9/11: A journey through memory and airspace

This is a picture of me on the top of the World Trade Center South Tower in late August 1991 or early September, roughly ten years before 9/11. The picture was taken by my then-wife when we were on a delayed trip around the world a year after we married. Memories being fragile and fragmental, I don’t have much recollection of the building other than vague inklings conjured up by that photo. I do remember the fantastic views and from that spot I looked out to the Statue of Liberty. In those days the Statue was still open to the public but the queue to climb the stairs was too long so we didn’t bother going to the top when we were there the day before.

Getting to the top of the World Trade Center was far less problematic. I don’t remember the queue being onerous, the minute long trip to the 107th floor was probably just as uneventful as this one in September 2000 just one year before the towers were obliterated. Yet something had already changed between 1991 and 2000 – the World Trade Center had been seriously bombed. While I was on honeymoon, the planning to destroy the towers had already begun. The aim of the 600kg explosion that went off in February 1993 was to knock one tower into the other and bring both tumbling down. That didn’t happen but the blast killed six people, seriously damaged five sublevels and sent smoke spiralling up 93 floors of both towers making evacuation difficult and two hours long.

The 1993 perpetrators came from all over the Middle East led by Kuwaiti-born Ramzi Yusef. The bombing was financed by Yusef’s uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who is now in Guantanamo Bay and probably the main reason Obama broke his election promise to close it. As well as WTC 1993, his terror credits included the 1995 Bojinka Plot to blow up 12 US airliners and also crash a plane into CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Yusef said the idea for using planes to crash into buildings came from his friend Abdul Hakim Murad, who in turn heard it from the CIA. An undeterred Khalid Mohammed apparently proposed the plan of the 9/11 plot to Bin Laden in 1996.

Whether that is true or not is debatable, but the idea of suicide attackers has long been an extreme staple of warfare because it is so difficult to defend against. It entered the political landscape in 1881 when Tsar Alexander II of Russia was attacked by Nihilist Ignaty Gryniewietsky who who blew himself up killing the Russian ruler in the process. Gryniewietsky’s last letter read: "Alexander II must die...He will die, and with him, we, his enemies, his executioners, shall die too...How many more sacrifices will our unhappy country ask of its sons before it is liberated? It is my lot to die young, I shall not see our victory, I shall not live one day, one hour in the bright season of our triumph, but I believe that with my death I shall do all that it is my duty to do, and no one in the world can demand more of me.”

Gryniewietsky's dangerous conflation of honour and purpose was exactly the same as that inspired Japanese kamekazes in WW2 and later infused Yusef, Sheik Mohammed and those that came after them in 2001. Osama Bin Laden is now dead so there is no way of knowing what role he played in 9/11. What is clearer is the role of Mohammed Atta, the ringleader of the 19 terrorists that brought down the four planes in the attack. Atta was one of just 4 who weren’t from Saudi Arabia.

Born in Egypt, he graduated in architecture at the University of Cairo and was the key person in the Hamburg cell of radical jihadists that got together from 1998. Atta and other members of the cell went to Afghanistan to meet Bin Laden where they agreed to work with Al Qaeda. In March 2000 he sent an e-mail to 60 companies inquiring about flight training, "Dear sir, we are a small group of young men from different Arab countries,” Atta wrote. “We would like to start training for the career of airline professional pilots.”

His application for a 5-year US visa was approved and he flew to Newark in June 2000 to enrol in the Accelerated Pilot Program at the Academy of Lakeland in Florida, bankrolled by Sheik Khalid. Within a month Atta was flying solo as was his friend Marwan al-Shehhi (who would lead the South Tower attack as Atta took out the North). With daily training. Atta earned his commercial pilot’s licence in November 2000. He told trainers he was hurrying because he had a job lined up at home. With plenty of money to wave around, no one asked him any questions.

By the end of the year, Atta was studying flight deck videos for most of the major commercial airline planes including Boeing 767s and Airbus A320s. In July 2001 Atta went to Spain to meet Yemeni-born Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a fellow Hamburg cell co-conspirator. Ramzi was supposed to be one of the attackers but could not secure a US visa because immigration officials thought Yemenis would illegally overstay their visit. Ramzi supposedly passed on Bin Laden’s instructions what was to be targeted: "four symbols of America”: Congress, the Pentagon, and the two towers.

A plan to get a 20th hijacker to replace Ramzi was thwarted when Saudi-born Mohammed al-Qahtani (also now at Guantanamo) was not allowed in the country because he arrived with a one way ticket and not enough cash to convince authorities he wouldn’t end up an illegal immigrant. It meant Flight 93 had four hijackers unlike the five on the other planes making overpowering them slightly more feasible.

