The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [133]
“YOU ARE NOT UNAWARE OF THE INJUSTICE, repression, and aggression that have befallen Muslims through the alliance of Jews, Christians, and their agents, so much so that Muslims’ blood has become the cheapest blood and their money and wealth are plundered by the enemies,” bin Laden said, on August 23, 1996, in his “Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places.” The latest indignity—“one of the worst catastrophes to befall the Muslims since the death of the Prophet”—was the presence of American and coalition troops in Saudi Arabia. The purpose of his treatise was “to talk, work, and discuss ways of rectifying what has befallen the Islamic world in general and The Land of the Two Holy Mosques in particular.”
“Everyone is complaining about everything,” bin Laden observed, adopting the voice of the Islamic man on the street. “People have been greatly preoccupied with matters of their livelihood. Talk of economic decline, high prices, massive debts, and overcrowded prisons is widespread.” As for Saudi Arabia, “everyone agrees that the country is moving toward a deep abyss.” Those brave few Saudis who confronted the regime demanding change were disregarded; meanwhile, the war debt had caused the state to impose taxes. “People are wondering: Is ours really the largest oil exporting country? They feel that God is tormenting them because they kept quiet about the regime’s injustice.”
He then taunted the American secretary of defense, William Perry, by name. “O William, tomorrow you will know which young man is confronting your misguided brethren…. Terrorizing you, while you carry weapons in our land, is a legitimate and moral obligation.”
He was so far from being able to carry out such threats that one might conclude that the author of this document was utterly mad. Indeed, the man in the cave had entered a separate reality, one that was deeply connected to the mythic chords of Muslim identity and in fact gestured to anyone whose culture was threatened by modernity and impurity and the loss of tradition. By declaring war on the United States from a cave in Afghanistan, bin Laden assumed the role of an uncorrupted, indomitable primitive standing against the awesome power of the secular, scientific, technological Goliath; he was fighting modernity itself.
It did not matter that bin Laden, the construction magnate, had built the cave using heavy machinery and that he had proceeded to outfit it with computers and advanced communications devices. The stance of the primitive was appealingly potent, especially to people who had been let down by modernity; however, the mind that understood such symbolism, and how it could be manipulated, was sophisticated and modern in the extreme.
SOON AFTER BIN LADEN set up his camp in Tora Bora, he agreed to meet a visitor named Khaled Sheikh Mohammed. He had known Mohammed slightly during the anti-Soviet jihad, when Mohammed worked as a secretary for bin Laden’s old sponsor, Sayyaf, and also for Abdullah Azzam. Far more significantly, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed was also the uncle of Ramzi Yousef, who had bombed the World Trade Center in 1993. Now Yousef was under arrest and his uncle was on the run.
Except for their hatred of America, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed and Osama bin Laden had almost nothing in common. Mohammed was short and squat; pious but poorly trained in religion; an actor and a cutup; a drinker and a womanizer. Whereas bin Laden was provincial and hated travel, especially in the West, Mohammed was a globe-trotter fluent in several languages, including English, which he perfected while studying mechanical engineering at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, a mostly black school in Greensboro.
In Tora Bora, Mohammed briefed bin Laden about his life since the anti-Soviet jihad. Inspired by Ramzi Yousef’s attack on the World Trade Center, Mohammed joined his nephew for a month in the Philippines in 1994.