Chaingang -> RE: Al Queda warns Muslims to evacuate USA??? (9/24/2006 3:34:26 PM)
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My view may be controversial, but I don't think it can be dismissed out of hand. See: ----- Al-Qaeda has no clear structure, and this permits debate as to how many members make up the organization, whether it is millions scattered across the globe, or whether it is even zero. According to the controversial BBC documentary The Power of Nightmares, al-Qaeda is so weakly linked together that it is hard to say it exists apart from Osama bin Laden and a small clique of close associates. The lack of any significant numbers of convicted al-Qaeda members despite a large number of arrests on terrorism charges is cited by the documentary as a reason to doubt whether a widespread entity that meets the description of al-Qaeda exists at all. The extent and nature of al-Qaeda remains a topic of dispute. The al-Qaeda name itself does not seem to have been used by bin Laden himself to apply to his organization until after the September 11 attacks. Previous attacks attributed to bin Laden and al-Qaeda were, at the time, claimed by organizations under a variety of names. Bin Laden himself has since attributed the al-Qaeda name to the MAK base in Pakistan, dating from the Afghan war days. Daniel Benjamin in "The Age of Sacred Terror" cites an incident in the early 1990s where a document titled "The Foundation", Arabic "Al-Qa'eda", was found on an associate of Ramzi Youssef [5]. Fawaz A. Gerges writes that "Although in 1987 sheikh Abdullah Azzam, the spiritual father of the Afghan Arabs, planted the seeds of a trans-nationalist organization called 'Al Qaeda al-Sulbah' (the Solid Foundation), the bin Laden network saw the light much later, around the mid-1990s."[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Qaida ----- Once you realize how loosely defined the whole thing is it starts to fall apart quite quickly. If you accept that Osama bin Laden is the head of this organization, you have an even bigger problem. You do realize that we have no idea of whether OBL is even alive or dead, right? What does that do to their supposed leadership? Right - no one knows because no one really understands what AQ even is - not even the people that argue for its existence. Pretty funny really. If we were talking about ANY OTHER THING and I provided you with this little evidence to support the existence of someone or something you would think I was literally insane.
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