The Martyr
America, however, stood apart from the colonial adventures that had characterized Europe’s relations with the Arab world. At the end of the Second World War, America straddled the political chasm between the colonizers and the colonized. Indeed, it was tempting to imaged America as the anticolonial paragon: a subjugated nation that had broken free and triumphantly outstripped its former masters. The country’s power seemed to lie in its values, not in European notions of cultural superiority or privileged races and classes. And because America advertised itself as an immigrant nation, it had a permeable relationship with the rest of the world. Arabs, like most other peoples, had established their own colonies inside America, and the ropes of kinship drew them closer to the ideals that the country claimed to stand for.|
And so, Qutb, like many Arabs, felt shocked and betrayed by the support that the US government had given to the Zionist cause after the war. Even as Qutb was sailing out of Alexandria’s harbor, Egypt, along with five other Arab armies, was in the final stages of losing the war that established Israel as a Jewish state within the Arab world. The Arabs were stunned, not only by the determination and skill of the Israeli fighters but by the incompetence of their own troops and the disastrous decisions of their leaders. The shame of that experience would shape the Arab intellectual universe more profoundly than any other even in modern history. “I hate those Westerners and despite them!” Qutb wrote after President Harry Truman endorsed the transfer of a hundred thousand Jewish refugees into Palestine. “All of them, without any exception: the English, the French, the Dutch, and finally the Americans, who have been trusted by many”
America itself had just been shaken by a lengthy scholarly report titled Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, by Alfred Kinsey and his colleagues at the University of Indiana. Their eight-hundred-page treatise, filled with startling statistics and droll commentary, shattered the country’s leftover Victorian prudishness like a brick through a stained-glass window. Kinsey reported that 37 percent of the American men he sampled had experienced homosexual activity to the point of orgasm, nearly half had engaged in extramarital sex, and 69 percent had paid for sex with prostitutes. The mirrors that Kinsey held up to America showed a country that was frantically lusty but also confused, ashamed, incompetent, and astoundingly ignorant. Despite the evidence of the diversity and frequency of sexual activity, this was a time in America when sexual matters were practically never discussed, not even by doctors. One Kinsey researcher interviewed a thousand childless American couples who had no idea why they failed to conceive, even though the wives were virgins.
Qutb was familiar with the Kinsey Report, and referenced it in his later writings to illustrate his view of Americans as little different from beats—”a reckless, deluded herd that only knows lust and money.” A staggering rate of divorce was to be expected in such a society, since “Every time a husband or wife notices a new sparkling personality, they lunge for it as if it were a new fashion in the world of desires.” The turbulent overtones of his own internal struggles can be heard in his diatribe: “A girl who looks at you, appearing as if she were an enchanting nymph or an escaped mermaid, but as she approaches, you sense only the screaming instinct inside her, and you can smell her burning body, not the scent of perfume but flesh, only flesh. Tasty flesh, truly, but flesh nonetheless”
In Qutb’s passionate analysis, there was little difference between the communist and capitalist systems; both, he believed, attended only the material needs of humanity, leaving the spirit unsatisfied. He predicted that once the average worker lost his dreamy expectations of becoming rich, America would inevitably turn towards communism
Although Qutb came from a little village in Upper Egypt, it was in America that he found “a primitiveness that reminds us of the ages of jungles and caves.” Social gatherings were full of superficial chatter. Though people filled the museums and symphonies, they were there not to see or hear but rather out of a frantic, narcissistic need to be seen and heard
Once, Qutb and several friends were turned away from a movie theater because the owner thought they were black. “But we’re Egyptians,” one of the group explained. The owner apologized and offered to let them in, but Qutb refused, galled by the fact that black Egyptians could be admitted but black Americans could not
Qutb would later write that “racism had brought America down from the summit to the foot of the mountain—taking the rest of humanity down with it”
“The issue of sexual relationships is simply biological,” one of the college women explained to Qutb. “You Orientals complicate this simple matter by introducing a moral element to it. The stallion and the mare, the bull and the cow, the ram and the ewe, the rooster and the hen—none of them consider moral consequences when they have intercourse. And therefore life goes on, simple, easy and carefree.” The fact that the woman was a teacher made this statement all the more subversive, in Qutb’s opinion, since she would be polluting generations of young people with her amoral philosophy
Qutb saw a spiritual wasteland, and yet belief in God was nearly unanimous int eh United States at the time. It was easy to be misled by the proliferation of churches, religious books, and religious festivals, Qutb maintained; the fact remained that materialism was the real American god. “The soul has no value to Americans,” he wrote to one friend. “There has been a Ph.D. dissertation about the best way to clean dishes, which seems more important to them than the Bible or religion.” Many American were beginning to come to similar conclusions. The theme of alienation in American life was just beginning to cast a poll over the postwar party. In many respect, Qutb’s analysis, though harsh, was only premature
Certainly the trip had not accomplished what Qutb’s friends in Egypt had hoped. Instead of becoming liberalized by his experience in America, he returned even more radicalized. Moreover, his sour impressions, when published, would profoundly shape Arab and Muslim perceptions of the new world at a time when their esteem for America and its values had been high.
