Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (93 page)

Thomas Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, and the former Democratic representative Lee Hamilton led the work of the 9/11 Commission. In reconstructing the long series of events leading up to 9/11, as well as the United States government’s response to the attacks, the commission won high praise, for both its depth and the clarity with which its final report was written. The commission report laid out the trail of Islamic terror threats and activities against the United States and its interests: the February 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center that killed six; a plot to blow up the Holland Tunnel, connecting lower Manhattan to New Jersey; the October 1993 downing of an American helicopter in Mogadishu, Somalia—the event depicted in the book and film
Black Hawk Down
—that was accomplished with the help of Al Qaeda; a series of murderous bombings in Saudi Arabia in 1995 and 1996; the August 1998 attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 244 people; and, in October 2000, just a few weeks before the presidential election, the assault on the USS
Cole
, a U.S. Navy destroyer, in Yemen, killing seventeen American sailors.

At the center of these acts was a man known to the American intelligence community as “Usama Bin Ladin” (as the Commission Report called him) or, more widely, Osama bin Laden. The wealthy son of a Saudi family, he had moved from financing terror to forming and leading the group that became known as Al Qaeda, Arabic for “the base,” in the late 1980s. Its stated mission was to rid Muslim countries of Western influence and replace their governments with fundamentalist Islamic regimes. Al Qaeda, according to Jayshree Bajoria and Greg Bruno of the Council on Foreign Relations, grew out of a group that was fighting the Russians who had invaded Afghanistan in 1979. “In the 1980s, the Services Office—run by bin Laden and the Palestinian religious scholar Abdullah Azzam—recruited, trained, and financed thousands of foreign mujahadeen, or holy warriors, from more than fifty countries. Bin Laden wanted these fighters to continue the ‘holy war’ beyond Afghanistan. He formed al-Qaeda around 1988.”

Ten years later, in February 1998, bin Laden issued a fatwa, or holy decree, declaring that it was the will of God that every Muslim should kill Americans because of America’s “occupation” of Islam’s holy places in Saudi Arabia (particularly since American combat troops were stationed in the kingdom during the first Gulf War against Iraq) and for aggression against Muslims, especially in supporting Israel.

At various times during the Clinton administration, numerous attempts were made to kill or capture bin Laden and other senior al Qaeda leaders with both air strikes and cruise missiles.

When the 9/11 Commission released its sobering report in July 2004, it was only after tremendous resistance from the Bush White House and the intelligence community. A member of the commission, John Farmer, a former federal prosecutor, attorney general of New Jersey, and dean of Rutgers Law School, would later write in his 2009 book
The Ground Truth
, “The Bush administration . . . demonstrated that leadership is undermined by dissembling. The false and misleading account the administration peddled about its response to the 9/11 attacks may have worked for a time. . . . At the end of the day, however, the Administration’s story raised more questions than it answered, and led directly to the formation of the 9/11 Commission.”

One of the commission’s first conclusions was that the attacks “were a shock but they should not have come as a surprise.” The nineteen-month investigation laid bare the failures of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Pentagon, the National Security Council (NSC), and virtually every other government agency responsible for defending the nation.

Apart from the unsuccessful attempts to kill bin Laden, the 9/11 Committee laid out a series of grievous intelligence failings, which kept different arms of the American intelligence community from sharing information that could have led to the capture of the hijackers. Some of these were turf battles between agencies, others simple human error. In the end, the results were disastrous. “Across the government, there were failures of imagination, policy capabilities and management. . . . Terrorism was not the overriding national security concern for the U.S. Government under either the Clinton or the pre 9/11 Bush administrations,” the report said in a damning assessment.

In public, the Bush administration maintained that it was not time for “finger-pointing,” and balked at any independent investigation of the run-up to the 9/11 catastrophes and the nation’s response to the emergency.

The official foot-dragging at the White House, in particular, only seemed to heighten the belief that a conspiracy to conceal the truth was at work. The editors of the magazine
Popular Mechanics
would write in March 2005, in a comprehensive article examining the “conspiracy theories”:

The collapse of both World Trade Center towers—and the smaller WTC 7 a few hours later—initially surprised even some experts. But subsequent studies have shown that the WTC’s structural integrity was destroyed by intense fire as well as the severe damage inflicted by the planes. That explanation hasn’t swayed conspiracy theorists.

Responding to the compelling questions that surrounded the 9/11 tragedies, the notably apolitical
Popular Mechanics
had set out to investigate some of the claims made by the advocates of conspiracy theories. The editors wrote:

Healthy skepticism, it seems, has curdled into paranoia. Wild conspiracy tales are peddled daily on the Internet, talk radio and in other media. Blurry photos, quotes taken out of context and sketchy eyewitness accounts have inspired a slew of elaborate theories. . . . In the end we were able to debunk each of these assertions [made by conspiracy theorists] with hard evidence and a healthy dose of common sense. We learned that a few theories are based on something as innocent as a reporting error on that chaotic day. Only by confronting such poisonous claims with irrefutable facts can we understand what really happened on a day that is forever seared into world history.

The article in
Popular Mechanics
specifically addressed and rebutted many of the major questions and controversies raised about 9/11 and the destruction of the World Trade Center in particular. Offering extensive support for their statement, the magazine’s editors concluded that “The widely accepted account that hijackers commandeered and crashed the four 9/11 planes is supported by reams of evidence, from the cockpit recordings to forensics.”

