2001 - September 11 was a third-rate operation - MICHAEL DORAN

2001 - September 11 was a third-rate operation – MICHAEL DORAN

Asia Time Online - Daily News

Middle East

Mar 28, 2008

SPEAKING FREELY
September 11 was a third-rate operation
By Bohdan Pilacinski

Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have their say. Please click here if you are interested in contributing.

In late April of 2001, just five months before the September 11 attack date, Mohamed Atta was stopped for driving erratically late at night near Ft Lauderdale, Florida. By then, the pilots all had their licenses, final-phase planning must have been under way. Yet, here was Osama bin Laden's field commander for the entire operation, driving a red Pontiac (though 15 years old), with Arabic stickers, and no driver's license, or at least none he would show.

Warned and lucky, Atta was told to show up for a court date, with a license, or a warrant would go out for his arrest. He got the license but failed to show. Ten weeks later, he was stopped for speeding, but unaccountably no computer coughed up a warrant. Now Florida has reciprocity; so at least in theory and for no good reason, the September 11 attack team functioned its last four months with an arrest warrant out for their leader in 50 states.

Having sorted out the contestants in their publicly touted "mastermind" of the month contest, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) released this disclosure of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, (so successfully water-boarded in Pakistan). Zacarias Moussaoui, who'd presumably attracted Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) attention by advising his flight instructor that he wasn't much interested in take-offs and landings [1], hadn't been a member of the 9/11 teams at all; he was being held in reserve. Why? Because he was a belligerent loud-mouth and hence a security risk. As he so proved.

Point is, any decent handler with minimal judgment and authority would have yanked Moussaoui out of the country within days of this assessment. But no, he was left scheming on his own, possibly with consequences for al-Qaeda more severe than we know ... such as forcing the attack date.

No license, sloppy driving, even Arabic stickers; worse, an unbalanced agent working solo. These aren't just lapses in the learning curve of an amateur operation; these are ludicrous standards for operational security in any clandestine organization.
In the orchestrated fear campaign pursuant to the attack, we were systematically inundated with extravagant claims for al-Qaeda's potency, reach, cohesion, dedication, vision and Satanic focus. Dr No on petrodollars! Everything Vladimir Lenin could wish he'd had or been! Of course much of this has since - in the jargon of the financial press - been "subject to downward revision"; yet, to this day, insistence on al-Qaeda as a formerly monolithic, then metastasized, demon pathology of epic capacity for terror and evil, has been virtually obligatory throughout the US media: left, right and center.

As late as June 2, 2006, National Intelligence czar John Negroponte pronounced al-Qaeda as the biggest threat to America in the world today. Again, prima facia evidence to the contrary accumulated from day one. Why, if the enemy was so formidable, were a quarter of his assets hanging out over a hayfield in the middle of nowhere, an hour and a quarter past the initial strike on the North Tower? Why were the hijacker's identities rumbled so quickly; why didn't they have identification documents with Anglicized, or Europeanized or Latinized names? And the big tracking question: If they're this good tactically, how good are they strategically?

Our first clue came in late December. Having scored perhaps the most spectacular guerrilla attack in the history of warfare, what did al-Qaeda do for an encore? Would-be trans-Atlantic airline bomber Richard Reid, who couldn't find the bathroom to blow up his shoes.

There are perfectly satisfactory answers to the above questions and others like them, but these matter less than what they spell out collectively. September 11 was a minimalist operation, funded at the cost of a modest San Francisco Bay Area condominium, by a small, weak opponent. At its height, al-Qaeda's external operations never mounted to better than a third-rate execution.

Beyond that, al-Qaeda's been an American-made myth: fear, credulity ... and hype.

The military and the intellectuals - the social elements with perspective - were not that impressed, (the FBI and terrorism professionals were hysterical). Al-Qaeda wasn't even the first suspect; the initial law enforcement sweep was scattershot, and rolled up a large Israeli spy ring along with all the Arab males and foreigners. [2] New York was wounded but sober. It was the American TV audience that was blown away.

On closer examination - all publicly available information - every Washington-generated myth about al-Qaeda erodes or vaporizes. Here are two.

Myth number one: A fanatical brotherhood of impenetrable loyalty. As early as 1995, Moroccan and British intelligence tried to turn an al-Qaeda pilot into a double agent. L'Housssaine Kherchtou returned from his flying duties in Africa to find his pregnant wife begging in the streets of Khartoum (Sudan) for money to fund a cesarean section. He petitioned al-Qaeda for US$500 to cover the procedure ... and was denied. His loyalties faded, but he refused to turn. (Bin Laden was away and the Saudis had confiscated his assets. Al-Qaeda was suddenly bankrupt. A series of defections ensued). In the end, Kherchtou became the star witness in the New York trial which convicted four al-Qaeda terrorists in the bombing of the two US embassies in Africa. No deals ... this of his own free will. He's now in witness protection.

On to middle management: Ramzi bin al-Shiba, would-be pilot and hijacker, but for a US entry visa, became instead the 9/11 liaison between the Hamburg cell and al-Qaeda central. Worth $25 million to the US. With his bodyguards dead, taken without resistance after a three-hour gun battle with Pakistani police.

Consider: This fount of information knew what he'd face and might reveal. With three hours to give orders that he's not to be taken alive and/or to prepare his own death, he gave himself up with predictable consequences. The gravest of which was a trail leading to the apprehension six months later of al-Qaeda's operational chief, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed (KSM).

On the run with just one guard, surprised asleep at 3 am, he got off a few rounds with his Kalashnikov before he was overpowered. His cell phones gave him up. Though he'd juggled 30 numbers, or maybe only 10, American and Pakistani intelligence had gotten enough of them to either triangulate his location or to trace his last call. Such, anyway, is the official story, which was extremely useful to both President George W Bush and President Pervez Musharraf for different reasons at the time. He's now at Guantanamo. [3].

I don't mean to imply in an abbreviated presentation that al-Qaeda's operatives caved like dominoes; they didn't. But the myth of impenetrability was likely a function of, and cover for, a debased post-Cold War CIA. As The Atlantic reported in February of 1998, the agency was running on bureaucratic rot. Their intelligence stank, their agents were bought, their case officers were self-promoting liars, and their division heads knew no languages. Nearly everyone with integrity had quit. [4]. As recently reported by Le Monde and belying Washington's post factum claims of impenetrability, well before 9/11 French intelligence had penetrated al-Qaeda's Afghan training camps from three directions, one of them "up to the command structures".

A specific alert to the CIA's Paris station, dated January 5, 2001, of the certainty of al-Qaeda's commitment to hijack American planes, never reached the appropriate analysts within the agency and has left no trace in any American post 9/11 investigations. [5] And even as far back as the Afghan campaign, everything ran through Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), without which the Americans were lost.

Relatively speaking, the Hamburg cell was of exceptional quality and mostly self-motivated. As for the rest, for every half competent operative there's a glaring embarrassment. Reid, Moussaoui ... consider the 20th hijacker:

One short, al-Qaeda's aspirants kept getting turned away as potential economic migrants. The key to US entry was a Saudi passport. In August, with the attack plan on hold, al-Qaeda finally got a Saudi as far as Orlando (Disney World). He arrived on a one-way ticket, with no credit cards, and insufficient money to cover his one-week vacation. Then he couldn't keep his story straight. He never got past airport security. [6] Again, they send a bozo out on his own. Where's the handler on this?

On the last leg of the plan - a plan five years in the making - the embarrassments really stack up. Days before the attack, Atta et al got drunk and started a row in a Florida oyster bar. Then they left a pile of flight manuals in a motel room. Then they abandoned rental cars with more Arabic paraphernalia. And then Atta's idiotic suitcase, with that bizarre will, and a roadmap for an investigation. Why did that suitcase exist? Why wasn't it packed with generic clothes and toilet articles?

The trail up the East Coast was one a blind dog could follow; so thick the FBI believed the hijackers wanted to be known. Esprit de corps, we were told, they're weird that way. But the sloppiness went further. One small delay at the jetport in Portland, and Atta and Omari would have missed their flight in Boston.

It would have taken very little more: a minder to stay cool in the oyster bar, cover tracks and pick up loose ends; return a rental car which was a credit card trail; very little extra to minimize exposure.

