The 9/11 Wars (126 page)

102
.
Statement of Mohammed Ajmal Amir Qasab, November 2008, author collection.

103
.
Ibid. Pranab Dhal Samantha, ‘GPS records, CD transcript boost India’s case’,
The Indian Express
, July 6, 2010. Jason Burke, ‘Mumbai: behind the attacks lies a story of youth twisted by hate’,
Observer
, November 30, 2008. For name confusion see Prabeen Swami, ‘Terrorist’s name lost in transliteration’,
The Hindu
, December 6, 2008. Kasab is the name of the gunman’s caste, mispelt by Indian policemen who needed a surname for their paperwork.

104
.
Its spokesmen had been happy to meet the author in a five-star Lahore hotel in March 2008.

105
.
Possibly initially as an informer for the Drugs Enforcement Agency. Headley had been convicted of heroin smuggling in 1998 and cooperated to reduce his sentence.

106
.
National Investigation Agency, Government of India, Interrogation Report of David Headley, June 2010, p. 89. Author collection.

107
.
When in America, a US-based LeT member had assisted Headley and, days after returning to Pakistan after completing his first surveillance mission, Headley met with senior LeT associates and discussed potential targets in India.

108
.
Interrogation Report of David Headley, pp. 1–5, 39, 44, 63, 66–9, 79, 84. See indictments: USA vs. Abdur Rehman Hashim Syed, ‘Criminal Complaint’, Northern District of Illinois, 2009; USA vs. David Headley, ‘Criminal Complaint’, Northern District of Illinois, 2009. Author collection.

109
.
What was clear, however, was the confluence in thinking and worldview between men like ‘Major Iqbal’ and his immediate superiors and people like Headley, Zaki ur Rehman Lakhvi and others. When Headley reported to his handler that the Jewish Nariman House had been added to the target list, ‘Major Iqbal’ was very pleased. This did not mean that he was a violent extremist, simply that he shared the anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist worldview of the LeT militants and all those many millions across the Islamic world who saw attacks on Israeli, and by extension Jewish, targets as entirely justified.

110
.
‘Suicide bomber hits foreign forces in Afghanistan’, Reuters, December 26, 2008. The British Ministry of Defence announced eight soldiers killed in Helmand in the first two weeks of December alone. Michael Evans and Alexi Mostrous, ‘Three Royal Marines killed in Afghanistan by boy with wheelbarrow bomb’,
The Times
, December 13, 2008.

111
.
Dexter Filkins, ‘Afghan civilian deaths rose 40 percent in 2008’,
New York Times
, February 17, 2009. United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan figures, obtained March 2009, Kabul. Ismail Sameem, ‘Taliban kill 20 police in Afghanistan’, Reuters, January 1, 2009.

112
.
Riaz Khan, ‘Militants seize convoy for US-led forces’, Associated Press, November 11, 2008. Rahimullah Yusufzai, ‘No to Nato’,
Newsline
, December 2008. For Caravan reference, see Tariq, ‘The Life of Baitullah Mahsood’.

113
.
Author interview with a senior French diplomat, Paris, February 2009.

CHAPTER 15: THE 9/11 WARS: EUROPE, THE MIDDLE EAST, IRAQ

    1
.
‘Let the American people prepare to continue to reap what has been planted by the heads of the White House in the coming years and decades,’ bin Laden said. ‘Double blast against Obama shows strain on Qaeda’, Reuters, June 3, 2009.

    2
.
Full text of Obama victory speech, BBC, November 5, 2008.

    3
.
Those with a favourable view of the US in Jordan rose from 19 per cent to 25 per cent and in Egypt from 22 per cent to 27 per cent. Pew Research Center,
Pew Global Attitudes Survey: Confidence in Obama Lifts U.S. Image Around the World
, July 23, 2009.’ Pew Research Center,
Pew Global Attitudes Survey: Muslim Disappointment: Obama More Popular Abroad than at Home, Global Image of US
Continues to Benefit
, June 17, 2010. The new American president was popular in Indonesia, where he spent several years as a child, where 71 per cent of Indonesians voiced confidence in him, and among Nigerian Muslims (81 per cent), Israeli Arabs (69 per cent) and Lebanese Sunnis (65 per cent).

    4
.
The favourability rating of the US in the spring of 2009 in Turkey was 14 per cent, lower than shortly before the Iraq war of 2003. In Pakistan those expressing a favourable view of the US actually dropped from 19 per cent before Obama’s election to 16 per cent afterwards. Pew Research Center,
Confidence in Obama
, p. 5. There many, predictably and depressingly, suspected a conspiracy. One senior journalist, looking out on the crowded streets from the window of the newsroom of the country’s biggest satellite TV news channel on the day of Obama’s victory, told the author that he could not believe that ‘a black’ could make it to such a powerful position in America without the help of the Jews or the CIA. ‘Blacks just aren’t intelligent enough. And Americans are too racist,’ he explained.

    5
.
The request was as ever coupled with a reassurance that the security of Israel was paramount. Obama’s ratings were particularly high among Israeli Arabs (69 per cent), according to one poll. Pew Global Attitudes Project,
Little Enthusiasm for Many Muslim Leaders
, February 4, 2010.

    6
.
Holbrooke refused the title ‘envoy’ on the basis that it meant ‘you’re sent to do things’. George Packer, ‘The Last Mission’,
New Yorker
, September 28, 2009.

