WASHINGTON - 05.23.01 | U.S. Representative Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) today organized a letter signed by more than 100 of her colleagues, including Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) and Democratic Leader Dick Gephardt (D-MO), calling on President Bush to intervene on behalf of Afghanistan's Hindu minority. Afghanistan's Taliban government is planning to force Hindu residents and other religious minorities to wear labels on their clothes to differentiate them from Muslim citizens.

"The action of the Taliban toward Afghanistan's Hindu minority is disturbingly reminiscent of Nazi Germany's treatment of the Jews. The United States has a responsibility as the world leader to speak up now and to demand an immediate end to this policy, before it's too late," said Schakowsky.

May 23, 2001

The Honorable George W. Bush
President of the United States
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20500

Dear President Bush:

We are writing to you today because we are extremely concerned after hearing news reports which indicate that the Taliban leadership in Afghanistan plans to force Afghan Hindus to wear labels on their clothing to differentiate them from Muslims. We urge you to immediately take steps that will convince the Taliban to withdraw this proposal.

History has shown over and over that segregation of this kind can lead to genocide. This action alone is enough to raise that specter. Afghanistan is also the source of disturbing reports of persecution of religious minorities and women in particular, making this recent news all the more troubling.

News reports also indicated that the policy was justified by Taliban officials as a way to protect the Hindu population in that country. We believe this action will be counter-productive to that goal. As the leader of the free world, our nation has a solemn obligation to lead in opposition to such dangerous plans. We urge you to immediately fulfill that obligation.

We appreciate your consideration of our request, and look forward to your response.

Houston Chronicle. June 4, 1992. "Federal authorities are investigating the activities of a Houston businessman -- a past investor in companies controlled by a son of President Bush -- who has been accused of illegally representing Saudi interests in the United States.

The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network -- known as FinCEN -- and the FBI are reviewing accusations that entrepreneur James R. Bath guided money to Houston from Saudi investors who wanted to influence U.S. policy under the Reagan and Bush administrations, sources close to the investigations say. FinCEN, a division of the U.S. Department of Treasury, investigates money laundering. Special agents and analysts from various law enforcement agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Customs Service, are assigned to work with the FinCEN staff.

"The federal review stems in part from court documents obtained through litigation by Bill White, a former real estate business associate of Bath . White contends the documents indicate that the Saudis were using Bath and their huge financial resources to influence U.S. policy. Such representation by Bath would require that he be registered as a foreign agent with the U.S. Department of Justice. In general, people required by law to be registered are those who represent a foreign entity seeking to influence governmental action or policy. An Annapolis graduate and former Navy fighter pilot, White, 46, claims that Bath and the judicial system, under the veil of national security, have blackballed him professionally and financially because he has refused to keep quiet about what he regards as a conspiracy to secretly funnel Saudi dollars to the United States. White became entangled in a series of lawsuits and countersuits with Bath , who for some six years has prevailed in the courts. White says the legal action has financially devasted him and Venturcorp Inc., the real estate development company in which he and Bath were partners.

"In sworn depositions, Bath said he represented four prominent Saudis as a trustee [one of whom was Saudi Sheik Salem M. Binladen] and that he would use his name on their investments. In return, he said, he would receive a 5 percent interest in their deals. Tax documents and personal financial records show that Bath personally had a 5 percent interest in Arbusto '79 Ltd., and Arbusto '80 Ltd., limited partnerships controlled by George W. Bush, President Bush's eldest son. Arbusto means bush in Spanish. Bath invested $50,000 in the limited partnerships, according to the documents. There is no available evidence to show whether the money came from Saudi interests. (To be concluded tomorrow.)

According to a 1976 trust agreement, drawn shortly after Bush was appointed director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Saudi Sheik Salem M. Binladen appointed Bath as his business representative in Houston. Binladen, along with his brothers, owns Binladen Brothers Construction, one of the largest construction companies in the Middle East. According to White, Bath told him that he had assisted the CIA in a liaison role with Saudi Arabia since 1976. Bath has previously denied having worked for the CIA. In a sworn deposition, Bath said he was the sole director of Skyway Aircraft Leasing Ltd., a company that a court document shows is owned by Khaled bin Mahfouz. Bin Mahfouz had been a major shareholder in the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, a banking empire that has been accused of money laundering and of using Mideast oil money to seek ties to political leaders in several countries. Mahfouz and his family own the National Commercial Bank of Saudi Arabia. In 1990, Bath bought the Express Auto Park garage at Hobby Airport for $8.4 million, which included a $1.4 million loan provided by Mahfouz, according to transaction documents. Bath received a 5 percent interest in the companies that own and operate Houston Gulf Airport after purchasing it on behalf of Binladen in 1977. After Binladen died in 1988, his interests in the airport were taken over by Mahfouz, according to court documents. --Jerry Urban, 6/4/92

