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nowhere. In fact, they end in tiny Afghan villages just across the border, 
where the trucks dump ammunition and weapons in safe houses. Later, according 
to U.S. Army officials, small groups of between four and a dozen terrorists 
from the camps cross the border amid the flow of civilian traffic. Once inside 
Afghanistan, the Americans say, the terrorists are assisted by abettors who 
provide money, pass on information about U.S. troop movements and safeguard 
supplies. Loaded with equipment and intelligence, the al-Qaeda forces then move 
out to harass American troops. Since the U.S. forces cannot cross into 
Pakistan, they can only try to catch the terrorists after they re-enter 
Afghanistan. 

For the Administration of George W. Bush, the recent attacks and the evidence 
that al-Qaeda may be regrouping in Pakistan come at a terrible time. Washington 
is determined to eliminate Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and has made 
clear that it believes the best way of doing so is by military action. Adding 
another problem to a plateful of them, the Administration disclosed last week 
that North Korea, in breach of an agreement signed in 1994, had admitted to 
restarting its program to develop nuclear weapons. And the crisis between the 
Israelis and the Palestinians, with its potential for poisoning relations 
between the U.S. and moderate regimes in the Muslim world, seems as intractable 
as ever. Mighty the U.S.'s resources may be, but in terms of military, 
diplomacy, intelligence gathering and synthesis, the system is being stretched. 
The CIA, with a limited number of spies and a small paramilitary force, will 
find it hard to wage a worldwide war against al-Qaeda at the same time as it 
must collect evidence of weapons programs in Iraq and perhaps hunt down Saddam 
Hussein. A war in Iraq, says a senior U.S. intelligence official, "will make 
things harder but not impossible. It cannot help but strain us." 

Of all these challenges, the enduring potency of Islamic fanaticism may be the 
most difficult. To its credit, the Administration has never claimed that the 
struggle against terrorism would be anything other than long and arduous. Yet 
the success of the bombing campaign in Afghanistan, coupled with the arrest of 
such key al-Qaeda leaders as Ramzi Binalshibh, who allegedly handled the 
logistics for the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, led some to 
look on the bright side. Nobody pretended that al-Qaeda was finished. But there 
was quite recently a sense that it might be capable of only relatively small-
scale, opportunistic attacks against "soft" Western targets, especially outside 
the U.S. This year's attacks on German tourists in Tunisia and French contract 
workers in Pakistan fit that pattern. 

You don't hear such talk now. Experts are openly comparing Islamic terrorism to 
communism and fascism, ideologies that retained the loyalty of devotees despite 
occasional setbacks. "Al-Qaeda is not just an organization," says 
Ranstorp. "It's a movement. We shouldn't gauge its success through a short-term 
prism." It took a year, but recent attacks suggest that the dispersal of 
terrorists from Afghanistan back to their home bases reinvigorated local 
extremist groups—among them Jemaah Islamiah in Indonesia—with an influx of 
logistical and financial resources. That has Tenet worried. "The threat 
environment we face," he said last week, "is as bad as it was before Sept. 11. 
It is serious—they have reconstituted, they are coming after us." Al-Qaeda, 
U.S. intelligence has concluded, is able to plan an attack on the scale of the 
one seen a year ago. "They still have the capacity for a spectacular 
operation," says a U.S. counterterrorism official. "In fact, that's what we are 
expecting next, or in the near future. We don't have a clue where." Officials 
fear that such an attack could be launched against any one of a number of 
American cities. And they are particularly worried about attacks 
by "conventional" means against the chemical or nuclear infrastructure of the 
U.S., that would cause widespread toxic or radiological fallout. 

The amount of "noise" counterterrorism sources are hearing from intercepted 
communications among terrorist groups has grown to levels last reached in the 
summer of 2001. Public pronouncements by al-Qaeda leaders—such as the Web 
statement purportedly made by bin Laden, a separate bin Laden audiotape played 
on the Qatari TV channel al Jazeera and another ostensibly from his second in 
command, Ayman al-Zawahiri (U.S. authorities believe that the voice on the tape 
was indeed al-Zawahiri's)—have added to the tension. A senior State Department 
official believes that the messages by bin Laden and al-Zawahiri may amount to 
the starting gun for a fresh campaign. Saad al Fagih, a Saudi dissident based 
in London, says those in circles close to al-Qaeda talk these days 
with "strange confidence" about a second big attack against the U.S. "Before 
Sept. 11, bin Laden would talk in general terms about a major attack coming and 
a major, major attack following," says al Fagih. "He would say , 'The first 
attack is going to be this size,' pointing to the tip of his finger, 'and the 
next is going to be this size,' indicating the whole length of his finger." 

