The 9/11 Wars (101 page)

  
13
.
The 4,000 figure appears to have come from a
Jerusalem Post
internet article quoting an Israeli Foreign Ministry statement that 4,000 Israelis were believed to have been ‘in the areas of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon at the time of the attacks’. ‘The 4,000 Jews rumor: hundreds of Israelis missing in WTC attack’,
Jerusalem Post
online, September 12, 2001.

  
14
.
Douglas Feith,
War and Decision
, Harper, 2008, p. 93.

  
15
.
Brian Whitaker, ‘Muslim peoples doubt role of Arabs in September 11’,
Guardian
, February 28, 2002. Gallup Poll of the Islamic World, based on interviews of nearly 10,000 residents in nine predominantly Islamic countries, Gallup, February 2002, Washington, DC.

  
16
.
ICM/BBC, BBC Poll of British Muslims,
Today
, Radio 4, November 2001.

  
17
.
Author interview with Mike Scheuer, CIA, head of Alec Station, August, 2005. See also the useful accounts in Coll,
Ghost Wars
;
The 9/11 Commission Report
; and Wright,
The Looming Tower
. A 1995 National Intelligence Estimate correctly analysed the danger as coming from ‘transient groupings of individuals’ that lacked ‘strong organization but rather are loose affiliations’ and operated ‘outside traditional circles but have access to a worldwide network of training facilities and safe havens’. Effective and timely action was not taken.

  
18
.
Coll,
Ghost Wars
, p. 425.

  
19
.
Author interview, September 2008.

  
20
.
Department of Defense budget for Financial Year 2000, US DoD news release, February 1, 1999.

  
21
.
Lawrence Freedman,
A Choice of Enemies
, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2009, p. 370. Author telephone interview with Jack Cloonan, 2008.

  
22
.
Author interview with senior former MI6 officer, London, 2003.

  
23
.
Gary C. Schroen,
First In
, Ballantine Books, 2005, p. 26.

  
24
.
Coll,
Ghost Wars
, p. 493.

  
25
.
Ibid., p. 499.

  
26
.
See the testimony of Abu Jandal. That a meeting was to be held that bin Laden would chair at the camp was apparently widely known. Also Coll,
Ghost Wars
, p. 410.

  
27
.
Author interview with American officials, Riyadh, 2008

  
28
.
Author telephone interview with former senior CIA analyst, August 2009. Indian intelligence officials later admitted to the author that there was ‘no evidence at all’ of bin Laden’s presence in Kashmir. The admission came in 2003 at a time of a relative thaw in relations between India and Pakistan.

  
29
.
Author interviews with three Middle Eastern intelligence service officials, Islamabad 1999–2000. Coll,
Ghost Wars
, p. 443.

  
30
.
Author interview with Michael Scheuer, CIA, head of Alec Station, 2002.

  
31
.
Author telephone interview with Art Keller, April 2008.

  
32
.
Ibid.

  
33
.
There was no station in Kabul. Author interview with British intelligence official, 2010.

  
34
.
Author interview, London 2009.

  
35
.
The identity of those at Tora Bora is a useful guide. Along with the Saudis, Egyptians and Yemenis who made up the core strength of al-Qaeda were Moroccans and Kuwaitis, Palestinians from Jordan, Syrians, Turks and many central Asian fighters, especially Uzbeks. There were several Chinese Uighur Muslims, a handful of Britons, a large number of Pakistanis and at least three Frenchmen.

  
36
.
The number of Egyptians appears to have dropped away during the 1990s, as one would expect given the course of the militancy in Egypt itself. By 2000, one volunteer was posing the question ‘What is the reason for not having new Egyptian freedom fighters amongst us?’ to bin Laden. Harmony documents, document ID: AFGP-2002-801138.