"If Afghanistan is to be taken on, however, the United States must absorb its complexities and learn the lessons of past failures there -- its own as well as those of others. Afghanistan is more than a terrorist camp overseen by an implacably fundamentalist regime. It is also the site of one of the world's greatest humanitarian crises, with up to 1 million people in danger of starvation this year. Some 300,000 people in the capital, Kabul, survive on U.N. food deliveries, and the United States has spent more than $100 million to subsidize food aid this year alone. After four years of drought and two decades of war, the countryside is an economic wasteland, and cities already have been reduced mostly to rubble. The Taliban's medieval oppressiveness has made it unpopular among many Afghans, but the political alternatives to it are hardly credible. And though it is isolated from almost the entire world, the Taliban still has backing in Pakistan, an unstable neighbor ruled by a military regime that now has nuclear weapons." --Wash. Post, 9/15/01

"...It was the Americans, after all, who poured resources into the 1980s war against the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul, at a time when girls could go to school and women to work. Bin Laden and his mojahedin were armed and trained by the CIA and MI6, as Afghanistan was turned into a wasteland and its communist leader Najibullah left hanging from a Kabul lamp post with his genitals stuffed in his mouth. But by then Bin Laden had turned against his American sponsors, while US-sponsored Pakistani intelligence had spawned the grotesque Taliban now protecting him. To punish its wayward Afghan offspring, the US subsequently forced through a sanctions regime which has helped push 4m to the brink of starvation, according to the latest UN figures, while Afghan refugees fan out across the world. All this must doubtless seem remote to Americans desperately searching the debris of what is expected to be the largest-ever massacre on US soil - as must the killings of yet more Palestinians in the West Bank yesterday, or even the 2m estimated to have died in Congo's wars since the overthrow of the US-backed Mobutu regime. "What could some political thing have to do with blowing up office buildings during working hours?" one bewildered New Yorker asked yesterday...." --Guardian, 9/15/01

Acting State Department Spokesperson Charles F. Hunter announced yesterday [7/30/01] that $27 million from the State Department's Emergency Refugee and Migration Assistance Fund has been authorized "to respond to unexpected and urgent humanitarian emergencies in Guinea, Sierra Leone, Eritrea and Afghanistan." $6.5 million of these new funds will be allocated to assist displaced Afghans in the South Asian region, including Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan, and $5 million will be on reserve for immediate response to unexpected and urgent refugee and migration needs. These funds will help to relieve the suffering of the hundreds of thousands of Afghans escaping from the barbaric treatment of the Taliban regime and the worst drought to hit the region in thirty years. Many have fled to Pakistan where they have only found death and starvation in refugee camps. Women have suffered disproportionately under the military rule of the Taliban which has enforced restrictive decrees banning women from leaving their homes unless accompanied by a close male relative, ban women and girls from attending school, and have even denied women the right to work to feed their starving children. The emergency aid for refugees that was announced yesterday is in addition to the $43 million in assistance for internally displaced Afghans announced in May by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. In his May announcement, Secretary Powell stated explicitly that the aid would be dispensed through the United Nations and NGOs, not through the Taliban. [See relevant Colin Powell quote re Taliban in WOMENSNEWS story below.] The Feminist Majority has been urging the increase of humanitarian assistance to Afghans, especially women and children who are at peril for their lives. At the urging of the Feminist Majority, 13 U.S. Senators, led by Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), sent a letter to Secretary of State Powell urging the provision of emergency assistance to help both internally displaced Afghans and Afghan refugees living in Pakistan. The Feminist Majority has also been working with Senator Barbara Boxer, (D-CA) and Senator Feinstein to develop legislation which would provide more funding for health and education programs and income generation for programs to help women and their families in Afghanistan and living as refugees in Pakistan. Thousands of individuals have already sent letters, petitions, and e-mails through FM's Campaign to Stop Gender Apartheid in Afghanistan. --FDN, 7/31/01 (more).

