Bin Laden seems to have been clearly connected to the embassy bombings (which included the very awful Kenya bombing) and to the bombing of the USS Cole. But so far, unless I've missed something, absolutely the only hard evidence of his connection to this bombing is a bumper sticker on a car in a Florida airport parking lot that says the arabic equivalent of Go Bin Laden -- which, if it does turn out to be connected to the group that pulled this off, would be a blazon of amateurishness rather than evidence of a mastermind at work.
Of course, the investigation is still young. But what strikes me in looking over the record is that New York has been the host of a series terrorist conspiracies over the last decade, all of which have converged on the same kind of targets that were attacked this week. But despite years of investigation, not one of them has been connected to Bin Laden -- despite tireless attempts to do so, and even though endless repetition is succeeding in making most of us assume they they succeeded. Instead, the picture you get is not unlike that of the anti-globalization movement: a de-centered network of college-educated guys who devote themselves to attacking their political enemies. Their aims and means are pretty drastically different (as well as their seemingly exclusive guyhood). But their means seem pretty similar.
Take the first World Trade Center bombing, in 1993. Who was the mastermind then? Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, a Palestinian who hated the US and swore revenge. Born in 1968, he studied engineering in Wales, and then, when Afghanistani rebels pushed the Russians out in 1989 he went there, much as one of us might train with the Ruckus society. He then went to the Philippines to work with Abu Sayyaf. Then he came here, recruited a bunch of guys from Sheik Rahman's mosque, and they planted the bomb. Their amateur status seems clear on the face of it. Yousef said the the bomb would have been bigger, but $8500 was all he had. And we all remember why the gang got caught -- because one of them, Mohammed Salameh, went back to the Ryder truck company a few days afterwards to reclaim his $400 deposit. Both of these things seem to make it clear that he and his group weren't supported by any foreign governments or billionaires or guided by foreign secret services. Of if they were, the support and guidance was so pitiful it didn't count as support or guidance.
Remember also that Yousef wasn't simply convicted of the WTC bombing. His even more dastardly scheme was to bomb a dozen US airliners leaving the US for pacific destinations over a period of several days. When the authorities finally caught him in Pakistan, his laptop was full of a dozen ideas. This is what he lived to do, make spectacular strikes against the US. It wasn't hard for him to recruit others who wanted to help. And it wasn't hard for people like him to work out ways to do it. And he wasn't incompetent. He was learning. The WTC bomb went off; it just wasn't big enough. He test-bombed a Phillippine plane and it worked just fine. According to the judge in his trial, his scheme for bombing 12 planes in a few days came very close to coming true.
The main nexus for these guys to meet was the mosque of Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman. Remember him? The blind Egyptian cleric with a mosque in Brooklyn? He hated Egypt for selling out to Israel. He was put on trial in Egypt several times and convicted in abstentia. When he got here, he continued to fulminate against Israel and Egypt. He organized a conspiracy to kill Mubarak when he visited the US in 1993. He was finally convicted in 1996 of a conspiracy to bomb the UN, the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels, the GW Bridge, and the local federal buildings. 20 guys were convicted with him, Palestinans and muslims from around the world living in the states, none of them with a connection to Bin Laden that anyone has been able to find. After his conviction groups in Egypt swore revenge and groups in the US swore to reopen his mosque and carry on the fight. And since Rahman is part of a tradition of Egyptian Islamic radicalism that assasinated Sadat for signing Camp David; and has tried several times to assasinate Mubarak; and generally considers the sell-out government of Egypt right up there with Israel and the US as part of an evil triumpherate that keeps the Arab world down; they seem like pretty good suspects for a bombing that went off on the anniversary of the Camp David accords. If Sheik Rahman wasn't foremost in the minds of the police when the bomb went off, the memory of his plot is certainly encoded in our emergency plans. At least I assume that's why we closed the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels and the GW Bridge, which we didn't do after the first bomb, and which, at first sight, seemed to make evacuation more difficult.
But my real point is that this conviction that there must be a state behind these guys, and that there must be a lot of money, and that there must be a single command center, seems unjustified. I suspect it's probably just as wrong as the conviction many people had a couple of years ago that the anti-globalization protesters had leaders and central control. I think Occam's razor points instead to a culture of political conviction married to a culture of problem solving.
Supposedly after the first bomb went off in 1993, Ramzi stood on the Jersey side of the Hudson, deeply disappointed. He watched the smoke billow out from the bottom and asked "What does it take to knock these buildings down?" I think a lot of people like him asked that question. This desire to strike those buildings was not rare. And clearly some of them set out to answer it. And since their collective idea of a spectacular victory has repeated turned on blowing up planes, and the World Trade Center, and other prominent US monuments, it can't have been that long before someone thought Hey, why not fly one into the other? And when everyone voiced the obvious problems -- how do you fly the things? How do you take them over? What would be their countermeasures -- they came up with solutions. I remember hearing one newscaster saying it was diabolical how these guys knew exactly how best to destroy the building. He said, Who knew you strike it at the top? I would have thought the bottom! Well, so did they. They tried that. It didn't work. So they studied more. How did they learn to fly planes? They went to flight school. It took some time, it took some money, but it wasn't beyond their means. They read books like How Buildlings Fall Down. Etc. Their solutions seem brutally simple. So I think it might well turn out that none of these guys is a genius -- but that the old truth that a network of people focussed on the same goal is much smarter than any individual works for malign goals as well as it does for beneficial ones. And if they aren't geniuses, we should remember that the individuals that make up the network are at least as smart as we are. They have degrees in engineering and computer science. The only unmodern thing about them is their goal to be religious martyrs in a Jihad.
The occurrences yesterday that led to the re-shutdown of New York airports has strengthened my belief that this is a large network of activists rather than a centrally controlled operation run from a state or Bin Laden. The guys went back to try again as soon as planes started flying, and took their cancelled tickets from Tuesday, are not quite as dense as Mohammed Salameh. But they have similarities. They are clearly short on cash, and they seem to be full of emotion. It seems like they can't believe or accept that they might have missed their big chance. Where network of cold blooded operatives famed for their patience would clearly have lain dormant for years.
Displacing anger onto Bin Laden might not be a bad thing in the short term. He's surely guilty of heinous crimes. And if we have to strike in hot anger, I'd rather it were against one guilty man than an amorphous network of otherwise normal people. But in the long term, the fact that he might turn out to have had nothing to do with this bombing, just as he had nothing to do with any of the other New York conspiracies, seems an important thing to bear in mind. It underlines Nathan's slogan: The Only Ultimate Defense is a Just World
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com