That Day, Again

September 11 Remembered
It's that time of year again to cast our minds back to one of the most amazing and asttounging events in memory. This was no Olympic Game or a World Series Three-pete, this was no Hollywood blockbuster with dazzling special effects, this was the real deal.

Here's the AP take on the topic, amid reports that videos featuring Osama Bin Laden have surfaced.

Heinz Fromm, Germany's domestic intelligence chief, said earlier this year that bin Laden's group had been degraded into a "diffuse, amorphous organization." He added: "One today cannot talk any longer of a central leadership role of al-Qaida."

Magnus Ranstorp, a terrorism expert at Sweden's Center for Asymmetric Threat Studies, said the West has consistently misunderstood the nature of the enemy it faces, attributing to al-Qaida a level of control and leadership over local radical groups that it simply does not have.

"We in the West tend to look for structure where there is none. We talk about the terror CEO, or the al-Qaida franchise, and that is completely misleading in terms of the amorphousness of the adversary we're facing," he said. "In fact, there hasn't been any correlation or firm evidence that al-Qaida knew about or participated in any of the attacks since Sept. 11."

But Ranstorp and other counterterrorism experts caution that there is no cause for celebration. Progress against the core of al-Qaida has been overshadowed by a steady stream of deadly bombings by local groups, many of them Muslim extremists inspired to take up bin Laden's apocalyptic call.

In attack after attack, homegrown militants have shown they are capable of massive destruction, with or without al-Qaida's help.

More importantly. Osama bin Laden is still at large, being our generation's Goldstein.
And so, five years on, one wonder what those five years have meant.