The Longest War (24 page)

It was their bad luck that in the spring of 2002 a handwritten, anonymous letter arrived at the FBI office in Buffalo, New York, charging that terrorists had come to Lackawanna “
for recruiting the Yemenite youth
.” When Sahim Alwan was asked by an FBI agent what he had done on his trip to Pakistan a year earlier, he lied and said he had gone only for religious instruction.

The FBI’s investigation went into high gear during the summer of 2002 as the first anniversary of al-Qaeda’s assaults on Washington and New York
fast approached. One of the Lackawanna group, Mukhtar al-Bakri, was then traveling in the Middle East. On July 18 Bakri sent a mystifying email message home to a buddy in Lackawanna, subject “
Big Meal
,” which was intercepted by the feds. The email said, “The next meal will be very huge. No one will be able to stand it.” Bakri’s friend wrote back, “Are you talking about a hamburger meal, or what?” The cryptic message about the “huge” meal was compounded by chatter picked up from Bakri that his “wedding” was fast approaching. As the word
wedding
was believed to be code for an impending al-Qaeda attack, this raised the Lackawanna investigation to a matter that President Bush was now being regularly briefed on.

The decision was made to arrest Bakri, who was now in Bahrain. But the wedding was not a code; on the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks Bakri was arrested in his marital chamber, pulled from the
tender caresses
of his just-married teen bride. He soon admitted attending the Afghan training camp and his five friends were swiftly detained in the United States.

The Justice Department held a press conference to announce the disruption of an “al-Qaeda terrorist cell” and President Bush told journalists, “One by one, we’re hunting the killers down.” And in his January 2003 State of the Union address, Bush claimed that an al-Qaeda cell had been
recently broken up in Buffalo
, referring to the Lackawanna case. This was a reach. None of the Lackawanna Six was ever accused of planning an act of terrorism nor had they ever joined al-Qaeda. A New York Police Department report concluded, “There was never any evidence of any operational targeting or planning in the United States.” But the Lackawanna Six had certainly exercised very poor judgment to travel to an al-Qaeda training camp after the organization had already bombed the American embassies in Africa and the USS
Cole
.

In the charged atmosphere of the first years after 9/11, it was obvious to the lawyers for the Lackawanna Six that the “material support” they had offered to al-Qaeda in the form of their own “services” was a charge that would stick, and there was always a possibility that the government could play the “enemy combatant” card against them, which would mean their clients could be held indefinitely without charge. Eventually all six took plea bargains and received prison terms of
between seven and ten years
.

The ringleader of the group, Kamal Derwish, had fled to Yemen, although his escape would prove short-lived. On November 3, 2002,
Derwish was incinerated
in a CIA drone strike on the car he was riding in across the Yemeni
desert, along with one of the USS
Cole
conspirators. He was the first American citizen to be killed in a U.S. drone strike.

Many jihadist terrorism cases during the first Bush term had no real connection to al-Qaeda at all but simply involved Americans inspired by bin Laden’s ideas. Some involved feckless wannabes, such as the
Portland Six
, a group of mostly African-American converts to Islam from Oregon who tried to join the Taliban or al-Qaeda immediately after 9/11. They were not subtle. Only two weeks after the attacks on New York and Washington, members of the group—several sporting Taliban-style turbans and long robes—were spotted shooting off automatic weapons at a gravel pit in the Portland area. It’s hard to imagine a performance more likely to garner the attention of the feds. The group then traveled to China in 2002 in a vain bid to cross from there into Afghanistan, but were detained by Chinese officials and arrested after their return to the States. None of them had gotten within a thousand miles of Afghanistan.

During the summer of 2004, as Bush campaigned for a second term, the outlines of what seemed to be another wave of serious al-Qaeda attacks on the East Coast appeared, this one linked to an al-Qaeda operative, Dhiren Barot. Barot, a British convert from Hinduism to Islam, was, like many converts, more zealous than most of his coreligionists and had volunteered at age twenty to fight against the Indian army in Kashmir and later worked in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan in the late 1990s
as an instructor
at a military training camp.