Did they want to be known? Al-Qaeda has never claimed its attacks. Bin Laden denied knowledge and responsibility for almost four years, by which time the whole world believed it his doing anyway. And was being known a tactical advantage or disadvantage to al-Qaeda?

The evidence argues there was an al-Qaeda infrastructure in Hamburg, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan. There was nothing on American soil. No handlers, no minders, no oversight. A near total absence of tradecraft and a minimal knowledge of terrain. (In San Diego, Nawaf al-Hamzi and Khalid al-Mihdhar actually rented a bedroom from a top FBI counterterrorism informant). [7] The one thing the hijackers did right was keep their mouths shut; but not a trained spook in the entire organization in so much as a consulting capacity; not even a fundamentalist moonlighting from the ISI. There was no depth.

No depth and no breadth ... this introduces Washington's second al-Qaeda myth.

Myth number two: Al-Qaeda's deep threat with global reach. Traditionally, as any moviegoer knows, a top priority of a clandestine operation is to cover identities. Suppose the passenger lists on the four crashed planes hadn't revealed a quota of five Arabic names each (except for flight 93, which had four)? The evidence, after all, was going up in smoke; the hijackers all expected to incinerate themselves. From the site in New York, we don't even have a set of teeth.

Absent a pattern on the passenger lists, how would this have stretched the investigation? How long would it have been delayed? And when the FBI finally located 19 nonexistent passengers, ciphers all, what then? What effect might lengthened exposure to the unknown have had on the American public? What advantage, if any, might a lengthened and confused investigation have yielded al-Qaeda in Afghanistan?

These begin as tactical questions but turn into strategic ones.

In September of 2001, in northern Afghanistan, the Taliban were about to finish off the Northern Alliance, which militarily was a spent force. On September 9, bin Laden's assassins got to Ahmad Shah Massoud, the alliance's brilliant commander and only figure capable of keeping the alliance together. Only because the "French TV journalists", with their cameras full of explosives, had been detained incommunicado waiting for their interview was the assassination three weeks late. But for that one turn of fate, by 9/11 the Taliban would have been mopping up America's only available proxy ground force. The Americans would have had to invade in winter and do their own fighting - in the snow, and on the ground as in Iraq.

As Professor Michael Doran wrote in Political Science Quarterly, "Bin Laden engineered the decapitation of the Northern Alliance in order to throw it into such disarray that it would be useless to the United States as an instrument of retribution." [8] Which raises the question: Why crowd the planning so tightly, with no margin for error? Why 9/11? Why not 10/11, or just before winter? And if 9/11, why not delay American resolve by whatever means, including confusion; consolidate and maintain the initiative?

How difficult would it have been to use misleading identities? To procure them, then cover them with airfares? To smuggle a 20th hijacker across the border? Would it have justified the additional risks? The short answers are: Easily, fairly easily, fairly easily, and no. Al-Qaeda acted rationally within its limitations ... which were severe.

By 2001, America had won the Cold War, owned the future, had no enemies, and security was lax. That was then. Five years later, on August 1, 2006, the Associated Press reported that undercover investigators had entered the US using fake documents at nine border crossings on both the Mexican and Canadian borders repeatedly that year. Same in 2003 and 2004. On May 5, 2006, on "All Things Considered", National Public Radio reported that very convincing fake IDs - driver's licenses and social security cards - could be had on any number of street corners in Los Angeles for $100. The Los Angeles Police Department vouched for the quality. Criminals including a murderer, "have walked out of police stations" with these.

The hijackers all boarded showing legitimate US driver's licenses, which deflected any potentially embarrassing lines of inquiry regarding country of origin. The pilots, of course, had licenses from living here. Two hijackers paid a Salvadoran in a convenience store parking lot $50 each to vouch for them as Virginia residents, which was all Virginia required; they then vouched in turn for five new arrivals - "muscle" in the plot. Keep it simple ...

Getting fake IDs might have been easy. Using them courted unforeseeable risks. Non-Arabic names call for non-Arabic language skills; 13 of the men were new arrivals, 12 of them Saudis. Dealing with unfamiliar criminal elements, especially outside one's own ethnic group, can also generate unforeseeable complications. And finally, paying for the tickets ... cash is a security tip-off; a convincing set of credit card trails would have required some finesse and the infrastructure wasn't there.

So the 9/11 teams didn't cover their identities and obliterate their trail because they couldn't. It was beyond their competence. But if al-Qaeda couldn't expect to stall American mobilization, why hadn't central command delayed the attack date to follow on the Taliban offensive? [9]

Assuming the CIA video found in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, is genuine [10], bin Laden was notified of the 9/11 attack date six days in advance. Stateside, attempted ticket purchases (though unsuccessful as they failed a credit check), began 33 days in advance. This would mean compartmentalization was so extreme that al-Qaeda central did not determine, control or know the attack date.

In fact, the record argues that bin Laden had long pressed for a much earlier attack, but Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Atta had resisted. So it seems that in the planning stage, the 9/11 plot was unrelated to ongoing events in Afghanistan, and in its final stage, was not strategically coordinated with the Taliban's offensive against the Northern Alliance.

Conversely, it's unlikely the Taliban leadership even suspected al-Qaeda's intent. The French intelligence documents referred to above maintain the Taliban leadership consented to the "tactical" hijacking of American commercial airliners; but as noted in follow-up commentary, hijacking an airplane prior to September 11 meant forcing it "to land at an airport to conduct negotiations" - for which there were standard procedures. [5] Peter Bergen, CNN's terrorism analyst, flatly states that Taliban leader Mullah Omar was not informed, certainly not of a plan to fire-bomb American targets, and would have vetoed such had he known. [11]

Was there a strategy behind 9/11? According to Abu Hafs, al-Qaeda's military commander and bin Laden's closest confederate, it was to provoke an American invasion of Afghanistan. [12] But an American invasion, of an exhausted and divided country, without the knowledge or consent of one's ally and host, expecting him to destroy the "second superpower" as the mujahideen had the first? With supply lines from where? Russia, which was crushing Chechnya? Pakistan, where Musharraf was and is a balancing act? This is a strategy? It's a regional civil war or it's nothing.

The US overran Afghanistan, destroyed bin Laden's ally and his base, and garnered the sympathy of most of the Muslim world. Would it had stopped there. Bin Laden has succeeded not for his strategy, but because the US overreached and unmasked itself in Iraq.

In all the government and media hyperbole about the terrorist threat, the most hystericized has been al-Qaeda's imminent procurement of a nuclear weapon. They tried to buy one from the Russians, we're told. They were scammed in Sudan buying uranium and were probably scammed repeatedly thereafter. But they still want a nuclear weapon? The entire subject of terrorist nukes has been framed in nearly unrestrained speculation. Intent is far from capability.

Concretely, in narrative shorthand: Already under surveillance, KSM'S top in-house bomb maker (who was good), got himself busted because his lab caught fire. [13] Bin Laden's attempts to assemble a team of foreign scientists; to procure necessary materials, technologies and workable plans; let alone to establish production facilities, never got past the wishful thinking stage.

The proper question asked nowhere in the press is what, in the decade that Russia was on its knees, as the Russian army sold itself for food, as a Russian admiral sank his fleet in Vladivostok harbor for scrap, while Russia regressed to a barter economy and everything was for sale; in this decade of Russia's collapse and chaos and gangster capitalism, what did al-Qaeda with all its alleged petrodollars actually get?

Nothing. We already know they got no spooks. Weapons? All leftovers from America's proxy war against the Red Army in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Sophisticated communications equipment? None. And well before 9/11, Russia was supplying the Northern Alliance.

And they got no intelligence. Neither al-Qaeda nor the Taliban was prepared for the American assault. It's unlikely anyone there even read Jane's Defence Weekly. That's your ... deep threat with global reach.

The American people have been far, far too impressed with a hole in the middle of New York City. Al-Qaeda's capability was to damage those buildings and to kill several hundred people; to trap or destroy the top 15 floors was the most that they hoped for. [14]. The collapse of the twin towers was entirely a function of their structural engineering.

