Al Qaeda Software
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During a conversation with John Kiriakou and author Ian Trottier on the Michael Jaco show, one of the speakers raised the claim that "Al-Qaeda" is, by his understanding, also the name of a terrorist-tracking software, distinct from, but overlapping in name with, its use as the name of the terrorist organization.

The claim was raised in the context of discussing the Analysis Corporation, a database created in 1990 to track terror movements following the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, during the wider Mujahideen-era discussion of the conversation.

Al-Qaeda's origins, per Kiriakou

Separately from the software claim, Kiriakou has discussed the historical origins of al-Qaeda the organization. He says al-Qaeda was not deliberately created by the CIA, though the agency could be said to have "accidentally" created it as blowback from its anti-Soviet war effort in Afghanistan. He credits this dynamic to his mentor at the CIA, Gust Avrakotos, later dramatized by Philip Seymour Hoffman in Charlie Wilson's War, whose single-minded focus was killing as many Russians as possible, whatever the consequences of arming the fighters who did it. One tactic used to motivate Osama bin Laden and other fighters during the anti-Soviet campaign, per Kiriakou, was portraying the Soviets as anti-religious Communists.

Kiriakou traces a chain of blowback from that campaign: al-Qaeda formed, and when the U.S. began killing al-Qaeda members, ISIS emerged from within an American military prison in Iraq, created, he says, because some detainees considered al-Qaeda insufficiently radical, followed later by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and al-Qaeda in the Sahel. He also recalls that a year before the Khobar Towers bombing, al-Qaeda bombed the OPM-SANG building in Riyadh, a location where he used to grocery shop, killing several Third Country Nationals, in part, he says, because the building sold pork.
