Inside the mind of Al Qaeda

The last three years have certainly challenged Al Qaeda. Afghan training camps have been dismantled, and many top leaders killed or arrested. Cash flow is dwindling and the operational environment is squeezed.

What's worse, to Al Qaeda, may be what the leaders see as a lukewarm reaction on the part of Islam. Jenkins notes that a lengthy January message attributed to bin Laden deliberately portrayed Muslims as "guilty of substandard zealotry," and therefore needing to be aroused to action.

Still, Al Qaeda may see itself as having survived the worst the US could dish out. Successful operations, such as the Madrid train bombings, continue. And most experts believe Al Qaeda is responsible for the bombings in Egyptian Red Sea resorts last week that killed at least 33 and wounded 149. America's invasion of Iraq has provoked Muslims and even split infidel nations - while opening a potential new front for jihad.

What will happen in the long run, under Al Qaeda's theology? Discontented youth will flock to the group's banner. They will practice the ancient warfare of Arabs - fulfilling the Koran's charge to lie in wait, beleaguer the enemy, and attack him when he is inattentive.

The goal is "war until judgment day," according to Jenkins.

The source for this and other assessments is largely the terrorists themselves. Some of it comes from the interrogation of captured Al Qaeda members, but much of the Islamist worldview is in plain sight, in communiqués issued over the years by bin Laden and his top lieutenants.

Whenever a new audio or videotape purporting to come from Al Qaeda is released, excitement races through the US intelligence community, according to the recently released book "Imperial Hubris," written by an anonymous serving CIA official. Analysts pore over obscure items, such as lichen on rocks or the shape of individual trees, to try and figure out where the tape might have been made. They listen to vocal tone to try and gain clues about bin Laden's health.

Amid this scurry, "bin Laden's words are the most overlooked part of the tape," writes the "Imperial Hubris" author, who has been named in news reports as Michael Scheurer.

Thus "bin Laden's post-[9/11] rhetoric again shows he knows us, and how we will react, far better than we know him," writes Scheurer.

Bin Laden's rhetoric often focuses on perceived injustices inflicted on the Islamic world. He portrays Muslims in Bosnia, Kashmir, Chechnya, Afghanistan, and the former Central Asian republics of the USSR as victims of a US-led crusade.

He seems to feel that his theological credibility rests on convincing Muslims that they are everywhere under attack. He tells Americans that he knows many are "good and gentle people," but that he is at war with their government. He even urges US citizens to convert to Islam so as to rid themselves of their "dry, miserable, and spiritless materialistic existence."

Hard-pressed by US forces, bin Laden - a former management student - may have adapted by decentralizing his operation, says Dr. Jerrold Post, director of the political psychology program at George Washington University. Leaders who function as regional directors may now be charged with raising their own cash and planning their own operations.

Al Qaeda "has become more of an inspiring ideology, rather than maybe an organized network," says Dr. Post, who also ran the CIA's psychological profiling unit.

In the most recent bin Laden video, made public last winter, he looked gaunt, and said that it did not matter whether he lives or dies - but that what he started must carry on.

"Perhaps he was seeing himself at the end of his life and wants to go down in radical Muslim history as the major actor in this insurrection against the West," says Post.

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