He also brought home anew and abiding anger about race. “The white man in Europe or America is our number-one enemy,” he declared. The white man crushes us underfoot while we teach our children about his civilization, his universal principles and noble objectives…. We are endowing our children with amazement and respect of the master who tramples our honor and enslaves us. Let us instead plant the seeds of hatred, disgust, and revenge in the souls of these children. Let us teach these children from the time their nails are soft that the white man is the enemy of humanity, and that they should destroy him at the first opportunity.”
Oddly, the people who knew Qutb in America say he seemed to like the country. They remember him as shy and polite, political but not overtly religious. Once introduced, he never forgot anyone’s name, and he rarely voiced an direct criticism of his host country. Perhaps he kept the slights to him until he could safely broadcast them at home.
It was clear that the was not just writing about America, His central concern was modernity. Modern values—secularism, rationality, democracy, subjectivity, individualism, mixing of the sexes, tolerance, materialism—had infect Islam through the agency of Western colonialism. America now stood for all that
The Sporting Club
Until the end of World War II, there was little precedent in Islam for the anti-Semitism that was now warping the politics and society of the region. Jews had lived safely—although submissively—under Muslim rule of 1,200 years, enjoying full religious freedom; but in the 1930s, Nazi propaganda in Arabic-language shortwave radio, coupled with slanders b Christian missionaries int eh region, infected the area with this ancient Western prejudice. After eth war Cairo became a sanctuary for Nazis, who advised the military and the government. The rise of the Islamist movement coincided with the decline of fascism, but they overlapped in Egypt, and the germ passed into a new carrier
Zawahiri began saying that Americans were the enemy and must be confronted. “I don’t understand,” Schleifer replied. “You just came back form Afghanistan where you’re cooperating with the Americans. Now you’re saying America is the enemy?”
“Sure, we’re taking American help to fight the Russians,” Zawahiri responded, “but they’re equally evil.”
“How can you make such a comparison?” said Schleifer, outraged. “There is more freedom to practice Islam in American than in Egypt. And in the Soviet Union, they closed down fifty thousand mosques!”
“You don’t see it because you’re an American,” said Zawahiri.
Schleifer angrily told him that the only reason they were even having this conversation was that NATO and the American army had kept the Soviets from overrunning Europe and then turning their attention to the Middle East. The discussion ended on a bad note. They had debated each other many times, but always with respect and humor. This time Schleifer had the feeling that Zawahiri wasn’t talking to him—he was addressing a military
Islamists say the Sharia cannot be improved upon, despite fifteen centuries of social change, because it arises directly from the mind of God. They want to bypass the long tradition of judicial opinion from Muslim scholars and forge a more authentically Islamic legal system that is untainted by Western influence of any improvisations caused by the engagement with modernity. Non-Muslims and Islamic modernists, on the other hand, are that the tenets of Sharia reflect the stringent Bedouin codes of the culture that gave birth to the religion and are certainly not adequate to govern a modern society
The screams of fellow prisoners who were being interrogated kept many men in a state of near madness, even when they weren’t tortured themselves. Because of his status, Zawahiri was subjected to frequent beatings and other ingenious and sadistic forms of punishment created by Intelligence Unit 75, which oversaw Egypt’s inquisition.
One line of thinking proposes that American’s tragedy on September 11 was born in the prisons of Egypt. Human-rights advocates in Cairo argue that torture created an appetite for revenge, first in Sayyid Qutb and later in his acolytes, included Ayman al-Zawahiri. The main target of the prisoners’ wrath was the secular Egyptian government, but a powerful current of anger was also directed towards the West, which they saw as an enabling force behind the repressive regime. They held the West responsible of corrupting and humiliating Islamic society. Indeed, the theme of humiliation, which is the essence of torture, is important to understanding the radical Islamists’ rage. Egypt’s prisons became a factory for producing militants whose need for retribution—they called it justice—was all-consuming.