On 23 August 2001 two events occurred that might have raised the alarm about Atta. His driving licence was revoked in court for failing to turn up to defend driving when without a licence earlier that year. The same day Mossad included him on 19 names they gave to the CIA they said were planning an imminent attack. But no-one connected the dots. On September 10, he drove to Portland, Maine where he was scheduled to fly to Boston at 6am on the 11th. At the airport the following morning, Atta was selected for extra screening by the Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-screening System.

The Clinton administration launched CAPPS in the late 1990s as a response to the growing terrorist threat. The system uses information on the ticket booking matched against no-fly lists, FBI fugitive lists and other data to assign a risk score. CAPPS deemed 8 of the 19 attackers worthy of further attention. One was ignored because he had no bags, and the rest, including Atta passed muster because their bags contained no explosives. The process was designed to stop people leaving bombs in the luggage and then leaving the airport. But it did not take into account people who wanted to use the planes themselves as another example of the poor man’s air force.

On arrival at Boston, Atta and the others had to go through security again – something the hijackers were not expecting and got angry about - but they got through without incident. The Portland detour served several purposes – a smaller airport was easier to get through, it deflected attention from the fact 8 other Middle Eastern men were leaving directly from Boston and also left the operation intact if Atta had been arrested in Maine.

There was no evidence Atta had box cutters aboard the plane. He did have two Swiss Army knives and a Leatherman multi-tool. He boarded American Airlines Boeing 767 Flight 11 to LAX scheduled to depart at 7.45am. 81 passengers (out of a 158 capacity) and 11 crew were aboard. Two hijackers sat in first class, Atta and two others sat in business class with none in economy (coach). Flight 11 took off at 7.59am and was close to cruising altitude in 15 minutes. The last routine instruction the plane responded to was “American 11 turn 20 degrees right”. When air traffic control radioed Flight 11 seconds later to climb to 35,000 feet, there was no response. They asked 8 more times in the next 10 minutes with no answer.

By now Atta and his 4 helpers stabbed and slashed their way to control of the cockpit. At 8.19am flight attendant Betty Ong rang the NC reservations office to say there was something wrong. She rang that number because it was a common help line for passengers with reservation issues. Her call lasted 25 minutes, though only a default first four minutes was recorded. A calm sounding Ong told the bemused operator the cockpit was not answering her calls and she thought they were getting hijacked. She said two attendants had been stabbed.

By 8.25am Boston air traffic control knew there was a hijack situation. They heard a hijacker’s voice saying “We have some planes. Just stay quiet and you will be okay. We are returning to the airport”. Seconds later Boston Control heard him say “If you try to make any moves you will endanger yourself and the airplane.” As they escalated the information, Ong told NC the plane was flying erratically. Boston told FAA command in Virginia the flight had entered New York air space.

Another Flight 11 attendant Madeline Sweeney got through to Boston Airport and spent 12 minutes talking to the American Airlines flight service manager. The airline then set up an emergency response centre. By now Ong was reporting a fatality in seat 9B held by former Israeli soldier Daniel Lewin. A minute later Boston heard another message from the cockpit: "Nobody move please. We are going back to the airport.” Boston desperately tried to raise Cape Cod military staff to get fighters airborne to tail the plane.

By 8.38am Ong was telling the operator the flight was descending rapidly. At the same time, Boston told the North American Aerospace Defense Command's Northeast Air Defense Sector a plane had been hijacked. Battle Commander Colonel Robert Marr was getting ready for a NORAD exercise when he confirmed this was "real-world" and ordered fighter pilots at Otis Air Force Base in Massachusetts to battle-stations. He phoned Major General Larry Arnold who confirmed the order to scramble the planes and “get permission later”.

At 8.44am the Ong call ended abruptly. At the same time Sweeney was saying “Something is wrong. We are in a rapid descent... we are all over the place." The flight service manager asked her to look out the window to work out where they were. Sweeney told him, "We are flying low. We are flying very, very low. We are flying way too low." Seconds later she said, "Oh my God we are way too low" and her call ended.

A minute later the Air Force was scrambled but had no idea where to go. At 40 seconds past 8.46am, American Airlines Flight 11 slammed into the World Trade Center. Atta, Ong, Sweeney and 89 others in the plane were dead as well as countless others in the North Tower. The full horror of Sheik Mohammed’s planned day would take just two more hours to enfold on the world, mostly on live television. The scars it left on America’s psyche, the Arab world and the airplane-travelling public have yet to heal 10 years later.

