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Tenacious terrorism(附图)
http://www.sina.com.cn 2003/05/19 10:07  上海英文星报

  WASHINGTON - Al Qaeda was probably behind the deadly explosions in Saudi Arabia, showing that Osama bin Laden's network can still attack Americans despite intense US efforts to destroy it.

  US terrorism experts said last Tuesday that while it was too early to definitely pin the massive, co-ordinated car bombings in Riyadh on al Qaeda, the operation bore the characteristics of thesgroupsblamed for the September 11, 2001, attacks on the US.

  "It says to me that they are alive and well. Some of the top management may have been captured and a lot of the troops may be dispersed, but al Qaeda lives," said Congresswoman Jane Harman, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.

  "If it can mount this kind of attack in Saudi Arabia, it can mount this kind of attack in Europe or America."

  Simultaneous attacks are a hallmark of suspected al Qaeda operations, officials said. On September 11, four airliners were hijacked and crashed, killing 3,000 people. In 1998 there were co-ordinated bombings of two US embassies in East Africa.

  "You have to make sure, but it is very, very likely al Qaeda," a US official said.

  After September 11, the US launched a war on terrorism to destroy bin Laden, al Qaeda and their allies. The US military bombed and went into Afghanistan, but bin Laden escaped.

  It was unclear whether thesgroupsthat conducted the Saudi bombings received orders from bin Laden. But a former top US intelligence official said the attack would probably have happened regardless of bin Laden's role.

  Level of rage

  "I think after our invasion of Iraq, I suspect the level of rage among Arab extremists is so high that it would not have taken an Osama bin Laden, there are enough other terrorist leaders in the region," he said. "He could have been behind it, but if Osama bin Laden were dead it probably would have happened also."

  More than 3,000 al Qaeda related suspects have been rounded up and about half of the top two dozen leaders killed or captured, US officials say.

  The Saudi bombings show how hard it is to uncover the precise information that could prevent an attack because communications among terrorism suspects picked up by spy agencies is rarely specific.

  US intelligence agencies knew something was up. They had collected threat information that prompted the State Department to issue a May 1 advisory against travel to Saudi Arabia.

  And last week Saudi authorities were pursuing 19 al Qaeda members after a shoot-out with security forces in Riyadh. One of the compounds bombed was just hundreds of yards from where that al Qaeda cell had operated, a US official said.

  "There was certainly warning of imminent attacks against Americans in Saudi Arabia," Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts said.

  "Plans were being made, the decision to attack had been made, and the attack was imminent. The reports did not get specific enough to say who, when and where." US spy agencies must improve in acquiring on extremists, he said.

  The war on terrorism's clamp down may actually have forced al Qaeda to focus more on "softer and unprotected" targets such as the Saudi housing compounds, Roberts said.

  "These problems are not going to go away in the foreseeable future. We can minimize them, but it is like trying to prevent storms - you can deal with natural catastrophes, you can get much better at coping with them, but you can't prevent them all," said Anthony Cordesman, a Middle East specialist at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.




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