The 9/11 Wars (100 page)

  
47
.
Ahmed Rashid,
Descent into Chaos
, p. 20. Author interview with Nigel Inkster, former deputy head of MI6, London, February 2009.

  
48
.
Author interviews with Nigel Inkster, Richard Dearlove, London, February 2009. Richard Dearlove, former head of MI6, response to question at conference, London, February 2009.

  
49
.
Material later found by US forces showed, however, that, though he appeared assured and confident on the finished video, he had in fact had been nervous and irritable, and it had taken many attempts to record his statement. See Martyr Tape of Ziad Samir Jarrah, reproduced in Referral Binder – Part I, Ali Hamza Ahmad Suliman al Bahlul, AFGP-2003-001320.

  
50
.
Charge sheet, USA vs. Ali al-Bahlul, FBI interrogation of al-Bahlul report statement, July 30–31, 2003. Author collection.

  
51
.
Educated at a private school and then at the engineering faculty of Abdel Aziz university, bin Laden had been raised in a strict Wahabi household. Subsequently, like millions of young men across the Muslim world, he had been exposed in the late 1970s to the modern ideas of political Islam that were gaining in strength at the time. Bin Laden did not, as often claimed, head ‘straight for Afghanistan’ when the Soviets invaded in 1979 but in fact probably first arrived in Peshawar in 1981. He raised funds through his own network of wealthy contacts and helped with the administration of Abdullah Azzam’s ‘Office of Services’ organization, which raised funds from the Islamic world and Muslim communities in Europe and America to aid the Afghan refugees and wounded
mujahideen
and, to a much lesser extent, recruited volunteers to fight. Azzam’s propaganda videos, with their bloody images of civilians wounded in Soviet attacks and exciting footage of ambushes among the scruffy, scrubby hills of eastern Afghanistan, were rudimentary but extremely effective on both wide-eyed teenagers and on the devout, wealthy patrons in the Gulf whom bin Laden solicited for funds. In 1989 bin Laden led a group of international militants at the catastrophic battle of Jalalabad, when, at the bidding of the Pakistani ISI, the squabbling
mujahideen
factions and their Arab auxiliaries incurred massive losses as they attempted to storm the eastern Afghan city.
    Further points worth making about the issue of CIA support for bin Laden or others like him include the fact that the CIA were not allowed to enter Afghanistan (an injunction they obeyed), and did not instruct any Arab Afghans, disburse funds to them or supply them directly with equipment. As pointed out in the main text, any US contact with
mujahideen
of any background was indirect, with the Pakistani ISI acting as an intermediary, and the latter trained and supplied only Afghans, and then only from the seven factions that they recognized. Afghan leaders like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, favoured by the ISI, had no wish or need to share hard-won resources with foreigners. Nor indeed did men like bin Laden, with their own sources of funding, need assistance. The Saudi Arabian government matched US aid to the
mujahideen
dollar for dollar, but these resources too were distributed by the ISI. The only exception was the faction of Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, an Afghan cleric who was very close to Saudi Wahhabi networks and the Saudi intelligence services, who received funds directly. As mentioned in the main text, techniques taught by the ISI on the basis of manuals and instruction from the CIA did bleed into the world of the Arab volunteers – the eleven-volume
Encyclopedia of Jihad
compiled in 1991 by international militants in Peshawar and dedicated to bin Laden and Azzam is based on American instruction manuals – but no direct instruction took place.
    As for the other myths, it is worth stressing that the bulk of foreign volunteers arrived in Peshawar after the Soviets had begun withdrawing, and even the military contribution of foreigners who had arrived earlier was negligible. Most were engaged in construction, missionary or humanitarian work. Those who did fight were distributed in tiny groups among the
mujahideen
factions of Hekmatyar and Sayyaf. Rodric Braithwaite argues convincingly in his excellent
Afgantsy: the Russians in Afghanistan 1979–1989,
Profile, 2011, that the impact of the American Stinger surface-to-air missiles distributed from 1986 onwards was minimal too, as the Soviets soon found ways to reduce their losses to previous levels.

  
52
.
A useful account of this period to be found in Chapter 2 of Peter Bergen’s excellent
The Longest War
, Simon and Schuster, 2011. Also, Bergen,
The Osama Bin Laden I Know
, pp. 80–81. Also in Lawrence Wright,
The Looming Tower
, Allen Lane, 2006, pp. 132–4. Early sources include documents provided to the author by Ron Motley, lead lawyer, 9/11 victims vs. Saudi Arabia, 2003. Also of interest is the US government evidence in USA vs. Enaam Arnout, January 2003, which deals in part with al-Qaeda in the 1990s. See also Burke,
Al-Qaeda
, Chapter 1, ‘What Is Al-Qaeda?’. Minutes of the final meeting on August 20, 1988 at which the formation of the group was agreed ends with the line that ‘the work of al-Qaeda commenced on September 9, 1988’.

  
53
.
Quoted in Rohan Gunaratna
, Inside Al Qae’da
, Hurst, 2002, p. 3.

  
54
.
His Saudi citizenship was withdrawn three years later.

  
55
.
A multitude of works now exist on this period. See Peter Bergen,
Holy War Inc
., Touchstone, 2002; Gilles Kepel,
Jihad
, I. B. Tauris, 2002; Wright,
The Looming Tower
;
The 9/11 Commission Report
, W. W. Norton, 2004; and Burke,
Al-Qaeda
.

  
56
.
Khaled Sheikh Mohammed jealously guarded his autonomy and consistently refused to swear the
bayat
or oath of allegiance to bin Laden. See
The 9/11 Commission Report
, p. 59. Also: ‘Sheikh Mohammed said he attempted to postpone swearing the
bayat
as long as possible to ensure that he remained free to plan operations however he chose,’ Substitution for the testimony of Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, United States vs. Moussaoui, July 31, 2006, the United States District Court, Eastern District of Virginia.

