Jihad Joe (22 page)

Then there were the pilots. Essam Al Ridi, Osama bin Laden's personal pilot, traveled to Arizona during the 1990s. Suspected Islamic extremists from all over the world—Saudi Arabia, Kenya, Jordan, and Pakistan—were spotted by the FBI at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona, a few hours away. One of them flat-out told FBI agents that the United States was a “legitimate military target” for Muslims and that al Qaeda's murderous attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were justified.

In July 2001 the FBI's Phoenix field office proposed a full-scale investigation to headquarters, citing its belief that the would-be pilots were linked to Osama bin Laden, but its plea fell on deaf ears, and the investigation foundered.
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Hani Hanjour had first visited Tucson some ten years prior. A devout Muslim and an experienced jihadist who fought in Afghanistan, he came as a student to learn English, left, then returned to the United States in 1996 to train as a pilot. First, he qualified for a private pilot's license. Later, he succeeded in being certified as a commercial pilot.
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Hanjour spent about five years in the United States, much of it of Arizona, often in the company of al Qaeda–linked extremists who had been noticed by the FBI.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Hanjour was seated in the cockpit of a commercial jet, American Airlines Flight 77, just as he had trained for in the heat of an American desert. Under his steady hand, the plane screamed down out of the sky and slammed into the side of the Pentagon, disintegrating in a fiery explosion and killing 189 people, including himself.
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On the morning of September 11, Anwar Awlaki was also sitting in an airplane bound for Washington.

The Yemeni-American imam was returning home from a conference in San Diego, the city where he had first befriended two of the men who were even now helping Hanjour complete his suicide mission. A third hijacker on Flight 77 had also met Awlaki, later, at the Dar Al Hijrah Mosque near Washington, where the imam now worked.

Awlaki was landing at Reagan National Airport around the time that the hijackers were boarding their flight at the nearby Washington Dulles International Airport. The timing was extraordinarily tight. Awlaki heard news of the hijackings during his cab ride home.

Awlaki rushed to the mosque. After a consultation, the facility's leaders decided to close the facility for the rest of the day, citing security concerns, and issued a press release condemning the attacks. That night, they called the police after someone drove up to the mosque and started shouting at the people huddled inside.

The African American mujahid from Brooklyn was a long way from his glory days in Afghanistan. For the last eight years, Abdullah Rashid had been living
in a series of prisons. Since 1999 his home had been the federal penitentiary at Terre Haute, Indiana.
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Not long after the planes hit, Rashid was taken out of his cell and moved to death row.

“They said it was the safest point in the prison,” his wife, Alia, recalled. “I said, ‘That's bull.'”

Alia believed that they wanted to “get him outta their face. [ … ] He was gettin' on their nerves real bad, and they fixed him.”
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Rashid remained on death row for more than a year. After that, it was on to another prison.

On a morning when the rest of America was waking up to the reality of war, John Walker Lindh was already there—in a foxhole in Afghanistan, fighting on behalf of the Taliban.

It had been a long, unlikely path that brought him to this point. He had spent his adolescence in Marin County, the heart of American liberalism. Lindh had been named after John Lennon. He was called quiet and sweet, a sickly child, homeschooled for a time, then educated at a progressive California school.
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Lindh had converted to Islam as a teenager, drawn to the religion after watching Spike Lee's film about Malcolm X. One year later he traveled to Yemen to study the Arabic language. He landed at the Al Iman University in Sanaa, headed by Abdel Majid Al Zindani, a close ally of al Qaeda and mentor to Anwar Awlaki.
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From Yemen, he went to Pakistan, where he enrolled in a madrassa with the intention of memorizing the Koran. There he was exposed to the Taliban, and in the spring of 2001, he traveled to Afghanistan to fight on their behalf against the Northern Alliance, an anti-Taliban militia and an enemy of al Qaeda.
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In June 2001 he trained for combat at al Qaeda's Al Farooq camp, where he heard rumors about suicide attacks in the works against the United States. He even met Osama bin Laden, who thanked him for taking part in jihad.
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Lindh was fighting with a foreign fighter unit on behalf of the Taliban on September 11. News of the attack traveled quickly, even in this remote, rugged terrain. Word came down that al Qaeda personnel were being deployed to face the inevitable U.S. response. Lindh stayed with his unit.

In November Lindh's unit was captured by the Northern Alliance, which was now fighting the Taliban and allied with the United States. The detainees staged an escape, during which a CIA agent was killed.

Lindh was quickly recaptured. He was hiding in a tunnel with other Taliban when it was flooded by U.S. forces. He emerged, muddy and tattered. Photos of his capture would be splashed over every newspaper and television broadcast in the world under the words “American Taliban.”
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From Pakistan, near the border, Adnan Shukrijumah called his mother in Florida.

“Did you hear what happened?” he asked her. “They're putting it on the Muslims.”

She told him not to come home. They were arresting all of the Muslims, she said.

“‘No, I didn't do nothing,” he replied. “I will come, don't worry about this.”

But he never came.
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He had fought and trained as a jihadist in Bosnia and Kashmir, and now Ismail Royer was the civil rights coordinator for the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Royer had arrived at his office just before 9 a.m. when he heard coworkers calling from the conference room. They were huddled around the TV, staring at the gaping hole in the first tower of the World Trade Center.

“I hope Muslims didn't do this,” he said.

