OBL Archives

Fun with the newly accessible New York Times archives. The oldest reference to "al-Qaeda" (August 28, 1998) that I could find concludes with this paragraph, eerily similar, yet strikingly different from today's offerings:

At a news conference at F.B.I. headquarters, senior law enforcement and diplomatic officials here hailed the action as an important victory in the United States war against terror in large part because they had succeeded in bringing a suspect in an overseas attack from Africa into an American court within 20 days of the bombing.

See also this early think piece from September 12, 1998 where we see the first stirrings of a familiar pattern:

Two years later, after investigators tied Mr. bin Laden's group to bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed more than 250 people, including 12 Americans, Clinton Administration officials launched a cruise missile attack on his camps in Afghanistan. ''This is, unfortunately, the war of the future,'' Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright said.

Terrorism experts applauded the military action as a necessary quick response. But they said the notion of announcing a war against someone like Mr. bin Laden posed problems.

''It's unfortunate that she used the term war, because it's very misleading. Americans like their wars to be short, with no casualties, and then we kick back and watch the Super Bowl,'' said David Long, a former State Department official. ''Flu would be a better simile. Every year there's a new strain of flu, and every two or three years one is lethal. You manage it. You're not going to win the war on flu.''

You can also see from a search for "Osama bin Laden" that, somewhat contrary to the post-9/11 mythology, OBL had been fairly extensively covered in the couple of years before the attacks. Indeed, his first mention comes way back in Chris Hedges' 1994 article "Sudan Linked to Rebellion in Algeria" where the sixteenth graf of the piece, amidst a long litany of complaints about Sudan's regime, notes that "Osama Bin Laden, a wealthy Saudi financier who bankrolls Islamic militant groups from Algeria to Saudi Arabia, also lives under heavy guard in Khartoum." A 1996 note observed his relocation to Afghanistan. Blogosphere faves Jeff Gerth and Judy Miller teamed up later in '96 to write about terrorism financing and noted that "The State Department, in a detailed document made public this year, called Mr. Bin Laden 'one of the most significant financial sponsors of Islamic extremist activities in the world.'" Coverage only really heats up, however, in 1998, around the time the term "al-Qaeda" starts showing up in the press.

Comments

The flu analogy is excellent. Reminds me of this:

"And, indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperiled. He knew what these jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned by books: the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city."

Bush clearly "read" the wrong Camus book. I guess the one about killing an Arab was too tempting.

Posted by Led | September 22, 2007 12:44 PM

Fun with Time Magazine's archives. From 1993:

Monday, Oct. 04, 1993

.............

The Afghan Connection

Afghanistan was a powerful catalyst in activating fundamentalist Muslim youth, inspiring if not actually training many militants. During the 1980s, thousands of volunteers from 50 countries rallied to the rebel mujahedin. Most of them worked for relief organizations or in hospitals and schools. A few thousand actually went into the field to fight. Some returned home to cause serious trouble for their rulers. Several of those arrested in the World Trade Center bombing were veterans of the Afghan campaign. The now imprisoned Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman made at least three trips to Afghanistan during the war, and two of his sons reportedly fought there. But there is no hard evidence on how many volunteers there were...

During the war in Afghanistan, two main organizations provided a pipeline for volunteers, funding and relief workers. One was the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928, and the other was the World Muslim League, supported by Saudi Arabia. Linked to them were smaller groups of activists and influential individuals, including charismatic recruiter Abdullah Azzam, a Jordanian-born Palestinian who brought in hundreds of zealous volunteers, and his New York-based agent, Mustafa Shalabi, who ran the Alkifar Refugee Center in Brooklyn, known as "the Jihad office." Both Azzam and Shalabi were murdered in 1991. Another key figure was Saudi financier Osama bin Laden, who fought with the mujahedin himself and brought many others to the cause. Arab governments under attack by extremists often claim that the returned Afghan veterans are being directed by a central office in Afghanistan and financed by Iran. Such suspicions have not been proved.

Posted by El Cid | September 22, 2007 2:28 PM

It was horribly frustrating that the cruise missile attack on Bin Laden's camp was dismissed at the time as a 'Wag the Dog' moment aimed at managing the news cycle around the Lewinsky affair. In order to believe that you would have to believe that Clinton knew enough about the future to know that one) the deposition would happen that day and two) that Bin Laden would be in camp that same day and all in time to pre-position two attack submarines. And that the Navy would simply go along.

The whole thing was absurd. If Republicans had for an instant suppressed their partisan instincts and gotten behind the search for Bin Laden there is at least the off chance that 9/11 could have been prevented. But no, Clinton's trouser snake was clearly the higher national priority. (I still remember some wingnuts at work laughing, not suprisingly pointing out the illogic of the situation didn't penetrate.)

Posted by Bruce Webb | September 22, 2007 2:51 PM

I read them all, sorry you missed them, glad you have been able to finally read them. :-)

Try going back to following the development of the story of the 93 WTC bombing, that should yield you some interesting stuff.

BTW, Judith Miller once was not totally evil incarnate. On the eve of Bill Clinton's impeachment hearings, when every Tom Dick and Harry journalist was working any scrap they could find on the Monica angle, Judith went to the White House with William J. Broad to do an interview with Clinton in which the topic was to be the threat of Islamic terrorism, something he wanted more public awareness of. They didn't ask him about Monica, therefore no one was interested in reading it. Instead, most journalists continue to pursue the wag the dog issue over lobbing missiles at Sudan from Martha's Vineyard during the impeachment thing.

He said it was likely that there would be an attack on the U.S. in the next three years, but he was hoping to get lucky and prevent it, and that if nothing happened, he would be the happiest man on earth. He said he laid awake at night worrying about the threat of a germ attack, he thought that have the
worst consequences. Here it is:

CLINTON DESCRIBES TERRORISM THREAT FOR 21ST CENTURY
By JUDITH MILLER AND WILLIAM J. BROAD
Published: January 22, 1999

Posted by artappraiser | September 22, 2007 3:13 PM

I'm almost sure that there was a WaPo article around the time Clinton left office that described hisprioritization of terrorism, and quoted some expert as saying that he spent too much time on Osama bin Laden. No Lexis, so I can't test that hypothesis...

Posted by Elvis Elvisberg | September 22, 2007 3:47 PM

Moammar Qaddafi in Libya was Osama's first state-level enemy.

Miller co-authored the book "Germs", in which Clinton looks very good. I have no idea what happened to the lady.

Posted by John Emerson | September 23, 2007 1:08 AM