Quoting Mugabe
This site has been opened to attempt to record the lies and manipulation, the hatred, the racism and sometimes just the pure and utter stupidity that flows from the mouth of Robert Mugabe, and some other quotes from his idiotic and corrupt government officials who scrap and squabble over Mugabe's favour.
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Recent Posts
Reports that thousands homeless after government's...
Questioned about Retirement
2004 May
Dialogue between MDC and ZANU-PF? Never!
Cementing his Dictatorship
2002 - Parlimentary Elections
2001 - Land Reform Program Intensifies
2000 June - Elections Approach
2000 - Land Reform Program
1999 April: In response to the IMF denying balance...
Archives
November 2005
November 11, 2005
Reports that thousands homeless after government's clean-up program
"Nonsense!"Robert Mugabe said in an ABC News interview.
"That's nonsense... anyone who wants facts should come and see what's happening. We removed them from slums and put them in new places."
"Obviously when you destroy slums, even as you prepare new places for them, there is a dislocation, disorganization of the family for that moment."
"Thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands. You go there now and see whether those thousands are there... Where are they? A figment of their imagination. They exaggerated."
posted by African Wanderer | Friday, November 11, 2005 | 1 comments
Questioned about Retirement
Mugabe in an interview with ABC saying that he would remain in charge of the country, even after he leaves office.
"I'll still be in the party," he said. "The party is greater than government, by the way, and my being president of the party is similar to my being president of the country."
posted by African Wanderer | Friday, November 11, 2005 | 0 comments
November 10, 2005
2004 May
Talking about efforts by international food agencies to get food to his starving population, in an interview with Sky TV.
"Why foist this food upon us? We do not want to be choked, we have enough."
posted by African Wanderer | Thursday, November 10, 2005 | 1 comments
Dialogue between MDC and ZANU-PF? Never!
2003 August: "Those who seek unity must not be our enemies. No, we say no to them, they must first repent... they must first be together with us, speak the same language with us, act like us, walk alike and dream alike."
2003 June: "Let the MDC and its leadership be warned that those who play with fire will not only be burnt, but consumed by that fire."
2004 February: "We cannot discuss with allies of the West. The devil is the devil and we have no idea of supping with the devil"
posted by African Wanderer | Thursday, November 10, 2005 | 0 comments
Cementing his Dictatorship
2002 December: At the annual conference of his ruling party, Zanu-PF, referring to white commercial farmers who resisted his land reform scheme
"We saw who they were, what they were and we realised we had nurtured enemies among us, so we started treating them as enemies, enemies of our government, enemies of our party, enemies of our people."
2002 December: At the annual conference of his ruling party, Zanu-PF, referring to western countries (Bush and Blair)
"The more they work against us... the more negative we shall become to their kith and kin here."
2003 March: In a speech at funeral of Dr Swithun Mombeshora
"This Hitler has only one objective: justice for his people, sovereignty for his people, recognition of the independence of his people and their rights over their resources… If that is Hitler, then let me be a Hitler tenfold."
2003 December: At the ZANU-PF annual conference
"If they (the MDC) want to violate the laws of the country, we can unleash legal force and legal violence, which we are permitted to do. [...] Some measures of force must be used to restrain them."
posted by African Wanderer | Thursday, November 10, 2005 | 0 comments
2002 - Parlimentary Elections
February: "We are in a war to defend our rights and the interests of our people. The British have decided to take us on through the MDC."
March: "All of you gathered here can see that whites want us to be their slaves and they are now closing shops and factories to throw you blacks into the streets so that you can turn against the government."
In a speech celebrating his re-inauguration and clarifying his policy towards the opposition MDC: "We will make them run. If they have not run before we will make them run now…. We will not pander to them any longer. That is gone. It is finished. We are now entering a new chapter, and there will be firm government, very firm government…."
posted by African Wanderer | Thursday, November 10, 2005 | 0 comments
2001 - Land Reform Program Intensifies
In a televised speech: "Violence is not just happening, it in fact has been deliberately hatched at the center of the MDC and by its patrons and principals overseas... This is a real physical fight and we have to prepare for it."
In an interview marking his 77th birthday: "I would like to [retire], sure. As long as I am assured that those we fought yesterday are thoroughly beaten and that the carpet they now stand on, the economic carpet, has been removed from their feet and it has become our carpet."
Talking about white farmers arrested for refusing to move from their farms: "They will not be treated like special creatures. Why should they be treated as if they are next to God? If anything, they are next to he who commands evil and resides in [the] inferno."
posted by African Wanderer | Thursday, November 10, 2005 | 0 comments
2000 June - Elections Approach
"The whites can be citizens in our country, or residents, but not our cousins. They are the greatest racists in the world."
Typical references to Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of the opposition.
"A white man masquerading as a black" and "A tea boy for his white boss."
"Morgan Tsvangirai is an ambitious frog ... as long as Morgan will be used by the British he will be a frog."
BBC interview with David Dimbleby - 26th June 2000
On whites in Zimbabwe
"We have not stopped singing to the theme of unity and the theme of love. Even the whites are free to live here. But they must change. Your kind - the British kind - are very difficult to change. We rate them as the most conceited, the most arrogant, the most selfish and the most racist in our situation."
"We ourselves should not ever... as government, as a party, as individuals within the party, be seen to be acting in a racist way, blacks against whites, we refuse to do that. The whites wouldn't be here if I was like that....we can't do things like that."
On his governments failure to uphold the law.
"The law of the land must also work for moral justice - if I lead the people on the land and then get time to bring about law and order then it is a far better proposition, a better approach than one which will pit the forces against the masses of people now occupying the land and there would be greater death greater bloodshed - this is just a little row of trespass."
"Elsewhere, those who commit murders are being arrested, those who commit robberies are being arrested, other crimes are being taken care of and there is greater law and order.
Only in the little area of trespass on the farms, where there has in fact been injustice all along by the farmers and if they suffer this very little - shall I say? - inconvenience of their land being occupied. And they suffer that very little inconvenience, against the inconvenience that we have suffered as a people for decades."
On the possibility of an opposition election victory.
"That probability should never be entertained. I can never concede that they have the capacity to win , in dreamland perhaps, yes, I could see them in power but when I get up I say that is a dream, never a reality. Why do you want us to talk about dreams now?"
"If Zanu-PF loses, we will not accept the results. We fought and died for this country and you cannot expect us to hand the country on a silver plate to some new party backed by the white man."
posted by African Wanderer | Thursday, November 10, 2005 | 0 comments
2000 - Land Reform Program
March: "Those who try to cause disunity among our people must watch out because death will befall them..."
May: "They have expressed their concern. What concern? We just want our land and will take it the way we know how. What can they do?"
Independence Day: "Our present state of mind is that you [white commercial farmers] are now our enemies because you really have behaved as enemies of Zimbabwe."
posted by African Wanderer | Thursday, November 10, 2005 | 0 comments
1999 April: In response to the IMF denying balance-of-payment support due to lack of transparency
"Let that monstrous creature get out of our way. Unless I am prevailed upon to see things otherwise [...] I will lead my government in the direction where we dismiss the IMF as an institution that we can relate to, and that is coming very soon."
posted by African Wanderer | Thursday, November 10, 2005 | 0 comments
1980 - Zimbabwean Independence
"If yesterday I fought you as an enemy, today you have become a friend and an ally with the same national interest, loyalty, rights, and duties as myself."
"It could never be a correct justification that, because the whites oppressed us yesterday when they had power, that the blacks must oppress them today because they have power."
"If you were my enemy, you are now my friend. If you hated me, you cannot avoid the love that binds me to you and you to me."
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President Mugabe's Quotes
Robert Mugabe Quotes
Type:
Statesman Quotes
Category:
Quotes
Date of Birth:
February 21, 1924
Nationality:
Zimbabwean
Find on Amazon:
Robert Mugabe
Related Authors:
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Winston Churchill
Benjamin Disraeli
Edmund Burke
Lord Chesterfield
Abu Bakr
Morning Star
Countries such as the U.S. and Britain have taken it upon themselves to decide for us in the developing world, even to interfere in our domestic affairs and to bring about what they call regime change.
Robert Mugabe
I wish to assure you that there can never be any return to the state of armed conflict which existed before our commitment to peace and the democratic process of election under the Lancaster House agreement.
Robert Mugabe
If the choice was made for us, one for us to lose our sovereignty and become a member of the Commonwealth or to remain with our sovereignty and lose membership of the Commonwealth, then I would say, then let the Commonwealth go.
Robert Mugabe
If the choice were made, one for us to lose our sovereignty and become a member of the Commonwealth or remain with our sovereignty and lose the membership of the Commonwealth, I would say let the Commonwealth go.
Robert Mugabe
In most recent times, as the West started being hostile to us, we deliberately declared a Look East policy.
Robert Mugabe
It may be necessary to use methods other than constitutional ones.
Robert Mugabe
Our party must continue to strike fear in the heart of the white man, our real enemy!
Robert Mugabe
Our votes must go together with our guns. After all, any vote we shall have, shall have been the product of the gun. The gun which produces the vote should remain its security officer - its guarantor. The people's votes and the people's guns are always inseparable twins.
Robert Mugabe
People are free to campaign and they will be free to vote. There won't be any soldiers, you know, at the queues. Anyone who has the right to vote is free to go and cast his vote anywhere in his own area, in his own constituency.
Robert Mugabe
So, Blair keep your England, and let me keep my Zimbabwe.
Robert Mugabe
Some people are contriving ways and means of making us collapse.
Robert Mugabe
Stay with us, please remain in this country and constitute a nation based on national unity.
Robert Mugabe
The land is ours. It's not European and we have taken it, we have given it to the rightful people... Those of white extraction who happen to be in the country and are farming are welcome to do so, but they must do so on the basis of equality.
Robert Mugabe
The only white man you can trust is a dead white man.
Robert Mugabe
The white man is not indigenous to Africa. Africa is for Africans. Zimbabwe is for Zimbabweans.
Robert Mugabe
True, some land was bought by a few Cabinet Ministers. They bought the land. No minister, to my knowledge acquired land which was meant for resettlement.
Robert Mugabe
Was it not enough punishment and suffering in history that we were uprooted and made helpless slaves not only in new colonial outposts but also domestically.
Robert Mugabe
We are no longer going to ask for the land, but we are going to take it without negotiating.
Robert Mugabe
We are not hungry... Why foist this food upon us? We don't want to be choked. We have enough.
Robert Mugabe
We don't mind having sanctions banning us from Europe. We are not Europeans.
Robert Mugabe
We have said the first step was to designate the land, inform the owners. And the second would be to get the responses from the owners. And this will be openly done.
Robert Mugabe
We of Africa protest that, in this day and age, we should continue to be treated as lesser human beings than other races.
Robert Mugabe
We pride ourselves as being top, really, on the African ladder... We feel that we have actually been advancing rather than going backwards.
Robert Mugabe
Type:
Statesman Quotes
Category:
Quotes
Date of Birth:
February 21, 1924
Nationality:
Zimbabwean
Find on Amazon:
Robert Mugabe
Related Authors:
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Winston Churchill
Benjamin Disraeli
Edmund Burke
Lord Chesterfield
Abu Bakr
Morning Star
Countries such as the U.S. and Britain have taken it upon themselves to decide for us in the developing world, even to interfere in our domestic affairs and to bring about what they call regime change.
