Notwithstanding this benefit, however, senior CIA officers repeatedly reminded the Clinton national security team that the Islamist fighters acquired via rendition operations were being taken to states that the U.S. State Department routinely cited as human-rights abusers. In response, the White House tasked the CIA to request assurance from each foreign government that received an al-Qaeda fighter that the prisoner would be treated according to that country’s laws. In other words, State X would have to pledge that it would treat the al-Qaeda fighter according to the laws of State X. Needless to say, the prisoner-receiving government always made this assurance, and it was passed to the White House. At no time in my experience did the president or his advisers ever task the CIA to solicit from a prisoner-receiving country a guarantee that an al-Qaeda fighter would be treated according to U.S. legal standards or the norms of international law. Claims made by former Clinton administration officials to the contrary are lies.
The problem with the rendition program is that it has emerged as the major counterterrorism tool of the U.S. government. The program was never intended to be, or capable of being, the instrument through which al-Qaeda would be defeated. Al-Qaeda is far too large an organization to be defeated by what President Clinton and President George W. Bush have described as a process of “arresting them one man at a time and bringing them to justice.” The CIA’s rendition program was and is successful in picking off senior al-Qaeda leaders and thereby keeping al-Qaeda off balance because of the need to replace talented leaders. It was not and is not the means to victory, and that it is now thought of as such speaks again to the pernicious effect of Cold War hangovers: the constant search for third-country proxies to handle captured rendition targets; the fear of applying strong military force even after it is clear that arresting Islamists one at a time does not adequately protect America; and the willingness of presidential administrations from both parties to be intimidated by human-rights groups and vote-seeking politicians like Senator McCain and Senator Carl Levin (D-Michigan) (Michigan is a large Muslim-population state) into neutering the one counterterrorism program that was producing positive and measurable results. My congressional testimony on the rendition program can be read in “Extraordinary Rendition in U.S. Counterterrorism Policy: The Impact on Trans Atlantic Relations,” April 17, 2007, serial 110–28, http://foreignaffairs.house.gov/110/34712.pdf.
8.Quoted in Woodward, Bush at War, 65.
9.Ibid. In July 2007 the National Intelligence Estimate came close to officially recognizing General Powell’s mistake in identifying the 9/11 raids as an attack on the entire Western community (rather than what it was, a direct attack only on the United States) by noting its concern that the “level of international cooperation [against al-Qaeda] may wane as 9/11 becomes a more distant memory and perceptions of the threat diverge.” The term “perceptions of the threat diverge” appears to be a bureaucratic nicety that means that the Intelligence Community anticipates that our non-English-speaking allies will come to see that they are on al-Qaeda’s bull’s-eye list only as long as they are overtly aiding the United States. See “NIE: The Terrorist Threat to the U.S. Homeland,” July 17, 2007.
10.Osama bin Laden, “Statement to the Peoples of Countries Allied to [the] Tyrannical U.S. Government,” Alneda (online), November 21, 2002.
11.Ibid.
12.Ibid.
13.Ibid.
14.Osama bin Laden, “Speech to the Peoples of Europe,” Al-Arabiyah Television, April 15, 2004.
15.Ibid.
16.“Spanish Government Admits Defeat,” http://news.bbc.co.uk., March 15, 2004; Isambard Wilkonson, “Election Blow of Bush’s War on Terrorism,” www.telegraph.co.uk, March 15, 2004; and Faye Bowers, “Do Terrorists Play Election Politics?” Christian Science Monitor, March 17, 2004.
17.“Official Results: Prodi Defeats Berlusconi,” Associated Press, April 11, 2006.
18.Kevin Sullivan and Mary Jordan, “Blair Says He Will Step Down Within 12 Months,” Washington Post, September 8, 2006, A-12.
19.Sebastian Berger, “Thailand Coup Raises Hope for a Deal with Muslim Insurgents,” www.telegraph.co.uk, September 29, 2006, and Kim Barker, “Gleam Is off Thailand’s Quiet Coup,” Chicago Tribune, December 10, 2006.
20.Craig Gordon, “When Did Bush Know?” www.newsday.com, June 2, 2006; Ruxandra Adam, “Maliki Slams U.S. Military for Attack,” http://news.softpedia.com, August 8, 2006; Fisnik Abrashi, “Karzai: Attacks Wearing Thin on Afghans,” Associated Press, December 8, 2006; “Karzai Criticizes Foreign Tactics,” www.newsvote.bbc.co.uk, June 22, 2006; Tim Abalone and Michael Evans, “Karzai Wants Rethink on Terror War as al-Qaeda Urges Uprising,” www.timesonline.co.uk, June 23, 2006.