To combat the terrorists' ambitions, the Administration has tried to sort out 
the well-aired problems of coordination and analysis that dogged the 
counterterrorism operation last year. The effort has had mixed success. The 
Administration's belated proposal for a Department of Homeland Security remains 
bottled up in Congress. The FBI is just at the beginning of a mammoth 
reorganization to refocus its mission on counterterrorism. In June, a mere 10 
months after Bush and his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, chose 
retired General Wayne Downing to head counterterrorism operations at the 
National Security Council, Downing abruptly resigned, frustrated by his lack of 
power. His successor, retired Air Force General John Gordon—a former deputy 
director of the CIA—gets higher marks from insiders, though some complain that 
the Counter-Terrorism Security Group, of which he is chairman, is "too bulky." 
Meetings of Gordon's committee sometimes have representatives from 15 agencies, 
among them minor players. If there are 20 to 30 people in a room, some without 
the highest security clearance, the FBI and the CIA will not share sensitive 
intelligence, says a White House aide. 

Still, in other respects, Bush's war on terror has made some progress lately—
partly because there are just more terrorist hunters than there used to be. In 
addition to the 8,000 members of the armed forces in Afghanistan, there are now 
nearly 800 U.S. forces based in the East African nation of Djibouti, across the 
Red Sea from Yemen, and a Marine Corps amphibious assault ship, the Belleau 
Wood, has been in the area since August. Sources tell Time the U.S. is looking 
to use the port of Assab in Eritrea as a naval base to keep an eye on traffic 
between Yemen, Sudan and Somalia. At home, the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center 
(CTC) now has a staff of 1,100 analysts and covert operatives, almost triple 
the number it had a year ago. Technologists are working on new gadgets to track 
terrorists, as well as hardware to process the 75,000 cables that come into the 
CTC from field offices each month. A top-secret website called CT-Link, first 
established in 1994, has had its reach expanded so that those with the right 
clearances in 75 government locations in the U.S. and overseas can access the 
latest intelligence on the fight against terrorism. 

Cooperation with foreign-intelligence and law-enforcement authorities is key; 
since Sept 11, 2001, a total of 2,974 terror suspects have been detained in 98 
countries. Americans have learned to use local assets, like the Filipino agents 
who disguise themselves as ice-cream vendors or beauticians, to track down 
terrorists. "The feeling here," says a senior French investigator, "is that the 
Americans are doing an excellent job in police and intelligence terms." Not 
everything goes according to plan. High-tech listening devices are of no use if 
nobody sends an electronic message. "The bad guys," says a Western diplomat in 
Islamabad, "have been taught that talking on cell phones or sat phones is a no-
no. Now they are delivering messages on motorcycles." Raids on Afghan refugee 
camps in Pakistan aimed at finding al-Qaeda men have been compromised by leaks 
from local police and intelligence services. And—as happened earlier this month 
in an operation at the Shemshahtoi camp outside Peshawar—even if the FBI and 
their local friends get into a camp, suspects can easily vanish among the maze 
of adobe huts, which teem with thousands of Afghans who hate the police. In a 
similar raid on the Jalousai camp, 12 miles from Peshawar, however, the feds 
were luckier, picking up four Afghans who were al-Qaeda suspects, plus a trove 
of sat phones and computer diskettes. 

Still, a few phones and some computer files are not sufficient to stop a 
ruthless enemy whose reputation among its supporters soared after the 
destruction of the World Trade Center. With such a display of power, whether 
bin Laden is alive or not is beside the point. "For the militant groups in the 
Islamic world, it is the ideology that counts, not a specific leader," says 
Hala Mustafa of the Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in 
Cairo. "The roots of fanaticism will still be there." 

