17 January 1996

Posted on January 17, 2021February 2, 2021 by Featherproof Books

The Egyptian national Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman (the “Blind Sheikh”), a resident of Brooklyn, is sentenced to life in prison for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center and the Landmarks Case—or the so-called “days of terror” attacks, the spring 1993 conspiracy to attack multiple buildings and tunnels in New York City.

Together with nine other defendants who do not enter in plea agreements with the government, Abdel-Rahman is sentence to life in prison for “sedition.” It is the end of active plotting in the New York area, most of it only ever tentatively connected to al Qaeda, but the beginning of the era of “homegrown violent extremists.”

27 December 1993

Posted on December 27, 2020January 30, 2021 by William Arkin

In Egypt, an attack on a bus in old Cairo wounds 16 Austrian and Egyptian tourists. Gama’a al-Islamiya (Islamic Group) claims responsibility. In September, the group warned tourists that they shouldn’t enter Qana province, which includes some of Egypt’s most famous sites. The first attack on tourists occurs a month later, killing one British national. Six more attacks on tourists—in Qana and Cairo—kill more than a dozen foreign tourists.

The Islamic Group’s “spiritual” leader is Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman. The group would claim responsibility for the multi-year campaign of tourist attacks, including the November 1997 attack at Luxor that killed 58 foreign tourists.

11 November 1996

Posted on November 11, 2020December 23, 2020 by William Arkin

The FBI first interviews Jamal al-Fadl and is taken on quite a ride.

The Sudanese national Jamal Ahmad al-Fadl walked into the U.S. Embassy in Asmara, Eritrea in June 1996, claiming that he was a secretary and fixer for Osama bin Laden in Sudan. As the FBI would later tell the story to Lawrence Wright, al-Fadl embezzled $110,000 from al Qaeda; when bin Laden found out about it, and al-Fadl begged for forgiveness, bin Laden said the money would have to be returned. Fadl flees. He attempts to become an agent for Saudi Arabia and even Israel before he lands with the FBI. (Looming Tower, p. 197)

As the story goes, al-Fadl had lived in Brooklyn and was connected to the Al-Kifah Center, then the radical mosque linked to the 1993 World Trade Center attack and the “blind Sheikh” Omar Abdel Rahman.

After a long vetting process in Germany, al-Fadl began to tell the FBI of al Qaeda’s worldwide organization, activities, and finances. He is such a valuable source, he is moved to the U.S. under witness protection, and in New Jersey, “junior”—as the FBI handlers called him—spills on everything from plots known and unknown to al Qaeda’s supposed pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. That little tidbit rockets his information to the White House.

Though the WMD report would receive wide circulation—and would influence the U.S. cruise missile attack in Sudan two years later—according to Wright (who is always complimentary of the FBI), outside of a small circle of FBI specialists and prosecutors, Fadl’s reports engender little interest. (Looming Tower, p. 242)

George Tenet says in his autobiography (At the Center of the Storm, p. 102) that al-Fadl (whom he doesn’t name) “told us that UBL [bin Laden] was the head of a worldwide terrorist organization with a board of directors that would include the likes of Ayman al-Zawahiri and that he wanted to strike the United States on our soil. We learned that al Qaeda had attempted to acquire material that could be used to develop chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapons capability. He had gone so far as to hire an Egyptian physicist to work on nuclear and chemical projects in Sudan.”

Oh, and al-Fadl won the New Jersey Lottery. He is still thought to be in witness protection.

5 November 1990

Posted on November 5, 2020November 6, 2020 by William Arkin

Rabbi Meir Kahane, an American-born Zionist extremist and founder of the Jewish Defense League, is assassinated at a Marriott Hotel in midtown Manhattan. It is perhaps the first case of radical Islamic terrorism on America’s shores, and certainly a precursor to all that would follow, from the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center to 9/11.

El Sayyid Nosair, an Egyptian-born American citizen, infiltrated the hotel, where Kahane was giving a speech. Others who were later involved in the February 1993 attack on the World Trade Center accompanied him or waited outside in getaway cars.