21.“France Will Withdraw Some Forces from Afghanistan,” International Herald Tribune, December 17, 2006, and Elaine Ganley, “French Pull Troops from Afghanistan,” Washington Post, December 20, 2006.
22.Alan Cowell, “Britain to Pull 1,600 Troops out of Iraq, Blair Says,” New York Times, February 21, 2007; Mark Rice-Oxley, “As U.S. Surges, British Start Exiting Iraq,” Christian Science Monitor, February 22, 2007.
23.Ian Fisher, “Italian Prime Minister Resigns,” New York Times, February 22, 2007, and Phil Stewart, “Italy’s Prodi Quits After Foreign Policy Defeat,” Boston Globe, February 21, 2007.
24.Kim Murphy, “New Polish Premier Pledges Iraq Pullout,” Los Angeles Times, November 24, 2007; Tim Johnston, “Bush Ally Defeated in Australia,” New York Times, November 25, 2007; and Rohan Sullivan, “Australian Troops Home from Iraq in 2008,” Associated Press, November 30, 2007.
25.Sachiko Sakamaki, “Fukuda Fails to Renew Japan Deployment for Afghan War,” www.bloomberg.com, November 1, 2007; Jung Sung-ki, “Troop Pullout from Afghanistan Starts,” www.koreatimes.com, August 30, 2007; “Cost of Afghan War a ‘biggie’ for Dutch; not so much in Canada,” www.canadianpress.google.com, October 30, 2007; “Sarkozy Favors French Afghan Withdrawal,” news.brisbane times.com.au, April 27, 2007; and Thomas Walkom, “Memo for Minister McKay: The Hearts and Minds campaign Isn’t Working. It’s Time to Talk Peace with the Taliban,” Toronto Star (online), August 18, 2007.
26.Pape, Dying to Win, 129–39.
27.For America’s military, diplomatic, and intelligence services, this reality is new, unique, and profoundly disquieting. Historically all three services are assigned tasks to further the implementation and success of U.S. foreign policy. Now, however, a successful effort in support of any U.S. policy on which bin Laden has focused Muslim attention worsens America’s problems. The U.S. military overthrows Saddam’s regime and occupies Iraq; Muslims see the fulfillment of the Koran’s guidelines for a defensive jihad. U.S. diplomats support Beijing’s contention that Muslim Uighur separatists are terrorists; heretofore-neutral Uighurs become anti-American. Intelligence officers provide data to Saudi Arabia that allows the capture and incarceration of local mujahedin; Saudi Islamists harden their view that Riyadh is an un-Islamic, American agent. In reality, an event that U.S. leaders view as a success for their policies can often truly be a case of one step forward and two—or more—steps back.
28.Little should be made of the upticks in U.S. popularity that always occur after U.S. relief aid is delivered to the scene of natural disasters in the Muslim world, such as the post-9/11 tsunami in Indonesia and the earthquake in Pakistani Kashmir. This aid reinforces the admiration that Muslims already have for American generosity, but it does nothing to lessen their animosity toward our foreign policies. Muslims make a clear and broad separation between the two sets of issues.
29.Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
30.See, for example, “Christian Evangelist Franklin Graham Blasts Islam, Says Will Rebuild Churches in Sudan,” Associated Press, October 9, 2006.
31.To be fair, some eminent scholars believe Christianity is growing as fast as or perhaps faster than Islam. See for example Philip Jenkins, “The Next Christianity,” Atla
ntic Monthly (October 2002), 68. Perhaps deciding which estimate is precisely correct matters less than Jenkins’ all-too-accurate conclusion. “But the twenty-first century,” he warns, “will almost certainly be regarded by future historians as a century in which religion replaced ideology as the prime animating and destructive force in human affairs, guiding attitudes toward political liberty and obligation, concepts of nationhood, and, of course, conflicts and wars.”
32.William Dalrymple, “Islamophobia,” New Statesman (online version), January 19, 2004.
33.Ibid.
34.Abid Mustafa, “Why the West Has Lost the Ideological War Against Muslims,” Media Monitors Network (online version), March 11, 2005.