    7
.
Obama had said in June 2007: ‘To build a better, freer world, we must first behave in ways that reflect the decency and aspirations of the American people. This means ending the practices of shipping away prisoners in the dead of night to be tortured in far-off countries, of detaining thousands without charge or trial, of maintaining a network of secret prisons to jail people beyond the reach of the law.’ Barack Obama, ‘Renewing American Leadership’,
Foreign Affairs
, July–August 2007.

    8
.
He had signalled his more pragmatic approach, different both from the Clinton administration’s belief in the inevitable benefits of globalization and the more ideological approach of Bush, in the repeated Congressional hearings on Iraq over the previous fifteen months. David Miliband, ‘Stay with Obama on Muslims’,
International Herald Tribune
, November 6, 2010.

    9
.
Remarks by the President, June 4, 2009, The White House. ‘A New Beginning’, Cairo University.

  10
.
News conference by President Obama, Palais de la Musique et des Congrès, Strasbourg, France, April 4, 2009.

  11
.
Michael Scherer, ‘The five pillars of Obama’s foreign policy’,
Time
, July 13, 2009.

  12
.
Jason Burke, ‘We must never forget the lessons learned from D-Day, says Obama’,
Observer
, June 7, 2009.

  13
.
CNN, interview with Anderson Cooper, February 3, 2010. Cited in Bergen,
The Longest War
, Simon and Schuster, 2011, p. 303.

  14
.
Garsallaoui, who had accompanied those arrested to Pakistan, had left them soon after their arrival there and had subsequently remained in the FATA. His wife, who had posted a picture of her husband firing a rocket-propelled grenade on her website, was also detained. Consultation du dossier de Mr Hicham Beyayo, Testimony of Walid Othmani to French interrogators, January 30, 2009; both author collection. Author interviews, Christophe Marchand, lawyer for Hicham Beyayo, Alain Grignard, head of Belgian counter-terrorism police, Brussels, February 2009. Gilbert Dupont, ‘Les Six du réseau kamikaze’,
La Dernière Heure
, December 13, 2008. Belgium had seen other plots over previous years. The two men who had killed Ahmed Shah Massood forty-eight hours before the 9/11 attacks had come from Belgium, passing through London to collect the credentials which ensured their access to the Northern Alliance leader. There had been the female suicide bomber – one of the first of the 9/11 Wars – who with her Moroccan-born husband had driven to Iraq in their family car.

  15
.
French nationals Bassam Ayachi and Raphael Gendron were remanded in custody and charged with terrorism offences after Italian authorities established their ties to an extremist network operating in France and Belgium. Bruce Crumley, ‘Europe pieces together terrorism puzzle’,
Time
, May 12, 2009.

  16
.
Europol,
TE-SAT 2009 – EU Terrorism Situation and Trend Report
, April 2009. The British government’s published counter-terrorist policy argued that al-Qaeda as an organization had fragmented, leading to a greater role for self-starting groups.

  17
.
Cécilia Gabizon, ‘A Vénissieux, terre d’expansion de la burqa’,
Le Figaro
, July 1, 2009.

  18
.
Hicham Beyayo, the supposed suicide bomber, had grown up on the Place Alphonse Lemmens in Anderlecht with seven siblings and Moroccan parents who had arrived in Belgium in 1966. Beyayo and two of his brothers had a history of involvement in theft, handling stolen goods and assault.

  19
.
Ben Leapman, ‘4,000 in UK trained at terror camps’,
Sunday Telegraph
, April 19, 2008. Home Office Statistical Bulletin, quarterly update to December 2009, June 2010, p. 5.

  20
.
Alan Travis, ‘Two-thirds of UK terror suspects released without charge’,
Guardian
, May 13, 2009.

  21
.
One good indication of when the conventional threat was considered to be less worrying was a renewed emphasis on unconventional attacks involving radioactive ‘dirty’ bombs, makeshift chemical weapons or similar. Briefings of journalists by politicians and security officials about the terrorist threat to the UK in early 2009 frequently stressed the potential consequences of such an attack.

  22
.
Four British men in their early twenties, known as the Nairobi Four, were arrested in Kenya in January 2007, after allegedly fighting in the Somali civil war, and an unnamed twenty-one-year-old university student from Ealing, west London, was reported to have blown himself up at a checkpoint in Somalia in February 2009.

  23
.
Author interview, London, August 2009.

  24
.
Alan Travis, ‘Britain downgrades al-Qaida terror attack alert level’,
Guardian
, July 20, 2009.

  25
.
Europol,
TE-Sat 2010 – EU Terrorism Situation and Trend Report
, 2010, p. 12; Europol,
EU Terrorism Situation and Trend Report
, 2009, p. 17.

  26
.
Thomas Renard, ‘Europol Report Describes Afghanistan-Pakistan Connection to Trends in European Terrorism’,
Terrorism Monitor
, vol. 7, no. 12, May 8, 2009.

  27
.
Grignard, author interview, Brussels, March 2009.

  28
.
National Coordinator for Counterterrorism,
National Terrorist Threat Assessment No. 8,
April 25, 2007, p. 3.

  29
.
The Netherlands National Coordinator for Counterterrorism,
Sixth Progress Report on Counterterrorism
, The Hague, June 4, 2007. The Netherlands National Coordinator for Counterterrorism, ‘Threat level for the Netherlands once again to “substantial” ’, press release, March 6, 2008, The Netherlands National Coordinator for Counterterrorism ‘The level of the terrorist threat against the Netherlands has been lowered’, press release, December 15, 2009.