Bin Laden’s threat to American interests was magnified by Washington

is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Davis. Trained as a linguistic anthropologist, his first book, The Moral Resonance of Arab Media: Audiocassette Poetry and Culture in Yemen (Harvard University Press, 2007), examined how Yemenis have used traditional poetry and new media technologies to envision a productive relationship between tribalism and progressive Muslim reform.

Below is ILNA’s interview with this authentic figure on the anniversary of the September 11 attacks.

Q: In “The Audacious Ascetic: What the Bin Laden Tapes Reveal about Al-Qaeda ”, things begin with a conversation between you and Abdulla, leader of an al-Qaeda front called the World Islamic Organization. What was the context of your visit to Yemen and what were its aspects?

A: I began working in Yemen during the mid-1990s as a linguistic anthropologist.  My dissertation, and later my first book, focused on how Yemenis used poetry to solve social conflicts.  I was especially interested in tribalism and the ways new media technologies, especially the audiotape, were being used to help Yemenis think about the role that tribal identity could play in the modern world.  On one occasion, during a meeting with tribal sheikhs in southern Yemen, I came across a man who called himself Abdulla and who made it very clear that I was unwelcome in the region and that the “World Islamic Organization” would soon be taking Yemen and the Middle East back from invading forces.  Years later, I realized that he was a propagandist from a nearby militant training camp that has been shown to have been an important base for bin Laden’s supporters in Yemen at the time.

Q: How did you gain access to the so-called al-Qaeda audio library, which was discovered in the Afghani city of Kandahar? What leads you to work on these tapes?

A: The tapes were originally acquired by the Cable News Network in early 2002, a few months after al-Qaeda and the Taliban had been routed from the city by American Special Forces alongside Afghan troops and tribal leaders.  CNN informed U.S. intelligence officials of the existence of this material.  While they appear to have reviewed the tapes, they declined stewardship of the collection.  Inundated after the fall of the Taliban with printed documents, computer hard drives, video cassettes, and other materials of more immediate intelligence value, officials advised CNN to pass the collection on to an academic community.  A year later CNN arranged for the cassettes to be shipped to Williams College with the understanding that they would be made available for researchers.  In 2006, the tapes were moved to Yale University where they have been converted into digital format and can now be heard.

Thanks to an anthropologist colleague at Williams, I first got involved conducting research on the tapes when they arrived from CNN’s Islamabad office.  Since no inventory or description of the archive existed at the time, my main task over the next several years was to develop a report that could explain the significance of the collection for further studies of al- Qaeda and Bin Laden’s role in particular.

Q: What was the number of cassette tapes left from the Peshawar safe house? And as the only person who turned them into books, how do you categorize and analyze these documents (with ideological, political, security, military, cultural, social, or propaganda content)? Which category did Osama emphasize the most?

A: There were over one-thousand five-hundred audiotapes at the guest-house.  They feature over two hundred different speakers, 98% of them talking in Arabic.  Most of these individuals were known to be established scholars of Islamic law with an ample record of condemning Bin Laden’s style of reasoning.  Prominent among them are members of the exclusively Sunni “Saudi Awakening” movement during the 1980s and they can be heard drawing from a range of intellectual and legal discourses.  These recordings are valuable for what they show about who bin Laden was listening to in the years leading up to 9/11 and how he sought to bend mainstream perspectives toward violent ends.  Dozens of tapes also feature top al-Qaeda leaders speaking to a variety of audiences, often at training camps.  Also valuable is a vast range of amateur and extemporaneous recordings that were not designed for broad circulation: taxi cab conversations, chat over breakfast in make-shift kitchens, sounds of live battle as militants communicate on two-way radio transceivers, wedding ceremonies, celebrations before and after combat missions, poetry competitions, trivia games, lectures in training camp classrooms, interviews with leaders, telephone calls, studio-produced dramas of mock battles and their aftermath, and Islamic anthems sung late into the night.  Much of this material was quite familiar to me and brought back memories of conversations and songs that I had come across while working with close friends in Yemen, the Arab Gulf, and the United States.  I also heard ordinary views co-opted by heinous extremism.  To help make sense of such shifts, I listened to the tapes with dozens of native Arabic speakers in the Middle East and the United States, some of whom were ex-fighters themselves who had known Bin Laden intimately.  In time, I discovered not just how different Bin Laden’s world had been from those familiar to most of us.  I learned much about what drew these worlds together.