35.Kenneth S. Stampp, And the War Came: The North and the Secession Crisis, 1860–1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1970), 253.
36.Don E. Fehrenbacher, Sectional Crisis and Southern Constitutionalism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995), 31.
37.James F. Simon, Lincoln and Chief Justice Taney: Slavery, Secession, and the President’s War Powers (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 96, 112, 121, 271. In reviewing the cauldron of substantive issues debated in antebellum politics, as well as northern derision of the South, the analogy to contemporary American politics becomes troublingly and perhaps eerily apparent. In the current debate on culture, the genuine substantive issues are apparent: homosexuality, abortion, pornography, evolution-vs.-creationism, and so on. Also noticeable is the often condescending tone of superiority that those individuals who take the pro-side of the issues use toward their opponents. Not only are creationists said to be wrong, for example, but they are described as antimodern, unsophisticated, antiscience, parochial, and misogynist, and their pro-life arguments are ridiculed as quaint, mystical, or fanatically religious. Such rhetoric cannot help but hinder the search for common ground.
38.Fehrenbacher, Sectional Crisis, 31.
39.Since that speech, two anthologies of bin Laden’s major speeches have been published, but together they only scratch the surface of the corpus of his materials and leave the work of al-Zawahiri and other al-Qaeda leaders untouched. The better, more complete of the two anthologies is Randall Hamud, ed., Osama bin Laden: America’s Enemy in His Own Words (San Diego, Calif.: Nadeem Publishing, 2005). The other useful work is Bruce Lawrence, ed., Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden (London: Verso, 2005). Finally, a third anthology—The Al-Qaeda Reader, published in 2007—claims to “prove once and for all” that al-Qaeda is waging an offensive vice defensive jihad, and that its true motivation is to destroy western civilization and establish a worldwide caliphate. The selection of documents from the enormous al-Qaeda archive is small and selective; meant to support neoconservative scare-mongering about the caliphate and the rising tide of Islamofascism; and introduced and endorsed by the Neocons’ history-is-what-I-say-it-is spokesman, Victor Davis Hanson. While the neoconservatives have long identified the publication and wide-distribution of al-Qaeda documents in English as tantamount to supporting terrorism, Hanson now endorses their publication in an unscholarly form that will mislead Americans about their enemies’ intentions and motivations. The real tragedy in The Al-Qaeda Reader is that its compiler and editor, Raymond Ibrahim, is obviously a talented and knowledgeable man. His endnotes in the volume about the ins and outs of Islamic theology are extensive, clear, and very valuable to the average reader. Unfortunately, Mr. Ibrahim’s status as an admirer and former student of Dr. Hanson has led him to produce a volume that supports his mentor’s view, but does little to accurately inform Americans. See Raymond Ibrahim (ed.), The Al-Qaeda Reader (New York: Broadway Books, 2007).
40.It is impossible to conceive a rationale for why the U.S. government or some major foundation has not already sponsored the translation and publication of the full texts of speeches, letters, books, and interviews by bin Laden and Zawahiri. We learned a horrific lesson from failing to translate and publish Hitler’s Mein Kampf in a timely manner, and we rectified it by making the works of Communist leaders accessible to all Americans who were interested. Given the threat that al-Qaeda poses to the United States, the approach we took to the words of Communist leaders seems appropriate for those of bin Laden et al. Although I disagree with the conclusions President George W. Bush draws from reading the words of al-Qaeda’s leaders, his attitude toward them is exactly right. “The world ignored Hitler’s words and paid a terrible price,” Mr. Bush said in September. 2006. “Bin Laden and his allies have made their intentions as clear as Lenin and Hitler before them. The question is: Will we listen? Will we pay attention to what these evil men say?” See Ken Herman, “Bush: Pay Attention to Words of Evil,” www.kentucky.com, September 6, 2006.
Chapter 7. “O enemy of God, I will give thee no respite”: Al-Qaeda and Its Allies Take Stock
1.“Transcript of Republican Presidential Debate in South Carolina,” www.nytimes.com, May 17, 2007.
2.Patrick J. Buchanan, “Who Was Right—Ron or Rudy,” www.townhall.com, May 18, 2007.
3.“The Terrorist Threat to the Homeland: NIE Key Judgments,” www.dni.gov, July 17, 2007.
4.Woodward, Bush at War, 45.
