Ziad Jarrah arrives back in Hamburg, the first of the “Hamburg four” to return from Afghanistan, where they received their assignments to be pilots in the “planes operations” being organized by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
The four – Jarrah, Mohammed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, and Ramzi Binalshibh, went from Kandahar, where they met with Osama bin Laden, to Karachi, where they meet KSM, who provides instruction on plans, travel, and operational security. Jarrah and al-Shehhi leave first, Atta returning to Hamburg in late February, and Binalshibh arriving shortly thereafter. (911 Commission, p. 167)
Month: January 2021
Lebanese citizen Ziad Jarrah, while transiting Dubai on his way from Karachi, Pakistan back to Hamburg, Germany, draws questioning from UAE authorities about an overlay of the Qu’ran that appeared on one page of his passport. It is a sign of travel to Afghanistan and possible involvement in radical Islamic groups. The officials also noticed the religious tapes and books Jarrah had in his possession. The send him to secondary inspection but release him after he argues that he had lived in Hamburg for a number of years and was studying aircraft construction there.
The CIA Counterterrorist Center (CTC) provides a classified briefing to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in which it states that some 70,000 to 120,000 people were trained in al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan since the Soviet invasion in 1979.
It is a huge number, but the CIA is unable to precisely answer how many active al Qaeda members there are, nor how many who trained during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan was mere jihad “tourists” from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, with no intention of ever going on to conduct terrorism. The core of al Qaeda fighters – at 9/11 – in fact is thought to be more in the 5,000-6,000 range.
In Dubai, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali (Ammar al-Baluchi) deposits $5,000 into the Citibank account of Saudi Hani Hanjour. Hanjour, who would fly the plane into the Pentagon on 9/11, was the last of the four pilots to come onboard with the plot and the only Saudi amongst the pilots.
Aziz Ali, a nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (and often called “Cousin Ali” by the other hijackers, was located in the United Arab Emirates, and thus was the secure (and less suspicious) financial link between al Qaeda and the hijackers in the United States (rather than KSM in Pakistan).
He was captured in a police raid in Karachi, Pakistan on April 30, 2003, and is now in Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
Five months after the African embassy bombings, the CIA issues its first major analytic report—“How Bin Ladin Commands a Global Terrorist Network” on the nature of al Qaeda, that it is present in some 60 countries.
“Usama bin Laden is the ultimate decisionmaker in the organization,” the classified report states. “He is directly involved in the planning of terrorist operations and oversees those in his group responsible for terrorism even when he is one step removed from the details.”
The report relies heavily on arrests made after the African bombings, as well as the defection of Jamal al-Fadl and the arrest of Khalid Fawwaz, bin Laden’s news media representative in London.
It concludes that the organization is capable of undertaking more than one terrorist operation simultaneously.
The Project for a New American Century (PNAC)—founded by, amongst others, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, Zalmay Khalilzad, Richard Armitage, and Scooter Libby (all future Bush administration principals and officials)— releases its first public letter where it demands that President Clinton undertake the “removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime” in Iraq, labeling containment “dangerously inadequate.”
The Project for a New American Century is later labeled “neocon” and influential in setting up a war with Saddam Hussein but the Clinton administration started down this path to a final showdown, both overstating the WMD threat and declaring that regime change was the only path to normalization of relations.
White House counterterrorism advisor Richard Clarke sends an urgent memo to Condoleezza Rice and deputy national security advisor Stephen Hadley warning that there are al Qaeda sleeper cells within the United States and of an impending terrorist attack on America soil.
In a grand strategy paper on dealing with terrorism, Clarke advocates targeting al Qaeda training camps in response to the October attack on the USS Cole in Yemen. He proposes “rolling back” al Qaeda over a period of three to five years, proposes military action as well that would attack Taliban infrastructure. (At the Center of the Storm, p. 143)
Clarke writes that al Qaeda “is not some narrow, little terrorist issue that needs to be included in broader regional policy,” taking a jab at Rice’s concept of a “regional” solution to terrorism. He says that key decisions that had been deferred with the end of the Clinton administration dealing with covert aid to the Northern Alliance and the Uzbeks, to political messages to the Taliban and Pakistan, and new money for CIA operations need to be resolved regardless of larger policy.