Imagine a large zipper opening from the top. Three floors - crashed and weakened by fire - create a slider of some 15 floors above. On every floor, the outer sheath is held in tension to the tower's core by steel floor joists beneath a concrete tray. As the "slider" hits the floors, the joists give and pull the sheath in after them. With every floor, the "slider's" weight and speed increases, pulling the next floor in and down before it. Very clean, and unforeseen, and emphatically not al-Qaeda's doing.

The remaining loose thread in this narrative, the fate of flight 93 which crashed in Pennsylvania, again illustrates both the intelligence and the vulnerability of the plot.

It's self evident that minimum exposure maximizes odds of mission success in a surprise attack by a weak opponent on a strong one; and the plan was for a near synchronous takeoff. But flight 93 was delayed 40 minutes, and took off as the first plane crashed the North Tower. So - an hour and three quarters of hang time in red alert, but still doable; target approach would be from an unforeseen direction.

The hijacking was executed as late as possible, as the plane neared the north-south flight corridor of Detroit-Washington, DC, which dictated a sharp left turn. Had the takeoff been on time, this turn would have been executed before there'd been any reason for alarm on the ground; and with the transponder off, it might well have gone undetected. Instead, ground radar stayed on track despite losing the transponder signal (which is harder); and feedback from the ground leaked back onto the plane through cell phone conversations. [15].

That's it. That's how big and bad and deep al-Qaeda was. This is the platform for America's "war on terror", which migrated so glibly onto the biggest remaining oil field in the Middle East. By comparison, Columbian drug cartels had secure routes for money, drugs and personnel; near untraceable money laundering operations; and one lost a half-built, 100- foot submarine to police in a suburb of Bogota. Russian documents were found at the site. [16].

Al-Qaeda's leadership was rolled up in fairly short order because it was few to begin with. The Economist now says, "Al-Qaeda probably never had more than a few hundred committed members." [17]. Ted Galen Carpenter of the libertarian Cato Institute tells us to get some perspective: "The closest historical analogy for the radical Islamic terrorist threat ... is the violence perpetrated by anarchist forces during the last third of the 19th century." [18].

Even the current official line, that al-Qaeda was a cohesive organization since gone to seed, is just half true. For example, Spanish police concluded there was no link between al-Qaeda and the Madrid bombings of 2004. Bin Laden never controlled Abu Musab al-Zarqawi or "al-Qaeda in Iraq". [19]. After a four-year investigation, the LA Times' Terry McDermott concluded:

Al-Qaeda itself was never the huge organization its opponents sometimes portrayed. Its core was at most a couple hundred men. [It] sat at the center of ... a web of other like-minded organizations spread across the globe ... but was never in any sense in control of [them].

The tight, operational group around bin Laden was quite small. Then, McDermott's view on the brunt of this article:

One underappreciated aspect of al-Qaeda operations was how crude many of them were. Intelligence analysts sometimes cited the plans' complexity and sophistication, as if blowing up buildings or boats or vehicles was high-end science. In fact, many al-Qaeda plots have been marked by the haphazardness of their design and execution. Over the years, many of the plots seemed harebrained at worst, ill-conceived at best, pursued by ill-equipped and unprepared, inept men. Some were almost comical in their haplessness: boats sank, cars crashed, bombs blew up too soon. Some of the men virtually delivered themselves to police. The gross ineptitude of the execution often disguised the gravity of the intent, and hid, also, the steadfastness of the plotters. [20].

A threat, but not a danger, was the likely view of Western intelligence agencies. But the plot succeeded for one big reason which the American public holds in denial; it walked through a series of open doors. I'm not referring to the lax security and all the government has been faulted for. I'm referring to the atmosphere and attitude which then pervaded the country from top to bottom.

The plot encountered no resistance because America was in a frenzy of narcissistic triumphalism: every form of self- inflation and as arrogant as possible. Let's revisit that period.

The government's priorities were plundering the public trust and institutionalizing crony capitalism. The world was our casino. Cultural leadership had passed to the voice of the sewer. From frenzied corporate racketeering, to "in-your-face" aggression in sports, to the spew of invective then called "rap", to the anger of youth for show ... at every social stratum America gloried in the liberation of the sociopath.

The codes which temper the power of the strong over the weak had so collapsed that the lionized National Football League "role models" routinely beat up, and occasionally murdered, their girlfriends; multiple-victim schoolyard shootings impelled by bullying were occurring in the white, suburban heartland every six months down to the junior high school level. In the fashion magazines, the models looked like they'd been raped, and want to know what happens next.

With no enemies, and on its own terms, this America was on a roll. Accountability to the outside world rated zip. Nobody, let alone an upstart like al-Qaeda, merited American attention, unless there was money to be made. Why should they, when the world consisted of us, and a planet full of wannabes?

But off stage the world's scorned realities persisted ...

The Palestinians were a nation crucified on the politics of oil, and Oslo had been a fraud. So? A generation of Iraqi children were stunted for malnutrition. "That's just the price we have to pay," said US secretary of state Madeleine Albright. [21] Both of these were explicitly proffered as a cause for war by bin Laden. [22]. And this may have gotten by you: the entire Muslim delegation virtually begged the US to send representation to a racism conference in Durban, South Africa; top of the agenda was Israeli apartheid. The US blew them off in a manner just short of insulting.

America had lost its soul and never noticed the difference; but a champion rose up for Muslim victims in the form of bin Laden. He has yet to be acknowledged here as such, his enemy so base it offers only slanders. [23].

The terrorists attacked a great American symbol. Of what? Of multiculturalism, and internationalism and inclusiveness, which had hosted every kind of urban activity; "our way of life". [24] A symbol of course, is a munificent propaganda asset: it means what one wants it to mean, generates no feedback loops and is responsible for nothing. Within three months the media successfully obfuscated that the Twin Towers had been the thickest hive of finance capitalism on Earth, let alone what that might mean. [25]. Everyone was strenuously "innocent" ... and so remain.

And so it came to pass and the above is all it took.

- To lock in a propaganda culture.
- To generate a blank check for war.
- To destroy two countries, convert them into gangster states, and incite a civil war in the middle of the world's energy supplies.
- To earn the fear and hatred of much of the world.
- To bring a proto-police state out of the closet.
- To institutionalize torture.
- To ruin the US Army.

And the ramifications may take decades to play out ... because the people were afraid, and have been shunted around like a school of fish.