  
37
.
Tim Judah, ‘The Taliban Papers’,
Survival
, vol. 44, no. 1, spring 2002. The body of evidence produced by the recruits themselves in the form of interviews with journalists or their own published accounts of their experiences, the published biographies of ‘martyrs’, evidence later found in Afghanistan by intelligence operatives and reporters as well as the imperfect but nonetheless useful testimonies hundreds of them gave to investigators or tribunals while in custody now allows, a decade after 9/11, a relatively accurate picture to be put together of who they were and how and why they travelled to Afghanistan. In April 2011, the author was able to consult 800 leaked official secret files on every detainee in Guantanamo Bay compiled between 2003 and 2007 to support recommendations for release or continued imprisonment. Each provided detailed biographies of their subject. Among other useful primary sources are the court proceedings and witness statements of Abu Jandal, Ali al-Bahlul, al-Batarfi, who all ended up in Guantanamo Bay, and the testimonies of al-Utaiba, Hossein Kertchou and Jamal al-Fadl during the 2001 trial of the 1998 east African bombings, USA vs. Usama bin Laden, New York Southern District Court, February 2001. Also John Walker Lindh indictment, February 2, 2002, US vs. John Walker Lindh in the US Eastern District Court of Virginia. Material that emerged during investigations of the Millenium Plot is also informative: testimony of Ahmed Ressam, USA vs. Mokhtar Houari, July 3, 2001; testimony of Judge Jean-Louis Brugiere, trial of Ahmed Ressam, Los Angeles, April 2, 2001; USA vs. Abu Doha sealed complaint, US Southern District Court, New York, July 2, 2001. Also related are the interrogation report of Djamal Beghal, author collection; Moroccan Ministry of Justice, interrogation report of Zuhair Hilal Mohammed al-Tubaiti, Casablanca, June 19, 2001, author’s collection. Also among the many interviews the author conducted on this topic two of the most useful were with Mohammed Umr al-Madani, Kabul, 2008, and Noman Benotman, formerly of the Libyan Fighting Group, London, 2002, 2003 and 2008. There are now voluminous secondary sources on the training camps in Afghanistan in the 1990s though still relatively little on exactly who made the journey to reach them.

  
38
.
See Giles Kepel,
Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam
, I. B. Tauris, 2002; and Olivier Roy,
The Failure of Political Islam
, Harvard University Press, 1998. An additional advantage was that it drew heavily on the language and thought of those strands that had preceded it and thus seemed less alien.

  
39
.
Human Rights Watch,
Annual Report
, 2001.

  
40
.
See Bergen,
Holy War Inc
.; Bergen,
The Osama Bin Laden I Know
; Wright,
The Looming Tower
; Andy Worthington,
The Guantanamo Files
, Pluto, 2007; Burke,
Al-Qaeda
, pp. 56–72.

  
41
.
See Thomas Hegghammer,
Terrorist Recruitment and Radicalization in Saudi Arabia
, Middle East Policy, 2006, p. 44.

  
42
.
Ibid., p. 49.

  
43
.
A couple sought martyrdom to join a brother already killed in Afghanistan in heaven. See Hegghammer,
Terrorist Recruitment
, p. 49 and note 33 for further sources.

  
44
.
Others, such as the French convert Hervé Loiseau, simply followed older or respected charismatic individuals on whom they had developed a certain degree of emotional dependence. Loiseau and another young Frenchman of Algerian origin followed a much more motivated and capable nineteen-year-old called Mourad Benchellali, whose father was a radical cleric whose brother had tried and failed to fight in Chechnya. Three of his family had spent time in French prisons. Benchellali insisted he had sought ‘adventure’, enhanced local status and to rival his brother and later published a fairly unapologetic book about his time in Afghanistan. Worthington,
The Guantanamo Files
, p. 63.

  
45
.
Sharon Curcio, ‘Generational Differences in Waging Jihad’,
Military Review
, July–August 2005, pp. 84–8.

  
46
.
Notebooks found at Darunta and Khost camps by the author, November 2001.

  
47
.
Letters found in New Khaldan camp by the author, November 2001.

  
48
.
A very high proportion of accounts from Western recruits refer to sickness. See also Curcio, ‘Generational Differences’.

  
49
.
Author interview with David Hicks, July 2010.

  
50
.
Author interview with cleric and courier ‘Haji Anwar’, Peshawar, October 2001.

  
51
.
By the end of the 1990s, ‘America stood out as an object for admiration, envy and blame … This created a kind of cultural asymmetry. To us, Afghanistan seemed very far away. To members of al-Qaeda, America seemed very close. In a sense, they were more globalized than we were,’ the official American commission of inquiry into 9/11 accurately noted in 2004.
The
9
/
11
Commission Report
, p. 340. Though unfair to President Clinton and many of the senior counter-terrorist officials in Washington who recognized that fanatical politically or religiously motivated violence would be a growing threat as the world became more interconnected, these words did adequately capture how very few grasped how close the threat had become.

  
52
.
Two examples are Abu Qutada and Abu Musab al-Suri, who was perhaps the single most significant militant strategist of the 9/11 Wars.

  
53
.
Ruling of Special Immigration Appeals Commission, March 8, 2004. Tawil,
Brothers in Arms
, p. 125. An MI5 officer present at the meeting apparently sensed that Abu Qutada was close to offering to assist investigations into radical activity in the UK.

  
54
.
Abu Musab al-Suri, ‘A Message to the British and the Europeans, August, 2005’, quoted by Tawil,
Brothers in Arms
, p. 126.

  
55
.
Brynjar Lia, ‘The Al-Qaida Strategist Abu Mus’ab al-Suri: A Profile’, Presentation OMS-Seminar, March 15, 2006, Oslo, Norway. Author interviews with Omar Mohammed Bakri Fostok, London, 2000, 2001.

  
56
.
He received no reply, however. Tawil,
Brothers in Arms
, p. 125.