American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us

by Steven Emerson

  Direct Organizing

  I should note here, however, that there are also far more purposively sinister organizations in this country. These include a Tampa-and Chicago-based organization run in part by known terrorists of Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network took control of a network of offices dedicated to supporting Afghan mujahideen and refugees, located in over thirty American cities including such major urban centers as New York, Boston, and Tucson.

  In some cases, the terror networks have even operated under their own names. One good example is the Advice and Reformation Committee, also known as ARC, set up by a man named Khalid al-Fawwaz. Al-Fawwaz has been indicted by the United States in association with the bombing of the United States embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and the United States is currently seeking his extradition from the United Kingdom in order to put him on trial. Al-Fawwaz was tasked directly by bin Laden to create the Advice and Reformation Committee (ARC) in London to facilitate the propaganda efforts of bin Laden against Saudi Arabia for permitting American troops to be based on its soil. As bin Laden has made clear repeatedly, the American “occupation” of the country in which are located the two holiest sites in Islam, Mecca and Medina, is one of the reasons why he declared jihad against all American citizens. Bin Laden himself is listed on the British articles of incorporation for the ARC.

  On December 2, 1998, U.S. prosecutors unsealed documents seeking the extradition of Khalid al-Fawwaz. Among the unsealed documents were two invoices for telephone services billed to the Advice and Reformation Committee that were seized when authorities investigating the bin Laden organization searched al-Fawwaz’s London apartment. These invoices bore post office box addresses in Denver, Colorado and Kansas City, Missouri. Despite having at least two United States addresses, the ARC was never incorporated in the United States. If there are other branches of the Advice and Reformation Committee here, they are under no obligation to announce themselves.

  Appendix B shows the known organizations that are closely linked to infamous international terrorist organizations. For example, the brother of the head of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and one of his top deputies (and eventual successor) came to America to help form and run an organization in Tampa and Chicago. On the other hand, the ties between terrorists and many of the groups discussed in Appendix C are far more tenuous. The leaders of the Muslim Arab Youth Association are not suspected to be terrorists—but they are clearly proponents of militant Islam, and their group serves an important function as a venue for radical ideology to be disseminated in the American terrorist infrastructure. To paraphrase Mao, MAYA provides the sea in which the fish swim. But MAYA itself is not likely guilty of any criminal behavior.

  I cannot overemphasize that the total number of terrorists in the U.S. is but a fraction of the total number of Islamic extremists, which itself is but a tiny fraction of the total number of American Muslims. There are peaceful and genuinely moderate Muslim-American leaders and organizations here, such as the Islamic Supreme Council of America and the Ibn Khaldun Society. If anything, it is precisely because extremism exists within otherwise legitimate, nonviolent organizations that it must be exposed. The purpose of Appendix C is to show how some of these organizations, even as they pursue “civil rights” and “humanitarian” causes, champion Islamic extremism.

  One final bit of perspective: there are over 1,200 mosques in the United States, and anywhere from three to eight million Muslims (the figure is heavily disputed, although new studies clearly indicate the number at the lower end of the range).11 The vast majority of all American Muslims subscribe to the strong Islamic tradition of tolerance and human dignity. Yet for one key reason, the extremists have disproportionate influence. One prominent cleric argued in 1999 that “because they are active they took over…more than 80 per cent of the mosques that have been established in the U.S.”12 Although our pluralist ideals tend to view this statement as an automatic exaggeration, the reality is far more sobering. The vast majority of American mosques are funded with Saudi Arabian money, and most of the funders subscribe to the Saudi doctrine of Wahhabism, an eighteenth-century ideology of extreme purity that supports the spread of Islam through violence. Local imams can be appointed by anyone who chooses to fund and/or found a mosque; hence, the influence of this minority ideology is well entrenched among American clerics.

  To see how the potent mix of strident ideology, foreign nationals and American recruits, money, and a modest amount of technological knowhow can produce mayhem, we need look no further than New York City in the early 1990s.