Ultimately Sheik Khalid Mohammed and Osama Bin Laden were successful in hastening the destruction of US power. In October 2001, Bush turned down a Taliban offer to hand over Bin Laden to a third country and as early as late 9/11 Rumsfeld was pushing the line to bomb Iraq “because there were no targets in Afghanistan”. At no point was any effort made to punish Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah for providing most of the terrorists or Egypt's Mubarak for providing Atta.

Instead the PNAC agenda pushed the 9/11 disaster cost of $240 billion out to the dubious double war cost of $1,248 trillion and counting. At 10 percent of US GDP in a time of financial crisis, neither crippling war can yet be considered a success. Instead, they represent a victory to terrorists far greater than they could have imagined with the long-planned destruction of large buildings.

Pakistan's ISI murders journalist Saleem Shahzad

Pakistani journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad has paid the ultimate price for exposing links between the Pakistani military and Al Qaeda. Shahzad was killed, probably by the Pakistani intelligence service for embarrassing them in the media. The 40-year-old father of three was the Pakistan bureau chief of the Hong Kong-based Asia Times online and considered an expert on Al-Qaeda and Taliban militants. He was kidnapped two days after writing an investigative report about al Qaeda’s 17-hour attack last week on a naval air base at Karachi and found murdered two days later. Shahzad’s dangerous truth was that the attack was carried out to avenge the arrest of naval officials arrested on suspicion of al Qaeda links. (photo: AP/ Shah Khalid)

In Shahzad’s last fatal article he said the underlying motive for the air base attack was a reaction to massive internal crackdowns on al-Qaeda affiliates within the navy. Shahzad revealed that several weeks ago, naval intelligence traced an al-Qaeda cell operating inside navy bases in Karachi. An anonymous senior navy official told him Islamic sentiments were common in the armed forces. “While nobody can obstruct armed forces personnel for rendering religious rituals or studying Islam, the grouping [we observed] was against the discipline of the armed forces,” the source said. “That was the beginning of an intelligence operation in the navy to check for unscrupulous activities." Shahzad also revealed there were negotiations between an Al-Qaeda operative in North Waziristan and naval officers.

A few days after writing the article, Shahzad went missing in Islamabad. He was driving his Toyota Corolla on Sunday evening to the Dunya TV Studios to participate in a current affairs show that evening but he never made it. According to Pakistan’s The News, the kidnappers overpowered him and took him in his own car past three police checkpoints and three toll plazas where police are also usually present. The dumped his body in the Jhelum canal 100km north of Islamabad where it got entangled in the net placed to recover the bodies of drowning victims in the canal. The kidnappers then travelled to the town of Sarai Alamgir about 150km southeast of the capital where they abandoned the vehicle. The body was found late Tuesday.

Human Rights Watch said Shahzad was held by the Pakistani intelligence organisation the Inter-Services Intelligence. Ali Dayan Hasan, senior South Asia researcher at Human Rights Watch, said Shahzad had complained about being threatened by the ISI. “The other day he visited our office and informed us that ISI had threatened him. He told us that if anything happened to him, we should inform the media about the situation and threats,” Hasan told AFP.“We can form an opinion after the investigation and a court verdict, but… in the past the ISI has been involved in similar incidents.”

The Committee to Protect Journalists said it was alarmed and angered by the targeted killing. They said Pakistan had the most journalists deaths in the world in 2010. Shahzad is the 15th to die since the 2002 killing of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. On May 3 (World Press Freedom Day), a CPJ delegation met with President Asif Ali Zardari and Interior Minister Rehman Malik to press for a reversal of the abysmal record of impunity with which journalist are killed in Pakistan. “Zardari and Malik pledged to address the vast problem of uninvestigated and unprosecuted targeted killings of journalists," said Bob Dietz, CPJ's Asia program coordinator. "With the murder of Saleem Shahzad, now is the time for them to step forward and take command of this situation."

As the Daily Beast notes, Shahzad, a father of three, covered a particularly dangerous beat and he and landed many exclusive stories. In 2008 he interviewed Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, who died in a drone strike the following year.A year later, he interviewed Ilyas Kashmiri, the al Qaeda-affiliated jihadist who masterminded the 2008 Mumbai attack. Shahzad had just published latest book, Inside al Qaeda and the Taliban: Beyond bin Laden and 9/11, to much critical acclaim. Historian Gareth Porter said he unique knowledge and contacts made his writing a 'must read' for anyone who wants to understand Afghan and Pakistani Taliban.

