Robert McFadden Quoted: Did al Qaeda Die with bin Laden?

August 20, 2011

Toronto Star
By Michelle Shephard

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Hard to fathom now, but a decade ago, as the remains of the World Trade Center and Pentagon smouldered, most people had never heard of Osama bin Laden.

On September 12, 2001, newspaper headlines shouted “Terror,” or “America Attacked,” or “Bastards!” above photos of the towers as they were hit, burned, crumbled…

Four months ago, in the Pakistani town of Abbottabad, about 55 kilometres from the country’s capital, an elite Navy SEALs team delivered what former-U.S.-president Bush promised a decade earlier.

Robert McFadden, a longtime counterterrorism investigator with the U.S. Navy Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), was one of them.

…He was a member of the team investigating the attack on the USS Cole, which Al Qaeda had bombed a year earlier in the harbour of Aden, killing 17 American sailors…

“I remember the FBI colleague having to tell me he had to go because apparently there was a bomb that went off in downtown Manhattan,” McFadden said in his first interview since retiring from NCIS last month.

McFadden joined his partner, FBI agent Ali Soufan, in the ambassador’s office and turned on CNN.

“I can recall saying, ‘No doubt about it.’ As we watched the second plane (crash) live, all of our hearts and minds knew with certainty it was Al Qaeda,” McFadden said.

…”Al Qaeda tends to be the lazy analytical term for what’s going on right now. What’s the frame of reference for what Al Qaeda is?” asks McFadden, who this month joined his former partner’s security consulting company, The Soufan Group, as vice-president…

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To read the full article please click on the link below:http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/article/1042335–did-al-qaeda-die-with-bin-laden

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