Montassir al-Zayyat, an Islamist attorney who was imprisoned with Zawahiri and later became his lawyer and biographer, maintains that the traumatic experiences suffered by Zawahiri in prison transformed him from being a relatively moderate force in al-Jihad to a violent, and implacable extremist
Allam found Zawahiri “shy and distant. He doesn’t look at you when he talks, which is a sign of politeness in the Arab world”
Zawahiri himself doesn’t admit to this in his memoir, except obliquely, where he writes about eh “humiliation of imprisonment. “The toughest thing about captivity is forcing the mujahid, under the force of torture, to confess about his colleagues, to destroy his movement with his own hands, and offer his and his colleagues’ secrets to the enemy.”
Perversely, the authorities placed Qamari in the same cell with Zawahiri after Zawahiri testified against him and thirteen others. Qamari received a ten-year sentence. “As usual, he received the news with his unique calmness and self-composure,” Zawahiri recorded. “He even tried to comfort me, and said, ‘I pity you for the burden you will carry.’” In 1988 Qamari was shot to death by police after escaping from prison
he witnessed Zawahiri in prison, “his head shaved, his dignity completely humiliated, undergoing all sorts of torture.” The officer went on to say that the had been in the interrogation room when another prisoner was brought into the chamber, chained hand and foot. The interrogators were trying to get Zawahiri to confess his involvement in the Sadat assassination. When the other prisoner said, “How would you expect him to confess when he knows the penalty is death?” Zawahiri replied, “The death penalty is more merciful than torture”
Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a prominent sociologist at the American University in Cairo, spoke to Zawahiri soon after he got out of prison, and he noted a pronounced degree of suspicion and an overwhelming desire for reverence, which was characteristic of men who have been abused in prison. Torture may have had other, unanticipated effects on these intensely religious men. May of them said that after being tortured they had had visions of being welcomed by the saints into Paradise and of the just Islamic society that had been made possible by their martyrdom.
Ibrahim had done a study of political prisoners in Egypt in the 1970s. According to his research, most of the Islamist recruits were young men from villages who had come to the city for schooling. The majority were sons of middle-level government bureaucrats. They were ambitious and tended to be drawn to the fields of science and engineering, which accepted only the most qualified students. They were not the alienated, marginalized youth that a sociologist might have expected. Instead, Ibrahim wrote, they were “model young Egyptians. IF they were not typical, it was because they were significantly above the average in their generation.” Ibrahim attributed the recruiting success of the militant Islamist groups to their emphasis on brotherhood, sharing, and spiritual support, which provided a “soft landing” for the rural migrants to the city.
Zawahiri, who had read the study in prison, heatedly disagreed. He asserted that the recruits responded to the Islamist ideals, not to the social needs that the groups attended. “You have trivialized our movement by your mundane analysis,” he told Ibrahim. “My God have mercy on you”
The Founder
There was also in his nature a romance with the spirituality of the desert, humble and stripped of distraction. Throughout his life, he would huger for austerity like a vice; the desert, the cave, and his as et unspoken to die anonymously in a trench in warfare. But it was difficult to hold on to this self-conception while being chauffeured around the Kingdom in the family Mercedes.
At one time, Osama made an effort not to be too much of a prig. Although he was opposed to the playing of musical instruments, he organized some of his friends into an a cappella singing group. They even recorded some of their tunes about jihad, which for them meant the internal struggle to improve themselves, not holy war. Osama would make copies and give them each a tape. When they played soccer, Osama would bring along tune and cheese sandwiches for the other players, even on days when he was fasting. His commitment and composure command respect. Out of modesty, he stopped wearing regular soccer shorts and took to playing in long pants. IN deference to his beliefs, the other players followed suit
Change
Unimaginable wealth had filled on these austere desert nomads—a gift form God because of their piety, they genuinely believed. Paradoxically, this gift was undermining every facet of their identity
One of the ideas the government entertained was to flood the underground chambers, then electrocute everyone inside with high-voltage cables. Such a plan, however, did not distinguish the hostages from their captors
Because of the prohibition against non-Muslims entering the holy city, they converted to Islam in a brief, formal ceremony
The Miracles
Radicalism usually prospers in the gap between rising expectations and declining opportunities. This is especially true where the population is young, idle, and bored; where the art is impoverished; where entertainment—movies, theater, music, is poised or absent altogether; and were young men are set apart from the consoling and socializing presence of women. Adult illiteracy remained the norm in many Arab countries. Unemployment was among the highest in the developing world. Anger, resentment, and humiliation spurred young Arab to search for dramatic remedies.