Shahzad’s editor said Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari has expressed deep grief and sorrow over his death but doubted anything would come of it. “It will be business as usual in a country that had the most journalist deaths in the world in 2010,” the editor said. “As long as this appalling record continues, and Pakistan mouths platitudes while its security apparatus - whether directly or though subcontracting - runs rampant, the country will never be viewed as a trusted partner, as the United States has learned over and over again in the 10 tortuous years that it has been forced into an embrace with Islamabad.” Syed Saleem Shahzad learned brutally just how rampant that apparatus is.

Obama and Osamarama

The joke Donald Trump is demanding to see Osama’s death certificate will wear thin very quickly if the US doesn’t scuttle rumours he is still alive. According to the president, America finally got its man. The body of Osama Bin Laden was taken into “US custody” after a firefight in Pakistan on the weekend. After facial identification and DNA matching was confirmed, he was buried within 24 hours of his death which was according to Muslim tradition but the burial took place at sea, which wasn’t. Osama was responsible for thousands of deaths, but so were the people who killed him. The least the Americans could to do was to bury him with dignity.

I don’t jump for joy Bin Laden is dead but I don’t mourn him either. His 1998 US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania showed no respect for neutrals in his war. His actions killed over 200 people mostly Kenyans and Tanzanians and were designed to do one thing: goad the US into retaliation by waging an unwinnable win in Afghanistan. Backed by Pakistan he succeeded handsomely, surviving ten years as the world hide-and-seek champion before intelligence possibly produced under torture finally gave the US enough clues to his whereabouts.

Born in Riyadh in 1957 of a Yemeni father and Syrian mother, Osama was the inauspicious forty-third of fifty-three siblings. His father Muhammad Bin Laden was a wealthy builder and the family was adopted by the Saudi Royal Family after Muhammad died in a plane crash. Osama was educated at King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah where he studied Islamic trends under Muhammad Qutb (brother of the Egyptian Father of Islamism Sayyid Qutb) and Abdullah Azzam. Azzam encouraged Osama to join the Afghan mujahideen in 1982 and fight against the Soviets. Osama set up a database of Arab fighters he called al qaeda – meaning the base or foundation.

Osama spoke out against the US invasion of Iraq in 1990 because it put troops on Saudi soil. It was a sacrilege to have the infidel so close to Mecca. He emigrated to Pakistan, Afghanistan and then Sudan to organise a new jihad against the foreign invader. From Sudan, Osama launched his first attack – on Yemen - and also fought against the Americans in Mogadishu in 1993. Under increasing international pressure in 1996, Sudan president Bashir told him he could no longer protect him from assassination. After meeting Mullah Omah, he moved to Afghanistan and threw his weight behind the Taliban. That year he also sent his declaration of war against Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holiest Sites to British based Palestinian journalist Abdel Bari Atwan.

Atwan was one of the last to interview Bin Laden at the Tora Bora Caves in the winter of 1996. He was struck by how modestly Bin Laden lived. His austerity contributed to an air of a champion of revolution and rebellion to many Muslims. After the Taliban overran the Northern Alliance, they refused Americans demands to hand him over. These requests continued "until just days before” 9/11.

The Taliban wanted proof of his involvement in criminal offences; the US demurred. They would never offer the Taliban a face-saving way out of the impasse and continued to insist bin Laden face trial in the US justice system. Even after 9/11, the Taliban offered to handover Bin Laden. Spokesman Amir Khan Muttaqi said in late October 2001, "we do not want to fight. We will negotiate. But talk to us like a sovereign country. We are not a province of the United States, to be issued orders to. We have asked for proof of Osama’s involvement, but they have refused. Why?"

The answer was that Osama had nothing to do with the American demand, nor was there any convincing evidence linking him to 9/11. The PNAC had their sights set on war in Afghanistan and Iraq and capturing Osama would not aid that outcome. But the Americans seriously underestimated him. As Guy Rundle said, for Osama surviving the war by three months was an achievement, but 10 years was a major victory. “Bin Laden won this one, every year since 2001, a shelf of premierships, the phantom West versus the phantom al-Qaeda,” Rundle said. “If he lost in the Arab heartland, where it matters, it's because, as a conspiracy rather than a movement, it was always going to, as a real historical process took over there.”

Though many in the Arab world supported Bin Laden as a hero after 9/11, his reputation has been nosediving in recent years. Al Qaeda's indiscriminate attacks on civilians in Jordan and Iraq gradually alienated many Muslims as did his links to hardline Wahhabi extremism. The recent wave of Arab pro-democracy revolutions have also left the terror groups feeling irrelevant. Paul Mason at the BBC said Osama died politically on 25 January due to the events in Tahrir Square in Cairo.

