Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden was a Saudi Arabian-born militant and founder of the pan-Islamic militant organization Al-Qaeda. The group is designated as a terrorist group by the United Nations Security Council, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the European Union, and various other countries. Under bin Laden, Al-Qaeda was responsible for the 11 September attacks in the United States and many other mass-casualty attacks worldwide.
Richard Alan Clarke is an American national security expert, novelist, and former government official. He served as the Counterterrorism Czar as the National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counter-Terrorism for the United States between 1998 and 2003.
Serena Altschul is an American broadcast journalist, known for her work at MTV News and CBS.
Ali Abdul Saoud Mohamed is a double agent who worked for both the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and Egyptian Islamic Jihad simultaneously, reporting on the workings of each for the benefit of the other.
The September 11 attacks, commonly known as 9/11, were four coordinated suicide terrorist attacks carried out by the militant Islamist extremist network al-Qaeda against the United States on September 11, 2001. That morning, 19 terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners scheduled to travel from the New England and Mid-Atlantic regions of the East Coast to California. The hijackers crashed the first two planes into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, two of the five tallest buildings in the world at the time. The hijackers aimed the next two flights toward targets in the Washington metropolitan area as part of a similarly coordinated attack on the nation's capital, and successfully flew the third plane into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Defense in Arlington County, Virginia. The fourth was intended to strike a nearby federal government building in Washington, D.C., but crashed in rural Pennsylvania following a passenger revolt. The attacks killed nearly 3,000 people and instigated the multi-decade global war on terror.
Jose A. Rodriguez Jr. is an American former intelligence officer who served as Director of the National Clandestine Service of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). He was the final CIA deputy director for operations (DDO) before that position was expanded to D/NCS in December 2004. Rodriguez was a central figure in the 2005 CIA interrogation videotapes destruction, leading to The New York Times Editorial Board and Human Rights Watch to call for his prosecution.
Osama bin Laden, the founder and former leader of al-Qaeda, went into hiding following the start of the War in Afghanistan in order to avoid capture by the United States and/or its allies for his role in the September 11, 2001 attacks, and having been on the FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list since 1999. After evading capture at the Battle of Tora Bora in December 2001, his whereabouts became unclear, and various rumours about his health, continued role in al-Qaeda, and location were circulated. Bin Laden also released several video and audio recordings during this time.
This article is a chronological listing of allegations of meetings between members of al-Qaeda and members of Saddam Hussein's government, as well as other information relevant to conspiracy theories involving Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Peter Bergen is an American journalist, author, and producer who is CNN's national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor at Arizona State University and the host of the Audible podcast 'In the Room with Peter Bergen.' Bergen has written or edited ten books. Three of the books were New York Times bestsellers, four of the books were named among the best non-fiction books of the year by the Washington Post, and they have been translated into 24 languages. Three books were turned into documentaries for HBO and CNN, which were nominated for an Emmy and won an Emmy. Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden (2001); The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of al Qaeda's Leader (2006); The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict between America and Al-Qaeda (2011); Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden From 9/11 to Abbottabad (2012); Talibanistan: Negotiating the Borders Between Terror, Politics, and Religion (2013); Drone Wars: Transforming Conflict, Law, and Policy (2014); United States of Jihad: Investigating America's Homegrown Terrorists (2016); Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos (2019); The Rise and Fall of Osama Bin Laden (2021); and Understanding the New Proxy Wars (2022) He produced the first television interview with Osama bin Laden in 1997, which aired on CNN.
The One Percent Doctrine (ISBN 0-7432-7109-2) is a nonfiction book by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Ron Suskind about America's hunt for terrorists since September 11, 2001. On July 24, 2006, it reached number 3 on the New York Times Best Seller list.
David Cohen is the former Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence for the New York City Police Department. He was the first to be appointed to this position, created by the city government in response to the September 11 attacks. He used to be Deputy Director of CIA for Operations (DDO) in the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), working for the organization for 35 years. He worked briefly in the private sector following his career in the CIA, doing global risk assessment for the American International Group. He retired from the New York City Police Department in December 2013. Former CBS correspondent John Miller succeeded him.
