Roots of ExtremismAmbassador Hamid Al-Bayati*

The Ottoman Empire, which ruled more than 600 years, was the last Dynasty to rule the Muslim World according to the (Khilafa) system started by the Umayyad Dynasty and followed by the Abbasid Dynasty. The Khilafa system was considered to be the rule of a monarch implementing Sharia (Islamic law).

The Ottoman Empire followed a policy of Ottomanism for all non-Turkish citizens all over the Muslim World, although the narrative of the Prophet Mohammed (SA) states that his successors are all from “Quraish.” Therefore the majority of the Islamic scholars believed that successors of Prophet Mohammed should be Arabs; but a minority issued a religious decree (fatwa) that non-Arabs can rule Muslim nations. The Ottoman Dynasty established their empire in accordance with that fatwa.

The empire was the one of the largest and longest lasting empires in history. It was inspired by and sustained by Islam and Islamic institutions. It replaced the Byzantine Empire as the major power in the Eastern Mediterranean. The Ottoman Empire reached its height under Suleiman the Magnificent (reign1520-66), when it expanded to cover the Balkans and Hungary, and reached the gates of Vienna. The Empire began to decline after being defeated at the Battle of Lepanto (1571) and losing almost its entire navy. It declined further during the next centuries, and was effectively finished off by World War I and the Balkan Wars. (1)

The Ottoman Empire stood with the Germans against the British and French during World War I. Sharif Hussein, ruler of Mecca, signed an agreement with the British that he would start an Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire, and in return the British would appoint him king of an Arab State which was to include all the Arab nations. That agreement was reached after correspondence between Sharif Hussein and Mackmahon, the British Foreign Minister. When the British and French won World War I, they did not fulfill their promise to Sharif Hussein; instead, they divided the Arab world into many countries.

The British invaded one of those countries, Iraq, to control oil and to protect British lines of communication to India. They captured Basra province in 1914. This was enough to achieve their objectives, but they decided to advance north and were defeated by the Iraqis and Ottomans in Kut in 1916. However, the British regrouped and advanced, managing to capture Baghdad in 1917 and Mosul in the north in 1918. After the war, Iraq was under British Mandate from 1920 to 1932 and the British established a monarchy and installed King Feisal I in 1921. (2)

When Iraq came under British occupation, the Iraqis started many revolts against the British. The most important one, called the “The Revolution of 1920,” cost the British army a lot of causalities and money and forced the British to end the occupation. The Iraqis demanded that Iraq be ruled by a Muslim Arab king; so the British established an Iraqi monarchy under British Mandate in 1921, and King Faisal I became the first king of Iraq. After his death his son King Ghazi became the 2nd king of Iraq. Ghazi died in a car accident in 1939, although the Iraqis believed that he was killed by the British. King Faisal II ascended the throne too young to rule—age four, so his uncle served as ruler

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from 1939 to 1953. King Faisal II became the ruler in 1953 and was killed in 1958 in a military coup by Free Military Officers. However the Iraqi people went to the streets to celebrate the overthrown of monarchy and coup was called the revolution of July 14, 1958.

Muslim Brotherhood

The Muslim Brotherhood is the oldest Islamic movement, established in Egypt in 1928 during the era of the late King Hassan Al-Banna, a teacher and religious scholar. The Brotherhood started as an Islamic Political movement with humanitarian purposes, and developed into a violent political movement. The Brotherhood was accused of assassinating Egyptian Prime Minister Mahmoud an-Nukrashi Pasha in 1949, which resulted in the assassination of Hassan Al-Banna himself in the same year.

In 1952, the Free Officer movement toppled the monarchy under the leadership of General Mohammed Najeeb, and Gamal Abdul Nasir emerged as the new leader for the revolution. Nasir created an Arab Nationalist Movement that spread throughout the Arab world, similar to the Turkish National Movement of Mustafa Kamal Ataturk and the Iranian National Movement of Redha Shah. Gamal Abdul Nasir accused the Muslim Brotherhood of an assassination attempt against him, and some historians believe it was staged by Nasir himself. As a result Nasir launched a repression; many of the Muslim Brotherhood were executed.

During the Cold War, the U.S. government was afraid of the spread of communism, especially in the Arab World, because of the United States' dependence on the Arab nations as its main source for oil. U.S. leaders were convinced that the best way to defeat Communism in Islamic countries was to support the Islamic movements including the Muslim Brotherhood. In addition, they thought that good relations with Islamic movements such as the Muslim brotherhood would calm the tensions among European Muslims.

Since the 1950s, the successive administrations of the United States government, including the Obama administration, have secretly struck up alliances with the Brotherhood or its offshoots. Each time, U.S. leaders have decided that the Brotherhood could be useful and tried to bend it to America’s goals, and each time, maybe not surprisingly, the only party that clearly has benefited has been the Brotherhood. Americans, however, remain unaware of this history, due to a mixture of wishful thinking and a national obsession with secrecy around the extensive dealings with the Muslim Brotherhood.

In 1953, during the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower, for example, the year before Egyptian President Nasser called the Muslim Brotherhood an illegal organization, a covert U.S. propaganda program headed by the U.S. Information Agency invited around thirty Muslim scholars and activists from several Muslim countries to participate in a so called “academic conference” at Princeton University. The goal was to create a favorable impression in the minds of Muslims about American support and concern for spiritual and moral issues. The hope was that these Islamic leaders could influence Muslims in their countries more than their respective governments. As such, this was part of the campaign against Communism in Muslim countries.

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According to Eisenhower’s appointment book, one of the leaders was “The Honorable Saeed Ramahdan, Delegate of the Muslim Brothers.”  Saeed Ramadhan was the son-in-law of the Brotherhood’s founder Hasan Al-Banna and at the time was described as the “foreign minister” for the Muslim Brotherhood. The U.S. officials thought that these religious scholars could advocate religious freedom in the U.S., and fight Communism which would be shown to be against religion and atheist. The CIA considered Saeed Ramadhan to be a “fascist interested in the grouping of individuals for power.” Still, the White House invited him to visit. Later on, the CIA supported Saeed Ramadhan when he had a battle with local Muslims to take over a mosque in Munich. For decades after, that mosque became the most important center for Muslim Brotherhood members who lived in exile. In the end, the U.S. didn’t reap much for its efforts, as Ramadhan was more interested in spreading his Islamist agenda than fighting communism. (3)

A compelling result of studying in or visiting the U.S. for some Muslim Brotherhood leaders was that they became more radicalized than they were at the outset. For example, Egyptian writer Sayyid Qutb. After studying for two years at Colorado State Teachers College, now the University of Northern Colorado, he became a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood when he returned to Egypt. After ample time to observe America, he condemned it as a soulless, materialistic place that no Muslim should aspire to live in. He was once considered for a Cabinet post in Egypt after the overthrow of the Egyptian monarchy in 1953. In 1966, Qutb was executed, having been accused of plotting against the government. (4)

Most of the political movements in the Middle East started as reformist movements, and developed gradually into violence, whether they were Communists, Nationalists or Islamists; and the Muslim Brotherhood is no exception. In Egypt, Hasan Al-Banna started to focus on reforms in society and government during the rule of a corrupt royal family supported by the West; although it started to use violence later which culminated in killing the Egyptian Prime Minister and the assassination of the Muslim Brotherhood founder. Some other leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood were even more radicalized than Hassan Al-Banna.

In Iraq for example, I was very close to many Islamic organizations among Sunnis and Shiites because my tribe (the Al-Bayati tribe) contains different ethnic groups such as Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen and all of these ethnic groups get divided into Sunnis and Shiites. I grew up with the Muslim Brotherhood and Al-Tahrir Sunni movements as well as with Al-Daawa Islamic Party, Al-Shabab Al-Muslim, Al-Aqaidyeen, Jund Al-Imam and the Islamic Movement Shiites organizations. All these organizations became more active after the Soviet Union supported communist parties in Muslim countries. The Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) was founded in 1928 and it came to Iraq from Iran, the Iranian Toda Communist party having been founded before the ICP.

Communism and the Communist party became very popular in Iraq, especially among young people because of the British occupation and British mandate in Iraq between 1914 and 1932, and because the monarchy in Iraq was installed by the British and maintained a strong connection with Britian. As such, Communism became a symbol for progressive ideology and the patriotic struggle against the British colonial power and their puppet government in Iraq. The Iraqi government, under British influence,

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suppressed the ICP and declared it illegal because it lead demonstrations and distributed leaflets against the government. Many of the leaders of ICP were arrested and tortured. A few of them were executed.

After the 1958 revolution which toppled the Iraqi monarchy, the new government was lenient towards Communism. Many high ranking Iraqi officials were members of the Iraqi Communist Party, so the party was legal. It had public activities and its own militia, called the “Popular Brother (??) Resistance” like the militias in many of the communist countries. It became fashionable for the young people to join the Communist Party or the Militia, because their military training allowed them to carry firearms in the street in front of people.

In Iraq, still a very conservative country in the 1950s, the religious establishments and scholars worried that young people would be driven away from their religion and traditions. So the scholars mounted a counter campaign against Communism and the Iraqi Communist Party.

The highest religious authority in the holy city, Najaf Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Muhsin Al-Hakim, issued a fatwa that Communism meant atheism and blasphemy. Many Shiites and young Islamic people joined the Muslim Brotherhood and the Al-Tahrir Party because there were no Shiite Islamic political parties in Iraq. There were only some Shiite Islamic educational institutes and forums for writers and poets, mainly in the holy cities of Najdaf, Karbala and Kadhimiya.

Some religious scholars and Islamic personalities decided to establish Islamic parties such as Al-Shabab Al-Muslim, Al-Aqaedyieen and the Al-Daawa Islamic Party, all of which were secret organizations. However despite some Islamic reservations about the secrecy of these parties, they were supported by the religious establishment indirectly, which reasoned that these Islamic parties would be a better influence than the Communist Party on Iraqi youth.

