Boris Ustyugov. World terrorist #1 turns 47

World terrorist #1 turns 47
Boris Ustyugov

Publication date: March 10, 2004

And information about the life of the genius of world villainy Osama bin Laden is contradictory and deceptive. Until now, not a single intelligence service in the world has undertaken to debunk the two most scandalous rumors about him. First: no bin Laden ever existed; he was invented by CIA specialists in order to personify Islamic terrorism, and at the same time justify his own existence. The second rumor was voiced by former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: bin Laden has already been caught , the Bush administration is waiting for the most crucial moment of the election race in order to present the living terrorist to the world community as the main merit of the current American president to the electorate.

However, rumor #2 does not at all exclude the version about the virtuality of the al-Qaeda leader - finding a suitable person to play the role of bin Laden a few weeks before the elections will not be difficult, especially since the bearded appearance of this embodiment of evil is not difficult to copy (by the way, not a single beardless During the entire period of the hunt for him, the face of bin Laden was never revealed to the world).

The problem is different. The capture or other neutralization of the formidable Osama will automatically give rise to a lot of questions and problems - for example, to whom will the American authorities attribute new terrorist attacks, which, alas, will happen sooner or later in the United States or other countries? What will the real or fictitious bin Laden be able to tell during interrogations and how will this affect the fight against global terrorism? How can officials justify the fact that bin Laden has only now been caught? And much more...

In addition, the image of bin Laden gave rise to entire areas of business technology - from harmless flash toys on the Internet to the development of complex cryptographic data protection systems and the transmission of encoded signals in the form of graphic pictures, which al-Qaeda agents allegedly use to communicate with their colleagues around the world. Bin Laden, as a “quality mark” of the elusive and therefore all-powerful Islamic evil, is circulated daily on millions of advertising media and is used by almost all states for one or another propaganda purpose - from creating the image of an Islamic martyr to a grotesque character in anti-globalist comics.

And although it is becoming more and more difficult to prove the reality of bin Laden’s existence to the American competent authorities every day, it is obvious that the civilized world needs terrorist #1 alive and free, but at the same time constantly hiding and flashing once every six months on low-quality videos from Al-Jazeera and " Al-Arabiya" . Under the guise of hunting for bin Laden, the Americans can conduct several more large and medium-sized military operations in the Middle East, extract several additional billions of dollars from Congress for the fight against terrorism and arrest several more of bin Laden’s right and left hands who were responsible for preparing and carrying out bad operations.

Therefore, the personality of the elusive Osama must be poeticized as much as possible and brought closer to the established ideal of a rebel villain. This is what numerous biographers of bin Laden have been doing in recent years. If you clear the information about him from unnecessary and obviously fictitious details, such as the al-Qaeda leader’s commitment to olives, Toyota cars and camel racing , this man’s life path strictly fits into the canons tested by centuries.

Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden was born on March 10, 1957 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The bin Laden family consisted, in addition to the pope, of his 10 wives and 52 children. Little Osama spent his childhood, of course, in the homeland of Islam, in the city of Hijaz. From the age of 16, he was a member of one of the fundamentalist groups, and a little later he served in the kingdom’s Sharia police (something like a voluntary Komsomol squad that supervised the implementation of the commandments of the Koran among Saudi citizens).

Bin Laden's father, Mohammed, was the owner of the Saudi Bin Laden Group construction company, which the Saudi royal family even trusted to repair the holy mosques in Medina and Mecca. This construction company now has up to 60 branches and subsidiaries in 50 countries (including the USA and Europe). Osama inherited the family fortune (about a quarter of a billion dollars) in the late 80s, after his father died in a private plane crash over the United States. In 1979, Osama bin Laden graduated from the Faculty of Economics and Management at King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah and immediately went to Afghanistan to fight against the Shuravi. According to some reports, in Pakistan, bin Laden was trained in one of the CIA camps, but in Afghanistan itself he was mainly engaged in construction - he supervised the laying of underground tunnels from Pakistan to Afghanistan and other fortification work in the mountains, which the militants carried out with the help of construction equipment of bin Laden's father .

In the early 1980s, Osama created the Maktab al-Khadamat (Service Bureau) to funnel fighters and money to the Afghan resistance. The bureau opened recruitment centers in the United States, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, which sent thousands of people to Afghanistan. The Bureau also organized and financed military training camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Bin Laden was also an intermediary between the Saudi royal family and the mujahideen - they say that during several years of war, tens of billions of dollars passed through Osama, which the Saudi princes spent on supporting the Afghan rebels. In 1989, Osama returned to the family construction business, but continued to be involved in politics, optionally helping anti-government organizations in Saudi Arabia and Yemen. It ended with bin Laden being expelled from Arabia to Sudan in 1991. Sudanese authorities sheltered bin Laden until 1996, when, under pressure from the UN and the United States, they achieved his deportation to Afghanistan - allegedly for participating in the preparation of the assassination attempt on Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in 1995 in Ethiopia.

Apparently, now, in addition to an extensive network of fifty terrorist organizations, which include up to 7 thousand active members, bin Laden owns a fairly large “peaceful” business - Osama over the years has replenished the family property with the Sudanese construction company Al-Hijra, an investment concern "Taba" and a controlling stake in the Middle Eastern bank "Al-Shamal". Since the mid-1990s, bin Laden also has a trading business in Kenya and several instrument companies, publishing houses and ceramic factories in Yemen.

Of course, there is not even a dozen documentary evidence of Osama bin Laden’s tortuous working career. In addition, he came to the attention of the Western press only in 1993 - as one of the organizers of the explosion in the New York International Trade Center , when 6 people were killed and about 1000 were injured. Now bin Laden heads the FBI's list of the world's most dangerous terrorists, in which he appears as "a man about 195 cm tall, weighing about 70 kg, with a thin build. Brown eyes, dark brown hair, dark complexion. Speaks Arabic and Pashto. Left-handed. For "There is a reward of $25 million + $2 million from non-governmental organizations for information leading to capture."