The Bin Laden Issue Station, also known as Alec Station, was a standalone unit of the Central Intelligence Agency in operation from 1996 to 2005 dedicated to tracking Osama bin Laden and his associates, both before and after the 9/11 attacks. It was headed initially by CIA analyst Michael Scheuer and later by Richard Blee and others.
American officials have reported that the late al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden had numerous bodyguards. They reported that the detainees held in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp included at least 30 of Bin Laden's bodyguards.
Hamza bin Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden, better known as Hamza bin Laden, was a Saudi Arabian-born member of Al-Qaeda. He was a son of Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, and, following his father's death in 2011 and the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City, he was described as the new leader of the Al-Qaeda organization.
Michael A. Sheehan was an American author and former government official and military officer. He was a Distinguished Chair at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York and a terrorist analyst for NBC News.
At around 9:30 pm on September 11, 2001, George Tenet, director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) told President George W. Bush and U.S. senior officials that the CIA's Counterterrorism Center had determined that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda were responsible for the September 11 attacks. Two weeks after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the Federal Bureau of Investigation connected the hijackers to al-Qaeda, a militant Salafist Islamist multi-national organization. In a number of video, audio, interview and printed statements, senior members of al-Qaeda have also asserted responsibility for organizing the September 11 attacks.
The death of Osama bin Laden on May 2, 2011, gave rise to various conspiracy theories, hoaxes and rumors. These include the ideas that he had died earlier, or that he lived beyond the reported date. Doubts about bin Laden's death were fueled by the U.S. military's supposed disposal of his body at sea, the decision to not release any photographic or DNA evidence of bin Laden's death to the public, the contradicting accounts of the incident, and the 25-minute blackout during the raid on bin Laden's compound during which a live feed from cameras mounted on the helmets of the U.S. special forces was cut off.
Allegations of a support system in Pakistan for Osama bin Laden have been made both before and after Osama bin Laden was found living in a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan and was killed by a team of United States Navy SEALs on 2 May 2011. The compound itself was located just half a mile from Pakistan's premier military training academy Kakul Military Academy (PMA) in Abbottabad. In the aftermath of bin Laden's death, US-President Barack Obama asked Pakistan to investigate the network that sustained bin Laden. "We think that there had to be some sort of support network for bin Laden inside of Pakistan", Obama said in a 60 Minutes interview with CBS News. He also added that the United States was not sure "who or what that support network was." In addition to this, in an interview with Time magazine, CIA Director Leon Panetta stated that US-officials did not alert Pakistani counterparts to the raid because they feared the terrorist leader would be warned. However, the documents recovered from bin Laden's compound 'contained nothing to support the idea that bin Laden was protected or supported by the Pakistani officials'. Instead, the documents contained criticism of Pakistani military and future plans for attack against the Pakistani military installations.
Manhunt: The Search for Bin Laden is a 2013 documentary film directed by Greg Barker that explores the Central Intelligence Agency's investigation of Osama bin Laden, starting from 1995 until his death in 2011. It premiered on HBO on May 1, 2013, two years after the mission that killed bin Laden. The documentary features narratives by many of the CIA analysts and operatives who worked over a decade to understand and track bin Laden, and includes archival film footage from across Washington, D.C., Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Middle East. It also features extensive and rarely seen footage of Al-Qaeda training and propaganda videos, including video suicide notes from various terrorists who later worked as suicide bombers.
The Abbottabad Commission Report is a judicial inquiry paper authored and submitted by the Abbottabad Commission, led by Justice Javaid Iqbal, to the Prime Minister of Pakistan on 4 January 2013. The report investigates the circumstances surrounding the death of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad. Upon submission, the report was immediately classified by the Prime Minister and its findings were not made public.
