For LH's benefit here's the chapter and verse on it:

"The name of the organization comes from the Arabic noun qâ'idah, which means foundation or basis and can also refer to a military base or database. The initial al- is the Arabic definite article the, hence the base. In Arabic qa'idah bayanat is database where bayanat is data and qa'idah is base.

Osama bin Laden explained the origin of the term in a videotaped interview with Al Jazeera journalist Tayseer Alouni in October 2001:

" The name 'al-Qaeda' was established a long time ago by mere chance. The late Abu Ebeida El-Banashiri established the training camps for our mujahedeen against Russia's terrorism. We used to call the training camp al-Qaeda. The name stayed."

Saad Al-Faqih, a Saudi expert on al-Qaida, has stated that the name al-Qaida, "…originated from a documentation system in the Bait al-Ansar guesthouse back in the 1980s."

The United Kingdom politician Robin Cook, who served as the United Kingdom Foreign Secretary and Leader of the House of Commons described Al-Qaeda as meaning "the database" and a product of western miscalculation. Cook wrote, "Al-Qaida, literally 'the database', was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians."

Robin Cook was a complete and utter idiot at the best of times. His contention is ludicrous considering how little the US intelligence services knew about Al-Qaeda, mainly because they always dealt with them via middle-men in Pakistan's ISI.