Notes
1. "Presumably" because the flight instructor, who's supposed to be the primary source for this assertion, denies it happened. Moussaoui was referred for a security check because of incongruities in his story and in how he presented himself. He was then detained for overstaying his visa as this was investigated. Moreover, prior to his arrest, he was only regarded as unstable; he deteriorated in custody. Of course the report of his expressed disinterest in take-offs and landings didn't fabricate itself. See: Seymour Hersh, Chain Of Command, 106, 110-112.
2. About 120 Mossad agents and trainees conducting a multi-tiered operation. This is a story in itself.
3. The official story is almost certainly a fabrication, but the likelier options don't affect the contention of this essay. See: Simon Denyer, "Pakistan Accused of Staging bin Laden Aide Arrest", Reuters, November 3, 2003; and the exhaustively annotated maze of media reports in Paul Thompson's "Is There More to the Capture of ..."; both via. In the latest version, as told by senior CIA officials to Ron Suskind (The One Percent Doctrine), Mohammed was turned in by an al-Qaeda defector, and not even for the money. Clearly, "healthy Islam turned him in", plays better than "we got him with our intrusive technology and coercive methods"; but who knows?
4. Edward Shirley (CIA officer, Directorate of Operations), "Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?" The Atlantic, February 1998, pp 45-. And the earlier CIA wasn't that impressive either. As Ward Churchill pointed out, with a quarter of a million people on its payroll, it couldn't predict the Tet Offensive.
5. Guillaume Dasquie, September 11, 2001: "The French Knew Much About It," Le Monde, April 16, 2007. Synopsis of a leaked, classified, 328 page DGSE (French secret services) al-Qaeda file.
6. Terry McDermott, Perfect Soldiers, 228 and 304 n 54.
7. McDermott, 191 and 304 n 51.
8. Quoted in Imperial Hubri Michael Scheuer 34.
9. Moussaoui's arrest was August 16. The first and unsuccessful attempt to purchase 9/11 tickets, was just over a week earlier, August 8. In a rushed book and on no real supporting data, terrorism expert Rohan Gunaratna asserted that Moussaoui's arrest forced the advance of the 9/11 plot. (Inside Al Qaeda, 2002, p 109). After four years of researching 9/11, the LA Times' Terry McDermott concluded that "In the end, the Moussaoui arrest caused more upset than action". But his "disappearance would have been a powerful argument against" delaying the plot. (226 and 304 n 50
) 10. Theoretically, it could have been planted by either side. The grainy video shows a bin Laden character with his alleged lieutenants and a religious notable discussing the attack. The incriminating element is just several sentences on the voice track; easily spliced and inadmissible as evidence in an American court (and so received in the Arab world). So, were it a CIA plant, why not a stickier indictment than six days advance notice? If an al-Qaeda plant, why contradict Bin Laden's public position? And his mother said it wasn't him.
11. Peter Bergen, The Osama bin Laden I Know, xxx (introduction).
12. Bergen, 255. Account of Ahmad Zaidan, al-Jazeera's bureau chief in Pakistan; all the more credible as Abu Haf's claim followed the attack on the USS Cole, and predated 9/11 by nearly a year.
13. Ramzi Yousef, the Manila airline bomb plot of January 1995. For details, see McDermott, 144-154 and 287 n 49 and 50.
14. Transcript of above video: Bin Laden, "As regards the towers, we assumed [casualties] in the three or four floors the planes would crash into. That was all we estimated. I was the most optimistic. Due to the nature of my profession and work [construction], I figured that the fuel in the plane would raise the temperature in the steel to the point that it becomes red and loses its properties. So if the plane hits the building here [he gestured with his hands] the portion of the building above will collapse. That was the most we could hope for." This is the most convincing translation, by Ali al-Ahmed, used in Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower, 370.
15. Quoting a NORAD source, McDermott writes that flight 93's transponder went off just before the turn; and implies that no fighter jets ever got near it. Lots of planes were scrambled, but only two F-16s from Langley were ever in position in time to defend a target, and they were chasing the ghost of Atta's flight 11, on the mistaken belief that it had passed New York and was headed toward Washington. It was that bad. (240 and 241).
16. BBC online, September 7, 2000. The comparison is flawed insofar as domestic drug distribution is American, which qualifies the drug trade as a criminal joint venture. But the issue here is means and extent of external penetration of territorial security, and that comparison holds.
17. The Economist, September 2, 2006, p 26.
18. Ted Galen Carpenter, "Keeping the al-Qaeda threat in perspective", San Jose Mercury News, October 9, 2006, page 1.
19. Mary Anne Weaver, "Inventing al-Zarqawi," The Atlantic, July, 2006, pp 87-.
20. McDermott, 174.
21. Who now runs her own emerging markets hedge fund. Alan Abelson, Barron's, January 22, 2007, p 6.
22. "Crucified" in the literal Christian sense of the term. In Rene Girard's thesis, all civilizations have been and are, built on the cornerstone of the designated victim. Though the terms of occupation are Israel's, the world at large assents because the Palestinians have been sacrificed to the global politics of oil.
23. Who bin Laden was is beyond the scope of this article, but if Che Guevara has legitimacy, then bin Laden has it in spades. Peter Bergen's summary assessment: "In my view, bin Laden is an intelligent political actor who is fighting a deeply felt religious war against the West." Bergen, 389. This corroborates Michael Scheuer's representation in Imperial Hubris, whose publication was sponsored by the CIA.
24. A Benetton commercial of global harmony and goodwill; this is standard. For its latest issue, see Lawrence Wright (staff writer for the New Yorker, Pulitzer Prize 2007), The Looming Tower, 2006, p 368. "Al-Qaeda had aimed ... at America, but it struck all of humanity."
25. Multiple sources, including the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and CNN, posted a listing; CNN's included square footage (this is no longer on the website). Over 75% of the occupied space was some kind of financial institution; 83% including law firms and consultants. Morgan Stanley had 21 floors. "War on Wall Street" screamed that week's cover of Barron's.

(For an expansion of the theme implicit in this essay (that the "war on terror" is both a misconception and a fraud), at the elite levels of journalism, see William Pfaff, "A 'long war' designed to perpetuate itself", October 2, 2006, and Olivier Roy, June 9, 2006 at www.iht.com; the archives at www.williampfaff.com; and John Mueller, "Why al-Qaeda Hasn't Hit the US Again", Foreign Affairs, September/October, 2006, p 2.)

Bohdan Pilacinski claims no credentials whatsoever; the essay stands on its own merits.

(Copyright 2008 Bohdan Pilacinski.)

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The White House, President George W. Bush




Michael Doran
Senior Director for Near East and North African Affairs
National Security Council

In August 2005, Mike Doran was appointed to the National Security Council as Senior Director for Near East and North African Affairs. His portfolio covers all of the countries in the region except for Iraq.

Prior to coming to the NSC, Dr. Doran was a professor in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, where he taught courses on the international politics of the Middle East. From 2002 to 2004 he also served as an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. Prior to arriving at Princeton, Dr. Doran taught in the History Department at the University of Central Florida.

He is the author of, among other things, a study of the first Arab-Israeli war, entitled Pan-Arabism before Nasser, and “Somebody Else’s Civil War,” an influential article on Osama bin Laden, published in the January/February 2002 issue of Foreign Affairs.

Originally from Indiana, Dr. Doran received a BA from Stanford in 1987 and a PhD from Princeton in 1997.

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An Eye for Terror Sites
NSC Puts Scholar in Charge of Middle East

By Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 17, 2005; A29

Michael Doran, an expert on Muslim extremism, at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.Michael Doran, an expert on Muslim extremism, at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.



Photo Credit: By Lucian Perkins -- The Washington Post
Related Article: An Eye for Terror Sites, page A29

Michael S. Doran may have been destined to work for a Republican administration. During the 1972 presidential campaign, his father ran him around Carmel, Ind., to rip down posters of Democratic candidate George McGovern. His father was a Republican precinct committeeman.

"That was fun for a 10-year-old," Doran recalled recently.

But Doran ended up at the National Security Council staff in charge of the Middle East because of his unusual specialty: He is a 21st century scholar -- an aficionado of Muslim extremist Web sites.

At Princeton, Doran was on the Web as early as 5 a.m. to track the latest commentaries, manifestoes or fatwas from militant groups. His work soon put him on the map.

After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by al Qaeda, Doran wrote a defining piece in Foreign Affairs magazine -- "Somebody Else's Civil War" -- that Middle East experts still cite.

Osama Bin Laden had "no intention of defeating America," Doran wrote. "War with the United States was not a goal in and of itself but rather an instrument designed to help his brand of extremist Islam survive and flourish among the believers."

Al Qaeda wanted Washington to dispatch U.S. troops to the Islamic world, so Muslims would turn on governments allied with the United States -- and provoke their collapse, Doran explained. "Americans, in short, have been drawn into somebody else's civil war."

That argument is at the heart of U.S. policy in the Islamic world, which has shifted from President Bush's first-term focus on fighting terrorism to the second's emphasis on democracy as the salve to extremism.

"Mike is one of the most interesting folks in the field. He's astonishingly creative and independent," said Gideon Rose, Foreign Affairs' managing editor. "He understands radical Islamists the way they understand themselves."

He was also a natural fit for the Bush administration. Doran got the job in August in part because of his "extremely interesting articles," said national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley, adding that Doran's comments on U.S. policy were "thoughtful and useful."

Doran's views are not without controversy -- nor is he afraid to spark debate. In an interview, he described Middle East studies on American campuses as "stultifying, homogenous and conformist." The field has "gone into a dead end. It's highly politicized and dominated by one point of view," reflecting the pro-Arab "orientalism" of the late Palestinian-born Columbia University scholar Edward W. Said.

Yet experts who differ with Doran praise his scholarship.

"Mike's politics on the Middle East are pure neo-con," said the University of Vermont's F. Gregory Gause III. "He believes democracy has to come to the region and America should play a major role. . . . He thinks Arab public expression for the Palestinians is really about anger at their own governments. I disagree."