His real death was not long in coming. The CIA found him through a Libyan named Abu al-Libi, who was with Bin Laden in Afghanistan. Al-Libi later fled to Peshawar. A courier named Maulawi Abd al-Khaliq Jan contacted al-Libi and asked him to work for Bin Laden. Jan wanted al-Libi to collect donations, organise travel and distribute funds for families in Pakistan. In 2003 al-Libi moved to Abbottabad and worked the link back to Peshawar. The US captured Al-Libi two years later and he was among a network of couriers the CIA interrogated to pin down Bin Laden’s whereabouts.

He was found in the flash suburb of Bilal in the city of Abbottabad named for British army officer General Sir James Abbott. Abbottabad is a military-cantonment city in the hills north of Islamabad, where much of the land is controlled or owned by the Pakistani Army and retired Army officers. Here Osama was housed under state control safe from international action, protected by the human shield of a sympathetic Pakistani military and ISI, or so he thought.

On Sunday, US helicopters stormed the area. One eye witness stood on his roof and saw people attacking a house where women and children could be heard screaming and crying. The women and children were loaded onto a chopper with “some other stuff” and flown away. “Geronimo EKIA,” the mission team reported back to the White House and Obama went on air at 11.55pm Eastern Time to tell Americans the news.

Obama said his troops had killed Osama. The justification was 9/11, “carried out by al Qaeda - an organization headed by Osama bin Laden, which had openly declared war on the United States and was committed to killing innocents in our country and around the globe." Death was the simplest solution, as Robert Fisk said a court would have worried more people than Bin Laden. America never wanted more than his body “in custody”.

Obama would never admit this but did say an intelligence lead in August led them to Osama in Abbottabad. “Last week, I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action, and authorized an operation to get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice.” Leon Panetta, the head of the CIA who ran the mission, was rewarded with the Defence Secretary job to replace the retiring Republican appointee Robert Gates.

Now other Republicans want some of the credit for this “justice”. It was the strict laws and waterboarding Bush put in place, they argued, that laid the groundwork for the capture. As left-leaning Talking Points Memo acidly put it, the credit had to extend to two presidents: one who didn't find bin Laden, and one who did.

It is well Obama soak it up while he can. This was the night he probably won the 2012 election he was probably going to win any way. Or perhaps not. For everyone saying this was a massive boost for Obama there were others who said it was not. Of more importance is what does Osama’s death do Obama’s attitude to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Salman Rushdie has called on the world to declare Pakistan a terrorist state. The narrative propelling the $1.3 trillion war on terror and the Western presence in Afghanistan will almost definitely prove harder to sustain. The truth of Bin Laden’s death will also struggle against the weight of conspiracy theories with Pakistan Taliban among those saying he is still alive.

It is not just the theorists having loopy moments, the media are too. There were fake pictures and a fake quote but Twitter bignoted itself best by breaking the news in “a CNN moment”. The firefight was live tweeted by someone who had no idea what he was seeing and then broken by Keith Urbahn, Rumsfeld’s chief of staff who heard rumours of the operation.

This is not the first time the activity has been conflated with the tool, but it was easily the biggest. Within hours, the Internet was awash with speculation and memes. If social media really is the future of news it is a serious worry. As Twin Laden pointed out (and I was guilty of several of these sins in the last 24 hours) we “only deal with news through a prism of pop culture references, manic hysteria and unfettered ego”. Osama’s death will end up adding to the myth of his life.

Yemen grapples with Al Qaeda

Yemeni forces have arrested three Al Qaeda militants it claims were behind the threats that closed several foreign embassies. Those arrested include local Al Qaeda leader Mohammed Ahmed al-Hanaq. Al-Hanaq and the others were ambushed on Monday in a security force raid in Arhab, 40 kilometres north of the capital Sanaa. Two of his relatives were killed and three other people wounded in the attack but al-Hanq escaped. However he was captured in a hospital with two others in the town of Reedah, Amran province, north of Sanaa.

The men were arrested in connection with the threats to the US and other embassies in the capital. The attack on Al Qaeda came just days after General David Petraeus, the US regional military commander, travelled to Sanaa for talks with the Yemeni president. The US embassy re-opened yesterday after being closed for two days. They cited a “successful security operation in the north” as the reason for the re-opening. The British and French embassies also resumed operation but were still closed to the public.

Yemen has been in the international spotlight since Yemeni Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for the Christmas Day bomb plot in which Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was charged with trying to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam with 278 passengers as it landed in Detroit. The 23-year-old son of a prominent Nigerian banker had hidden a fistful of high explosive in a package sewed into the crotch of his underwear. As the flight prepared to land, Abdulmutallab covered himself with a blanket and injected a chemical to detonate the explosive. He succeeded only in starting a fire which passengers and crew put out as they wrestled him down.