Many Shiite leaders of Al-Daawa Islamic Party defected from Al-Tahrir Party, which included more Shiites than the Muslim Brotherhood—such as Shaikh Arif Al-Basri—who was executed by the Baath Regime in Iraq with four other leaders of Al-Daawa Islamic Party in 1974; and Abdul Hadi Al-Subaiti, an engineer who fled Iraq in 1970s, worked in Jordan, and was handed over to Saddam’s regime and executed in 1980s.

Most of these Islamic secret parties had adopted four stage strategies to achieve their objectives. Stage one is to educate people and create an Islamic society that believes in Islam as a religion and a way to rule and govern political, economic, and social life. Stage two is to fight a political war against other parties and the ruling governments to prove to the people that Islam is the only way to have good governance, provide services and solve their problems. Stage three is to manage to get to power through political or military means. Stage four is to keep the Islamic government safe from the enemies who will try to overthrow these governments.

The two major sources of Islamic education, ideology and Islamic books from the 1950s to the 1970s were the Muslim Brotherhood and the Al-Tahrir Party. Most young Muslims started their Islamic education reading the books of Hasan Al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb, his brother Mohammed Qutb, Al-Bahi Al-Kholi, and other authors of the Muslim

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Brotherhood, as well as the books of Taqi Al-Nabhani and Abdul Qadeem Zaloom, who were the first and second leaders of the Al-Tahrir Party in Jordan. In addition, these Islamic parties used to distribute secret internal newspapers, leaflets and magazines.

Over time, I had a chance to read the majority of these books, secret newspapers, leaflets and magazines and all of them describe the same method of employing this four stage strategy to establish an Islamic state. These Islamic parties were new to political life and all started in the 20th century, so they were reading each other's books and learning from each other. Also, members of some of these Islamic parties were defecting from one party to another. They took their education and experiences with them.

Some of these parties started to establish military wings, have training camps and collect weapons. Moreover, some of them launched military campaigns against the regimes. Examples are the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria during the 1980s and Al-Daawa and Harakat AL-Mujahideen Al-Iraqiyeen in Iraq in the 1980s. Some of these military training camps were run by Palestinian military movements in Lebanon, in Syria and in Iran.

After Nasir’s death, Egyptian President Anwar Al-Sadat released prisoners from the Muslim Brotherhood and gave them some measure of freedom. They published a large number of books of what kind of tortures they were subjected to in prisons. These books were forbidden in many Arab countries.

In one of my trips from Iraq to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia by car, I bought some of the books written by Egyptian leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood who were tortured from an annual “International Book Fair” in Kuwait. I was stopped and questioned in Saudi Arabia and Iraq about these books, which were published in Egypt and Lebanon.

In Saudi Arabia, I told them I had bought these books in Kuwait and would take them back with me to Iraq. They said they could not allow me to take the books into Saudi Arabia and they kept them at the border check point until I left Saudi Arabia. When I left, I was allowed to take them back.

At the Kuwaiti-Iraqi border, the customs officer saw them and he informed the security officer who looked into each and every book. I told him I bought them from an annual “International Book Fair” in which Iraq had participated. He said that these books were forbidden in Iraq and he confiscated them and insisted on sending me to the center of the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) in Basra. After long discussions, I managed to convince him to refer to me to the center of the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) in Baghdad, which is my city. However, when he asked me for my address, I gave him a false address in Baghdad. I knew that I could be arrested and tortured because of those books.

The tragedy on September 11th, 2001 was born in the prisons of Egypt. Human-rights advocates in Cairo argue that torture created an appetite for revenge in leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, first in Sayyid Qutb and later in his acolytes, including Ayman al-Zawahiri, the second person in command in the Al-Qaeda terrorist group after Osama Bin Laden.

“Montassir al-Zayyat, an Islamist attorney who was imprisoned with al-Zawahiri and later became his lawyer and biographer, maintains that the traumatic experiences

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suffered by al-Zawahiri in prison transformed him from being a relatively moderate force in al-Jihad into a violent and implacable extremist.” (5)

Western support for dictatorial regimes in the Muslim World was also a reason for extremism. The West humiliated Muslim societies through corrupting its leaders. The Muslim Brotherhood spread from Egypt to many countries in the Middle East, especially to Arab countries. In Iraq, for example, the Muslim Brotherhood was the first Islamic movement which started its activities during the 1930s and 1940s as a secret Islamic Party during the monarchy era. The most politically active party then was the Iraqi Communist Party which was illegal and was oppressed by the regime. A large number of Iraqi Communist Party members were imprisoned and many of its leaders were executed.

After the revolution of 1958 against the monarchy in Iraq by the “Free Military Officers Movement” which was similar to Egypt's “Free Military Officers Movement”, the new regime issued a law to allow political parties to have public activities. The Communist Party became public and a large number of youth joined, embracing it as a symbol of the struggle against British occupation and Western colonialism.

The Muslim Brotherhood submitted an application to establish a legal political party called “The Islamic Party,” but the government turned down their application. They continued to have secret activities. Many high ranking officials during Abdul Karim Qasim's (specify who this is) era were members of the Iraqi Communist Party. The Communist Party became strong in Iraq.

The ideas of the Muslim Brotherhood spread all over the Arab World and some other Muslim countries. They were very well known for their Islamic education at mosques, their books and publications, and charitable work such as helping poor people, and opening Islamic schools and medical clinics. (6)

In 2012, Mohammed Mursi was the first leader of the Muslim Brotherhood to be elected as President in Egypt. The U.S. government supported the Muslim Brotherhood government. However, Mursi’s government was toppled by Defense Minister Abdul Fattah and Sisi. Many Arab countries such as Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates considered the Muslim Brotherhood to be a terrorist organization.

The Muslim Brotherhood could be the new generation of extremists and may use violence now that their elected President was toppled by the army in a similar situation to the Front of Islamic Salvation FIS in Algeria, where the Muslim Brotherhood won the elections and were forbidden from ruling the country. They became very violent, attacking military and police targets as well as civilians. Some Islamists blame the government and the army of orchestrating those massacres, not the Muslim Brotherhood.

Osama Bin Laden

Osama Bin Laden was born in Saudi Arabia to a very rich father who was a friend of the Saudi king and got huge construction contracts through which he earned millions of dollars. His father Mohammed Awad bin Laden came to the kingdom from Hadramout (South Yemen) sometime around 1930. Mohammed started his life as a very poor laborer, a porter in Jeddah port, to end up as owner of the biggest construction company in the kingdom. During the reign of King Saud, bin Laden the father became very close to the royal family when he took the risk of building King Saud's palaces much cheaper than the

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cheapest bid. He impressed King Saud with his performance but he also built good relations with other members of the royal family, especially Faisal. During the Saud-Faisal conflict in the early sixties, bin Laden the father had a big role in convincing King Saud to step down in favor of Faisal. After Saud's departure the treasury was empty and bin Laden was so supportive to King Faisal that he literally paid the civil servants' wages of the whole kingdom for six months. King Faisal then issued a decree that all construction projects should go to bin Laden. Indeed, he was appointed for a period as the minister of public works. (7)

Osama bin Laden joined the Islamic movement of the Muslim Brotherhood. It was a secret organization which recruited young people at mosques, educated them and involved them in social works. The objectives of Muslim Brotherhood were similar to many other Islamic organizations in the region, educating Muslims about Islam, teaching them the Quran and the prophet narrations (Sunna), and establishing an Islamic society, and ultimately an Islamic State based on Shair’a law.

"We were hoping to establish an Islamic state somewhere," said Jamal Khashoggi, a friend of bin Laden's who joined the Brotherhood at about the same time. "We believed that the first one would lead to another, and that would have a domino effect which could reverse the history of mankind." (8)

For bin Laden, Islam was more than just a religion: It shaped his political beliefs and influenced every decision he made. While he was at college in the late 1970s, he became a follower of the radical pan-Islamist scholar Abdullah Azzam, who believed that all Muslims should rise up in jihad, or holy war, to create a single Islamic state. This idea appealed to the young bin Laden, who resented what he saw as a growing Western influence on Middle Eastern life. (9)

The Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, and the invasion resulted in resistance movements started by Afghani groups and tribes but developed later to include Arab fighters from all over the world who were called (Jihadists) or (Mujahideen) from the word Jihad.

The Western governments and especially the U.S. administration supported the resistance and provided Arab Jihadists with money, training and weapons against the Soviet occupation and convinced Arab fighters that they were fighting a holy war (Jihad) against infidels—the Soviet communists. The U.S. provided the Mujahideen with very sophisticated and advanced weapons including shoulder to air Stinger missiles which allowed them to shoot down Soviet airplanes and jet fighters.

Thousands of Mujahideen came to Afghanistan from all over the world to liberate it from the Soviet occupation. In the mid-1980s, Osama bin Laden became the prime financier for an organization that recruited Muslims from mosques around the world. Osama bin Laden built a base for fighters and established an organization called Al-Qaeda, which means the base in Arabic. These "Afghan Arab" mujahideen, which numbered in the thousands, were crucial to defeating Soviet forces. (10)

Osama bin Laden became a leader for the so called Arab Mujahideen who fought a holy war against the communist infidels occupying Muslim lands. He was surrounded and

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protected by a large number of Arab fighters who were very loyal to him and protected him with their lives.

