The Longest War (43 page)

Major Nidal Malik Hasan, a Palestinian-American medical officer and a rigidly observant Muslim who made no secret to his fellow officers of his opposition to America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, went on a shooting spree at the giant Army base at Fort Hood, Texas, on November 5, 2009, killing thirteen and wounding many more. This attack seems to have been an attempted suicide operation in which Hasan planned a jihadist “death-by-cop.” In the year before his killing spree, Hasan had made Web postings about suicide operations and the theological justification for the deaths of innocents, and had sent more than a dozen emails to Anwar al-Awlaki, an
American-born cleric
living in Yemen who is a well-known al-Qaeda apologist. Awlaki said he first received an email from Major Hasan on December 17, 2008, and in that initial communication he “
was asking for an edict
regarding the [possibility] of a Muslim soldier [killing] colleagues who serve with him in the American army.”

Hasan was a social misfit who never married, largely avoided women (except, apparently,
strippers
), and had few friends, while the psychiatric counseling he gave to wounded veterans when he worked at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., might have contributed to a sense of impending doom about his own deployment to Afghanistan. But while Hasan was undoubtedly something of an oddball, in what he assumed to be his final days he seems to have conceived of himself as a holy warrior intent on martyrdom.

Early on the morning of the massacre, the deadliest ever on a U.S. military base, Hasan was
filmed at a convenience store
buying his regular snack, dressed in white, flowing robes. The color white is often associated with martyrdom in Islam, as the dead are wrapped in white winding sheets. In the previous days Hasan had given away many of his possessions to his neighbors in the decrepit
apartment block they shared. Neighbor Lenna Brown recalled, “I asked him where are you going, and he said Afghanistan.” Asked how he felt about that, Hasan paused before answering: “
I am going to do God’s work
.” He gave Brown a Koran before he left for what he believed to be his last day on earth.

As he opened fire in a room full of fellow soldiers who were filling out paperwork for their deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq, Hasan
shouted at the top of his lungs
, “Allah Akbar!” God is Great! It has been the battle cry of Muslim warriors down the centuries. Hasan survived being shot by a police officer and was put in intensive care in a hospital in San Antonio, Texas. After he woke up he found himself not in Paradise but being interrogated by investigators and paralyzed from the waist down.

For Americans fired up by jihadist ideology, American soldiers fighting two wars in Muslim countries were particularly inviting targets. A few months before Hasan’s murderous spree, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, an African-American convert to Islam, had shot up a
U.S. military recruiting station
in Little Rock, Arkansas, killing a soldier and wounding another. Despite the fact that the FBI had had him under surveillance following a mysterious trip that he had recently taken to Yemen, Muhammad was still able to acquire guns and attack the recruiting station in broad daylight. When Muhammad was arrested in his vehicle, police found a rifle with a laser sight, a revolver, ammunition, and the makings of Molotov cocktails. (The middle name that Muhammad had assumed after his conversion to Islam, Mujahid, or “holy warrior,” should have been a red flag, as this is far from a common name among Muslims.)

A group of some half-dozen American citizens and residents of the small town of Willow Creek, North Carolina, led by Daniel Boyd, a charismatic convert to Islam who had fought in the jihad in Afghanistan against the Soviets, was also alleged to have had some kind of plan to attack American soldiers. Starting in 2008, Boyd purchased eight rifles and a revolver and members of his group did paramilitary training on two occasions in the summer of 2009.
According to federal prosecutors
, members of Boyd’s cell conceived of themselves as potential participants in overseas jihads from Israel to Pakistan. And Boyd obtained maps of Quantico Marine Base in Virginia, which he allegedly cased for a possible attack on June 12, 2009. He also possessed armor-piercing ammunition, saying it was “to attack Americans,” and said that one of his weapons would be used “for the base,” an apparent reference to the Quantico facility.

Similarly, in 2007 a group of observant Muslims—a mix of Albanians, a Turk, and a Palestinian—living in southern New Jersey and angered by the Iraq War
told a government informant
they had a plan to kill soldiers stationed at the Fort Dix Army base. One of the group made an amateur mistake when he went to a Circuit City store and asked for a videotape to be transferred to DVD. On the tape a number of young men were shown shooting assault weapons and shouting “Allah Akbar!” during a January 2006 training session. An alarmed clerk at the store alerted his superiors; quickly the FBI became involved in the case and an informant was inserted inside the group.