Among the chief claims of the conspiracy theorists was the contention that the impact of the planes could not have caused the towers to fall and that the buildings had also been wired with explosives.
Popular Mechanics
instead offered a plausible scientific explanation; summarizing, it said that the plane debris had “sliced through the utility shafts at the North Tower’s core, creating a conduit for burning jet fuel—and fiery destruction throughout the building.” The burning fuel was not hot enough to melt steel but was hot enough to weaken the structural strength of the building’s steel frames. The fuel ignited other combustible materials, including furniture, rugs, curtains, and paper. As Forman Williams, a professor of engineering at the University of California, told
Popular Mechanics
, “The jet fuel was the ignition source. It burned for maybe 10 minutes, and the towers were still standing in 10 minutes. It was the rest of the stuff burning afterward that was responsible for the heat transfer that eventually brought them down.”

The
Popular Mechanics
article and multiple investigations of the catastrophic events of 9/11 by government agencies and by writers—such as Lawrence Wright in his award-winning account of Al Qaeda,
The Looming Tower
, and James Bamford in
Body of Secrets
, his analysis of the role of the National Security Agency (NSA) in failing to prevent the attacks—have all confirmed the voluminous facts that the 9/11 Commission reported. These conclusions are supported by thousands of phone intercepts made by the NSA, the precise record of communications between the planes and ground control, and the heart-wrenching records of telephone calls made by those who died on board the planes and those who were able to communicate before the towers crashed.

However, in his book
The Ground Truth
, the 9/11 Commission member John Farmer also noted that as of June 2009, there was still no plan to have “interoperability” of emergency communications, one of the key recommendations of the commission. While some cities have acted to improve emergency communications, which failed disastrously at the World Trade Center (and would also contribute to the fatally inadequate response to Hurricane Katrina in the summer of 2005), Farmer noted, “National interoperable communications will not be achieved . . . for the foreseeable future.”

Must Reads:
The 9/11 Report
;
The Ground Truth
by John Farmer;
102 Minutes
by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn;
The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
by Lawrence Wright;
Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency
by James Bamford.

War in Afghanistan: Who? What? When? Where? Why?

To most Americans, Afghanistan is another of those countries that are as obscure and remote as the dark side of the moon. Slightly smaller than Texas, with 29 million people (2010 est.), Afghanistan is a landlocked country, a landscape of stark mountains and harsh desert in central Asia. Its name typically suggests either a crocheted blanket or a breed of dog.

The nation of Afghanistan piqued some Americans’ curiosity when the Soviet Union invaded it in 1978. However, that was mostly because the invasion meant an American-led boycott of the 1980 summer Olympics in Moscow. With the assistance of the CIA, Afghan rebels kept up a protracted war against the Soviet Union and the Afghan regime it had installed. This region was, as many Americans noted with some relish, “the Soviets’ Vietnam.”

In 1988, a UN-mediated agreement paved the way for the Soviet Union’s withdrawal, leading to a civil war for control of the country. Eventually, the Taliban, a radical fundamentalist Islamic insurgent group, seized power in 1996. They immediately began to enforce a rigid Islamic code in the country. The Taliban were in control of Afghanistan at the time of the attacks on 9/11 and had turned parts of the country into a training ground for terrorist groups, including bin Laden’s Al Qaeda. Initially the Taliban were a mixture of mujahideen, or Islamic “holy warriors,” who fought against the Soviet invasion of the 1980s, with the backing of the United States’ CIA, and a group of Pashtun tribesmen who spent time in Pakistani religious schools, or madrassas, and received assistance from Pakistan.

According to the Council on Foreign Relations:

The Taliban practiced Wahhabism, an orthodox form of Sunni Islam similar to that practiced in Saudi Arabia. With the help of government defections, the Taliban emerged as a force in Afghan politics in 1994 in the midst of a civil war between forces in northern and southern Afghanistan. They gained an initial territorial foothold in the southern city of Kandahar, and over the next two years expanded their influence through a mixture of force, negotiation, and payoffs. In 1996, the Taliban captured Kabul, the Afghan capital, and took control of the national government.

Taliban rule was characterized by a strict form of Islamic law, requiring women to wear head-to-toe veils, banning television, and jailing men whose beards were deemed too short. One act in particular, the destruction of the giant Buddha statues in Bamiyan, seemed to symbolize the intolerance of the regime. The feared Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice authorized the use of force to uphold bans on un-Islamic activities.

The Taliban had also allowed Osama bin Laden, who had fought by their side against the Soviets, to freely use Afghan territory to train Al Qaeda recruits. On August 20, 1998, U.S. cruise missiles struck bin Laden’s training camps north of Kabul. In 1999, the United Nations imposed sanctions on the Taliban for their refusal to turn bin Laden over to the United States for prosecution. Throughout this period, the CIA maintained its support of an Afghan opposition group, the Northern Alliance, which it hoped would overthrow the Taliban regime.

MILESTONES IN THE WAR IN AFGHANISTAN

2001

September 9
Ahmed Shah Massoud, a leader of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, is assassinated in a bombing.

September 11
Following the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush demands that the Taliban turn over Al Qaeda leaders or face destruction.

September 18
President Bush signs a joint resolution authorizing the use of force against those responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

October 7
The United States, with British support, commences the bombing of Afghanistan, beginning Operation Enduring Freedom. Canada, France, Australia, and Germany pledge future support to the war effort.

October 26
The USA PATRIOT (Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism) Act is signed into law. The law increases the ability of law enforcement agencies to search telephone, e-mail communications, medical, financial, and other records. It also eases restrictions on foreign intelligence gathering within the United States; expands the authority of the Treasury Department to regulate financial transactions, and broadens the power of law enforcement to detain and deport immigrants suspected of activities related to terrorism. The act was supported by wide margins in both houses of Congress.