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

[reorg]

69. following recent discussions and reports, the turn of phrase

"taking them seriously" is used to circumscribe the willingness to take military action against whomever it is that is currently threatening us.

If ISIS now poses a threat that must be taken as seriously as we should have taken the threat by al-Qaeda in 2001 - I read that yesterday - the implication is obvious: everyone who opposes military action is willing to put us at risk.

As to your claim that the Web was essentially non-existent in 2000, that's just not true. Your and other examples in this thread show that even now we can still access many news articles written way before 2000. The NYT is online since 1996. I remember well that the Guardian was one of the first papers with an online edition in the mid-nineties, too.

But I didn't ask for links, I pointed out that you cannot point to specific reports or discussions where "al-Qaeda" was a major topic and thought to be a major threat to the general public at large. I believe that those who followed the news were aware that the group existed, that they had carried out some rather spectacular attacks in countries far away, but that they were neither politically nor militarily significant.

It was only later, long after 2001, that we learned that they had been active in Bosnia and Kosovo, which was never mentioned anywhere until reporters dug the stories out because they became interesting in retrospect. They also had been active in other areas threatened by civil war, apart from Afghanistan. A new kind of mercenary outfit, ready and willing to pose a threat as long as they have backers and financiers using them. It's still a very murky affair, just like these ISIS nuts with their rolexes, action movies, drive-by killings and propaganda scripts.