Gary Tuchman | BIO
AC360° Correspondent

Ever since I began reporting from Ground Zero on September 11th, 2001, I have never wavered in my conviction that the merry band of Al Qaeda terrorists are among the most cowardly human beings on earth. You have sunk as low as you can go when you kill innocent human beings and claim there is justification for it. That goes for the terrorists who flew on the planes, and the terrorists who ordered them to do so. And that brings me to Ayman Al-Zawahiri.

The number two Al Qaeda leader is at the very least tied for number one in cowardice, and his latest action is symbolic of his style. Today, he came out with his first post American election statement in which he uses an extremely disparaging racial term to describe Barack Obama. What’s notable are the similarities between Al-Zawahiri’s methods and America’s own Ku Klux Klan. For generations, Klan members have used the cloak of their hoods to hide their identities as they spewed their hatred.

And now, Al-Zawahiri is echoing some of the Klan’s own racist sentiment and doing it with his own cloak; an audiotape, which is used because he and his minions are way too afraid to give away clues about their lairs. Haters come in different packages, but they share the characteristic of diabolical rationalization, and utter lack of courage.

In a CNN exclusive, a Pakistani Taliban delivers a warning to President-elect Barack Obama. CNN's Reza Sayah reports.

Reza Sayah | BIO
CNN Islamabad Correspondent

I’m pretty sure the Taliban didn’t shed tears of joy when America elected Barack Obama as president, but I was curious what they thought. Did the Taliban welcome the change Obama promised in his campaign? What do they think of “America’s evil empire” electing a black man, who shares a middle name with a Muslim prophet, for president?

Getting to the Taliban in Pakistan isn’t easy these days. Sometimes you can reach them by phone but face to face meetings are tough. Two major military offensives in Northwestern Pakistan have Taliban leaders keeping a low profile, and traveling in the region is as dangerous as ever. This week in Peshawar an American aid worker was shot and killed, a Canadian and an Afghan journalist were shot, and an Iranian diplomat was kidnapped. So we had to get creative to get the Taliban on camera.

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Nic Robertson | BIO
Senior International Correspondent

There is a new fight against Bin Laden, al Qaeda and their fellow radicals. It’s coming from within Islam and may yet prove the most powerful agent for transforming the Saudi terror leader from radical Islamist Icon to a has-been hero.

Taking down one of his best loved web sites is only the beginning. Much, much more is happening behind the scenes. Muslims angry Bin Laden is giving Islam a bad name are fighting back.

I’m hearing it from guys as diverse as those that fought along side the Al Qaeda leader in the anti Soviet Jihad in Afghanistan to British Pakistani’s frustrated their children are being singled out for ridicule for being un-Islamic by their peers. These Muslims want to do something and they are.

Waseem Mahmood, a British Pakistani helped get a bunch of popular Pakistani pop stars to record a song decrying Bin Laden type terror. It was an instant hit staying at the top of the Pakistani charts for several weeks. He followed up with a SMS, phone text message petition for Pakistanis to sign up if they were against terrorism. More than 60 million did, that’s more than a third of the population, massive when you consider most of us think of Pakistan as a very Conservative Muslim nation. Mahmood is getting ready to grow that number.

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'Al-Ekhlass' A website where many of al Qaeda's jihadist messages are posted is offline, having been replaced with the domain joker.com.

UPDATE FROM OCTAVIA: Thanks for the comments about the hacking vs. domain registration expiration. This is definitely a valid point. Our focus here is not to write a technical essay about hacking. It’s merely an attempt at showing how some people – we don’t know who – are fighting al Qaeda by attacking their websites. Al-Ekhlaas website has been down for months following years of operation. While today it redirects you to joker.com, tomorrow it might redirect you to another site. While we do not know who is hacking into the jihadi websites, there is no doubt they’re being hacked.

How do we know that?

On the jihadi sites that work, it is common practice to announce that “Site X has been downed by evil forces but we’re working on bringing it back up.” Or “Site Y was hacked but you can join us temporarily on this address.” To the dismay of the jihadist community and its supporters, the Al-Ekhlaas website has been downed/hacked/disabled – you choose the terminology that works for you. From the chatter about it, this doesn’t seem like this is a domain registration problem. Al-Ekhlaas has been on line uninterrupted for a long time. This is the first time it disappears abruptly and can’t get back on.
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Octavia Nasr | BIO
CNN senior editor for Arab affairs

A hacking war is raging on Jihadi websites. Radical Islamist sites have been attacking and getting attacked for quite some time. The website hacking practice was common in 2001 and 2002… Following the 9/11 attacks when al Qaeda used only one website to communicate its messages to supporters and foes alike. That website was called alneda.com. It was getting constantly hacked… sometimes several hackings a day. After every hacking the site managed to resurface on the net until it disappeared from the scene in 2004 to be replaced by other websites — What started as one al Qaeda-linked site mushroomed into dozens which branched out into hundreds of supporting sites that serve as dissemination centers over the internet.

Two well-known al Qaeda-linked sites are Al-Hesbah and Al-Ekhlaas. Al-Hesbah is the oldest and requires a username and password to access it. Its membership was open to the public in 2004 but became restricted over the years. This site became known as the first venue for uploaded al Qaeda messages — from Osama bin Laden video messages to statements and claims of responsibilities for attacks carried out in Afghanistan, Iraq or even Europe. Al-Ekhlaas followed with a sleeker image, and more technical bells and whistles.