A conventional view of al-Qaeda maintains that the organization’s ultimate goals are to drive America out of the Muslim world, to destroy Israel, and to create a jihadist caliphate larger than the Ottoman Empire at its height.[1]  Many statements by top al- Qaeda leaders support just this formula.  Questions arise, however, about how well these long-term objectives translate into the real concerns of people who might be inclined to take these leaders seriously.  While militant ambitions to establish a caliphate are readily trotted out for non-Muslim audiences, speakers exercise far more restraint when lobbying for the notion among Muslim activists, as I discuss with respect Palestinian militant Abdulla Assam later in the book.[2]  For Assam, struggling toward a pan-Islamic caliphate should take a back seat to more immediate and everyday objectives, among them seeking justice in one’s own homeland.  Muslims must cultivate a far broader repertoire of strategies, tactics, and methods for ensuring that the good fight isn’t lost or perverted before it even begins.  In this respect, al-Qaeda theoreticians had to position themselves within in-house debates about founding principles and practices.  What makes a good Muslim?  What is the nature of sin? How can the righteous remain vigilant against injustice?  How much effort should one devote to seeking knowledge of other faiths and cultures?  Which research topics are worth pursuing?  What was the path of the pious forebears?  What are the qualities of a good leader?   How can a believer survive in the modern world while abiding by the Prophet Muhammad’s example to his community?  Such questions yield no easy answers.  Different points of view and public disputation constituted the very terrain on which speakers engaged with each other in attempts to find common cause.  By linking these debates to changing discourse about al-Qaeda's past, present, and future, my work has moved beyond the tendency to lump Arab Afghan radicals together under a single overarching narrative. 

Q: What does your research reveal about Osama and al-Qaeda leaders in the years leading up to 9/11?

A: To many people’s surprise, my research shows that, from the outset, bin Laden struggled to convince others that there a worldwide militant organization called “Al-Qaeda” much less to take credit for leading it.  In Arabic, “al-Qaeda” means “the base” or “the rule.”  Some experts said that Bin Laden and Palestinian militant `Abdullah `Azzam set up a coordinated computer database called “al-Qaeda ” to help process paperwork from Arab volunteers who arrived in Peshawar in the mid 1980s.  Others say that `Abdullah `Azzam invented the idea of a “flexible base” (qaʿida ṣulba) for global Islamic militancy and that bin Laden took cue.  The tapes show no support for these arguments.  Indeed, they reveal that there was active disagreement about what “al-Qaeda ” was, what it meant, who was best qualified to lead it, and who benefitted from the idea.

My book presents an argument that many have found shocking: the idea of a worldwide militant organization called al- Qaeda that was led by Osama was not created in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia or any other Muslim-majority country.  Instead, it was created and propagated most effectively by Western security officials, especially federal prosecutors in the United States.   This argument begins by recalling that 9/11 was not the first time the World Trade Center was attacked by Middle Eastern terrorists.  The first attack was in 1993 and was led by Egyptian militants. It was in attempts to find a larger network of terrorists involved in that bombing that the name Osama bin Laden and his possible influence began to be important to American law enforcement and intelligence officials.  In hindsight, the Federal Bureau of Investigation never found any evidence that bin Laden was involved in those attacks, an assessment that proves true through today.  In the mid-1990s, however, prosecutors built a robust story about the possibility of his command over a vast, global jihadi network and took pains to convince American judges, juries and journalists about its primary goal of attacking the United States.  The idea of Al-Qaeda as Bin Laden’s global militant organization, I suggest, was one of their own inception.

Beginning in the early to mid-1990s, a trickle of reports from the Middle East and Africa did, in fact, begin surfacing in the West about Bin Laden’s involvement in something called Al-Qaeda.  Inconsistencies arose, however, about exactly what it was or where it was located. One of the earliest claims made by someone alleging the role of Al-Qaeda in a terrorist attack involving Bin Laden was by controversial American investigative journalist Steve Emerson during the World Trade Center trial in the mid-1990s. According to Emerson, a better English translation for the title of an Arabic bomb manual found with one of Ramzi Yousef’s travel companions, defendant Ahmed Ajaj, was “The Base” and its publication proved to have emanated from Afghanistan in 1987 rather than Jordan five years earlier. Although his testimony was instrumental to prosecutors’ efforts to link the attacks to Bin Laden and al-Qaeda, the argument was too tenuous to sustain and ultimately proven groundless. U.S. Special Forces agent Billy Waugh reports first hearing the name al-Qaeda in 1992: “When I arrived in Khartoum, I was told by our chief of a station that Bin Laden was one of our targets. ‘Keep an eye on him,’ he told me. ‘We don't know what he's up to, but we know he's a wealthy financier and we think he's harboring some of these outfits called al-Qaeda. See what you can find out.’”[3] In 1993, Agence France-Presse journalist Randa Habib reported a “27-year-old militant” admitting that he had been “trained by al-Ka’ida, a secret organization in Afghanistan that is financed by a wealthy Saudi businessman who owns a construction firm in Jeddah, Ossama ibn [sic] Laden."[4] A U.S. diplomatic cable the following year spoke of Bin Laden’s work with Egyptian militant Ayman al-Zawahiri in Peshawar, and of their joint establishment of a “guest house” in the city called “the base.”[5] An Egyptian militant around the same time told FBI interrogators that an organization of this description was active in Sudan and that it provided lessons in hijacking and espionage at special training camps. Bin Laden was reported to be in charge, though the Defense Department said notes from the meeting were lost.[6]

