Anthony Summers - The Eleventh Day

82 “The generals”:Fury, xxiii–.

83 “never took”: NYT , 10/19/04. During his 2004 campaign against Bush for the presidency, Senator John Kerry claimed the President “took his eye off the ball, off of Osama bin Laden” (second Bush-Kerry debate, 4/10/08, cbsnews.com);

84 “get” bin Laden:Woodward, Bush at War , 254, 224, 311, The Times (London), 10/14/01;

85 “going to lose”:Suskind, One Percent , 58–;

86 “asking”:Fury, 148;

87 “obsessed”:Suskind, One Percent , 96, Woodward, Bush at War , 338;

88 “Terror’s bigger”:Bush press conference, http://archives.cnn.com, 3/13/02.

89 taken Rumsfeld:Woodward, Plan of Attack , 1–;

90 “Goddamn!”:ibid., 8 & see Franks, 315;

91 general pestered:Woodward, Plan of Attack , 31, 36–, 42– & see Michael Gordon & Bernard Trainor, Cobra II , NY: Pantheon, 2006, 25–.

92 “a natural”: al-Wafd (Egypt), 12/26/01, citing Pakistan Observer , www.opednews.com, Fox News, 12/26/01;

93 escape/wound: Newsweek , 10/31/08, Fury, 286, New Republic , 10/22/07, NYT , 9/23/02, Bergen, OBL I Know , 334–, U.S. Senate, Tora Bora Revisited , 2;

94 2011 reports/tribes: Guardian (U.K.), 4/26/11, Michael Scheuer, Osama bin Laden , NY: Oxford University Press, 2011, 131.

95 Good evidence/02/03/04:Not included here as an indication of bin Laden’s survival is a videotaped statement shown by Al Jazeera on December 26, 2001. Though that transmission postdated the Tora Bora battle, all one knows for sure—because of a reference in the statement to the bombing “some days ago” of a mosque at Khost—is that it was recorded shortly after November 16. Thus not necessarily after the Tora Bora conflict ended—on December 17 (ed. Lawrence, 151–, U.S. Senate, Tora Bora Revisited , 14).

96 “We agreed”:Though not all the hijacked flights took off on time on 9/11, they had been scheduled to take off within the same twenty-five-minute period. The authors have in these paragraphs cited letters and tapes attributed to bin Laden, edited by Professor Bruce Lawrence, humanities professor of religion at Duke University, translated by James Howarth, and published in book form.

“Although the question of authenticity inevitably arises whenever a message is released in bin Laden’s name,” Howarth wrote, the statements in the book had all “been accepted as genuine by a majority of the experts and officials who have examined them.” Lawrence and others have cast doubt on the authenticity of other taped statements attributed to bin Laden, allowing for the possibility of forgery for propaganda purposes.

It is not a ridiculous notion, for the CIA is on record as having fabricated film footage. In the late 1950s it arranged for the making of a film purportedly showing President Sukarno of Indonesia in bed with a woman in the Soviet Union. As late as 2003, before the invasion of Iraq, there was discussion about making a video showing Saddam Hussein having sex with a teenage boy. According to a

Washington Post

report, the CIA actually did make a video “purporting to show Osama bin Laden and his cronies sitting around a campfire swigging bottles of liquor and savoring their conquests with boys.”

Doubts have been expressed about a videotape released in December 2001, supposedly following its seizure by U.S. troops in Afghanistan. It purports to show bin Laden in conversation the previous month with a visiting sheikh, openly acknowledging his foreknowledge of the 9/11 attack. While there may be other good reasons to doubt the

tape’s authenticity, the authors suggest that a couple of points made in support of the forgery theory have no validity.

Skeptics noted that the bin Laden figure wears a ring in the video—supposedly out of character for him, perhaps even contrary to religious law. As noted in another chapter, his wife Najwa had given him a ring as a token of her affection just before leaving Afghanistan on the eve of 9/11. He is, moreover, shown wearing a ring in another video accepted as authentic. Bin Laden’s son Omar, meanwhile, has scotched the argument that a shot of his father writing with his right hand is a giveaway—as the real Osama was supposedly left-handed. “My father,” Omar wrote in 2009, “is right-handed.”

That is not to say that the “confession” videotape is necessarily authentic. Professor Lawrence did not use the transcript of it in his published collection on bin Laden, and has reportedly expressed the view that the tape is indeed a fake. No quotations from it have been used in this book (scheduled: CR, 10; ed. Lawrence, 158–244 & see BBC News, 4/15/04, “The Osama bin Laden Tapes,” Special Report, undated,

www.guardian.co.uk

; Sukarno: Interim Report, “Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders,” U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Govt. Ops with Respect to Intelligence Activities, 94th Cong., 1st Sess., Washington, D.C.: U.S. Govt. Printing Office, 11/20/55, 74n4, Anthony Summers,

Goddess

, NY: Macmillan, 1985, 182; Hussein sex/“purporting”:

WP

, 5/25/10; video 12/01: transcript by Defense Dept. cited

www.defenselink.mil

,

NYT

, 12/14/01; not ring: e.g., Griffin,

The New Pearl Harbor Revisited

, 209, “Farce: Control of the Village Through Terror,” 2/6/07,

www.opednews.com

; had ring: bin Ladens & Sasson, 282 & see “Confession Video,”

www.911myths.com

; left-handed: David Ray Griffin,

Osama bin Laden

, Gloucestershire, U.K.: Arris, 2009, 30, Bergen,

OBL I Know

, 335; “right-handed”: bin Ladens & Sasson, 159–; reportedly expressed: Griffin,

OBL

, 36).

97 “I knew”:Fury, 286;

98 “This was where”: National Geographic , 12/04.

Part IV: PLOTTERS

CHAPTER 17

1

phenomenon:

Staff Statement 13, CO, Lawrence Wright,

The Looming Tower

, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006, 176–, CR, 278;

2

target:

James F. Pastor,

Security Law & Methods

, NY: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2006, 522, 539, Barrett & Collins, 107.

3

OBL visit to U.S.:

bin Ladens & Sasson, 25–, 302, & see (1981 visit)

New Yorker

, 12/14/08. Though the best, firsthand source, Najwa is not the first to refer to an early bin Laden visit to America. Kahled Batarfi, a boyhood friend, has spoken of the episode, offering details that to some extent conform with Najwa’s account. Bin Laden’s sometime supervisor at the family construction firm, Walid al-Khatib, said bin Laden made “trips” to America. Allowing for confusion over the date, Khatib’s and Najwa’s recollections may be corroborated by the account of wealthy Saudi businessman Yassin Kadi. Kadi said he met bin Laden in Chicago in 1981, when the future terrorist leader was recruiting engineers for the family business. Khaled Bahaziq, a boyhood friend of bin Laden who knew Azzam, has recalled that Azzam was “lecturing in America in the 1970s.” He certainly visited repeatedly in the 1980s (Batarfi: Bergen,

OBL I Know

, 22, Coll,

Bin Ladens

209–; Khatib: Coll,

Bin Ladens