"In the immediate aftermath of Tuesday's attacks, US authorities and the media are once again declaring that Osama bin Laden is responsible. This is possible, although, as always, they present no evidence to back up their claim. But the charge that bin Laden is the culprit raises a host of troubling questions. Given the fact that the US has declared this individual to be the world's most deadly terrorist, whose every move is tracked with the aid of the most technologically sophisticated and massive intelligence apparatus, how could bin Laden organize such an elaborate attack without being detected? An attack, moreover, against the same New York skyscraper that was hit in 1993?

"The devastating success of his assault would indicate that, from the standpoint of the American government, the crusade against terrorism has been far more a campaign of propaganda to justify US military violence around the world than a conscientious effort to protect the American people. Moreover, both bin Laden and the Taliban mullahs, whom the US accuses of harboring him, were financed and armed by the Reagan-Bush administration to fight pro-Soviet regimes in Afghanistan in the 1980s. If they are involved in Tuesday's operations, then the American CIA and political establishment are guilty of having nurtured the very forces that carried out the bloodiest attack on American civilians in US history." --WSWS, 9?13/01

TASHKENT, Aug 08, 2001 (Itar-Tass via COMTEX) -- The George W. Bush administration is to provide additional financial assistance to the people of Afghanistan. The sum will amount to 6.5 million dollars, as offcially reported by the information department of the Uzbek Embassy in the United States. The total volume of U.S. financial help to Afghanistan will amount to over 132 million dollars this year. Thus, the USA will become the world's biggest financial source for Afghanistan."

(WOMENSENEWS)—Sept. 11, 2001. The Bush administration has given Afghanistan $43 million including $10 million for “other livelihood and food security programs,” a reference to the ruling Taliban's ban on poppy cultivation that dramatically changed the economy of the war-torn nation. The poppy is the source of opium and the crop had provided significant revenues to Afghan farmers. The aid was described as humanitarian. In addition to being an ally in the U.S. war against drugs, the Taliban also has banned the education of girls and women. It has banned women from professions and from most outside-the-home employment, even with international relief agencies. It has banned women from seeing male doctors and it prevents women from practicing medicine. Colin Powell, in announcing the gift, said the administration hoped that the Taliban "will act on a number of fundamental issues that separate us: their support of terrorism, their violation of internationally recognized human rights--especially their treatment of women and girls--and their refusal to resolve Afghanistan's civil war through a negotiated settlement." He also called on other nation's to join the U.S. with “dispatch and energy.” http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/561/context/outrage

By ROBERT SCHEER
The Los Angeles Times

Enslave your girls and women, harbor anti-U.S. terrorists, destroy every vestige of civilization in your homeland, and the Bush administration will embrace you. All that matters is that you line up as an ally in the drug war, the only international cause that this nation still takes seriously. That's the message sent with the recent gift of $43 million to the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan, the most virulent anti-American violators of human rights in the world today. The gift, announced last Thursday by Secretary of State Colin Powell, in addition to other recent aid, makes the U.S. the main sponsor of the Taliban and rewards that "rogue regime" for declaring that opium growing is against the will of God. So, too, by the Taliban's estimation, are most human activities, but it's the ban on drugs that catches this administration's attention.

Never mind that Osama bin Laden still operates the leading anti-American terror operation from his base in Afghanistan, from which, among other crimes, he launched two bloody attacks on American embassies in Africa in 1998. Sadly, the Bush administration is cozying up to the Taliban regime at a time when the United Nations, at U.S. insistence, imposes sanctions on Afghanistan because the Kabul government will not turn over Bin Laden. The war on drugs has become our own fanatics' obsession and easily trumps all other concerns. How else could we come to reward the Taliban, who has subjected the female half of the Afghan population to a continual reign of terror in a country once considered enlightened in its treatment of women?

At no point in modern history have women and girls been more systematically abused than in Afghanistan where, in the name of madness masquerading as Islam, the government in Kabul obliterates their fundamental human rights. Women may not appear in public without being covered from head to toe with the oppressive shroud called the burkha , and they may not leave the house without being accompanied by a male family member. They've not been permitted to attend school or be treated by male doctors, yet women have been banned from practicing medicine or any profession for that matter. The lot of males is better if they blindly accept the laws of an extreme religious theocracy that prescribes strict rules governing all behavior, from a ban on shaving to what crops may be grown. It is this last power that has captured the enthusiasm of the Bush White House.