Robert Mugabe
I wish to assure you that there can never be any return to the state of armed conflict which existed before our commitment to peace and the democratic process of election under the Lancaster House agreement.
Robert Mugabe
If the choice was made for us, one for us to lose our sovereignty and become a member of the Commonwealth or to remain with our sovereignty and lose membership of the Commonwealth, then I would say, then let the Commonwealth go.
Robert Mugabe
If the choice were made, one for us to lose our sovereignty and become a member of the Commonwealth or remain with our sovereignty and lose the membership of the Commonwealth, I would say let the Commonwealth go.
Robert Mugabe
In most recent times, as the West started being hostile to us, we deliberately declared a Look East policy.
Robert Mugabe
It may be necessary to use methods other than constitutional ones.
Robert Mugabe
Our party must continue to strike fear in the heart of the white man, our real enemy!
Robert Mugabe
Our votes must go together with our guns. After all, any vote we shall have, shall have been the product of the gun. The gun which produces the vote should remain its security officer - its guarantor. The people's votes and the people's guns are always inseparable twins.
Robert Mugabe
People are free to campaign and they will be free to vote. There won't be any soldiers, you know, at the queues. Anyone who has the right to vote is free to go and cast his vote anywhere in his own area, in his own constituency.
Robert Mugabe
So, Blair keep your England, and let me keep my Zimbabwe.
Robert Mugabe
Some people are contriving ways and means of making us collapse.
Robert Mugabe
Stay with us, please remain in this country and constitute a nation based on national unity.
Robert Mugabe
The land is ours. It's not European and we have taken it, we have given it to the rightful people... Those of white extraction who happen to be in the country and are farming are welcome to do so, but they must do so on the basis of equality.
Robert Mugabe
The only white man you can trust is a dead white man.
Robert Mugabe
The white man is not indigenous to Africa. Africa is for Africans. Zimbabwe is for Zimbabweans.
Robert Mugabe
True, some land was bought by a few Cabinet Ministers. They bought the land. No minister, to my knowledge acquired land which was meant for resettlement.
Robert Mugabe
Was it not enough punishment and suffering in history that we were uprooted and made helpless slaves not only in new colonial outposts but also domestically.
Robert Mugabe
We are no longer going to ask for the land, but we are going to take it without negotiating.
Robert Mugabe
We are not hungry... Why foist this food upon us? We don't want to be choked. We have enough.
Robert Mugabe
We don't mind having sanctions banning us from Europe. We are not Europeans.
Robert Mugabe
We have said the first step was to designate the land, inform the owners. And the second would be to get the responses from the owners. And this will be openly done.
Robert Mugabe
We of Africa protest that, in this day and age, we should continue to be treated as lesser human beings than other races.
Robert Mugabe
We pride ourselves as being top, really, on the African ladder... We feel that we have actually been advancing rather than going backwards.
Robert Mugabe
THE TRUTH ABOUT MARTIN LUTHER KING
The Beast as Saint:
The Truth About "Martin Luther King, Jr."
WHEN THE COMMUNISTS TOOK OVER a country, one of the first things that they did was to confiscate all the privately-held weapons, to deny the people the physical ability to resist tyranny. But even more insidious than the theft of the people's weapons was the theft of their history. Official Communist "historians" rewrote history to fit the current party line. In many countries, revered national heroes were excised from the history books, or their real deeds were distorted to fit Communist ideology, and Communist killers and criminals were converted into official "saints." Holidays were declared in honor of the beasts who murdered countless nations.
Did you know that much the same process has occurred right here in America?
Every January, the media go into a kind of almost spastic frenzy of adulation for the so-called "Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr." King has even had a national holiday declared in his honor, an honor accorded to no other American, not Washington, not Jefferson, not Lincoln. (Washington and Lincoln no longer have holidays -- they share the generic-sounding "President's Day.") A liberal judge has sealed the FBI files on King until the year 2027. What are they hiding? Let's take a look at this modern-day plastic god.
Born in 1929, King was the son of a Black preacher known at the time only as "Daddy King." "Daddy King" named his son Michael. In 1935, "Daddy King" had an inspiration to name himself after the Protestant reformer Martin Luther. He declared to his congregation that henceforth they were to refer to him as "Martin Luther King" and to his son as "Martin Luther King, Jr." None of this name changing was ever legalized in court. "Daddy" King's son's real name is to this day Michael King.
King's Brazen Cheating
We read in Michael Hoffman's "Holiday for a Cheater":
The first public sermon that King ever gave, in 1947 at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, was plagiarized from a homily by Protestant clergyman Harry Emerson Fosdick entitled "Life is What You Make It," according to the testimony of King's best friend of that time, Reverend Larry H. Williams.
The first book that King wrote, "Stride Toward Freedom, - -was plagiarized from numerous sources, all unattributed, according to documentation recently assembled by sympathetic King scholars Keith D. Miller, Ira G. Zepp, Jr., and David J. Garrow.
And no less an authoritative source than the four senior editors of "The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.- - (an official publication of the Martin Luther King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, Inc., whose staff includes King's widow Coretta), stated of King's writings at both Boston University and Crozer Theological Seminary: "Judged retroactively by the standards of academic scholarship, [his writings] are tragically flawed by numerous instances of plagiarism.... Appropriated passages are particularly evident in his writings in his major field of graduate study, systematic theology."
King's essay, "The Place of Reason and Experience in Finding God," written at Crozer, pirated passages from the work of theologian Edgar S. Brightman, author of "The Finding of God."
Another of King's theses, "Contemporary Continental Theology," written shortly after he entered Boston University, was largely stolen from a book by Walter Marshall Horton.
King's doctoral dissertation, "A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Harry Nelson Wieman," for which he was awarded a PhD in theology, contains more than fifty complete sentences plagiarized from the PhD dissertation of Dr. Jack Boozer, "The Place of Reason in Paul Tillich's Concept of God."
According to "The Martin Luther King Papers", in King's dissertation "only 49 per cent of sentences in the section on Tillich contain five or more words that were King's own...."!
In "The Journal of American History", June 1991, page 87, David J. Garrow, a leftist academic who is sympathetic to King, says that King's wife, Coretta Scott King, who also served as his secretary, was an accomplice in his repeated cheating. ("King's Plagiarism: Imitation, Insecurity and Transformation," The Journal of American History, June 1991, p. 87)
Reading Garrow's article, one is led to the inescapable conclusion that King cheated because he had chosen for himself a political role in which a PhD would be useful, and, lacking the intellectual ability to obtain the title fairly, went after it by any means necessary. Why, then, one might ask, did the professors at Crozer Theological Seminary and Boston University grant him passing grades and a PhD? Garrow states on page 89: "King's academic compositions, especially at Boston University, were almost without exception little more than summary descriptions... and comparisons of other's writings. Nonetheless, the papers almost always received desirable letter grades, strongly suggesting that King's professors did not expect more...." The editors of "The Martin Luther King Jr. Papers" state that "...the failure of King's teachers to notice his pattern of textual appropriation is somewhat remarkable...."
But researcher Michael Hoffman tells us "...actually the malfeasance of the professors is not at all remarkable. King was politically correct, he was Black, and he had ambitions. The leftist [professors were] happy to award a doctorate to such a candidate no matter how much fraud was involved. Nor is it any wonder that it has taken forty years for the truth about King's record of nearly constant intellectual piracy to be made public."
Supposed scholars, who in reality shared King's vision of a racially mixed and Marxist America, purposely covered up his cheating for decades. The cover-up still continues. From the "New York Times" of October 11, 1991, page 15, we learn that on October 10th of that year, a committee of researchers at Boston University admitted that, "There is no question but that Dr. King plagiarized in the dissertation." However, despite its finding, the committee said that "No thought should be given to the revocation of Dr. King's doctoral degree," an action the panel said "would serve no purpose."
No purpose, indeed! Justice demands that, in light of his willful fraud as a student, the "reverend" and the "doctor" should be removed from King's name.
Communist Beliefs and Connections
Well friends, he is not a legitimate reverend, he is not a bona fide PhD, and his name isn't really "Martin Luther King, Jr." What's left? Just a sexual degenerate, an America-hating Communist, and a criminal betrayer of even the interests of his own people.
On Labor Day, 1957, a special meeting was attended by Martin Luther King and four others at a strange institution called the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee. The Highlander Folk School was a Communist front, having been founded by Myles Horton (Communist Party organizer for Tennessee) and Don West (Communist Party organizer for North Carolina). The leaders of this meeting with King were the aforementioned Horton and West, along with Abner Berry and James Dumbrowski, all open and acknowledged members of the Communist Party, USA. The agenda of the meeting was a plan to tour the Southern states to initiate demonstrations and riots.
From 1955 to 1960, Martin Luther King's associate, advisor, and personal secretary was one Bayard Rustin. In 1936 Rustin joined the Young Communist League at New York City College. Convicted of draft-dodging, he went to prison for two years in 1944. On January 23, 1953 the "Los Angeles Times" reported his conviction and sentencing to jail for 60 days for lewd vagrancy and homosexual perversion. Rustin attended the 16th Convention of the Communist Party, USA in February, 1957. One month later, he and King founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, or SCLC for short. The president of the SCLC was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The vice-president of the SCLC was the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, who was also the president of an identified Communist front known as the Southern Conference Educational Fund, an organization whose field director, a Mr. Carl Braden, was simultaneously a national sponsor of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, of which you may have heard. The program director of the SCLC was the Reverend Andrew Young, in more recent years Jimmy Carter's ambassador to the UN and mayor of Atlanta. Young, by the way, was trained at the Highlander Folk School, previously mentioned.
Soon after returning from a trip to Moscow in 1958, Rustin organized the first of King's famous marches on Washington. The official organ of the Communist Party, "The Worker,- - openly declared the march to be a Communist project. Although he left King's employ as secretary in 1961, Rustin was called upon by King to be second in command of the much larger march on Washington which took place on August 28, 1963.
Bayard Rustin's replacement in 1961 as secretary and advisor to King was Jack O'Dell, also known as Hunter Pitts O'Dell. According to official records, in 1962 Jack O'Dell was a member of the National Committee of the Communist Party, USA. He had been listed as a Communist Party member as early as 1956. O'Dell was also given the job of acting executive director for SCLC activities for the entire Southeast, according to the St. Louis "Globe-Democrat - -of October 26, 1962. At that time, there were still some patriots in the press corps, and word of O'Dell's party membership became known.
What did King do? Shortly after the negative news reports, King fired O'Dell with much fanfare. And he then, without the fanfare, "immediately hired him again- - as director of the New York office of the SCLC, as confirmed by the "Richmond News-Leader - -of September 27, 1963. In 1963 a Black man from Monroe, North Carolina named Robert Williams made a trip to Peking, China. Exactly 20 days before King's 1963 march on Washington, Williams successfully urged Mao Tse-Tung to speak out on behalf of King's movement. Mr. Williams was also around this time maintaining his primary residence in Cuba, from which he made regular broadcasts to the southern US, three times a week, from high-power AM transmitters in Havana under the title "Radio Free Dixie." In these broadcasts, he urged violent attacks by Blacks against White Americans.
During this period, Williams wrote a book entitled "Negroes With Guns." The writer of the foreword for this book? None other than Martin Luther King, Jr. It is also interesting to note that the editors and publishers of this book were to a man all supporters of the infamous Fair Play for Cuba Committee.