Martyrdom promised such young men an ideal alternative to a life that was so paring in its rewards. A glorious death beckoned to the sinner, who would be forgiven, it said, with the first spurt of blood, and he would behold his place in paradise even before his death. Seventy members of his household might be spared the fires of hell because of his sacrifice. They martyr who is poor will be crowned in heaven with a jewel more valuable than the earth itself. And for those young men who came from culture where women are shuttered away and rendered unattainable for someone without prospects, martyrdom offered the conjugal pleasures of seventy-two virgins—“the dark-eyed houris,” as the Quran describes them, “chaste as hidden pearls.” They awaited the martyr with feats of meat and fruit and cups of the purest wine
For the journalists covering eth way, the Arab Afghans were a curious sideshow to the real fighting, set apart by their obsession with dying. When a fighter fell, his comrades would congratulate him and weep because they were not also slain in battle. These scenes struck other Muslims as bizarre. The Afghans were fighting for their country, not for Paradise or an idealized Islamic community. For them, martyrdom was not such a high priority
The Base
extended the death warrant to encompass, for instance, anyone who registered to vote. Democracy, in their view, was against Islam because it placed in the hands of people authority that properly belonged to God. Therefore, anyone who voted was an apostate, and his life was forfeit
Return of the Hero
Fame creates its own authority, even in Saudi Arabia, where humility is prized and prestige is carefully pruned among non-royals
He had a commanding air of confidence, which was all the more deductive because of his instinctive humility
At first, it was difficult to grasp the basis of bin Laden’s complaint. The United States had never been a colonial power, nor for that matter had Saudi Arabia ever been colonized. Of course, he was speaking for Muslims in general, for whom American support of Israel was a cause of language, the United States had been a decisive ally in the Afghan jihad. The sense of humiliation had more to do with the stance of Muslims in the modern world
His actions at the time belied this public stance. Privately, bin Laden approached members of the royal family during the Afghan jihad to express his gratitude for American participation in that war. Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, remembered bin Laden coming to him and saying, “Thank you. Thank you for bringing the Americans to help us get rid of the secularist, atheistic Soviets.”
Bin Laden had never shown himself to be an interesting or original political thinker—his analysis, until then, was standard Islamist boilerplate, uninformed by an deep experiences in the West. And yet, wrapped int eh mystique that had been spun around him, bin Laden held a position in Saudi society that gave weight to his pronouncements. The very fact that his American critique was being uttered at all—in a country where speech was so curtailed—suggested to other Saudis that there must be royal consent behind the anti-American campaign that bin Landen had launched.
Few countries were so different from each other, and yet so dependent on one another, as America and Saudi Arabia
Although the Americans—and other coalition forces—were stationed mainly outside the cities in order to stay out of view, Saudis were mortified by the need to turn to Christians and Jews to defend the holy land of Islam. That many of these foreign soldiers were women only added to their embarrassment. The weakness of the Saudi state and its abject dependence on the West for protection were paraded before the world, thanks to the 1,500 foreign journalist who descended on the Kingdom to report on the buildup to the war. For such a private and intensely religious people, with a press that had been entirely under government control, the scrutiny was disorienting—at time both shameful and exhilarating
The Silicon Valley
One could not say, however, that they had a cogent political plan. Revenge for many varied injustices was their constant theme, even though most of the conspirators were enjoying freedoms and opportunities in America no accorded in their own countries. They had a network of willing conspirators who were inflamed and eager to strike. The only thing that the jihadi terrorists lacked to carry off a truly devastating attacked on America was the organization and technical skills
They spread out maps of Afghanistan on the floor of Zent’s office, and Mohammed indicated the mujahideen training camps. He mentioned the name of Osama bin Laden, who Mohammed said was preparing an army to knock off the Saudi regime. Mohammed also spoke about an organization, al-Qaeda, which was operating training camps in Sudan. He even admitted that he was providing the members instruction in hijacking and espionage. The interrogators apparently made nothing of these revelations. It would be three critical years before anyone else in American intelligence would hear of al-Qaeda.
