11 October 2000

Posted on October 11, 2020October 11, 2020 by William Arkin

Bush and Gore engage in their second debate, at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, and covering foreign policy, focused very much on Iraq.

Bush calls for a less interventionist foreign policy, saying, “If we’re an arrogant nation, they’ll resent us.” Gore responds, “I think we also have to have a sense of mission in the world.”

Bush says that America’s leaders “…must be… humble in how we treat nations that are figuring out how to chart their own course.” He says that U.S. should “reach out to moderate Arab nations, like Jordan and Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.”

He says that “the coalition against Saddam has fallen apart or it’s unraveling” and that “sanctions are being violated.”

“We don’t know whether he’s developing weapons of mass destruction,” Bush says, adding, “He better not be or there’s going to be a consequence should I be the president.”

Citing the absence of inspectors, a fractured coalition, and Iraqi meddling in the Middle East, he says that “it’s going to be important to rebuild that coalition to keep the pressure on him,” never actually voicing regime change as a prerequisite for an Iraq policy. But he aligns himself with the Clinton administration, saying that what he is basically proposing is no different than what is current policy.

10 October 1990

Posted on October 10, 2020October 11, 2020 by William Arkin

Nayirah testifies before Congress in 1990

The era of modern media manipulation begins with the appearance of 15-year-old Nayirah al-Ṣabaḥ, a Kuwaiti refugee who told the Congressional Human Rights Caucus a harrowing story about Iraqi atrocities in occupied Kuwait. Nayirah speaks of witnessing Iraqi soldiers taking babies out of incubators in a Kuwaiti hospital, stealing the incubators and leaving the babies to die. Amnesty International corroborates the story. It is a front page sensation, with others repeating similar tales.

It turn out that her testimony, representing Citizens for a Free Kuwait, was paid for by the Kuwait government in exile through a contract with Hill & Knowlton, to create an information campaign that would solidify any flagging support for a U.N. resolution authorizing the use of force to eject Iraq from Kuwait. Rick MacArthur revealed in 1992 that Nayirah was really the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S. and that while there were abundant examples of Iraqi war crimes in Kuwait, the incident likely never happened.

9 October 1999

Posted on October 9, 2020October 11, 2020 by William Arkin

A wedding is held, at the Quds mosque in Hamburg, Germany and it’s attended by Mohammed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, and Ziad Jarrah: the three pilots who would go on to lead the 9/11 attacks.

A videotape of the October 9, 1999 wedding of Said Bahaji, a German-born Muslim of Moroccan descent, is recovered by German authorities after 9/11. It also depicts Ramzi Binalshibh—now at Guantanamo—giving a speech denouncing Jews as a problem for all Muslims. Binalshibh reads a Palestinian war poem, and al-Shehhi participates in singing a jihadi song. German investigators believe that other men attending were part of the “Hamburg four’s” network of support. Among them was Mohammed Heidar Zammar, another German of Moroccan descent who is believed to have recruited for al Qaeda.

James Bamford writes in Pretext for War (p. 172): “By October 1999 at the latest, the members of the group under Atta’s leadership had decided to participate in jihad through a terrorist attack on America and kill as many people as possible.”

8 October 1999

Posted on October 8, 2020October 10, 2020 by William Arkin

The State Department first designates al Qaeda (al-Qa’ida) a foreign terrorist organization (FTO), the first new such designation of an organization since the list was created two years earlier. It says: “Al-Qaida, led by Usama bin Ladin [sic], was added because it is responsible for several major terrorist attacks, including the August 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania.”

The FTO designation was created after the Oklahoma City domestic bombing (in the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996) to combat the possibility, as stated by the Congress, that “foreign terrorist organizations, acting through affiliated groups or individuals, raise significant funds within the United States, or use the United States as a conduit for the receipt of funds raised in other nations.”

The initial FTO list was issued in 1997 included 30 organizations, but not al Qaeda. Why it was not included in the original 30 organizations has to do with a formal processes and arcane criteria and definitions that result in a mix of organizations (including, for instance, the IRA) being listed as FTOs.

7 October 2000

Posted on October 7, 2020October 10, 2020 by William Arkin

Ziad Jarrah, the hijacker pilot of United Airlines Flight 93, takes the first of five foreign trips while he is in the United States in preparation for the 9/11 attacks.

He flies from Atlanta to Frankfurt, Germany and then travels on to Bochum, Germany, where he sees his common-law wife Aysel Senguen. The two then travel to Paris for a vacation.

Jarrah, the only Lebanese of the 9/11 hijackers, is also the most cosmopolitan of the 19 men, maintaining a close relationship with a woman, going on vacations, traveling the world. While in the United States, Jarrah makes hundreds of phone calls to Senguen and communicates frequently by email. (911 Commission, p. 224)

During this trip, the Navy destroyer USS Cole is attacked (on October 12) and Mohammed Atta, the leader of the terrorists, was concerned that Jarrah would be stranded overseas when U.S. immigration tightened with the al Qaeda attack.

But when Jarrah returns to the U.S. on October 29, he has no trouble passing through immigration and customs in Tampa, being admitted on a six-month tourist visa, even though he was still in flight school.

