The Atlantic Online is carrying a story by Alan Cullison a journalist working for the Wall Street Journal in Kabul when it fell. The story is about how he obtained Ayman al-Zawahiri’s PC (Osama bin Laden’s top deputy) and how he copied the contents of the hard drive before he had to turn it over to the CIA. He didn’t have time to copy a laptop’s drive that had been owned by Muhammad Atef, but the PC had a lot of interesting internal Al-Qaeda communications.In the story Mr Cullison has extracts of emails and text documents he found on the hard drive from some of the bigger names in Taliban/Al-Qaeda including Osama himself. One of the more telling tracts in the piece is that apparently the main goal of the 9/11 attack was to get the technologically superior America to attack and hopefully get bogged down in a clumsy mire as the Russians did in the 80s. “Rather, its aim was to tempt the powers to strike back in a way that would create sympathy for the terrorists.” When this didn’t happen quite as planned in Afghanistan, Al Qaeda may have been disappointed. However, the move into Iraq (no connection to Iraq has been found on the PC) may have created the very situation Al Qaeda hoped for: mass Arab resentment against an invading infidel which might “galvanize” the movement and aid it’s internet driven recruitment effors.