Will those roots be watered by a war with Iraq? Optimists within the Bush 
Administration argue that the removal of Saddam Hussein would open a space for 
the development of true democracy across the Arab world, one that would offer 
for the first time a real choice between corrupt authoritarian regimes on the 
one hand and millennial Islamic extremists on the other. But many experts are 
skeptical. French officials otherwise wholly supportive of the U.S. are worried 
that, as one puts it, "some of the headway made against Islamists is lost by 
American diplomacy that has alienated most of the Muslim world." It is not that 
the extremists love Saddam. "Frankly," says a French source, "they don't give a 
s___ about Iraq, and they openly disdain Saddam as corrupt. But anything that 
happens in Iraq will just be used as further justification for terrorism." But 
if American soldiers are welcomed as warmly in Baghdad as they were by the 
people of Kabul, the effect of a war on the recruitment of terrorists might be 
different. Even if things turn out well in Iraq, Islamic terrorists will still 
be around, still able to kill and maim. Says Omar Bakri, who is based in London 
and is the leader of the radical Islamic Al-Muhajiroun youth movement, "The 
message was so clear in Bali—it is a war against the disbelievers' camp." A 
French investigator puts the terrorists' chilling beliefs in stark terms. "They 
really, truly don't care about which Westerner they murder," he says. "Just so 
long as an enemy is dead." In Bali, where a precise count of the charred bodies 
is not yet complete, more than 180 died. They will not be the last.     
—Reported by Bruce Crumley/ Paris, Helen Gibson/London, Jeff Israely/Rome, 
Scott MacLeod/Cairo, Tim McGirk/Islamabad, Isabella Ng and Andrew Perrin/Bali, 
Douglas Waller/ Washington and Michael Ware/Paktia
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Indonesia Muslims back decrees as U.S. vows help  
JAKARTA/BALI, Oct. 20 – Reuters

Indonesia's largest Islamic group said on Sunday it supported new anti-terror 
decrees introduced after the Bali bombing, as the U.S. president vowed to help 
track down the killers of more than 180 people.  

A week after the blasts on Indonesia's main tourist island, investigators were 
still poring over the bombsite for clues while Australia came to a standstill 
to mourn the victims and flags were lowered in Britain in memory of the dead. 

Police arrested a militant Muslim cleric suspected of links to the al Qaeda 
network on Saturday but said the man, Abu Bakar Bashir, was too ill to face 
questioning on Sunday. 

Earlier in the weekend, President Megawati Sukarnoputri had signed emergency 
anti-terror regulations aimed at giving authorities wide powers in the hunt for 
the perpetrators of the Bali bombings. 

A leader of the 40-million-strong Nahdlatul Ulama, Indonesia's biggest Muslim 
organisation, welcomed the anti-terror decrees. 

''Our current conditions need regulation to make efforts to tackle terrorism 
more effective,'' Masduki Baidlowi, deputy secretary general of the Nahdlatul 
Ulama, told Reuters. 

Baidlowi said authorities should be careful not to abuse the regulations and 
must only act on evidence, but he did not think there would be the major human 
rights problems some have feared in the world's most populous Muslim country. 

Syafii Maarif, chairman of the 30-million-strong moderate Muhammadiyah, 
dismissed concern that the regulations would be used to arrest Muslims guilty 
of no more than a hardline approach to religion. 

''It's rubbish,'' he said. ''If those so-called radicals did not do anything 
wrong, they should not worry.'' 

Even before the Bali bombs Indonesia had been under international pressure to 
act against radical groups linked by foreign intelligence agencies to terrorism 
but the government feared a backlash. 

Indonesia's Muslims, 85 percent of the population, are mostly moderate but many 
fear the U.S.-led war on terror could be used against Islam in general. 

But the Bali attack seems to have galvanised authorities into action, not only 
with the issuing of the decrees, but also with the arrest of Bashir, who was 
held after he was taken to hospital with what doctors said were respiratory and 
heart problems. 

Police say he faces questioning about attacks in the capital nearly two years 
ago. 

Under Supervision 
''Bashir is still in our custody in hospital but because he is sick he cannot 
be questioned and therefore we'll keep him there under supervision,'' Arianto 
Sutadi, national police director for general crimes, told Reuters on Sunday. 

Sutadi said there had been no decision on when the cleric would be moved from 
the central Java city of Solo to the capital as that depended on his health. 
Bashir denies any connection to militant groups and says he is just an Islamic 
teacher. 

At the Bali bombsite investigators gathered more evidence on Sunday as Balinese 
and the few remaining holidaymakers on the island came to pay their respects to 
the more than 180 people killed in the blasts at the Sari nightclub. 

At a joint news conference, Australian and Indonesian investigators said the 
site would remain closed to the public until Friday to allow police to finish 
their search for clues. 

They said they were questioning 60 people in Bali as witnesses and also 
checking airline passenger manifests for people who have left but who were 
present during the event and could be surveyed. 

Witnesses have ''provided a number of very useful leads,'' said Brett Swan, 
spokesman for the Australian investigators, without elaborating. 

He had no comment on a claim by an authority on Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda 
network that an unidentified Saudi may have funnelled $74,000 to the Jemaah 
Islamiah, the al Qaeda-linked group intelligence experts see as a key player in 
regional terrorism plans, to buy explosives used in the Bali bombing. 