These reports certainly square with what was known of Bin Laden’s activities and locations during this period. When combined, they provided key components of a master narrative about Al-Qaeda’s roots and Bin Laden’s role from the outset. As I show in my research, much was lost in translation.  Vast and competing agendas informed Arab involvement in the Islamic jihad in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and beyond. To be sure, Osama was a wealthy Saudi national valued for his family’s international connections and proximity to the Saudi crown. Beyond colorful news coverage at the home of his devotion to the Afghan cause, however, he was also a relatively obscure player in a conflict marked by contributions from many of the Islamic world’s leading statesmen, theologians, intellectuals, and tribal warlords. With a master's degree in civil engineering and his wealthy family connections, his credentials as an aspiring militant paled in comparison to those of the Islamic world’s most experienced military warriors. As a religious leader, he lacked even the rudiments of training and education that informed the careers of influential Muslim scholars at the time. His family’s tribal background, so important throughout the region, was similarly insignificant, even in Saudi Arabia. A closer review of trial documents submitted by prosecutors helps shed light on why Bin Laden’s command over any sort of “base” would have been shakier than either early intelligence reports or federal prosecutors claimed. As a legal process premised on producing new evidence that could “connect the dots”, American prosecutors’ legal arguments worked most successfully when presenting the complexities of jihadi conspiracy against the clear light of a single entity founded, directed, and indebted to a single man.

The story told by prosecutors focused on bin Laden’s activities in Peshawar in mid-August 1988.  According to the indictment U.S. v. Enaam Arnaout, Bin Laden hosted a series of meetings in order to discuss the formation of an organization called “al-Qaeda” with the aim of ”making God’s word victorious” after the Soviets left Afghanistan.[7] Bullet points from the meetings, provided to the court only in English translation, mention a discussion “regarding the establishment of a new military group” along with the words “general camp,” “special camp,” and “Qaeda.”[8] Days later, a list of “advisory council” members was drawn up beginning with “Sheikh Usama” and including others present at the meeting: Saudi Red Crescent chief Wael Julaidan, Abu Ubaidah Al-Banshiri (who became al Qaeda’s military commander), “Abu Hajir al-Iraqi, who traveled in Bosnia in 1998 with defendant Arnaout’s assistance, and others.[9] Military training was discussed, and recruits were to be enlisted in basic and advanced sessions along the following lines: “Limited duration: they will go to Sada camp [in Pakistan], then get trained and distributed on Afghan fronts under [the] supervision of the military council; Open [ended] duration: they enter a testing camp and the best brothers of them are chosen, in preparation to enter Al Qaeda Al Askariya [‘the Military base’].” “Within six months of Al-Qaeda,” one comment noted, “314 brothers will be trained and ready.”

