The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [29]
SECURITY FORCES GREETED the incoming prisoners by stripping them naked, blindfolding and handcuffing them, then beating them with sticks. Humiliated, frightened, and disoriented, they were thrown into narrow stone cells, the only light coming from a tiny square window in the iron door. The dungeon had been built in the twelfth century by the great Kurdish conqueror Saladin, using the labor of captured Crusaders. It was part of the Citadel, a massive fortress on a hill overlooking Cairo, that had served as the seat of government for seven hundred years.
The screams of fellow prisoners who were being interrogated kept many men in a state of near madness, even when they weren’t tortured themselves. Because of his status, Zawahiri was subjected to frequent beatings and other ingenious and sadistic forms of punishment created by Intelligence Unit 75, which oversaw Egypt’s inquisition.
One line of thinking proposes that America’s tragedy on September 11 was born in the prisons of Egypt. Human-rights advocates in Cairo argue that torture created an appetite for revenge, first in Sayyid Qutb and later in his acolytes, including Ayman al-Zawahiri. The main target of the prisoners’ wrath was the secular Egyptian government, but a powerful current of anger was also directed toward the West, which they saw as an enabling force behind the repressive regime. They held the West responsible for corrupting and humiliating Islamic society. Indeed, the theme of humiliation, which is the essence of torture, is important to understanding the radical Islamists’ rage. Egypt’s prisons became a factory for producing militants whose need for retribution—they called it justice—was all-consuming.
Montassir al-Zayyat, an Islamist attorney who was imprisoned with Zawahiri and later became his lawyer and biographer,* maintains that the traumatic experiences suffered by Zawahiri in prison transformed him from being a relatively moderate force in al-Jihad into a violent and implacable extremist. Zayyat and other witnesses point to what happened to his relationship with Essam al-Qamari, who had been his close friend and a man he keenly admired. Immediately after Zawahiri’s arrest, officers in the Interior Ministry began grilling him about Major Qamari, who continued to slip their nets. He was now the most wanted man in Egypt. He had already survived a firefight with grenades and automatic weapons in which many policemen were killed or wounded. In their relentless search for Qamari, the security officers booted the distinguished Zawahiri family out of their house and tore up the floors and pulled down all the wallpaper looking for evidence. They also waited by the phone, betting that eventually the desperado would call. Two weeks later, the call finally came. The caller identified himself as “Dr. Essam” and asked to meet Zawahiri. Qamari was unaware that Zawahiri was in custody when he phoned, since it had been kept secret. A police officer, pretending to be a family member, told “Dr. Essam” that Zawahiri was not there. The caller suggested, “Let him pray the maghreb”—the sunset prayer—“with me,” at a mosque they both knew.
“Qamari had given him an appointment on the road to Maadi, but he noticed the security people, and he escaped again,” said Fouad Allam, who was the head of the Interior Ministry’s anti-terrorism unit at the time. He is an avuncular figure with a basso profundo voice, who has interrogated almost every major Islamic radical since 1965, when he questioned Sayyid Qutb. “I called Ayman al-Zawahiri to my office in order to propose a plan.” Allam found Zawahiri “shy and distant. He doesn’t look at you when he talks, which is a sign of politeness in the Arab world.” According to Zawahiri’s uncle Mahfouz, Zawahiri had already been brutally tortured, and he actually came to Allam’s office wearing only one shoe, because of an injury inflicted to his foot. Allam arranged to have Zawahiri’s telephone line transferred into his office, and he held Zawahiri there until Qamari finally called again. This time Zawahiri answered and