America and Global Terror from 1980–2001
“Oceania was at war with Eastasia”*
—GEORGE ORWELL
The United States’ relationship with the Islamic world is a product of its modern role in the international community. After World War I, the United States and Britain engaged in an open door policy, like the one in China, with respect to Middle Eastern oil.1 During World War II, Churchill and FDR signed an Anglo-American Petroleum Agreement in 1944, partitioning Middle Eastern oil.2
During the Cold War and through its role as Israel’s ally, the United States rose as a Middle Eastern power. In 1953, the CIA and Britain’s MI6 orchestrated the overthrow of the elected prime minister of Iran to impose an absolutist rule under the Shah and the military.3 In 1957, President Eisenhower raised the stakes against the Soviet Union, declaring “the United States regards as vital to the national interest and world peace the preservation of the independence and integrity of the nations of the Middle East,” which Congress affirmed, promising military and financial aid to nations threatened in the Middle East.4 During the Carter administration in 1979, revolutionaries overran the U.S. embassy in Tehran, resulting in the Iranian hostage crisis.5 America had sown enmity abroad that soon would stop taking the form of state and quasi-state aggression, transfiguring into the more inconspicuous visage of terrorist jihad.
The 1986 Berlin nightclub bombing in Germany stands in stark contrast to the remainder of the 1980s, which was a time of relative peace for Americans from terrorist attacks. Terrorist organizations would begin challenging the United States on its soil in the next decade.
During the 1980s, however, the Soviet Union was attempting to subjugate Afghanistan.6 The United States, playing the proverbial white knight, covertly intervened for the Islamic mujahideen—Afghani jihadists fighting against the Soviet Union encroaching on their soil—with substantial monetary and weapons support.7 Osama bin Laden “heard the call” for jihad and joined the mujahideen in 1979.8 By 1984, he had formed the Maktab Khadamat (MAK), or Afghan Services Bureau, to raise support from around the world for combating the Soviets.9 The mujahideen began recruiting in the United States through MAK.10 One notably successful recruiter was the “Blind Sheikh” Omar Abdel-Rahman, who operated out of a mosque on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, New York.11
George H. W. Bush became president in January 1989. The Soviet Union completed leaving Afghanistan a month later in February 1989.12 Afghanistan plunged into seven years of sectarian violence and civil war.13 That same year, 1989, bin Laden founded al Qaeda to carry out global jihad.14 Bin Laden and his mujahideen-turned-al-Qaeda force traveled to Saudi Arabia, his homeland.15 Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, and bin Laden offered his soldiers as mercenaries to King Fahd Al Saud against the vastly superior Iraqi army.16 The king declined bin Laden’s offer, opting for the United States to station troops in Saudi Arabia instead.17 Bin Laden began recruiting members and speaking out against the House of Saud for profaning the Holy Land by permitting infidels (U.S. troops) there.* Eventually, bin Laden was banned from Saudi Arabia, and he moved al Qaeda to the Sudan in 1992, remaining there until 1996.18 America created an enemy in its former ally—the former mujahideen newly branded as al Qaeda.
The Clinton Administration: The War on Terror Begins and the Executive Claims New Powers
All presidents must legally swear to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States,” creating an affirmative duty on the president as chief law enforcer to preserve freedom and as commander in chief to prevent force from assaulting security.19 In the recent wave of 1990s nostalgia, the William J. Clinton administration years have been hailed as a centrist utopia of peace and prosperity. Despite his economic accomplishments compared to his two successors, President Clinton failed in responding to the threat of global terrorism, paving the way for the attacks of September 11th 2001 and the ensuing decade-plus-long war on freedom.20
In his 1997 book about the Clinton administration, former senior aide and my former Fox News colleague Dick Morris recalled a conversation with the president about where Clinton would sit in history, in which Clinton ruefully conceded that he was in the middle of the pack in terms of presidential greatness.21 History will judge the Clinton administration harshly for its inattention to the dawn of international terrorism.22 Moreover, it will blame Clinton personally for laying the legal foundation for George W. Bush’s rendition and torture programs, for doing the same for Obama’s drone programs, and for having a negligent national security infrastructure during his term.
