Sorry, just a point of fact. Bin Laden's 'war declaration' (fatwa) was in 1998, not 1996.

[Cruzan]

http://www.fas.org/irp/world/para/docs/980223-fatwa.htm

[blm]

1. True - Al Qaeda actually had no organized existence till then.

I remember when some on the RW tried to attack Kerry's book The New War that warned of the growing global terror networks and tracked how they fund their operations. In the 2004 campaign they mocked that he didn't talk about Al Qaeda - well, Kerry's book was written in 1996, published in 1997 and had been based on the information he had pored over during his investigations that uncovered IranContra and BCCI.