[Reader-list] PC apparently used by al-Qaida leaders reveals details of four years of terrorism

[Harsh Kapoor]

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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