The Longest War (23 page)

One by one
we’re hunting the killers down.

—President Bush on September 14, 2002, following
the arrest of a group of Yemeni-Americans accused
of being members of an al-Qaeda sleeper cell

O
n December 21, 2001, in Paris, Richard Reid attempted to board American Airlines Flight 63 to Miami. Reid, a six-foot-four British-Jamaican with an unkempt semi-Afro and a straggly beard, attracted considerable attention from security officers, particularly when they found a magazine he was carrying that showed a picture of Osama bin Laden. A small-time criminal and convert to Islam (a type that would become increasingly common among jihadist terrorists after 9/11), Reid was flagged as a potential troublemaker and he was extensively searched. That search did not turn up the bomb hidden in his
ankle-high hiking boots
and the next day Reid successfully boarded the same flight for Miami.

Reid, an al-Qaeda recruit, had instructed a friend to send an email to his mother after what he believed would be his certain death in which he told her, “What I am doing is part of the ongoing war between Islam and disbelief …
Forgive me for all the problems I have caused you both in life and death and
don’t be angry
for what I have done.”

Three hours into the flight
, which was almost full with 184 passengers and fourteen crew members, Reid attempted to light his shoe bomb with matches. Passengers complained of a smoky smell and a flight attendant found Reid with one shoe in his lap, a fuse leading into the shoe, and a lit match. She tried grabbing Reid twice, but he pushed her to the floor each time, and she screamed for help. A second flight attendant tried to grab Reid and he bit one of her hands. Reid was disabled by passengers who tied him down with seat belts. It was later determined that Reid’s shoe bomb was made with a high explosive that likely would have ripped a hole in the outside skin of the plane, bringing it down in the middle of the Atlantic and making any investigation into the resulting crash close to impossible. Reid told investigators that bombing a U.S. passenger jet during the Christmas season would have caused substantial damage to the American economy.

There was enough evidence of a possible second series of al-Qaeda attacks after 9/11 to merit the serious concern of the Bush administration. One of the possible perpetrators of that second wave was Zacarias Moussaoui, the French citizen who had attracted attention to himself in the summer of 2001 at a flight school in Minnesota and was already in jail during the attacks on Washington and New York. While Moussaoui was often portrayed as the “twentieth hijacker,” in fact he had nothing to do with that operation but had instead been tasked by al-Qaeda to go to the States to participate in some way in the next round of attacks.

Another al-Qaeda plant was Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, the citizen of Qatar who had arrived in the United States on September 10, 2001, on a student visa, ostensibly to study computer programming at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois. Following 9/11,
at least 1,200
mostly Muslim men were detained in a post–9/11 dragnet that caught almost no really threatening person except Marri, who was questioned a month after the attacks and again in December 2001. After Marri was questioned for the second time, the FBI searched his laptop and found that he had conducted extensive research on chemical weapons, including the manufacture of hydrogen cyanide. Investigators concluded that the highly technical information found on his computer “
far exceeds the interest
of a merely curious individual.” Marri had also stored on his computer the usual panoply of bin Laden lectures typical of an al-Qaeda acolyte. At the time of his arrest Marri had set up multiple fake
credit card accounts. He was charged with credit card fraud and lying to federal investigators and was jailed.

Two years later, Marri was named an enemy combatant by the Bush administration and was incarcerated in a Navy brig in Charleston, South Carolina, where he was then held in solitary confinement for almost six years. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), who was captured in March 2003, appears to have been the source of some of the information that led the Bush administration to treat Marri as an enemy combatant. Marri had trained at al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan beginning in 1998, and during the summer of 2001 he met with KSM and volunteered for some kind of operation in the States. Marri then traveled to Dubai, where he met Mustafa al-Hawsawi, the paymaster for much of the 9/11 operation, who gave him ten thousand dollars. Marri arrived in the States the day before the attacks on New York and Washington along with his wife and five kids, good cover that pegged him as a family man.