Peter Bergen, the journalist who interviewed Osama bin Laden said, “We witnessed the Herculean efforts that al-Qaeda members made to protect their leader. My colleagues and I were taken to bin Laden's hideout as night fell; we were made to change vehicles while blindfolded; and we had to pass through three successive groups of guards armed with submachine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. We were thoroughly searched and the guards then ran some kind of electronic scanner over us to see if we were concealing weapons or tracking devices.” Al-Qaeda made sure their leader was protected very carefully. (11)

CIA & Bin Laden's Recruiting Office By the mid-1980s, Osama bin Laden and his mentor Abdullah Azzam founded a

charity based in Pakistan which was called Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK) (“services office”) and was in essence a front for terrorist activities. Also known as Al-Kifah (which means “struggle”), it opened branches in the U.S. The first one opened in Tucson, Arizona, where al-Qaeda had a sleeper cell. But around 1986, Khaled Abu el-Dahab informally founded a branch in Brooklyn, New York, and it soon became the most important outpost. The Brooklyn office recruited Arab immigrants and Arab-Americans to go fight in Afghanistan, even after the Soviets withdraw in early 1989. Before they head to Afghanistan, the office arranges training. Recruits learn to use assault weapons, rifles and handguns, and then helps them get visas, plane tickets, and contacts. They go to the MAK/Al-Kifah office in Peshawar, Pakistan, and then are connected to either the radical Afghan faction led by Abdul Rasul Sayyaf or the equally radical one led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. The CIA has a connection to Al-Kifah that has yet to be fully explained. Newsweek would later say the Brooklyn office “doubled as a recruiting post for the CIA, who was seeking to steer fresh troops to the mujaheddin” fighting in Afghanistan. It was also where “veterans of [the Afghan war arrived] in the United States—many with passports arranged by the CIA.” (12)

Robert I. Friedman wrote about the daily offerings at the Brooklyn office for New York magazine. He described it as a refuge for ex- and future Mujahedeen. “But the highlight for the center’s regulars was the inspirational jihad lecture series, featuring CIA-sponsored speakers.…one week on Atlantic Avenue, it might be a CIA-trained Afghan rebel traveling on a CIA-issued visa; the next, it might be a clean-cut Arabic-speaking Green Beret, who would lecture about the importance of being part of the mujaheddin, or ‘warriors of the Lord.’ The speakers who attracted larger crowds spoke upstairs in the roomier Al-Farouq Mosque. This was the case when Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman, traveling on a CIA-supported visa, came to town.” One frequently invited speaker was Ali Mohamed, who was in the U.S. Special Forces, and bin Laden’s mentor Abdullah Azzam. In 1988, Azzam tells “a rapt crowd of several hundred in Jersey City, that ‘Blood and martyrdom are the only way to create a Muslim society.… However, humanity won’t allow us to achieve this objective, because all humanity is the enemy of every Muslim.’” The Brooklyn office also serves as a fundraising center for MAK/Al-Kifah back in Pakistan. The Independent called the office “a place of pivotal importance to Operation Cyclone, the American effort to support the mujaheddin. The Al-Kifah

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[Refugee Center was] raising funds and, crucially, providing recruits for the struggle, with active American assistance.” (13)

The New Phenomenon of Terrorism

The world today is facing a new phenomenon and new waves of fundamentalism, extremism and terrorism which were not known until the 1980s. These began after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December of 1979. The Soviet invasion resulted in the creation of resistance movements by Afghani groups and tribes, but developed later to include Arab fighters from all over the world who were called Jihadists or Mujahideen, from the word Jihad, which means holy war.

In spite of the danger of this new terrorism, the West could not understand the roots of terrorism. The West could not anticipate the capabilities of the terrorists and terrorist groups such as Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, and was not ready to face such danger.

Shimon Peres has said: “If a problem has no solution, it is not a problem to be solved but a fact to be coped with over time.” Former Secretary of state Donald Rumsfeld, in his book “Known and Unknown,” said, “that seems to be what’s going on with terrorism right now. We’re coping with it, and taking care of the damage brought on by terrorism, instead of finding the cure for it (even though there can’t be one simple solution to make terrorism go away).”(14)

Douglas Feith, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy from 2001 to 2005, wrote about the Western experts' view of terrorism prior to the September 11th, 2001 attacks. He wrote, “most terrorism, they reasoned, was intended to create a spectacle—to dramatize the frustrations and aspirations of desperate people in order to win attention and ultimately, sympathy for their causes. The attacks of the 1970s and 1980s supported the conclusion that 'terrorists want a lot of people watching and a lot of people listening, but not a lot of people dead.' The terrorists of those decades engaged in relatively small-scale violence- assassinations, bus bombings, machine gun attacks at airport ticket counters, and the like. To engage in mass killings, or use weapons of mass destruction, the reasoning went, might forfeit the sympathy of others. This view was common and may have been the prevailing theory of terrorism- among Western experts in the era before 9/11.”(15)

Pakistan played an important role in creating the Afghan groups which fought the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. “In many cases, The Pakistani Intelligence Services (ISI) had created, trained, and equipped al Qaeda and other militant jihadist groups,” wrote Terry McDermott and Josh Meyer in their book. The U.S. provided a lot of funding to ISI during the Soviet occupation. Osama bin Laden led many of the young men who joined the Arab-Afghan army, funded by the ISI, to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan. This was the beginning of bin Laden's shift to a proactive stance in his war against America. (16)

“Single al-Qaeda members earned about $1,000 a month in salary; married members $1,500. Everyone got a round-trip ticket home each year and a month of vacation. There was a health-care plan and—for those who changed their mind—a buyout option: They received $2,400 and went on their way. From the beginning, al-Qaeda

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presented itself as an attractive employment opportunity for men whose education and careers had been curtailed by jihad.” (17)

Many religious scholars issued religious decrees (Fatwa) that holy war (Jihad) in Afghanistan is a duty for Muslims. Abdullah Azzam was the person who most influenced bin Laden's involvement with the Afghan cause. A charismatic Palestinian scholar and mystic, Azzam issued such a fatwa and was preaching to people about Jihad in Afghanistan during Friday prayers.

Al-Qaeda's educational message was that faith is stronger than weapons or nations, and the ticket to enter the heaven where miracles occur is the willingness to die. “Radicalism usually prospers in the gap between rising expectations and declining opportunities. Where the population is young, idle, and bored; where art is impoverished; where entertainment—movies, theater, music—is policed or absent altogether; and where young men are set apart from the consoling and socializing presence of women. Adult illiteracy remained the norm in many Arab countries. Unemployment was among the highest in the developing world. Anger, resentment, and humiliation spurred young Arabs to search for dramatic remedies.” (18)

The Soviet forces lost the war in Afghanistan because they lost a lot of money and lives. About 15,000 Soviet soldiers were killed, and about 35,000 were wounded. The Soviet government started to withdraw their forces from Afghanistan, and on February 15, 1989, the Soviet Union announced that all its troops had left.

After the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan, Osama Bin Laden went back to Saudi Arabia and set up an organization to help the veterans of the war in Afghanistan. Bin Laden also studied with radical Islamic thinkers in Saudi Arabia.

After Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, he started to attack Saudi territories near the Kuwaiti borders. Because of this, the Saudi government invited the U.S. military forces into their lands. Osama Bin Laden started to criticize the Saudi government and he was expelled from Saudi Arabia. He left Saudi Arabia and went to Sudan, where he established a headquarters for Al-Qaeda in Khartoum.

Bin Laden worked to set up an alliance with other extremist groups, and in February 1998 he announced the establishment of the "International Islamic Front for Jihad against the Jews and Crusaders"—that included the Egyptian al-Gama'at al-Islamiyya, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the Harakat ul-Ansar, and other groups.

The U.S. and Saudi Arabia put pressure on Sudan to expel bin Laden, which it did in 1994. So he went back to Afghanistan. He worked with Taliban’s regime in Kabul to launch attacks against the U.S.

Al-Qaeda Terrorist Attacks    

It is obvious that Osama bin Laden had good relations with the United States and the CIA when he started his work in Afghanistan fighting the Soviet troops, recruiting Arab Mujahideen and providing them with money, training and weapons. It is also obvious that Osama bin Laden became U.S. enemy number one, the most dangerous terrorist in the world, and the most wanted fugitive in the history of the United States. It is well known also that bin Laden did not always have a negative attitude against the West and that at one point he wanted to apply for asylum in the United Kingdom after he

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came under pressure from the Sudanese government to leave Sudan for his campaign against the Saudi government. Upon hearing that bin Laden wanted to apply for asylum in Britain, the British home secretary immediately banned him. (19)

The big question is, what made Osama bin Laden turn against the West and especially against the United States? And what made Osama Bin laden target U.S. troops in Somalia, in Riyadh, in Al-Khubar in Saudi Arabia and in Yemen, as well as the United States embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, eventually attacking targets inside the U.S. such as the World Trade Center and the Pentagon?

It was the Gulf crisis that crystallized bin Laden's hatred of America. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, bin Laden wanted Arab veterans of the Afghan war to help the Saudi army defend Saudi Arabia. In the 1980s, bin Laden merely disdained America for its alliances with Israel and moderate Muslim states. But when in 1990 he observed the arrival of American troops to confront Saddam—and the continued U.S. military presence in the Gulf after the war—he saw it as a violation of the sanctity of Muslim territory. (20)

On December 29, 1992, al-Qaeda's first well known attack took place in Aden, Yemen. That evening, a bomb went off at the Gold Mohur hotel, where U.S. troops had been staying while en route to Somalia, though the troops had already left when the bomb exploded. The bombers targeted a second hotel, the Aden Movenpick, where they believed American troops might also be staying. That bomb detonated prematurely in the hotel car park, around the same time as the other bomb explosion, killing two Australian tourists. Bin Laden later claimed that he and Mohamed Khan were responsible for the 1992 Yemen attack.

