Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US

In the wake of the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, government authorities, Congress, and the public wanted to know whether the U.S. intelligence community and President George W. Bush had had any warning of the attacks and whether steps could have been taken to prevent them. Those who later concluded that the attacks were the result of intelligence failures and a lack of a sense of urgency on the president's part point to the record of an intelligence briefing the president received on August 6, 2001, a little more than a month before the attacks. This document was declassified and made public on April 10, 2004, at the urging of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, commonly referred to as the 9/11 Commission. Supporters of the president, who had been in office less than seven months, argued that the document was vague and that it indicated that investigations were under way—and thus that there was little more the administration could have done to prevent the attacks.

The document focuses on the Islamic terrorist network al Qaeda (spelled “Al-Qa'ida” in the briefing) and its elusive leader, Osama bin Laden (spelled “Ladin”). Bin Laden, born in 1957 in Saudi Arabia, had since at least the 1990s been an outspoken proponent of jihad against the West and particularly against the United States and Israel. He has been implicated in numerous terrorist attacks around the world, most notably the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and he was almost certainly the mastermind behind the attacks of September 11. Since then, he has been perhaps the world's most wanted man, although he was on the FBI's ten most-wanted list as early as 1999. It is generally believed that as of late 2010 he was in hiding somewhere along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, though there is also widespread—but unconfirmed—speculation that he is dead.