Bin Laden and Qaeda in the Mid-90s

Some excerpts regarding bin Laden activity in the mid-90s from Steve Colls excellent book Ghost Wars:

...Murad confessed that he had been working with Yousef on multiple terrorist plots: to bomb up to a dozen American commercial airliners flying over the Pacific, to assassinate President Clinton during a visit to the Phillipines, to assassinate the Pope when he visited Manila, and to hijack a commercial airliner and crash it into the headquarters of the CIA.

Yousef, who is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's nephew, lived in a bin Laden funded safe house in Pakistan and had in his possession, when arrested in 1995, the business card of a bin Laden relative.

Another excerpt:

In August 1994 three hooded North Africans killed two Spanish tourists in a Marrakesh hotel. The attackers and their handlers had trained in Afghanistan. Bombings of the Paris Metro later that year were traced to Algerians trained in Afghan camps. In December 1994 four Algerian terrorists from the Armed Islamic Group hijacked an Air France jet. They planned to fly to Paris and slam the plane kamikaze-style into the Eiffel Tower. French authorities fooled the hijackers into believing that they did not have enough fuel to reach Paris, so they diverted to Marseilles where all four were shot dead by French commandos. In March 1995, Belgian investigators seized a terrorist training manual from Algerian militants. The document explained how to make a bomb using a wristwatch as a timer, and its preface was dedicated to bin Laden. In April, Filipino guerrillas swearing loyalty to the Afghan mujahedin leader Abdurrab Rasul Sayyaf sacked the Mindanao island town of Ipil. They killed sixty-three people, robbed four banks, and took fifty-three hostages, killing a dozen of them. On June 26, 1995, Egyptian guerillas with the Islamic Group, equipped with Sudanese passports, unsuccessfully attempted to assassinate Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in Ethiopia. A month later a member of the Egyptian extremist group al-Jihad said in a published interview that bin Laden sometimes knew about their specific terrorist operations against Egyptian targets. On November 13, 1995, a car bomb loaded with about 250 pounds of explosives blew up near the three-story headquarters of the office of the program manager of the Saudi Arabian national guard in Riyadh. Five Americans died, and thirty-four were wounded. Months later one of the perpetrators confessed in a Saudi television broadcast that he was influenced by bin Laden and the Egyptian Islamist groups, and that he had learned how to make the car bomb because of "my experiences in explosives which I had during my participation in the Afghan jihad operations." One week after the Riyadh bombing, Islamist terrorists drove a suicide truck bomb into the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad, killing fifteen people and injuring eighty.

9/11 didn't come out of nowhere. Looking at the record of terrorist atrocities carried out worldwide after the Afghan Arabs ended their jihad against the Soviets, and the increased importance of bin Laden, I can't keep myself from thinking again about what might have been in those documents that Sandy Bergers stuffed in his socks at the Archives.

Again from Ghost Wars:

He [bin Laden] did not behave like a typical underground terrorist leader. He was accessible and visible in Khartoum during these years; he was certainly not trying to hide.

What Berger was hiding is anyone's guess, but examining terrorist activity from the mid-90s onward and holding it up next to the Clinton administration's reaction, it's more than likely the documents clearly inicated an unwillingness to take terrorism and bin Laden seriously. "Yeah, we know about bin Laden and we know where he is and we could easily get him, but it's not our problem."