Gause said he used to urge Doran to log off his computer and take his wife to dinner, in part because the Islamic Web sites represent a "very small slice of the debate. It's among the privileged -- the ones on the Internet." But, Gause added, "Mike wrote the best piece after 9/11."

Reports that Princeton had deferred tenure, in part because of an offer on another campus, sparked an outpouring on student blogs last March. "He leans to the . . . gasp . . . right? No tenure for you," one blogger wrote. "It's amazing he's lasted this long," another wrote.

Doran never expected to play the role of new thinker or iconoclast. "Water polo was my life until college," he said. An All-America in high school, he played for Stanford as a freshman. He had no interest in the Middle East -- and had never been abroad -- until a professor suggested the region might interest him.

Doran, an Irish Catholic from Middle America whose parents did not go to college, ended up in Israel for three years, learning Hebrew and enough Arabic to get by. "The Middle East was just a totally different universe," Doran recalled. He came away thinking he wanted to specialize in the 500-year Ottoman rule of the region -- until he translated a key concept incorrectly for a major paper.

"A good rule in the Middle East is that you should work on periods after the advent of the typewriter," he reflected. "Looking at Ottoman manuscripts, you have to be philologically talented."

The 1991 Persian Gulf War shifted Doran's focus to current Middle East events. He wrote his thesis on modern Egypt.

After graduate work at Princeton, Doran taught at the University of Central Florida, then returned to Princeton. "He was a brilliant teacher, which is an understatement," said Avrom Udovitch, who was Doran's professor and then a colleague. "He had a cult of followers." Udovitch was also impressed that between Doran's early morning obsession with Islamic Web sites and his heavy teaching schedule, he ironed his own shirts every day. "He has very traditional personal habits," Udovitch said.

Former student Carlos Ramos-Mrosovsky said Doran made an impression on him at Princeton, when four or five male streakers ran into Doran's class as a prank. Doran coolly shut the door so the streakers couldn't leave without asking. "He took command of the situation," Ramos-Mrosovsky said.

His politics, Princeton affiliation and scholarship have led colleagues and students to call Doran a "young Bernard Lewis," a leading scholar whose work -- including "The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror" and "What Went Wrong: The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East" -- influenced the administration's response to the Sept. 11 attacks.

"It's flattering, although I'm not sure why," Lewis said, adding that Doran's scholarship on Islamic Web sites is "important and original." Lewis, who has emeritus status at Princeton, noted that Doran's lectures were so popular they had to be moved every year to larger lecture halls.

Doran now works out of a barren office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. He deals with topics including Iran's disputed nuclear program, the Arab-Israeli conflict, Syria's ties to terrorists and reform in the oil-rich Persian Gulf kingdoms.

Now that he's in government, Doran finds he no longer has the time to fully explore the intelligence that he longed for as an academic. In one recent 24-hour period, he had 2,714 items in his intelligence folder. He described himself as a kid in a candy shop -- who can't eat all the free candy.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company













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The Saudi Paradox
By Michael Scott Doran

From Foreign Affairs , January/February 2004

Summary: Saudi Arabia is in the throes of a crisis, but its elite is bitterly divided on how to escape it. Crown Prince Abdullah leads a camp of liberal reformers seeking rapprochement with the West, while Prince Nayef, the interior minister, sides with an anti-American Wahhabi religious establishment that has much in common with al Qaeda. Abdullah cuts a higher profile abroad -- but at home Nayef casts a longer and darker shadow.

Michael Scott Doran is Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University and Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

THE DUAL MONARCHY

When an attack on a residential compound in Riyadh killed 17 people and wounded 122 in early November 2003, U.S. officials downplayed the significance of the incident for Saudi Arabian politics. "We have the utmost faith that the direction chosen for this nation by Crown Prince Abdullah, the political and economic reforms, will not be swayed by these horrible terrorists," said Deputy U.S. Secretary of State Richard Armitage, in Riyadh for a visit.

But if any such faith existed, it was quite misplaced. Abdullah's reforms were already being curtailed, the retrenchment having begun in the wake of a similar attack six months earlier. And despite what was reported in the American press, an end to the reforms was exactly what the bombers and their ideological supporters hoped to accomplish. To understand why this is the case -- and why one of Washington's staunchest allies has been incubating a murderous anti-Americanism -- one must delve into the murky depths of Saudi Arabia's domestic politics.

The Saudi state is a fragmented entity, divided between the fiefdoms of the royal family. Among the four or five most powerful princes, two stand out: Crown Prince Abdullah and his half-brother Prince Nayef, the interior minister. Relations between these two leaders are visibly tense. In the United States, Abdullah cuts a higher profile. But at home in Saudi Arabia, Nayef, who controls the secret police, casts a longer and darker shadow. Ever since King Fahd's stroke in 1995, the question of succession has been hanging over the entire system, but neither prince has enough clout to capture the throne.

Saudi Arabia is in the throes of a crisis. The economy cannot keep pace with population growth, the welfare state is rapidly deteriorating, and regional and sectarian resentments are rising to the fore. These problems have been exacerbated by an upsurge in radical Islamic activism. Many agree that the Saudi political system must somehow evolve, but a profound cultural schizophrenia prevents the elite from agreeing on the specifics of reform.

The Saudi monarchy functions as the intermediary between two distinct political communities: a Westernized elite that looks to Europe and the United States as models of political development, and a Wahhabi religious establishment that holds up its interpretation of Islam's golden age as a guide. The clerics consider any plan that gives a voice to non-Wahhabis as idolatrous. Saudi Arabia's two most powerful princes have taken opposing sides in this debate: Abdullah tilts toward the liberal reformers and seeks a rapprochement with the United States, whereas Nayef sides with the clerics and takes direction from an anti-American religious establishment that shares many goals with al Qaeda.

THE POWER OF TAWHID

The two camps divide over a single question: whether the state should reduce the power of the religious establishment. On the right side of the political spectrum, the clerics and Nayef take their stand on the principle of Tawhid, or "monotheism," as defined by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the eponymous founder of Wahhabism. In their view, many people who claim to be monotheists are actually polytheists and idolaters. For the most radical Saudi clerics, these enemies include Christians, Jews, Shi`ites, and even insufficiently devout Sunni Muslims. From the perspective of Tawhid, these groups constitute a grand conspiracy to destroy true Islam. The United States, the "Idol of the Age," leads the cabal. It attacked Sunni Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq, both times making common cause with Shi`ites; it supports the Jews against the Sunni Muslim Palestinians; it promotes Shi`ite interests in Iraq; and it presses the Saudi government to de-Wahhabize its educational curriculum. Cable television and the Internet, meanwhile, have released a torrent of idolatry. With its permissive attitude toward sex, its pervasive Christian undertones, and its support for unfettered female freedom, U.S. culture corrodes Saudi society from within.

Tawhid is closely connected to jihad, the struggle -- sometimes by force of arms, sometimes by stern persuasion -- against idolatry. In the minds of the clerics, stomping out pagan cultural and political practices at home and supporting war against Americans in Afghanistan and Iraq are two sides of the same coin. Jihad against idolatry, the clerics never tire of repeating, is eternal, "lasting until Judgment Day," when true monotheism will destroy polytheism once and for all.

The doctrine of Tawhid ensures a unique political status for the clerics in Saudi Arabia. After all, they alone have the necessary training to detect and root out idolatry so as to safeguard the purity of the realm. Tawhid is thus not just an intolerant religious doctrine but also a political principle that legitimizes the repressiveness of the Saudi state. It is no wonder, therefore, that Nayef, head of the secret security apparatus, is a strong supporter of Tawhid. Not known personally as a pious man, Nayef zealously defends Wahhabi puritanism because he knows on which side his bread is buttered -- as do others with a stake in the repressive status quo.

In foreign policy, Nayef's support for Tawhid translates into support for jihad, and so it is he -- not Abdullah -- who presides over the Saudi fund for the support of the Palestinian intifada (which the clerics regard as a defensive jihad against the onslaught of the Zionist-Crusader alliance). On the domestic front, Nayef indirectly controls the controversial Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (CPVPV), the religious police. The CPVVP came under withering attack in March 2002 when its men reportedly used batons to beat back schoolgirls as they tried to flee from a burning dormitory. The girls, so the story goes, failed to cover themselves in proper Islamic attire before running from the flames, and the religious police then mindlessly enforced the laws on public decency. More than a dozen girls were trampled to death in the incident. It is impossible to say whether the story is true in all respects, but considerable evidence indicates that the CPVPV did in some manner hamper rescue efforts. Nayef, however, flatly denies that the religious police did anything wrong.