According to King's biographer and sympathizer David J. Garrow, "King privately described himself as a Marxist." In his 1981 book, "The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr.", Garrow quotes King as saying in SCLC staff meetings, "...we have moved into a new era, which must be an era of revolution.... The whole structure of American life must be changed.... We are engaged in the class struggle."
Jewish Communist Stanley Levison can best be described as King's behind-the-scenes "handler." Levison, who had for years been in charge of the secret funnelling of Soviet funds to the Communist Party, USA, was King's mentor and was actually the brains behind many of King's more successful ploys. It was Levison who edited King's book, "Stride Toward Freedom." It was Levison who arranged for a publisher. Levison even prepared King's income tax returns! It was Levison who really controlled the fund-raising and agitation activities of the SCLC. Levison wrote many of King's speeches. King described Levison as one of his "closest friends."
FBI: King Bought Sex With SCLC Money
The Federal Bureau of Investigation had for many years been aware of Stanley Levison's Communist activities. It was Levison's close association with King that brought about the initial FBI interest in King.
Lest you be tempted to believe the controlled media's lie about "racists" in the FBI being out to "get" King, you should be aware that the man most responsible for the FBI's probe of King was Assistant Director William C. Sullivan. Sullivan describes himself as a liberal, and says that initially "I was one hundred per cent for King...because I saw him as an effective and badly needed leader for the Black people in their desire for civil rights." The probe of King not only confirmed their suspicions about King's Communist beliefs and associations, but it also revealed King to be a despicable hypocrite, an immoral degenerate, and a worthless charlatan.
According to Assistant Director Sullivan, who had direct access to the surveillance files on King which are denied the American people, King had embezzled or misapplied substantial amounts of money contributed to the "civil rights" movement. King used SCLC funds to pay for liquor, and numerous prostitutes both Black and White, who were brought to his hotel rooms, often two at a time, for drunken sex parties which sometimes lasted for several days. These types of activities were the norm for King's speaking and organizing tours.
In fact, an outfit called The National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee, which is putting on display the two bedrooms from the Lorraine Motel where King stayed the night before he was shot, has declined to depict in any way the "occupants - -of those rooms. That "according to exhibit designer Gerard Eisterhold "would be "close to blasphemy." The reason? Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spent his last night on Earth having sex with two women at the motel and physically beating and abusing a third.
Sullivan also stated that King had alienated the affections of numerous married women. According to Sullivan, who in 30 years with the Bureau hadáseen everything there was to be seen of the seamy side of life, King was one of only seven people he had ever encountered who was such a total degenerate.
Noting the violence that almost invariably attended King's supposedly "non-violent" marches, Sullivan's probe revealed a very different King from the carefully crafted public image. King welcomed members of many different Black groups as members of his SCLC, many of them advocates and practitioners of violence. King's only admonition on the subject was that they should embrace "tactical nonviolence."
Sullivan also relates an incident in which King met in a financial conference with Communist Party representatives, not knowing that one of the participants was an infiltrator actually working for the FBI.
J. Edgar Hoover personally saw to it that documented information on King's Communist connections was provided to the President and to Congress. And conclusive information from FBI files was also provided to major newspapers and news wire services. But were the American people informed of King's real nature? No, for even in the 1960s, the fix was in "the controlled media and the bought politicians were bound and determined to push their racial mixing program on America. King was their man and nothing was going to get in their way. With a few minor exceptions, these facts have been kept from the American people. The pro-King propaganda machine grinds on, and it is even reported that a serious proposal has been made to add some of King's writings as a new book in the Bible.
Ladies and gentlemen, the purpose of this radio program is far greater than to prove to you the immorality and subversion of this man called King. I want you to start to think for yourselves. I want you to consider this: What are the forces and motivation behind the controlled media's active promotion of King? What does it tell you about our politicians when you see them, almost without exception, falling all over themselves to honor King as a national hero? What does it tell you about our society when any public criticism of this moral leper and Communist functionary is considered grounds for dismissal? What does it tell you about the controlled media when you see how they have successfully suppressed the truth and held out a picture of King that can only be described as a colossal lie? You need to think, my fellow Americans. You desperately need to wake up.
Sources:
1. The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.- - (an official publication of the Martin Luther King Center for Nonviolent Social Change).
2. "King's Plagiarism: Imitation, Insecurity and Transformation," The Journal of American History, June 1991, p. 87) David J. Garrow
3. New York Times" of October 11, 1991, page 15.
4. "The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr.", David J. Garrow, (1981).
5. "And the walls came tumbling down," Rev. Ralph Abernathy (1989)
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The Truth About "Martin Luther King, Jr."
WHEN THE COMMUNISTS TOOK OVER a country, one of the first things that they did was to confiscate all the privately-held weapons, to deny the people the physical ability to resist tyranny. But even more insidious than the theft of the people's weapons was the theft of their history. Official Communist "historians" rewrote history to fit the current party line. In many countries, revered national heroes were excised from the history books, or their real deeds were distorted to fit Communist ideology, and Communist killers and criminals were converted into official "saints." Holidays were declared in honor of the beasts who murdered countless nations.
Did you know that much the same process has occurred right here in America?
Every January, the media go into a kind of almost spastic frenzy of adulation for the so-called "Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr." King has even had a national holiday declared in his honor, an honor accorded to no other American, not Washington, not Jefferson, not Lincoln. (Washington and Lincoln no longer have holidays -- they share the generic-sounding "President's Day.") A liberal judge has sealed the FBI files on King until the year 2027. What are they hiding? Let's take a look at this modern-day plastic god.
Born in 1929, King was the son of a Black preacher known at the time only as "Daddy King." "Daddy King" named his son Michael. In 1935, "Daddy King" had an inspiration to name himself after the Protestant reformer Martin Luther. He declared to his congregation that henceforth they were to refer to him as "Martin Luther King" and to his son as "Martin Luther King, Jr." None of this name changing was ever legalized in court. "Daddy" King's son's real name is to this day Michael King.
King's Brazen Cheating
We read in Michael Hoffman's "Holiday for a Cheater":
The first public sermon that King ever gave, in 1947 at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, was plagiarized from a homily by Protestant clergyman Harry Emerson Fosdick entitled "Life is What You Make It," according to the testimony of King's best friend of that time, Reverend Larry H. Williams.
The first book that King wrote, "Stride Toward Freedom, - -was plagiarized from numerous sources, all unattributed, according to documentation recently assembled by sympathetic King scholars Keith D. Miller, Ira G. Zepp, Jr., and David J. Garrow.
And no less an authoritative source than the four senior editors of "The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.- - (an official publication of the Martin Luther King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, Inc., whose staff includes King's widow Coretta), stated of King's writings at both Boston University and Crozer Theological Seminary: "Judged retroactively by the standards of academic scholarship, [his writings] are tragically flawed by numerous instances of plagiarism.... Appropriated passages are particularly evident in his writings in his major field of graduate study, systematic theology."
King's essay, "The Place of Reason and Experience in Finding God," written at Crozer, pirated passages from the work of theologian Edgar S. Brightman, author of "The Finding of God."
Another of King's theses, "Contemporary Continental Theology," written shortly after he entered Boston University, was largely stolen from a book by Walter Marshall Horton.
King's doctoral dissertation, "A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Harry Nelson Wieman," for which he was awarded a PhD in theology, contains more than fifty complete sentences plagiarized from the PhD dissertation of Dr. Jack Boozer, "The Place of Reason in Paul Tillich's Concept of God."
According to "The Martin Luther King Papers", in King's dissertation "only 49 per cent of sentences in the section on Tillich contain five or more words that were King's own...."!
In "The Journal of American History", June 1991, page 87, David J. Garrow, a leftist academic who is sympathetic to King, says that King's wife, Coretta Scott King, who also served as his secretary, was an accomplice in his repeated cheating. ("King's Plagiarism: Imitation, Insecurity and Transformation," The Journal of American History, June 1991, p. 87)
Reading Garrow's article, one is led to the inescapable conclusion that King cheated because he had chosen for himself a political role in which a PhD would be useful, and, lacking the intellectual ability to obtain the title fairly, went after it by any means necessary. Why, then, one might ask, did the professors at Crozer Theological Seminary and Boston University grant him passing grades and a PhD? Garrow states on page 89: "King's academic compositions, especially at Boston University, were almost without exception little more than summary descriptions... and comparisons of other's writings. Nonetheless, the papers almost always received desirable letter grades, strongly suggesting that King's professors did not expect more...." The editors of "The Martin Luther King Jr. Papers" state that "...the failure of King's teachers to notice his pattern of textual appropriation is somewhat remarkable...."
But researcher Michael Hoffman tells us "...actually the malfeasance of the professors is not at all remarkable. King was politically correct, he was Black, and he had ambitions. The leftist [professors were] happy to award a doctorate to such a candidate no matter how much fraud was involved. Nor is it any wonder that it has taken forty years for the truth about King's record of nearly constant intellectual piracy to be made public."
Supposed scholars, who in reality shared King's vision of a racially mixed and Marxist America, purposely covered up his cheating for decades. The cover-up still continues. From the "New York Times" of October 11, 1991, page 15, we learn that on October 10th of that year, a committee of researchers at Boston University admitted that, "There is no question but that Dr. King plagiarized in the dissertation." However, despite its finding, the committee said that "No thought should be given to the revocation of Dr. King's doctoral degree," an action the panel said "would serve no purpose."
No purpose, indeed! Justice demands that, in light of his willful fraud as a student, the "reverend" and the "doctor" should be removed from King's name.
Communist Beliefs and Connections
Well friends, he is not a legitimate reverend, he is not a bona fide PhD, and his name isn't really "Martin Luther King, Jr." What's left? Just a sexual degenerate, an America-hating Communist, and a criminal betrayer of even the interests of his own people.
On Labor Day, 1957, a special meeting was attended by Martin Luther King and four others at a strange institution called the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee. The Highlander Folk School was a Communist front, having been founded by Myles Horton (Communist Party organizer for Tennessee) and Don West (Communist Party organizer for North Carolina). The leaders of this meeting with King were the aforementioned Horton and West, along with Abner Berry and James Dumbrowski, all open and acknowledged members of the Communist Party, USA. The agenda of the meeting was a plan to tour the Southern states to initiate demonstrations and riots.
From 1955 to 1960, Martin Luther King's associate, advisor, and personal secretary was one Bayard Rustin. In 1936 Rustin joined the Young Communist League at New York City College. Convicted of draft-dodging, he went to prison for two years in 1944. On January 23, 1953 the "Los Angeles Times" reported his conviction and sentencing to jail for 60 days for lewd vagrancy and homosexual perversion. Rustin attended the 16th Convention of the Communist Party, USA in February, 1957. One month later, he and King founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, or SCLC for short. The president of the SCLC was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The vice-president of the SCLC was the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, who was also the president of an identified Communist front known as the Southern Conference Educational Fund, an organization whose field director, a Mr. Carl Braden, was simultaneously a national sponsor of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, of which you may have heard. The program director of the SCLC was the Reverend Andrew Young, in more recent years Jimmy Carter's ambassador to the UN and mayor of Atlanta. Young, by the way, was trained at the Highlander Folk School, previously mentioned.
Soon after returning from a trip to Moscow in 1958, Rustin organized the first of King's famous marches on Washington. The official organ of the Communist Party, "The Worker,- - openly declared the march to be a Communist project. Although he left King's employ as secretary in 1961, Rustin was called upon by King to be second in command of the much larger march on Washington which took place on August 28, 1963.
