FC: Al Qaeda PC appears to reveal secrets of terrorism campaign

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

[I don't have a URL to a free version of this article. --Declan]

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PC apparently used by al-Qaida leaders reveals details of four years of 
terrorism

By Alan Cullison and Andrew Higgins
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

KABUL, Afghanistan, Dec. 31 —  Last May, someone sat down at an IBM desktop 
here and typed out a polite letter to a bitter foe of al-Qaida, the 
anti-Taliban leader Ahmed Shah Massoud. The writer tapped at the computer 
for 97 minutes, according to its internal record, then printed out the 
fruit of his labor: a request for an interview with Massoud, to be 
conducted by "one of our best journalists, Mr. Karim Touzani."

ON SEPT. 9, two men posing as journalists, one carrying a passport in the 
name of Karim Touzani, detonated a hidden bomb as they interviewed Massoud. 
The legendary Afghan commander was mortally wounded. Two days later came 
the suicide attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Now, as 
al-Qaida, the group blamed for all of those lethal attacks, is uprooted 
from its Afghan sanctuaries, it is leaving behind cyber-fingerprints. The 
letter to Massoud is one of hundreds of text documents and video files in a 
computer evidently used for four years by al-Qaida chieftains in Kabul. Its 
hard drive is a repository for correspondence with militant Muslims around 
the world, portraying al-Qaida bosses struggling to administer, inspire and 
discipline the sprawling global organization.

Dating from early 1997 through this fall, the files paint a picture of both 
ghoulish ambitions and quotidian frustrations within an organization that, 
despite its medieval zealotry, sometimes mimicked a multinational 
corporation. Memos refer to al-Qaida as "the company" and its leadership as 
"the general management."

[...]




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