THE CALL OF TAQARUB

If Tawhid is the right pole of the Saudi political spectrum, then the doctrine of Taqarub -- rapprochement between Muslims and non-Muslims -- marks the left. Taqarub promotes the notion of peaceful coexistence with nonbelievers. It also seeks to expand the political community by legitimizing the political involvement of groups that the Wahhabis consider non-Muslim -- Shi`ites, secularists, feminists, and so on. In foreign policy, Taqarub downplays the importance of jihad, allowing Saudis to live in peace with Christian Americans, Jewish Israelis, and even Shi`ite Iranians. In short, Taqarub stands in opposition to the siege mentality fostered by Tawhid.

Abdullah clearly associates himself with Taqarub. He has advocated relaxing restrictions on public debate, promoted democratic reform, and supported a reduction in the power of the clerics. Between January and May 2003, he presided over an unusually open "national dialogue" with prominent Saudi liberals. Two separate petitions established the essential character of the discussion: the National Reform Document, which offered a road map for Saudi democracy, and Partners in the Homeland, a call by the oppressed Shi`ite community for greater freedoms. The first endorsed direct elections, the establishment of an independent judiciary, and an increased public role for women. Its drafters also took pains to express respect for Islamic law. The clerics were not mollified, but this affront to their sensibilities was as nothing compared to the Shi`ite petition, which, in their eyes, issued straight from the bowels of hell.

The Saudi religious establishment is viscerally and vocally hostile to Shi`ism. Although Shi`ites constitute between 10 and 15 percent of the population, they do not enjoy even the most basic rights of religious freedom. Nevertheless, in an unprecedented move, the crown prince met with their leaders and accepted their petition. The controlled Saudi press did not publish the petition or even report on it, but Abdullah's move sent ripples of discontent through the Saudi religious classes.

By floating the "Saudi Plan" for Arab-Israeli peace -- traveling to Crawford, Texas, to debate the measure with President George W. Bush in April 2003 -- and accepting the notorious Shi`ite petition, the crown prince has sided resolutely with the backers of Taqarub against the hard-line clerics. To a Western eye there is no inherent connection between Abdullah's domestic political reform agenda and his rapprochement policies toward non-Muslim states and Shi`ite "heretics." In a political culture policed by Wahhabis, however, they are seen to be cut from the same cloth.

THE THREAT OF TAKFIR

While Abdullah has signaled friendship with the West, Nayef has encouraged jihad -- to the point of offering tacit support for al Qaeda. In November 2002, for example, he absolved the Saudi hijackers of responsibility for the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. In an interview published openly in Saudi Arabia, he stated that al Qaeda could not possibly have planned an operation of such magnitude. Nayef perceived an Israeli plot instead, arguing that the attacks aroused so much hostility to Muslims they must have been planned by the enemies of Islam. This statement not only endorsed the clerics' paranoid conspiracy theory, but, more important, sent a message that the secret police saw no justification for tracking down al Qaeda.

The case of the Saudi cleric Ali bin al-Khudayr helps explain Nayef's stance. A close associate of al Qaeda, al-Khudayr is known as a leader of the takfiri-jihadi stream of Islamic radicalism -- that is, as someone quick to engage in takfir, the practice of proclaiming fellow Sunnis guilty of apostasy (a crime punishable by death).* After September 11, he issued a fatwa advising his followers to rejoice at the attacks. Depicting the United States as one of the greatest enemies that Islam has ever faced, he chided those who had misgivings about the deaths of so many innocent civilians, listing a number of American "crimes" that justified the attacks: "killing and displacing Muslims, aiding the Muslims' enemies against them, spreading secularism, forcefully imposing blasphemy on peoples and states, and persecuting the mujahideen."

Al-Khudayr was eventually arrested by Nayef's security services, but only after the May 2003 suicide bombings in Riyadh that killed 34 people -- when the cleric's brand of extremism began to threaten the political status quo. Until then, he had been allowed to operate freely and spread his violent anti-Americanism without constraint. Why? Because along the way he helped terrorize critics of the religious establishment. For Nayef, Wahhabi vigilantism is useful in keeping reformers in check.

Saudi journalist Mansur al-Nuqaydan, for example, is an open critic of the hard-line clerics. An ex-Islamic extremist himself, he went to jail in his youth for rooting out idolatry by firebombing a video store. The combination of his personal background, his mastery of the clerics' idiom, and his clear and unflinching support for Taqarub makes him particularly threatening to the religious establishment. Consequently, the extremists have singled him out for special treatment.

Along with some associates, al-Khudayr accused al-Nuqaydan of apostasy, pointing to the text of an interview in which the journalist committed the crimes of "secular humanism" and "scorn for religion, its rites, and devout people." Particularly incriminating, claimed the clerics, was al-Nuqaydan's conviction that "we need an Islam reconciled with the other, an Islam that does not know hatred for others because of their beliefs or their inclinations. We need a new Reformation, a bold reinterpretation of the religious text so that we can reconcile ourselves with the world." On the basis of this expression of Taqarub he was sentenced to death, with the edict posted publicly on al-Khudayr's Web site. For five months, the authorities did nothing. In a regime where openly practicing Shi`ism can land you in jail for years, al-Khudayr's period of freedom speaks volumes. So long as the cleric was limiting his activities to inciting violence against Americans and intimidating reformers, Nayef had no argument with him.

Around the same time that al-Khudayr was arrested, on the other hand, al-Nuqaydan lost his job and soon after was barred from writing or traveling abroad -- a casualty of a parallel crackdown on the reform movement. For Nayef, whose chief concern is to protect the status quo, there is nothing puzzling about this juxtaposition. Al-Khudayr ran afoul of him when bombs targeting the regime started going off, but al-Nuqaydan also represented something of a threat to the Saudi elite. Nayef himself does not take overt responsibility for the persecution of the reformers, but the hand of the secret police is barely hidden from view.

The sequence of events is now familiar. Either without warning or in response to a complaint by a prominent cleric, a critic of the religious establishment loses his job. His employers subsequently refuse to comment. Islamic extremists then issue a death threat to the unemployed man over the phone or on the Internet. In 1999, for example, an associate of al-Khudayr's issued a fatwa against the Saudi novelist Turki al-Hamad, who later signed the National Reform Document. Partly as a result, al-Hamad received a slew of death threats. He and his family were also harassed by the CPVPV. The novelist turned to Abdullah for help, receiving a sympathetic hearing and an offer of physical protection. By offering only bodyguards, however, Abdullah tacitly admitted that he could not control the shadowy parts of the government that belong to his half-brother.

UNCLE TOM FRIEDMAN

In the aftermath of September 11, informed American opinion concluded that Osama bin Laden had attacked "the far enemy" -- the United States -- in order to foment revolution against "the near enemy" -- the Saudi regime. Subsequent events have confirmed that al Qaeda does indeed use the war with the United States as an instrument against its domestic enemies. Yet the tacit cooperation between Nayef and al-Khudayr shows that the relationship between al Qaeda and the Saudi royal family is more complex than most people seem to think.

To better understand how al Qaeda reads Saudi Arabia's political map, one can turn to the work of Yusuf al-Ayyiri, a prolific al Qaeda propagandist who died last June in a skirmish with the Saudi security services. Just before his death he wrote a revealing book, The Future of Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula After the Fall of Baghdad, which gives a good picture of how al Qaeda activists perceive the world around them.

According to al-Ayyiri, the United States and Israel are the leaders of a global anti-Islamic movement -- "Zio-Crusaderism" -- that seeks the destruction of true Islam and dominion over the Middle East. Zio-Crusaderism's most effective weapon is democracy, because popular sovereignty separates religion from the state and thereby disembowels Islam, a holistic religion that has a strong political dimension. In its plot to denature Islam, al-Ayyiri claims, Zio-Crusaderism embraces three local allies: secularists, Shi`ites, and lax Sunnis (that is, those who sympathize with the idea of separating religion from state). Al Qaeda's "near enemy," in other words, is the cluster of forces supporting Taqarub.