Bayard Rustin's replacement in 1961 as secretary and advisor to King was Jack O'Dell, also known as Hunter Pitts O'Dell. According to official records, in 1962 Jack O'Dell was a member of the National Committee of the Communist Party, USA. He had been listed as a Communist Party member as early as 1956. O'Dell was also given the job of acting executive director for SCLC activities for the entire Southeast, according to the St. Louis "Globe-Democrat - -of October 26, 1962. At that time, there were still some patriots in the press corps, and word of O'Dell's party membership became known.
What did King do? Shortly after the negative news reports, King fired O'Dell with much fanfare. And he then, without the fanfare, "immediately hired him again- - as director of the New York office of the SCLC, as confirmed by the "Richmond News-Leader - -of September 27, 1963. In 1963 a Black man from Monroe, North Carolina named Robert Williams made a trip to Peking, China. Exactly 20 days before King's 1963 march on Washington, Williams successfully urged Mao Tse-Tung to speak out on behalf of King's movement. Mr. Williams was also around this time maintaining his primary residence in Cuba, from which he made regular broadcasts to the southern US, three times a week, from high-power AM transmitters in Havana under the title "Radio Free Dixie." In these broadcasts, he urged violent attacks by Blacks against White Americans.
During this period, Williams wrote a book entitled "Negroes With Guns." The writer of the foreword for this book? None other than Martin Luther King, Jr. It is also interesting to note that the editors and publishers of this book were to a man all supporters of the infamous Fair Play for Cuba Committee.
According to King's biographer and sympathizer David J. Garrow, "King privately described himself as a Marxist." In his 1981 book, "The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr.", Garrow quotes King as saying in SCLC staff meetings, "...we have moved into a new era, which must be an era of revolution.... The whole structure of American life must be changed.... We are engaged in the class struggle."
Jewish Communist Stanley Levison can best be described as King's behind-the-scenes "handler." Levison, who had for years been in charge of the secret funnelling of Soviet funds to the Communist Party, USA, was King's mentor and was actually the brains behind many of King's more successful ploys. It was Levison who edited King's book, "Stride Toward Freedom." It was Levison who arranged for a publisher. Levison even prepared King's income tax returns! It was Levison who really controlled the fund-raising and agitation activities of the SCLC. Levison wrote many of King's speeches. King described Levison as one of his "closest friends."
FBI: King Bought Sex With SCLC Money
The Federal Bureau of Investigation had for many years been aware of Stanley Levison's Communist activities. It was Levison's close association with King that brought about the initial FBI interest in King.
Lest you be tempted to believe the controlled media's lie about "racists" in the FBI being out to "get" King, you should be aware that the man most responsible for the FBI's probe of King was Assistant Director William C. Sullivan. Sullivan describes himself as a liberal, and says that initially "I was one hundred per cent for King...because I saw him as an effective and badly needed leader for the Black people in their desire for civil rights." The probe of King not only confirmed their suspicions about King's Communist beliefs and associations, but it also revealed King to be a despicable hypocrite, an immoral degenerate, and a worthless charlatan.
According to Assistant Director Sullivan, who had direct access to the surveillance files on King which are denied the American people, King had embezzled or misapplied substantial amounts of money contributed to the "civil rights" movement. King used SCLC funds to pay for liquor, and numerous prostitutes both Black and White, who were brought to his hotel rooms, often two at a time, for drunken sex parties which sometimes lasted for several days. These types of activities were the norm for King's speaking and organizing tours.
In fact, an outfit called The National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee, which is putting on display the two bedrooms from the Lorraine Motel where King stayed the night before he was shot, has declined to depict in any way the "occupants - -of those rooms. That "according to exhibit designer Gerard Eisterhold "would be "close to blasphemy." The reason? Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spent his last night on Earth having sex with two women at the motel and physically beating and abusing a third.
Sullivan also stated that King had alienated the affections of numerous married women. According to Sullivan, who in 30 years with the Bureau hadáseen everything there was to be seen of the seamy side of life, King was one of only seven people he had ever encountered who was such a total degenerate.
Noting the violence that almost invariably attended King's supposedly "non-violent" marches, Sullivan's probe revealed a very different King from the carefully crafted public image. King welcomed members of many different Black groups as members of his SCLC, many of them advocates and practitioners of violence. King's only admonition on the subject was that they should embrace "tactical nonviolence."
Sullivan also relates an incident in which King met in a financial conference with Communist Party representatives, not knowing that one of the participants was an infiltrator actually working for the FBI.
J. Edgar Hoover personally saw to it that documented information on King's Communist connections was provided to the President and to Congress. And conclusive information from FBI files was also provided to major newspapers and news wire services. But were the American people informed of King's real nature? No, for even in the 1960s, the fix was in "the controlled media and the bought politicians were bound and determined to push their racial mixing program on America. King was their man and nothing was going to get in their way. With a few minor exceptions, these facts have been kept from the American people. The pro-King propaganda machine grinds on, and it is even reported that a serious proposal has been made to add some of King's writings as a new book in the Bible.
Ladies and gentlemen, the purpose of this radio program is far greater than to prove to you the immorality and subversion of this man called King. I want you to start to think for yourselves. I want you to consider this: What are the forces and motivation behind the controlled media's active promotion of King? What does it tell you about our politicians when you see them, almost without exception, falling all over themselves to honor King as a national hero? What does it tell you about our society when any public criticism of this moral leper and Communist functionary is considered grounds for dismissal? What does it tell you about the controlled media when you see how they have successfully suppressed the truth and held out a picture of King that can only be described as a colossal lie? You need to think, my fellow Americans. You desperately need to wake up.
Sources:
1. The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.- - (an official publication of the Martin Luther King Center for Nonviolent Social Change).
2. "King's Plagiarism: Imitation, Insecurity and Transformation," The Journal of American History, June 1991, p. 87) David J. Garrow
3. New York Times" of October 11, 1991, page 15.
4. "The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr.", David J. Garrow, (1981).
5. "And the walls came tumbling down," Rev. Ralph Abernathy (1989)
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BIOGRAPHY OF OSAMA BIN LADEN
This document was given to FRONTLINE by a source close to bin Laden who would like to remain anonymous. FRONTLINE found it a very useful source of information, but could not independently verify much of the information contained herein. Some of the information is true. However, some of it runs contrary to accounts given by other reliable sources. That said, this document does provide some important details regarding bin Laden and his family life.
Born 1957 for Syrian mother, Osama bin Laden was the seventh son among fifty brothers and sisters.
Note: This document is published here exactly as in the original translated document given to FRONTLINE. No changes have been made to grammar or punctuation.
His father Mohammed Awad bin Laden came to the kingdom from Hadramout (South Yemen) sometime around 1930. The father started his life as a very poor laborer (porter in Jeddah port), to end up as owner of the biggest construction company in the kingdom. During the reign of King Saud, bin Laden the father became very close to the royal family when he took the risk of building King Saud's palaces much cheaper than the cheapest bid. He impressed King Saud with his performance but he also built good relations with other members of the royal family, especially Faisal. During the Saud-Faisal conflict in the early sixties, bin Laden the father had a big role in convincing King Saud to step down in favor of Faisal. After Saud's departure the treasury was empty and bin Laden was so supportive to King Faisal that he literally paid the civil servants' wages of the whole kingdom for six months. King Faisal then issued a decree that all construction projects should go to bin Laden. Indeed, he was appointed for a period as the minister of public works.
In 1969 the father took the task of rebuilding Al-Aqsa mosque after the fire incident. Interestingly the bin Laden family say that they have the credit of building all the three mosques, because later on their company took over the task of major extension in Mecca and Medina mosques.
The father was fairly devoted Moslem, very humble and generous. He was so proud of the bag he used when he was a porter that he kept it as a trophy in the main reception room in his palace. The father used to insist on his sons to go and manage some projects themselves.
The father had very dominating personality. He insisted to keep all his children in one premises. He had a tough discipline and observed all the children with strict religious and social code. He maintained a special daily program and obliged his children to follow. At the same time the father was entertaining with trips to the sea and desert. He dealt with his children as big men and demanded them to show confidence at young age. He was very keen not to show any difference in the treatment of his children.
Osama was exposed very early on his age to this experience but he lost his father when he was 13. He married at the age of 17 to a Syrian girl who was a relative. He grew up as religiously committed boy and the early marriage was another factor of protecting him from corruption.
Osama had his primary, secondary and even university education in Jeddah. He had a degree in public administration 1981 from King Abdul-Aziz university in Jeddah. Countries of the Arabian Peninsula, Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Sudan are the only countries he has been to. All stories of trips to Switzerland, Philippines, and London are all unfounded.
In addition to the general Islamic commitment he started forming an Islamic responsibility at early age. His father used to host hundreds of pilgrims during Hajj season from al over the world. Some of those were senior Islamic scholars or leaders of Muslim movements. This habit went on even after his father's death through his elder brothers. He used to make good contacts and relations through those gatherings.
At secondary school and university he adopted the main trend of many educated Muslims at that time, Muslim Brotherhood. There was a collection of Muslim scholars in Jeddah and Mecca at that period. There was nothing extraordinary in his personality and that trend was rather very non-confrontational. Interestingly, the 1980 raid in the Grand Mosque in Mecca was not appealing to him, neither the theology or that group. He had two distinguished teachers in Islamic studies, which was a compulsory subject in the university. First was Abdullah Azzam who became later as one of the big names in Afghanistan and the second was Mohammed Quttub, a famous Islamic writer and philosopher.
The first encounter with Afghanistan was as early as the first two weeks of Soviet invasion. He went to Pakistan and was taken by his hosts Jamaat Islami from Karachi to Peshawar to see the refugees and meet some leaders. Some of those leaders like Rabbani and Sayyaf were common faces to him because he met them during Hajj gatherings That trip which was [a] secret trip lasted for almost a month and was an exploratory rather than action trip. He went back to the kingdom and started lobbying with his brothers, relatives and friends at the school to support the mujahedeen. He succeeded in collecting huge amount of money and material as donations to jihad. He made another trip to take this material. He took with him few Pakistanis and Afghanis who were working in bin Laden company for more than ten years. Again, he did not stay more than a month The trip was to Pakistan and the border only and was not to Afghanistan. He went on collecting money and going in short trips once or twice a year until 1982.
In 1982 he decided to go inside Afghanistan. He brought with him plenty of the construction machinery and put them at the disposal of the mujahedeen He started spending more and more time in Afghanistan occasionally joining actual battles but not in an organized manner. His presence was encouraging to more Saudis to come but the numbers were still small at that period.
In 1984 he had one further step in strengthening his presence in Afghanistan by establishing the guesthouse in Peshawar (Baitul'ansar). That house was supposed to be the first station of Arab mujahedeen when they come to Afghanistan before going to the front or start training. At that period Osama did not have his own command or training camps. He used to send the newcomers to one of the Afghan factions.
The guesthouse establishment was coinciding with the formation of Jihad Service Bureau by Abdullah Azzam in Peshawar. The Bureau was very active in terms of media, publications and charity work. The Bureau publications were important in attracting more Saudis and Arabs to Afghanistan.
