Al Qaeda Organization

Iraq's most influential newspaper is denying U.S. accusations that Baghdad has links with the Al Qaeda terrorist network, saying Saturday that the allegations are a "stupid new American ploy." The denial in Babel, the newspaper published by President Saddam Hussein's eldest son, Uday, came after top U.S. officials including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney alleged links between Iraq and Al Qaeda, which Washington blames for the Sept. 11 attacks.

Before he was the Yemen-based editor of the English-language online magazine for Al Qaeda's branch in the Arabian peninsula, Samir Khan was a radical young Muslim blogger in North Carolina. Khan, 25, a skilled propagandist, wrote virulently pro-Al Qaeda blog posts while a student at a community college in Charlotte. As a teenager, he posted blogs championing holy war from his parents' home on suburban Tradition View Drive in a modern Charlotte subdivision. Khan was one of two American citizens killed by a U.S. drone strike in Yemen, American and Yemeni officials announced Friday.

Undercutting new assertions by President Bush, a top U.S. intelligence official testified Wednesday that Al Qaeda's organization in Iraq is overwhelmingly composed of fighters from that country, and that the terrorist network's ability to operate in Pakistan poses the greater danger to the United States.

A Chicago taxi driver was arrested Friday on charges that he provided material support to Al Qaeda by trying to send money overseas, federal authorities said. Raja Lahrasib Khan, 56, was arrested in downtown Chicago while working, authorities said. Khan was charged with two counts of providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization and could face up to 15 years on each count. Federal prosecutors said there did not appear to be any imminent threat, though Khan had spoken with an associate about wanting to bomb a stadium.

U.S. officials scrambled Sunday for conclusive evidence that they have captured one of Osama bin Laden's top commanders, and began the process of interrogating the man for information about Al Qaeda terrorist plots that may already be underway.

The FBI, acting on information from a captured senior aide to Osama bin Laden, warned banks and financial institutions throughout the Northeast on Friday that they face the threat of terrorist attacks.

Is it conceivable that Al Qaeda, as defined by President Bush as the center of a vast and well-organized international terrorist conspiracy, does not exist? To even raise the question amid all the officially inspired hysteria is heretical, especially in the context of the U.S. media's supine acceptance of administration claims relating to national security.

Saudi Arabia remains the world's leading source of money for Al Qaeda and other extremist networks and has failed to take key steps requested by U.S. officials to stem the flow, the Bush administration's top financial counter-terrorism official said Tuesday. Stuart A.

The band of terrorists who survived the battle for Tora Bora came down the mountain on donkeys Monday, dazed and sick and wounded, hands tied behind their backs with red nylon, their eyes to the ground. There were 18 of them--nine Arabs and nine Afghans. They were young and bearded and caked in dirt. They rode with slumped shoulders. Some cried. Village men and boys lined the dirt track along the way but said nothing as the nameless faces of Osama bin Laden's shattered army passed by.

Before the wins and losses are tallied up and the war on terror goes down in the books as either wisdom or folly, it might be recalled what took place this spring on the 13th floor of the federal courthouse in Sacramento. There, in a perfectly dignified room, in front of prosecutors, defense attorneys and judge, a tall, gaunt man named James Wedick Jr.

A senior Al Qaeda operative being hunted in the December bombing of a U.S. base used by the CIA in Afghanistan was among those killed in a missile strike in Pakistan's tribal area, U.S. officials said Wednesday. Hussein Yemeni, an Al Qaeda bomb expert and trainer, is believed to have been among more than a dozen people killed in the strike last week in Miram Shah, the largest town in North Waziristan, the officials said. Yemeni is thought to have had a major planning role in the Dec. 30 suicide bombing in Afghanistan that killed seven CIA employees and contractors and a Jordanian intelligence officer, a counter-terrorism official said.

Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden claimed responsibility for the Christmas Day attempt to blow up an American commercial jet in an audiotape broadcast Sunday on Arab television. U.S. intelligence officials quickly raised doubts about Bin Laden's role and suggested the statement was an attempt to score propaganda points for a plot already claimed by an increasingly independent faction of his movement in Yemen. In the clip, Bin Laden said his group was behind the failed attempt allegedly carried out by Nigerian national Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to blow up a Detroit-bound Northwest Airlines flight.

U.S. officials believe that as many as three dozen Americans who converted to Islam while in prison in the United States have traveled to Yemen over the last year, possibly to be trained by Al Qaeda, according to a Senate report. The findings have alarmed U.S. counter-terrorism officials, who think that Al Qaeda has expanded its recruitment efforts in Yemen "to attract nontraditional followers" capable of carrying out more ambitious operations. The report by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee underscores the growing anxiety in the United States about the Al Qaeda offshoot, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which has claimed responsibility for orchestrating the suspected attempted suicide bombing of a U.S. jetliner bound for Detroit from Amsterdam on Christmas Day. "The Christmas Day plot was a nearly catastrophic illustration of a significant new threat from a network previously regarded as a regional danger, rather than an international one," the report concluded.

One of Al Qaeda's top military strategists in Yemen was reportedly killed Friday along with five other militants in airstrikes targeting two vehicles in the country's northeastern mountains, according to officials and news agencies. The operation by the Yemeni air force was the latest in a string of attacks on Al Qaeda strongholds and the terrorist network's key operatives. The government, which has been guided by U.S. intelligence in the past, has yet to capture or kill the group's two leaders, but Friday's strikes were an indication that Al Qaeda faces increasing pressure.

Yemeni special forces killed a suspected Al Qaeda leader and captured four fighters as the country increased pressure on the militant network operating in several key tribal provinces, officials said Wednesday. Yemen's government, juggling a civil war in the north and a secessionist movement in the south, had been slow to react to a widening Al Qaeda threat. Its stepped-up raids come amid international concern over the country's ability to defeat a branch of Yemeni and Saudi fighters that has claimed responsibility for the failed Christmas Day attack on a Northwest airliner.

President Obama says he has no intention of sending American troops to Yemen or Somalia. Obama told People magazine in an interview to be published Friday that he still believes the center of Al Qaeda activity is along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. "I never rule out any possibility in a world that is this complex," Obama said. However, he said, "in countries like Yemen, in countries like Somalia, I think working with international partners is most effective at this point."

A year ago, Sunni Arab fighter Abu Abed led an improbable revolt against Al Qaeda in Iraq. As he killed its leaders and burned down hide-outs, he became a symbol of a new group called the Sons of Iraq -- the man who dared to stand up to the extremists in Baghdad when it still ranked as a suicidal act. Today, Abu Abed is chain-smoking cigarettes in Amman, betrayed by his best friend, on the run from a murder investigation in his homeland.

An audio recording attributed to Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden offered rewards in gold Thursday for the killing of top U.S. and U.N. officials in Iraq or of the citizens of any nation fighting there. The 20-minute recording, dated Thursday, appeared on two websites known for militant Islamic messages. The voice sounded like that of Bin Laden and the words were filled with Koranic verse, but the authenticity of the recording could not immediately be verified.

A Pakistani television station aired a video Saturday allegedly showing the suicide bomber who hit a CIA outpost in Afghanistan telling the Pakistani Taliban leader that he had shared U.S. and Jordanian intelligence secrets with fellow militants. He also urged militants to strike other U.S. targets in retaliation for the killing of the leader's predecessor last year in a U.S. missile strike. Although its veracity could not be immediately determined, the video is a powerful recruiting tool and its content potentially embarrassing to the U.S. spy agency.

The suicide bomber who carried out an attack on a CIA firebase in Afghanistan detonated the device as he was about to be searched and used an explosive so powerful that it killed agency operatives who were as far as 50 feet away, a U.S. intelligence official said Friday. The details shed new light on how the attacker, a Jordanian physician thought to possess valuable intelligence on Al Qaeda's inner circle, was able to kill seven CIA employees and contractors and his Jordanian handler and injure six others despite a heavy security presence at the base.