5.Jonathan Tobin, “That Old Standby—the Scapegoat,” http://jewishworldreview.com, December 16, 2004.
6.Gabriel Schoenfeld, “What Became of the CIA?” Commentary (March 2005), online www.opinionjournal.com.
7.Morris J. Amitay, “Not Very Funny,” www.washingtonpac.com, April 20, 2006. For my article (to which Mr. Amitay refers) praising the Israeli government’s superb and utterly successful covert political-action campaign to suppress criticism of Israel in the United States, see Michael F. Scheuer, “Does Israel Conduct Covert Action in America? You Bet It Does,” www.antiwar.com, April 8, 2006.
8.Mearsheimer and Walt, “Israel Lobby.” The article was then developed into the authors’ book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007).
9.James Carroll, “The Thread of Anti-Semitism,” Boston Globe, April 3, 2006; Max Boot, “Attacking the Israeli Lobby,” Los Angeles Times, April 3, 2006; “Paper on Israeli Lobby Draws Ire,” United Press International, April 3, 2006; Christopher Hitchens, “Overstating Jewish Power,” www.slate.com, March 27, 2006; David Gergen, “There Is No Israel ‘Lobby.’” New York Daily News, March 26, 2006; Victor Davis Hanson, “When Cynicism Meets Fanaticism,” www.nationalreview.com, March 31, 2006; Steven Simon, “Here’s Where the ‘Israel Lobby’ Is Wrong,” Daily Star, May 4, 2006; Jonathan Tobin, “View from America: The Paranoid Style of American Anti-Israel Politics,” www.jpost.com, April 3, 2006; and Richard L. Cravatts, “Anti-Semitic Paranoia at Harvard,” http://news.bostonherald.com, April 3, 2006.
10.Gergen, “No Israel ‘Lobby.’”
11.In Islam, takfir is the process of excommunication: that is, declaring a person or a group of persons non-Muslim. Takfiris are those who take it upon themselves to judge whether an individual or group should be excommunicated. While living in the Sudan in the early 1990s, for example, bin Laden was twice attacked by takfiris who believed he was not a “good Muslim.” Currently, there are small groups of Sunni Islamists who can legitimately be called takfiris, and these groups often take it upon themselves both to excommunicate and then kill those excommunicated. This is a small, unpopular trend within the Islamist militant movement because most Sunnis believe that the takfiris, in essence, illegitimately preempt Allah’s final judgment on an individual. Some U.S. writers, like Mary Habeck and Fawaz Gerges, have identified al-Qaeda as a takfiri organization, but this is grossly inaccurate. Overall, the Israel-first takfiris of U.S. politics are much more dangerous to U.S. interests than are Islamist takfiris.
12.Quoted in Melton, Quotable Founding Fathers, 101.
13.Quoted in James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1956), 283.
14.William R. Cook, Tocqueville and the American Experiment, 24 lectures (Chantilly, Va.:
Teaching Company, 2006).
15.Ibid., CD 5, lecture 10, and Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Harvey C. Mansfield and Debra Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 227.
16.McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State, 6.
17.Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 243–45.
18.Bin Laden has repeatedly discussed al-Qaeda’s goal of bankrupting the U.S. economy. See, for example, Taysir Alouni, “Interview with Usama Bin Ladin, 21 October 2001,” www.qoqaz.com, May 23, 2002, and “Statement by al-Qaida leader Osama bin Ladin,” Al-Jazirah Satellite Television, December 27, 2001. On spreading out U.S. forces, Zawahiri has written: “In this great battle…It is compulsory on the Muslim youth to spread the battle against the crusaders and Jews on the biggest space possible of land, and to threaten their interests in all places, and not to let them rest or find stability.” See Ayman al-Zawahiri, “The Freeing of Humanity and Homelands Under the Banner of the Qur’an,” www.jiahdunspun.com, March 8, 2005.
19.In the period since July 2006, there have been about thirty messages from bin Laden and al-Zawahiri. The great majority of them have been from the latter.
20.Osama bin Laden, “Message to the American People,” Al-Jazirah Satellite Television, January 19, 2006, and Azzam al-Amriki, “Legitimate Demands,” As-Sahab, May 29, 2007. For the best examination of this American mujahid, see Raffi Khatchadourian, “Azzam the American,” New Yorker, January 22, 2007.
Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series) Page 44
