You are confusing revenues with net income. Ford did not "make" (which means "earns" or "net income" by all definitions of the word) $129 billion, they made (net profit) $6.6 billion in 2010. There are a lot of companies (including Ford) who have had revenues of $129 billion or more and had a negative net income (lost money) in various years. It is usually more useful to compare Ford to the rest the auto industry, rather than GNP of a particular country, especially since Ford is a multi-national global company and their reported revenues and net income are not all attributable to the US.

In the US, one million people is less than 1/3 of one percent (.32 %) of the population. In terms of public opinion, that is rather small. There are least than many Marxists in the US, but one would hardly say that Marxism is popular political movement in the US (at the present time). There are probably at least one million in the US who believe they have been kidnapped (and returned) by aliens (not the illegal kind, the ones from other planets, etc), or pick any other unusual and/or ridiculous opinion.

You might be shocked about how few people in the US know about IRA terrorism in the UK. That is one reason why Irish "charities" in the US have been so successful in funding the IRA over the years.

Not that many media had websites in 1999, and there have been many other spellings of Al Qaeda. But so what if Al Qaeda was not widely known or reported about back then? What are you implying, that the US made up Al Qaeda or falsely accusing them for the USS Cole or 9/11? That seems to be your tone.

It was merely an example to show that a number or quantity can be big without being a large percentage of the whole, either way you still seem to be defending the idea that 1 million people is not a lot, and even then this discussion is getting further off topic from my original point. Whether my point is actually true or not, a lot of people hold the view that Al Qaeda barely existed before 9/11 which I then tried to backup with news reports.



I would have been more than 10-years ago, but about then I discovered that the US populous was directly funding Irish Terrorists to the tune of about half of their yearly financial income - strangely this point is rarely mentioned, and no-doubt some would accuse the American people of funding terrorists (probably unwittingly) and they would not be wrong.

However that is an excelent point for explaining that people in certain areas of the world are afflicted by terrorist groups that dont really affect the rest of the world. e.g. the average American 20-years ago might have heard little bits of news about the IRA, but nowhere near as much as we in the UK did because it was directly affecting us. Likewise Al Qaeda or Bin Laden prior to the 11th of September didnt really feature in the mainstream news in the UK in the same way that it did in the USA. More examples can easily be given, ETA, Khmer Rouge and numerous others that dont affect us and are rarely mentioned, but have caused devestation and murdered huge numbers of people.



The number of websites with media at that time is of no importance to my searches as all of the searches were conducted withing exactly the same 12-month time period, as far as the spelling of Al Qaeda is concerned I got a single hit for the way I have been spelling it for years (seemingly in error as there is no U), if there are other ways of spelling it then feel free to educate me as to your findings, then we can add up all of the hits and lets see if we can get 100 hits..... this still pales in comparison to the number of hits for Osama Bin Laden thus re-affirming my point that Al Qaeda was a long way from being a household name.



Feel free to re-read all of my posts, I have not said that, but I have alluded to the fact that a lot of people around the world "believe" that to be the case, I am sure this is partly because of the very few mentions of Al Qaeda prior to 9/11, and then the very rapid (hours not days) accusations from the US government that Al Qaeda was behind it, and that was said with 90% certainty by many different people within the US government. If you put these 2 things together it is easy to see why many people then accused the US government of hiding something from the public - this then leads to accusations and conspiricy theories.

I do not believe that the US government masterminded the murder of thousands of its own civilians, that is unbelievable. However as the US government (as well as others) funded and armed the Mujahideen to fight the soviets in Afghanistan, some of those US funded guerilla fighters then ended up as members of Al Qaeda including Osama Bin Laden - at least some of the credit for this must be accepted by the US government - this is another weapon that the conspiricy theorists always point towards - the direct link between Osama Bin Laden and the US Government.

Again I must point out that I dont hold any of these points as true, but I feel that some are believed by a large number of Americans (not a large percentage), and those people also now have an additional conspiricy theory to add, that of Osama Bin Laden either being still alive having been captured by the US Government - which again I dont bel,ieve it to be true, but if it is I dont care how they are torturing the man.


Andy

You can check my link for an alternate spelling, Andy.
It's not a random link. I linked to the prosecution that really put AQ on the map. You will have a much easier finding references to AQ in the period between this case was made public and 9/11.

It's not surprising that OBL is mentionned more. OBL had long been seeking media attention as an individual or in the context of other terrorist organizations, whether they be grand-sounding empty shells or functioning organizations.

Comparisons to orgnizations such as the IRA are misleading. The IRA was an organization who used terrorist tactics in the furtherance of what was percieved as the national interest, just like the US government. The Irish state and its two ruling political parties is in part a product of the old IRA which goes to show that this organization more important aims than terror. The IRA had a command structure, rules and so forth.
Organizations which have no base and who therefore have no other plans than to sow violence operate differently. Would-be jihadis are known to travel around the world trying to lend support to fellow Muslims in their conflicts with Russia and other non-Muslim states. They have local organizations and obviously establish contacts with each other and form networks of sorts. But it's not clear any kind of formal international organization was required for the succesful terrorist operations generally attributed to AQ.

As I previously mentioned, there are sufficient numbers of Muslims in the US (from the Middle East, Asia, of Black Muslims) who refuse to believe that people are committing terrorists acts in the name of Islam. There are also those on the far-left like Noam Chomsky who likewise hate the US. So what? What is the significance of this? Nothing.

There is no significance because a very large percentage of Americans believe the following:

1. The US Apollo 11 landing on the moon in 1969 was staged on a movie set by the US Government.
2. Lee Harvey Oswald did not kill Kennedy.
3. The US government knows that aliens landed in Roswell NM in 1947, and they have been hiding that fact from the American public ever since.
4. etc, etc, etc

So if a few few million, or even 10 million in the US think that OBL is innocent and 9/11 was a conspiracy dreamed up by the US government, then it would not surprise me, but it really doesn't mean anything IMO.

As to whether the US government gave legitimacy to OBL during the Soviet Afghan war, yes that did happen, but OBL was independently wealthy, and I don't know if US funding for that war was in any way transferred over to Al Qaeda.

One more point. If you read the Federal Indictment of OBL and others prior to 9/11 (the link I posted above), you will see a history of Al Qaeda explained. In the that history is the fact that OBL "is" Al Qaeda, they have always been synonymous. I don't recall myself whether I heard the term Al Qaeda prior to 9/11, even though I was very much aware of the terrorist activities of OBL prior to 9/11. It may just be that the US media chose not to mention the name of his organization much. I don't understand why you think this is in any way significant.

Interesting news about the bounty of digital information captured at the OBL mansion.
Apparently there is a lot of pr0n on OBL's storage devices: http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=21634

Reminds me of Saddam Hussein presenting his soldiers in Kuwait as 'holy warriors'.
And when they surrendered to the US troops, guess what was found stashed in large numbers in their bunkers?
Obviously, a lot of pr0n magazines. Hypocrisy always sells well to stupid people...

I'd want to have some corroborating information, before believing that this is true. The image of OBL watching TV is obviously manipulated (the image on the TV screen), and it is quite different from the others from the same time, shown on multiple sources.