The late American journalist Claire Sterling won international fame with her 1981 book The Terror Network, in which she demonstrated that many of the world's spontaneous-looking local terrorist outfits actually took their marching orders and got their ammo and training from the Kremlin.
That fame has apparently not yet reached New Yorker foreign correspondent Mary Anne Weaver, nor the people who transcribe interview tapes for the magazine, nor the New Yorker's "vaunted" fact-checking department.
In the course of an article on Osama bin Laden, Weaver interviews a former State Department official named David Long. "Is Osama bin Laden the exclusive font of terrorist evil?" Weaver quotes Long as asking. "No. This is an informal brotherhood we are seeing now, whose members can draw on each other; it's not a clear, sterling network."
The New Yorker's comprehension turns out to have been no more clear than its knowledge of terrorism was sterling.