Middle Eastern Terrorism. Mark Ensalaco
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lull after bin Laden's “Declaration of War Against the Americans who Occupy the Land of the Two Holy Mosques” in 1996. But then, in February 1998, bin Laden and others issued a ruling of Islamic law that purported to impose a religious obligation on all Muslims to kill Americans. Al Qaeda destroyed two U.S. embassies in East Africa months later. Clinton retaliated with cruise missile strikes on Al Qaeda facilities in Afghanistan and gave instructions to the CIA to capture or kill bin Laden. America was now engaged in a covert, low-intensity war against militant Islam. Al Qaeda attempted unsuccessfully to conduct mass casualty attacks against Americans on the eve of the new millennium of the Christian era. At the end of 2000, Al Qaeda terrorists attacked and severely damaged the USS Cole. There could be no doubt that militant Muslims had taken it upon themselves as a religious obligation to attack Americans and “kill them on the land, on the sea, and in the air.”
Americans went to the polls to elect a new president twenty-five days after the Cole attack. Al Qaeda had killed Americans on land and sea. By the time George W. Bush took the oath of office, the Al Qaeda terrorists who would kill Americans in the air on 9/11 had already entered the United States. The CIA knew this but never alerted the FBI. Vague warnings about a catastrophic Al Qaeda attack surged in the first months of the Bush administration. By the summer of 2001, counterterrorism officials were warning the national security advisor and the president about an imminent, mass casualty attack that would come without warning. The president was slow to appreciate the urgency of the situation and never took charge of the nation's security crisis. In the first week of August, the CIA briefed the president on bin Laden's determination to strike in the United States. Al Qaeda struck thirty-seven days later. On the night of 11 September, the president addressed the nation: “Today our nation saw evil.”
The face of terrorism changed over the three decades between the spectacle of the PFLP's Skyjack Sunday operation in Black September 1970 and the atrocity of Al Qaeda's attack on 11 September 2001. Militant Islam replaced secular Palestinian nationalists as the ideology of terror. Jihad against apostates and infidels replaced the liberation of Palestine as the cause. Militant Islam was sworn to the destruction of the State of Israel, but now destruction of apostate Arab regimes and expulsion of Americans from Muslim lands became new strategic objectives of terror. Militant Islam proclaimed the murder of Americans, who had rarely been targeted by Palestinian terrorists, to be a religious duty. Terror became far more lethal with the advent of mass casualty suicide attacks. The face of terrorism has changed, but not its nature.
Acts of terror are war crimes. Terrorism is a crime against humanity. Terrorism is a form of irregular warfare that violates the laws and customs of war, as terrorists deliberately target noncombatants for the purpose of instilling fear and ultimately compelling governments to capitulate to their demands. Whatever the validity of the terrorists' political, social, or religious grievances, acts of terror negate the legitimacy of the cause. One of the air pirates who participated in Skyjack Sunday attempted to justify hostage-taking by saying “no one heard our screams or our suffering.” The man behind the Black September terror operations attempted to distinguish “revolutionary violence, which is a political act” from “terrorism, which is not.” But whether the ideological motivation for terror was secular Palestinian nationalism or militant Islam, terrorists justified murder. “The idea,” said a leader of a secular Palestinian terror organization was “to take passengers hostage, kill them in the terminals, blow them out of the skies.” This differs not at all from the Muslim imam's exhortation to all Muslims to kill Americans “on the land, on the sea, and in the air.”
The crimes narrated in this book involve, fundamentally, acts that are “part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population”: murder and willful killing, the taking of hostages, torture, and destruction not justified by military necessity.1 It is immaterial to me that terrorists reject these standards of lawful warfare; the standards have broad international acceptance in principle, albeit not always in practice, and I apply them to the conduct of my own government in the War on Terror.
The attacks on 9/11 clearly constituted a war crime. Al Qaeda intentionally launched an attack that was certain to cause loss of life or injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects—to paraphrase the language of the statute that established the International Criminal Court. But there is a deeper stratum to this criminality. Bin Laden's 1998 fatwa, discussed in Chapter 9, constituted direct and public incitement to commit acts intended to destroy a national group, to paraphrase the Genocide Convention.2 Bin Laden's fatwa was incitement to genocide: “In compliance with God's order, the ruling to kill the Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it.”
In the three decades from the first PFLP hijacking to the Al Qaeda attack on 11 September, terrorists have sacrificed innocent human lives in the name of abstractions. Then it was a war for the liberation of Palestine, now it is jihad against apostates and infidels. Terrorism in the Middle East, from Black September to 11 September, began as a U.S. president struggled to avert a conventional war between Israel and the Arab states committed to Israel's destruction; it ended with an atrocity, unimaginable thirty years earlier, that led another president to declare a global war on terrorism.
Chapter 1
No One Heard Our Screams or
Our Suffering
In the spring of 1967, Lyndon Johnson was agonizing over the escalating war in South East Asia. It had been nearly two years since he announced the fateful decision to commit U.S. combat forces in South Vietnam in order to defeat the Viet Cong guerrillas fighting to liberate South Vietnam and unify it with the Communist North. Johnson, who had assumed office after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, and went on to a landslide victory in the 1964 presidential election, saw his presidency destroyed by an intractable guerrilla war in the jungles of Vietnam. But by the spring of 1967 he was becoming concerned about a guerrilla war in the deserts of the Middle East and the possibility of a conventional war between Israel and the Arab states encircling it. Palestinian guerrillas were regularly conducting guerrilla raids against Israel from Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. In May, the Egyptian president mobilized Egyptian forces, expelled the United Nations peacekeeping force deployed in the Sinai Peninsula, and closed the Gulf of Aqaba to Israeli shipping. “The danger implicit in every border incident in the Middle East,” Johnson wrote after leaving office, “was not merely war between Israelis and Arabs but an ultimate confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States.” Johnson urged restraint on Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, but the president understood that the Egyptian provocations constituted a cause for war: “I used all the energy and experience I could muster to prevent war. But I was not too hopeful.”1 Under the exigent circumstances, to ask for Israel's forbearance was to ask for too much. On the morning of 5 June, Israel launched a massive preemptive strike against the Egyptian air force, destroying virtually all its Soviet-made combat aircraft on the ground. Over the next six days Israeli troops engaged Arab armies on three fronts. By the time the Israelis complied with UN Security Council Resolution 242 demanding an end to the fighting on 10 June, Israeli forces had occupied Egyptian territory in the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza strip, Syrian territory in the Golan Heights, and Jordanian territory on the West Bank and Jerusalem, giving Israel sovereignty over the site of its ancient Temple and one of Islam's holiest places, the Al-Aksa Mosque.2 The Israeli victory in the Six Day War demoralized the Arab states, but it radicalized the Palestinian national movement and marked the onset of an era of terrorism directed against Israel, moderate Arab states and, inevitably, Europe and the Unites States. By the time Johnson left office in January 1969, Palestinian terrorists had launched a full-scale assault on civilian aviation intended to compel the world to consider the plight of the Palestinian people.
Origins
Palestinians refer to the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 as al-nakba, the catastrophe. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were displaced as result of the creation of the Jewish state, the ensuing war between the Arabs and Israelis, and an Israeli policy of expulsion.3 As Jews—many of them Holocaust survivors—toiled to build a viable democratic