A Quote by Peter Bergen
The special reverence that al Qaeda had for Sheikh Rahman was underlined by a two-hour propaganda videotape that the group's media division released in the spring of 2001, when the 9/11 attacks were in their final planning phase.
Related Quotes
Sheikh Rahman's fatwa was the first time that anyone associated with al Qaeda had given religious sanction to attacks on American aviation, shipping and economic targets.
The American incarceration of Sheikh Rahman was a hot-button issue for al Qaeda for many years.
While it may be true that the UAE has been an ally since the September 11, 2001, attacks, the American people know it has also harbored and aided some of the al Qaeda agents who were involved in that attack.
Al-Qaeda, which means 'the base' in English, lost its base and training camps in Afghanistan, while its leaders were on the run, captured, or dead. One year after the 9/11 attacks, al-Qaeda was still on life support.
If you don't understand what al Qaeda was trying to do on 9/11, if you don't have a sense of who Osama bin Laden is as a person, if you don't have a sense of what al Qaeda, the organization, was on 9/11, 9/11 appears to be more or less inexplicable.
When Abu Zubaydah was shown a series of photos of al Qaeda members by Soufan, he identified one of them as the operational commander of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
If al-Qaeda had not had a home in Afghanistan, maybe 9/11 would never have taken place. God forbid if al-Qaeda gets another strong foothold in Afghanistan.
Well, our position, and our chairman has talked about this extensively, is that we had a lot of intelligence prior to 9/11. We knew that two al Qaeda operatives who ultimately participated in the 9/11 disaster were in the United States. We didn't find them.
It was Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda who attacked the U.S. on September 11, 2001, not Saddam Hussein and Iraq.
The blame for the 9/11 attacks lays squarely and exclusively with the Al-Qaeda network.
The attacks of September 11 were made possible, in part, by the fact that U.S. law enforcement had a bias that 'rich Saudis are safe Arabs.' Al Qaeda understood that bias and relied on it to operate freely in the United States for years, even when the terrorists were engaged in activities that the authorities considered suspicious.
A war on Al-Qaeda could have been won with a decisive military strike in Tora Bora during December 2001, but American fighters at Tora Bora were refused requests for more forces when they trapped Al-Qaeda there; the Pentagon was busy husbanding resources for the Iraqi invasion.
I totally disagree with the premise that al Qaeda is on the path to defeat. Quite the contrary, al Qaeda has deliberately decentralized its operations - not because of the relentless attacks we have had on its national leadership in Pakistan, but because its strategic objective is to dominate and control Muslim countries in the region.
Sheikh Rahman had a doctorate in Islamic jurisprudence from al-Azhar University in Cairo, the Harvard of Islamic thought. He also had a long history of guiding terrorist groups.
Once the attacks occur, as we learned on Sept. 11, it is too late. It makes little sense to deprive ourselves of an important, and legal, means to detect and prevent terrorist attacks while we are still in the middle of a fight to the death with al Qaeda.
'Horse Soldiers' is the untold story of how a small band of U.S. Special Forces soldiers secretly entered Afghanistan in 2001, just five weeks after September 11, saddled up on horses, and rode to an improbable victory against a vastly larger Taliban and Al Qaeda army.
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