6 October 1981

Posted on October 6, 2020October 10, 2020 by William Arkin

Egyptian president Anwar Sadat is assassinated while viewing a military parade celebrating the eighth anniversary of the 1973 Yom Kippur war, when Egypt crossed the Suez Canal into the Sinai Peninsula.

As the two-hour parade is culminating with a flyover, a truck stops in front of the reviewing stand. Five soldiers shoot into the crowd of dignitaries and throw grenades, killing Sadat. The soldiers are often associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamic group that is a legitimate political force in Egypt. In reality, they are followers of what would become Egyptian Islamic Jihad and Gama’a al-Islamiya (the Islamic Group), the modern-day feeders of al Qaeda.

Some 300 Islamic radicals are arrested after the Sadat assassination, including Ayman al-Zawahiri, an English-speaking doctor, who would go on to become Osama bin Laden’s second and successor.

5 October 2000

Posted on October 5, 2020October 5, 2020 by William Arkin

Candidates Dick Cheney and Joseph Lieberman discuss Iraq during a vice presidential debate.

There isn’t really much debate. Both the former secretary of defense and the Connecticut senator support more aggressive action to achieve regime change in Iraq—and both are generally critical of Clinton administration policy.

Cheney defends his record in stopping the 1991 Gulf War short of overthrowing the Iraqi leader and marching on Baghdad by saying that Saddam’s military was “decimated” and that Iraq was “back in the box” after being ejected from Kuwait.

Cheney blames the Clinton administration for allowing sanctions to fray. If it were discovered that Iraq is rebuilding weapons of mass destruction, Cheney says the U.S. might have to consider military action. On a question regarding “taking out” Saddam Hussein, Cheney says: “We might have no other choice.”

But for all of the later criticism of the Bush administration’s supposed conspiracy to depose Saddam and go to war in Iraq, the debate proved a hawk-fest, Lieberman just as hostile towards any kind of normalization of relations, almost competing with Cheney as to who would guarantee military action.

4 October 2000

Posted on October 4, 2020October 3, 2020 by William Arkin

Vice President Al Gore and Gov. George W. Bush engage in their first presidential debate, a 90-minute match at the Clark Athletic Center of the University of Massachusetts.

George Bush, considered a lightweight, probably won by not losing, many would later write. But Vice President Gore, while more knowledgeable about the issues, came off as smug and condescending. The New York Times would later write that this seminal debate lost Vice President Gore the presidency, with a rich oral history of those involved speaking in 2016 of the lessons to be learned before the first Clinton-Trump debate.

“We felt the first debate would be his moment—that people would see two candidates on stage, but only one president,” said Tad Devine, Gore senior advisor. But as the debate got underway, Gore showed his contempt and impatience for Bush. “Gore was … sighing and reacting to Bush, and there were lots of reaction shots. It was somewhat inexplicable —as if the things that Gore had been told not to do became his to-do list,” said Robert Shrum, one of Gore’s senior advisors. “I didn’t think Gore’s sighs were a really big deal until I got to the spin room,” Shrum said. The Gore campaign soon found out that many thought Gore had blown it.

3 October 1993

Posted on October 3, 2020October 7, 2020 by William Arkin

In two days of fighting in urban Mogadishu, Somalia, 18 U.S. Army special operations personnel (Rangers and Delta Force operators) die and over 70 are wounded in a failed raid to capture warlord Mohammed Farrah Aidid. Some 500 Somalis also die in two days of fighting, and three Black Hawk helicopters are lost.

Many would later say that the Pentagon, under Secretary of Defense Les Aspin, was responsible for the incident, denying earlier military requests for additional equipment and then failing to provide backup as the disaster unfolded. Though the Clinton administration inherited the failed Somalia “peacekeeping” operation from the George H.W. Bush administration, Aspin would later admit that he made a mistake in not providing more support for U.S. forces there, and he offered his resignation in December as a result of his decision-making here, after less than a year as secretary.

It was only much later that al Qaeda’s involvement in Somalia was understood. It is now generally agreed that al Qaeda operatives “trained” Somali militia (though what substantive aid they provided is unclear). Osama bin Laden later takes credit for the American deaths and though that is an exaggeration, there is no question that the subsequent U.S. withdrawal influenced al Qaeda views of American weakness.

Mark Bowden’s account of the raid, Black Hawk Down, was a bestselling book and 2001 movie

2 October 1999

Posted on October 3, 2020October 3, 2020 by William Arkin

The CIA readies an operation to capture or kill Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, secretly training and equipping approximately 60 military commandos supplied by the Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) establishment.

The covert action, approved by President Clinton, includes a quid pro quo, that Pakistan would train and prepare the commandos and conduct the operation, in return for the lifting of economic sanctions imposed with Pakistan’s nuclear testing.

The plan is briefed and supposedly ready to go, but it is then aborted because on October 12, Pakistan Army General Pervez Musharraf takes control of the country in a military coup. Most would later say that no ISI-sponsored operation would have been successful given that the organization was filled with Taliban and al Qaeda sympathizers.