tions to reassert their prominence in the region. And now AI Qaeda is silent no more — and is taking the rhetorical offensive. In recent statements, Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden’s second- in-command, and Qaeda surrogates have aligned themselves with the protesters in Libya, Egypt and elsewhere, while painting

encouraged America to use torture and secret prisons to fight back. For more than a decade Al-Qaeda has sought to provoke wars. Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri assumed from the start of their self-proclaimed jihad that the more chaos and violence they could provoke between the Islamic world and the West on