World Trade Center Attack of February 1993

On February 26, 1993 the first World Trade Center attack and the first terrorist attack on America occurred. A bomb, built in nearby Jersey City, is driven into an underground garage at the World Trade Center and detonated, killing six and wounding 1,500.  Yousef, nephew of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, masterminded the attack, working with nearly a dozen local Muslims. While U.S. officials disagree on whether Osama bin Laden instituted the attack, and Yousef denies he ever met bin Laden, the CIA later learns that Yousef stayed in a bin Laden-owned guest house in Pakistan both before and after the attacks. (21)

The attack killed six people and more than 1,000 people were injured, including 88 firefighters, 35 police officers, and an emergency medical services worker. About 50,000 people had to be evacuated from the World Trade Center. The towers were relatively full when the bombing occurred, as wintery conditions may have kept many inside during the normal lunch hour. The explosion knocked out electrical power to a neighboring hotel and significant areas within the North and South towers, affecting the operation of elevators, emergency communication, ventilation systems, and lighting. Emergency power generators were also damaged by the blast. They shut down after 20 minutes. Within minutes, the North Tower lobby filled with thick black smoke. Some WTC tenants began an evacuation down dark and smoky stairwells with improvised light

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sources such as cigarette lighters and mini-flashlights. Others were impeded by increasing smoke in the stairwells and forced to wait in conditions severe enough that some tenants had to break windows. (22)

City authorities and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) undertook a massive manhunt for suspects, and within days several radical Islamic fundamentalists were arrested. In March 1994, Mohammed Salameh, Ahmad Ajaj, Nidal Ayyad, and Mahmoud Abouhalima were convicted by a federal jury for their role in the bombing of the World Trade Center, and each was sentenced to life in prison. Salameh, a Palestinian, was arrested when he went to get back the $400 deposit he had left for the Ryder rental van used in the bombing. Ajaj and Ayyad, who helped build the bomb, were arrested after. Abouhalima, who helped to buy and mix the explosives, fled to Saudi Arabia but was caught in Egypt two weeks later.

The mastermind of the attack--Ramzi Ahmed Yousef--remained at large until February 1995, when he was arrested in Pakistan. He had previously been in the Philippines, and in a computer he left there were found plans that included a plot to kill Pope John Paul II and a plan to bomb 15 American airliners in 48 hours. On the flight back to the United States, Yousef reportedly admitted to a Secret Service agent that he had directed the Trade Center attack from the beginning and even claimed to have set the fuse that exploded the 1,200-pound bomb. His only regret, the agent quoted Yousef saying, was that the 110-story tower did not collapse into its twin as planned--a catastrophe that would have caused thousands of deaths. Eyad Ismoil, who drove the Ryder van into the parking garage below the World Trade Center, was captured in Jordan that year and taken back to New York. All the men implicated had ties to Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, a radical Egyptian religious leader who operated out of Jersey City, New Jersey, located just across the Hudson River from Manhattan. In 1995, Rahman and ten followers were convicted of conspiring to blow up the United Nations headquarters and other New York landmarks. Prosecutors argued that the World Trade Center attack was part of that conspiracy, though little clear evidence of this charge was presented.

In November 1997, Yousef and Ismoil were convicted in a courtroom only a few blocks away from the Twin Towers and subsequently sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Only one other man believed to be directly involved in the attack, Iraqi Abdul Rahman Yasin, remains at large.(23)

Abdul Rahman Yasin is the only participant in the 1993 attack against the World Trade Center who was never caught. Yasin, who was indited in the bombing but escaped, was interviewed by CBS News’ Lesley Stahl in an Iraqi installation near Baghdad on May 23, 2002. Abdul Rahman Yasin fled to Iraq after the first World Trade Center bombing. He lived as a free man for a year, but the authorities in Iraq tell CBS News they put him in prison in 1994. After 9/11, President Bush put Yasin on a new most wanted list, with a $25 million reward. Yasin confirms that Yousef was the maker of the bomb used in the attack and that Yousef learned the process in a terrorist camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, before entering the United States.  Yasin said that in Peshawar there were schools that taught bomb-making. Asked if he knew that Yousef had been trained to come to the United States to make bombs and blow things up, Yasin says, "I knew that after I started working with them."

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Yasin was picked up by the FBI a few days after the bombing in an apartment in Jersey City that he was sharing with his mother. He was so helpful and cooperative, giving the FBI names and addresses, that they released him. Yasin says he was even driven back home in an FBI car. Yasin says he is sorry for what he did and that the bombers, whom he said he met for the first time while living in a Jersey City apartment building, talked him into it. "[Yousef and Salameh] used to tell me how Arabs suffered a great deal and that we have to send a message that this is not right … to get revenge for my Palestinian brothers and my brothers in Saudi Arabia," Yasin tells Stahl. He adds that they also prodded him, telling his that since he was Iraqi, he should avenge the defeat of Iraq in the Gulf War. (24)

On April 4, 2005, the U.S. State Department announces that it is offering a reward of up to $5 million for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Abdul Rahman Yasin, who is still at large.(25)

Attack in Somalia of October 1993

The United States Army has a long tradition of humanitarian relief. No such operation has proven as costly or shocking, however, as that undertaken in Somalia from August 1992 to March 1994. Greeted initially by Somalis happy to be saved from starvation, U.S. troops were slowly drawn into inter-clan power struggles and ill-defined "nation-building" missions. The American people woke up one day in early October 1993 to news reports of dozens of our soldiers killed or wounded in fierce fighting in the streets of Mogadishu, its capital city. These disturbing events have taken on increasing meaning after the horrific attacks of September 11, 2001. The army began its presence in Somalia by assisting in relief operations. By December 1992, however, it was deeply engaged on the ground in Operation RESTORE HOPE in that chaotic African country. In the spring of the following year, the initial crisis of imminent starvation seemed to be over, and the U.S. led Unified Task Force (UNITAF) turned over the mission to the United Nations, leaving only a small logistical, aviation and quick reaction force behind to assist. There was a feeling that the U.S. had accomplished its mission. This made October 3rd and 4th 1993 even more startling: through the media, Americans saw the spectacle of dead U.S. soldiers being dragged through the streets by cheering Somali mobs—the very people Americans thought they had rescued from starvation.(26)

On those two days, U.S. Army rangers and commandos from the 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta, known as "Delta Force" were engaged in street battles in Mogadishu. During a successful mission to capture lieutenants of Somali warlord Mohamed Farah Aideed, hundreds of Somali gunmen shot at the U.S. teams and killed 18 soldiers, wounding 73 others. The Somali gunmen shot down two Black Hawk choppers. America's subsequent hasty exit from that mission, which was originally to support United Nations humanitarian operations, emboldened a little-known terrorist leader at the time, bin Laden, who boasted that the superpower was weak for withdrawing after losing G.I.s in what he called "minor battles" there. "You left [Somalia] carrying disappointment, humiliation, defeat and your dead with you," he taunted in his 1996 fatwa. What bin Laden didn't say in 1996 was that his henchmen had a hand in training and equipping the Somali militiamen who inflicted the worst day of casualties in the

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history of U.S. Special Operations Forces. Deadly al Qaeda attacks in the Horn of Africa against U.S. targets in 1996, 1998 and 2000 followed, leading up to 9/11. "It is true that al Qaeda was emboldened by 1993 – it was their first successful attack on us and we were unaware of bin Laden's involvement until later," former Sen. Bob Kerrey, who served on the 9/11 Commission, told ABC News.(27)

Lawrence Wright wrote that one of the documents Dan Coleman of the FBI, who opened the first case on bin Laden, “found on Wadih el-Hage’s (bin Laden’s former secretary) computer in Nairobi made a tentative link between al-Qaeda and the killing of American servicemen in Somalia, and that became the basis of the criminal indictment that was eventually returned against bin Laden in New York in June 1998.” (28)

Attack in Riyadh of November 1995 In this attack, two truck bombs killed five Americans and two Indians in the U.S.

operated Saudi National Guard training center in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Al-Qaeda was blamed for the attacks.  The attack changed U.S. investigators’ views of the role of bin Laden, from mere al-Qaeda financier to its leader. The Vinnell Corporation, thought by some experts to be a CIA front, owned the facility that had been attacked. (29)

The U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Raymond Mabus, confirmed it was a bomb that destroyed the military building in Riyadh. Seven people were killed, including five Americans. Sixty others were injured. Mabus said a bomb blew up the U.S.-leased building. A Pentagon spokesman, Ken Bacon, told CNN preliminary reports indicated there was a large explosion in a parking lot outside the training facility at around 11:20 a.m. (3:20 a.m. EST, 0820 GMT), followed by a smaller blast about five minutes later. Officials in Saudi Arabia called the explosion a deliberate act of terrorism and said authorities were confident of "arresting those who carried out this crime." At the time, the United States was assuming that the explosion was the result of a car bomb, but officials had not ruled out the possibility the blast was the result of a natural gas explosion. Saudi Arabia, U.S. State Department and Pentagon officials said the three-story building is used by U.S. military and civilian personnel. The office building was the headquarters of the Office for Program Management of the Saudi Arabian National Guard (OPM-SANG), and a mix of U.S. military and contract workers worked there. Witnesses said chaos reigned right after the blast. Bystanders helped to load bleeding casualties into cars to be taken to hospitals, and a hospital spokesperson in Riyadh described a stream of people coming in with severe burns. "A huge explosion shook our building," a Riyadh resident said. "It was like an earthquake." A group called The Islamic Movement for Change took responsibility. Recall that Saudi Arabia was the launching point for the U.S.-led multinational military force that drove Iraq's occupation troops from Kuwait in the 1991 Gulf War. But the U.S. military training mission in Saudi Arabia was unrelated to the troops stationed there in the aftermath of the Gulf War.(30)

Attack in Al-Khubar Attack of June 1996

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On June 25, 1996, al-Qaeda launched an attack in a housing complex in the city of Khobar, Saudi Arabia, located near the national oil company (Saudi Aramco) headquarters of Dhahran. At that time Khobar Towers were being used as quarters for foreign military personnel. A powerful truck-bomb was detonated adjacent to building number 131, an eight-story structure housing United States Air Force personnel from the 4404th Wing (Provisional), primarily from a deployed rescue squadron and a deployed fighter squadron. In all, 19 U.S. servicemen were killed and 498  people of many nationalities were wounded. Bin Laden himself stated in a 1997 interview, “Only Americans were killed in the explosions. No Saudi suffered any injury. When I got the news about these blasts, I was very happy.”(31)

