16 October 2000

Posted on October 16, 2020October 20, 2020 by William Arkin

NSA director Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden announces a major reorganization at the upper reaches of his agency. The changes, he says, are designed to enable top managers to focus on reengineering signals intelligence in the face of rapidly changing communications technology, particularly the move from radio wave intercepts to digital intercept and exploitation.

Speaking at a computer security conference in Baltimore, Hayden says that cyberspace had become as important a potential battlefield as any other. He said that digital cyberspace—not just Internet-connected computers and systems but also computer networks—held out as much prospect for offense as well as defense. “It is a place where we must ensure American security as surely as land, sea, air and space,” Hayden said.

Twenty years later, the statement seems both prescient and archaic in that it could be as much said today, with the U.S. government still struggling to establish the capabilities and the rules of the road for intelligence collection and action in cyberspace. But then the reality was that the “retooling” was driven as much by old sources of intercepts drying up, or at least becoming less of a priority than data transiting digital networks.

15 October 1997

Posted on October 15, 2020October 20, 2020 by William Arkin

Max van der Stoel, Special U.N. Rapporteur of Iraqi Human Rights, reports widespread continuing violations of human rights in Iraq, torture and execution, and displacement and retention of political dissidents and ethnic minorities. (U.N., A/52/476, 15 October 1997)

Saddam Hussein was hardly the only one in the Middle East at the time, but a combination of under-the-surface changes highlighted and gave unsettling detail to his rule and the internal situation. Though the human rights community—some in that community—focused on American blame (in the bombing inside Iraq during Desert Storm or the effects of the use depleted uranium), the repression inside the country came as no surprise. But for a U.S. national security system that had ignored Iraq’s domestic situation, all of a sudden there was the “intelligence” that comes in with an intense and intimate presence to support assistance to the Kurds, enforcing the no-fly zones, support for U.N. inspectors and then abundant covert actions. A good part of the U.S. military and intelligence communities were focused on Iraq, with the flow of information to follow.

Finally, as U.S. intelligence used the U.N. presence to increase clandestine spying—particularly eavesdropping from inside Baghdad—the details of Saddam’s absolute rule and nepotism, cruelty and corruption increased. The dynamic was inscrutable: was the intelligence needed to support U.S. policy or did the intelligence drive it? When the Clinton administration finally said that there could be no normalization of relations—even if Iraq eliminated its WMD and satisfied the U.N. inspectors—there was no end game but war.

Van der Stoel shouldn’t be criticized for his report—and nor should the human rights community—but they, too, became agents for inevitable war. And what does it have to do with 9/11? Only that Iraq became dominant and overwhelming as a problem, diverting attention from terrorism, while those drawn to al Qaeda saw the plight of Iraq—they’ve killed one million Iraqi children, Osama bin Laden said many time—as further “proof” of American perfidy and the West’s campaign to destroy the Middle East.

14 October 2000

Posted on October 14, 2020October 20, 2020 by William Arkin

A year before 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) is appointed head of all media operations for al Qaeda. Between then and the attacks, he works with London and other Arab-based media in transmitting statements and distributing videos and cassettes.

The 34-year-old Pakistani national, who was raised in Kuwait and went to college in the United States, was by then an experienced operator for Osama bin Laden, having worked in Islamic aid organizations in Pakistan and Afghanistan during and after the Soviet occupation and then playing a hand in various plots, including the 1998 African embassy bombings.

Though indicted for terrorist conspiracy in 1996 by the Southern District of New York (for a plot to blow up American airliners over the Pacific), and even after a failed rendition attempt by the FBI, he is not a household-name terrorist, not even amongst CIA analysts, FBI investigators, or experts. And yet he is now universally accepted to have been the conceiver of the airline plot and the “teacher” of the Hamburg Three (Mohammed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, and Ziad Jarrah) with regard to operational security and preparing their year-and-a-half long preparations in the United States.

13 October 2000

Posted on October 13, 2020October 20, 2020 by William Arkin

Vice presidential candidate Dick Cheney urges swift retaliation for the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. “Any would-be terrorist out there needs to know that if you’re going to attack, you’ll be hit very hard and very quick. It’s not time for diplomacy and debate. It’s time for action.”

It is tantamount to approval for the Clinton administration to attack al Qaeda, even with an upcoming election.

