Meeting Osama

There was a nice edition of the short BBC World Service radio program Witness today, about Osama Bin Laden. It focuses on Abdel Bari Atwan, the editor of al-Quds al-Arabi, who met him in the late 1990s.

Listen here for the next seven days. Atwan's book about al-Qaeda — The Secret History of al Qaeda —includes many of the vignettes he talks about here, and is a pretty interesting non-academic, non-CT oriented, account of Bin Laden and friends. Atwan is funnily self-deprecating as a pampered "five-star journalist" when served "soggy potatoes and rotten cheese." I wonder if the gebna qadima was al-Zawahri's contribution.