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To: Nick who wrote (42541)	9/25/2001 9:11:48 AM
From: Nick	Respond to of 65232

Osama: A tall man with a giant ego ISLAMABAD: Osama Bin Laden, suspected to be the brain behind the WTC attacks on September 11, is a man with a big ego and an inferiority complex, according to a handwriting expert who studied the fax issued by the terrorist mastermind exhorting Pakistanis to defend Islam. A graphologist, commissioned by Britain's Daily Telegraph to analyse the signature on the fax, suggested the hand-writing betrayed a man who combines a giant ego with an inferiority complex that drives him to aggression and violence. "He seems to have a wish or vengeance against society which he may believe has treated him unfairly," Caroline Murray said. "He's a rebellious individualist and a non-conformist with a hedonistic drive for stimulation. Anticipation of punishment doesn't stop him." This image of Bin Laden conveniently fits with his reputation as a coldly calculating killer who has become synonymous with a new type of global terrorism. But it clashes with the impressions of people who have actually met the tall (6 foot 5 inch, 1.95 metre) 44-year-old. A source in Pakistan who has visited Bin Laden at his villa in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar described him as warm and hospitable. "He likes his food, he's generous to a fault and he gives the impression he would do anything for you." A British teacher who taught Bin Laden as a 13-year-old teenager in an elite school in Saudi Arabia said he had been a shy, quiet and well-behaved boy who never gave any indication that he would go on to have a 25-million-dollar price placed on his head. After his westernised school education, Bin Laden went on to study civil engineering at Jeddah university -- appropriately for the son of a construction magnate with close ties to the Saudi royal family. According to friends from those days he was anything but a devout Muslim and a regular in the nightclubs of Beirut, Lebanon. Somewhere along the way, however, Bin Laden got disillusioned with the playboy life and in the ideological turmoil that gripped the Islamic world at the end of the 1970s discovered the militant brand of Islam, centred on the duty of jihad, or holy war, that he was to make his life's work. Stripped of his Saudi citizenship in 1994 and disowned by his family, Bin Laden has lived since 1996 in Afghanistan as an honoured guest of the Taliban militia that rules the country under its own ultra-rigid interpretation of the Islamic faith. But nobody knows if he is still there. The Taliban claim it wants him to leave but has not been able to find him and speculation has been rife that he has already slipped away to another hideaway in Central Asia or elsewhere. He is reported to have at least three wives and more than 20 children -- the last public sighting of him was at the February wedding of one of his sons in Kandahar. His residence there is a large mansion close to the home of the equally secretive Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, its opulence at odds with the self-image that Bin Laden likes to cultivate of an ascetic man. By his own account, Bin Laden's view of the world was transformed by a combination of events at the end of the 1970s: Egypt's decision to make peace with Israel, the Islamic revolution in Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. But it was in the crucible of Afghanistan's fight against the 1979-89 Soviet occupation that his vision of a global jihad against the western powers and their treacherous allies in the Islamic world crystallised. "One day in Afghanistan was like one thousand days of praying in an ordinary mosque," he later recalled. After spending the first few years of the Afghan war raising money for the Islamic resistance, he moved to Afghanistan in 1984, taking command of, and financing, a brigade of up to 20,000 militant fighters recruited from across the Arab world. It was also in Afghanistan that Bin Laden began to acquire the organisational and communications skills that have made him such a feared adversary of the West today. How much of this is due to the training he received at the hands of the CIA is an uncomfortable question for the United States as it seeks to establish the extent of Bin Laden's hand in the New York and Washington atrocities. Bin Laden's network -- al-Qaeda, or The Base -- is believed to have been first established around 1988, a year before the Soviet Union finally pulled out of Afghanistan. But it was not until four years later that western intelligence officials began to link the organisation to attacks on US forces in Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Somalia. In November 1998, a US prosecutor indicted Bin Laden for masterminding bomb attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania which left more than 200 people dead. Behind these and other attacks lies Bin Laden's fury over what he regards as the ultimate betrayal of the Islamic faith -- King Fahd's 1990 decision to allow US troops to be stationed in Saudi Arabia in preparation for the Gulf War against Iraq. For Bin Laden, the US presence was an outrage, the effective occupation of the land that was the birthplace of the prophet Mohammed and is home to Islam's holiest sites, Mecca and Medina.

To: Nick who wrote (42541)	9/25/2001 9:44:16 AM
From: Venkie	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 65232

Another one bites the dust... dailynews.yahoo.com