Yemeni Al Qaeda hailed Abdulmutallab as a “brother hero” for evading security screening and intelligence monitoring. It was another boost for the local branch of Al Qaeda whose numbers had been swelled by several veterans of Guantánamo Bay and who are preaching global jihad. The problem for the Obama administration is that 91 of the 198 detainees still at Guantanamo are Yemeni nations. Yesterday, Obama announced he was halting the transfer of prisoners back to their homeland. “There's an ongoing security situation which we have been confronting for some time, along with our Yemeni partner,” he said. “Given the unsettled situation, I've spoken to the Attorney General and we've agreed that we will not be transferring additional detainees back to Yemen at this time.” In the same speech Obama also admitted not only the US had intelligence Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had traveled to Yemen and joined up with extremists there but also Al Qaeda were targetting American interests there and in the US itself.

While Al Qaeda's brother heroes are a threat to Yemen, they are not an existential threat. Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh has two bigger issues to worry about; a war in the north with Shia rebels and separatist unrest in the south (the two halves of Yemen came together in 1990). Christopher Boucek, from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told the 7.30 Report says Yemen’s problems are rooted in a failing economy, falling oil reserves, and massive population growth leading to corruption and 35 per cent unemployment. “Basically the Central Government is not in control of all of territory of Yemen, and the Central Government's authority and legitimacy is receding as it deals with all of these problems,” said Boucek. “So it's in those ungoverned places where you see Al Qaeda affiliated and directed organisations seeking refuge.”

Until recently the Government shied away from direct conflict. Al Qaeda had been bolstered by members of the group’s Saudi branch which fled to safety in Yemen and formally accepted Yemeni leadership under a new name "al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula". But under US pressure, the government made some headway against Al Qaeda in the week before Christmas. Yemen claims that five air attacks on training camps between 17 and 24 December killed 60 fighters and there are another 29 in custody. But several women and children were also killed in the raids causing anger among a disenfranchised public. The danger for Yemen, as The Economist points out is that “further fighting against Al Qaeda could provoke a wider civil conflict, which in turn could undermine a regime that has rattled many of its own people by throwing in its lot with the West.”

New Al Qaeda video affirms Bin Laden is still alive

Al Qaeda have released a new video marking the seventh anniversary of 9/11 which claims Osama Bin Laden and former Taliban leader Mullah Omar are both alive and well. The 90 minute video also contains speeches by Al Qaeda’s number two Ayman al-Zawahiri and the head of Al Qaeda in Iraq Abu Ayyub al-Masri, (also known as Hamza al-Muhajir) as well as a reading of the will of 9/11 Flight 93 hijacker Saeed al Ghamdi. Al Qaeda’s video production arm As Sahab released the footage in full on jihadi websites this week after Al Jazeera had broadcast excerpts on 8 September.

The full video comes just days after two suicide car bombers claimed the lives of 17 people (including 6 attackers) at the US embassy in Sana the capital of Yemen. A group calling itself Islamic Jihad has claimed responsibility for the attack but the group is almost certainly linked to Al Qaeda. Bin Laden’s father Muhammad was born in Yemen and Osama remains extremely popular in the Gulf state. A large percentage of his followers and all his bodyguards are Yemenis or from the nearby Assir region of southern Saudi Arabia. Al Qaeda’s first ever attack bombed US soldiers in Aden in 1991. And one of its most notorious attack before 9/11 was on the USS Cole also at Aden in October 2000 in which 17 American sailors died.

The British based Palestinian journalist Abdel Bari Atwan would not be surprised to hear the news that Osama is still alive. Atwan is the editor of the London based Arabic newspaper Al Quds Al Arabi and the author of the book The Secret History of Al Qa’ida. He is also one of the few Western based journalists to interview Bin Laden in person. He tells the story of that hair-raising interview in the first chapter of his book. After a secret and dangerous trip via Peshawar and Jalalabad, he arrived at the Tora Bora caves in the Winter of 1996. Atwan complained to Bin Laden how cold it was in the caves. Bin Laden said he was lucky; when the UK Independent journalist Robert Fisk arrived, it was Summer and the caves were infested by scorpions.

Atwan was struck by how modestly Bin Laden lived. His manner, austere living habits, and renouncement of comfort and wealth have all contributed to his air of a champion of revolution and rebellion to many Muslims. He was born in Riyadh in 1957, of a Syrian mother and a self-made construction contractor father Muhammad Awad bin Laden. Muhammad was from the Hadramaut region of southern Yemen whose inhabitants are renowned for their business prowess. Bin Laden senior fit the mould and rose from being a labourer to a billionaire presiding over the largest construction empire in the Arab world.

