8 23 time. Whatever the metric, therefore, the attacks that day were unparalleled in their severity and lethal ambitions. Significantly, too, from a purely terrorist operational perspective, spectacular simultaneous attacks such as took place on September 11th-using far more prosaic and arguably conventional means of attack (such as car bombs, for example)—are relatively uncommon. For reasons not well understood, terrorists typically have not undertaken coordinated operations. This was doubtless less of a choice than a reflection of the logistical and other organizational hurdles and constraints that all but the most sophisticated terrorist groups are unable to overcome. Indeed, this was one reason why we were so galvanized by the synchronized attacks on the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam three years ago. The orchestration of that operation, coupled with its unusually high death and casualty tolls, stood out in a way that, until September 11th, few other terrorist operations had. During the 1990s, perhaps only one other terrorist operation evidenced those same characteristics of coordination and high lethality: the series of attacks that occurred in Bombay in March 1993, when ten coordinated car bombings rocked the city, killing nearly 300 persons and wounding more than 700 others. In the preceding two decades there were comparatively few successfully executed, simultaneous terrorist spectaculars.25 24 Finally, the September 11th attacks not only showed a level of patience and detailed planning rarely seen among terrorist movements today, but the hijackers stunned the world with their determination to kill themselves as well as their victims. Suicide attacks differ from other terrorist operations precisely because the perpetrator's own death is a 23 Some 440 persons perished in a 1978 fire deliberately set by terrorists at a movie theater in Abadan, Iran. Celia W. Dugger, "Victims of '93 Bombay Terror Wary of U.S. Motives," New York Times, 24 September 2001. 25 Apart from the attacks on the same morning in October 1983 of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut (241 persons were killed) and a nearby French paratroop headquarters (where 60 soldiers perished); the 1981 hijacking of three Venezuelan passenger jets by a mixed commando of Salvadoran leftists and Puerto Rican independistas; the attacks on the Rome and Vienna airports staged by the Abu Nidal Group in December 1986; and the dramatic 1970 hijacking of four commercial aircraft by the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine), two of which were brought to and then dramatically blown up at Dawson's Field in Jordan, there have been comparatively few successfully executed, simultaneous terrorist spectaculars. Several other potentially high lethality simultaneous attacks during the 1980s were averted. These include, a 1985 plot by Sikh separatists in India and Canada to simultaneously bomb three aircraft while inflight (one succeeded: the downing of an Air India flight while en route from Montréal, Québec, to London, England, in which 329 persons were killed); a Palestinian plot to bomb two separate Pan Am flights in 1982 and perhaps the most infamous and ambitious of all pre-September 11th incidents: Ramzi Ahmed Yousef's “Bojinka" plan to bring down 12 American airliners over the Pacific. See Jenkins, "The Organization Men: Anatomy of a Terrorist Attack." p. 6. 9 26 requirement for the attack's success. This dimension of terrorist operations, however, arguably remains poorly understood. In no aspect of the September 11th attacks is this clearer than in the debate over whether all 19 of the hijackers knew they were on a suicide mission or whether only the four persons actually flying the aircraft into their targets did. It is a debate that underscores the poverty of our understanding of bin Laden, terrorism motivated by a religious imperative, in particular, and the concept of martyrdom. 27 The so-called Jihad Manual, discovered by British police in March 2000 on the hard drive of an al-Qa'ida member's computer is explicit about operational security (OPSEC) in the section that discusses tradecraft. For reasons of operational security, it states, only the leaders of an attack should know all the details of the operation and these should only be revealed to the rest of unit at the last possible moment. Schooled in this tradecraft, the 19 hijackers doubtless understood that they were on a one-way mission from the time they were dispatched to the US on their mission of martyrdom. Indeed, the video tape of bin Laden and his chief lieutenant, Dr. Ayman Zawahiri, recently broadcast by the Arabic television news station al Jazeera contains footage of one of the hijackers acknowledging his impending martyrdom in an allusion to the forthcoming September 11th attacks. On the tape, Ahmad Ibrahim Al Haznawi, one of the hijackers who provided the "muscle" and was not the pilot aboard the American Airlines flight which crashed into the