Asked about a theory that there may have been three bombs in the area where 
most damage was done rather than two as generally believed, Indonesian 
investigation spokesman Aritonang said: ''It's true we have got information but 
there is no confirmation...so we're still investigating.'' 

He mentioned that on Sunday police had questioned two fishermen who ''know a 
lot about explosives'' but said there were still no suspects in the case. 

No one has claimed responsibility for the attacks but Indonesia and several 
other countries have pointed the finger at al Qaeda, which is blamed for the 
September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, and at Jemaah Islamiah. 

Bashir Denies Role 
Intelligence officials say Bashir is a leader of Jemaah Islamiah. He denies 
that as well as any ties to the Bali blasts. 

''I believe the Bali bombing's actor is al Qaeda. Much intelligence information 
that I received (suggested) that it was done by al Qaeda,'' Defence Minister 
Matori Abdul Jalil repeated on Saturday. 

Australia lost the most nationals in the tragedy, more than 100, and on Sunday 
church bells tolled across the country as U.S. President George W. Bush sent 
Australians a videotaped message promising to help hunt down the bombers. 

''Together we face an enemy which does not value innocent life, an enemy which 
tries to terrorise the free world into inaction... Together we will fight 
terror so as to keep the peace and to make the world more free,'' Bush said. 

Canberra, Washington and London have all issued security and travel advisories 
to their nationals regarding Indonesia, suggested those already there consider 
leaving, and have been evacuating some embassy staff and their families. 

The Australian government has also said it received intelligence that parts of 
the Indonesian capital might be bombed in attacks aimed at Westerners and urged 
its citizens to avoid certain areas. 

The grim and difficult work of identifying the Bali victims continued but the 
blast and the fires that followed left many bodies badly burned and others 
obliterated. 

Officials say that only two or three bodies are likely to be identified each 
day and some remains may never be identified. 

Police and forensics experts from six countries are helping Indonesia in the 
investigation, dubbed ''Operation Alliance,'' which is run jointly by Indonesia 
and Australia. The vast majority of the overseas helpers are from Australia, 
which has supplied 100 law-enforcement personnel. 
-- (With reporting by Grace Nirang in Jakarta and Michael Smith in Sydney) 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Straits Times
Oct 21, 2002 Mon
Osama 'gave Bashir money for Bali bombs' 
-- Al-Qaeda operative tells the CIA that $130,000 was sent to Jemaah Islamiah 
to buy the explosives used in attack 
By Alfred Lee 

LONDON - Osama Bin Laden sent money to Abu Bakar Bashir, the spiritual leader 
of the Jemaah Islamiah, to buy C4, the powerful explosive used in the Bali 
bombings, according to a former top lieutenant of the Al-Qaeda leader.

He said that £48,000 ($133,440) was transferred to the JI terror network - 
thought to be behind the attack in Bali that killed more than 180 people - from 
an account in the name of Sheikh Abu Abdullah Emirati, one of Osama's 
pseudonyms.

Details of the transfer, believed to have taken place earlier this year, were 
given to the United States Central Intelligence Agency by Omar Faruq, who was 
arrested in Indonesia in June and later handed over to America, according to 
the Sunday Times.

The newspaper said it had seen a confidential document detailing Faruq's 
statement that the money was used to buy a total of three tons of explosives 
illegally, from Indonesian military sources.

The newspaper said that the Indonesian military uses C4 plastic explosives, 
traces of which were found at the Bali bomb site.

Faruq, a Kuwaiti, told the CIA that Bashir gave the money to aides to buy the 
explosives, which were then distributed to Islamic groups.

Faruq said he had been sent to South-east Asia by Al-Qaeda in the 1990s to work 
with Indonesian co-conspirators to fight for a separate Islamic state by 
carrying out terrorist attacks on Western targets, Indonesians and Israelis.

In 2000, he escorted Al-Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri to Indonesia, 
to forge closer links with rebel groups trying to drive out Christians from the 
mainly Muslim archipelago.

He claimed there had been two attempts to assassinate Indonesian president 
Megawati Sukarnoputri.

One attempt failed when the group could not get hold of guns. The other ended 
with the assassin blowing his leg off when the bomb he was carrying exploded 
prematurely in a Jakarta shopping mall.

The Sunday Times said Faruq had also told the CIA of other plots which had been 
considered. These included:
-- The random shooting of Israelis and Americans at hotels across Indonesia. 
This was abandoned because it would have only 'minimal impact'.
-- Hijacking a civilian aircraft and flying it into an Israeli target.
-- A plan in May this year to blow up American warships during a US-Indonesian 
naval exercise, by planting underwater explosives.
-- An attack using cyanide, sprayed from perfume bottles. 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~