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“Whatever you’re going to print, you’re going to print,” he said. “As long as it’s the truth, we’re good.” He refused to answer any question that related to the program or his actions.

TRANSFERENCE AND THE FAR ENEMY

Aside from its obvious ambition, there are a number of interesting features in the Day of Terror plot and its relation to the war in Bosnia. Without the Bosnian cause to draw the participants together, the plot would likely have failed to gain critical mass. And although I was unable to find evidence that the Third World Relief Agency funded the bombing plot directly, it did finance the activities that brought most of the conspirators together.

The majority of the participants were drawn into the plot on the pretext that they were training to fight on behalf of the Bosnians, whether as trainers, mujahideen fighting abroad, or support workers in the United States. Sometimes this pretext was extraordinarily thin. At other times, it was incredibly intense. But nearly every one of the nine people prosecuted in the Day of Terror attacks (not counting Nosair and Rahman) claimed that they got involved in the plot because of Bosnia.

Of course, most of them also claimed they had not done things they were caught on tape doing. To this day, Abdullah Rashid denies he committed the acts for which he was convicted. In an e-mail sent from prison in 2009, he insisted that the FBI had admitted he was not guilty of the crimes for which he was imprisoned.67

Nevertheless, wiretaps and surveillance logs clearly back up the conspirators’ universal claim that they originally became involved in the plot because they thought they were doing something on behalf of Bosnia. The leaders of the cell fixated on Bosnia and endlessly discussed what they could do to help the Bosnian Muslims.

From a May 30, 1993, audio recording:

HAMPTON-EL: All those powers of [infidels] being aided by people like, Mubarak, Hussain, Khomeini, Assad et cetera, et cetera, um. What’s happening now, akie [Arabic for “brother”], is that here in America, the government story in the news media to justify to their physical attack on Muslims [inaudible]. In fact the people of the world who don’t really give a damn what’s going on in Bosnia, will say [inaudible] a Muslim [inaudible] because the people in Bosnia—

SIDDIG ALI: Massacred.

HAMPTON-EL: Hamdillah [praise Allah], I mean massacred and the world has not cried out with outrage. You know, we’ll keep talking. Ah, the Muslims of America, at that time coming [they will] need preparation, very few of them are.

Similarly, Siddig, in a lecture where he appeared after Saffet Catovic, berated the audience for passively sitting by while Muslims were dying.68

With their passions inflamed, the participants in the Day of Terror plot took incremental steps in the direction of violence—first buying weapons, then training, then buying more weapons, then stockpiling ammunition, and finally purchasing the components for bombs.

Equally incremental was the change in intent, from waging jihad in Bosnia to waging jihad in New York in the name of Bosnia. In the language of jihadist theology, this change in focus is known as the “near enemy” versus the “far enemy,” a concept championed by Al Qaeda’s second-in-command, Ayman Al Zawahiri.69

Near and far in this context refer to the distance from the offending behavior. For Bosnia, the near enemy was the Serbs; the far enemy was the United States, whose policies (in Siddig’s worldview) were enabling the Serbs to carry out their atrocities.

The distinction between fighting the near and far enemies is useful in distinguishing between jihadism and terrorism, at least during this period. Jihadists often tend to work in a gray area of morality, fighting battles that are to some degree justifiable against targets seen as directly persecuting Muslims—in other words, the Serbs. In contrast, terrorists often aim for the symbolic target, those they see as supporters or even just passive enablers. However, the