Nor should the hijackers, their shadowy handlers and Osama bin Laden be taken for the authentic voice of Islam, the religion and civilization, with 1.3 billion adherents and nearly 1,400 years of history.
Mohammed Khalifa, Wali Khan AminShah, and Ibrahim Munir, all of whom had fought alongside, pledged a loyalty oath to, or worked for a shadowy Saudi Arabian millionaire named Osama bin Laden.
It is hard to make analogies between Hitler, who commanded the strongest army in Europe, and bin Laden, who commands "shadowy networks" that will take vast resources and infinite patience merely to define.
The old system a mess of competing agencies mainly set up to collect information on other countries, not on shadowy non-state actors like Mr bin Laden plainly needed changing.
Osama bin Laden remained a shadowy figure who built a multinational terror network whose scope was largely undetected until 1998, when Al Qaeda bombed the embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
B5 EXPRESSING SURPRISE -- The Al-Qadir Trading Company in Quetta, Pakistan, and its owner, Abdul Manan Agha, have been identified by the United States as part of the shadowy financial network that supports Osama bin Laden.
One of the top aides to Yemen's president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, said, "As we have told the Americans, nobody can say there is solid proof that Osama bin Laden is the shadowy man behind the bombing, but we are convinced, on the basis of everything we have learned so far, that he was".
"We had good contact" with shadowy figures who had information about the bin Laden group's activities.
— They are the shadowy warriors of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden: two dozen members of the Navy Seals who stormed the fortified compound in Pakistan where Bin Laden was hiding.
The order apparently covers any deal the government may have made with a shadowy figure named Sidi Tayyib, who was married to one of Mr. bin Laden's relatives.
Behind the wall of secrecy that surrounded today's discussions, it was a fair guess that one issue that caused dissension was the American demand for access to everything that Pakistan's shadowy military intelligence agency, the Interservices Intelligence directorate, or ISI, knows about the bin Laden network.