In June 2001, a United States federal grand jury charged 13 Saudis and a Lebanese man in the Khobar Towers bombing. Iranian officials were also implicated, but none were identified or charged. The United States does not have an extradition treaty with Saudi Arabia, so it would fall to Saudi Arabia to try the accused. In June 2002, Saudi Arabian officials announced that the kingdom had sentenced some of the people it had arrested for the bombing, but did not say how many, nor specify what their sentences were. Then the September 11, 2001 attacks, having been so carefully planned, fueled speculation that al Qaeda had also bombed the Khobar Towers. Subsequent investigations by U.S. intelligence have shown that representatives of bin Laden sought out Iranian intelligence agents in the mid-1990's in an attempt to cultivate an anti-American terrorism alliance. It is now believed that the bombing of the Khobar Towers may have been the work of al Qaeda. After all, Osama bin Laden's main goals included chasing American forces out of the Arabian Peninsula – a place considered sacred by some extremists because the faith was founded there. Hitting the American military in the Khobar Towers would have been consistent with that goal.(32)

Bin Laden’s War Against the U.S. in August 1996

In August 1996, Osama Bin Laden issued “A declaration of war” against the U.S. “The U.S. today has set a double standard, calling whoever goes against its injustice a terrorist,” bin Laden complained. "It wants to occupy our countries, steal our resources, impose agents on us to rule us ... and wants us to agree to all these. If we refuse to do so, it will say, 'You are terrorists.' ” He also said “Terrifying an innocent person and terrorizing him is objectionable and unjust, also unjustly terrorizing people is not right. Whereas, terrorizing oppressors and criminals and thieves and robbers is necessary for the safety of people and for the protection of their property.... The terrorism we practice is of the commendable kind. (33)

Osama bin Laden's first fatwa, "Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places," targeted the United States and Israel, was 30 pages long, and published in a London newspaper called Al Quds al Arabi. The central premise of this fatwa is that "the people of Islam had suffered from aggression, iniquity, and injustice imposed on them by the Zionist-Crusaders alliance and their collaborators." He chronicles the various "injustices" and concludes that, "It is no longer possible to be quiet. It is not acceptable to give a blind eye to this matter." Bin Laden said that there is "no more important duty than pushing the American enemy out of the holy land,"and he calls on his Muslim brothers to concentrate on "destroying, fighting and killing the

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enemy until, by the Grace of Allah, it is completely defeated." He warns fellow Jihadists that, due to "the imbalance of power between our armed forces and the enemy forces, a suitable means of fighting must be adopted i.e. using fast moving light forces that work under complete secrecy." At the end of the fatwa, Osama bin Laden urges all Muslim brothers to "take part in fighting against the enemy -- your enemy and their enemy -- the Americans and the Israelis. They are asking you to do whatever you can, with one's own means and ability, to expel the enemy, humiliated and defeated, out of the sanctities of Islam."(34)

In January 1998, Ayman al-Zawahiri, leader of Jihad group in Egypt and al Qaeda second-in-command, began writing a draft of a formal declaration that would unite all of the different Mujahideen groups that had gathered in Afghanistan under a single banner. It would turn the movement away from regional conflicts and toward a global Islamic jihad against America. The language was measured and concise, in comparison with bin Laden's declaration of war two years before. Zawahiri cited three grievances against the Americans. First, the continuing presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia seven years after the end of the first Gulf War. "If some people have formerly debated the fact of the occupation, all the people of the peninsula have now acknowledged it," he observed. Second, America's intention to destroy Iraq, as evidenced by the death of what he said was more than a million civilians. Third, the American goal of propping up Israel by incapacitating the Arab states, whose weakness and disunion are Israel’s only guarantee of survival.”(35)

The second fatwa was published on February 23, 1998, in Al Quds al Arabi. Unlike the first fatwa, which was issued by bin Laden alone, this fatwa was signed by Osama bin Laden; Ayman al-Zawahiri; Abu-Yasir Rafa'l Ahmad Taha, leader of the Islamic Group; Sheikh Mir Hamzah, secretary of the Jumiat-ut-Ulema-e-Pakistan; and Fazlul Rahman, leader of the Jihad Movement in Bangladesh. The fatwa reasons that "three facts that are known to everyone" compel war against the United States. First, the United States has been "occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places." Second, the "Crusader-Zionist alliance" has inflicted great devastation upon the Iraqi people. Third, the United States' goal is "to serve the Jews' petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there." It concludes with instructions to Muslims everywhere: the ruling to kill the Americans and their allies -- civilians and military -- is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it.... [E]very Muslim who believes in God and wishes to be rewarded is to comply with God's order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it.(36)

Attacks in Kenya & Tanzania of August 1998

On August 7, 1998, Al-Qaeda launched a terrorist attack against the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya. 224 people were killed, including 12 Americans. Approximately 4,650 more were wounded. The bomb in Nairobi was delivered in a truck to the rear entrance of the embassy and exploded at about 10:35 a.m. local time. The back of the five-story embassy was severely damaged and a building adjacent to the embassy was leveled.

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On the same day, there was another terrorist attack in Dar Es Salaam in Tanzania. A total of ten people were killed, all Tanzanians employed by the U.S. Embassy. The bomb at Dar es Salaam went off at about 10:40 a.m. local time. It severely damaged the southeastern corner of the three-story embassy building.

On November 4, 1998, a federal grand jury in New York City issued a 238-count indictment against Osama bin Laden, charging him in the August bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. Twenty other al Qaeda members were also named in the indictment. Bin Laden allegedly had planned and financed the attacks, which were then carried out by his followers. Bin Laden was also placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List. He eventually was killed in a military operation in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in May 2011. Abu Anas al Libi, one of the indicted, was captured on October 5, 2013, in Tripoli, Libya.

The bombings would be to the scale of bin Laden's seemingly lunatic declaration of war on the United States, and the suicide of the bombers would provide a scanty moral cover for operations intended to murder as many people as possible, to satisfy those who might question this action. In this, al-Qaeda was also unusual. Death on a grand scale was now a goal in itself. Why attempt to spare innocent lives, since the concept of innocence was subtracted from al Qaeda's calculations? Although the Quran specifically forbids killing women and children, one of the reasons the embassy in Kenya was targeted was that the death of the female American ambassador, Prudence Bushnell, would garner more publicity. “Osama bin Laden initially said that the sites had been targeted because of the "invasion" of Somalia; then he described an American plan to partition Sudan, which he said was hatched in the embassy in Nairobi. He also told his followers that the genocide in Rwanda had been planned inside the two American embassies.” This was bin Laden’s reasoning for the embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.(37)

Attack against USS Cole in Yemen of October 2000In October 12, 2000, Al-Qaeda attacked a U.S. ship USS Cole in Yemen. While

refueling at a port in Aden, Yemen, the U.S. Navy destroyer Cole was attacked by two suicide bombers navigating a small motorboat full of explosives. The explosion ripped a hole in the hull of the ship, killing 17 U.S. sailors. Thirty-nine others were injured. On December 2000 - Yemeni officials arrest suspects Fahd al-Quso and Jamal al-Badawi. Additionally, U.S. and Yemeni officials identify Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri as a key figure in the bombing. The attack was later attributed to a cell within the al-Qaeda network; it had been supervised by Osama bin Laden. The Cole bombing alerted Americans of the reality of terrorism, though, even when the connection to al-Qaeda was established, the threat represented by the al-Qaeda network remained generally underestimated. The ship, which was carrying a crew of 293, was en route to the Persian Gulf to help enforce an oil embargo against Iraq. Though the port in Aden had once been off-limits to U.S. ships as a safety measure, it had been reopened both because of, and to help further, improved U.S.-Yemen relations. The day of the bombing, U.S. President Bill Clinton said in a statement, “If, as it now appears, this was an act of terrorism, it was a despicable and cowardly act.” The attack represented the first major international terrorist attack on a U.S. facility since

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the 1998 bombings of the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the deadliest against a U.S. Naval vessel since the USS Stark came under Iraqi attack in 1987.(38)

In the days after the attack, President Clinton vowed retribution against the terrorists. “You will not find a safe harbor,” he proclaimed. “We will find you and justice will prevail. But in his final months in office, Clinton never retaliated against al-Qaeda, frustrating some of his own counterterrorism advisors. Clinton later told the 9/11 commission he was never shown hard proof that Osama bin Laden’s operatives were behind the attack.   

On January 9, 2001 The Department of Defense issues a report on the USS Cole attack which finds significant shortcomings in security against terrorist attacks. On January 19, 2001, the results of a Navy investigation are released, concluding that the incident could not have been prevented. On March 1, 2001, Al-Jazeera broadcasts Osama bin Laden reading a poem mentioning the attack. ''In Aden, the young man stood up for holy war and destroyed a destroyer feared by the powerful.'' On June 2001 - A video circulates showing followers of Osama bin Laden training in Afghanistan and singing, "We thank God for granting us victory the day we destroyed Cole in the sea." Those communications were first mentioned in a little noticed footnote in the 9/11 commission report. But NBC News obtained from the National Archives newly declassified notes of commission staffers who were given access to verbatim copies of the internal emails sent by two top White House counterterrorism officials, Roger Cressey, former Director of Transnational Threats, and his boss Richard Clarke, the chief counter-terrorism advisor under Clinton who stayed in the same job during the early years of the Bush presidency. Those notes, which include extensive quotes directly from the emails, reveal how Cressey, who is now an NBC News terrorism analyst, and Clarke repeatedly tried to get the attention of top Bush White House officials to bin Laden’s role in the attack to prod them to approve a new, more aggressive strategy aimed at striking back at al-Qaeda. But those warnings were all but ignored until the attacks of September 11th.(39)  

Directly after the bombing, citizens of the USA found out about the realities of terrorism. A terrorist cell within the group called the Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for the crime. A certain Osama Bin Laden was leading it. Sadly, the group was gravely underestimated then. The suicide attack was a deadly wake-up call for the Navy. They needed to reevaluate and work on improved force protection, shipboard equipment, damage-control training, mass-casualty response, and intelligence sharing. Now, more than a decade after, there has been a great amount of advancement in force protection. Everything from personnel requirements to logistics have been modified and training itself has stepped up and received a complete overhaul. The USA has gone through its share of tragic terrorist attacks. While most could have been prevented, bombings like the one on the USS Cole served as a catalyst that spurred a much-needed revamp of how the USA Navy handled anti-terrorism measures. Some, however, might think it a case of 'too little, too late.'(40)