Within hours of the hijackings, Royer had written and issued a press release condemning the attack and urging Muslims to report harassment. The phones were now ringing off the hooks, and it was his job to answer them. Many of the calls were reporting hate crimes and harassment.
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Yet after he left the office—near midnight—Ismail Royer's mind was elsewhere. A message had been passed through his circle of friends, half a dozen men he had spent hours training with outside the office. Everyone in the group who owned a gun was to assemble for a meeting.
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That meeting took place four days after September 11, at the behest of an American-born cleric, Ali Al Timimi. Timimi told Royer and the other gathered
jihadists that the Muslims of Afghanistan now needed their help, far more than the Kashmiri Muslims on whose plight the group had previously focused. The Muslims of Afghanistan had a new enemy, and that enemy was the United States.

Armageddon was at hand, Timimi told his rapt audience. September 11 was a sign of the impending apocalypse, and everyone in the room had a part to play.
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Al Qaeda's most accomplished spy, the American citizen Ali Mohamed, had been living in the witness protection wing of a federal prison for the past few months. Mohamed had cut a plea deal and agreed to provide information about al Qaeda in the hope of winning a reduced sentence.

That hope went out the window on the morning of September 11, when he was abruptly hustled out of his cell and moved to solitary confinement. No contact with other prisoners and especially no news of the world—no television, radio, or newspapers.

A few days later, the questions began. “How did they do it?”

Calmly, Mohamed laid it all out. This is where you sit to hijack a plane; this is how you get a blade through security. He had taught these tricks to his fellows at al Qaeda. Mohamed had obtained a copy of the FAA's security procedures manual and given it to al Qaeda. One of his trainees, Ihab Ali, had attended the Airman Flight School in Norman, Oklahoma, which Mohammad Atta had contacted to ask about flight training.
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Ali Mohamed may not have known that the September 11 attack specifically was in the works, but he knew an awful lot about how it
could
be done.

Mohamed must have known that day that he would not be receiving a reduced sentence. In fact, he would never be sentenced at all. While other prisoners would become hot topics among civil libertarians, Mohamed just faded away without a fuss. After September 11, his plea deal was little more than a joke. Ali Mohamed was too dangerous to ever walk the streets again.

In the days after September 11, Anwar Awlaki spoke to the press over and over again, one of many Muslim leaders stepping forward to give the community's response to the attacks.

Although his statements were mostly conciliatory, there was an unmistakable edge. Awlaki was eager to blame the United States for inciting the terrorist attack through its “anti-Muslim” foreign policy.

“Our hearts bleed for the attacks that targeted the World Trade Center as well as other institutions in the United States, despite our strong opposition to the American biased policy toward Israel,” Awlaki said during the first Friday
khutba
following the attacks.
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A week later he continued to drum the message home, using language that seemed to justify the attack. “We were told this was an attack on American civilization. We were told this was an attack on American freedom, on the American way of life. This wasn't an attack on any of this. This was an attack on U.S. foreign policy.”
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Awlaki then turned the focus toward the alleged victimization of Muslims in the United States due to bigotries stirred by the 9/11 attack.

“Most of the questions are, ‘How should we react?' Our answers are, especially for our sisters who are more visible because of [wearing a head scarf]: Stay home until things calm down.”
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Yet Awlaki was unable to produce any victims of hate crimes, such as the woman he claimed was beaten with a baseball bat.
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Behind the scenes, Awlaki was having other conversations—with the FBI, which had quickly identified him as a point of contact for the hijackers.
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Awlaki's story shifted, depending on the day and the person to whom he was speaking. The FBI called him in for at least four interviews in the weeks following September 11.
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On September 17 Awlaki admitted to the FBI that he had known Nawaf Al Hazmi in San Diego—well enough to describe his appearance and personality in some detail.
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Scant days later, he told an Associated Press reporter tracking the investigation that he didn't know any of the hijackers. Instead he sought to turn scrutiny back on the FBI. “Our people won't listen to us when they see this is how the FBI is treating them,” he said. “It strengthens our belief that we are a community under siege, whose civil rights are being violated.”
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The imam was under pressure because of his relationship to the hijackers, and his worldview turned ever darker. Under the watchful eyes of FBI surveillance, he turned back to an old vice, visiting prostitutes in the D.C. area, at least one of whom was underage.
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His sermons also darkened, taking an increasingly combative tone. Awlaki had always been an advocate of the view that Muslims were victims of discrimination and violent persecution around the world, parroting the Saudi-influenced scholars who had come before him. Now, by his account, that persecution had come squarely to America.

Rather than focus on the perpetrators of 9/11—whom he had, wittingly or unwittingly, assisted in their suicide mission—Awlaki pointed, with increasing stridency, at the U.S. government. As the days stretched into weeks, Awlaki's condemnations of terrorism became ever more equivocal and convoluted. In an October
khutba
, Awlaki delivered a speech that blamed terrorists for their violent acts while blaming the United States exponentially.

The fact that the US has administered the homicide of one million Iraqi civilians, and supported the murder of thousands of Palestinians does not justify the killing of one civilian in NY or Washington DC. And the killing of six thousand American civilians does not justify the killing of one innocent Afghani. Two wrongs don't make a right.
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Awlaki's peers didn't see anything particularly radical about the imam from San Diego. “We could have all been duped,'' said Johari Abdul-Malik after Awlaki
had come out of the jihadist closet in 2009, echoing the view of others in the community. “But I think something happened to him, and he changed his views.''
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Shaker El Sayed, another imam who served at Dar Al Hijrah, echoed this view, dismissing the idea that Awlaki's contact with the September 11 hijackers should have been scrutinized.

Well, he was an imam when he left and he was an imam at the Islamic center in San Diego. And being an imam myself, I get in touch with lots of people, but does this necessarily mean that I agree with what they are doing behind my back? Of course not.

So the government, in the case of Muslims, they did not look for the serious scrutiny; they spread a broad dragnet of suspicion around Muslims, in general, and the Islamic centers in particular.
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