“The U.S. government has strong evidence from multiple sources that the suicidal terrorists who carried out yesterday’s catastrophic attacks in New York and Washington were connected to Saudi fugitive Osama bin Laden, who previously was linked to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, senior officials said.”
“One senior official said the probability that bin Laden is behind the deadly assaults is in “the high 90s,” while another U.S. official said investigators gathered evidence “strongly suggesting” that bin Laden’s organization, al Qaeda, was involved.”
“The evidence pointing to bin Laden was gathered following the attacks in a joint effort by the CIA and the FBI, with information from domestic and overseas sources, a senior official said.”
“Unprecedented in scope and sophistication, the coordinated assault on the world’s financial and political capitals caught the United States completely off guard — despite a massive intelligence and law enforcement network devoted to detecting and thwarting such attacks. With efforts focused largely on guarding against bomb threats to overseas targets, U.S. authorities conceded they were ill-prepared for hijacked jetliners purposely crashed on American soil.”
“Bin Laden, 44, an extremist Islamic militant from a wealthy Saudi family, has been defying U.S. efforts to capture or kill him for years. Since 1996, he has been living under protection of the fundamentalist Taliban regime in Afghanistan in a remote mountain redoubt. He has previously been linked to terrorists who attempted to destroy the World Trade Center in 1993. He has also been indicted for the deadly 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi and was linked to last October’s attack on the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen, which killed 17 American servicemen.”
“President Bush, addressing the nation last night, said the United States will make “no distinction” between terrorists and countries that harbor them in its hunt for those responsible in the attacks.”
“In Kabul, the Taliban’s foreign minister swiftly condemned yesterday’s attacks and rejected suggestions that bin Laden could be behind them.”
“According to the [State Department’s April 2001] report, bin Laden founded the group in the late 1980s to bring together Arabs who had fought against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and it now works to “overthrow regimes it deems non-Islamic” and expel Westerners and non-Muslims from Muslim countries.””
Read more: U.S. Intelligence Points To Bin Laden Network
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