, bin Laden announced that he and his followers would stage terrorist attacks against U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia to force an American withdrawal. The Digest has learned that after bin Laden called for this jihad, as many as eight attacks against U.S. military targets in the Middle East were attempted. These were foiled by an intense Saudi intelligence effort, which included enticing a top financial aide to bin Laden to defect.

Today, the State Department says, terrorist organizations that have received support from bin Laden continue to operate around the world. In March 1998 Brussels police arrested seven men and confiscated a cache of explosives. The men are believed to be part of the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), which is responsible for the slaughter of thousands in Algeria over the last six years. One knowledgeable source says GIA has received financial support from bin Laden. In May, eight suspected GIA members were arrested in London.

Sheik Omar Bakri Muhammad, a religious scholar in London with ties to bin Laden, told The Digest that bin Laden is funding armed Muslim groups in Albania, Chechnya, Bosnia, Nigeria and Algeria. "We are sending British and American Muslims to train in camps run by bin Laden," Bakri says. "This is an international army—Mohammed's army—to combat occupying governments."

The Coming Crusade
The groups obeying bin Laden are hard to track down and difficult to penetrate. "These small groups, which may be just five or ten persons, can never be eradicated," says Saad al-Faghi, a Saudi dissident living in London. "They believe they belong to the jihad, not by command but by faith. They are very dangerous." Today bin Laden lives in Afghanistan with three wives and 42 other Arab families in a 30-house complex. Reader's Digest has been told that bin Laden has bought heavy weapons on the black market and is training new fighters at his camp in the north. He is also seeking to widen his alliances. The February 1998 London fatwa against Americans was issued under the banner of the International Islamic Front and signed by radical Islamic leaders in Egypt, Bangladesh and Pakistan. Bin Laden's coldblooded invitation to murder is taken seriously by American diplomats. "If they want to attack us, they can," says a U.S. diplomat in Pakistan. "We're all soft targets." But U.S. officials are not the only ones at risk. In November 1997, for example, four American oil-company workers were gunned down in Pakistan. The murders were just two days after the conviction in a Fairfax, Virginia, court of Pakistani Mir Aimal Kasi, who went on a 1993 shooting spree outside CIA headquarters, killing two CIA employees. For more than a decade, bin Laden has reached across the world, funding terrorism. As his money flows, so does innocent blood.

"Having borne arms against the Russians in Afghanistan," bin Laden has declared, "we think our battle with the Americans will be easy by comparison. We are now more determined to carry on until we see the face of God." "Bin Laden has plenty of manpower and explosives," declares Saad al-Faghi. And the world has learned that when a pronouncement is uttered in the name of Osama bin Laden, the threat is anything but idle.

His fresh article:

What We Knew…and Didn't Do
			Posted by optimistically_conservative On News/Activism 04/17/2004 7:14:38 PM EDT with 12 comments Reader's Digest ^ \| April 13, 2004 \| Kenneth Timmerman In 1997-1998, I became aware of clearly observable warnings of hostile terrorist intentions against America, by Osama bin Laden. For over eighteen months -- as part of an investigation for Reader's Digest -- I had been learning from a variety of former U.S. intelligence officers and foreign sources about a vast, world wide network of Islamist radicals, who had emerged from the U.S.-backed war to drive the Soviet Union from Afghanistan. At their head was the shadowy Saudi renegade, Osama bin Laden, whom his followers referred to as the "Prince of Jihad." What made bin Laden unusual was his background....

While the death of any US soldier is a horrendous loss, we have to remember that for over a decade now, US diplomats, missionaries, business people, etc., have been losing their lives around the world to these same people.

It's nice to see the media's concern for every soldier lost in Iraq...but maybe if the media paid as much attention to these US citizens who were losing their lives, we could've took the enemy more serious. Lives are expected to be lost in a time of war; the fact that we were losing them in a time of supposed peace...and the media didn't care, then, tells you something about the media.

It's because they are cynical in their overwhelming desire to defeat Bush..

Despite my disagreement with isolationists, I see more good points in their argument from the right against the war in Iraq (it is not our business, lets them kill themselves, let's get out of there and kick them out of here) than from the left. This war is all about draining terrorism swamp by bringing classical liberal values to Middle East. Even if only some of them stick, it's great. We don't have to make Vermont out of Iraq to succeed in disrupting the quiet business of nurturing terrorism, and we killed many bad guys in the process.

I am sure that if President Gore did everything exactly the same as President Bush did (we can do this mental exercise), we'd have no anti-war movement of any significance.

I'd like to express my appreciation for both your comments.

I have been incensed at the left, not for their dissent, but for the blatant hypocrisy of their dissent.