Though the 9/11 Commission would say that Rice did not respond directly to Clarke’s memo and no principals committee meeting regarding al Qaeda took place until September 4 (911 Commission, p. 201), the truth was that Clarke’s memo presented nothing new and didn’t represent any new intelligence regarding the immediate threat. One can fail the Bush administration for not seriously engaging with the issue, but it is also the case that Clarke failed (as did CIA director George Tenet) to convince the new administration of the threat, later trumpeting so many warnings that they drowned the new administration. And in his January 25 memo, which the 9/11 Commission tartly labels “elaborate,” Clarke’s inclusion of his 2000 strategy and his 1998 plan annoyed Rice and Hadley, that it was both too stale and too narcissistic.
Mary Anne Weaver writes in The New Yorker that Washington has “mythologized” Osama bin Laden. She writes: “Each time the Clinton administration raises the stakes, and further enhances bin Laden’s prominence, more and more disaffected Saudis flock to join the kingdom’s military Islamist underground, of which bin Laden remains a central part. That is one of the most worrisome consequences of America’s obsession with one man.”
The obsession theme, and the parade of journalists and experts who would downplay bin Laden, al Qaeda, and the threat of terrorism is not new. In March 1997, The New Republic printed an article by Susan Ellingwood entitled “Hot Air” that mocked the Clinton administration’s attempts to strengthen airport security, calling it an absurd waste of money.
In August 1998, former CIA officer Milton Bearden penned an op-ed in The New York Times arguing that Osama bin Laden has been “blown out of proportion.”
“One might argue that the following of Osama bin Laden that has been created by the romantic mythology has become more dangerous than the man himself,” Bearden writes.
In June 2000, writing in The Washington Post in response to the National Commission on Terrorism Report, former State Department counter-terrorism official Larry C. Johnson also says that more Americans have died from scorpion bites than from foreign terrorist attacks over the past five years, calling the Commission’s description of the terrorism threat “vastly exaggerated.”
In November 2000, Bearden and Johnson banded together to write in The Los Angeles that “American attempts to blast Usama bin Laden out of his Afghan redoubt have elevated him to levels of mystical power in the Islamic world.”
On May 31, 2001, Benjamin Weiser writes in The New York Times (“Trial Poked Holes in Image of bin Laden’s Terror Group”) about how al Qaeda is not all that fearsome. Osama bin Laden “loomed large” before the African embassy bombings trial, Weiser writes, “because so little was known about how he worked.”
“But the trial … made clear that while Mr. Bin Laden may be a global menace, his group, Al Qaeda, was at times slipshod, torn by inner strife, betrayal, greed and the banalities of life that one might find in any office.”
On July 10, 2001, Johnson was back in The New York Times: “The overall terrorist threat trend is down … Nor are the United States and its policies the primary target … The greatest risk clear: if you are drilling for oil in Colombia—or in nations like Ecuador, Nigeria or Indonesia—you should take appropriate precautions; otherwise Americans have little to fear.”
President Jimmy Carter proclaims the Carter Doctrine. “An attempt by an outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including force,” he says.
The Carter Doctrine is a response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iranian revolution and leads not just to the creation of the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force (which will eventually become U.S. Central Command) but also a steady build-up of U.S. capabilities in the Gulf.
On the second day of the Bush administration, The New York Times runs a story about Iraqi WMD (Steven Lee Myers and Eric Schmitt, “Iraq Rebuilt Weapons Factories, Officials Say”), the beginning of a relentless drumbeat creating the impression that Saddam has managed—with and without U.N. sanctions—to continue the development of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons.
The WMD narrative will build after 9/11 and as the 2003 second Gulf War nears. Many would go on to say and believe that the Bush administration both “fixed the facts” on Iraqi WMD and was the sole champion for a final showdown and regime change with Saddam Hussein. But the fretting about Iraq’s WMD—and the many intelligence blind spots and misinterpretations about Iraq’s continued pursuit of WMD—was a holdover from the Clinton administration, which had additionally adopted American policy that there would be no normalization of relations with Iraq without regime change.
The role that the Times and other news media played in trumpeting the threat of WMD, in shaping elite opinion, is still largely unexamined as history. Yes, there were countervailing stories questioning the facts on this or that piece of evidence, but the more war with Iraq became “Bush’s war,” the more any contrary view of the strategic purpose (and effects) of a war was also drowned out.