The chief difference between the ways al Qaeda and the Saudi religious establishment define their primary foes is that the former includes the Saudi royal family as part of the problem whereas the latter does not. This divergence is not insignificant, but it does not preclude limited or tacit cooperation on some issues. Although some in the Saudi regime are indeed bin Laden's enemies, others are his de facto allies. Al Qaeda activists sense, moreover, that U.S. plans to separate mosque and state constitute the greatest immediate threat to their designs and know that the time is not yet ripe for a broad revolution. So al Qaeda's short-term goal is not to topple the regime but to shift Saudi Arabia's domestic balance of power to the right and punish supporters of Taqarub.

The politics surrounding the suicide bombings in Riyadh last May show how the interests of al Qaeda and the Saudi religious establishment overlap. Working together, they managed to turn a terrorist attack on Americans into a political coup against Americanizers. Right after the attack, the Saudi authorities called for public assistance in capturing 19 suspects, whose names and pictures were published in the press. In response, al-Khudayr and two like-minded clerics issued a statement claiming that the accused were not terrorists but "pious and devout" men and "the flower of the mujahideen." The statement claimed that the Saudi authorities, acting on U.S. orders, were using the suicide bombings as a pretext for persecuting fighters who had "participated in the jihad against the malevolent Crusaders in Afghanistan" and "distinguished themselves with courage and heroism in the battles in the Tora Bora mountains." The clerics called on the population to disobey the regime's request for help and pronounced that any assistance to the police would constitute aid to the United States in its war against Islam. The statement urged other Saudi clerics to step forward and support the beleaguered mujahideen.

Responding to this call, 33 activist clerics who had already formed a group called the Internal Front Facing the Current Challenges lobbied the government on the basis of a statement that reads like a contract for a new alliance between the Saudi dynasty and the Wahhabi religious establishment. The statement worked with al-Khudayr's basic premise -- that the Saudis, in deference to their foreign masters, had grown hostile to jihad. But it changed the tone of the discussion. Whereas al-Khudayr had focused on the need to wage jihad against the Americans, the clerics emphasized the need to wage jihad against the Americanizers -- a reference to the enemy at home.

The statement drew a causal link between the movement for liberal reform and religious extremism. On the one hand, it admitted that religious extremism exists in Saudi Arabia and called for it to be restrained. Yet it also blamed extremism on the creep of "reprehensible practices" -- a euphemism for the growing public legitimacy of the Taqarub reform agenda. The Internal Front essentially offered Abdullah a tradeoff: if he would curtail the reformers' activities, then the clerics would provide Islamic legitimacy for a government crackdown on the takfiri-jihadis, al Qaeda and its fellow travelers.

To make these demands more explicit, the Internal Front's leader, Salman al-Awda, posted an additional statement on his Web site attacking the aggressively reformist newspaper al-Watan. (The newspaper's name means "the homeland," but religious conservatives refer to it as "al-Wathan," meaning "the idol.") According to the statement, the publication's staff was little better than agents of the Americans working against Islam -- "Thomas Friedmans in Saudi garb."

The reformers at al-Watan had concluded that the terrorist attacks vindicated the principle of Taqarub and mistakenly assumed -- like many in the West -- that the Saudi authorities had no choice but to dismantle those institutions that promote Tawhid. Emboldened by a general mood of public outrage, they began to publish articles criticizing the entire Wahhabi edifice. One cartoon in particular enraged the religious establishment. It depicted a suicide bomber wearing a belt of dynamite next to a cleric wearing a belt of fatwas. The caption read, "Those who issue fatwas and manifestos inciting terror are themselves terrorists."

But al-Watan failed to take the full measure of its enemy. Having a good argument is one thing; controlling the secret police is another. One week after the bombing, a journalist had the temerity to ask Prince Nayef if the bombing meant that the CPVPV would be restructured: "As a Saudi," Nayef snarled, "you should be ashamed to be asking this question." One week later, al-Watan's editor, Jamal Khashoggi, was fired. He now resides in London.

THE U.S.-SHI'ITE CONSPIRACY

It is often claimed that the recent growth of anti-Americanism in the Middle East has been due to U.S. policies themselves. The fact that the suicide bombing of an American compound in Riyadh turned into a crackdown on Saudi reformers and that the bombings continued even after the announcement of a U.S. troop withdrawal, however, should give us pause. These events strongly suggest that the jihad against the United States is actually a continuation of domestic politics by other means. The Saudi religious classes and al-Qaeda use it to discredit their indigenous enemies, who, given half a chance, would topple the clerics from power.

If Saudi clerics do indeed preach a murderous anti-Americanism because they fear their domestic rivals, then certain implications follow for U.S. foreign policy. Washington cannot afford to ignore what Saudis say about each other, because sooner or later the hatreds generated at home will be directed toward the United States.

This is particularly true of the Shi`ite question in Saudi politics. Radical Sunni Islamists hate Shi`ites more than any other group, including Jews and Christians. Al-Qaeda's basic credo minces no words on the subject: "We believe that the Shi`ite heretics are a sect of idolatry and apostasy, and that they are the most evil creatures under the heavens." For its part, the Saudi Wahhabi religious establishment expresses similar views. The fatwas, sermons, and statements of established Saudi clerics uniformly denounce Shi`ite belief and practice. A recent fatwa by Abd al-Rahman al-Barrak, a respected professor at the Imam Muhammad bin Saud Islamic University (which trains official clerics), is a case in point. Asked whether it was permissible for Sunnis to launch a jihad against Shi`ites, al-Barrak answered that if the Shi`ites in a Sunni-dominated country insisted on practicing their religion openly, then yes, the Sunni state had no choice but to wage war on them. Al-Barrak's answer, it is worth noting, assumes that the Shi`ites are not Muslims at all.

This sectarian hatred that the clerics preach bears directly on the United States. Projecting their domestic struggle onto the external world, Saudi hard-liners are now arguing that the Shi`ite minority in Saudi Arabia is conspiring with the United States in its war to destroy Islam. Thus al-Ayyiri, the al-Qaeda propagandist, argued that the Shi`ites have hatched a long-term plot to control the countries of the Persian Gulf. As part of this conspiracy, the Shi`ite minorities in Sunni countries are insinuating themselves into positions of responsibility so as to function as a fifth column for the enemies of true Islam. "The danger of the Shi`ite heretics to the region," he states, "is not less than the danger of the Jews and the Christians."

Many other clerics warn of a Shi`ite-U.S. conspiracy. Safar al-Hawali, for example, a prominent cleric and member of the Internal Front, wrote a long and vituperative response to the Shi`ite petition Abdullah accepted. Al-Hawali characterized the petition as an attempt by the Shi`ite minority to tyrannize the Sunni majority. Throughout history, al-Hawali wrote, the Shi`ites have conspired with the foreign enemies of the Sunnis: in the thirteenth century they aligned with the Mongol invaders; today they conspire with the Americans. If the Saudi authorities meet the demands of the Shi`ite petitioners, al-Hawali continued, one of two outcomes would result: Shi`ite government or a secular state.

All this might sound like the product of an addled brain, but it is not as detached from political reality as it seems. The Saudi clerics and al Qaeda base their political analysis of the Shi`ites on two assumptions: that Wahhabism is true Islam and that it must have a monopoly over state policy. From this perspective, the various forces promoting Taqarub, both domestic and foreign, are indeed in cahoots to upend the status quo. The Shi`ites offer an alternative notion of Islamic community and history, they tend to cluster in strategically key regions, they share bonds with co-religionists beyond the borders of their country, and they have political interests that coincide with those of Sunni reformers. These attributes would allow the Shi`ites to form a powerful political bloc should a participatory political system ever emerge. And offering them even minor political concessions now would be dangerous, the clerics say, since other sects and other regional identities would clamor for political representation and soon overwhelm the system.

