Did you take Al Qaeda / bin Laden seriously before 9/11?

[jakeXT]

17. PBS did

But there's some confusion here apparently. Today in the United States, we hear from law enforcement about Al Qaeda.

Yes.

But to you that's something different.

Well, I [really] laugh when I hear the FBI talking about Al Qaeda as an organization of bin Laden. ... [It's really a] very simple story. If bin Laden is to receive Arabs from Saudi Arabia and from Kuwait--from other regions--he is [to] receive them in the guest house in Peshawar. They used to go to the battle field and come back, without documentation.

What do you mean without documentation?

There [was] no documentation of who has arrived. Who has left. How long he stayed. There's only [a nice general reception]. And you go there. And you join in the battle field. ... Very simple organization. Now, he was embarrassed by many families when they called him and ask what happened to our son. He don't know. `Cause there's no record. There's no documentation. Now he asked some of his colleagues to start documenting the movement of every Arab coming under his umbrella. ... It is recorded that [they] arrived in this date and stayed in this house. ... And then there was a record of thousands and thousands of people. Many of them had come only for two weeks, three weeks and then disappeared. That record, that documentation was called the record of Al Qaeda. So that was Al Qaeda. There's nothing sinister about Al Qaeda. It's not like an organization--like any other terrorist organization or any other underground group. I don't think he used any name for his underground group. If you want to name it, you can name it "bin Laden group." But if they are using the term Al Qaeda ... Al Qaeda is just a record for the people who came to Peshawar and moved from there back and forth to the guest house. And moved back to their country. And if they want to follow the number, they must be talking about 20, 30 thousand people. Which is impossible to trace. And I think most of those records are in the hands of the Saudi government anyway, because people used the Saudi airlines, [at] a very much reduced fare. Twenty-five percent of the total fare of a trip to Islamabad. ...

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/binladen/interviews/al-fagih.html


published april 1999; last updated sept. 2001
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/binladen/