More weird stuff to go with all the other weird stuff regarding U.S. government actions and policy prior to and after the USS Cole bombing. The story here is that starting in 1999 and for nearly a year, Polish intelligence gave the CIA information on an impending al Qaeda attack on a U.S. warship. The CIA investigated and didn’t find any corroborating evidence, and downplayed the likelihood of an attack to the Poles. Then al

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Qaeda blew up the USS Cole in the port of Aden. So what happened, the CIA missed it, despite the Polish intelligence and NSA’s constant surveillance of the Yemen hub? And then in the aftermath, the CIA withheld information on the suspects including two in the U.S. who turned out to be 9/11 hijackers. The more you look at the Cole, the less it makes sense. Makowski—who spent 20 years in the Polish espionage service and rose to the rank of colonel—also blames the CIA for the suicide bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000, which claimed the lives of 17 American sailors. “Beginning in 1999, for almost a year, we started giving information that bin Laden had made a decision to prepare an operation to attack U.S. warships in the Gulf,” Makowski told McClatchy. “There was a 27 person team… We told them who its leader was, his passport number [and] his Dubai identity card.” About three months before the attack, according to Makowski, the CIA said they thought “such an attack is impossible.” Gutman notes that Makowski’s former colleague Gromoslaw Czempinski—a legend at the CIA for leading the rescue of six U.S. intelligence officers from Iraq in 1990—vouched for his story.(41)

U.S. mistakes and lessons to be learned

U.S. policies were sometimes reactions to certain events and circumstances, and there were no strategic policies. That is very clear in the area of U.S. policies regarding counterterrorism, Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden's activities.

When the U.S. faced the Cold War after the World War II and the spread of communism in the Middle East and Muslim countries, it supported some Islamic secret movements on the basis that these movements could counter Communism.

The U.S. also thought that Islamic leaders in these Islamic Secret organizations are able to influence their nations more than the government and regimes which ruled Muslim nations.

For instance, since the 1950s, United States governments including the Obama Administration have secretly struck up alliances with the Muslim Brotherhood or its affiliated groups. U.S. leaders consider the Muslim Brotherhood as a useful organization who could help the U.S. to fight communism and achieve U.S. objectives. However the Muslim Brotherhood uses their relationship with the US government to achieve their own objectives.

U.S. leaders have decided that the Brotherhood could be useful and tried to bend it to America’s goals, and each time, maybe not surprisingly, the only party that clearly has benefitted has been the Brotherhood. However the Americans are unaware of this outcome because of a mixture of wishful thinking and a nation obsession with secrecy which covered extensive dealings with the Muslim Brotherhood.

Since its establishment in 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood was the womb for all fundamental and extreme movements in the Muslim World. Many Muslim Brotherhood leaders adopted an ideology of considering the Jews and the Christians as infidels and enemies of Islam. This is how they have justified killing Jews and Christians.

Moreover, some of these leaders considered that Muslims who are not practicing Islamic rituals such as saying prayers, fasting the holy month of Ramadhan, wearing veils

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for women are apostate and infidels. This is how they have justified killing these Muslims and confiscating their properties and money.

Previously, the U.S. followed the same policy to fight the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. The U.S. government supported the Islamic Movement, Afghan Mujahideen and Osama bin Laden with money, training and weapons to fight the Soviet forces in Afghanistan.

By the mid-1980s, Osama bin Laden and his mentor Abdullah Azzam jointly founded a charity front based in Pakistan which is called Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK) (which means “services office”) and is also known as Al-Kifah (which means “struggle”). Branches start to open in the U.S., the first one apparently opens in Tucson, Arizona but another branch was opened in Brooklyn, New York, and it soon becomes the most important U.S. branch.(42) 

On December 29, 1987, three men, Mustafa Shalabi, Fawaz Damra, and Ali Shinawy, formally file papers incorporating Al-Kifah, which is called the Al-Kifah Refugee Center. At first, it is located inside the Al Farouq mosque, which is led by Damra. But eventually it will get it own office space next to the mosque. Shalabi, a naturalized citizen from Egypt, runs the office with two assistants: Mahmud Abouhalima, who will later be convicted for a role in bombing the World Trade Center in 1993, and El Sayyid Nosair, who will assassinate a Jewish leader in New York in 1990.(43)

Bin Laden’s mentor Abdullah Azzam was a regular visitor to New York around this time. And a popular lecturer in the area. In 1988, he told a crowd of several hundred in Jersey City, ‘Blood and martyrdom are the only way to create a Muslim society.… However, humanity won’t allow us to achieve this objective, because all humanity is the enemy of every Muslim.’(44) Ayman Al-Zawahiri, future Al-Qaeda second in command, makes a recruiting trip to the office in 1989.(45) Shaikh Omar Abdul-Rahman, better known as the “Blind Sheikh,” was closely linked to bin Laden. In 1990, he moves to New York on another CIA-supported visa and soon dominates the Al-Kifah Refugee Center.(46)

In many cases, The Pakistani Intelligence Services (ISI) had created, trained, and equipped al Qaeda and other militant jihadist groups.” The U.S. provided funding to ISI during the Soviet occupation. Osama bin Laden led many of the young men who joined the Arab-Afghan army, funded by the ISI, to fight the Soviets out of Afghanistan. This was at the beginning of when bin Laden became proactive in his war against America. “Among dozens of competing potential beneficiaries, seven political parties had been designated by the United States and Saudi Arabia as worthy recipients of the hundreds of millions of dollars they poured into the war against the Soviets. Sayyaf's Islamic Union was at the head of the pack.” Kalid Shaikh Mohammed (KSM) worked for the Islamic Union’s newspaper and taught engineering at Abu Sayyaf’s university Dawa’a al-Jihad. Essentially, the U.S. played a role in funding KSM’s livelihood while he was young. (47)

Mistakes in U.S. Policy

Declassified documents show the frustrations of top White House counterterrorism officials over the U.S. failure to respond to al-Qaeda’s October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole despite evidence that Osama bin Laden was reading poetry

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about the murderous attack and publicly taking credit for it. The lack of U.S. response to the Cole attack — under both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush — has re-emerged as a painful issue, as crew and family members gather at the U.S. naval base in Norfolk, Va., to mark the 10th anniversary of the bombing. But two senior investigators — one with the FBI and another with the Naval Criminal Investigative Task Force — almost immediately told NBC News there was actually compelling evidence that al-Qaeda was responsible for the bombing. Two of the Cole bombers arrested by Yemeni security forces confessed their role and told investigators they were working for two top al-Qaeda operatives known to U.S. intelligence — information that was quickly made available to FBI and naval investigative agents. “Within two weeks, we had significant information (that) we felt … was solid evidence that the attack was linked not only to al-Qaida but to Osama bin Laden,” said Mark Fallon, chief of the U.S. Navy Investigative Task Force, in an exclusive interview with NBC News. By January, after those confessions were verified in questioning by FBI agent Ali Soufan, the case against bin Laden and al-Qaeda was “rock solid,” Fallon added.

If there were any lingering doubts before Clinton left office in late January 2001, they were erased in the early days of Bush’s presidency. In their first months in office, Bush administration officials ignored repeated assertions from White House counterterrorism officials that bin Laden was taking credit for the bombing and using it as a propaganda and recruitment tool, the newly obtained documents show.(48)

President Bush believed that it was clear that the terrorists and Al-Qaeda had interpreted the United States' lack of a serious response to the terrorist attacks before 9/11 as a sign of weakness and an invitation to attempt more broad attacks. Al-Qaeda also considered the U.S. withdrawal of military forces from Saudi Arabia as another sign of weakness.

Also President Bush believed that the reason for terrorist attacks were linked to an assumption that the terrorist group could withstand the retaliation of the U.S., as it was not considered serious in the past. Bush makes clear that it is necessary to send a message and not take small measures. That is why Bush did not only call for airstrikes on the Taliban he also called for troops on the ground and creating a new state with a new government in Afghanistan.

President Bush wrote “After al Qaeda killed nearly three thousand people in the United States, it was clear the terrorists had interpreted our lack of a serious response as a sign of weakness and an invitation to attempt more brazen attacks. Al Qaeda messages frequently cited our withdrawals as evidence that Americans were, in the words of bin Laden, “paper tigers” who could be forced to “run in less than twenty-four hours.”(49)

Saddam Hussein also had the same way of the thinking. He used to say that Americans have no guts to fight and the U.S. is a paper tiger. The reason is that after Saddam’s invasion to Kuwait in August 1990 and during the second Gulf War to liberate Kuwait in 1991, President Bush stopped short of removing Saddam from power.

The Kuwaiti Ambassador to the UK, Kahled Al-Duwaisan, invited me to attend a meeting in London to celebrate the liberation of Kuwait. At the meeting, President Bush talked. He said that he decided to stop the war without removing Saddam’s regime for three reasons (date?). One is the United Nations' mandate was to liberate Kuwait and not

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to remove Saddam’s regime. Second is that if they had gone to Baghdad, the coalition which they built to liberate Kuwait would disintegrate, and Arab armies that participated in liberating Kuwait such as Egyptian, Syrian, Saudi and Qatari forces will refuse to remove Saddam’s regime. The third was that if they had gone to Baghdad, Saddam’s forces would fight back and there would have been U.S. causalities.

I was invited to Washington in August 2002 as part of a six-member Iraqi Opposition delegation and we had meetings with Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and all other high ranking U.S. officials except President Bush, who was in Texas.

During our meeting with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, he asked many questions about Saddam’s power and his forces and about the Iraqi people and whether they are armed or not. However the most important question for him was whether there would be fierce resistance by Saddam’s forces of U.S. forces surrounded Baghdad. Our answer was that Saddam’s forces would collapse because they were fed up with Saddam and his hostile policies and wars with neighboring countries, the UN, the West and the international community, which had been going on since 1980.