In the following months Marri placed calls from payphones in the Peoria area to members of al-Qaeda, sometimes traveling as far as 150 miles from his home to elude detection. Ali Soufan, the Arabic-speaking FBI agent, remembers that Marri was placing calls to Hawsawi, the 9/11 paymaster: “
He was using a payphone
outside the motel where he was staying with his family to call Hawsawi. There is one person that called Hawsawi before; it was Mohammed Atta.” Having denied the charges against him for years, Marri finally entered a
plea agreement
in April 2009 in which he admitted his deep ties to al-Qaeda.

Marri was not the only al-Qaeda foot soldier planning attacks on Americans in the wake of 9/11. The
Ohio trucker
Iyman Faris was born in Pakistani Kashmir in 1969. As a young man Faris had fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan and after a spell fighting in Bosnia he slipped into the States in 1994 where he promptly married an American, Geneva Bowling. Five years later, by now an American citizen, Faris divorced his wife. Around this time, on a trip to Pakistan he met with KSM, who recruited him to work for al-Qaeda.

Always dreaming up
the next terror spectacular, KSM tasked Faris with severing the cables on the Brooklyn Bridge, an idea he got from watching the movie
Godzilla
. Faris explored the idea of bringing down the bridge by cutting its suspension cables with an acetylene torch. In February 2003, Faris concluded that this harebrained scheme was not going to work and via a Baltimore contact told KSM “the weather is too hot,” unsubtle code for nixing the operation. He
was detained on March 20, 2003, and for six weeks Faris’s arrest was kept secret, during which time he gave investigators a considerable amount of information about al-Qaeda (without any coercive measures being applied).

While Reid, Marri, and Faris were genuine al-Qaeda recruits, many of the terrorism cases during the first Bush term did not amount to very much. A critical element of the Bush administration’s approach to the threat after 9/11 was that there were large numbers of al-Qaeda “sleeper cells” in the United States. The week after the attacks on New York and Washington,
three North African Muslim men
living in Detroit were arrested on suspicion of being such a cell. Attorney General John Ashcroft said the Detroit cell members were “suspected of having knowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks.” Much of the evidence against the men, however, had been supplied by a
known con man
facing a prison sentence who was hoping to cut a deal for himself.

U.S. officials found a videotape of a trip the “Detroit cell” had made to Disneyland and became convinced that it was a “casing tape” for a future terrorist attack. Prosecutors said that the Arabic narration on the tape described Disneyland as “a rising cemetery,” but the translator for the defense said the correct translation was, “
What a lovely view
!” Ron Hansen, a reporter for the
Detroit News
who covered the case, explained that the Disneyland video didn’t look like a terrorist casing tape: “I could never get past the fact that the tape looked
just like a tourist tape
. The Disneyland ride, for example, was a lengthy queue, people just making their way to the ride. The camera occasionally pans to look at the rocks on the wall, made to look like an Indiana Jones movie, and after several minutes the camera, it pans across and shows a trash can momentarily, and then continues off to look into the crowd. The [government] expert basically said that, by flashing on that trash can for a moment, the people who are part of this conspiracy to conduct these kinds of terrorist operations—they would understand what this is all about: how to locate a bomb in Disneyland in California.”

The case became even more bizarre when officials also charged that the members of the Detroit sleeper cell were planning to attack a U.S. Air Force base in Turkey. Drawings of the base, discovered in a diary, were later determined to be the demented doodles of a Yemeni who variously believed he was
Yemen’s minister of defense
and Saudi Arabia’s president and who had committed suicide a year before any of the accused had arrived in Detroit. Eventually, the terrorism convictions of the three North African men were overturned.

