Oct
30
In contrast to bin Laden’s first recruits, they excelled in their training. By mid-August, Atta and Shehhi were able to make solo African Mango flights and earned their private pilot license tests. In mid-December, they received their commercial licenses and began practicing flying large jets on flight simulators. Jarrah also obtained a single-engine private …
Oct
30
In an unguarded moment, bin Laden once conceded that the September 11 attacks had exceeded his wildest expectations. His goal had been to “terrorize” Americans, to kill hundreds, and to force them to rethink their military presence in the Islamic world. He had not expected so many people to die, or the World Trade …
Oct
30
All causus belli are often overlooked in favor of a reductionist approach that views these organizations simply as “jihadi murderers,” crazy Arabs; or Islam itself is presented as “the enemy.” As a result, these analysts tend to become propagandists for the War on Terror, trafficking in orientalist pseudo-explanations, and effec- tively ignoring the key …
Oct
30
As we have seen, al-Qaeda emerged as a result of the convergence of two developments—entropy of the local jihadist movement in the mid-1990s (not in the late 1980s, as many terrorism experts and security pundits claim) and the reverberations of the Afghan jihad. Transnational jihad spearheaded by al-Qaeda was a desperate effort to keep …