In 1986 Osama decided to have his own camps inside Afghanistan and within two years he built more than six camps. Some were mobilized more than once. He decided to have his own front and to run his own battles with his own command. Among the Arab fighters he had, there were senior Arab ex-military men from Syria and Egypt with good military experience. The story of the guesthouse and the camps was very attractive for more Arab mujahedeen to come and there was a significant surge in their numbers at that period.
In addition to many exchanges of fire and small operations, the first major battle he had face to face with the Soviet army with pure Arab personnel was the battle of Jaji in the province of Baktia 200 kilometers away from Khost. From then until 1989 he had more than five major battles with hundreds of small operations and exchanges of fire. During the period 1984-1989 he was staying more in Afghanistan than Saudi Arabia. He would spend a total of eight months a year or more in Afghanistan.
In 1988 he noticed that he was backward in his documentation and was not able to give answers to some families asking about their loved ones gone missing in Afghanistan. He decided to make the matter much more organized and arranged for proper documentation. He made a tracking record of the visitors, be they mujahedeen or charity or simple visitors. Their movement between the guesthouse and the camps had to be recorded as well as their first arrival and final departure. The whole complex was then termed Al-Qa'edah which is an Arabic word meaning "The Base." Al-Qa'edah was very much public knowledge. It was funny to see some people triumphing because they discovered it!
Late 1989 after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, he went to the kingdom in an ordinary trip. There he was banned from travel and was trapped in the kingdom. The Soviet withdrawal might have been a factor but the main reason for the travel ban were his intentions to start a new "front" of jihad in South Yemen. In addition, he embarrassed the regime by lectures and speeches warning of impending invasion by Saddam. At that time the regime was at very good terms with Saddam. He was instructed officially to keep low profile and not to give public talks. Despite the travel ban he was not hostile to regime at this stage. Indeed he presented a written advice in the form of a detailed, personal, private and confidential letter to the king few weeks before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
He reacted swiftly to Iraqi invasion and saw it fulfilling his prophecy. He immediately forwarded another letter to the king suggesting in detail how to protect the country from potentially advancing Iraqi forces. In addition to many military tactics suggested, he volunteered to bring all the Arab mujahedeen to defend the kingdom. That letter was presented in the first few days of the incident, and the regime response was of consideration!
While he was expecting some call to mobilize his men and equipment he heard the news which transferred his life completely. The Americans are coming. He always describes that moment as shocking moment. He felt depressed and thought that maneuvers had to change. Instead of writing to the king or approaching other members of the royal family, he started lobbying through religious scholars and Muslim activists. He succeeded in extracting a fatwah from one of the senior scholars that training and readiness is a religious duty. He immediately circulated that fatwah and convinced people to have their training in Afghanistan. It was estimated that 4000 went to Afghanistan in response to the fatwah. The regime was not happy with his activities so they limited his movement to Jeddah only. He was summoned for questioning twice for some of his speeches and activities and was given warnings. To intimidate him, the regime raided his farm in the suburb of Jeddah by the National Guard. He was not there during the raid and was very angry when told. He wrote a letter of protest to Prince Abdullah. Abdullah apologized and claimed he is not aware and promised to punish who ever were responsible.
Osama was fed up with this almost house arrest situation and did not imagine himself able to stay in the country with the American forces around. One of his brothers was very close to King Fahad and also close to Prince Ahmed, deputy minister of interior. He convinced his brother that he needed to leave the country to sort out some business matters in Pakistan and come back. There was a difficult obstacle, the stubborn Prince Nayef, minister of interior. His brother waited until Nayef went in a trip outside the kingdom and extracted lifting the ban from prince Ahmed. When he arrived in Pakistan around April 1991 he sent a letter to his brother telling him that he is not coming back and apologized for letting him down with the royal family.
After his arrival to Pakistan he went straight to Afghanistan because he knew the Pakistani intelligence would hand him back to the Saudis. There, he attended the collapse of the communist regime and the consequent dispute between the Afghan parties. He spent great effort to arbitrate between them but with no success He ordered his followers to avoid any involvement in the conflict and told them it was a sin to side with any faction. During his stay the Saudis tried more than once to kidnap or kill him in collaboration with the Pakistani intelligence. His friends in the Saudi and Pakistani establishments would always leak the plan and make him ready for it. After his failure in sorting the Afghani dispute, he decided to leave Afghanistan. The only alternative country he had was Sudan. He left Afghanistan disguised in private jet only few months after his arrival. That was late 1991.
His choice of Sudan had nothing to do with jihad or "terrorism." He was attracted to Sudan because of what was at that time an Islamic banner raised by the new regime in Sudan. He wanted to have good refuge as well as help the government in its construction projects. There was no intention from his side or from the Sudanese regime to have any military activity in Sudan. Indeed the Sudanese government refused even sending some of his followers to the front in the south. He was treated in Sudan as a special guest who wanted to help Sudan when everybody was turning away. In Sudan he mobilized a lot of construction equipment and enrolled himself in busy construction projects. He spent good effort in convincing Saudi businessmen to invest in Sudan and had reasonable success. Many of his brothers and Jeddah merchants had and still have investment in real estate, farming and agricultural industry. In Sudan he had again escaped an assassination attempt which turned out later to be the plan of Saudi intelligence.
During his stay in Sudan anti-American incidents happened in Somalia and South Yemen. Neither of the two incidents was performed by his group in the proper sense of chain of command. Both were performed by people who had training in Afghanistan and had enough anti-American drive. He might have given some sanctioning to the operations but one thing was certain, the Sudanese were completely unaware of either.
Between his arrival to Sudan and early 1994 he was not regarded publicly as Saudi opposition and Saudi citizens were visiting him without too much precautions. Only the well-informed people would know that he was classified as enemy to the Saudi regime. His assets were frozen sometime between 1992 and 1994 but that was not published. The Saudis decided to announce their hostility early 1994 when they publicized withdrawing his citizenship.
After long silence and tolerance, bin Laden replied by issuing a communiqué condemning the Saudi decision and saying that he does not need the "Saudi" reference to identify himself and it is not up to Al-Saud to admit or expel people from Arabian Peninsula. He then formed together with activists and scholars from the kingdom a group called "Advice and Reform Committee" (ARC). The ARC was, according to its communiqués and published agenda, a purely political group. The ARC published around 17 communiqués which might have contained harsh criticism of the Saudi regime and plenty of religious rhetoric but never contained reference for violence or incitment of violence.
The car bomb in spring 1995 in Riyadh was the first major anti-American action in the kingdom. Bin Laden never claimed responsibility, but the Saudi government tried to link the incident to bin Laden by showing video confessions of four "Arab Afghans" involved in the bombing.
Sudan was exposed to huge international pressure for hosting bin Laden and his followers, and bin Laden felt that he is becoming an embarrassment to the Sudanese. Early in 1996 he started making contacts with his old friends in Afghanistan to prepare for his reception. He fled Sudan in a very well planned trip with many of his followers to go straight to Jalalabad in Eastern Afghanistan.
When he arrived there, the situation in Afghanistan was very unsettled between the many factions, but he had very good relations with all factions and all would protect him. The area he arrived to was under control of Yunis Khalis, a very influential warlord who later on joined Taliban.
June 1996, after his arrival in Afghanistan was the Khobar bombing. Nobody claimed responsibility, but sources from inside the Saudi ministry of interior confirmed involvement of Arab Afghans, with possible link to bin Laden The Saudi government wanted to frame Shi'a, at the beginning but Americans were very suspicious of the Saudi story. Bin Laden himself never claimed responsibility but gave many hints that he might have been involved. The Saudi government has acknowledged recently that bin Laden's men were behind the bombing
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Born 1957 for Syrian mother, Osama bin Laden was the seventh son among fifty brothers and sisters.
Note: This document is published here exactly as in the original translated document given to FRONTLINE. No changes have been made to grammar or punctuation.
His father Mohammed Awad bin Laden came to the kingdom from Hadramout (South Yemen) sometime around 1930. The father started his life as a very poor laborer (porter in Jeddah port), to end up as owner of the biggest construction company in the kingdom. During the reign of King Saud, bin Laden the father became very close to the royal family when he took the risk of building King Saud's palaces much cheaper than the cheapest bid. He impressed King Saud with his performance but he also built good relations with other members of the royal family, especially Faisal. During the Saud-Faisal conflict in the early sixties, bin Laden the father had a big role in convincing King Saud to step down in favor of Faisal. After Saud's departure the treasury was empty and bin Laden was so supportive to King Faisal that he literally paid the civil servants' wages of the whole kingdom for six months. King Faisal then issued a decree that all construction projects should go to bin Laden. Indeed, he was appointed for a period as the minister of public works.
In 1969 the father took the task of rebuilding Al-Aqsa mosque after the fire incident. Interestingly the bin Laden family say that they have the credit of building all the three mosques, because later on their company took over the task of major extension in Mecca and Medina mosques.
The father was fairly devoted Moslem, very humble and generous. He was so proud of the bag he used when he was a porter that he kept it as a trophy in the main reception room in his palace. The father used to insist on his sons to go and manage some projects themselves.
The father had very dominating personality. He insisted to keep all his children in one premises. He had a tough discipline and observed all the children with strict religious and social code. He maintained a special daily program and obliged his children to follow. At the same time the father was entertaining with trips to the sea and desert. He dealt with his children as big men and demanded them to show confidence at young age. He was very keen not to show any difference in the treatment of his children.
Osama was exposed very early on his age to this experience but he lost his father when he was 13. He married at the age of 17 to a Syrian girl who was a relative. He grew up as religiously committed boy and the early marriage was another factor of protecting him from corruption.
Osama had his primary, secondary and even university education in Jeddah. He had a degree in public administration 1981 from King Abdul-Aziz university in Jeddah. Countries of the Arabian Peninsula, Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Sudan are the only countries he has been to. All stories of trips to Switzerland, Philippines, and London are all unfounded.
In addition to the general Islamic commitment he started forming an Islamic responsibility at early age. His father used to host hundreds of pilgrims during Hajj season from al over the world. Some of those were senior Islamic scholars or leaders of Muslim movements. This habit went on even after his father's death through his elder brothers. He used to make good contacts and relations through those gatherings.
At secondary school and university he adopted the main trend of many educated Muslims at that time, Muslim Brotherhood. There was a collection of Muslim scholars in Jeddah and Mecca at that period. There was nothing extraordinary in his personality and that trend was rather very non-confrontational. Interestingly, the 1980 raid in the Grand Mosque in Mecca was not appealing to him, neither the theology or that group. He had two distinguished teachers in Islamic studies, which was a compulsory subject in the university. First was Abdullah Azzam who became later as one of the big names in Afghanistan and the second was Mohammed Quttub, a famous Islamic writer and philosopher.
The first encounter with Afghanistan was as early as the first two weeks of Soviet invasion. He went to Pakistan and was taken by his hosts Jamaat Islami from Karachi to Peshawar to see the refugees and meet some leaders. Some of those leaders like Rabbani and Sayyaf were common faces to him because he met them during Hajj gatherings That trip which was [a] secret trip lasted for almost a month and was an exploratory rather than action trip. He went back to the kingdom and started lobbying with his brothers, relatives and friends at the school to support the mujahedeen. He succeeded in collecting huge amount of money and material as donations to jihad. He made another trip to take this material. He took with him few Pakistanis and Afghanis who were working in bin Laden company for more than ten years. Again, he did not stay more than a month The trip was to Pakistan and the border only and was not to Afghanistan. He went on collecting money and going in short trips once or twice a year until 1982.