Part of Saddam's propaganda machine and psychological war against the United States and its Allies was the assertion that American troops would die at the gates of Baghdad. The U.S. army prepared ten thousand body bags but they did not have any casualties until Saddam’s regime collapsed, as we expected.

On March 2, 2001, Roger Cressey, former Director of Transnational Threats sent an email to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and her deputy, Steve Hadley, titled “re: Bin Laden on the USS Cole.” The email reported that at a wedding reception for his son at a camp known as Tarnak Farm in Afghanistan (and broadcast on Al Jazeera), bin Laden had “read (a) new poem … about the Cole attack.” In another email to Hadley on March 22, pushing him about the need for a new aggressive strategy against al-Qaeda, Cressey wrote: “The investigation continues on the law enforcement side, but we know all we need to about who did the (Cole) attack to make a policy decision.” Two days later, Clark emailed national security officials reporting that Yemen’s prime minister  had briefed the State Department’s top counterterrorism adviser about his country’s investigation into the attack. Titled “Yemen’s View on the USS Cole,” the email quoted the Yemeni prime minister as saying “We are not saying publicly, we are being very careful, but we believe 99 percent that it’s (bin Laden).” That same day, Cressey emailed Rice and Hadley and identified Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, known to investigators as al-Qaida’s  “maritime commander,” as a “Cole  plotter” who had gone “underground.”And on June 21, Clarke wrote yet another email entitled “Al Qida (sic) Video claims responsibility for Cole attack.” The email reported that a 90-minute video showing footage of the Cole attack had “surfaced” in the Gulf. One of the quotes on the video, according to Clarke’s email: “Thanks to Allah for the victory on the day we destroyed the Cole.”(50)

Roger Cressey, former Director of Transnational Threats, and his boss Richard Clarke were pushing for a full-fledged military and diplomatic response aimed at forcing the Taliban government in Afghanistan to cease giving al-Qaida a safe haven. “DOD should be ready to hit Taliban command/control, terrorist infrastructure (tunnels,

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bunkers),” Clarke wrote in a June 30, 2001 email to top national security officials.  "The argument we in our office were trying to make is that, this should not be forgotten," Cressey said in an interview when asked about the newly declassified emails. "Bin Laden issues a videotape, he reads a poem ... he's rubbing it in our faces. He's directly challenging the United States and he's gloating about it. ... And so what we were trying to do was to tee up this issue for a decision and to say, 'let's make a choice. Do we respond? Do we hold these people accountable? ... We owe that to the families of those who lost their loved ones in the Cole." But just as the Cole slipped off the agenda during the late days of the Clinton administration, it fell by the wayside during the early days of the Bush presidency. "We would have meetings at the (White House) counterterrorism security group where we would talk about the Cole. But that really was preaching to the choir. ... We would then bump it up — and inevitably it would run into other issues."There was the policy review on Afghanistan and Pakistan. There was the issue of how to negotiate possibly with the Taliban — to try and persuade them to remove bin Laden, extradite him to the United States. There were the other issues of China, Russia, arms control, the Middle East peace process. And as you saw how the new administration, like any administration, comes in to pursue their policy agenda, something like the USS Cole gets pushed further and further down … the list." Rice, now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, declined through a spokeswoman to comment on the declassified emails.(51)

The issue of how to negotiate with the Taliban reminds me of a meeting I had in London with a U.S. official in charge of Iraqi files in the State Department, who I met in London in June 2001; he told me that the Bush Administration was reviewing its policy towards Saddam’s regime in Iraq and that the conclusion of the review could be increasing the pressure against Saddam’s regime or could be to ease that pressure—to improve U.S relations with Saddam’s regime. He added if it were up to him he would like to see the U.S. tighten the pressure against Saddam but said it is an administration decision and not a personal one. When I asked him: “When we could know the result of the review?” He said July and August are the months of summer holidays and he will come back to London in September to tell me the result of the review. In September—on the 11th—the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center took place, and everything changed. The U.S. policy shifted from containment of Saddam’s regime to change of the regime and the U.S. military doctrine changed from deterrence for Saddam’s regime to pre-emptive strike. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfield wrote, “Just as there is no single successful model of management in business, there is no single correct model or approach for a president to lead the NSC.” I think the same can be said about terrorism, and I think that’s what we’re struggling with. There are so many terrorist groups out there – though they seem to come from the same region, they’re all different in some ways. So to fight different groups, we need different approaches. Unfortunately, the only thing that seems to help is trial and error. Lives are at stake here so the trial and error method doesn’t sound like a plan anyone would want to adopt.(52)

Condoleezza Rice told the 9/11 Commission that “there was never a formal, recorded decision not to retaliate specifically for the Cole attack,” according to the commission’s report. “Exchanges with the president” and among his top national security advisers “had

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produced a consensus that ‘tit for tat’ responses were likely to be counterproductive,” the panel’s report quoted Rice as saying. Then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told the panel that “too much time had passed” for the Bush administration to respond to the attack and Paul Wolfowitz, deputy defense secretary, thought the Cole attack was “stale,” the 9/11 commission said. Hadley had said the administration’s “real response” would be a new more aggressive strategy against al-Qaida — one that had yet to be approved prior to the attack on 9/11. The failure by both the Clinton and Bush administrations to respond had consequences in the fateful months before 9/11 — and some of them resonate today amid new evidence that al-Qaeda’s Yemeni affiliate is resurgent and threatening new attacks on the U.S. homeland.  “The attacks on the USS Cole galvanized al-Qaeda’s recruitment efforts,” concluded the 9/11 commission. The propaganda video that bin Laden instructed be made about the bombing was widely distributed in the Arab world and struck a nerve, causing “many extremists to travel to Afghanistan for training and jihad.” Cressey agrees that the Cole bombing emboldened bin Laden and places the blame on both the Clinton and the Bush administrations. "Think about the optics," he said, "You had a billion dollar warship nearly sunk, with 17 Americans killed. You had the United States not doing anything publicly about it. Bin Laden and al-Qaeda were able to issue a series of videotapes crowing about their achievement. So, if I'm an impressionable young man who aspires to conduct jihad, and I see what al-Qaeda did and they weren't held responsible, hell yeah, I'm going to go toward them. And that, in effect, is what happened."(53) 

U.S. Intelligence Mistakes

Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 terrorist attack against the World Trade Center, arrived illegally in the United States on September 1, 1992, and was holding a false passport with the name Abdul Basit Mahmoud Abdul Karim. He was traveling separately. Ajaj tried to enter with a forged Swedish passport, though it had been altered and thus raised suspicions among INS officials at John F. Kennedy International Airport. When officials put Ajaj through secondary inspection, they discovered bomb making instructions and other materials in his luggage, and arrested him. Yousef tried to enter with a false Iraqi passport, claiming political asylum. Yousef was allowed into the United States, and was given a hearing date.

Ramzi Yousef had stowed most of his materials, including the bomb recipes, in Ajaj's bag. Questioned about the lack of a visa, he immediately admitted the passport was not his, gave his real name, and requested political asylum. The immigration holding facility was full, so he was assigned a court date and released on his own recognisance. He took a taxi to New Jersey, went to a mosque, and soon recruited a makeshift crew to assist him in blowing up the World Trade Center.”??? He slipped away from immigration even after traveling with someone who had bomb recipes and diagrams. He later planted a truck bomb in the World Trade Center. .(54)

The question is, why couldn't the U.S. get Yasin after he fled to Iraq? Why couldn't U.S. forces find him after the invasion of Iraq in 2003? Why couldn't U.S. Intelligence find Yasin, even though his mother and brother lived in the United States?

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There was information that Abdul Rahman Yasin was fighting American troops in Iraq with the leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq Abo Musaab Al-Zarqawi until al-Zarqawi's death in a U.S. air raid on June 7, 2006.

In August 1993, CIA analyst Gina Bennett, while working at the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, the small intelligence shop inside the State Department, had authored a paper that was the first warning of the threat posed by a man named "Osama Bin Ladin," who was "enabling hundreds of jihadists and training even more" in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan and Yemen. She also fingered him as the possible sponsor of the bombing of the World Trade Center on February 26, 1993, an attack that killed six and was the first time that a group of Islamist terrorists had struck in the United States. Bennett wrote an analytic assessment that same year noting that bin Laden had "established an organization called al-Qa'ida in the 1980s." This was many years before the name of bin Laden’s terrorist group became public and was a term that was then unknown even to many of the foot soldiers in his training camps.” (55)

After the terrorist attack of Al-Qaeda on USS Cole in Yemen on October 12, 2000, the FBI, Defense Department, and Navy launched investigations to determine culpability for the attack and to review procedures. A broad DoD review of accountability was conducted by a special panel. On January 9, 2001, the panel issued its report which avoided assigning blame but found significant shortcomings in security against terrorist attacks, including inadequate training and intelligence. On January 23, 2001, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman, John Warner, announced intentions for the Committee to hold its own investigation. Issues for Congress include the adequacy of (1) procedures by U.S. forces to protect against terrorist attacks; (2) intelligence related to potential terrorist attacks; and (3) U.S. anti-terrorism policy and response. This report will be updated if major new developments warrant. (56)

Former Polish spy Alexander Makowski wrote a book in 2012, “Ferreting out bin Laden.” Published in Poland, but not yet available in English, the book offers previously unknown details about how the United States missed warning signs of the deadliest foreign attack ever on U.S. soil. It is told from the perspective of an allied intelligence service whose specialty is human intelligence – recruiting and running agents – not the technological monitoring that’s considered the U.S.’s strength….The bin Laden mission was not the only missed opportunity that Makowski highlights. He also blames the CIA for the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000, which claimed the lives of 17 American sailors. “Beginning in 1999, for almost a year, we (Poland) started giving information that bin Laden had made a decision to prepare an operation to attack U.S. warships in the Gulf,” Makowski told McClatchy. “We started supplying details. There was a 27-person team, the command was divided and it was based in Dubai. We told them who its leader was, his passport number, his Dubai identity card and that they were preparing to attack a U.S. warship,” he said. At first the CIA asked for more information. But after seven or eight months of reporting, the agency wrote back that “the information is interesting, but ….. such an attack is impossible,” Makowski said. Three months later, the Cole was attacked as it was anchored in port in Yemen. “To me, the most appalling thing is that after we supplied all this information about an attack on a warship in the Gulf, the Cole wasn’t protected in any way,” Makowski said. The CIA has not commented as yet on the book or on Makowski’s assertions.(57)

