Are We Serious?

...The FBI fi rst recruited Salem to serve as a mole prior to the World Trade Center bombing...

...This miscarriage of justice, McCarthy explains, was further compounded by an incompetent investigation...

...McCarthy exposes a fundamental fl aw in the government’s counterterrorism strategy prior to September 11...

...He is the author, most recently, of Iran’s Proxy War Against America (Claremont Institute...

...For example, in one of his initially overlooked notebooks, Nosair expressed his desire to destroy America’s “high world buildings which they are proud of and their statues which they endear and the buildings in which gather their heads [their leaders...

...And he received the support of the two leading state sponsors of terrorism: Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and the mullahs’ Iran...

...In the early 1990s Turabi forged a broad terrorist coalition that included Osama bin Laden’s core group of followers, all of al Qaeda’s affi liates, and a number of other organizations...

...By way of contrast, consider that the former National Security Council offi cial Richard Clarke has stated that “perhaps over 10,000 terrorists” were trained “at the camps in Afghanistan” alone...

...for radical Islam...

...Nor did Rahman’s jihadists stop there...

...Much of the burden of dealing with an imminent national security threat was, therefore, placed on the criminal justice system...

...In landmark convictions, Rahman and his cohort were found guilty of participating in a broad conspiracy to attack Americans, including the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and a follow-on plot to destroy landmarks in the New York area just months later...

...visas...

...But authorities failed to analyze much of it...

...Seven people were killed, including an unborn child, but the damage could have been much worse: The terrorists responsible, some of whom had consulted Nosair in prison and attended the fi rearm drills in Long Island, wanted to kill thousands...

...From McCarthy’s perspective, the missteps began in 1989 when the FBI prematurely abandoned its investigation into a group of jihadists conducting fi rearm drills in Calverton, Long Island...

...In the latter case, the FBI would have known about a plot that it failed to stop—a surefi re recipe for public scorn...

...Turabi envisioned bringing all of these parties together in one grand anti-American terrorist coalition...

...McCarthy argues that, more than a decade after the Blind Sheikh was convicted of inspiring terrorism on American soil, America remains largely blind...

...Sudan’s sponsorship went far beyond Rahman’s goons...

...Rahman’s followers thought the Egyptian Salem was a committed jihadist who could provide them with invaluable explosives expertise...

...In the process, McCarthy has given us one of the most important books on jihadist terrorism...

...At the time, the law was so illequipped to handle such a case that McCarthy and his team had to charge the sheikh with violating a Civil Warera statute prohibiting seditious conspiracy...

...The terror network centered on Rahman should have been years earlier—or, better yet, never allowed to develop on American soil in the fi rst place...

...Yet, despite his dark past, Rahman was repeatedly granted U.S...

...What’s worse is that Sheikh Rahman was allowed to freely operate and inspire these terrorist acts from American soil in the early 1990s...

...The thinking is that the terrorists like to call themselves “jihadists,” thereby appropriating an Islamic term which can have far more benevolent meanings, such as the struggle for spiritual betterment or simply to do good...

...On February 26, 1993, more than two years after Kahane’s murder, a powerful truck bomb was detonated underneath the World Trade Center...

...For Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, the answer begins with a series of fateful events in the early 1990s...

...Nosair was no lone wolf, as McCarthy makes clear, but one of Sheikh Rahman’s gaggle of followers...

...And together they had more grandiose designs...

...But as McCarthy reveals, even this success has a troublesome back story...

...Even the September 11 attacks did not fully awaken our nation, or its leaders, from their slumber...

...McCarthy’s story is centered on the trial of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman (“The Blind Sheikh”) and 11 of his followers...

...McCarthy led the prosecution of this dirty dozen in 1995...

...It is beyond my scope here to summarize all of the evidence that supports this thesis, but suffi ce it to say that McCarthy is exactly right when he asserts, It is not diffi cult to fi nd some current or former intelligence offi cial ready and willing to opine that Sunnis [such as Rahman and bin Laden] would never cooperate with secularists or Shiites—overlooking abundant evidence of the Ba’athist Saddam Hussein coddling Sunni jihadists and a yearslong history of collaboration between al Qaeda and Shiite Hezbollah...

...It is no exaggeration to say that the convictions stand out as a singular achievement in counterterrorism history...

...Instead, Salem led them down a path of misdirection: The plotters mixed the chemicals for a bomb in a Queens warehouse under Salem’s (and the FBI’s) watchful eye...

...All of these parties know how their words will be interpreted by the Muslim masses, and no fi at from the Washington bureaucracy will undo this widely accepted meaning...

...While our enemies were waging a war, we were prosecuting them as mere criminals...

...Clearly, America was not on a war footing...

...McCarthy, however, does not rest on his laurels...

...The bureau, therefore, decided to end Salem’s employment several months before the World Trade Center bomb was detonated...

...It is true that, in some Islamic traditions, “jihad” has been endowed with such inoffensive meanings...

...For them, we are the “other,” infi dels who deserve to be slaughtered as victims of a religious jihad, and there are many who are willing to support their war on us...

...It is ironic, then, that while the sheikh could not safely preach in Cairo, he could preach in mosques in Brooklyn and Jersey City...