The origin story of al-Qaeda under Bin Laden was part of federal prosecutors’ argument: an evidentiary proffer that could lead to the defendant’s formal indictment. In hindsight, the proffer was part of a larger effort to incriminate the accused by virtue of his or her association with a racialized form of religious dissidence made criminal through charges of material support for a Foreign Terrorist Organization. My book, the Audacious Ascetic: What the Bin Laden Tapes Reveal about al-Qaeda, shows how translators hired by U.S. federal prosecutors, Department of Defense personnel, and security analysts from the mid-1990s onward strategically rendered innocuous Arabic references to “the military base” or “camp” – Qaeda, in Arabic – into the transliterated English term “Qaeda” even as they translated accompanying Arabic words. Their goal, I argue, was to persuade non-Arabic speaking audiences of the relevance of Bin Laden’s notorious terrorist organization across a range of very different contexts. With respect to chief U.S. Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s translated 1988 memo about a “general camp,” “special camp,” and “Qaeda,” for instance, memories from other Arab-Afghan militants who participated in the meetings relate not only that Bin Laden’s flagship organization was never discussed but that a focus on the meetings was establishing a training camp called Al-Faruq in Khost, Afghanistan.[10] According to Bin Laden’s bodyguard Nasir al-Bahri, the “base” (qaeda) discussed at the time was Al-Faruq, a more advanced “military base for jihad.” Registration there required initial training in Pakistan, at the Sada Camp, and was to be followed by a more specialized program at the Al-Faruq Military College, located on the grounds of the Al-Faruq base.[11] Members of the “advisory council” referred to by Fitzgerald and detailed by Jamal al-Fadl in the USA v. Bin Laden, et. al. several years earlier were men known to have founded and developed the Al-Faruq base, including its first emir, Abu Ayyoub al-Kurdi. Indeed, contrary to claims by Fitzgerald’s office and al-Fadl that Bin Laden was the chief of the advisory council and, hence, of “al-Qaeda,” Bin Laden was explicitly marginalized in Al-Faruq’s founding charter. Made publicly available later by West Point’s Combatting Terrorism Center, the nineteen-page charter, an “al-Qaeda contract” according to Fitzgerald during trial proceedings, provides the following qualification in a section outlining the amir’s security apparatus: “Neither the commander of the guards nor his associates can be from any of the Gulf States or from Yemen.”[12] With the addition of this single clause, peculiar for a document purporting to be a general charter for all Arab and Muslim militants, Bin Laden’s core Saudi and Yemeni supporters, those most likely to pledge their lives in his defense, were ensured no part in the base’s praetorian guard.

Given the influence of prosecutors’ claims, indictments that led to arrests, and the eagerness of journalists, statesmen, and audiences across the world for a trail of accountability that could help explain events like 9/11, the possibility of Bin Laden’s early marginalization may seem ludicrous. Scholars of al-Qaeda as well as early participants in the Afghan conflict have had ample reasons to perceive things differently, however. In the late 1980s, Arab veterans from across North Africa and the Middle East viewed Saudi, Yemeni, and Persian Gulf State militants as insufficiently committed to the kind of transnational, pan-Islamic radicalism required of camp leaders. Their governments regularly granted them the right to return home, whileex-veterans from less stable countries including Egypt, Palestine, Algeria, and Iraq had no such luxury and were thus understood to be more ambitious revolutionaries. Saudi and Persian Gulf money, moreover, welcomed though it was, always came with a caveat: don’t let your Islamic revolution lead to calls for regime-change at home. The clause in al-Qaeda’s charter banning Saudis, Gulf State nationals and Yemenis from the camp’s elite security detail served as a strategic firewall against the potentially moderating influence of financial donors from those areas. According to the CIA, Al-Faruq’s founders appear not to have ultimately drawn upon Bin Laden’s financial reserves at all. Indeed, since the late 1980s or early 1990s, the only camp benefitting from Bin Laden’s financial support was a “Kunar camp” for Arab-Afghans located north of Jalalabad.[13]

Much of the power of prosecutors’ narrative worked, of course, by selecting Islamic fundamentalism as the paradigmatic case for religious radicalism in its most anti-American form. In USA v. Bin Laden, et. al., prosecutors and defense attorneys talked of Bin Laden’s work in turning Islam, one of the world’s great faiths, into a “hierarchy of evil” whose followers, bound by unshakable oaths, committed them to forms of violence wholly alien to the civilized world.[14]  Bin Laden’s media image, magnified globally in the wake of the twin attacks on the United States’ embassies in East Africa in August 1998, helped underscore reports of his cultish sway. Greenwashing’s deeper politics would stem from highlighting connections between religious extremism – defensible in and of itself as an expression of personal belief protected by the First Amendment – and racialized financial investments that threatened states’ abilities to regulate free trade and promote free trade zones.  According to prosecutors, the problem with the defendants’ ideology was not religious interpretation alone but rather its conjunction with “their nationality.”  Whichever Arab country they were from, their decision to “hate and kill people” sprung from a politically compromised form of religion, one inspired by collective and regionalized power struggles rather than by a strict personal commitment to transcendent religious ideals. Nowhere were the perils of religious nationality more serious, moreover, than when paired with “greed,” an unholy trinity repeatedly highlighted by prosecutors throughout the trial.[15]   As the Clinton administration sought to clamp down on money-laundering and terrorist financing worldwide, the racializing of financial investments by religious organizations could grant prosecutors leverage in expanding state powers to regulate free trade and promote free trade zones.

