AL-QAEDA NOW

摘要

Which Is Scarier, The Noise or the silence? Long after the attacks of Sept. 11, the clangor of terror echoes worldwide. But for U.S. investigators, what they don't hear is almost as frightening as what they do. Terrorist communications, according to Francis X. Taylor, the State Department's counterterrorism coordinator, have reached levels "probably as high as they were last summer." Attacks continue. In April, a truck bomb―now thought to be the work of Islamic terrorists with links to al-Qaeda, the network headed by Osama bin Laden―crashed into a synagogue in Djerba, Tunisia, killing 19, including 14 German tourists. On May 8, an apparent suicide bomber in Karachi, Pakistan, pulled his car up beside a military bus loaded with French contract workers, exploded the car and killed 14. Those waiting nervously for a second al-Qaeda attack on the U.S. may have forgotten: it already happened. Last December, shoe bomber Richard Reid tried to blow up an American Airlines plane over the Atlantic in an incident that investigators have long been convinced was an al-Qaeda plot. Though that effort was foiled, the terrorists have not given up. "Just as a wounded animal is the most dangerous of all," Air Force General Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last week, "al-Qaeda remains a real threat."