Pentagon on September 11th, contained a date and place name beside his reproduced signature indicating that it was recorded in Khandahar, Afghanistan around March 2001. In it, Al Haznawi bluntly explains that he is a martyr being deployed to America to kill Americans.2 28 The phenomenon of terrorist martyrdom in Islam has of course long been discussed and examined. The act itself can be traced back to the Assassins, an off-shoot of the Shia Ismaili movement, who some 700 years ago waged a protracted struggle against the European Crusaders' attempted conquest of the Holy Land. The Assassins embraced an ethos of self-sacrifice, where martyrdom was regarded as a sacramental act—a highly desirable aspiration and divine duty commanded by religious text and communicated by 26 See Yoram Schweitzer, "Suicide Terrorism: Development and Main Characteristics," in The International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, Countering Suicide Terrorism: An International Conference (Jerusalem and Hewlett, NY: Gefen, 2001), p. 76. 27 See bin Laden's comments about this on the videotape released by the U.S. Government in November 2001, a verbatim transcript of which is reproduced in Reporters, Writers, and Editors, Inside 911: What Really Happened, pp. 313-321. 28 See Howard Schneider and Walter Pincus, "Bin Laden Video Includes Sept. 11 Praise," clerical authorities. This is still evident today. An important additional motivation then as now was the promise that the martyr would feel no pain in the commission of his sacred act and would then ascend immediately to a glorious heaven, described as a place replete with "rivers of milk and wine... lakes of honey, and the services of 72 virgins,” where the martyr will see the face of Allah and later be joined by 70 chosen relatives.29 The last will and testament of Muhammad Atta, the ringleader of the September 11th hijackers, along with a "primer" for martyrs that he wrote, entitled, "The Sky Smiles, My Young Son," clearly evidences such beliefs." Contrary to popular belief and misconception, suicide terrorists are not exclusively derived from the ranks of the mentally unstable, economically bereft, or abject, isolated loners. In fact many of the hijackers' relatively high levels of education, socio-economic status and stable family ties were characteristics not uncommon among terrorists deployed on suicide missions. In point of fact, In the more sophisticated and competent terrorist groups, such as the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or Tamil Tigers), it is precisely the most battle-hardened, skilled and dedicated cadre who enthusiastically volunteer to commit suicide attacks. 32 We also failed to understand and comprehend Usama bin Laden: his vision, his capabilities, his financial resources and acumen as well as his organizational skills. For bin Laden, the weapons of modern terrorism critically are not only the traditional guns and bombs, but also the mini-cam, videotape, television and the Internet. The professionally produced and edited two hour al-Qa'ida recruitment videotape that bin Laden circulated throughout the Middle East during the summer of 2001-which according to Bergen also subtly presaged the September 11th attacks-is exactly such an example of what Peter Bergen has described as bin Laden's nimble exploitation of "twenty-first-century communications and weapons technology in the service of the most extreme, retrograde reading of holy war.' The tape, with its graphic footage of infidels attacking Muslims in Chechnya, Kashmir, Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, Indonesia and Egypt; 33 29 "Wedded to death in a blaze of glory-Profile: The suicide bomber," The Sunday Times (London), 10 March 1996; and Christopher Walker, "Palestinian 'Was Duped into Being Suicide Bomber'," The Times (London), 27 March 1997. 30 See Reporters, Writers, and Editors, Inside 9-11, on pp. 304-313. 31 See, for example, Jenkins, "The Organization Men," p. 8. 32 See in particular the work of Dr. Rohan Gunaratna of St Andrews University in this area and specifically his "Suicide Terrorism in Sri Lanka and India," in International Policy, Countering Suicide Terrorism, pp. 97-104. 33 Peter L. Bergen, Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden (NY: Free Press, children starving under the yoke of United Nations economic sanctions in Iraq; and most vexatiously, the accursed presence of "“Crusader” military forces in the holy land of Arabia, was subsequently converted to CD-ROM and DVD formats for ease in copying onto computers and loading onto the world-wide web for still wider, global dissemination. An even more stunning illustration of his communications acumen and clever manipulation of media was the pre-recorded, pre-produced, B-roll, or video clip, that bin Laden had queued and ready for broadcast within hours of the commencement of the American air strikes on Afghanistan on Sunday, October 7th. 34 In addition to his adroit marrying of technology