Perhaps Mohammed was revealing these details because of some psychological need to elevate his importance. “He saw himself as a James Bond,” an FBI agent who later talked to him observed. But it is more likely that this highly directed operative was seeking to fulfill Zawahiri’s assignment of penetrating American intelligence. Al-Jihad and al-Qaeda were still separate entities in the spring of 1993, and Zawahiri had not yet signed on to bin Laden’s campaign against America. Apparently Zawahiri was willing to sell out bin Laden in order to get access to American intelligence that would benefit his own organization
Zawahiri was shaken by the popular outrage. “The unintended death of this innocent child pained us all, but we were helpless and we had to fight the government,” he wrote in his memoir. He offered to pay the blood money to the girl’s family. The Egyptian government arrested 280 more of his followers; 6 were eventually given a sentence of death. Zawahiri wrote: “This meant that they wanted my daughter, who was now two at the time, and the daughters of other colleagues, to be orphans. Who cried or cared for our daughters?”
Paradise Lost
From the beginning of al-Qaeda, there were reformers and there were nihilists. The dynamic between them was irreconcilable and self-destructive, but events were moving so quickly that it was almost impossible to tell the philosophers from the sociopaths. They were glued together by the charismatic personality of Osama bin Laden, which contained both strains, idealism and nihilism, in a potent mix
Given the diversity of trainees and their causes, bin Laden’s main task was to direct them towards a common enemy
The Prince of Darkness
O’Neill was separated from bin Laden by many layers of culture and belief, but he devoted himself to trying to understand this new enemy in the darkened mirror of human nature. They were quite different men, but O’Neil and bin Laden were well-matched opponents: ambitious, imaginative, relentless, and each wager to destroy the other and all he represented
In a society where no one could speak freely, the thunder of bin Laden’s language jolted and titillated his mute countrymen. But he did not call for revolution. Although he accused several leading princes of corruption and incompetence, he was not asking for the overthrow of the royal family. Except for the king’s abdication, he didn’t propose solutions to the problems he cited. He pointedly made no reference at all to crown Prince Abdullah, next in line to the throne. Despite the incendiary tone of the document, it was essential modest in its ambition. Bin Laden showed himself to be a loyal reformer with little to offer int eh way of useful political ideas. His insurrectionary zeal was directed toward the United States, not toward his homeland
The Boy Spies
To deal with Zawahiri, Egyptian intelligence agents devised a fiendish plan. They lured a thirteen-year-old boy named Ahmed into an apartment with the promise of juice and videos. Ahmed was the son of Mohammed Sharraf, a well-known Egyptian fundamentalist and a senior member of al-Jihad. The boy was drugged and sodomized; when he awakened, he was confronted with photographs of the homosexual activity and threatened with the prospect of having them shown to his father. For the child, the consequences of such a disclosure were overwhelming. “It could even be that the father would kill him,” a source close to Zawahiri admitted.
Egyptian intelligence forced him to recruit another child, Mus’ab, whose father, Abu al-Faraj was also in al-Jihad and served as the treasurer of al-Qaeda. Mus’ab endured the same humiliating initiation of drugs and sexual abuse and was forced to turn against his family. The agents taught the boys how to plant microphones in their own homes and photograph documents. A number of arrests followed because of the information produced by the boy spies.
The Egyptian agents then decided to use the boys to kill Zawahiri. They gave Mus’ab a bomb to place inside a five-story apartment building where Zawahiri’s’ family lived. But Zawahiri was not there, and the Sudanese intelligence discovered the bomb. The other child, Ahmed, was int eh hospital, suffering from malaria. He had not yet been revealed as a spy. His physician was Zawahiri, who visited him every day. They Egyptian agents learned from Ahmed what time to expect his doctor. The next day an assassination team was waiting, but for whatever reason, Zawahiri didn’t come.
An even better opportunity arose, however: Egyptian intelligence learned of a meeting of al-Jihad’s shura council. An agent gave Mus’ab a suitcase bomb and instructed him to place it in the office where Zawahiri and his companions would be meting. As the boy got out of the agent’s car, however, both the Sudanese intelligence and Jihad security were waiting for him. The Egyptian agent sped away, leaving the boy to his fate.
Al-Jihad and Sudanese intelligence quarreled who would take custody of Mus’ab. Finally, Zawahiri was allowed to question the boy. He promised to return him safely. He soon placed his young patient, Ahmed, under his arrest as well. Then Zawahiri convened a Sharia court.
Many members of al-Jihad and al-Qaeda objected to putting children on trial, saying it was against Islam. In response, Zawahiri had the boy stripped naked to determine if they had attained puberty, which they had. The helpless boys confessed everything. The court convicted them of sodomy, treason, and attempted murder.