The October surprise “norm” for a sitting president—if there is one—is to settle (or at least not exacerbate) pending foreign policy complications for an incoming administration, thereby not tilting the election one way or another. Bill Clinton himself inherited a losing hand in both Somalia and Iraq from George Bush the elder. Somalia would end up a disaster for the Clinton team and Iraq of course would dog the White House for the next eight years. And Barack Obama would hesitate to take stronger action against Russia in 2016, not wanting to tilt the election or tie the hands of an incoming Hillary Clinton administration.

Perhaps Cheney’s bluster was just pre-election posturing, but more important, the former secretary of defense believed that the implications of striking at al Qaeda was cost-free, that attacking—“very hard and very quick”—had no implications for blowback on the United States, that an attack on the U.S. itself wasn’t even conceived. Ultimately this belief was as much responsible for the new Bush administration’s slow development of a counter-terrorism policy in the nine months of 2001 before 9/11—that it just didn’t see al Qaeda as more than a run-of-the-mill terrorist organization.

12 October 2000

Posted on October 12, 2020October 12, 2020 by William Arkin

In Aden, a small bomb-laden boat approaches the destroyer USS Cole at midship and the two suicide bombers detonate their explosives, killing 17 sailors and injuring at least 40 others.

The destroyer, en route to the Persian Gulf, was making a prearranged fuel stop, part of a Central Command (CENTCOM) initiative to improve relations with the Yemen government. The blast ripped a hole in the side of the USS Cole approximately 40 feet in diameter. The attack occurs without warning, and the Navy vessel was never warned to expect a terrorist attack.

The subsequent FBI investigation revealed that the USS Cole bombing followed an unsuccessful attempt on January 3, 2000, to bomb another U.S. Navy ship, the USS The Sullivans. In this earlier incident, the boat sank before the explosives could be detonated. The boat and the explosives were salvaged and refitted, and the explosives were tested and reused in the USS Cole attack.

The “story” of the aftermath, favorable to a supposedly do-no-wrong FBI, is later told in Lawrence Wright’s Looming Tower, and the attack becomes an emotional debating point in the Bush-Gore presidential election. The outgoing Clinton administration is reluctant to retaliate against al Qaeda—the clear perpetrator—because an election is just a month away. But the Bush administration also does not take any military action, told by the CIA that it did not have enough “proof” of al Qaeda direction.

Yemeni authorities establish that Tawfiq bin-Atash (known as Khallad), who had been a trainer at an al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan and worked as an Osama bin Laden bodyguard, was not only one of the commanders but that he had been present at the January 2000 meeting of al Qaeda operatives in Malaysia. Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, the San Diego duo who would go on to be “musclemen” on 9/11, were also present.

According to the 911 Commission Report (p. 191), back in Afghanistan, bin Laden anticipated U.S. military retaliation and ordered the evacuation of al Qaeda installations, fleeing to the desert area near Kabul, then to Khowst and Jalalabad, and eventually back to Kandahar. In Kandahar, he rotated between five to six residences, spending one night at each residence. In addition, he sent his senior advisor, Mohammed Atef, to a different part of Kandahar and his deputy, Ayman al Zawahiri, to Kabul so that all three could not be killed in one attack.

In writing his autobiography, George Tenet says that “neither our intelligence nor the FBI’s criminal investigation could conclusively prove that Usama bin Ladin and his leadership had had authority, direction, and control over the attack. This is a high threshold to cross… What’s important from our perspective at CIA is that the FBI investigation had taken primacy in getting to the bottom of the matter.” (At the Center of the Storm, p. 128).

11 October 2000

Posted on October 11, 2020October 11, 2020 by William Arkin

Bush and Gore engage in their second debate, at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, and covering foreign policy, focused very much on Iraq.

Bush calls for a less interventionist foreign policy, saying, “If we’re an arrogant nation, they’ll resent us.” Gore responds, “I think we also have to have a sense of mission in the world.”

Bush says that America’s leaders “…must be… humble in how we treat nations that are figuring out how to chart their own course.” He says that U.S. should “reach out to moderate Arab nations, like Jordan and Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.”

He says that “the coalition against Saddam has fallen apart or it’s unraveling” and that “sanctions are being violated.”

“We don’t know whether he’s developing weapons of mass destruction,” Bush says, adding, “He better not be or there’s going to be a consequence should I be the president.”

