The Arab Office

Chief 9/11 Architect Critical of Bin Laden

Josh Meyer in the LATimes: To hear Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed tell it, Osama bin Laden was a meddling boss whose indiscretion and poor judgment threatened to derail the terrorist attacks.

He also saddled Mohammed with at least four would-be hijackers who the ringleader thought were ill-equipped for the job. And he carelessly dropped hints about the imminent attacks, violating Mohammed's cardinal rule against discussing the suicide hijacking plot. ...

Yet Mohammed describes a terrorist outfit fraught with the same conflicts and petty animosities that plague many American corporations. Mohammed describes himself in particular as having to fend off a chairman of the board who insists on micromanaging despite not knowing what he was doing. ...

Mohammed also resented a purported 20th hijacker, Mohammed al-Qahtani, imposed on him by Bin Laden, describing him as "too much of an unsophisticated Bedouin to function in a modern society." Al-Qahtani was turned away by a suspicious customs agent in Orlando, Fla., and never joined the mission. ...

Meanwhile, to Mohammed's chagrin, Bin Laden was repeatedly dropping hints about what was soon to come.

In one case, Mohammed said, Bin Laden told visitors to his Afghanistan headquarters to expect a major near-term attack against U.S. interests. In another, he said, the boss asked trainees at the Al Farooq camp near Kandahar "to pray for the success of a major operation involving 20 martyrs."

Both Mohammed and Atef "were concerned about this lack of discretion and urged Bin Laden not to make additional comments about the plot," Mohammed told his interrogators.

The interrogation summary also said he had resisted taking a sworn oath of allegiance, or bayat, to Bin Laden for as long as possible, "to ensure that he remained free to plan operations however he chose."

After Sept. 11, Mohammed finally relented, he said. Even then, he did so grudgingly, after he was told "that the refusal of such a senior and accomplished Al Qaeda leader to swear bayat set a bad example for the group's rank and file."

One of the failures of the U.S.'s policies in the Middle East is that there aren't more offices for Arabs like bin Laden and Mohammed to play out their power struggles. We've propped up repressive and incompetent dictators like the Saudi royal family and Hosni Mubarak (not to mention Saddam Hussein), accepting their hard-line promises of 'stability' at the expense of the always-challenging journey of economic development, in the process selling out the people of the region.

But articles like this do make me think we, at least, are beginning to recover from 9/11.

The shock of that day was so great that we understandably gave bin Laden and al-qaeda entirely too much credit for years afterwards. It's human nature to think that it required an evil mastermind, on the level of Satan, to take down the Twin Towers in one surgical strike. That, or advanced technology, which we haven't relinquished our monopoly on.

So it had to be the devil approach. But in doing so we elevated this desert rat, this rich man who stumbled into his anti-Americanism not from deduction or analysis but outof a fundamental failure to understand reality--like a newborn chick that latches onto a nearby farmyard dog as its mother, bin Laden in the depths of Arab shame and humiliation lashed out at the biggest thing he could see.

After 9/11 we turned him into a formidable adversary, when truth be told the WTC disaster had as much to do with our lack of experience in the large-scale evacuation of office buildings, and an engineering design that understandbly didn't calculate to withstand the precise impact of a jet and its full load of fuel.

Bin laden didn't plan to kill thousands that day, or bring down 100-story office buildings. He lucked into it; which doesn't make him any less bad, but it does make him less of a mastermind.

The real enemy we're battling isn't anything as neat and compact as a single bad man, or even a band of them. It's something much worse, a profound despair and emptiness that some feel they can numb only by taking on the biggest thing around.

In past centuries these men would've gone west; or sailed over the horizon to plunder and loot or find a wife and settle down. Now, boxed in by repressive regimes, years of inward-forced anger and shame explodes in terrorism.

Too bad we can't just send Osama and his ilk to Slough.

Image of Ricky Gervais in his role as David Brent from website for The Office.

Image of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in numberous places on the Web.