  
57
.
The first version of the plan envisaged all the planes crashing into their targets except for one, which would land to allow Khaled Sheikh Mohammed himself to give a press conference.

  
58
.
Author interview with David Hicks, July 2010.

  
59
.
Another senior militant later remembered: ‘I was staying at the general guesthouse when a bus arrived from the camp with at least forty-five trainees on board … When we asked why they had left the camp they told us that it had been closed down on bin Laden’s orders because the date of the martyrdom operation was approaching. Everyone based in the camp was to head to Kandahar or Kabul or dispersed into the mountains to avoid becoming an easy target for any military strike.’ Interview with Mohammed al-Tamimi, in Arabic newspaper
al-Hayat
, September 20, 2006, quoted in Camille Tawil,
Brothers in Arms
, Telegram, 2010, p. 182. The general guesthouse he referred to was in Kandahar and used by new arrivals.

  
60
.
Both men had travelled from Belgium, where they had been living, to Afghanistan earlier in the year. One had travelled, his wife later said, after seeing footage of bin Laden on the evening news. Like many of those who were enrolled in the 9/11 attack, the pair had been selected for their ‘martyrdom mission’ by al-Qaeda leaders who regularly visited the camps looking for talent among the trainees. The killing was a sweetener for the Taliban, who had already made their opposition to any direct attacks on American soil very clear, though bin Laden repeatedly told associates he did not expect the ‘cowardly’ US to send any soldiers to Afghanistan in retaliation for the coming attack. He cited the use of missiles only following the embassy bombings of 1998 as evidence.

  
61
.
A useful account of the assassination can be found in John Lee Anderson,
The Lion’s Grave
, Atlantic Books, 2002.

  
62
.
Charge sheet, USA vs. Ali al-Bahlul, FBI interrogation reports, author collection. Court testimony of Ali Soufran and Christopher Anglin, FBI agents, USA vs. Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, November 2008.

  
63
.
Wright,
The Looming Tower
, p. 358.

  
64
.
Ibid. Questions answered by email by David Fratz, al-Bahlul’s lawyer, July 2009. Evan Kohlmann,
Inside As-Sahaab: The Story of Ali al-Bahlul and the Evolution of al-Qaida’s Propaganda
, Nefa Foundation, 2008.

CHAPTER 2: 9/11, BEFORE AND AFTER

    
1
.
George Bush,
Decision Points
, Virgin, 2010, p. 134.

    
2
.
Richard Clarke,
Against All Enemies
, Simon and Schuster, 2004, p. 2. Bob Woodward,
Bush At War
, Simon and Schuster, 2003.
The
9
/
11
Commission Report
. Alistair Campbell,
The Blair Years
, Hutchinson, 2007, pp. 560–61.

    
3
.
Michael Powell, ‘In 9/11 Chaos, Giuliani forged a lasting image’,
New York Times
, September 21, 2007.

    
4
.
Bush,
Decision Points
, p. 144.

    
5
.
Campbell,
The Blair Years
, p. 561.

    
6
.
Sharon had been elected in February.

    
7
.
On October 9, 2001, in Britain’s
Mirror
newspaper, David Trimble, the Unionist leader in Northern Ireland, declared that there was no difference between ‘Irish and Arab terrorists’. In the run-up to the March presidential elections, President Robert Mugabe labelled his opponents ‘terrorists’, thus appearing to condone violent attacks by his supporters on his political opponents. ‘Amnesty Now’,
Amnesty International
magazine, summer 2002.

    
8
.
‘Reaction from around the world’,
New York Times
, September 12, 2001. ‘Attacks draw mixed response in the MidEast’, CNN, September 12, 2001. Saddam Hussein afterwards denied approving the terms used by the newsreaders in question. This seems unlikely given the nature of his regime, but possible.

    
9
.
‘Islamic world deplores US losses’, BBC News Online, September 14, 2001.

  
10
.
‘Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi condemns attacks against civilians: forbidden in Islam’, IslamOnline and News Agencies, September 13, 2001.

  
11
.
See
America’s Image in the World: Findings from the Pew Global Attitudes Project
, March 2007. A problem with gauging pre-9/11 sentiment is the lack of reliable data for the 1990s. Though anecdotally evidence of the attraction of living in the USA is clear, hard data is again difficult to find. Immigration statistics are one indication. US Department of Homeland Security and US Census figures show rising numbers of entrants to the US from Indonesia, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia in the late 1990s.

  
12
.
Such conflicted feelings were particularly evident among many Palestinians. Though Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, expressed shock at the attacks, ostentatiously giving blood for the victims, reports of cheering Palestinians in parts of the Occupied Territories and in some Palestinian refugee camps in the Lebanon were genuine, despite internet rumours to the contrary. The real question was not whether ‘celebratory gunfire’ had echoed in the West Bank city of Nablus but to what extent those who had fired were representative of more general sentiments. A single portrait of bin Laden at a rally by Hamas supporters in Gaza was wrongly taken as evidence of widespread sympathy for al-Qaeda’s leader. See ‘Bin-Laden poster seen at Gaza rally’, Associated Press, September 14, 2001; ‘AP protests threats to freelance cameraman who filmed Palestinian rally’, Associated Press, September 12, 2001; Joseph Logan, ‘Palestinians celebrate attacks with gunfire’, Reuters, September 12, 2001; ‘Palestinians in Lebanon celebrate anti-US attacks’, Agence France-Presse, September 11, 2001.