One of the plotters, Serdar Tatar, knew the Fort Dix base well because he made deliveries there from his family’s pizza parlor. The Fort Dix plotters assembled a small armory of rifles and pistols and regularly conducted firearms training in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. They also went on paint-ball trips together, a not uncommon form of bonding for jihadist militants living in the West. The plotters also looked into purchasing
an array of automatic weapons
. And on August 11, 2006, the ringleader, Mohamad Shnewer, surveilled the base and told the government informant, “This is
exactly what we are looking for
. You hit four, five, six Humvees and light the whole place [up] and retreat completely without any losses.”

Another group that planned to attack U.S. military installations was led by Kevin Lamar James, an African-American convert to Islam who formed a group dedicated to holy war while he was jailed in California’s Folsom Prison during the late 1990s. James, who viewed his outfit as “
Al-Qaeda in California
,” cooked up a plan to recruit five people, in particular those without criminal records, to help him with his plans. One of his recruits had a job at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), which James thought could be useful. In notations he made of potential targets, James listed LAX, the Israeli consulate in Los Angeles, a U.S. Army base in Manhattan Beach, California, and “Army recruiting centers throughout the country.”

James’s crew planned
to attack a U.S. military recruiting station in L.A. on the fourth anniversary of 9/11, as well as a synagogue a month later during Yom Kippur, the most solemn of Jewish holidays. Members of the group financed their activities by sticking up gas stations; their plans only came to light during the course of a routine investigation of a gas station robbery when police in Torrance, California, found documents that laid out the group’s plans for jihadist mayhem.

Between 9/11 and the summer of 2010 the government had charged or convicted
at least twenty
Americans and U.S. residents who had direct connections to al-Qaeda and were conspiring with the group to carry out some type of attack; another nine had attended one of al-Qaeda’s training camps but did not have an operational terrorist plan; and two dozen other militants aspired to help al-Qaeda in some other way but had failed to connect with the group because of their own incompetence or because they had been ensnared by
a government informant
.

Typical of the latter group was the posse of mostly Haitian-Americans who imagined they had sworn allegiance to al-Qaeda in 2006 in Liberty City, Miami, one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. After their arrests Attorney General Alberto Gonzales commented, “
Homegrown terrorists
may prove to be as dangerous as groups like al-Qaeda.” As far as the Liberty City group was concerned this was nonsense; the group of men, who were arrested for plotting to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago,
smoked a great deal of
marijuana and subscribed to the obscure beliefs of an outfit called the Moorish Science Temple; so nascent were their terrorist plans that they never even bothered to travel to Chicago. A government informant from Yemen who portrayed himself as an emissary from al-Qaeda had provided them with military-style boots, money, and weapons. It took putting the Liberty City crew on trial three times to get a jury to convict them.

The domestic terrorism cases during the latter years of Bush’s second term and Obama’s first years in office were a mix of purely “homegrown” militants of limited or no competence, like the Liberty City crew; jihadist lone wolves like Major Hasan and Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, who nonetheless both were able to pull off deadly attacks against U.S. military targets; “self-starting” radicals with no connections to al-Qaeda but inspired by its ideas, like the Torrance, California, cell who posed a serious threat to Jewish and military targets and whose plans for mass mayhem were, crucially, not driven forward by an informant; homegrown militants opting to fight in an overseas jihad with an al-Qaeda affiliate, such as the Somali-American recruits to Al Shabab; militants like David Headley, who played an important operational role for the Pakistani terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba, which is acting today with an increasingly al-Qaeda–like agenda; and finally those American citizens like Najibullah Zazi, who had managed to plug directly into al-Qaeda Central in Pakistan’s tribal regions.