The War on Terror began for the United States in 2001, when the Bush administration was “authorized” to use military force to root out terrorism anywhere in the globe, but it began for the opposing al Qaeda force in 1992. The first al Qaeda attacks on U.S. targets took place in 1992 and 1993, with a more blatant, formal declaration of war, or fatwah, being issued by bin Laden in August 1996 and again in 1998.23
The 1993 World Trade Center Bombings
On September 1st 1992, Pakistani radical Ahmed Ajaj was caught entering the United States. His partner, Ramiz Yousef, an al Qaeda–trained radical, was traveling with him.24 Ahmed’s uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and he had conspired with other radicals in America, including the “Blind Sheikh” Rahman, in a plan to attack the World Trade Center, carrying out bin Laden’s jihad.25 In an utterly macabre foreshadowing, the radicals bombed the World Trade Center on February 26th 1993, a little over one month into Bill Clinton’s presidency, killing six Americans and wounding more than a thousand persons.26 The FBI rounded up all the conspirators who were in America.27
In the ensuing criminal prosecutions in the Southern District of New York, the conspirators were convicted of several crimes, including seditious conspiracy to levy war. In United States v. Rahman—the Blind Sheikh’s 1999 appeal from those convictions to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit—one co-conspirator, El Sayyid Nosair (“the first al Qaeda operative to be arrested by America,” whose legal fees were being paid by bin Laden financial fronts),28 asserted that because he was a U.S. citizen, the Treason Clause requires the testimony of two witnesses who must support his conviction for levying war against the United States.29
The court clearly defined the defendants’ conduct as “levying war [against the United States],” which other circuit courts have tended to term terrorist acts.30 Moreover, the Second Circuit noted: “It is undisputed that Nosair’s conviction was not supported by two witnesses to the same overt act. Accordingly the conviction must be overturned if the requirement of the Treason Clause applies to this prosecution for seditious conspiracy.”31 However, citing Ex parte Quirin’s reasoning that citizenship alone won’t give Treason Clause protections, the Second Circuit denied their defense, and the Supreme Court denied certiorari the following year in 2000.32
Two months after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, on June 21st of that year, President Clinton issued Presidential Decision Directive 39, creating the precedent for a system of extraordinary rendition that permitted U.S. personnel to become complicit in torture. The Bush administration would use the directive as a legal excuse to do the same. “Return of the suspect[ed terrorists] by force may be effected without the cooperation of the host government.”33 Meanwhile, “the White House was [still] dismissive [of bin Laden].”34
Clinton and al Qaeda 1996–2001: Afghanistan, Khobar Towers, the Embassy Bombings, and the USS Cole
By 1996, al Qaeda became an arm of the Taliban’s defense ministry in the Islamic emirate of Afghanistan.35 Al Qaeda had five thousand fighters in the Taliban army, including one thousand of the elite Brigade 055 unit.36 Under Taliban governmental blessing, bin Laden’s army “establish[ed] military camps where fighters were trained to battle the Northern Alliance as well as conduct terrorist operations outside Afghanistan.”37 Moreover, by 2001 “the Taliban militia had become so subject to the dominion and control of al Qaeda that it could not pursue independent policies with respect to the outside world.”38 “[The Taliban have] proved themselves subservient to al Qaeda.”39 This organ of government declared war in 1996.40 Despite the clear associations, the Bush administration would sidestep the state-actor issue to avoid “giving rights” to war prisoners.
On June 25th 1996, an explosion “tore off the front of the [Khobar Towers] compound and was felt twenty miles away in Bahrain,” killing nineteen American servicepersons.41 Clinton did not address this as an intelligence or military matter.42 Moreover, Clinton’s attention was diverted elsewhere because he was in the midst of the Filegate and Whitewater scandals, and his former business partners had just been indicted in the latter of those.43 Obviously, this was a recipe for disaster.
