Justice and the Enemy

by William Shawcross

  Ramzi Yousef joined Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Karachi, and they both traveled to Manila, where KSM posed as a Qatari businessman in the timber business, one of many identities, and acquired a young Filipina dentist as a girlfriend. He hired a helicopter to show off to his girlfriend and to survey the city while he and Yousef made new plans to cause terror and to kill.

  An early ambition was to assassinate Pope John Paul II during his pilgrimage to the Philippines. They thought he would be easier to murder than their principal target, President Bill Clinton. Yousef refined and extended his expertise as a bomb maker; he developed a tiny new bomb that could be easily smuggled onto a plane in parts, the batteries hidden in the heels of shoes. Studying airline timetables, they worked out how five men could in a single day board twelve flights and hide under seats bombs primed and timed to explode on later flights. KSM called this Operation Bojinka. According to Terry McDermott, “The math was simple: 12 flights with at least 400 people per flight. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,000 deaths. It would be a day of glory for them, calamity for the Americans they supposed would fill the aircraft.” 20

  In December 1994 Yousef made a test run of Bojinka on a Philippine Airlines plane. In the lavatory he concocted a bomb from parts he had smuggled on board and then strapped it under his seat. It exploded on a later flight, tearing to pieces a young Japanese engineer, Haruki Ikegami, and almost bringing down the plane.

  At the beginning of 1995, they fixed on January 14 for their mass airline bomb plot and started brewing the explosive nitroglycerine in their Manila apartment. The infernal swill of chemicals took on its own life and smoke filled the apartment building. The police arrived. Yousef and KSM succeeded in fleeing and made it back to Pakistan. The Pope was spared attack and so were the passengers of many airliners.

  Betrayed by an informer in Pakistan, Ramzi Yousef was arrested at a guesthouse by Pakistani and U.S. security and flown to New York. His guilt was never in doubt and, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, he was convicted, along with two others, of planning the Bojinka plot. In a statement to the Court, Yousef boasted, “Yes, I am a terrorist, and proud of it as long as it is against the U.S. government and against Israel, because you are more than terrorists; you are the one who invented terrorism and are using it every day. You are butchers, liars, and hypocrites.”21 He was sentenced to life imprisonment, with no chance of parole, and was incarcerated in the Supermax federal prison at Florence, Colorado.

  Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was staying in the same guesthouse as Yousef, but he escaped detection by Pakistani or U.S. officials. Using one of his many passports, he returned to Qatar, where he was protected by sympathizers. But as a result of U.S. pressure on the government of Qatar to arrest him, he was forced to flee to Afghanistan, where he met Osama bin Laden.

  Bin Laden had been living in Afghanistan since 1996, when, under U.S. and Saudi Arabian pressure, the government of Sudan decided that hosting him was no longer in its interest. He had flown east and became the honored guest of Afghanistan’s Taliban, the recently-founded ultra-Islamist regime notable for its fundamentalism and its brutality. Outside Kandahar, the Taliban allowed bin Laden to set up training camps for terrorists who, armed with the necessary Islamist zeal and knowledge of modern tradecraft, could be dispatched all over the world to commit mass murder.

  Khalid Sheikh Mohammed began to plot with bin Laden in Afghanistan in 1998. He was aware that bin Laden was keen to embark on major operations against the United States and its interests. He gave bin Laden details of the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 and other terrorist plots in which he had been involved. He also outlined for the first time his vision of training Al Qaeda gangs to hijack numbers of planes and, turning them into massive missiles crammed with people, crash them into buildings in the United States.22 His original proposal envisaged planes flown at ten targets, including the C.I.A. and F.B.I. headquarters, nuclear power plants, and skyscrapers on the East and West coasts.

  In a revealing detail, KSM later said that he was determined that he himself should be in charge of the tenth hijacked plane. He intended to land the plane at a U.S. airport, slaughter all the male passengers on board and then, before the massed media, deliver a speech attacking the United States for its support of Israel, the Philippines, and repressive Arab governments. As the U.S. government’s 9/11 Commission later reported, “this vision” showed KSM’s true ambitions: “This is theater, a spectacle of destruction with KSM as the self-cast star—the super terrorist.” 23 And that is an important part of what he has always sought. His passion for grandstanding and jihadist propaganda would, one must imagine, be on display in any court where he is arraigned. His record suggests that he would try to dominate the proceedings as Goering dominated Nuremberg.d

  Nineteen ninety-eight was a crucial year for Al Qaeda, one in which it achieved its greatest successes to date and learned that it could continue to operate relatively undisturbed. Osama bin Laden repeated his declaration that Al Qaeda was at war with the United States. He asserted that America’s presence in Saudi Arabia, its alliances with other Arab states, and its hostility toward Saddam Hussein gave Muslims no alternative. He claimed that all Muslims must kill Americans and their allies “until the Aqsa Mosque [in Jerusalem] and the Haram Mosque [in Mecca] are freed from their grip and until their armies, shattered and broken-winged, depart from all the lands of Islam, incapable of threatening any Muslim.” 24

