LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Osama Bin Laden: Al Qaeda
built 200 days ago
Bin Laden regarded even American humanitarian efforts as disgraces to Muslim countries. The first terrorist attack believed to trace back to bin Laden involved the December 1992 explosion of a bomb at a hotel in Aden, Yemen. American troops, en route to Somalia for a humanitarian mission, had been staying at the hotel, but they had already left. Two Austrian tourists were killed. Almost a year later, 18 American servicemen were shot down over Mogadishu in Somalia. Bin Laden initially claimed not to be involved in the attack, yet he later admitted to an Arabic newspaper that he had played a role in training the guerrilla troops responsible for the attack.
Source:
Bin Laden and Azzam had different visions for what to do with the network they had established. Bin Laden decided to found Al Qaeda, based on personal affiliations created during the fighting in Afghanistan as well as on his own international network, reputation and access to large sums of money. The following year Azzam was assassinated. After the war ended, the Afghan-Arabs, as the mostly non-Afghan volunteers who fought the Soviets came to be known, either returned to their countries of origin or joined conflicts in Somalia, the Balkans and Chechnya. This benefited Al Qaeda’s global reach and later helped cultivate the second and third generations of Al Qaeda terrorists.
Source:
Just days before the sixth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, bin Laden issued another videotape message, his first since 2004. Intelligence experts verified the voice on the tape as that of bin Laden, and the taped message contained references to recent events. In it bin Laden railed against capitalism and global corporations as the chief cause of war and military conflict while maintaining that democracy was a failed system. Many intelligence experts... believed that bin Laden was no longer the principal leader or strategist for al-Qaeda. That distinction, they believed, belonged to his deputy, the Egyptian Ayman Muhammad al-Zawahiri.
Source:
In 1974, at the age of 18, bin Laden married his first wife (and first cousin), Najwah Ghanem. Islam permits men to take as many as four wives at one time and Bin Laden reportedly married four other women, divorcing one. He has fathered at least 24 children. Najwah, a Syrian and his mother's niece, reportedly had 11 children by bin Laden, seven of them sons, including Abdallah, Omar, Saad, and Muhammad. Saad, born in 1979, is reportedly active in an Iran-based al-Qaida network. Omar and Abdallah were reportedly organizing the U.S. branch of the World Congress of Muslim Youth in Falls Church, Virginia during the 1990s.
Source:
Despite fighting on the same side as America in the Soviet-Afghan war, Bin Laden's hatred and distain for America was manifest while he lived in Sudan. but it was actually weak and cowardly. Look at Vietnam, look at Lebanon. Whenever soldiers start coming home in body bags, Americans panic and retreat. Such a country needs only to be confronted with two or three sharp blows, then it will flee in panic, as it always has. It cannot stand against warriors of faith who do not fear death."
Source:
"Why don't President Bush and Osama bin Laden just get a room? Judging from events over the weekend, they need each other as much as they despise each other. The latest crackly tape issued by bin Laden (if it's him) confirms that al-Qaeda has no independent programme or war aims, but merely feeds off Western fears. And Bush's response - 'the bin Laden tape [shows] this is still a dangerous world' - suggests that his administration will leap on any squeak from the man on the mountain to justify the war on terror. B&B are more and more like a parasitical double act.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Al Qaeda