Jihad Joe_ Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam - J. M. Berger [86]
He also began to issue more formal communiqués in the style of Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al Zawahiri. An Invitation to Islam professed to offer Americans a chance to avoid certain destruction by converting. The video was introduced by Zawahiri, firmly establishing Gadahn’s credentials. Subsequent videos warned again and again about imminent and devastating attacks that never seemed to happen.22
Over time Gadahn ceased to be a novelty, and his messages became less effective with American audiences, due to a combination of increasing U.S. and Pakistani military pressure on his position and his growing immersion in the culture of al Qaeda.
He was, in many ways, an object lesson in the limitations of American jihadists in communications and more generally. Many of al Qaeda’s American recruits become enamored of Arab and Muslim culture early in the radicalization process. They eventually stop talking like Americans and start talking like Arabs. Often, the longer they are involved with terrorism, the less effective they are at reaching U.S. audiences.
Nevertheless, “Azzam the American” continued to be a significant figure in al Qaeda’s stream of propaganda communication. In 2009 he appeared in a video titled The Mujahideen Don’t Target Muslims, which tried to refute the growing (and accurate) perception that al Qaeda’s terrorist attacks were killing far more Muslims than “Crusaders,” particularly in Pakistan. Gadahn argued that the media had wrongly attributed recent attacks to al Qaeda, part of a frame-up by the governments of Pakistan and the United States.23
As of this writing, Gadahn is believed to be in hiding, somewhere along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Al Qaeda has often exploited its Western members for communications and publicity, but the original goal of recruiting Americans was always to use their passports and their ability to blend in while preparing terrorist attacks. That strategy became front-page headlines when jihadist Jose Padilla returned at long last to U.S. soil.
Padilla had spent September 2001 at the house of al Qaeda’s military commander, Mohammed Atef. When an American air strike killed Atef in November, it narrowly missed taking out Padilla as well. The Latino American had been training in explosives when the strike took place. He returned to find the house in ruins and helped dig Atef’s body out of the wreckage.24
Padilla and Adnan Shukrijumah, his compatriot from Florida, had been ordered to blow up apartment buildings back in the United States, but the two could not get along. Shukrijumah, ruthlessly competent and pragmatic, was intellectually a cut above Padilla, whose ambitions outstripped his ability by a wide margin. Shukrijumah bailed out of the apartments plot, and Padilla was assigned another partner, an Ethiopian named Binyamin Mohamed.
The two men went to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed—al Qaeda’s chief of terrorist operations and the mastermind of 9/11—to discuss the plan. Padilla continued to lobby for some kind of nuclear attack, but Mohammed was skeptical. Exasperated, he finally sent the two men to America with money in their pockets and a promise that instructions would follow.
Padilla was arrested the moment he stepped off the plane in Chicago. Binyamin didn’t even make it out of Pakistan before getting nabbed by authorities there.25
Attorney General John Ashcroft announced Padilla’s arrest in dramatic fashion, hyping the dirty bomb threat and labeling him an enemy combatant, which led to the al Qaeda member being incarcerated in a military prison without due process for more than three years. Finally, Padilla was moved