As Kahane was leaving the ballroom, Nosair shot him twice, killing him. He ran from the room, shouting “It’s Allah’s will!” At the door, a man tried to stop him and Nosair shot him in the leg and fled. Confronted by a U.S. postal police officer outside the hotel, Nosair also shot him. The officer, wearing a bulletproof vest, fired back, hitting Nosair, who was taken to Bellevue hospital.

Nosair was acquitted of the murder but convicted of lesser, related charges. When federal agents raided Nosair’s New Jersey residence after his arrest, they found many incriminating items, including a sermon by Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman (the “Blind Sheikh”) that urged followers to attack “the edifices of capitalism.” He would be later convicted on terrorist conspiracy to life in prison. FBI investigators reportedly later found that Osama bin Laden had paid for Nosair’s defense.

18 October 1992

Posted on October 18, 2020October 20, 2020 by William Arkin

Osama … we hardly knew you. Osama Bassnan, a Saudi government intelligence officer according to the FBI, throws a Washington, DC party for Omar Abdel Rahman, “the Blind Sheikh,” who is now living in New York. This is four months before the first bombing of the World Trade Center and well before there was much recognition of al Qaeda or Osama bin Laden.

An FBI asset is at the party, and according to the famed “28 pages” (the deleted material from the 9/11 Commission report that is finally released in 2016), Bassnan “made many laudatory remarks … about bin Ladin [sic], referring to Bin Ladin as … the ruler of the Islamic world.” According to the FBI asset, Bassnan spoke of Bin Laden “as if he were a god.” He also stated that he heard that the U.S. government had stopped approving visas for students from the Middle East. He said that such measures were insufficient to stop Islam because there were already “enough Muslims in the United States to destroy the United States and make it an Islamic state within ten to fifteen years.”

In May 1992, according to former Sen. Bob Graham (Intelligence Matters, pp. 24-25), the State Department provided the FBI “with a box of documents recovered from an abandoned car.” In the box are a number of letters addressed to Osama Bassnan, a “Saudi spy … [later] suspected of being groomed to replace [Omar] al-Bayoumi in San Diego.” Graham says “the FBI did not open an investigation,” even after the October party.

Omar al-Bayoumi, another Saudi intelligence officer, “meets” the first two hijackers to enter the United States—Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi—the would be pilots who arrived in Los Angeles and were helped by Bayoumi to settle in in San Diego. Bassnan would go on to live in the same apartment complex at Mihdhar and al-Hazmi. Both Bassnan and Bayoumi would disappear before 9/11, and though Bayoumi was interviewed in Saudi Arabia by Commission staffers, their involvement in 9/11 remained shrouded in secret.

29 September 2000

Posted on September 29, 2020September 30, 2020 by William Arkin

Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Rifa’i Ahmed Taha appear on Al Jazeera with the son of Omar Abdel Rahman, the Egyptian “the blind Sheikh,” calling for his release from American prison. The Blind Sheikh’s 1995 trial involved a group of New York-based terrorists in the so-called “Landmarks” case (or the “Days of Terror”), plans to blow up the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels and other New York landmarks. The Egyptian was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison under the rarely used Sedition Act of 1918.

The Al Jazeera video, aired numerous times starting on September 21, is believed to have been filmed sometime in the spring of 2000. It includes a direct warning by Zawahiri. “Enough of words,” he says, “it is time to take action against the iniquitous and faithless force which has spread troops through Egypt, Yemen and Saudi Arabia.”

By 2000, the al Qaeda leader and the two leaders of Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ)—Zawahiri and Taha—are practically joined as one, and the leadership of al Qaeda is dominated by Egyptians. But bin Laden’s influence should not be underestimated. By all accounts, he was successful in getting Zawahiri and the EIJ to focus away from attacks on the Cairo regime and more on international (that is, American) targets. Two weeks after Al Jazeera airs this video, the Navy destroyer USS Cole is attacked in Yemen.

Zawahiri would go on to lead the last remnants of al Qaeda with the killing of bin Laden in 2011. Taha was reported killed in a US drone strike in Syria in 2016.