From Garofalo's, "It wasn't hip" lack of concern during the Clinton wars to Hillary's "Not one American soldier had died in Haiti." and Rangel's "we didn't lose one member of the armed forces. Not anyone was injured. Not by accident." to DeGenova's "The only true heroes are those who find ways that help defeat the U.S. military," and "I personally would like to see a million Mogadishus." to Moore's "that majority must now sacrifice their children until enough blood has been let that maybe -- just maybe -- God and the Iraqi people will forgive us in the end."

I have clearly understood the left only sees the military as expendable political tools whether subordinate to their CINC, or for political smearing when not.

A classic example of a leftist recognizing this is Ron Silver's journey from "Those are our planes now" to post-9/11 war supporter.

The difference in dissent is stark:

One of Bill Clinton's first major acts as president was to deploy US Marines to Haiti in order to restore Jean Bertrand Aristide, their first democratically-elected left wing dictator, to power. I wholeheartedly disagreed with this operation. I don't think the entire island of Haiti is worth the life of one US Marine. That being said, the second that the decision was made to deploy the troops I completely dropped my objection and got behind the game. I hoped that the troops would get there, kill anyone that needed killing, accomplish their objective as quickly as possible, and come home victorious. Never, in a million years, would I have hoped for US troops to die simply so I could point my fingers at Bill Clinton and say, "I told you so."

The anti-American left exists. It is distinct from the patriotic isolationists.

Thanks. These liberals who get joy in seeing our soldiers die so they can bash Bush, are some the sickest people on this planet. Someone needs to tell Charlie Rangel that while no soldiers may have died in "Clinton's Wars," no peace was won, either. Haiti and Kosovo are bigger messes today because Clinton didn't have the personal courage to fullfil his obligations he made when he committed action to those countries. Which also means that more American men and women may die in the future to really fix those problems.

You'd also think that Charlie would understand that bombing someone from 15,000 feet is alot different from fighting someone from 50 feet. One president took his committment seriously...regardless of the political fallout, because it was more important to resolve the conflict, now...instead of having to fight it again in the future. For liberals to give Clinton credit for no US deaths when the very tactic taken in Kosovo lead to more civilian deaths, again, just shows their hypocrisy. Ironically, we are losing more people now in Clinton's so-called peaceful Kosovo, than we did during his war. These are really some sick people.

the so-called incriminating memo is notable mainly for its confirmation of the woeful state of US intelligence. The mention of "media reports" in the first sentence is a sly admission that you could have found out all the stuff in this "classified" briefing by reading the papers. If you'd read [this] piece by Kenneth Timmerman in the July 1998 Reader's Digest, you'd have been much more informed. Mark Steyn: Stop Whimpering, We're in a Battle the so-called incriminating memo is notable mainly for its confirmation of the woeful state of US intelligence. The mention of "media reports" in the first sentence is a sly admission that you could have found out all the stuff in this "classified" briefing by reading the papers. If you'd read [this] piece by Kenneth Timmerman in the July 1998 Reader's Digest, you'd have been much more informed.
Mark Steyn: Stop Whimpering, We're in a Battle
The Telegraph ^ | April 20, 2004 | Mark Steyn

Problem is, Charlie's wrong. And it's not just SFC Cardott in Haiti. Just to be clear, the media is reporting every death in Iraq, including accident and illness.

Calendar Year	Active Duty*	Full-Time Guard+Reserve (est)	Selected Reserve FTE**	Total Military FTE	Total Deaths	Accident	Hostile Action	Homicide	Illness	Pending	Self Inflicted	Terrorist Attack	Undetermined
1993	1,675,269	68,500	105,768	1,849,537	1,213	632		86	221		236	29	9
1994	1,581,649	65,000	99,833	1,746,482	1,075	544		83	206		232		10
1995	1,502,343	65,000	94,585	1,661,928	1,040	538		67	174		250	7	4
1996	1,456,266	65,000	92,044	1,613,310	974	527	1	52	173		188	19	14
1997	1,418,773	65,000	90,222	1,573,995	817	433		42	170		159		13
1998	1,381,034	65,000	88,149	1,534,183	826	445		25	168	10	161	3	14
1999	1,367,838	65,000	87,092	1,519,930	795	436		37	149	13	145		15
2000	1,372,352	65,000	86,524	1,523,876	774	400		31	124	42	142	17	18

Good find. Thanks.

As much as we can wish for a therapeutic war, it just does not exist.

War should be avoided. But when we get to it, there is no substitute for decisive actions and convincing victory.

Selective reporting is as old as journalism itself. If EVERY death on the highways was counted on EVERY news network, we'd stop driving.

Here is CIA's statistics. They maybe wanting in covert intelligence, but they are superb in the general data collection: http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/rankorder/2066rank.html

The death rate of population in USA 2003 est about 8 per 1000 people. Data from the table you posted varies at the level of 0.5 to 0.66 death per 1000 military personnel.

Yes, I know, the comparing of total population to the healthiest group is not quite right, still we talking about the high risk occupation.

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