Beneath the conspiracy theory, therefore, lurks a very sober struggle over real political and economic interests. The clerics hope to place the Shi`ites in a kind of political quarantine, making it all but unthinkable for Sunni reformers in Saudi Arabia to form alliances with them. The reams of anti-Shi`ite material on Saudi religious Web sites are marked by three persistent charges: that the Shi`ites are agents of Iran, allies of the United States, and close associates of the Jews. The last accusation merits particular attention.

Isaac Hasson, a professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, has identified what he calls a "neo-Wahhabi campaign against the Shi`ites, which aims to demonize them by comparing them to the Jews." Traditional Wahhabi teachings, for example, include the medieval Sunni myth that it was actually a Jewish convert to Islam, Abdullah bin Saba, who invented Shi`ism. This means Shi`ism has a kind of Jewish dna flowing through it. New attributes borrowed from modern antisemitism, such as the notion of a Jewish plot for world domination, have been grafted onto this charge. In the neo-Wahhabi campaign that Hasson has identified, therefore, Shi`ism is simultaneously an offshoot of Judaism, the natural ally of Zio-Crusaderism, and an inveterate generator of grand plots to destroy Sunni Islam.

The clerics' anti-Shi`ite campaign traces, on a communal scale, the same pattern as the threats that al-Khudayr directed against al-Nuqaydan. Just as the radical clerics pass death sentences on individual reformers, so the Saudi religious establishment periodically threatens the Shi`ites with genocide. In his refutation of the Shi`ite petition, for example, the cleric Safar al-Hawali warned the Shi`ites about the dangers of overreaching. If they were actually to succeed in establishing a secular state, he argued, the result would be a civil war, and "if the [Sunni] majority gets riled, it will act -- a matter that could lead to the complete annihilation of the [Shi`ite] minority." This thinly veiled threat carried even greater significance for having been published on the Web site of another cleric and anti-Shi`ite firebrand, Nasir al-Umar, who has urged the government to fire Shi`ites from all positions of responsibility in the country. Al-Umar has also insisted that the government must find "a quick solution" to the Shi`ites' demographic domination of the eastern province, a proposal that can only be described as an incitement to ethnic cleansing.

Rather than shutting such inflammatory voices down, Prince Nayef finds it convenient to keep them on the streets: al-Umar runs a mosque as a government employee and operates an attractive Web site. By giving clerics such as al-Umar privileged platforms from which to spread their doctrines, Nayef gets the best of both worlds. To foreign critics, he can distance himself from al-Umar's extremism, claiming that the cleric speaks only for himself; at home, meanwhile, he can reap the benefit of al-Umar's threats, which strike terror into Shi`ite hearts.

Al-Umar's booklet promoting ethnic cleansing was written almost a decade ago, before the notion of a U.S.-Shi`ite conspiracy gained traction. The fall of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, however, has made him pay closer attention to this putative relationship. He has thus returned to his pet theme of a grand Shi`ite plot but reshaped the story in light of the new political reality to include a prominent U.S. role. In a lecture he gave last April, he depicted the United States as the "nursemaid" of global terrorism. For 30 years, he stated, Washington has been supporting terror around the world, something that went largely unrecognized until the war in Iraq. The war also demonstrated clearly "the strength of the bond between America and the Shi`ite heretics," who allied with each other in order to destroy the Sunnis.

Any analysis of the causes of anti-Americanism in Saudi Arabia has to account for people such as al-Umar. Many factors lead him to preach a deep hatred of America, but three are most significant: a deep loathing of Shi`ites, an ingrained habit of associating them with hostile external powers, and fears about the future position of Wahhabi clerics in the Saudi political system. No conceivable shift in U.S. policy would affect any of the three.

THE IRAQ CONNECTION

Last year's suicide bombings in Riyadh forced Prince Nayef to crack down on extremists inside Saudi Arabia. As a consequence, the Saudi security forces have clashed repeatedly with militants, arresting hundreds of activists and confiscating large caches of weapons. In Washington, these operations have helped to support the view that the Saudis have, once again, become our close allies. After receiving a wake-up call in May and a reminder in November, so the story goes, the Saudis have come back around to play their role as the strategic partner of the United States.

In late November, this optimistic view was reinforced when Ali al-Khudayr recanted on prime-time television. Speaking from jail, he renounced entirely his radical stance on takfir and jihad. It is impossible to say whether this about-face was sincere, coerced, or part of a political bargain, but the Saudis are treating it as a great victory against extremism. To emphasize the point, they even allowed Mansur al-Nuqaydan to publish his columns again. Although this is certainly a positive development, the roots of Saudi unrest extend beyond the contest between these two figures. The thousands of disgruntled young men who looked to al-Khudayr for guidance are still angry, and the central question of whether to reduce the power of the clerics remains locked in controversy.

As the case of Nasir al-Umar demonstrates, the domestic Saudi conflicts that originally generated anti-American feeling are still in operation. Moreover, indications suggest that, despite the recent crackdown, al Qaeda and the establishment Saudi clerics still share a strong sense of the common enemy.

Consider, for example, a statement that Abu Abd al-Rahman al-Najdi, an al Qaeda spokesman, issued in early October 2003. What preoccupied him was not the Saudi security services' crackdown on al Qaeda but the rise of the Shi`ites in Iraq:

We call openly on our brothers, all the mujahideen in Iraq, to kill the Sunni clerics who befriend the Americans, because those clerics are infidel apostates; and to kill every satanic Shi`ite Ayatollah who befriends the Americans -- first among them the satanic Ayatollah Muhammad Bahr al-Ulum and those like him. Likewise we demand from the Shi`ite youth that they return to the book of God and the Sunna of Muhammad.

Al Qaeda's nightmare scenario is that the Americans and the Iraqi Shi`ites will force Riyadh to enact broad reforms and bring the Saudi Shi`ites into the political community. There is no question that many hard-line Saudi clerics share precisely the same fears. Even before the United States attacked Afghanistan, Saudi clerics preached the doctrine of a Jewish-American conspiracy to destroy Islam. Now that American forces have unshackled the Iraqi Shi`ites, it would be naive to expect those clerics to take a more benign view of U.S. intentions.

The Saudi religious establishment's views regarding the American-Shi`ite conspiracy are not simply an internal Saudi matter. They legitimize the daily attacks on American soldiers in Iraq's "Sunni Triangle," as well as attacks such as the anti-Shi`ite suicide bombing in Najaf last August. The dazed onlookers who crowded around the rubble in Najaf immediately asked themselves one question: Who did it? "Wahhabis," cried one group. "Baathists," cried another. If Washington maintains business as usual with Riyadh, it will not be long before the Iraqi Shi`ites will conclude that the United States covertly supports the Wahhabi bombers who blow up their mosques -- just as they concluded, after the events of 1991, that the United States supported Saddam Hussein against them.

Nonetheless, changing the situation will be difficult, because the United States has limited means of muting the anti-Shi`ism and anti-Americanism that the clerics espouse. Getting Riyadh to divorce itself from radical Wahhabism will be as great a task as getting the Soviet Union to renounce communism. Clearly, there are forces in the kingdom who would be willing to support the efforts of a Saudi Gorbachev, but it is not clear when or whether one will appear.

Wahhabism is the foundation of an entire political system, and everyone with a stake in the status quo can be expected to rally around it when push comes to shove. In Iraq, as odious as the regime of Saddam Hussein was, it still enjoyed a social base of support in the center of the country, and the opponents of the old system were -- and remain -- fragmented and leaderless. In Saudi Arabia, Washington faces a similar problem. The United States has no choice but to press hard for democratic reforms. But the very attempt to create a more liberal political order will set off new disputes, which will inevitably generate anti-American feelings. Saudi Arabia is in turmoil, and -- like it or not -- the United States is deeply involved. As Washington struggles to rebuild Iraq it will thus find, once again, that its closest Arab ally is also one of its most bitter enemies.

*Al-Khudayr's sympathies with al Qaeda are apparently reciprocated. Following the cleric's arrest in May 2003, the London-based Saudi dissident Saad al-Faqih reported that Osama bin Laden had warned the Saudi authorities not to hurt him. Bin Laden, the report claimed, labeled al-Khudayr "our most prominent supporter." Should any harm come to him, al Qaeda's response would be "commensurate with the sheikh's high standing with us, ... We will not issue a statement on the matter other than one dripping with blood."

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