  Chapter Three

  World Trade Center I

  WHEN FOREIGN TERROR ORGANIZATIONS first began colonizing the United States, it was not unreasonable to think that America wasn’t a target. A great deal of the conferences and publications I monitored in the 1990s concerned fundraising for Middle Eastern operations. Yet there were clues that Israel wasn’t the only western target of Hamas, al Qaeda, et al. Unfortunately, most of these clues were missed.

  When El-Sayeed Nosair murdered Rabbi Meir Kahane in New York City, for example, it was thought at first that he was acting alone, a crazed anti-Semite who was trying to take Middle Eastern politics into his own hands. Although the attack was on American soil, Kahane was associated with Israel and Israeli politics, not American institutions. But was he acting alone? And was he really uninterested in America? Hours after he was arrested, police raided his New Jersey apartment and carted away 47 boxes of personal papers. Much of it was in Arabic and appeared to be religious in nature. The contents were ignored—until after the first World Trade Center bombing two-and-a-half years later. Only then did investigators discover what they had missed—a road map of an international terrorist network headquartered in the United States. In a small wirebound notebook, Nosair had written, “We have to thoroughly demoralize the enemies of God by means of destroying and blowing up the towers that constitute the pillars of their civilization such as the tourist attractions they are so proud of and the high buildings they are so proud of.”1 There were cassette tapes of telephone conversations between holy warriors in the United States, Pakistan, and Europe, showing that the American residents were taking orders from abroad. In one conversation, Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman, apparently speaking from Peshawar, asked his followers in New Jersey something about an operation involving “camps” in the United States. A man responded, “It was a success. It started Friday evening and ended Monday. It lasted three days and we expect positive results.”2 This was the first indication that terrorist groups were running training camps on American soil. Unfortunately none of this emerged until after February 26, 1993.

  At 12:15 P.M. on that day, a huge explosion rocked the bottom floors of One World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. Within seconds smoke was curling up the stairwells of the 110-story building. Thousands of people were trapped on the upper floors. Six people eating lunch in a cafeteria were killed immediately. More than a thousand others suffered injuries ranging from broken bones to smoke inhalation.

  The federal investigation of the first World Trade Center bombing was fast and effective, reassuring Americans that its government could track down domestic terrorists. Furthermore, just a few months after the bombing, another conspiracy to attack multiple targets in New York City was foiled. The popular image of the conspirators in both cases was that they were dangerous but somewhat inept. Only later did it become clear that in both cases there were wide and deep networks of international support behind the assailants.

  An initial investigation of the World Trade Center bombing traced the explosion to the B-2 parking level. The blast, an explosion of 1,200 pounds of fertilizer-based urea nitrate compounded with three tanks of compressed hydrogen, had left a gaping hole five stories deep. At the epicenter investigators found fragments of tires, bumpers, pumps, pulleys, frame rails, hinges, and other vehicle parts. Calling in auto experts, they quickly determined that the parts came from a Ford 350 Econoline van. Wit
hin days, the investigators found the vehicle identification number on a piece of twisted wreckage. The van was quickly traced to a Ryder truck rental in Jersey City.

  The van had been rented the day before the blast by one Mohammed A. Salameh of Jersey City. He had left a $400 deposit. In an apparent attempt at establishing an alibi, Salameh had reported the truck stolen to Jersey City police a few hours later.

  One witness at a gas station said that someone answering Salameh’s description had filled the tank of a yellow Ryder van there on the morning of the explosion. He had also paid for filling a Lincoln Town Car. Two men of Middle Eastern extraction had been in each vehicle. Police staked out the Ryder agency; astonishingly, two days later Salameh came back to claim his $400 deposit. He was arrested.