Zawahiri had the boy shot. To make sure he got his point across, he videotaped their confessions and their executions and distributed the tapes as an example to others who might betray the organization
His strategy was to force the Egyptian regime to become even more repressive, to make the people hate it. In this he succeeded. But the Egyptian people did not turn to him or to his movement. They only became more miserable, more disenchanted, frightened, and despairing
“I loved that man [bin Laden] by that time,” Issam said, “because of so many ideas I see in him. There was no hypocrisy in his character. No divergence between what he says and what he does. Unfortunately, his IQ was not that great”
Hijira
Women were a particular target, as might be expected from men who had so little experience of their company. “If women are going outside with fashionable, ornamental, tight and charming clothes to show themselves,” the decree continued, “they will be cursed by the Islamic Sharia and should never expect to go to heaven.” Work and schooling for women were halted at once, which destroyed the health-care system, the civil serve, and effectively eliminated elementary education. Forty percent of the doctors, half of the government workers, and seven out of ten teachers were women. Under the Taliban, many of them would become beggars
Going Operational
The bureau was technologically crippled even before Freeh arrived, but by the time he left not even church groups would accept the vintage FBI computers as donations
In addition to their ingrained cultural reticence, the Saudis had legal reason to be caution in dealing with the American. Because the Kingdom is governed by Sharia law, clerical judges have complete discretion to throw out any evidence they don’t care to hear, such as material provide by foreign agencies. The Saudis were worried that the involvement of the FBI would taint the case. O’Neill worked out an agreement that allowed the FBI agents to interview suspects through mirrored glass, which gave the bureau access while preserving the appearance of separation that the Saudis insisted upon
“Maybe you have no options,” one of the Saudis told O’Neill. “If it is a military response, what are you going to bomb? Are you going to nuke them? Flatten their military facilities? Destroy their oil refiners? And to achieve what? We are next door to them. You are six thousand miles away.”
In the new era of a globalized FBI, O’Neill learned, it was one thing to solve the case, another to gain justice
Bread and Water
The men who were so feared and despised in the rest of the world did not seem so terrifying in their own homes, where they rough-housed with the children and helped with their homework. Zaynab remembered one occasion when her family was at the Zawahiris’ house in Kandahar and the father came in carrying his machine gun. As he was going up the stairs, Zaynab’s ten-year-old brother grabbed Zawahiri’s legs and begged him to give it to him. “Abdul Kareem, just wait until we go to the room!” said Zawahiri. The boy wouldn’t let go; he kept begging and grabbing for the weapon. Zawahiri finally relented and let the boy examine his weapon. This struck Zaynab and the others as a tender moment. “And this is the man, they make him seem like a monster!” she exclaimed
When Zaynab visited the Zawahiris for the engagement of their second daughter, Umayma, the girls talked and talked through breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Late at night, they were still singing, making so much noise that they couldn’t hear Dr. Ayman knocking on the door asking them to keep it down. “I thought about how this guy scares the whole world but he doesn’t even scream at us. We see them as nice and gentle”
The baby was born in the winter, severely underweight. Dr. Ayman realized at once that his fight daughter suffered form Down syndrome. Azza, already pressed by the responsibly of taking care of a large family in extraordinary circumstances, accepted this new burden as well. They named the baby Aisha. Everyone loved her, but Azza was the only one who could attend to all her needs.
Looking back at her friendships with the bin Laden and Zawahiri children, Zaynab observed that the families “had their ups and downs, but they were pretty much normal kids. They had pretty much a normal childhood”
Now It Begins
“Terrorism can be commendable and it can be reprehensible,” bin Laden philosophized in response to a planted question form one of his followers. “Terrifying an innocent person and terrorizing him is objectionable and unjust, also unjustly terrorizing people is not right. Whereas, terrorizing oppressors and criminals and thieves and robbers is necessary for the safety of people and for the protection of their property….The terrorism we practice sit of the commendable kind”
But to most of the world and even to some members of al-Qaeda, the attacks seemed pointless, a showy act of mass murder with no conceivable effect on American policy except tp provoke a massive response.
But that, as it turned out, was exactly the point. Bin Laden wanted to lure the United States into Afghanistan, which was already being called the graveyard of empires. The usual object of terror is to draw one’s opponent into repressive blunders
One of the people buried under the secretarial school was named Roselyn Wanjiku Mwangi—Rosie, as everyone called her. The rescuers could hear her talking to another victim whose leg was crushed, trying to keep his spirits up. For two days Rosie’s encouraging voice inspired the rescuers, who worked relentlessly. Finally they reached the man with the crushed leg and carefully worked him free of the debris. They promised Rosie they would have her loose in less than two hours, but when they finally did reach her, it was too late. Her death was a heartbreaking blow to the exhausted workers
While ‘Owhali was fighting with the Taliban, Jihad Ali came to him and said that they had finally been approved for a martyrdom operation, but it was to be in Kenya. ‘Owhali was crestfallen. “I wanted to attack inside the U.S.,” he pleaded. His handlers told hm that the embassy strikes were important because they would keep America distracted while the real attack was being prepared.