“[T]he Clinton [a]dministration not only failed to follow potentially productive leads but in some instances made the investigators’ job more difficult.”44 Clinton initially reacted with ire, promising justice and itching for a full-scale invasion of Iran.45 He met with a Saudi prince and wrote to King Fahd; Vice President Gore banged on a negotiating table during a temper tantrum, demanding information from a Saudi prince.46 However, Clinton “lost interest” in the investigation.47 “[T]he president barely mentioned the case in meetings with Saudi leaders.”48 FBI Director Louis Freeh, distrusting Clinton, waited until George W. Bush was in office to proceed: Then he sought an indictment of the co-conspirators in federal court in 2001.49 Eventually, when Freeh presented his findings to Sandy Berger, Clinton’s national security advisor, they were dismissed as “hearsay” and buried.50
Al Qaeda attacked the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya on August 7th, the eighth anniversary of the entrance of American forces into Saudi Arabia.51 Twelve Americans and more than two hundred others would die. Clinton publicly responded on that morning, posing almost Bush-like and turning vindictive: “We will use all the means at our disposal to bring those responsible to justice, no matter what or how long it takes,” but again he would lose interest.52
After issuing a capture-but-don’t-intentionally-kill order, Clinton took military action, but it was an abject failure, “the greatest foreign policy blunder of the Clinton Presidency”:53
Investigators quickly discovered that bin Laden was behind the attacks. On August 20, Clinton ordered cruise-missile strikes on a bin Laden camp in Afghanistan and the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan. But the strikes were at best ineffectual. There was little convincing evidence that the pharmaceutical factory, which administration officials believed was involved in the production of material for chemical weapons, actually was part of a weapons-making operation, and the cruise missiles in Afghanistan missed bin Laden and his deputies.54
Clinton was first assailed in the press, perhaps unfairly,55 for wagging the dog: The Monica Lewinsky scandal overlapped (the let’s-blame-let’s-exonerate-them affair from January 1998 to February 1999), and Clinton’s opponents attacked him for distracting from that “real issue” with this military gaffe.56 Clearly, President Clinton was distracted by the scandal.57
Second, Clinton was assailed for the poor outcome of the missile strikes in Afghanistan and Sudan. In total, six jihadists were killed. The press dubbed the pharmaceutical plant “the aspirin factory”: The plant had been producing aspirin and animal vaccines, “operating under a U.N. license and had been extensively inspected by a U.N. task force only months before.”58
Clinton was “pissed” about the result and halted a planned second missile strike in light of the press’s opprobrium.59 Instead, he issued an executive order on August 20th, freezing bin Laden and al Qaeda’s American assets.60 Losing interest, Clinton continued his “usual” vacillation over whether it was worth the political consequences to kill bin Laden by a covert operation.61 The Clinton Justice Department and FBI, however, went after all the co-conspirators that they could find. The trial, popularly known as the Embassy Bombings Case, lasted from January 2001 to May 2001.62 The defendants were convicted, and in 2010, their convictions were upheld when the Supreme Court denied their petition for certiorari.63
On October 12th 2000, the USS Cole was in Aden Harbor, Yemen, on a routine refueling mission.64 Two suicide bombers in a small motorboat rammed into the side of the ship, exploding themselves and killing seventeen sailors.65 The FBI and State Department were dispatched to the scene.66
At the time, Clinton was more interested in the escalating Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as the Washington Post’s John Harris stated, “[T]he escalation between Israelis and Palestinians took the edge in preoccupying senior administration officials.”67 Clinton’s address on the topic promised justice but quickly sidestepped and reframed the issue, claiming the terrorists were trying to disrupt the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.68 The FBI and State Department officials investigating on the ground started a “war” with each other early on that only escalated, resulting in an FBI official being recalled at an ambassador’s request and an attempt to run the investigation from across the Atlantic in New York. Notwithstanding all this, investigators linked the bombing to bin Laden.69
The Early George W. Bush Administration on Counterterrorism
Before 9/11, President George W. Bush simply did not “feel that sense of urgency.”70 Vice President Dick Cheney, who had “confidently assumed the national security portfolio for a president who had virtually no experience in the area,” was stuck in an outdated, Cold War mind-set of the Middle East.71 Thus, the Bush administration downgraded terrorism as a national security priority:
One of the first official acts of the current Bush administration was to downgrade the office of national coordinator for counterterrorism on the National Security Council—a position held by Richard Clarke. Clarke had served in the Pentagon and State Department under presidents Reagan and Bush the elder, and was the first person to hold the counterterrorism job created by President Clinton. Under Clinton, he was elevated to cabinet rank, which gave him a seat at the principals’ meeting, the highest decision-making group for national security.72
Before the 9/11 attack, the Bush administration cut counterterrorism funds, denied requests for more counterterrorism agents, threatened to veto additional counterterrorism spending, ignored numerous warnings about imminent attacks, and declared focusing on bin Laden a mistake.73 Later investigations would reveal, however, that at least seven months before 9/11, the Bush administration began domestic spying operations.74
Were George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton too tepid or too willing to use military violence for the wrong purposes? We may never know, but we do know that their uses of violence were grounded in the unchecked use of it by their predecessors.
* George Orwell, 1984 (New York: Signet Classics, 1950), 180–81.
* “The latest and the greatest of these aggressions, incurred by the Muslims since the death of the Prophet . . . is the occupation of the land of the two Holy Places—the foundation of the house of Islam, the place of the revelation, the source of the message and the place of the noble Ka’ba, the Qiblah of all Muslims—by the armies of the American Crusaders and their allies. (We bemoan this and can only say: ‘No power and power acquiring except through Allah’).” Osama Bin Laden et al., “Bin Laden’s Fatwa,” PBS Newshour, August 23, 1996, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/military/july-dec96/fatwa_1996.html. “Yet, it was the symbolic presence of the U.S. Marines on the Arabian Peninsula that enraged Osama bin Laden.” Richard Miniter, Losing Bin Laden: How Bill Clinton’s Failures Unleashed Global Terror (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2003), 2.