Al Qaeda Organization

U.S. authorities warned the public Thursday to be on the lookout for five Al Qaeda operatives who taped messages of martyrdom and may have been planning terrorist acts against the United States. U.S. soldiers recently found videotapes of the men's suicide messages in the rubble of a top Osama bin Laden lieutenant's home in Afghanistan, suggesting a closer link than previously thought between Bin Laden and his foot soldiers.

The young assassins prowled Khartoum's streets for hours on New Year's Eve, looking for Westerners on the way home from parties. They stopped a Land Cruiser but released it after seeing two children in the back seat. Another foreigner was let go because he was the "wrong" nationality, said Khartoum state Gov. Abdul Halim Mutaafi. "They wanted Americans or British," he said.

Five years ago, as 19 Al Qaeda operatives in the United States put the finishing touches on what would become the Sept. 11 attacks, a frail, asthmatic computer engineer from South Florida paid a visit to this tiny Muslim enclave where he'd lived as a boy. Adnan Gulshair Muhammad el Shukrijumah, then 25, kept a low profile over the course of the week. He hung out with a small circle of devout older men who were leaders of the local Islamic community.

These are excerpts from the findings of the commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks. Who Is the Enemy? Who is this enemy that created an organization capable of inflicting such horrific damage on the United States? We now know that these attacks were carried out by various groups of Islamist extremists. The 9/11 attack was driven by Osama bin Laden.

Sometimes he calls himself Mike, sometimes Abu Saad. He speaks several languages and has traveled through much of the Islamic world. His specialty: blowing things up, especially public buildings crowded with people. Now he sits in a concrete cell at the national police headquarters in Manila. Investigators suspect that he is linked to Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda organization.

We are inclined to see terrorists as fiends, wild-eyed expressions of evil, diabolical but two-dimensional figures whose faces briefly flash on news broadcasts or populate Hollywood movies. To portray them as human beings runs risks. Any attempt to understand terrorists' motivations could be seen as an excuse for their actions. The Sept. 11 attacks were clearly monstrous. What about the monsters who carried them out?

President Bush said in his Sept. 11 speech that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and other suspected Al Qaeda terrorist leaders now in custody had provided valuable information to the CIA "that has helped stop attacks in America and across the world." But he didn't specify which attacks had been stopped, or how. Here are questions and answers about terrorist plots discovered by CIA interrogators. Question: Which foiled attacks was the president referring to?

He can't drive. He can't tie his shoes. He can't count past 11 or remember your name. He lives next to the Brighton Beach boardwalk and can smell the salty summer air, but he must strain to see the ocean. His left eye is gone; sight in the other is half what it was. He gets by on a wheelchair and a walker. A stroke during his recovery left his right side all but useless, his hand permanently twisted. Because he can't read, at night he turns on the television, to a music channel.

The last of the "Lackawanna Six" pleaded guilty in federal court Monday to providing "material support" to Al Qaeda, bringing to a sudden close one of the most sensational terrorism cases involving American citizens -- without any defendant standing trial or the government ever having to prove that the men were part of a sleeper cell.

The Al Qaeda terrorist organization maintains an aggressive network of underground "sleeper" cells in the United States and is trying to smuggle even more terrorists into the country by having them pose as ordinary visitors, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft said Thursday. "Today the United States is at war with a terrorist network operating within our borders," Ashcroft testified before a congressional panel on homeland security.