Criminal Minds (29 page)

Meanwhile, Patty had been tied up and kept in a closet. In addition to experiencing food, sleep, and sensory deprivation, she was repeatedly raped and ranted at. All she knew was what her tormentors told her, and she had to do whatever they said in order to stay alive. The next time she appeared in public, she was calling herself Tania and helping the SLA to rob a bank. Two bystanders were shot, though not by her.

On May 16, SLA member Bill Harris was detained for shoplifting at a Los Angeles sporting goods store. In this incident, “Tania” unloaded a whole clip from an M-1 carbine, then got another rifle and continued shooting. She and her friends got away, but the next day the police surrounded the SLA hideaway, and after a massive shootout the place went up in flames. Six SLA members were killed, but Hearst, Bill Harris, and Bill’s wife, Emily, were holed up in a motel near Disneyland, watching the whole thing on TV.

After more bank robberies and some bombings, Hearst was arrested in San Francisco on September 18, 1975. Convicted of bank robbery and use of a firearm during the commission of a felony, she was sentenced to seven years in prison.

The theory at the time was that Hearst’s transformation into Tania was the result of Stockholm syndrome, the phenomenon in which captives come to identify with their captors. Hearst later said that that’s not what happened, that she was coerced into committing the crimes. An FBI agent who interviewed her after her arrest, however, said that she was a classic case of Stockholm syndrome.

In 1979, after Hearst had served two years of her sentence, President Jimmy Carter commuted her sentence.

 

 

EVERY AMERICAN
who is alive today knows about Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, the Islamist group that attacked the United States on the morning of September 11, 2001. One
Criminal Minds
episode, “Lessons Learned” (210), deals explicitly with al-Qaeda when Jason Gideon, Spencer Reid, and Emily Prentiss travel to the U.S. detainment facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to interrogate a prisoner who has knowledge of a terrorist plot in Virginia.

Al-Qaeda has its roots in the opposition to the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989. The mujahedeen (Muslim freedom fighters)—both native Afghanis and Arabs who came to join the struggle—fought the Soviets, and they were financed by the CIA, which was working with the Pakistani intelligence service, and Saudi Arabia. One of the Arabs who came to join the Afghanis was a Saudi Arabian named Osama bin Laden, who built roads (with the resources of his family’s construction company), collected financial contributions from wealthy Saudis and other gulf-state Arabs, and organized the Arab volunteers who flooded in to join the fight.

Bin Laden was born into a very wealthy family in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in the year 1377 in the Islamic calendar, which corresponds to July 1957 to July 1958 (his exact birth date is unknown, despite various rumors on the Internet). His father, Mohamed, was a poor man in Yemen who started a construction company and rose to become the main building contractor for the Saudi royal family. Mohamed had fifty-four children (twenty-five sons and twenty-nine daughters) by twenty-two wives. Osama was somewhere between the seventeenth and twenty-first son. He was the only son of the marriage of his father and his mother, a Syrian-born woman whom Mohamed divorced soon after the birth of their son—and for whom he then arranged a marriage to another man. Osama continued to live with his mother, who had four children with her next husband.

In 1968, the year after his father’s death in a small-plane crash, bin Laden was enrolled in an exclusive school in Jedda, Saudi Arabia. At his school, instead of wearing traditional Arab dress, the students wore uniforms similar to those of British schoolboys (white shirts, ties, and blazers in the winter months). Having lost his father (and despite having a stepfather), bin Laden might have been susceptible to the Syrian-born (like his mother) physical-education teacher, who offered an informal Islamic study group after school.

The teacher used soccer to entice the boys to join, then he told them that before playing each time they would read a verse from the Koran. Gradually he increased the study of the Koran and eliminated the playing of soccer. The teacher was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, a religious and political movement formed in opposition to British rule in Egypt. After the British abandoned the region, the group remained active, opposing the rule of President Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt and secular rule in any Muslim country. Despite being suppressed by Nasser, the Muslim Brotherhood flourished underground and continued advocating for rule by sharia, or Islamic law.

It was in this study group that bin Laden was exposed to the concept of violent jihad, or holy war against non-Muslims, and other forms of extreme political and religious activism. Bin Laden became committed to the group and its fervent cause of politically transforming the entire Muslim world.

In Afghanistan, bin Laden finally got to put some of his ideas into action. The Soviet invasion was exactly the sort of colonial-style takeover by “infidels” that he opposed. His role was as an organizer and a financier, and he worked with Saudi officials (and, indirectly, the CIA) to raise funds for the cause. When the Soviets withdrew early in 1989, this was evidence to bin Laden that Islamic fundamentalists could defeat a major superpower. Ultimately, he believed, the Soviets’ defeat in Afghanistan helped to break up the Soviet Union. Bin Laden would soon transfer this belief and this goal to the United States.

Bin Laden’s network coalesced into the organization called al-Qaeda, which means “the Base” in Arabic. After the Soviets withdrew, he returned to Saudi Arabia to work for his family’s construction company, but he was already more radicalized than most of the family, and he made no secret of his views. In 1990, when the Saudi government permitted U.S. troops to be stationed there after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, bin Laden was outraged by the idea of a non-Muslim presence in his homeland, which he viewed as a desecration. He offered his mujahedeen to fight the Iraqis, but his offer was rebuffed by the Saudi king, and the U.S. military arrived in Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden was expelled from his country the next year as a result of his antigovernment activities and diatribes. He took his fortune and moved to Sudan, where he owned a farm on which he raised horses and trained jihadis. A couple of years later Saudi Arabia revoked his citizenship.