Osama was the forty-third of fifty-three siblings and the family was adopted by the Saudi Royal Family after his father died in a plane crash. Osama was just 10 years old. He was educated at King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah where he studied Islamic trends under Muhammad Qutb (brother of the Egyptian Father of Islamism Sayyid Qutb) and Abdullah Azzam. Azzam was a highly influential Palestinian-born scholar and theologian, and a central figure in preaching for jihad.

Azzam became Osama’s mentor and encouraged him to join the mujahideen rising in Afghanistan against the Soviet invasion. He moved there in 1982 and became a key role in fundraising and organising Saudi volunteers for the jihad. He set up his own camps and created a register to inform families of those who were killed. The name of the register was Al Qaeda (“the base” or “the foundation”). After the Soviets withdrew in 1989, he and Azzam fled back to Saudi Arabia, having been warned by Pakistani intelligence that the pair were a target for CIA assassination.

The Saudis placed him under house arrest in 1990 after he was too outspoken about the threat from the “godless regime” of Saddam Hussein. He also predicted Iraq would invade Kuwait. When the panicked Saudis invited US troops into the country after his prediction came to pass, Osama described the deployment of the “infidel soldiers” as the “biggest shock of his life”. He used his royal connections to get a passport and moved to Pakistan and then to Afghanistan where he prepared to organise a new jihad against the invaders of his homeland.

After threats on his life, Osama moved to Sudan in 1991 where he was made welcome by the Bashir Islamic regime which had taken power in a coup two years earlier. Osama invested $200 million in Sudanese infrastructure including an airport in Port Sudan and the 400km Defiance Highway between Port Sudan and the capital Khartoum. From here, he launched his first attacks against the US, the Yemen incident mentioned earlier and he was also instrumental in bringing down two Black Hawk helicopters in the US 1993 mission in Mogadishu.

But under increasing international pressure, Sudan looked for a way to expel its increasingly dangerous guest. In 1996 Bashir told him Sudan could no longer protect him from assassination. Osama took the hint and moved his operation back to Afghanistan. The country was then in chaos as the Taliban were taking city after city. Osama was initially wary but changed his mind after meeting Mullah Omar in Spring 1996. He gave his bayat (pledge of allegiance) to Omar and threw his forces into battle against the Northern Alliance. The safe haven provided by Omar’s successful capture of Kabul allowed Osama to do longer term planning against his implacable enemy – the US.

That year, he faxed Atwan’s newspaper his declaration of war against the US, which he called the “jihad against the Americans occupying the land of the two sacred places” (Mecca and Medina). Atwan believes that planning for 9/11 started in 1998. Under the influence of his Egyptian 2IC Ayman Al-Zawahiri, Osama saw the advantages of the military strategy of suicide bombing. They looked for recruits with religious zeal, courage, mental agility, a clean criminal record, and those with no spouses or family to support. There were hundreds of eager applicants.

Al Qaeda are also sophisticated users of the Internet. Electronic jihad is a “sacred duty” in which believers are called on to defend Islam and also hack into, destroy American and Israeli websites. Jihadi groups have four elements: a leader, religious guide, members and IT specialists. Prior to his death in 2006, Iraqi Al Qaeda leader Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi gained enormous status almost entirely due to his use of the Internet. He averaged nine communications a day and released numerous videos on the Net. Al Qaeda is now believed to have almost five thousand websites promoting the movement.

Al Qaeda has been mostly extremely successful in meeting its goals. Its 9/11 operation cost $500,000 to fund and caused billions in financial damage. American troops left Saudi Arabia in 2003 and a year later Spain overthrew its pro Iraqi invasion right-wing government just three days after the Al Qaeda killed 200 people in the Madrid bombings. Osama has tapped into the worldwide Muslim umma, most of whom see him as a David figure, bringing down the American Goliath. As Atwan says, not many Muslims necessarily want Wahhabi-style caliph rule that Osama says he wants to bring back, but that is not an issue for now.

Osama is hoping to stretch American hegemony in the Middle East to breaking point (much like how the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989). Then, he believes, it will be easy overthrow the weak and corrupt Arab and Gulf regimes once US power in the region is destroyed. As Atwan concludes matter-of-factly and chillingly “as long as connections continue to be made between US policy, actual or perceived, and the continuing instability in much of the Middle East, we can expect that Al-Qaeda will grow stronger and expand the sphere of its operations”.