In 1982 he decided to go inside Afghanistan. He brought with him plenty of the construction machinery and put them at the disposal of the mujahedeen He started spending more and more time in Afghanistan occasionally joining actual battles but not in an organized manner. His presence was encouraging to more Saudis to come but the numbers were still small at that period.
In 1984 he had one further step in strengthening his presence in Afghanistan by establishing the guesthouse in Peshawar (Baitul'ansar). That house was supposed to be the first station of Arab mujahedeen when they come to Afghanistan before going to the front or start training. At that period Osama did not have his own command or training camps. He used to send the newcomers to one of the Afghan factions.
The guesthouse establishment was coinciding with the formation of Jihad Service Bureau by Abdullah Azzam in Peshawar. The Bureau was very active in terms of media, publications and charity work. The Bureau publications were important in attracting more Saudis and Arabs to Afghanistan.
In 1986 Osama decided to have his own camps inside Afghanistan and within two years he built more than six camps. Some were mobilized more than once. He decided to have his own front and to run his own battles with his own command. Among the Arab fighters he had, there were senior Arab ex-military men from Syria and Egypt with good military experience. The story of the guesthouse and the camps was very attractive for more Arab mujahedeen to come and there was a significant surge in their numbers at that period.
In addition to many exchanges of fire and small operations, the first major battle he had face to face with the Soviet army with pure Arab personnel was the battle of Jaji in the province of Baktia 200 kilometers away from Khost. From then until 1989 he had more than five major battles with hundreds of small operations and exchanges of fire. During the period 1984-1989 he was staying more in Afghanistan than Saudi Arabia. He would spend a total of eight months a year or more in Afghanistan.
In 1988 he noticed that he was backward in his documentation and was not able to give answers to some families asking about their loved ones gone missing in Afghanistan. He decided to make the matter much more organized and arranged for proper documentation. He made a tracking record of the visitors, be they mujahedeen or charity or simple visitors. Their movement between the guesthouse and the camps had to be recorded as well as their first arrival and final departure. The whole complex was then termed Al-Qa'edah which is an Arabic word meaning "The Base." Al-Qa'edah was very much public knowledge. It was funny to see some people triumphing because they discovered it!
Late 1989 after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, he went to the kingdom in an ordinary trip. There he was banned from travel and was trapped in the kingdom. The Soviet withdrawal might have been a factor but the main reason for the travel ban were his intentions to start a new "front" of jihad in South Yemen. In addition, he embarrassed the regime by lectures and speeches warning of impending invasion by Saddam. At that time the regime was at very good terms with Saddam. He was instructed officially to keep low profile and not to give public talks. Despite the travel ban he was not hostile to regime at this stage. Indeed he presented a written advice in the form of a detailed, personal, private and confidential letter to the king few weeks before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
He reacted swiftly to Iraqi invasion and saw it fulfilling his prophecy. He immediately forwarded another letter to the king suggesting in detail how to protect the country from potentially advancing Iraqi forces. In addition to many military tactics suggested, he volunteered to bring all the Arab mujahedeen to defend the kingdom. That letter was presented in the first few days of the incident, and the regime response was of consideration!
While he was expecting some call to mobilize his men and equipment he heard the news which transferred his life completely. The Americans are coming. He always describes that moment as shocking moment. He felt depressed and thought that maneuvers had to change. Instead of writing to the king or approaching other members of the royal family, he started lobbying through religious scholars and Muslim activists. He succeeded in extracting a fatwah from one of the senior scholars that training and readiness is a religious duty. He immediately circulated that fatwah and convinced people to have their training in Afghanistan. It was estimated that 4000 went to Afghanistan in response to the fatwah. The regime was not happy with his activities so they limited his movement to Jeddah only. He was summoned for questioning twice for some of his speeches and activities and was given warnings. To intimidate him, the regime raided his farm in the suburb of Jeddah by the National Guard. He was not there during the raid and was very angry when told. He wrote a letter of protest to Prince Abdullah. Abdullah apologized and claimed he is not aware and promised to punish who ever were responsible.
Osama was fed up with this almost house arrest situation and did not imagine himself able to stay in the country with the American forces around. One of his brothers was very close to King Fahad and also close to Prince Ahmed, deputy minister of interior. He convinced his brother that he needed to leave the country to sort out some business matters in Pakistan and come back. There was a difficult obstacle, the stubborn Prince Nayef, minister of interior. His brother waited until Nayef went in a trip outside the kingdom and extracted lifting the ban from prince Ahmed. When he arrived in Pakistan around April 1991 he sent a letter to his brother telling him that he is not coming back and apologized for letting him down with the royal family.
After his arrival to Pakistan he went straight to Afghanistan because he knew the Pakistani intelligence would hand him back to the Saudis. There, he attended the collapse of the communist regime and the consequent dispute between the Afghan parties. He spent great effort to arbitrate between them but with no success He ordered his followers to avoid any involvement in the conflict and told them it was a sin to side with any faction. During his stay the Saudis tried more than once to kidnap or kill him in collaboration with the Pakistani intelligence. His friends in the Saudi and Pakistani establishments would always leak the plan and make him ready for it. After his failure in sorting the Afghani dispute, he decided to leave Afghanistan. The only alternative country he had was Sudan. He left Afghanistan disguised in private jet only few months after his arrival. That was late 1991.
His choice of Sudan had nothing to do with jihad or "terrorism." He was attracted to Sudan because of what was at that time an Islamic banner raised by the new regime in Sudan. He wanted to have good refuge as well as help the government in its construction projects. There was no intention from his side or from the Sudanese regime to have any military activity in Sudan. Indeed the Sudanese government refused even sending some of his followers to the front in the south. He was treated in Sudan as a special guest who wanted to help Sudan when everybody was turning away. In Sudan he mobilized a lot of construction equipment and enrolled himself in busy construction projects. He spent good effort in convincing Saudi businessmen to invest in Sudan and had reasonable success. Many of his brothers and Jeddah merchants had and still have investment in real estate, farming and agricultural industry. In Sudan he had again escaped an assassination attempt which turned out later to be the plan of Saudi intelligence.
During his stay in Sudan anti-American incidents happened in Somalia and South Yemen. Neither of the two incidents was performed by his group in the proper sense of chain of command. Both were performed by people who had training in Afghanistan and had enough anti-American drive. He might have given some sanctioning to the operations but one thing was certain, the Sudanese were completely unaware of either.
Between his arrival to Sudan and early 1994 he was not regarded publicly as Saudi opposition and Saudi citizens were visiting him without too much precautions. Only the well-informed people would know that he was classified as enemy to the Saudi regime. His assets were frozen sometime between 1992 and 1994 but that was not published. The Saudis decided to announce their hostility early 1994 when they publicized withdrawing his citizenship.
After long silence and tolerance, bin Laden replied by issuing a communiqué condemning the Saudi decision and saying that he does not need the "Saudi" reference to identify himself and it is not up to Al-Saud to admit or expel people from Arabian Peninsula. He then formed together with activists and scholars from the kingdom a group called "Advice and Reform Committee" (ARC). The ARC was, according to its communiqués and published agenda, a purely political group. The ARC published around 17 communiqués which might have contained harsh criticism of the Saudi regime and plenty of religious rhetoric but never contained reference for violence or incitment of violence.
The car bomb in spring 1995 in Riyadh was the first major anti-American action in the kingdom. Bin Laden never claimed responsibility, but the Saudi government tried to link the incident to bin Laden by showing video confessions of four "Arab Afghans" involved in the bombing.
Sudan was exposed to huge international pressure for hosting bin Laden and his followers, and bin Laden felt that he is becoming an embarrassment to the Sudanese. Early in 1996 he started making contacts with his old friends in Afghanistan to prepare for his reception. He fled Sudan in a very well planned trip with many of his followers to go straight to Jalalabad in Eastern Afghanistan.
When he arrived there, the situation in Afghanistan was very unsettled between the many factions, but he had very good relations with all factions and all would protect him. The area he arrived to was under control of Yunis Khalis, a very influential warlord who later on joined Taliban.
June 1996, after his arrival in Afghanistan was the Khobar bombing. Nobody claimed responsibility, but sources from inside the Saudi ministry of interior confirmed involvement of Arab Afghans, with possible link to bin Laden The Saudi government wanted to frame Shi'a, at the beginning but Americans were very suspicious of the Saudi story. Bin Laden himself never claimed responsibility but gave many hints that he might have been involved. The Saudi government has acknowledged recently that bin Laden's men were behind the bombing
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BIOGRAPHY OF OSAMA BIN LADEN
This document was given to FRONTLINE by a source close to bin Laden who would like to remain anonymous. FRONTLINE found it a very useful source of information, but could not independently verify much of the information contained herein. Some of the information is true. However, some of it runs contrary to accounts given by other reliable sources. That said, this document does provide some important details regarding bin Laden and his family life.
Born 1957 for Syrian mother, Osama bin Laden was the seventh son among fifty brothers and sisters.
Note: This document is published here exactly as in the original translated document given to FRONTLINE. No changes have been made to grammar or punctuation.
His father Mohammed Awad bin Laden came to the kingdom from Hadramout (South Yemen) sometime around 1930. The father started his life as a very poor laborer (porter in Jeddah port), to end up as owner of the biggest construction company in the kingdom. During the reign of King Saud, bin Laden the father became very close to the royal family when he took the risk of building King Saud's palaces much cheaper than the cheapest bid. He impressed King Saud with his performance but he also built good relations with other members of the royal family, especially Faisal. During the Saud-Faisal conflict in the early sixties, bin Laden the father had a big role in convincing King Saud to step down in favor of Faisal. After Saud's departure the treasury was empty and bin Laden was so supportive to King Faisal that he literally paid the civil servants' wages of the whole kingdom for six months. King Faisal then issued a decree that all construction projects should go to bin Laden. Indeed, he was appointed for a period as the minister of public works.
In 1969 the father took the task of rebuilding Al-Aqsa mosque after the fire incident. Interestingly the bin Laden family say that they have the credit of building all the three mosques, because later on their company took over the task of major extension in Mecca and Medina mosques.
The father was fairly devoted Moslem, very humble and generous. He was so proud of the bag he used when he was a porter that he kept it as a trophy in the main reception room in his palace. The father used to insist on his sons to go and manage some projects themselves.
The father had very dominating personality. He insisted to keep all his children in one premises. He had a tough discipline and observed all the children with strict religious and social code. He maintained a special daily program and obliged his children to follow. At the same time the father was entertaining with trips to the sea and desert. He dealt with his children as big men and demanded them to show confidence at young age. He was very keen not to show any difference in the treatment of his children.
Osama was exposed very early on his age to this experience but he lost his father when he was 13. He married at the age of 17 to a Syrian girl who was a relative. He grew up as religiously committed boy and the early marriage was another factor of protecting him from corruption.
Osama had his primary, secondary and even university education in Jeddah. He had a degree in public administration 1981 from King Abdul-Aziz university in Jeddah. Countries of the Arabian Peninsula, Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Sudan are the only countries he has been to. All stories of trips to Switzerland, Philippines, and London are all unfounded.
In addition to the general Islamic commitment he started forming an Islamic responsibility at early age. His father used to host hundreds of pilgrims during Hajj season from al over the world. Some of those were senior Islamic scholars or leaders of Muslim movements. This habit went on even after his father's death through his elder brothers. He used to make good contacts and relations through those gatherings.