...Instead, Nosair was branded a “lone gunman” and the 40-plus boxes of evidence seized with Nosair were ignored, thereby allowing his fellow conspirators to initially escape scrutiny...

...An implacable hate drives our enemies to never-ending violence...

...One of those jihadists, El Sayyid Nosair, went on to murder an extremist Jewish leader named Rabbi Meir Kahane on November 5, 1990...

...The strategic failure McCarthy exposes is ongoing, and extends even to something as basic as naming the enemy...

...The failure to properly vet Nosair’s documents, or to continue using Salem’s services in the months leading up to the World Trade Center bombing, is bad enough...

...And in the aftermath of the events of 1993, the criminal justice system should not have been our frontline defense...

...Had McCarthy stopped at telling the story of the many tactical failures that allowed Rahman’s terrorists to menace America in the early 1990s, Willful Blindness would have been an invaluable addition to the literature of 9/11...

...But he takes his argument a step further, showing how these tactical failures were merely symptoms of a larger strategic failure to comprehend the nature of our terrorist enemies...

...But as McCarthy demonstrates in meticulous fashion, the courts are a poor substitute for the real battlefi eld, so much so that our terrorist enemies were consistently able to outfl ank us...

...Just as Willful Blindness was released, the State Department and other agencies published an edict banning the use of the word “jihadist” (as well as similar terms) from the government’s lexicon...

...That plot never got off the ground because of a well-placed FBI informant named Emad Salem...

...The Clinton administration even expelled two Sudanese delegates because of their involvement...

...Here, McCarthy has been at the forefront of explaining how jihadist terrorism is frequently, but not exclusively, a tool of hostile regimes: Writing in these pages in 1998 (“The Sudan Connection”), he explored the many ties between the 1993 plotters and the Sudanese regime then led by an Islamic radical named Hassan al-Turabi...

...And in his exceptional new book, he documents a series of missteps that led America to consistently misjudge both the scale and the nature of the terrorist threat...

...Out of this witch’s brew of state and nonstate actors grew the network that we commonly call “al Qaeda...

...Countless books, articles, documentaries—in addition to the 9/11 Commission’s high-profi le investigation during a hotly contested presidential election year—have all attempted to answer one central question: How could a small band of al Qaeda terrorists execute the greatest attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor...

...Therefore, pinning these events on Rahman—who clearly, at the very least, inspired them—was no small feat...

...Once a critical mass of evidence was collected, Rahman and his minions were rounded up, thereby short-circuiting their bomb making, and convicted as a result of McCarthy’s relentless prosecution...

...The sheikh slyly avoided discussing precise tactics, preferring instead to lend his voice to theological justifi cations for violence...

...delegation provided material support to Rahman’s terrorists as they plotted to blow up New York’s landmarks...

...At that point, for more than a decade, Rahman had provided the religious justifi cation for numerous terrorist plots in Egypt, including the assassination of Anwar Sadat...

...This time they wanted to simultaneously destroy several landmarks in the New York area, including the United Nations building and the Holland and Lincoln tunnels...

...As McCarthy writes, “In the eight years between the World Trade Center’s bombing and its destruction, the highprofi le court cases that constituted the Clinton administration’s counterterrorism strategy resulted in the convictions of exactly twenty-nine terrorists...

...In fact, one senses that if it were up to him, the trial of Rahman and his cohort would never have happened...

...And he was a player in the jihad against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, where he made numerous allies, including Osama bin Laden himself...

...Not only does Washington have a hard time properly naming our jihadist enemies, it still fails to understand that terrorist-sponsoring regimes have long backed them...

...Nosair left behind a treasure trove of information, including handwritten notes, connecting him to a broader terror network then operating in New York and New Jersey...

...When Sheikh Rahman called on his followers to wage “jihad,” they knew that their master did not mean for them to become absorbed in prayer...

...Indeed, Turabi and Rahman were longtime friends and allies...

...Moreover, Washington is apparently too obtuse to notice that Saddam Hussein, al Qaeda’s terrorists, Tehran’s mullahs, and Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi clerics have called for a militant brand of jihad persistently over the past several decades...

...Skittish agents, who mishandled Salem from the fi rst, alternated between fears that they could not corroborate his testimony and that Salem’s fellow plotters would be successful despite Salem’s meddling...

...His blessing was crucial for the terrorists to move forward, but America’s laws were not written with someone like Rahman, or his type of violence, in mind...

...But as McCarthy rightly argues, “jihad” has far more frequently been used to connote violent campaigns against infi dels since the earliest days of Islam...

...They soon began plotting yet another, more devastating, attack...

...He was the spiritual head of Egypt’s two main terrorist groups, both of which were instrumental in aiding al Qaeda’s rise...

...In McCarthy’s words, “The legal system circa 1993 was woefully unprepared Thomas Joscelyn is a terrorism researcher, writer, and economist living in New York...

...Despite overwhelming evidence of his guilt, Nosair was acquitted of Kahane’s murder and convicted of only lesser charges...

...McCarthy returns to this aspect of the story in Willful Blindness to show how Sudan’s U.N...