A challenge

Here's a challenge for you guys.

Find a news article or document dated before January 2001 that has the words "al Qaeda" in it, refering to that particular "international terrorist network." Surely if al Qaeda's tentacles are so far reaching, there must have at least something mentioned of them before January 2001. I'd imagine it would take at least a couple of years to establish such a huge network with numerous sleeper cells in every country etc.

And no, not any articles dated after January 2001 talking about the al Qaeda before 2001.

Go ahead, do it. You'll get a cookie if you find any!

Easy.

archives.cnn.com...

"U.S. and Yemeni investigators have said they suspect the attack might have been orchestrated by Al Qaeda, the organization headed by bin Laden"

Just poke around a bit and I'm sure you could find one too.

Where's my cookie?

[edit on 11/20/05 by redmage]

yeah, in all fairness, many people thought there would be a war soon on the horizon after the bombing of the USS Cole in yemen, turns out they were right. who knew right?

Yup.

Hey, wait a minute, back off man the cookie's mine!

Where's my cookie?

Ya, I just found that one myself, it's kind of close to January 2001 (refering to that court case where the US wanted to prosecute bin Laden for some embassy bombings). But well, ok, here ya go:
external image

EDIT: Found another one in October of 2000.

Ok, so I found three articles about al Qaeda in 2000, earliest one in October, but nothing before that, not yet at least.


New Challenge
The person who finds a article containing the word "al Qaeda" refering to the "international terrorist network" dated in early 2000 or before, will get my "Way Above" vote, AND then I will shut up about this.

[edit on 20/11/2005 by SwearBear]

Oh, there's plenty of those.

*Homer voice* Mmmmmmm, cookies.

Here we go:







It's not that Al-Qaeda didn't exist, it's that they didn't do anything dramatic enough pre-9/11 to really be noticed by Joe Public. The idea that Al-Qaeda was unheard of before 9/11 is an example of what it takes for people to notice problems.

search.cnn.com...

[edit on 20-11-2005 by AgentSmith]

Agent Smith gets the BIG cookie!

As usual, our members rise to the occasion. They also seem to have a sweet tooth.

Hail AgentSmith! You got my vote as promised.

[edit on 20/11/2005 by SwearBear]

A little late but since I got three........

Here's a cookie Smith

Thank you everyone!
Can anyone think of any other news archives? I guess that information is slightly restricted because it's only in more recent years that everything has been written up and archived on the internet isn't it?
When I looked on Google News it only went back a couple of months for some reason.

Yeah, I noticed that too so I went to CNN and checked their personal archives.

We could always check ABC, NBC, CBS, ugh FOX, etc. directly.

I deffinately took the gold medal in the dash, 13 mins to finish another thread I was reading, find this one, and get results; but you took the gold in the mile!

I still have a hard time believing the al Qaeda is what they say it is.

The US embassy bombings in East Africa took place in 1998 and the US gov't wanted to prosecute bin Laden, and then they used laws that were meant to prosecute organized crime groups like the Mafia, where being a member of this group is cruical.
So they found this sudanese militant who was in bin Ladens little group back in the day, he then happily, in exchange of safe haven in the US and a few hundred grand, drew up this picture about al Qaeda, basicly saying it's an all powerful international terrorist network, that bin Laden is the leader of it and so forth.
Even Blair said in a interview on Fox News that "al Qaeda isn't a organisation, it's a way of working."

I'll try to find some articles before those embassy bombings, perhaps I'll find some, perhaps not.


EDIT: Well I couldn't find anything on al Qaeda before the embassy bombings in 1998, but I found a article on CNN two months before the embassy bombings, where they talked about bin Laden and a group of his followers.
In that article bin Laden had vowed to wage a holy war against Americans and westerners in the mid-east.
www.cnn.com...

So two months before the attacks it was "bin Laden and a group of his followers", then a few days after the attacks it's "the international terrorist network al Qaeda led by bin Laden."


[edit on 20/11/2005 by SwearBear]

Well, I've done alot of searching (U.S. and international news archive databases) and it appears that the 08/28/98 incident, while supprisingly widely reported (by archives that go back that far), is the earliest publically reported use of the title "al Qaeda", by name, in the press.

Newspapers' archives seemed the most fruitfull as their archives, in general, went back the furthest.

Not posting any links cause they were all the "same" story, and, many newspapers only showed the first paragraph without a subscription.

Hindsight being 20/20 there are a few, very few, archives that go back to around '95 and they could possibly turn up Bin Laden by name, just not "al Qaeda" as an organization.

So the real challenge is to find a reference of "al Qaeda" dated pre 08/28/98.



Exactly.

If we changed the date/started a new challenge starting pre 08/28/98 I think we'd really be on to something.

While many 08/28 links can be provided, I think we may have discovered the "birth" of "al Qaeda".


[edit on 11/20/05 by redmage]

I have a copy of Esquire magazine, Dated April 1999 that has an interview with Osama Bin Laden in it. I'm just posting this here, as I found it very interesting, and if you can get hold of back copies of Esquire, it's is IMO worth a look. Oh, and al Qaida [sic] is mentioned by name.

As an avowed conspiracy theorist I feel compelled to point out that articles and dates placed upon the internet can be manipulated to create the illusion that situations existed at some time in the past, when, in fact, they did not come into being until some later time.

There is also the problem that the Internet is fairly young, this may be a job for National Archives... over to you!

That is an excellent question. Who ever thought of that moniker was a big Star Wars fan. It was just an intelligence database of known freedom fighters from Afghanistan.

Have you noticed that anyone killed these days can be labeled Al Quaeda.

Very true but when a story is corroborated by so many sources here (U.S.) and abroad, it does lend credence.

I'm simply stating that with, having now seen, so many sources dated 08/28/98 (and nothing earlier) that this is a very probable date for the public press unveiling of the title "al Qaeda" in referring to Bin Laden's "followers".