Looks at the international threat to the United States and how Al Qaeda has connections to organized crime families and drug traffickers to help finance their activities.

The face of Terror has changed dramatically. Today major terrorist attacks are marked by their meticulous preparation and deadly execution—as the Mumbai attacks of 26/11 have clearly established. The most important planning centre for these operations is the tribal region located on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Following the U.S. action in Afghanistan in December 2001 many Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters escaped and settled down in these regions where, historically, the writ of the state has always been weak. Taking advantage of the inhospitable terrain and the porous border, Al Qaeda militants of multiple ethnic origins regrouped. In 2008 alone they launched over fifty suicide missions which have inflicted more than six thousand casualties in attacks across the world. In these remote valleys the fatal mix of ultra-conservatism, economic under-development, religious obscurantism and the absence of law and justice has resulted in a cauldron of militancy which is being fed and fuelled by the shadowy presence of the Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Ever-younger fighters are being recruited for suicide missions while music, shaving and the education of girls are proscribed by increasingly powerful clerics. In this book Imtiaz Gul follows the trail of militancy and the way it has evolved under Al Qaeda’s influence in tribal areas.

In the wake of 9/11 no one knew when the next attack would come, or where it would come from. America's enemies seemed gathered on all sides, and for several nerve-racking months, we lived in fear that the perpetrators might be plotting another action or, worse, that our most dangerous enemies -- al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's murderous regime in Iraq -- could be banding together against us. The Bush administration and CIA director George Tenet warned against complacency and pointed to growing indications that al Qaeda and Iraq were in league. But their case was undercut by unnamed intelligence officials, skeptical politicians, and a compliant media. So America relaxed. A comforting consensus settled in: Osama bin Laden was an impassioned fundamentalist, Saddam a secular autocrat. The two would never, could never, work together. ABC News reported that there was no connection between them, and the New York Times said so too, and pretty soon just about everyone agreed. Just about everyone was wrong. In The Connection, Stephen Hayes draws on CIA debriefings, top-secret memos from our national intelligence agencies, and interviews with Iraqi military leaders and Washington insiders to demonstrate that Saddam and bin Laden not only could work together, they did -- a curious relationship that stretches back more than a decade and may include collaboration on terrorist acts, chemical-weapons training, and sheltering some of the world's most wanted radicals. Stephen Hayes's bombshell Weekly Standard piece on this topic was cited by Vice President Cheney as the "best source of information" about the Saddam-al Qaeda connections. Now Hayes delves even deeper, exposing the inner workings of America's deadliest opponents and providing a clear-eyed corrective to reams of underreported, politicized, and just plain wrong information. The Connection is both a gripping snapshot of the War on Terror and a case study in how bureaucratic assumptions and media arrogance can put us all at risk.

The news-breaking book that has sent schockwaves through the White House, Ghost Wars is the most accurate and revealing account yet of the CIA's secret involvement in al-Qaeada's evolution. Prize-winning journalist Steve Coll has spent years reporting from the Middle East, accessed previously classified government files and interviewed senior US officials and foreign spymasters. Here he gives the full inside story of the CIA's covert funding of an Islamic jihad against Soviet forces in Afghanistan, explores how this sowed the seeds of bn Laden's rise, traces how he built his global network and brings to life the dramatic battles within the US government over national security. Above all, he lays bare American intelligence's continual failure to grasp the rising threat of terrrorism in the years leading to 9/11 - and its devastating consequences.

In Al-Qaeda's Revenge: The 2004 Madrid Train Bombings, Fernando Reinares tells the story of "3/11" - the March 11, 2004, bombings of commuter trains in Madrid, which killed 192 people and injured more than 1,800. He examines the development of an al-Qaeda conspiracy in Spain from the 1990s through the formation of the 3/11 bombing network beginning in March 2002, and discusses the preparations for and fallout from the attacks. Reinares draws on judicial, police, and intelligence documents to which he had privileged access, as well as on personal interviews with officials in Spain and elsewhere. His full analysis links the Madrid bombings to al-Qaeda's senior leadership and unveils connections between 3/11 and 9/11. Al-Qaeda's Revenge, Spain's counterpart to The 9/11 Commission Report, was a bestseller in Spain.

In two previous books, Osama's Revenge and The Al Qaeda Connection, this seasoned investigative reporter revealed the alarming potential for nuclear terrorism on U.S. soil and the sinister connections among organized crime, illegal immigrants, and al Qaeda. Now, he broadens his focus beyond al Qaeda to provide readers with newly uncovered information on terrorist activities in Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, other Muslim countries - and our neighbor Canada What emerges is a harrowing picture of international terrorist activities, all aimed at the destruction of the United States and the collapse of the Western world. This cataclysm will usher in "the Day of Islam," the dream of radical Muslims to see all of humankind fall in submission before the throne of Allah. Sure to be controversial, this shocking expos sends a wake-up to Americans lulled into a false sense of security in the post-9/11 era.

For anyone wishing to understand the next, post-9/11 generation of al-Qaeda planning, leadership, and tactics, there is only one place to begin: Southeast Asia. In fact, such countries as the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia have been crucial nodes in the al-Qaeda network since long before the strikes on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, but when the allies overran Afghanistan, the new camps in Southeast Asia became the key training grounds for the future. It is in the Muslim strongholds in the Philippines and Indonesia that the next generation of al-Qaeda can be found. In this powerful, eye-opening work, Maria Ressa casts the most illuminating light ever on this fascinating but little-known "terrorist HQ." Every major al-Qaeda attack since 1993 has had a connection to the Philippines, and Maria Ressa, CNN's lead investigative reporter for Asia and a Filipino-American who has lived in the region since 1986, has broken story after story about them. From the early, failed attempts to assassinate Pope John Paul II and Bill Clinton to the planning of the 9/11 strikes and the "48 Hours of Terror," in which eleven American jetliners were to be blown up over the Pacific, she has interviewed the terrorists, their neighbors and families, and the investigators from six different countries who have tracked them down. After the Bali bombing, al-Qaeda's worst strike since 9/11, which killed more than two hundred, Ressa broke major revelations about how it was planned, why it was a Plan B substitute for an even more ambitious scheme aimed at Singapore, and why the suicide bomber recruited to deliver the explosives almost caused the whole plan to fall apart when he admitted he could barely drive a car. Above all, Ressa has seen how al-Qaeda's tactics are shifting under the pressures of the war on terror. Rather than depending upon its own core membership (estimated at three to four thousand at its peak), the network is now enmeshing itself in local conflicts, co-opting Muslim independence movements wherever they can be found, and helping local "revolutionaries" to fund, plan, and execute sinister attacks against their neighbors and the West. If history is any guide, al-Qaeda revisits its plans over and over until they can succeed -- and many of those plans have already been discovered and are here revealed, thanks to classified investigative documents uncovered by Ressa.

In this new work by a terrorism expert, the author of "Osama's Revenge: The Next 9/11" further explores the shocking dimensions of the international terrorist threat to America. Illustrations.

Al-Qaida is a multi-national support group which funds and orchestrates the activities of Islamic militants world-wide. It grew out of the Afghan war against the Soviets, and its core members consist of Afghan war veterans from all over the Muslim world. Al-Qaida was established around 1988 by the Saudi militant Osama bin Ladin. Based in of Afghanistan, bin Ladin uses an extensive international network to maintain a loose connection between Muslim extremists in diverse countries. Working through high-tech means, such as faxes, satellite telephones, and the internet, he is in touch with an unknown number of followers all over the Arab world, as well as in Europe, Asia, the United States and Canada.