The Black Banners_ 9_11 and the War Against Al-Qaeda - Ali H. Soufan [137]
Not everyone in Kandahar agreed with the wisdom of hitting a U.S. target in Yemen. Many al-Qaeda members were either Yemenis or had family ties to Yemen, and they feared the effect an attack would have on their families and their ability to travel home. They also questioned the wisdom of upsetting a country that had been very useful in providing refuge to them.
Hamdan was one of the al-Qaeda members who questioned the wisdom of the attack. His wife was a Yemeni, and he feared that they would be prevented from returning to Yemen after the attack. When he spoke to his brother-in-law in Yemen, Hamdan was told that the PSO was looking for him. Yemen was a no-go country for him for now.
When they were alone, Hamdan asked bin Laden, “Sheikh, why in Yemen, when that was always a safe haven for the brothers?” Bin Laden did not respond directly and changed the subject.
Other al-Qaeda members would not dream of questioning bin Laden, and Nashiri fell into this camp. He believed that bin Laden always knew best. Abu Jandal described Nashiri as someone who would commit a terrorist act “in Mecca, inside the Kaaba itself” if he believed the cause demanded it.
Bin Laden was convinced that the United States would retaliate against al-Qaeda for the bombing of the USS Cole. At a minimum, he expected al-Qaeda’s training camps to be bombed, as had happened after the East African embassy bombings. Before the Cole attack, bin Laden moved to protect himself and his followers.
Training camps were temporarily shut down, and operatives were ordered not to plan or carry out any terrorist acts. Bin Laden himself kept on the move, traveling from one safe house in Afghanistan to another. He first went to the hills around Kabul, then on to Khost and Jalalabad. After that he returned to Kandahar, moving between safe houses there. He also sent Abu Hafs and Ayman al-Zawahiri to separate locations in Kabul. That way, if one of them were killed, the others could continue running al-Qaeda.
Yet there was no retaliation from the United States, to bin Laden’s surprise. They would have to hit harder to get America’s attention, he told his aides. Hamdan later told me, “You [the United States] brought 9/11 on yourselves; you didn’t respond to the Cole, so bin Laden had to hit harder.”
As days and weeks went by, rumors that al-Qaeda was behind the Cole attack reverberated around the Muslim world. The image of the attack on the Cole—a small boat bringing down a mighty destroyer—was a powerful one. Bin Laden would later say that “the destroyer represented the capital of the West and the small boat represented the Prophet Muhammad.” In Kandahar, bin Laden, Abu Hafs, and Saif al-Adel met to discuss how best to further capitalize on the attack to boost al-Qaeda’s fund-raising and recruitment. They decided to make a video about the bombing.
Bin Laden instructed Ali al-Bahlul to produce the video. He and other members of al-Qaeda’s media office spent six months on the project, which included a reenactment of the Cole bombing, along with images of al-Qaeda camps and training sessions. It opened with the voice of Abu Hajer al-Iraqi, reading passages from the Quran—he was in jail in the United States for his role in the East African embassy bombings. The touch was significant: before the Cole bombing, bin Laden had issued a warning to the United States to release prisoners, among them Abu Hajer. Operatives later noted that the voiceover was bin Laden’s creative flourish—one of many improvements and revisions insisted