U.S. investigators believe that
bin Laden tasked Barot
to conduct surveillance of financial and Jewish targets in New York and Washington. Barot then applied to a college in New York, which gave him some plausible cover for casing financial targets on the East Coast between August of 2000 and April of 2001. Those
targets included
the New York Stock Exchange, the Citigroup building, and the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Washington. Barot’s casing notes were quite detailed, running to eighteen dense pages about the structure of the buildings; the locations of toilets where bombs might be assembled; and the likely sources of shrapnel that could amplify the effects of a bomb blast. Barot then sent his casing documents on to al-Qaeda Central in Pakistan.

Those casing notes were
discovered in an al-Qaeda safe house
in Pakistan during the summer of 2004. The discovery of the documents caused something close to panic in Washington. Frances Fragos Townsend, Bush’s
top counterterrorism adviser, recalls being briefed by the acting CIA director, John McLaughlin, someone not given to hyperbole: “
I’ll never forget
McLaughlin saying to me, he had looked at these casing reports, and said to me, they were as good if not better than anything he had ever seen done, including from the most senior CIA case officers. We realized that they had clearly been in these buildings, and they clearly had the intention to do it, and the buildings were vulnerable, and so there was a scramble then, before any of this became public, to talk to the folks in the financial sector, particularly the folks in the buildings that had been cased. We had enough to know to be very concerned about it, and not enough to know if the plot was still active.”

But a careful reading of the casing notes showed that they were “
little more than a graduate school report
on some famous buildings,” in the words of Michael Sheehan, who was then in charge of counterterrorism for the New York Police Department (NYPD). And, most importantly, the reconnaissance of the financial landmarks had all taken place
before
9/11. Sheehan remembers that he and David Cohen, the head of intelligence at NYPD and a three-decade veteran of the CIA, examined the casing documents carefully. “We’re like, ‘Holy shit, this is
the real deal
.’ Then we went back and reread it, and the more I looked at it, the more I looked at Cohen and said, ‘Wait a second. This
sounds
really ominous. But this could be done by any jackass having a cup of coffee at a Starbucks across from the Citigroup building, and on the Internet’…. Within an hour after reading it, I knew this was one guy, educated, who did a pre-9/11 reconnaissance of these buildings, and the information was five years old.”

That did not stop Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge
from going public
with specific warnings about the four landmark buildings in Washington, New York, and New Jersey. Sheehan was “
flabbergasted
,” as not only were the warnings completely unnecessary but Barot wasn’t yet in custody and surely would flee the United Kingdom where he was then living. But Barot did not flee and was arrested by British police two days later.

Barot’s arrest resulted in the Department of Homeland Security elevating the threat level to the orange “high” risk category for the financial services sectors in New York City, northern New Jersey, and Washington, D.C., on August 1, 2004, despite the fact that there was absolutely no indication that the plot was anything other than historical. The raising of the unnecessary alert to orange in the final months of the tight presidential campaign between Bush and John Kerry obviously did not hurt the “strong on terrorism” president.

Bush’s homeland security adviser Fran Townsend says that she “knew to be concerned that our motives would be questioned, and I worked incredibly hard to get hold of the Kerry campaign and brief them before it went public. I insisted that we reach out to them, that they
not get blindsided
, because I knew Kerry was going to be out in public and was going to get asked about it. I did not want him to say, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’”

The alert was lowered only
on November 10, a week after the election campaign was over.

How are nations ruled
and led into war? Politicians lie to journalists and then believe those lies when they see them in print.

—Austrian journalist Karl Kraus,
explaining the causes of World War I

You are entitled
to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.