“We have a plan to attack the U.S., but we’re not ready yet,” the suspect told Gaudin and other investigators. “We need to hit you outside the country in a couple of places so you won’t see what is going on inside. The big attack is coming. There’s nothing you can do to stop it”
Coleman had a sense of the empty space between the public O’Neill and the private one. The flashy suits, the gleaming fingernails, concealed a man of humble background and modest means. It was a front O’Neill could scarcely afford on a government salary. Belligerent and belittling at times, O’Neill was also anxious and insecure, frequently seeking reassurance and dragging a long tail of debt. Few knew how precarious his career was, how fragmented his private life, how unsettled his spirit. Once, when an agent got so angry at O’Neill in a meeting that he began screaming, O’Neill stalked out of the room and calmed himself down by making calls on his phone. ”You can’t do that,” Coleman told the agent. “Tell him you’re sorry—you didn’t mean to disrespect him.” O’Neill was as emotionally dependent on respect as any gangster.
But he was also capable of extravagant and almost alarming gestures of caring, quietly raising money for victims of the bombings he investigated and personally making sure his employees got the best doctors when they fell ill. One of O’Neill’s friends in Washington had bypass surgery during a blizzard. Traffic in the city was shut down, but he awakened to see O’Neill at his bedside. H had tramped through eighteen inches of snow. Every morning he insisted on bringing coffee and a pastry to his secretary from a kiosk on the street, and he always remembered birthdays. These gestures, large and small, spoke to his own longing to be notice and attended
The New Millennium
When Scheuer proposed an immediate cruise missile strike, the military objected, saying that as many as three hundred people might die and a nearly mosque would likely be damaged. Such considerations enraged Scheuer
Boom
Most who joined the jihad did so in a country other than the one in which they were reared. They were Algerians living in expatriate enclaves in France, Moroccans in Spain, or Yeminis in Saudi Arabia. Despite their accomplishments, they had little standing in the host societies where they lived
Alone, alienated, and often far from his family, the exile turned to the mosque, where he found companionship and the consolation of religion. Islam provided the element of commonality. It was more than a faith—it was an identity
The new Germany had carefully enshrined tolerance in its constitution, included the most openhanded political asylum policy in the world. Acknowledged terrorist groups were allowed to operate legally, raising money and recruits—but only if they were foreign terrorists, not domestic. It was not even against the law to plan terrorist operation so long as the attack took place outside the country. Naturally, many extremists took advantage of this safe harbor.
In addition to the constitutional barriers that stood in the way of investigating the radical groups, there were internal cautions as well. The country had suffered in the past from xenophobia, racism, and an excess of police power; any action that summoned upon such ghosts was taboo. The federal police preferred to concentrate their efforts on native right-wing elements, paying little attention to the foreign groups. Germany feared itself, not others
He was “elegant” and “delicate,” so that his sexual orientation—however unexpressed was difficult to read […] Atta constantly demonstrated an aversion to women, who in his mind were like Jews in their powerfulness and corruption. The will states: No pregnant women or disbelieves should walk in my funeral or ever visit my grave. No woman should ask forgiveness of me. Those who will wash my body should wear gloves so that they do not touch my genitals.” The anger that this statement directs at women and its horror of sexual contact invites the thought that Atta’s turn to terror had as much to do with his own conflicted sexuality as it did with the clash of civilization
His voice carrying a hint of Lebanon, the country where he was born. He knew what it was like to live in lawlessness and chaos, to see cities destroyed. His family fled to America during the civil war, and he loved America because it allowed him to dream. In return, America embrace him. His experience was completely opposite to that of the alienated Muslims in the West who had turned to Islamism as a way of finding an identity. He never personally experienced prejudice because he was an Arab or a Muslim; on the contrary, he was elected president of his student body and presented with many academic awards. After gaining his master’s degree in international relations at Villanova University, he planned to get his Ph.D. at Cambridge. But he had developed a fascination with the American Constitution, and like many naturalized citizens, he had a feeling of indebtedness of the new life he had been given. As he stood poised on the brink of an academic career, he decided—“as a joke”—to send his resume to the FBI. He thought the chances that a Muslim American scholar of Arab extraction would be hired by the bureau were laughably remote, but he was drawn by the mystique, and obviously something inside him cried out to be saved from the classroom. As he was packing to go to England, the response came: report to the FBI Academy in two weeks
“Is it American water?” the officer asked.