  FBI agents quickly determined that the owner of the Lincoln was Mahmud Abouhalima, another Jersey City resident who, it would later emerge, had fought in Afghanistan against the Soviets. In the car with him had been Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, who had entered the country six months before, claiming political asylum. Yousef had boarded a plane for Pakistan six hours after the bomb detonated. The fourth man, Eyad Ismoil, had fled to Jordan. Yousef soon emerged as an international link between the assailants and a network of supporters. He had arrived from Pakistan in September 1992 in the company of Ahmad M. Ajaj, a pizza deliveryman in Houston. Ajaj was detained at the airport for carrying three fake passports and other false identification. Incredibly, Yousef was not detained, even though he was by far the more dangerous individual. Yousef had made contact with Salameh within a few days of arrival, and telephone records showed that they called Ajaj frequently over the next six months in New York City, where Ajaj remained in prison. Ajaj seemed to have mysterious connections and unlimited funds. Immediately before deplaning in New York with Yousef he had traveled from Houston to Pakistan to the United Arab Emirates and back to Pakistan.

  Also tied to the Jersey City group was Nidal A. Ayyad, a 25-year-old chemical engineer at Allied Signal in Morristown, New Jersey. Ayyad was arrested in his home in Maplewood, New Jersey, on March 10, less than a month after the bombing. Telephone records and interviews showed that he had assiduously approached chemical companies trying to buy the urea-based fertilizers used in making the 1,200-pound bomb. Ayyad had also written a letter to The New York Times taking credit for the bombing and demanding that the United States change its policies in the Middle East.

  The whole operation had an incredibly amateur flavor. The suspects had not even used false names when renting the truck—a fairly easy process when leaving a cash deposit. The bomb, made from fertilizer and diesel oil, had been constructed by hand in several Jersey City apartments. The ingredients had been mixed in plastic trash barrels. Splashings had left conspicuous stains on floors and ceilings. Yet it was a mistake to dismiss the explosion as amateurish. Among the principal defendants—not to mention the 118 potential unindicted coconspirators named by federal prosecutors—were some highly skilled and highly trained men.

  In March 1994, little more than a year after the event, Salameh, Abouhalima, Ayyad, and Ajaj were brought to trial in U.S. District Court in Manhattan. Yousef, still a fugitive, was named a codefendant. The trial lasted five months, involving 207 witnesses and 1,003 exhibits and consuming 10,000 pages of transcript. When Willie Hernandez Moosh, the gas station attendant who filled the two tanks that morning, was asked to indicate the men he had seen, he pointed out two jurors. Nevertheless, the jury had little trouble reaching a verdict. As the forewoman read “Guilty” 38 times, Ayyad shouted “Victory to Islam!” in Arabic and two other defendants began crying out “Allah is great!” One also shouted insults at the jury. Security guards quickly hustled them from the courtroom. The defendants were each sentenced to 240 years in prison.

  Yet the verdict left a taste of frustration. Yousef, the apparent professional of the outfit, was still at large. When arrested, Ajaj was carrying a letter of introduction recommending him for training in guerrilla warfare in Pakistan or Afghanistan, suggesting other international connections among the perpetrators. In retrospect it was clear that outside support had come from somewhere. Where had Yousef and Ajaj gotten their money and fake ID papers? How had the defendants found each other in the first place? Writing in The New York Times, reporter Richard Bernstein, who had covered the trial, put it like this: “Who wrote Mr. Ajaj’s letter of introduction? Why would he have to travel to the Middle East to obtain it? Whom did he see in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia? Where did Mr. Salameh, who was certainly not a wealthy man, get the $8,400 that he deposited into a bank account he opened jointly with Mr. Ayyad and that prosecutors say was the bankroll for the operation? Did it come from abroad?”3

  *

  The case dovetailed neatly with another investigation that the FBI had been conducting in the New York area. Concerned about possible terrorist threats, the Bureau had established surveillance over a group assembled around a Jersey City mosque. Presiding was Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, a 57-year-old blind Egyptian cleric who had arrived in the United States in 1990 after being acquitted of attempting to assassinate Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. Sheikh Rahman regularly delivered fiery sermons in which he denounced the United States and Israel and called for a “holy jihad” against America.

  Rahman was one of a growing number of Islamic fundamentalists who believe that the secular governments that rule Muslim countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan are just as much an affront to true Islam as is the existence of Israel or the influence of the United States over Middle Eastern affairs. Inspired by the Ayatollah Khomeini, these purists have been working to undermine secular governments and assassinate their leaders in Muslim countries around the world.