Some of the men drawn to jihad in America in the decade since 9/11
looked like their largely disadvantaged and poorly integrated European Muslim counterparts. The Afghan-American al-Qaeda recruit, Najibullah Zazi, a high school dropout, earned his living as an airport shuttle bus driver; the Somali-American community in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis where some of the young men who volunteered to fight in Somalia had grown up is
largely ghettoized
. Family incomes there average less than fifteen thousand dollars a year and the unemployment rate is 17 percent. Bryant Neal Vinas, the kid from Long Island who volunteered for a suicide mission with al-Qaeda, skipped college, washed out of the U.S. Army, and later became a
truck driver
, a job he quit for good in 2007. Three of the five men in the Fort Dix cell were
illegal immigrants
who supported themselves with construction or delivery jobs.

Decades ago the anger and disappointments or thirst for adventure of some of these men might have been funneled into revolutionary anti-American movements like the Weather Underground or Black Panthers. Today, militant jihadism provides a similar outlet for the rage of disaffected young men, with its false promises of a total explication of the world, which is grafted onto a profound hatred for the West, in particular the United States.

This raises the question of what kind of exact threat to the homeland was posed by this cohort of militants, who ran the gamut from incompetent “homegrowns” to American citizens trained by al-Qaeda. If Zazi had managed to detonate his bombs on Manhattan’s subway lines he could have killed scores of Americans, as his plan looks similar to that of the al-Qaeda–directed bombers in London who killed fifty-two commuters in 2005 with the same kind of hydrogen-peroxide-based bombs that Zazi was assembling in his Denver motel room. But the Zazi case also represented the outer limit of al-Qaeda’s capabilities inside the United States in the decade after 9/11, indicating that al-Qaeda no longer posed a national security threat to the American homeland of the type that could launch a mass-casualty attack sufficiently large to reorient completely the country’s foreign policy as the 9/11 attacks had done, and instead represented a second-order threat similar to that posed by American domestic terrorists such as Timothy McVeigh, who killed 168 when he bombed the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995.

Some claimed the reason that al-Qaeda had not successfully attacked the United States again after 9/11 was that the group was waiting to match or top the attacks on Washington and New York. In 2006, Michael Scheuer, the former head of CIA’s bin Laden unit, asserted that “
they are not interested
in an
attack that is the same size as the last one.” This proposition could not be readily tested, as the absence of a 9/11-scale attack on the United States was, in this view, supposedly just more evidence for the assertion that al-Qaeda was waiting to hit the States with a massive attack. Of course, al-Qaeda wanted to mount an attack on the States on the scale of 9/11 or larger but intent is not the same thing as capability. And the Zazi case forcefully demonstrated that al-Qaeda was not waiting to launch “the big one,” but was in fact content to get any kind of terrorist operation going in the United States, even a relatively small-bore attack.

A frequent question after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon was why didn’t al-Qaeda mount an attack on a mall in some midwestern town, thus showing the American public its ability to attack in Anywheres-ville, USA? For the Muslims around the globe whom al-Qaeda is trying to influence, an attack on an obscure, unknown town in the Midwest would have little impact, which explains al-Qaeda’s continuing fixation on attacks on cities and targets well-known in the Islamic world. That explains Zazi’s travel to Manhattan from Colorado and al-Qaeda’s many attempts to bring down American passenger jets in the past decade. That is not, of course, to say that someone influenced by bin Laden’s ideas—but not part of al-Qaeda or one of its affiliates—might not attempt an attack in the future in some obscure American town, but the terrorist organization itself remains fixated on symbolic targets.

After 9/11, al-Qaeda did continue to pose a substantial threat to U.S. interests overseas and it demonstrated that it could still organize an attack that would kill hundreds of Americans, as was the plan during the “planes plot” of 2006 and the attempt to bring down Northwest Flight 253 three years later as it flew between Amsterdam and Detroit on Christmas Day, 2009.

No Western country was more threatened by al-Qaeda than the United Kingdom. Despite the relatively serious terror cases emerging in the United States as the Bush administration transitioned to that of Obama, America did not have a jihadist terrorism problem anywhere on the scale of Britain, where in 2009 British intelligence identified
as many as two thousand
citizens or residents who posed a “serious” threat to security, many of them linked to al-Qaeda, in a country with only a fifth of the population of the United States.