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Looser alqaeda { October 15 2002 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/15/international/asia/15QAED.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/15/international/asia/15QAED.html
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&ncid=716&e=5&u=/nyt/20021015/ts_nyt/al_qaeda_evolves_into_looser_network__experts_say
October 15, 2002
Al Qaeda Evolves Into Looser Network, Experts Say
By DOUGLAS FRANTZ
Since the rout of Al Qaeda last year in Afghanistan, intelligence and law enforcement officials in the United States and elsewhere have been forced to redefine their thinking about the organization and the threat it represents.
Stripped of their sanctuaries in Afghanistan and with their leadership on the run, Al Qaeda's followers dispersed throughout the world to re-establish themselves within a loosely knit alliance of like-minded but independent groups, officials said.
In some cases those groups share planning with operatives of Al Qaeda and receive money from its financial network, government officials said. But more often the extremists are linked by a common ideology without direct ties to Al Qaeda, officials said.
In its simplest terms, American and European officials said, Afghanistan was the training ground for a new generation of Islamic extremists who have moved their operations into basements, apartments and remote areas around the world to plan their own attacks.
Within the Federal Bureau of Investigation, some senior officials no longer use the name Al Qaeda. Instead, in recognition of the threat's broader dimensions, they refer privately to a radical international movement pursuing the United States and its allies.
"There is a radical international jihad, with some influences of midlevel Al Qaeda operations, that will remain a very difficult force for us for many years," a senior government official in Washington said.
Some counterterrorism experts outside government said the Qaeda rubric was applied too easily to many attacks and groups. Rather, they said, Al Qaeda is best described now as an ideological movement, not a traditional terrorist group with a strict hierarchical command.
"Today it is much more steered from the bottom up than from the top down," Magnus Ranstorp, acting director of the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, said in a telephone interview. "Localized interests will take inspiration from tapes that are aired urging attacks, but the local interests take precedence."
Experts inside and outside governments say the knowledge for carrying out attacks, even on the scale of the weekend bombing in Bali, is widely available through the Internet and CD-ROM's.
For years Al Qaeda aligned itself with other militant groups, providing training and sometimes financing and planning. In February 1998, Osama bin Laden established the International Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders, which trained at least 10,000 potential fighters in eastern Afghanistan.
Sworn members of Al Qaeda are estimated by American intelligence at no more than 300, but the organization's reach greatly expanded through graduates of its curriculum for terrorism and through the inspiration of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Even before the bombing in Bali and the attacks last week on a French oil tanker off Yemen and American marines in Kuwait, a senior French intelligence official warned of the threat from Qaeda copycats and freelancers inspired by Mr. bin Laden's organization.
A message attributed to Mr. bin Laden appeared on Islamic Web sites today, praising recent terrorist attacks, including those in Kuwait and off Yemen.
Sifting through evidence accumulated from several attacks in Pakistan in recent weeks, intelligence and police officials there have not come up with any direct links to Al Qaeda, according to officials. But the group's tactics and influences were discerned in some of those attacks, most notably a car bombing that killed 11 French engineers and three other people in Karachi in May and a larger blast outside the American Consulate there in June.
American investigators briefed on the Bali investigation said today that it was too early to say definitively whether the weekend blast was a Qaeda operation or the work of local groups like Jemaah Islamiyah.
But Senator Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who heads the Senate Intelligence Committee, said American intelligence officials told him today that the attack appeared to be linked to Al Qaeda.
"The intelligence is early and not conclusive, but the feeling is Al Qaeda was part of the bombing plot, probably in conjunction with a local Islamic militant organization," Mr. Graham said.
Senator Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the intelligence panel, said the authorities were still trying to determine whether the Bali attack had been ordered or inspired by Al Qaeda.
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