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There were some American officials who did see the larger strategic picture. Five days into the new Bush administration, on January 25, 2001 Richard Clarke wrote to National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice that a cabinet-level review of al-Qaeda policy was "urgently" needed. Attached to the memo was a paper titled "Strategy for Eliminating the Threat from the Jihadist Networks of al Qida (sic).” (The strategy that Clarke had outlined in the memo to Rice was essentially the same one that President Bush finally adopted after 9/11.) This was the strategy of sending drones to take out leaders, massive support to Afghan Northern Alliance headed by the late Afghan leader Ahmed Shah Massoud, U.S. Special Forces to destroy the Taliban and terrorist training camps, and making a deal with Uzbekistan to base drones there. (58)

*Ambassador Hamid Al-BayatiDistinguished Adjunct Professor, Fordham UniversitySpecial Advisor, Middle East Office of International Education, Fairleigh Dickinson University Permanent Representative of Iraq to the United Nations (2006-2013)

References

1- Ottoman Empire (1301-1922), BBC

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http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/islam/history/ottomanempire_1.shtml

2- Matthew W. William, THE BRITISH EXPERIENCE IN IRAQ FROM 1914-1926: WHAT WISDOM CAN THE UNITED STATES DRAW FROM ITS EXPERIENCE?

file:///C:/Users/MacBookAir/Downloads/ADA429024%20 (1).pdf

3- Ian Johnson, Washington’s Secret History with the Muslim Brotherhood

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/feb/05/washingtons-secret-history-muslim-brotherhood/

4-Robert Siegel, Sayyid Qutb's America, Al Qaeda Inspiration Denounced U.S. Greed, Sexuality, NPR, May 06, 2003

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1253796

5-Wright, Lawrence, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. New York: Knopf, 2006. P52, Print.

6-For the history of the Near East see Professor M.E.Yapp, The Making of The Modern Near East 1792-1923. Longman Group UK Limited, England 1987.

7-A Biography of Osama Bin Laden, Frontline, PBS,

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/binladen/who/bio.html

8-Wright, Lawrence, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. New York: Knopf, 2006. p 78, Print.

9-OSAMA BIN LADEN, History.

http://www.history.com/topics/osama-bin-laden

10- Wright, Lawrence. The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. New York: Knopf, 2006. p 235, Print.

11-Bergen, Peter L. Manhunt: The Ten-year Search for Bin Laden: From 9/11 to Abbottabad. New York: Crown, 2012. Print p81.

12-NEWSWEEK, OCTOBER 1, 2001

http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a111395truck&scale=2#a111395truck

13- INDEPENDENT, NOVEMBER 1, 1998

http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a111395truck&scale=2#a111395truck

14 - Donald Rumsfield, Known and Unknown A memoir, Penguin Group, New York, 2010, Page 16, Print.

15- Douglas Feith, War and Decision, Harper Collins Publisher, 2008, p 19, Print.

16- McDermott, Terry, and Josh Meyer. 2012, The Hunt for KSM: Inside the Pursuit and Takedown of the Real 9/11 Mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. New York, NY: Little, Brown and, 2012. p4

17-Wright, Lawrence, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. New York: Knopf, 2006. p142

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18-Ibid p 107

19-Ibid p195

20- Profile: Osama bin Laden, Council on Foreign Relations.

http://www.cfr.org/terrorist-leaders/profile-osama-bin-laden/p9951#p10

21-Al-Qaeda Timeline, Plots and attacks. NBC News.

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/4677978/ns/world_news-hunt_for_al_qaida/t/al-qaida-timeline-plots-attacks/#.U2wZh4FdVcU

22- Seth Cline, The 1993 World Trade Center Bombing: A New Threat Emerges, US news, Feb. 26, 2013.

http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/press-past/2013/02/26/the-1993-world-trade-center-bombing-a-new-threat-emerges

23-February 26, 1993, This day in History 1993 World Trade Center bombed, History Channel.

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/world-trade-center-bombed

24- CBS, The Man who Got Away, 60 Minutes.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-the-man-who-got-away/

25-1993 World Trade Center Bombing, Fast Facts, CNN Library

http://www.cnn.com/2013/11/05/us/1993-world-trade-center-bombing-fast-facts/

26- John S. Brown, The United State Army in Somalia 1992-1994

http://www.history.army.mil/brochures/Somalia/Somalia.htm

27- James Gordon Meek, Black Hawk Down' Anniversary: Al Qaeda's October 4, 2013, ABC News. 

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/black-hawk-anniversary-al-qaedas-hidden- hand/ story?id=20462820

28- Wright, Lawrence. The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. New York: Knopf, 2006. Print. p266

29-November 13, 1995: Al-Qaeda Bombing in Saudi Arabia, US Realizes Bin Laden Is More than Financier

http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a111395truck&scale=1#a111395truck

30-Ambassador: Car bomb destroyed military building, Six dead, 60 injured, November 13, 1995 http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/9511/saudi_blast/11am/

31-Al-Qaeda Timeline, Plots and attacks. NBC News.

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/4677978/ns/world_news-hunt_for_al_qaida/t/al-qaida-timeline-plots-attacks/#.VT5PwdLBzGc

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32-Al Qaeda Is Now Suspected in 1996 Bombing of Barracks, May 14, 2003

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/14/world/al-qaeda-is-now-suspected-in-1996-bombing-of-barracks.html

33-Wright, Lawrence, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. New York: Knopf, 2006. P 247, 263

34-Al-Qaeda: Declarations & Acts of War, Heritage Foundation

http://www.heritage.org/research/projects/enemy-detention/al-qaeda-declarations

35-Wright, Lawrence, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. New York: Knopf, 2006. p260

36-Al-Qaeda: Declarations & Acts of War, Heritage Foundation

http://www.heritage.org/research/projects/enemy-detention/al-qaeda-declarations

37-Wright, Lawrence. The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. New York: Knopf, 2006. Print. p 271, 272.

38-The USS Cole is towed away from the port city of Aden, Yemen, into open sea on Oct. 29, 2000.

http://www.911memorial.org/uss-cole-bombin

39-Declassified docs show U.S. officials urged Clinton, Bush to strike al-Qaida

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/39622062/ns/us_news-security/t/us-failure-retaliate-uss-cole-attack-rankled-then-now/#.U2wxH4FdVc

40-THE AFTERMATH OF THE DEADLIEST ATTACK AGAINST THE USS Cole

http://www.searchusapeople.com/blog/The-Aftermath-of-the-Deadliest-Attack-against-the-USS-Cole.php

41-Polish Intel Warning to CIA on USS Cole attack was ignored: top Polish spy.

Filed under: USS Cole, Yemen, Jane Novak, September 6, 2012.

http://armiesofliberation.com/archives/2012/09/06/polish-intel-warning-to-cia-on-uss-cole-attack-was-ignored-top-polish-spy/

42-NEW YORK TIMES, 10/22/1998; BURR AND COLLINS, 2006, PP. 269-270  

http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a111395truck&scale=2#a111395truck

43- NEW YORK TIMES, 4/11/1993; NEWSWEEK, 10/1/2001;CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER, 11/4/2001

http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a111395truck&scale=2#a111395truck

44-NEW YORK MAGAZINE, 3/17/1995

http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a111395truck&scale=2#a111395truck

45-NEW YORKER, 9/9/2002

http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a111395truck&scale=2#a111395truck

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46-NEW YORK TIMES, 10/22/1998

http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a111395truck&scale=2#a111395truck

47-McDermott, Terry, and Josh Meyer. 2012, The Hunt for KSM: Inside the Pursuit and Takedown of the Real 9/11 Mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. New York, NY: Little, Brown and, 2012. pp4, 36

48-Declassified docs show U.S. officials urged Clinton, Bush to strike al-Qaida

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/39622062/ns/us_news-security/t/us-failure-retaliate-uss-cole-attack-rankled-then-now/#.U2wxH4FdVcU

49-George Bush Decision Points, Page 191

50-Declassified docs show U.S. officials urged Clinton, Bush to strike al-Qaida

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/39622062/ns/us_news-security/t/us-failure-retaliate-uss-cole-attack-rankled-then-now/#.U2wxH4FdVcU

51- Ibid.

52- Donald Rumsfield, Known and Unknown A memoir, Penguin Group, New York, 2010. Print. Page 316-317

53-Declassified docs show U.S. officials urged Clinton, Bush to strike al-Qaida

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/39622062/ns/us_news-security/t/us-failure-retaliate-uss-cole-attack-rankled-then-now/#.U2wxH4FdVcU

54- McDermott, Terry, and Josh Meyer. 2012, The Hunt for KSM: Inside the Pursuit and Takedown of the Real 9/11 Mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. New York, NY: Little, Brown and, 2012. p46

55- Bergen, Peter L. The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict between America and Al-Qaeda. New York: Free, 2011. Print. p37

56-Terrorist Attack on USS Cole: Background and Issues for Congress, The Navy Department Library

http://www.history.navy.mil/library/online/usscole_crsreport.htm

57- Polish Intel warning to CIA on USS Cole attack was ignored: top Polish spy.

Filed under: USS Cole, Yemen, Jane Novak, September 6, 2012

http://armiesofliberation.com/archives/2012/09/06/polish-intel-warning-to-cia-on-uss-cole-attack-was-ignored-top-polish-spy/

58-Bergen, Peter L. The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict between America and Al-Qaeda. New York: Free, 2011. Print. p42

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