The Detroit case was emblematic of a number of the “terrorism” cases during the first Bush term, which often followed the trajectory of a tremendous initial trumpeting by the government only to collapse, or to be revealed as something less than earth-shattering, when the details emerged months later. Take Chaplain James Yee,
the supposed al-Qaeda spy at Guantánamo
who turned out to be cheating not on his country but on his wife. Or Brandon Mayfield, the unfortunate Oregon lawyer busted for his alleged role in the 2004 Madrid bombings. Mysterious Spanish documents found in Mayfield’s possession later turned out to be
his son’s homework
.

An iconic image of the war against the Taliban was the interview of “
American Taliban
” John Walker Lindh by CNN after Lindh was captured in northern Afghanistan in December 2001. Lying on a stretcher, heavily bearded and caked in dirt, Lindh explained in a vaguely Middle Eastern accent, “I was in [Pakistan’s] North-West Frontier Province. The people there in general have a great love for the Taliban. So I started to read some of the literature of the scholars and my heart became attached.” That an American citizen would admit just months after the 9/11 attacks that his “heart had became attached” to the Taliban made him, needless to say, the object of a great deal of hostility in the United States; many Americans wanted Lindh to be
tried for treason
.

Despite initial claims by Attorney General John Ashcroft that Lindh would be charged with conspiracy to kill Americans, the eventual plea agreement that the government reached with him was only that he had provided “services” to the Taliban contravening the 1999 Clinton executive order that had slapped sanctions on them. What services had Lindh provided to the Taliban? Himself, it turned out. Lindh had refused offers by al-Qaeda leaders to take part in operations against Americans and there was no proof that he was involved in any militant activity other than training at a Taliban camp, but that was
enough to convict
him of providing “services” to the Taliban.

Lindh’s conviction on the charge that he had provided his own services to the Taliban set an important precedent for a number of cases in the “war on terror.” The same charge of providing their own services to a terrorist group would also be the undoing of a group of Yemeni-Americans living in upstate New York who traveled to Afghanistan on something of a jihad vacation in 2001. A year later the group would be portrayed by the Bush administration with great fanfare as the first al-Qaeda sleeper cell discovered in the United States since 9/11.

The group of six Yemeni-Americans making up the supposed cell lived in the small, decaying Rust Belt town of
Lackawanna
, New York, where they had grown up as American as Big Macs. One dated and
married a high school cheerleader
, and many of them played soccer on the high school team. But in 2000 they fell under the spell of Kamal Derwish, a charismatic, deeply religious, fellow Yemeni-American, who told them stirring tales of derring-do about his role in the early-1990s war between the Bosnian Muslims and Serbs. Over late-night bull sessions
fueled by pizza
, Derwish led the group of very ordinary men—telemarketers, delivery men, and car salesmen—in discussions about the plight of Muslims around the world; gradually they came to embrace a militant form of Islam.

Derwish eventually persuaded the six men that they should go to Afghanistan to see the Taliban in action and deepen their commitment to jihad by attending training camps there. Under the cover that they were traveling to Pakistan as part of Tablighi Jamaat, a generally apolitical missionary organization with a large following in the Muslim world, Derwish and his buddies traveled to Afghanistan in two groups during the
spring and summer of 2001
.

At one of al-Qaeda’s Afghan training camps, the men trained on M-16 rifles, RPGs, and AK-47s. During their training bin Laden and Zawahiri appeared at the camp to announce the merger of their organizations. One of the Lackawanna group, Sahim Alwan, a twenty-nine-year-old father of three, was asked by bin Laden how Americans felt about suicide operations. Alwan did not give the al-Qaeda leader the answer he was looking for: “
We don
’t even think about it.” Realizing that he was in well over his head, Alwan
faked an ankle injury
and finagled his way out of the camp. Eventually almost all of the Yemeni-Americans returned home to Lackawanna. They kept their training in Afghanistan a secret, pushing it to the back of their minds, and if they recalled it at all they remembered the bad food, the uncomfortable rigors of life at the camp—four of them had washed out of their training early—and the depth of hatred for the United States among al-Qaeda’s recruits.