The Taliban fanatics, economically and diplomatically isolated, are at the breaking point, and so, in return for a pittance of legitimacy and cash from the Bush administration, they have been willing to appear to reverse themselves on the growing of opium. That a totalitarian country can effectively crack down on its farmers is not surprising. But it is grotesque for a U.S. official, James P. Callahan, director of the State Department's Asian anti-drug program, to describe the Taliban's special methods in the language of representative democracy: "The Taliban used a system of consensus-building," Callahan said after a visit with the Taliban, adding that the Taliban justified the ban on drugs "in very religious terms." Of course, Callahan also reported, those who didn't obey the theocratic edict would be sent to prison.

In a country where those who break minor rules are simply beaten on the spot by religious police and others are stoned to death, it's understandable that the government's "religious" argument might be compelling. Even if it means, as Callahan concedes, that most of the farmers who grew the poppies will now confront starvation. That's because the Afghan economy has been ruined by the religious extremism of the Taliban, making the attraction of opium as a previously tolerated quick cash crop overwhelming. For that reason, the opium ban will not last unless the U.S. is willing to pour far larger amounts of money into underwriting the Afghan economy.

As the Drug Enforcement Administration's Steven Casteel admitted, "The bad side of the ban is that it's bringing their country--or certain regions of their country--to economic ruin." Nor did he hold out much hope for Afghan farmers growing other crops such as wheat, which require a vast infrastructure to supply water and fertilizer that no longer exists in that devastated country. There's little doubt that the Taliban will turn once again to the easily taxed cash crop of opium in order to stay in power. The Taliban may suddenly be the dream regime of our own war drug war zealots, but in the end this alliance will prove a costly failure. Our long sad history of signing up dictators in the war on drugs demonstrates the futility of building a foreign policy on a domestic obsession.

Taliban to Consider Extradition of Bin Laden, BBC Web Site Says

London, Sept. 12 (Bloomberg) -- Afghanistan's ruling Taliban has offered to consider extraditing Osama Bin Laden to the U.S., the British Broadcasting Corp. reported on its Web site without citing sources. [Non-BBC sources report that the Taliban assumes the U.S. will provide evidence.]

"The United States has warned Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban militia that it would be held directly responsible for any attacks committed by suspected terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden during New Year’s celebrations, sources say. The warning from Mike Sheehan, head of the State Department counter-terrorism office, came during his meeting with the Taliban representative in New York on Monday, an administration official said today. Bin Laden is thought to be residing in Afghanistan at the Islamic militia’s behest.The announcement came after word that nearly a dozen people were arrested in the Middle East in connection with a plot to attack Americans during New Year’s celebrations, sources say....--ABC News, 12/14/00

Special report: terrorism in the US

Staff and agencies

Tuesday September 11, 2001

The Saudi dissident, Osama bin Laden, warned three weeks ago that his group would carry out an unprecedented attack on US interests for its support of Israel, an Arab journalist said today. Abdel-Bari Atwan, editor of the London-based al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper, said Islamic fundamentalists led by bin Laden were "almost certainly" behind the attack of the World Trade Centre.

"It is most likely the work of Islamic fundamentalists. Osama bin Laden warned three weeks ago that he would attack American interests in an unprecedented attack, a very big one," Mr Atwan said. "Personally we received information that he planned very, very big attacks against American interests. We received several warnings like this. We did not take it so seriously, preferring to see what would happen before reporting it."

But Professor Paul Rogers, of Bradford University's peace department, warned against assuming Middle East extremists were behind the tragedy.

"We've been here before. With Oklahoma, everybody assumed it was Middle East [terrorists], then it turned out to be home-grown Timothy McVeigh," he said. "Again with the pipe bomb in Atlanta, it turned out to be domestic."

The World Trade Centre has been targeted before, and was the scene of a massive van bomb that killed several people in February 1993. Prof Rogers said: "Since it is such a prestige building and has been attacked before, the symbolism is very strong. It suggests a well-organised paramilitary group is involved seeking to inflict great financial and psychological harm on the US. The World Trade Centre is hugely symbolic. It is a giant financial complex with great psychological and political prestige."