In 1993, al-Qaeda’s first violent action inside the United States took place: the bombing of New York’s World Trade Center. Six people died and hundreds more were wounded by a truck bomb that exploded in an underground garage. Six people were arrested, tried, and convicted on terrorism charges.

Bin Laden didn’t restrict his ire to U.S. soil, however. In October 1993, his jihadis teamed with Somalis to kill eighteen U.S. soldiers in Somalia. An al-Qaeda truck bombing in Riyadh in 1995 claimed five American lives and killed two Indians.

Bin Laden left Sudan in 1996, when that country, bowing to pressure from the U.S. and Saudi governments, expelled him. His next home was Afghanistan. Many have called the pressure on Sudan a mistake—at least there people knew where he was. In Afghanistan, he slipped off the radar. But he was far from inactive. That year, a U.S. Air Force barracks in Saudi Arabia was bombed, and nineteen U.S. servicemen were killed.

Bin Laden issued a fatwa (an Islamic legal decree) in early 1998 declaring war on the “Jews and Crusaders” of the United States: “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,” he stated.

Truck bombs exploded on August 7, 1998, outside the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, killing 224 people, 12 of them Americans. The United States responded with cruise missile attacks against terrorist camps in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan.

The next direct attack against U.S. interests came on October 12, 2000, when al-Qaeda suicide bombers blew up a small boat beside the USS
Cole
, a destroyer moored in a harbor in Yemen, killing seventeen U.S. sailors.

Then came September 11, 2001, when nineteen al-Qaeda suicide bombers flew two airplanes into the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers and a third airplane into the Pentagon; a fourth plane was intended to strike the U.S. Capitol but was downed by passengers in a field in Pennsylvania before it could reach its target. Nearly three thousand people were killed on this day, which made it the world’s worst terrorist attack to date.
Bin Laden
and
al-Qaeda
became household names. A month later a multilateral military action, led by the United States, was launched in Afghanistan against al-Qaeda and its Taliban hosts. Bin Laden narrowly escaped capture and death at Tora Bora and remains on the loose today.

Subsequent al-Qaeda attempts against the United States include the failed airliner bombings of Richard Reid, who carried explosives in his shoe, and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who carried them in his underwear. Quick-acting civilians foiled both plots. There are also alleged al-Qaeda connections to 2009’s Fort Hood shooting.

The last
Criminal Minds
episode of the third season, “Lo-Fi” (320), and the first episode of the fourth season, “Mayhem” (401), involve the planning and execution of a terrorist attack in New York City, during which Special Agent Aaron Hotchner unknowingly helps to place an ambulance loaded with explosives near a hospital in which an unspecified but very important person is being treated. On January 18, 2010, well over a year after the episode first aired, a Taliban suicide bomber drove an explosives-packed ambulance close to Afghani president Hamid Karzai’s presidential palace and detonated it.

On July 7, 2005, Muslim suicide bombers exploded four bombs in London, killing fifty-six and injuring about seven hundred. This attack is mentioned in the episode “Mayhem.” The same episode refers to Dr. Azahari Husin, a Malaysian terrorist and an engineer who is believed to have built the bombs used in devastating terrorist attacks in Bali and Indonesia. Associated with the terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah, Husin was killed in a police raid on November 9, 2005.

Al-Qaeda remains the focus of a great deal of controversy and uncertainty. Rather than a rigidly controlled organization, it appears to be a loose network of many groups, some of which, like al-Qaeda in Iraq or al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, use the name but don’t necessarily share any operational structure with other branches or have a direct connection to bin Laden. Even if bin Laden were to die or be captured, his role at this point might be largely symbolic; new al-Qaeda leaders are rising up all the time. Since the struggle of the West is against Islamist jihadism as a whole rather than against a specific group or people, many believe that the best way to approach the effort is through a combination of intelligence and law enforcement tactics. Others consider it war and prefer a military-oriented response. The usual U.S. approach has been to combine the two, using every tool possible.

Despite al-Qaeda’s many attacks around the world and the impact that those attacks have had on the civilian populations of the targeted countries, the overall goal that Osama bin Laden espouses—to remove Western countries from the Middle East and reestablish the caliphate (Islamic religious rule) throughout the Muslim world—has yet to come to pass. Although there appears to be a nearly unlimited supply of disaffected young (mostly male) Muslims willing to give their lives to suicide missions, many more Muslims have been turned off by bin Laden’s tactics, which increasingly seem to include killing other Muslims.

 

 

ANTHRAX ATTACKS
are the crime around which the
Criminal Minds
episode “Amplification” (424) revolves. The anthrax killer in this episode proves to be a scientist who was fired from his position at Fort Detrick. The 9/11 attacks are also mentioned in this episode, and the Amerithrax attacks (so named because they were suspected to have been caused by terrorists on U.S. soil) also come up in the episodes “Lessons Learned” (210) and “100” (509).