Citing the absence of inspectors, a fractured coalition, and Iraqi meddling in the Middle East, he says that “it’s going to be important to rebuild that coalition to keep the pressure on him,” never actually voicing regime change as a prerequisite for an Iraq policy. But he aligns himself with the Clinton administration, saying that what he is basically proposing is no different than what is current policy.

10 October 1990

Posted on October 10, 2020October 11, 2020 by William Arkin

Nayirah testifies before Congress in 1990

The era of modern media manipulation begins with the appearance of 15-year-old Nayirah al-Ṣabaḥ, a Kuwaiti refugee who told the Congressional Human Rights Caucus a harrowing story about Iraqi atrocities in occupied Kuwait. Nayirah speaks of witnessing Iraqi soldiers taking babies out of incubators in a Kuwaiti hospital, stealing the incubators and leaving the babies to die. Amnesty International corroborates the story. It is a front page sensation, with others repeating similar tales.

It turn out that her testimony, representing Citizens for a Free Kuwait, was paid for by the Kuwait government in exile through a contract with Hill & Knowlton, to create an information campaign that would solidify any flagging support for a U.N. resolution authorizing the use of force to eject Iraq from Kuwait. Rick MacArthur revealed in 1992 that Nayirah was really the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S. and that while there were abundant examples of Iraqi war crimes in Kuwait, the incident likely never happened.

9 October 1999

Posted on October 9, 2020October 11, 2020 by William Arkin

A wedding is held, at the Quds mosque in Hamburg, Germany and it’s attended by Mohammed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, and Ziad Jarrah: the three pilots who would go on to lead the 9/11 attacks.

A videotape of the October 9, 1999 wedding of Said Bahaji, a German-born Muslim of Moroccan descent, is recovered by German authorities after 9/11. It also depicts Ramzi Binalshibh—now at Guantanamo—giving a speech denouncing Jews as a problem for all Muslims. Binalshibh reads a Palestinian war poem, and al-Shehhi participates in singing a jihadi song. German investigators believe that other men attending were part of the “Hamburg four’s” network of support. Among them was Mohammed Heidar Zammar, another German of Moroccan descent who is believed to have recruited for al Qaeda.

James Bamford writes in Pretext for War (p. 172): “By October 1999 at the latest, the members of the group under Atta’s leadership had decided to participate in jihad through a terrorist attack on America and kill as many people as possible.”

8 October 1999

Posted on October 8, 2020October 10, 2020 by William Arkin

The State Department first designates al Qaeda (al-Qa’ida) a foreign terrorist organization (FTO), the first new such designation of an organization since the list was created two years earlier. It says: “Al-Qaida, led by Usama bin Ladin [sic], was added because it is responsible for several major terrorist attacks, including the August 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania.”

The FTO designation was created after the Oklahoma City domestic bombing (in the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996) to combat the possibility, as stated by the Congress, that “foreign terrorist organizations, acting through affiliated groups or individuals, raise significant funds within the United States, or use the United States as a conduit for the receipt of funds raised in other nations.”

The initial FTO list was issued in 1997 included 30 organizations, but not al Qaeda. Why it was not included in the original 30 organizations has to do with a formal processes and arcane criteria and definitions that result in a mix of organizations (including, for instance, the IRA) being listed as FTOs.

7 October 2000

Posted on October 7, 2020October 10, 2020 by William Arkin

Ziad Jarrah, the hijacker pilot of United Airlines Flight 93, takes the first of five foreign trips while he is in the United States in preparation for the 9/11 attacks.

He flies from Atlanta to Frankfurt, Germany and then travels on to Bochum, Germany, where he sees his common-law wife Aysel Senguen. The two then travel to Paris for a vacation.

Jarrah, the only Lebanese of the 9/11 hijackers, is also the most cosmopolitan of the 19 men, maintaining a close relationship with a woman, going on vacations, traveling the world. While in the United States, Jarrah makes hundreds of phone calls to Senguen and communicates frequently by email. (911 Commission, p. 224)

During this trip, the Navy destroyer USS Cole is attacked (on October 12) and Mohammed Atta, the leader of the terrorists, was concerned that Jarrah would be stranded overseas when U.S. immigration tightened with the al Qaeda attack.

But when Jarrah returns to the U.S. on October 29, he has no trouble passing through immigration and customs in Tampa, being admitted on a six-month tourist visa, even though he was still in flight school.