The attacks bore all the marks of a well-organised group. As President George Bush announced the FBI, CIA and national security experts were throwing all their resources into hunting down those responsible, experts pointed to a number of suspects, including Bin Laden.

Another group suspected is the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, but the group has denied an early report it was behind the attacks. The group blames Americans for "siding" with Israel in the escalating Middle East conflict but has never committed an atrocity on this scale.

US air chiefs will now have to completely rethink their security systems in the light of the World Trade Centre tragedy, said Phil Butterworth-Hayes, the civil aviation editor for Janes information group.

"When you get people determined to commit acts of terrorism, it is almost impossible to stop them," he said. "The whole civil aviation system works on trust.

"In America, security systems are the responsibility of the Federal Aviation Administration. The first thing the FAA are going to have to do is completely rethink some of the security systems they have in place at the moment.

"Aviation thought that it had sorted out the bombs-in-holds problem after Lockerbie but now there is a fresh problem to resolve. But it could be some time before new measures take effect."

He continued: "Terrorists are always one step ahead of the institutions that really need protection. Once you defeat one aspect of terrorism, you have to battle against something else." --Guardian, 9/11/01

September 9, 2001
On Videotape, Bin Laden Charts a Violent Future
By JOHN F. BURNS

The image on the grainy videotape is mesmerizing: a tall, slim, middle- aged Arab man, with the bushy beard, white robes and draped white headcloth of a devout Muslim, standing before a gathering somewhere in Afghanistan. He is reading an Arabic poem, apparently his own, on papers that riffle in a breeze.

The speaker's style is that of the fire-and-brimstone preachers common at Friday Prayers across the Middle East. But he is no imam, nor even, by calling, a poet. He is Osama bin Laden, the 46-year-old Saudi-born fugitive millionaire who has declared a "holy war" against the United States, directing suicide bombings that have made him the F.B.I.'s most-wanted terrorist.

In the verses, read at the wedding in Afghanistan of his oldest son earlier this year, Mr. bin Laden declares his purpose - killing Americans and Jews - more starkly than ever. Proudly, he salutes the suicide bombing of the American destroyer Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden last October in which 17 American sailors died, and promises more attacks.

"The victory of Yemen will continue," he says.

Shots of the Cole listing in Aden harbor after the attack, and of the Americans being carried in flag-covered coffins - and a simulation of the bombing, complete with a blinding flash - are played in the tape's opening and closing sequences.

The shots are taken from American television coverage, and accompanied by what seems like a gloating brutality. "Their limbs were scattered everywhere," Mr. bin Laden says.

The verses also celebrate what Mr. bin Laden describes as the futility of American military might. "In Aden, our brothers rose and destroyed the mighty destroyer, a ship so powerful it spreads fear wherever it sails," Mr. bin Laden says, over images of the Cole.

"But as it moves through the water, toward the small boat bobbing in the water, it is sailing to its own destruction, drawn by the illusion of its own power."

In the Cole attack, two Arab- speaking suicide bombers blew a gaping hole in the destroyer at the waterline with an explosives-laden skiff, causing $250 million damage. While Mr. bin Laden, on the tape, stops short of saying he ordered the strike, he effectively confirms what the F.B.I. suspected from the outset: that it was a bin Laden operation.

Mr. bin Laden uses the tape to spell out a continuing nightmare for his principal enemies, the United States and Israel. He promises an intensified holy war that includes aid to Palestinians fighting Israel - an important shift in emphasis, according to intelligence analysts. In recent years, through a series of violent attacks, Mr. bin Laden's main focus has been on driving American forces from the Arabian peninsula.

He also outlines plans for an expansion of his terrorist training operations in Afghanistan, saying that the Taliban, the Islamic militant movement that has sheltered him since 1996, have built an ideal, purified Islamic state that provides the perfect base for a worldwide holy war against "infidels."

When the two-hour videotape surfaced last June, it attracted little attention, partly because much of it was spliced from previous bin Laden interviews and tapes. But since then the tape has proliferated on Islamic Web sites and in mosques and bazaars across the Muslim world.

Intelligence officials who have analyzed the tape now say it features the fullest exposition yet of Mr. bin Laden's views, as well as his terrorist strategy, and thus provides a rough road map of where his organization, Al-Qaeda, is headed.