to religion and of harnessing the munificence of modernity and the West as a weapon to be wielded against his enemies, bin Laden has demonstrated uncommon patience, planning and attention to detail. According to testimony presented at the trial of three of the 1998 East African embassy bombers in Federal District Court in New York last year by a former bin Laden lieutenant, Ali Muhammad, "planning for the attack on the Nairobi facility commenced nearly five years before the operation was executed. Muhammad also testified that bin Laden himself studied a surveillance photograph of the embassy compound, pointing to the spot in front of the building where he said the truck bomb should be positioned. Attention has already been drawn to al-Qa'ida's ability to commence planning of another operation before the latest one has been executed in the case of the embassy bombings and the attack 27 months later on the U.S.S. Cole. Clearly, when necessary, bin Laden devotes specific attention-perhaps even to the extent of micro managing-various key aspects of al-Qa'ida "spectaculars." In the famous videotape discovered in an al-Qa'ida safe house in Afghanistan that was released by the U.S. government in December 2001, bin Laden is seen discussing various, intimate details of the September 11th attack. At one point, bin Laden explains how "we calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy, who would be killed based on the position of the tower. We calculated that the floors [that] would be hit would [be] three or four floors. I was the most optimistic of them all.... due to my experience in this field...." alluding to his knowledge of construction techniques gleaned from his time with the family business. 35 Bin Laden also knew that Muhammad Atta was the operation's leader and states that he 34 Ali Muhammad, a former major in the Egyptian Army, enlisted in the U.S. Army, where he served as a non-commissioned officer at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, teaching U.S. Special Forces about Middle Eastern culture and politics. Mohammed, among other al-Qa'ida operatives, like Wadi el-Hoge, demonstrates how al-Qa'ida found the U.S. a comfortable and unthreatening operational environment. See Hoffman, "Terrorism's CEO," www.theatlantic.com/unbound/interviews/int2002-01-09.html. 35 12 and his closest lieutenants “had notification [of the attack] since the previous Thursday that the event would take place that day [on September 11th]." 37 38 The portrait of bin Laden that thus emerges is richer, more complex, and more accurate than the simple caricature of a hate-filled, mindless fanatic. "All men dream: but not equally," T.E. Lawrence, the legendary Lawrence of Arabia, wrote. "Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible." Bin Laden is indeed one of the dangerous men that Lawrence described. At a time when the forces of globalization, coupled with economic determinism, seemed to have submerged the role the individual charismatic leader of men beneath far more powerful, impersonal forces, bin Laden has cleverly cast himself as a David against the American Goliath: one man standing up to the world's sole remaining superpower and able to challenge its might and directly threaten its citizens. Indeed, in an age arguably devoid of ideological leadership, when these impersonal forces are thought to have erased the ability of a single man to affect the course of history, bin Laden-despite all our efforts-managed to taunt us and strike at us for years even before September 11th. His effective melding of the strands of religious fervor, Muslim piety and a profound sense of grievance into a powerful ideological force stands— however invidious and repugnant-as a towering accomplishment. In his own inimitable way, bin Laden cast this struggle as precisely the "clash of civilizations" that America and its coalition partners have labored so hard to negate. "This is a matter of religion and creed; it is not what Bush and Blair maintain, that it is a war against terrorism,” he declared in a videotaped speech broadcast over al Jazeera television on November 3, 2001. "There is no way to forget the hostility between us and the infidels. It is ideological, so Muslims have to ally themselves with Muslims." 39 Bin Laden, though, is perhaps best viewed as a "terrorist CEO": essentially having applied business administration and modern management techniques leaned both at university and in the family's construction business to the running of a transnational 36 Ibid., p. 319. 37 Ibid., P. 317. 40 38 T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 23. Afghanistan Are a War Against Islam, " New York Times, November 4, 2001, p. B2. " Bin Laden is a graduate of Saudi Arabia's prestigious King Abdul-Aziz University, where in 1981 he obtained a degree in economics and public administration. He subsequently cut his teeth in the family business, later applying the corporate management techniques learned both in the classroom and on |