At secondary school and university he adopted the main trend of many educated Muslims at that time, Muslim Brotherhood. There was a collection of Muslim scholars in Jeddah and Mecca at that period. There was nothing extraordinary in his personality and that trend was rather very non-confrontational. Interestingly, the 1980 raid in the Grand Mosque in Mecca was not appealing to him, neither the theology or that group. He had two distinguished teachers in Islamic studies, which was a compulsory subject in the university. First was Abdullah Azzam who became later as one of the big names in Afghanistan and the second was Mohammed Quttub, a famous Islamic writer and philosopher.
The first encounter with Afghanistan was as early as the first two weeks of Soviet invasion. He went to Pakistan and was taken by his hosts Jamaat Islami from Karachi to Peshawar to see the refugees and meet some leaders. Some of those leaders like Rabbani and Sayyaf were common faces to him because he met them during Hajj gatherings That trip which was [a] secret trip lasted for almost a month and was an exploratory rather than action trip. He went back to the kingdom and started lobbying with his brothers, relatives and friends at the school to support the mujahedeen. He succeeded in collecting huge amount of money and material as donations to jihad. He made another trip to take this material. He took with him few Pakistanis and Afghanis who were working in bin Laden company for more than ten years. Again, he did not stay more than a month The trip was to Pakistan and the border only and was not to Afghanistan. He went on collecting money and going in short trips once or twice a year until 1982.
In 1982 he decided to go inside Afghanistan. He brought with him plenty of the construction machinery and put them at the disposal of the mujahedeen He started spending more and more time in Afghanistan occasionally joining actual battles but not in an organized manner. His presence was encouraging to more Saudis to come but the numbers were still small at that period.
In 1984 he had one further step in strengthening his presence in Afghanistan by establishing the guesthouse in Peshawar (Baitul'ansar). That house was supposed to be the first station of Arab mujahedeen when they come to Afghanistan before going to the front or start training. At that period Osama did not have his own command or training camps. He used to send the newcomers to one of the Afghan factions.
The guesthouse establishment was coinciding with the formation of Jihad Service Bureau by Abdullah Azzam in Peshawar. The Bureau was very active in terms of media, publications and charity work. The Bureau publications were important in attracting more Saudis and Arabs to Afghanistan.
In 1986 Osama decided to have his own camps inside Afghanistan and within two years he built more than six camps. Some were mobilized more than once. He decided to have his own front and to run his own battles with his own command. Among the Arab fighters he had, there were senior Arab ex-military men from Syria and Egypt with good military experience. The story of the guesthouse and the camps was very attractive for more Arab mujahedeen to come and there was a significant surge in their numbers at that period.
In addition to many exchanges of fire and small operations, the first major battle he had face to face with the Soviet army with pure Arab personnel was the battle of Jaji in the province of Baktia 200 kilometers away from Khost. From then until 1989 he had more than five major battles with hundreds of small operations and exchanges of fire. During the period 1984-1989 he was staying more in Afghanistan than Saudi Arabia. He would spend a total of eight months a year or more in Afghanistan.
In 1988 he noticed that he was backward in his documentation and was not able to give answers to some families asking about their loved ones gone missing in Afghanistan. He decided to make the matter much more organized and arranged for proper documentation. He made a tracking record of the visitors, be they mujahedeen or charity or simple visitors. Their movement between the guesthouse and the camps had to be recorded as well as their first arrival and final departure. The whole complex was then termed Al-Qa'edah which is an Arabic word meaning "The Base." Al-Qa'edah was very much public knowledge. It was funny to see some people triumphing because they discovered it!
Late 1989 after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, he went to the kingdom in an ordinary trip. There he was banned from travel and was trapped in the kingdom. The Soviet withdrawal might have been a factor but the main reason for the travel ban were his intentions to start a new "front" of jihad in South Yemen. In addition, he embarrassed the regime by lectures and speeches warning of impending invasion by Saddam. At that time the regime was at very good terms with Saddam. He was instructed officially to keep low profile and not to give public talks. Despite the travel ban he was not hostile to regime at this stage. Indeed he presented a written advice in the form of a detailed, personal, private and confidential letter to the king few weeks before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
He reacted swiftly to Iraqi invasion and saw it fulfilling his prophecy. He immediately forwarded another letter to the king suggesting in detail how to protect the country from potentially advancing Iraqi forces. In addition to many military tactics suggested, he volunteered to bring all the Arab mujahedeen to defend the kingdom. That letter was presented in the first few days of the incident, and the regime response was of consideration!
While he was expecting some call to mobilize his men and equipment he heard the news which transferred his life completely. The Americans are coming. He always describes that moment as shocking moment. He felt depressed and thought that maneuvers had to change. Instead of writing to the king or approaching other members of the royal family, he started lobbying through religious scholars and Muslim activists. He succeeded in extracting a fatwah from one of the senior scholars that training and readiness is a religious duty. He immediately circulated that fatwah and convinced people to have their training in Afghanistan. It was estimated that 4000 went to Afghanistan in response to the fatwah. The regime was not happy with his activities so they limited his movement to Jeddah only. He was summoned for questioning twice for some of his speeches and activities and was given warnings. To intimidate him, the regime raided his farm in the suburb of Jeddah by the National Guard. He was not there during the raid and was very angry when told. He wrote a letter of protest to Prince Abdullah. Abdullah apologized and claimed he is not aware and promised to punish who ever were responsible.
Osama was fed up with this almost house arrest situation and did not imagine himself able to stay in the country with the American forces around. One of his brothers was very close to King Fahad and also close to Prince Ahmed, deputy minister of interior. He convinced his brother that he needed to leave the country to sort out some business matters in Pakistan and come back. There was a difficult obstacle, the stubborn Prince Nayef, minister of interior. His brother waited until Nayef went in a trip outside the kingdom and extracted lifting the ban from prince Ahmed. When he arrived in Pakistan around April 1991 he sent a letter to his brother telling him that he is not coming back and apologized for letting him down with the royal family.
After his arrival to Pakistan he went straight to Afghanistan because he knew the Pakistani intelligence would hand him back to the Saudis. There, he attended the collapse of the communist regime and the consequent dispute between the Afghan parties. He spent great effort to arbitrate between them but with no success He ordered his followers to avoid any involvement in the conflict and told them it was a sin to side with any faction. During his stay the Saudis tried more than once to kidnap or kill him in collaboration with the Pakistani intelligence. His friends in the Saudi and Pakistani establishments would always leak the plan and make him ready for it. After his failure in sorting the Afghani dispute, he decided to leave Afghanistan. The only alternative country he had was Sudan. He left Afghanistan disguised in private jet only few months after his arrival. That was late 1991.
His choice of Sudan had nothing to do with jihad or "terrorism." He was attracted to Sudan because of what was at that time an Islamic banner raised by the new regime in Sudan. He wanted to have good refuge as well as help the government in its construction projects. There was no intention from his side or from the Sudanese regime to have any military activity in Sudan. Indeed the Sudanese government refused even sending some of his followers to the front in the south. He was treated in Sudan as a special guest who wanted to help Sudan when everybody was turning away. In Sudan he mobilized a lot of construction equipment and enrolled himself in busy construction projects. He spent good effort in convincing Saudi businessmen to invest in Sudan and had reasonable success. Many of his brothers and Jeddah merchants had and still have investment in real estate, farming and agricultural industry. In Sudan he had again escaped an assassination attempt which turned out later to be the plan of Saudi intelligence.
During his stay in Sudan anti-American incidents happened in Somalia and South Yemen. Neither of the two incidents was performed by his group in the proper sense of chain of command. Both were performed by people who had training in Afghanistan and had enough anti-American drive. He might have given some sanctioning to the operations but one thing was certain, the Sudanese were completely unaware of either.
Between his arrival to Sudan and early 1994 he was not regarded publicly as Saudi opposition and Saudi citizens were visiting him without too much precautions. Only the well-informed people would know that he was classified as enemy to the Saudi regime. His assets were frozen sometime between 1992 and 1994 but that was not published. The Saudis decided to announce their hostility early 1994 when they publicized withdrawing his citizenship.
After long silence and tolerance, bin Laden replied by issuing a communiqué condemning the Saudi decision and saying that he does not need the "Saudi" reference to identify himself and it is not up to Al-Saud to admit or expel people from Arabian Peninsula. He then formed together with activists and scholars from the kingdom a group called "Advice and Reform Committee" (ARC). The ARC was, according to its communiqués and published agenda, a purely political group. The ARC published around 17 communiqués which might have contained harsh criticism of the Saudi regime and plenty of religious rhetoric but never contained reference for violence or incitment of violence.
The car bomb in spring 1995 in Riyadh was the first major anti-American action in the kingdom. Bin Laden never claimed responsibility, but the Saudi government tried to link the incident to bin Laden by showing video confessions of four "Arab Afghans" involved in the bombing.
Sudan was exposed to huge international pressure for hosting bin Laden and his followers, and bin Laden felt that he is becoming an embarrassment to the Sudanese. Early in 1996 he started making contacts with his old friends in Afghanistan to prepare for his reception. He fled Sudan in a very well planned trip with many of his followers to go straight to Jalalabad in Eastern Afghanistan.
When he arrived there, the situation in Afghanistan was very unsettled between the many factions, but he had very good relations with all factions and all would protect him. The area he arrived to was under control of Yunis Khalis, a very influential warlord who later on joined Taliban.
June 1996, after his arrival in Afghanistan was the Khobar bombing. Nobody claimed responsibility, but sources from inside the Saudi ministry of interior confirmed involvement of Arab Afghans, with possible link to bin Laden The Saudi government wanted to frame Shi'a, at the beginning but Americans were very suspicious of the Saudi story. Bin Laden himself never claimed responsibility but gave many hints that he might have been involved. The Saudi government has acknowledged recently that bin Laden's men were behind the bombing.
home + introduction + who is bin laden? + trail of evidence + two terrorists + join the discussion
interviews + reporting from the times + links + press reaction + tapes & transcripts
frontline + pbs online + wgbh
web site copyright 1995-2008 WGBH educational foundation
email this page to a friend
your email
@
friend's email
@
brief message
send page »
subscribe to the FRONTLINE bulletin
Get FRONTLINE's updates &
behind the scenes newsletter
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Born 1957 for Syrian mother, Osama bin Laden was the seventh son among fifty brothers and sisters.
Note: This document is published here exactly as in the original translated document given to FRONTLINE. No changes have been made to grammar or punctuation.
His father Mohammed Awad bin Laden came to the kingdom from Hadramout (South Yemen) sometime around 1930. The father started his life as a very poor laborer (porter in Jeddah port), to end up as owner of the biggest construction company in the kingdom. During the reign of King Saud, bin Laden the father became very close to the royal family when he took the risk of building King Saud's palaces much cheaper than the cheapest bid. He impressed King Saud with his performance but he also built good relations with other members of the royal family, especially Faisal. During the Saud-Faisal conflict in the early sixties, bin Laden the father had a big role in convincing King Saud to step down in favor of Faisal. After Saud's departure the treasury was empty and bin Laden was so supportive to King Faisal that he literally paid the civil servants' wages of the whole kingdom for six months. King Faisal then issued a decree that all construction projects should go to bin Laden. Indeed, he was appointed for a period as the minister of public works.