  The FBI planted an informer, Emad Salem, among the Jersey City group. Salem carried hidden microphones and helped the FBI in planting a small video camera, recording the group as it made plans for a Day of Terror. The plan involved simultaneous strikes at United Nations headquarters, the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels, the George Washington Bridge, and the federal office building at 26 Federal Plaza. The recordings were remarkable. In one, four defendants prepared bombs out of diesel oil and fertilizer in a musty garage in Queens. In another, the group rode around Manhattan pointing out various targets and speculating how bombs could be placed to inflict the most damage. In a scene that proved critical, Salem reported to Sheikh Rahman that one of the conspirators had proposed bombing the United Nations, where many Muslim delegates might be killed. “Is this considered licit or illicit?” he asked. “It is not illicit,” the sheikh replied, “however it will be bad for Muslims.”4 Then he instructed Salem to find ways to “inflict damage on the American Army itself.”5

  In June 1993, shortly after the World Trade suspects had been apprehended, the FBI swooped in and arrested Sheikh Rahman and nine others, charging them with attempted terrorist acts. One of the defendants turned out to be none other than El-Sayeed Nosair. Even though he had been wounded at the scene at Meir Kahane’s murder and treated in the same emergency room, Nosair somehow escaped conviction for murder. He was jailed instead on gun charges. From jail, Nosair continued to plot a campaign of terror. Prison logs show that he met with several of the conspirators in the World Trade Center bombing. “He was a soldier when he shot Kahane and in some ways his status was elevated from soldier to trainer and martyr for the movement,”6 says Michael Cherkasky, former chief of investigations for the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. “In jail he only became more strident, demanding that the movement go forward. Others took up the mantle.”7 Evidence on Salem’s tapes showed that Nosair had been clearly involved in the new plots, and his assassination of Kahane, at first considered the attack of a lone crazed gunman, now emerged as part of a much wider effort. Also appearing regularly on the tapes were Mohammed Salameh, Ramzi Yousef, Ahmad Ajaj, and Nidal Ayyad.

  Evidence suggests that Sheikh Rahman had been making plans for a terror bombing even before fleeing Egypt in 1990. In telephone conversati
ons recorded by the militants themselves, he had talked with Nosair and Abouhalima about setting up training camps for Islamic soldiers in the United States. In July 1990, after brief stays in Sudan and Pakistan, Rahman arrived in the United States. His preaching quickly attracted followers at mosques in Jersey City and Brooklyn. Prosecutors argued that these speeches had inspired his followers to begin planning for the assassination of Rabbi Kahane as well as the World Trade Center explosion and other terror bombings. Federal prosecutor Mary Jo White brought charges under an obscure Civil War statute against seditious conspiracy.

  Central to the case once again was the elusive Yousef. Sheikh Rahman had placed several phone calls to an apartment where Yousef lived from 1992 to 1993. In addition, both men had called the same number in Pakistan several times. That number was also found scrawled on a bombing manual that Ajaj was carrying when he entered the country with Yousef.

  In the end, the FBI was unable to tie Sheikh Rahman directly to the World Trade Center explosion. They had placed a wiretap on his phone a few weeks before the explosion but nothing incriminating had emerged. Although Rahman advised his followers on specific targets during his speeches, he also attempted to keep his distance, saying he wanted to remain a political leader for Muslims. Defense attorney Lynn Stewart argued strenuously that Sheikh Rahman was being prosecuted for his political beliefs and that his sermons were protected by freedom of speech.

  Only four of the nine codefendants in the Day of Terror case testified in their own defense. One said he was training to help Muslims, another that he was preparing to aid Muslims in Afghanistan. A third insisted he knew of no terrorism plans. The fourth, Clement Hampton-El, an American-born Muslim who was wounded while serving as a volunteer medic against the Soviet occupying army in the 1980s, told of his impoverished American childhood. They were all found guilty of conspiracy.