Bases Covered

In his book “Al Qaeda and what it means to be modern”, the English philosopher John Gray argues that the human condition is not a cakewalk towards modernism and enlightenment. Gray examines Al Qaeda to show that it is not a throwback to medieval times but rather a fluid modern hybrid of Islam reinterpreted in the light of contemporary Western thought.

Al Qaeda is Arabic for “the base” but it can also mean that very modern conceit: “the database”. They use satellite phones, laptop computers and encrypted websites. They use satellite TV to mobilise support in the Arab world. Its organisation is the cellular structure of drug cartels and resembles a virtual business corporation. Al Qaeda is a modern global multinational company.

Their origins lie in the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. The CIA with the help of Pakistani’s equally shadowy ISI (Inter Services Intelligence) bankrolled the mujahideen resistance. With Abdullah Azzam, Osama Bin Laden was a founder member of Maktab al-Khadamāt (MAK) which raised funds in the US and elsewhere to support the war effort against the Soviets throughout the 1980s. As the decade went on, it was increasingly clear that this was a war the Red Army could not win. They bowed to the inevitable and announced their withdrawal in 1987. When the war ended Azzam and Bin Laden fought over what should be the new strategic goals of MAK. Azzam wanted to concentrate on installing an Islamic government in post-Soviet Kabul whereas Bin Laden wanted to launch global jihad. In 1989 Azzam was killed by a massive car bomb in Peshawar, Pakistan allowing Bin Laden to assume full control of the organisation. MAK split up but Bin Laden launched a new body called Al Qaeda.

Bin Laden returned to his native Saudi Arabia. He was there when Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990. Suddenly the ruling House of Saud was looking very shaky with a massive and belligerent army on their northern border. Bin Laden offered Al Qaeda’s services to protect Saudi Arabia from Iraq. King Fahd turned down his offer and allowed US troops to deploy instead. Bin Laden was enraged and spoke out publicly about the profane presence of foreign troops in the "land of the two mosques".
The now ostracised Bin Laden accepted an offer to come to Sudan in 1991. The Islamists had taken power there and wanted Al Qaeda operations to help their new government. They helped the government with major infrastructure projects and ran military camps.

From there, Bin Laden launched the next crusade and raised the Bosnian Mujahideen to help newly independent Bosnia in its war with Serbia. Bin Laden was forced to flee Sudan to Afghanistan in 1996 after the US implicated him in an attempted assassination of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. Kabul had just fallen to the Taliban at this time. The fundamentalist Taliban and Al Qaeda were a perfect match. Al Qaeda camps proceeded to train militant Muslims from around the world in the art of warfare. Around this time, Bin Laden started to focus on Saudi Arabia’s biggest ally, the US. In 1998, he and co-leader Egyptian Ahman Al-Zawahiri issued a fatwa against America and its allies.

Almost immediately they bombed the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Though the US retaliated by bombing an Al Qaeda base, Bin Laden struck again in 2000. While the missile destroyer USS Cole was at anchor in Aden, a small boat of suicide bombers attacked the ship and killed 17 sailors. Planning then commenced for the biggest attack yet. Mohammed Atta led a team of 17 hijackers to capture four aeroplanes in US airspace and killed 3,000 people in New York and elsewhere on 9/11. Though Al Qaeda never claimed responsibility, the US used the fatwa to pin the blame on them. The US plan to strike Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban and remove Al Qaeda. The invasion destroyed much of their infrastructure, but they survived and moved to the rugged Pakistani border territory. On 13 December 2001, the US government released a video tape of Osama speaking with associates talking about how they carried out 9/11. Its authenticity and English translation has been challenged but remains the single-most damning piece of evidence linking Al Qaeda with the attack.

The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 gave new impetus to Al Qaeda. Initially it posed a dilemma. Iraq is a largely Shiite nation, and Al Qaeda is composed of Sunnis who believe that the Shia are heretics. However the renegade Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi affiliated his organisation with Al Qaeda in 2004 and declared loyalty to Osama. Although it may simply have been designed to boost his own legitimacy it gave Al Qaeda a boost. Abu Ayyub al-Masri took over as head of al-Qaeda in Iraq since al-Zarqawi’s death. Al-Qaeda are now active in Kashmir and have links to Pakistan’s Lashkar-e-Toiba. Although rumours abound of Osama’s death due to typhoid fever, the movement he started is still healthy. Its ultimate goal remains the downfall of the Arabian House of Saud. While many in the West would support the removal of this autocratic and secretive empire, it is highly unlikely the US would ever consent to allowing the world’s richest oil reserves fall into the hands of militant extremists.