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Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the United States has pursued al Qaeda across the globe, and the international community largely has united in the fight against terrorism. However, al Qaeda by nature is ill-defined and elusive, placing small "cells" in specific areas and avoiding an easily discernible command structure.
The public perception in the United States largely has been that the four teams that carried out the Sept. 11 attacks were the only al Qaeda operatives in the country at the time, and that they carried out the coordinated hijackings with minimal supervision from overseas. From al Qaeda's perspective, however, this would make little sense. Acquiring a long-term ability to launch attacks within the United States has been widely accepted as one of the group's main goals. Why, then, would al Qaeda allow its entire base of operations to perish in the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon? It appears to us that the actual (unidentified) managers of the attacks must still be at large. And if these supervisors exist, they could be planning future attacks.
The arrest of suspected "sleeper operative" Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri is a case in point.
Four top suspected al Qaeda leaders have been taken into U.S. custody since the attacks. They are Zayn al-Abidin Mohammed Husayn (known as Abu Zubaydah), Mohamed Haydar Zammer, Ramzi bin al-Shibh and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. With the exception of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who graduated from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in 1986, none of them was known to have ever been inside the United States.
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