With his mockery of American power, Mr. bin Laden seems to be almost taunting the United States. Although F.B.I. investigators believe he was behind the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 that killed six people, two bombings in Saudi Arabia in 1995 and 1996 in which 24 American servicemen died, and the bombings of two American embassies in east Africa in 1998 that killed 224 people, as well as the Cole attack, the United States has found no way, so far, of containing him.

After nearly a year, American investigators have been unable to trace the Cole plot beyond six men arrested in Aden for assisting the bombers. The man thought to have directed the attack for Al-Qaeda, Muhammad al-Harazi, is believed to have fled to Afghanistan. Last month, the Indian police indicted Mr. bin Laden and Mr. Harazi for an abortive plot in June to bomb the American Embassy in Delhi, and alleged that Mr. Harazi visited New Delhi in February, using a pseudonym, when he was already named as a Cole suspect.

Now, despite a $5 million American reward for his capture, multiple indictments in American courts, and a cruise missile strike on his camps in Afghanistan in 1998 that he narrowly escaped, Mr. bin Laden is threatening still more attacks. He tells followers that there is nothing to fear from the United States and that their Islamic faith - and their willingness to die - is enough to neutralize America's military might.

To those who have studied Mr. bin Laden, this confidence is one of the tape's strongest features. "A year or two ago, after the missile attacks on Afghanistan, there were people in Washington saying bin Laden was in a box," said Peter Bergen, a Washington-based writer who interviewed Mr. bin Laden in Afghanistan in 1997 and who is now writing a book on him, to be titled "Holy War Inc." "But if he's in a box, he's a jack-in-a- box. He as much of a threat as he ever was."

Part of Mr. bin Laden's defiance seems to stem from his increasingly close ties with Afghanistan's Taliban rulers. Eager for American diplomatic recognition and aid, the Islamic clerics who lead the Taliban have suggested that they might expel Mr. bin Laden from Afghanistan, where he fled after being forced from Sudan under American pressure. But American officials suspect the Taliban's hints at estrangement from Mr. bin Laden were a ploy, and the tape seems to confirm this.

At one point, Mr. bin Laden declares the Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, the rightful spiritual leader of the Muslim world, and says Afghanistan has become the equivalent of the purified Islamic state established in Mecca and Medina, Islam's holiest cities, by the Prophet Muhammad in the early seventh century. He urges Muslims everywhere to migrate to Afghanistan to support the Taliban and Al- Qaeda, saying it is their duty to God.

"There is now a Muslim state that enforces God's laws, which destroys falsehoods, and which does not succomb to the American infidels - and it is led by a true believer, Mullah Muhammad Omar, the commander of the faithful," he says.

Another sign of the freedoms Mr. bin Laden appears to enjoy are the tape passages showing his followers engaging in combat training, including firing heavy weapons and storming buildings, at a location identified as the "al-Farooq camp." Some recruits appear little more than 11 or 12. In one scene, Mr. bin Laden himself is seen crouching to fire a Kalashnikov rifle.

Much of the tape focuses on the current upheaval in Israel and the Palestinian territories. What is not clear, say intelligence experts, is whether Mr. bin Laden plans to mount direct attacks on Israeli targets, or whether he is firing followers' passions for attacks elsewhere. "Our brothers in Palestine are waiting for you anxiously, and expect you to strike at America and Israel," Mr. bin Laden says. "God's earth is wide and their interests are everywhere."

Since the Jordanian police foiled a bin Laden operation to mount bombing attacks on pilgrims during millennium celebrations 20 months ago, Israel has been on alert for fresh bin Laden terror plots. Israeli intelligence officials say they have evidence that bin Laden agents have already linked up with radical Islamic groups like Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Lebanon-based Hezbollah.

Vincent Cannistraro, former head of counterterrorist operations for the Central Intelligence Agency, who reviewed the tape, said Mr. bin Laden's warnings of new attacks should be taken seriously. "The intifada has clearly focused his attention on the Palestinian problem, which he sees in holy war terms - the Palestinians being oppressed by the Israelis, in ways that are only possible because of the support they get from the United States," he said. "This has reinforced his opinion about the United States and its policies in the whole of the Middle East. It sharpens his instincts for attack."

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