  He went on to say: “By God’s leave, we call on every Muslim who believes in God and hopes for reward to obey God’s command to kill the Americans and plunder their possessions wherever he finds them and whenever he can. Likewise we call on the Muslim ulema and leaders and youth and soldiers to launch attacks against the armies of the American devils and against those who are allied with them from among the helpers of Satan.” 25

  In his most serious and enduring threat, bin Laden also declared that it was his duty as a jihadist to acquire and use weapons of mass destruction (WMD) against the enemies of God. This was an ambition that he often repeated in both private and public communications. The threat grew after the Egyptian Islamist group, Islamic Jihad, controlled by Ayman al-Zawahiri, merged with Al Qaeda. Zawahiri and his colleagues brought valuable technological expertise in WMD matters to the more ideological Al Qaeda. Bin Laden told Time magazine that “Acquiring [WMD] for the defense of Muslims is a religious duty.” From that point on, Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan trained hundreds of Islamist extremists in the production and use of chemical, biological, and radiological weapons. 26 The possession of weapons of mass destruction by Islamists was far more terrifying than their possession by the Soviet Union; the specter has lurked in the minds of American policy makers ever since, and after 9/11 came to dominate them.

  Al Qaeda’s threat had been growing for several years. On June 25, 1996, Islamist terrorists, almost certainly controlled by Iran, had a bloody success in Saudi Arabia. They detonated a sewage truck filled with explosives close to the Khobar Towers, a building in the town of Khobar that housed U.S. Air Force personnel. Nineteen Americans and one Saudi were killed; 372 people of many nationalities were wounded, some of them seriously.

  In August 1998, bin Laden activated a longstanding Al Qaeda plot to destroy the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. Neither was adequately protected and two truck bombers were able to blow up their lethal loads on August 7, 1998, exactly eight years after U.S. forces first arrived in Saudi Arabia. In Dar es Salaam, much of the blast was absorbed by a water tanker but it still killed eleven Tanzanians and wounded another eighty people. In Nairobi the carnage was far worse: twelve Americans and 201 Kenyans were killed. Another 4,500 people were injured, many of them terribly. Kenya’s medical services were quite unable to cope with carnage on this scale. The U.S. flew many of the worst injured to hospitals in Europe. Israel sent teams of sniffer dogs that were able to find scores of victims buried under the rubble.

  In both attacks, most of those
innocent Africans who died were Muslims. After the embassy bombings, bin Laden issued a statement justifying the murder of his co-religionists: “When it becomes apparent that it would be impossible to repel these Americans without assaulting them, even if this involved the killing of Muslims, this is permissible under Islam.” 27

  The American response was not a success. President Clinton ordered Tomahawk Cruise missiles to be launched against several of bin Laden’s training camps in Afghanistan. These killed six people. U.S. officials said they would have hit bin Laden himself had he not left one target an hour before it was struck. A chemical factory in Khartoum that had been mistakenly linked to Al Qaeda was also destroyed by Tomahawks. (U.S. officials believed that the factory had been producing VX nerve gas for the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein, another sworn enemy of the United States.)

  Altogether, the Clinton administration’s reaction to the embassy bombings seemed to demonstrate weakness rather than resolve and was thus another boost to the Islamist cause. Bin Laden was able to announce, “By the grace of God, I am alive.” His myth in the Islamic world was promoted and the group began to boast of its vast ambitions.

  The millennium celebration of the birth of Christ was an obvious moment for Al Qaeda extravaganzas—Jordanian police discovered a plot to blow up the Radisson Hotel in Amman at a time when it would be filled with American Christians. On the U.S.-Canadian border, a vigilant customs officer stopped a clearly nervous Algerian, Ahmed Ressam, who was trying to enter the U.S. in a car containing bomb-making materials and plans to target the Los Angeles International Airport. Plots were discovered throughout Europe, where inadequate asylum laws had allowed Islamist groups to multiply. One gang of would-be bombers, organized from London, had made themselves a film that contained scenes of Strasbourg’s Christmas market; over the images of the shoppers, the soundtrack, in Arabic, announced, “These are the enemies of God as they stroll about. You will all go to hell. God Willing.” 28

  Mercifully, vigilant police work thwarted this plot to attack Strasbourg. At their trial, the defendants refused to speak except to scream such slogans as “You are all Jews. I don’t need the court. Allah is my defender. Our only judge is Allah.” 29

  One millennium attack that succeeded was a suicide bombing assault on the United States Navy destroyer U.S.S. Cole when it was refueling in Aden Harbor on October 12, 2000. A small boat came up alongside the ship and its Al Qaeda crew exploded a massive bomb that killed seventeen American sailors and injured over forty more. Neither President Clinton, in the last months of his presidency, nor his successor, President Bush, undertook any direct military response to this brutal attack upon the U.S. navy.