—Senator Patrick Moynihan

I
n the spring of 1997, I traveled to eastern Afghanistan for CNN to produce Osama bin Laden’s first television interview, during the course of which the Saudi militant told a Western audience for the first time that he was launching a holy war against the United States. After the formal interview was over, the correspondent Peter Arnett asked bin Laden what he thought about Saddam Hussein, a subject that wasn’t then freighted with any of the significance it would later come to have. Bin Laden replied that Saddam was not sufficiently Islamic and had invaded Kuwait in 1990 for his own aggrandizement, statements with which few could disagree.

What bin Laden told us in 1997 represented his unvarnished opinion of
Saddam, a view from which he did not later waver. And there is no subsequent evidence that al-Qaeda and Saddam had anything but the most distant and frigid of relationships. However, following the 9/11 attacks the American public became convinced that Saddam and al-Qaeda were in league.
By September 2003
, six months into the war with Iraq, nearly 70 percent of Americans believed that Saddam was implicated in the attacks on New York and Washington, despite the fact that there was not a shred of evidence that this was the case.
Even five years later
, more than a quarter of Americans continued to believe that Saddam had had a
personal
role in 9/11, showing how effective Bush administration efforts to link the Iraqi dictator to the attacks had continued to be.

Why were Americans persuaded that there was an alliance between Saddam and bin Laden? Just as faulty intelligence and exaggerated claims by Bush officials made the case for a dangerous and threatening Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program, a case that went largely unchallenged by a pliant media, the same set of factors also allowed the Bush administration to create a useful myth: that there was a substantial connection between al-Qaeda and Iraq. The widespread belief that there was an al-Qaeda–Iraq alliance was a necessary precondition to create the public consensus to go to war in Iraq because Saddam’s supposed WMD programs were, of themselves, not enough to threaten American security. Even if the most exaggerated claims about Saddam’s WMD capabilities were in fact true, those weapons posed no threat to the United States because Saddam did not possess the ballistic missile systems to deliver them to American targets. For Saddam to present a threat to the United States you had to make the case that Saddam was in league with terrorists including bin Laden and that he might give WMD to a group like al-Qaeda, which would then deploy them against the United States.

Myriad variations of that argument were presented by Bush officials as a pressing reason to go to war against Iraq. A year after 9/11, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said that there was “
bulletproof
” evidence of an Iraq–al-Qaeda connection. In his January 2003 State of the Union address, President Bush said, “Saddam Hussein aids and
protects terrorists
, including members of al-Qaeda.”

Despite the many statements of Bush officials positing an al-Qaeda–Iraq axis, and a raft of stories in the media that seemed to confirm such an alliance, an examination of the historical record demonstrates that while al-Qaeda members and Iraqi officials had some limited contacts during the mid-1990s,
there were never any
outcomes
from those discussions. There is also no evidence that Saddam and al-Qaeda ever cooperated in any specific act of terrorism, nor that Iraq funded al-Qaeda. The evidence that Saddam passed WMD material or know-how to bin Laden’s men is also nonexistent.

Of course, the fact that Saddam, a secular dictator, and bin Laden, an Islamist zealot, were ideologically opposed does not mean they might not have cooperated with each other. The question is, did bin Laden’s ideological antipathy for Saddam ever diminish to the point that al-Qaeda entered into anything resembling a marriage of convenience with the Iraqi dictator? Among the reasons that suggest such an accommodation was implausible was the fact that bin Laden had been an antagonist of Saddam for many years. “
A year before
Hussein entered Kuwait,” bin Laden recalled in the 1997 CNN interview, “I said many times in my speeches at the mosques, warning that Saddam will enter the Gulf. No one believed me. I distributed many tapes in Saudi Arabia.” Khaled Batarfi remembers his childhood friend delivering those same warnings about Saddam to a salon of intellectuals in Mecca six months before his armies invaded Kuwait on August 1, 1990. Bin Laden told the group, “We should train our people, our young, and increase our army and prepare for the day when eventually we are attacked. This guy [Saddam]
can never be trusted
.”