In 1969 the father took the task of rebuilding Al-Aqsa mosque after the fire incident. Interestingly the bin Laden family say that they have the credit of building all the three mosques, because later on their company took over the task of major extension in Mecca and Medina mosques.
The father was fairly devoted Moslem, very humble and generous. He was so proud of the bag he used when he was a porter that he kept it as a trophy in the main reception room in his palace. The father used to insist on his sons to go and manage some projects themselves.
The father had very dominating personality. He insisted to keep all his children in one premises. He had a tough discipline and observed all the children with strict religious and social code. He maintained a special daily program and obliged his children to follow. At the same time the father was entertaining with trips to the sea and desert. He dealt with his children as big men and demanded them to show confidence at young age. He was very keen not to show any difference in the treatment of his children.
Osama was exposed very early on his age to this experience but he lost his father when he was 13. He married at the age of 17 to a Syrian girl who was a relative. He grew up as religiously committed boy and the early marriage was another factor of protecting him from corruption.
Osama had his primary, secondary and even university education in Jeddah. He had a degree in public administration 1981 from King Abdul-Aziz university in Jeddah. Countries of the Arabian Peninsula, Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Sudan are the only countries he has been to. All stories of trips to Switzerland, Philippines, and London are all unfounded.
In addition to the general Islamic commitment he started forming an Islamic responsibility at early age. His father used to host hundreds of pilgrims during Hajj season from al over the world. Some of those were senior Islamic scholars or leaders of Muslim movements. This habit went on even after his father's death through his elder brothers. He used to make good contacts and relations through those gatherings.
At secondary school and university he adopted the main trend of many educated Muslims at that time, Muslim Brotherhood. There was a collection of Muslim scholars in Jeddah and Mecca at that period. There was nothing extraordinary in his personality and that trend was rather very non-confrontational. Interestingly, the 1980 raid in the Grand Mosque in Mecca was not appealing to him, neither the theology or that group. He had two distinguished teachers in Islamic studies, which was a compulsory subject in the university. First was Abdullah Azzam who became later as one of the big names in Afghanistan and the second was Mohammed Quttub, a famous Islamic writer and philosopher.
The first encounter with Afghanistan was as early as the first two weeks of Soviet invasion. He went to Pakistan and was taken by his hosts Jamaat Islami from Karachi to Peshawar to see the refugees and meet some leaders. Some of those leaders like Rabbani and Sayyaf were common faces to him because he met them during Hajj gatherings That trip which was [a] secret trip lasted for almost a month and was an exploratory rather than action trip. He went back to the kingdom and started lobbying with his brothers, relatives and friends at the school to support the mujahedeen. He succeeded in collecting huge amount of money and material as donations to jihad. He made another trip to take this material. He took with him few Pakistanis and Afghanis who were working in bin Laden company for more than ten years. Again, he did not stay more than a month The trip was to Pakistan and the border only and was not to Afghanistan. He went on collecting money and going in short trips once or twice a year until 1982.
In 1982 he decided to go inside Afghanistan. He brought with him plenty of the construction machinery and put them at the disposal of the mujahedeen He started spending more and more time in Afghanistan occasionally joining actual battles but not in an organized manner. His presence was encouraging to more Saudis to come but the numbers were still small at that period.
In 1984 he had one further step in strengthening his presence in Afghanistan by establishing the guesthouse in Peshawar (Baitul'ansar). That house was supposed to be the first station of Arab mujahedeen when they come to Afghanistan before going to the front or start training. At that period Osama did not have his own command or training camps. He used to send the newcomers to one of the Afghan factions.
The guesthouse establishment was coinciding with the formation of Jihad Service Bureau by Abdullah Azzam in Peshawar. The Bureau was very active in terms of media, publications and charity work. The Bureau publications were important in attracting more Saudis and Arabs to Afghanistan.
In 1986 Osama decided to have his own camps inside Afghanistan and within two years he built more than six camps. Some were mobilized more than once. He decided to have his own front and to run his own battles with his own command. Among the Arab fighters he had, there were senior Arab ex-military men from Syria and Egypt with good military experience. The story of the guesthouse and the camps was very attractive for more Arab mujahedeen to come and there was a significant surge in their numbers at that period.
In addition to many exchanges of fire and small operations, the first major battle he had face to face with the Soviet army with pure Arab personnel was the battle of Jaji in the province of Baktia 200 kilometers away from Khost. From then until 1989 he had more than five major battles with hundreds of small operations and exchanges of fire. During the period 1984-1989 he was staying more in Afghanistan than Saudi Arabia. He would spend a total of eight months a year or more in Afghanistan.
In 1988 he noticed that he was backward in his documentation and was not able to give answers to some families asking about their loved ones gone missing in Afghanistan. He decided to make the matter much more organized and arranged for proper documentation. He made a tracking record of the visitors, be they mujahedeen or charity or simple visitors. Their movement between the guesthouse and the camps had to be recorded as well as their first arrival and final departure. The whole complex was then termed Al-Qa'edah which is an Arabic word meaning "The Base." Al-Qa'edah was very much public knowledge. It was funny to see some people triumphing because they discovered it!
Late 1989 after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, he went to the kingdom in an ordinary trip. There he was banned from travel and was trapped in the kingdom. The Soviet withdrawal might have been a factor but the main reason for the travel ban were his intentions to start a new "front" of jihad in South Yemen. In addition, he embarrassed the regime by lectures and speeches warning of impending invasion by Saddam. At that time the regime was at very good terms with Saddam. He was instructed officially to keep low profile and not to give public talks. Despite the travel ban he was not hostile to regime at this stage. Indeed he presented a written advice in the form of a detailed, personal, private and confidential letter to the king few weeks before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
He reacted swiftly to Iraqi invasion and saw it fulfilling his prophecy. He immediately forwarded another letter to the king suggesting in detail how to protect the country from potentially advancing Iraqi forces. In addition to many military tactics suggested, he volunteered to bring all the Arab mujahedeen to defend the kingdom. That letter was presented in the first few days of the incident, and the regime response was of consideration!
While he was expecting some call to mobilize his men and equipment he heard the news which transferred his life completely. The Americans are coming. He always describes that moment as shocking moment. He felt depressed and thought that maneuvers had to change. Instead of writing to the king or approaching other members of the royal family, he started lobbying through religious scholars and Muslim activists. He succeeded in extracting a fatwah from one of the senior scholars that training and readiness is a religious duty. He immediately circulated that fatwah and convinced people to have their training in Afghanistan. It was estimated that 4000 went to Afghanistan in response to the fatwah. The regime was not happy with his activities so they limited his movement to Jeddah only. He was summoned for questioning twice for some of his speeches and activities and was given warnings. To intimidate him, the regime raided his farm in the suburb of Jeddah by the National Guard. He was not there during the raid and was very angry when told. He wrote a letter of protest to Prince Abdullah. Abdullah apologized and claimed he is not aware and promised to punish who ever were responsible.
Osama was fed up with this almost house arrest situation and did not imagine himself able to stay in the country with the American forces around. One of his brothers was very close to King Fahad and also close to Prince Ahmed, deputy minister of interior. He convinced his brother that he needed to leave the country to sort out some business matters in Pakistan and come back. There was a difficult obstacle, the stubborn Prince Nayef, minister of interior. His brother waited until Nayef went in a trip outside the kingdom and extracted lifting the ban from prince Ahmed. When he arrived in Pakistan around April 1991 he sent a letter to his brother telling him that he is not coming back and apologized for letting him down with the royal family.
After his arrival to Pakistan he went straight to Afghanistan because he knew the Pakistani intelligence would hand him back to the Saudis. There, he attended the collapse of the communist regime and the consequent dispute between the Afghan parties. He spent great effort to arbitrate between them but with no success He ordered his followers to avoid any involvement in the conflict and told them it was a sin to side with any faction. During his stay the Saudis tried more than once to kidnap or kill him in collaboration with the Pakistani intelligence. His friends in the Saudi and Pakistani establishments would always leak the plan and make him ready for it. After his failure in sorting the Afghani dispute, he decided to leave Afghanistan. The only alternative country he had was Sudan. He left Afghanistan disguised in private jet only few months after his arrival. That was late 1991.
His choice of Sudan had nothing to do with jihad or "terrorism." He was attracted to Sudan because of what was at that time an Islamic banner raised by the new regime in Sudan. He wanted to have good refuge as well as help the government in its construction projects. There was no intention from his side or from the Sudanese regime to have any military activity in Sudan. Indeed the Sudanese government refused even sending some of his followers to the front in the south. He was treated in Sudan as a special guest who wanted to help Sudan when everybody was turning away. In Sudan he mobilized a lot of construction equipment and enrolled himself in busy construction projects. He spent good effort in convincing Saudi businessmen to invest in Sudan and had reasonable success. Many of his brothers and Jeddah merchants had and still have investment in real estate, farming and agricultural industry. In Sudan he had again escaped an assassination attempt which turned out later to be the plan of Saudi intelligence.
During his stay in Sudan anti-American incidents happened in Somalia and South Yemen. Neither of the two incidents was performed by his group in the proper sense of chain of command. Both were performed by people who had training in Afghanistan and had enough anti-American drive. He might have given some sanctioning to the operations but one thing was certain, the Sudanese were completely unaware of either.
Between his arrival to Sudan and early 1994 he was not regarded publicly as Saudi opposition and Saudi citizens were visiting him without too much precautions. Only the well-informed people would know that he was classified as enemy to the Saudi regime. His assets were frozen sometime between 1992 and 1994 but that was not published. The Saudis decided to announce their hostility early 1994 when they publicized withdrawing his citizenship.
After long silence and tolerance, bin Laden replied by issuing a communiqué condemning the Saudi decision and saying that he does not need the "Saudi" reference to identify himself and it is not up to Al-Saud to admit or expel people from Arabian Peninsula. He then formed together with activists and scholars from the kingdom a group called "Advice and Reform Committee" (ARC). The ARC was, according to its communiqués and published agenda, a purely political group. The ARC published around 17 communiqués which might have contained harsh criticism of the Saudi regime and plenty of religious rhetoric but never contained reference for violence or incitment of violence.
The car bomb in spring 1995 in Riyadh was the first major anti-American action in the kingdom. Bin Laden never claimed responsibility, but the Saudi government tried to link the incident to bin Laden by showing video confessions of four "Arab Afghans" involved in the bombing.
Sudan was exposed to huge international pressure for hosting bin Laden and his followers, and bin Laden felt that he is becoming an embarrassment to the Sudanese. Early in 1996 he started making contacts with his old friends in Afghanistan to prepare for his reception. He fled Sudan in a very well planned trip with many of his followers to go straight to Jalalabad in Eastern Afghanistan.
When he arrived there, the situation in Afghanistan was very unsettled between the many factions, but he had very good relations with all factions and all would protect him. The area he arrived to was under control of Yunis Khalis, a very influential warlord who later on joined Taliban.
June 1996, after his arrival in Afghanistan was the Khobar bombing. Nobody claimed responsibility, but sources from inside the Saudi ministry of interior confirmed involvement of Arab Afghans, with possible link to bin Laden The Saudi government wanted to frame Shi'a, at the beginning but Americans were very suspicious of the Saudi story. Bin Laden himself never claimed responsibility but gave many hints that he might have been involved. The Saudi government has acknowledged recently that bin Laden's men were behind the bombing.
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