  By this time, Osama bin Laden had approved Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s plan for an aerial assault on prominent targets in the United States. (Interestingly, KSM did not swear bay’ah (a pledge of loyalty) to bin Laden at this stage because he wished to be able to ignore any later decision by the Al Qaeda leadership to cancel his plan of attack.30) Bin Laden pledged to finance these attacks and to provide manpower from Al Qaeda’s Afghan training camps. KSM oversaw the planning and execution, helping the hijackers travel and selecting the targets—these were narrowed down to the World Trade Center, to symbolize American capitalism; the Pentagon; and the Capitol, which was considered to be the source of U.S. support for Israel. Bin Laden also wanted to target the White House, but this idea was dropped for fear that, if the president was not in residence, the attack would be seen as a failure.

  Khalid Sheikh Mohammed recruited potential pilots who were sent to the U.S. to enroll in flying schools, and thugs whose job was to overpower crew and passengers during the attacks. His eventual indictment alleged in plain but chilling words, “In or about 1999 and 2000, in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed trained the hijackers to use short bladed knives by killing sheep or camels.”31

  In the course of 2000 and early 2001 more and more of these gangs made their way to the United States. All of the logistics—relatively simple—were commanded and controlled by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and the men’s expenses, remarkably modest for such an ambitiously destructive operation, were transferred from the United Arab Emirates by another of his nephews.

  Cunning and limited use of the Internet and cell phones allowed the plotters to communicate relatively freely and undetected. There were, during the long conspiracy, various moments at which the U.S. authorities came close to uncovering the plot. In August 2001, just weeks before 9/11, one recruit, Zacarias Moussaoui, was arrested at his flight school in Minnesota after his erratic behavior aroused suspicion. He was held on immigration-violation charges and concerns that he might be a suicide hijacker actually reached the highest levels of the C.I.A. But the F.B.I. failed to obtain a warrant to search his laptop, which might well have revealed the wider plot. There were other intelligence hints of an impending attack that intelligence officials in the Bush administration should have pursued more diligently.

  On the morning of September 11, 2001, the long-planned mass murder took place. Four planes were hijacked by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s men and three successfully bombed their targets: the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon. Only the fourth plane failed to reach its target, the U.S. Capitol; the passengers, having learned that they were now part of a massive flying bomb, rebelled against the hijackers who, about to be overpowered, plunged the plane into a field in Pennsylvania. In addition to the 2,973 people who were murdered that day, some 3,000 children lost a parent and a new age of anxiety began.

  That evening, President Bush told the shocked American people that “Our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts.” He did not at this stage blame radical Islamists for the attacks, but he promised that America would fight back and would make no distinction between the terrorists themselves and anyone who harbored them.

  There was a very real fear at the time that the attacks of 9/11 were but the first in a series and that the next assault might well involve weapons of mass destruction. The Bush administration decided at once that the law enforcement response to terrorism was now inadequate; it would need to go beyond law enforcement to include military, financial, and diplomatic weapons in the defense of U.S. national security.

  On September 18, the U.S. Congress authorized President Bush “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.”

  This monumental mandate was unlimited in terms of time and geography. It was passed 98–0 in the Senate and 420–1 in the House of Representatives. From then all the force and power of the United States would be brought to bear to defeat America’s terrorist enemies on and off the battlefield, all over the world. There was almost no dissent, at home or abroad. America’s allies rallied to its defense. For the first time in history, NATO invoked Article 5, which pledges members to defend each other and declared its support for a fellow member under attack. The British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, was particularly robust in his response, immediately expressing full support for the United States in what he, too, called this new war. Later he recalled, “The most common words that day were ‘war,’ ‘evil,’ ‘sympathy,’ ‘solidarity,’ ‘determination,’ and, of course, ‘change.’ Above all, it was accepted that the world had changed. How could it be otherwise?” 32

  As America grieved and girded, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed celebrated in Karachi—the most cosmopolitan city of America’s Muslim ally Pakistan—and bin Laden rejoiced in his Afghan hideout. In a conversation recorded with his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and a visiting Saudi militant, Khaled al-Harbi, whose mother had reported that she had received many, many calls of congratulation, bin Laden waxed lyrical about the ef
fects of the crimes he had authorized Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to commit:The sermons they [the hijackers] gave in New York and Washington, made the whole world hear—the Arabs, the non-Arabs, the Indians, the Chinese—and are worth much more than millions of books and cassettes and pamphlets [promoting Islam]. Maybe you have heard, but I heard it myself on the radio, that at one of the Islamic centers in Holland, the number of those who have converted to Islam after the strikes, is greater than all those who converted in the last eleven years.

  Chapter 3

  CONVENTIONS

  “THE MOST SERIOUS CHALLENGE that faces modern civilization [is] war and international lawlessness.” 1

  So spoke Justice Jackson in 1949, just three years after judgment was reached against the major Nazi war criminals. Nineteen forty-nine was also the year in which the international community (a nebulous concept at the best of times), appalled by the horrors of the Second World War, renegotiated and redefined the Geneva Conventions, the rules by which wars between states are always now supposed to be fought.