The hacking war works both ways.
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David M. Reisner
AC360° Digital Producer

7 years after 9/11 many experts al Qaeda has regrouped, re-organized. The video tapes and audio tapes keep coming… promising more attacks. But those who know al Qaeda best say the only chance we have to defeat it, is to understand its past, see where its strengths lie today, and know where it wants to go in the future.

AC360° sat down with Lawrence Wright, Pulitzer prize winning author of “The Looming Tower: al Qaeda and The Road To 9/11″ and CNN Terrorism analyst Peter Bergen, one of the few journalists to have met Osama bin Laden, and author of ‘The Osama Bin Laden I Know: An Oral History.”

Some of you might be familiar with this special when it first broadcast earlier this year, others may have seen it streamed live on CNN.COM on the 7th anniversary of 9/11.

The feedback from both broadcasts was tremendous so we decided to place all parts of the program online for you to view:

In part one we investigate the underpinnings of al Qaeda & the man whose trip to America inspired bin Laden’s jihad
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In part two we investigate bin Laden’s descent into the shadows of radical Islam and a war that made him an underground legend.
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In part two we look at how and why bin Laden turned his sights on America.
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In part four we investigate how the terrorist group decimated after the U.S. response to 9/11 could rise again.
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In part five we investigate how the U.S. and the world can defeat this new type of enemy.
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Editor’s Note: Rebekah Sanderlin is a mother, an Army wife and a freelance journalist. She lives near Fort Bragg, Norh Carolina and writes a blog about military family life called “Operation Marriage” for The Fayetteville Observer newspaper. Her husband is currently on his third deployment to Afghanistan.

Rebekah Sanderlin
“Operation Marriage”

If the American military went to war and America went shopping, then seven years later the war wages on but America is home from the shopping spree with her credit cards maxed out and her head aching from buyer’s remorse.

The war didn’t change and the fighting force didn’t change, but the people back home are over it. War, it seems, went out of style in 2003.

In the military community we roll our eyes when we hear that Americans are war weary. Just what, we wonder, are you all weary of? Hearing about the war? Seeing stories in the news? Most Americans don’t even know anyone in the military and won’t have any direct contact with the war besides seeing uniformed soldiers in the airport. You all haven’t been asked to do anything more to support this war than sit back and watch as your tax dollars are spent.

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Mahvish Rukhsana Khan | Website
Author, My Guantánamo Diary

I expected a stern, forbidding place. Instead I found sunshine and smiling young soldiers, boozy nighttime barbecues, snorkeling and beaches that call to you for a midnight swim. Guantánamo Bay is physically a beautiful place. The water is green. The weather is perfect. There should be a Four Seasons hotel there instead of the dungeons and guard towers. Over two years, I’ve heard many stories — of betrayal and mistaken identity, of beatings and torture, of loneliness and hopelessness.

But there were also a lot of laughs, interfaith dialogue and intense friendships forged. When the legal talk was over—the detainees and lawyers often took time to quiz one another. Both were curious of the others mysterious culture.

One American attorney wanted to know how his Afghan client juggled two wives, whether the women were jealous of one another and what the sleeping arrangements were. His Afghan client couldn’t fathom the concept of internet dating or drinking to the point of intoxication. Of course, I do not believe that everyone at Guantanamo is innocent. (Although innocent is a strange choice of words. Innocent of what? Only about 20 of almost 800 have ever been charged with anything criminal).

On my first trip to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, I was very nervous. Everything that I had heard in the media about the “worst of the worst” had settled in and I was feeling apprehensive about sitting down with a terrorist.
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Watch Reza Sayah's report on Senator Barack Obama's trip to Afghanistan

Saturday in Kabul a grungy little boy with big brown eyes chased me for a block, begging me to buy a pack of Juicy Fruit gum. He could not have been more than four years old.

In downtown Kabul women in burqas begged along the streets as monster size U.S. armored vehicles rumbled by. That same day a NATO air strike that was supposed to take out militants killed nine Afghan soldiers instead. Sunday in southeastern Afghanistan two NATO mortar shells missed their targets and killed four civilians.

Man, does Afghanistan need help.

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Morgan Neil
AC360° Contributor

After Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki met with Barack Obama on Monday, his spokesman dropped a bombshell: Iraq had a vision, Ali al-Dabbagh said, that most US combat troops would withdraw from Iraq by the end of 2010.

Here in CNN’s Baghdad bureau, producer Jomana Karadsheh caught Dabbagh by phone as he boarded a plane with Maliki heading for Germany. Yes, he told her, the Iraqi Government’s “vision” is that most US combat troops would be out of Iraq by 2010.

And, he added, this was nothing new.

Well, not so fast.
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Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki during a joint news conference in Berlin, Tuesday.

Juan Cole
President of the Global Americana Institute

Despite all the talk about Iraq being “calm,” I’d like to point out that the month just before the last visit Barack Obama made to Iraq (he went in January, 2006), there were 537 civilian and ISF Iraqi casualties. In June of this year, 2008, there were 554 according to AP. These are official statistics gathered passively that probably only capture about 10 percent of the true toll.

That is, the Iraqi death toll is actually still worse now than the last time Obama was in Iraq! The hype around last year’s troop escalation obscures a simple fact: that Obama formed his views about the need for the US to leave Iraq at a time when its security situation was very similar to what it is now! Why a return to the bad situation in late 05 and early 06 should be greeted by the GOP as the veritable coming of the Messiah is beyond me. You have people like Joe Lieberman saying silly things like if it weren’t for the troop escalation, Obama wouldn’t be able to visit Iraq. Uh, he visited it before the troop escalation, just fine.

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