Soufan assured him that it was; moreover, he told the man, he had American water for all the others as well. They treated it as such a precious commodity that some would not drink it.
With this simple act of friendship, the soldiers lowered their weapons and Soufan gained control of the airport.
O’Neill was a little puzzled to find the soldiers saluting as he disembarked. “I told them you were a general,” Soufan confided
One can ask, at this point, whether 9/11 or some similar tragedy might have happened without bin Laden to steer it. The answer is certainly not. Indeed, the tectonic plates of history were, shifting, promoting a period of conflict between the West and the Arab Muslim world; however, the charisma and vision of a few individuals shaped the nature of this contest. The international Salafist uprising might have occurred without the writings of Sayyid Qutb or Abdullah Azzam’s call to jihad, but al-Qaeda would not have existed. Al-Qaeda depended on the unique conjunction of personalities, in particular with Egyptians—Zawahiri, Abu Ubaydah, Saif al-Adl, and Abu Hafs—each of whom manifested the thoughts of Qutb, their intellectual father. But without bin Laden, the Egyptians were only al-Jihad. Their goals were parochial. At a time when there were many Islamist movements, al of them concentrated on nationalist goals, it was bin Laden’s vision to create an international jihad corps. It was his leadership that held together an organization that had been bankrupted and thrown into exile. It was bin Laden’s tenacity that made him deaf to the moral quarrels that attended the murder of so many and indifferent ot the repeated failures that would have destroyed most men’s dreams. All of these were qualities that one can ascribe to a cult leader or a madman. But there was also an artistry involved, not only to achieve the spectacular effect but also to enlist the imagination of men whose lives bin Laden required
The Big Wedding
The usual course of a retired FBI executive is to become a security consultant in a high-paying corporate job, so that in the final years of his career he can finally cash in. O’Neill had applied for several positions of that sort, but eh one that he settled on when he returned from Spain was the world Trade Center post. Some of his friends, including Mark Rossini, congratulated him, saying, “At least now you’ll be safe. They already tried to bomb it.” And O’Neill replied, “They’ll try again. They’ll never stop trying to get those two buildings.” Once again, he was instinctively placing himself in the bull’s-eye. And perhaps in this decision there was a certain acceptance of his fate
Revelations
Soufan realized that the prison was well trained in counterinterrogation techniques, since he easily agreed to things that Soufan already knew—that he was fought in Bosnia, Somalia, and Afghanistan, for instance—and denied everything else. The responses were designed to make interrogators question their assumptions
For weeks, when he went home, Rossini would sit in his car and weep before he went into his house. Some of the agents had breakdowns. Some, like Dan Coleman, suffered permanent damage to their lungs because of the dust they inhaled that day.
The Trade Center burned for a hundred days. All during that time, the acrid stench penetrated the office of the FBI, a sickening reminder of their failure to stop the attack and their own narrow escape form death
In so many respects, the Trade Center dead formed a kind of universal parliament, representing sixty-two countries and nearly every ethnic group and religion in the world. There was an ex-hippie stockbroker, the gay Catholic Chaplin of the New York City Fire Department, a Japanese hockey player, an Ecuadoran sous chef, a Barbie Doll collector, a vegetarian calligrapher, a Palestinian accountant….The manifest ways in which they attached to life testified to the Quranic injunction that taking a single life destroys a universe. Al-Qaeda had aimed its attacks at America, but it had struck all of humanity
When anyone of the more than four hundred deceased members of the uniformed services was discovered, there was a special protocol, which was accorded O’Neill. An American flag was draped over his body, and the New York City policeman and firemen who were digging through the rubble stood at attention as his body was carried to the ambulance
the man who never kept family pictures in his office placed a photo of his grandson on his trophy wall. “You have been born in the greatest country in the world,” O’Neill wrote to his grandson, in a letter that his brokenhearted son would read at the funeral service. “It is well to learn the ethnic backgrounds of your parents, to love and cherish the ancient folklore. But never, never forget, you are an American first. And millions of Americans before you have fought for your freedom. The Nation holds all the terms of our endearment. Support, defend and honor those whose duty it is to keep it safe”
THE LOOMING TOWER: http://www.lawrencewright.com/books/#the-looming-tower-al-qaeda-and-the-road-to-9-11
Photo by Jericho Cervantes on Unsplash