For federal prosecutors, key members of US intelligence, journalists and interested observers throughout the 1980s and 1990s, nothing was more clear about Bin Laden than his steady access to vast financial reserves. Described by the American Central Intelligence Agency in 1995 as the “Ford Foundation of Sunni Islamic terrorism,” Bin Laden’s power seemed to transcend the surveillance and security mechanisms of the world’s wealthiest states.[16] Greenwashing conceals a different story. When moving from Afghanistan to Sudan in 1991, Bin Laden’s supporters knew of his financial woes from their first months in the country. Jamal Al-Fadl, Fitzgerald’s star witness, informed Bin Laden shortly after their arrival that new Sudanese investments made little business sense and were rapidly depleting his reserves.[17] In 1994, after being stripped of his Saudi citizenship for repeated attempts to stoke a revolution in southern Yemen, his family disinherited him to the tune of an estimated $20 million-plus an annual $1 million payment as a board member of the Bin Laden Group. Upon moving back to Afghanistan in early 1996, Bin Laden discovered the remainder of his assets, estimated to be $200-300 million, frozen by Saudi banks.[18] Back in Sudan, meanwhile, Colonel Omar Bashir sent Bin Laden with a debtor’s lament: none of the $165 million he put into building the country’s roads, infrastructure, and businesses would be returned to him. In 1998, according to reports from his closest associates, Bin Laden’s reserves shortly before the twin attacks on the United States’ embassies in East Africa had dropped to $55,000.[19]

The story of the Afghan Taliban’s relationship to Bin Laden after 1996 and his rise to notoriety as America’s “Enemy Number One” lies elsewhere. Our goal is to situate the narrative about Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda in a legislative state that held religious activism to be a particularly dangerous form of counter-liberal dissent. Whatever discrepancies arose in courtrooms between competing narratives about defendants’ involvement in criminal activity or terrorism, in intelligence circles about how seriously to take claims by religious leaders, in State Department and non-governmental organization where experts weighed in about rational actors or ideology, and in newsrooms about how to represent popular outrage at the US’s failed policies in the Middle East, the specter loomed of an actor inspired by what leading terror expert Bruce Hoffman called a new brand of “holy terror.” The message played well on prime-time American television. Anchored in representations of angry, fanatic Muslims dating back to the Iranian revolution of 1979, the tenets of a new “religious terrorism” were said to be utterly shorn of political rationality.[20] In league with Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington’s influential thesis, published in 1996 under the title The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Islamic terrorism was cultural.[21] For global television audiences adapting to America’s twenty-four-hour news coverage, the plausibility of Bin Laden’s threat to American interests was developed and magnified through a growing stream of documents that echoed the courtroom dramas involving Muslims charged with terrorism. Off-screen and omitted from a translation was Bin Laden’s extraordinary fall from grace at the time, at least in the eyes of Muslim heads-of-state and their extensive patronage networks.  By the summer of 1996, Bin Laden had survived at least six assassination attempts orchestrated by Arab powers, at least half of them sponsored by the Saudis.[22]  In turning to Western news networks at this time, Bin Laden sought to repair and restore his fortunes, more a refugee – stateless, bereft of financial reserves, on the margins of survival – than a “super-empowered individual.”[23] In repeated interviews starting in 1996, Bin Laden relished the chance to affirm Western journalists’ allegations that, according to intelligence officials, he had taken part in terrorist attacks on New York’s World Trade Center in 1993, the Saudi National Guard’s headquarters in 1995, and the Khobar Towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia in 1996, – allegations that have, in hindsight, proved groundless.  

More importantly, he passed himself off as a religious authority who could take on America and the West. In the wake of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, Bin Laden had tried to stylize himself as a base-camp “amir.”  Copies of the Al-Faruq Base charter, edited to foreground Bin Laden’s own leadership, surfaced in an American military archive in the mid-2000s and suggested the extent to which he tried to prevail over his colleagues’ attempts to prioritize militants far more experienced than he.[24] Western journalists reporting of al-Qaeda in the early 1990s reflected the views of a small circle who knew of Bin Laden’s rebranding efforts. Federal prosecutors’ narrative about the religious foundations of his dark ascendency, intoned to judges and jury members having little familiarity with the Islamic world, redounded to Bin Laden’s benefit. Their argument about the foundation of al-Qaeda under his leadership would become just the story he had struggled to tell to those who knew him better. [25]

Interview by: Farshad Golzari

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