July 2, 2008
Gathering Storm
by Bruce S. Thornton
National Review Magazine

A review of Andrew C. McCarthy, Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad, Encounter Books, 2008.

Eight years before the terrorist attacks on 9/11, Islamic jihadists sent America a wake-up call that most of us slept through.  On February 26, 1993, a Ryder van containing a 1400-pound urea-nitrate bomb exploded in the underground parking garage of the World Trade Center, killing seven, injuring over a thousand, and inflicting nearly a billion dollars worth of damage. As the subsequent investigation would reveal, a cell of jihadists living for several years in New York had executed the attack and were planning others against the U.N. building, the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, and the New York headquarters of the FBI.

Andrew McCarthy, now at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, lead the Justice Department team at the 1995 trial that ended in the conviction of the nine terrorists and their “emir,” Omar Abdel Rahman, the “Blind Sheikh.” In Willful Blindness, McCarthy tells the story of the 1993 attack, the investigation of the jihadists, and the intricate, laborious process of indicting, trying, and ultimately convicting those who we now know were merely the first wave of an Islamic army that has declared war on America. Along the way, McCarthy documents the bureaucratic bungling and political correctness that blinded investigators to the true aims of the terrorists and the jihad they were serving. Most important, he exposes the continuing folly of treating terrorists at war with America as criminal suspects entitled to the hypersensitive legal solicitude barely appropriate even for ordinary crimes.

McCarthy’s gripping narrative represents crime reporting at its best. He combines an eye for the telling detail with a seasoned prosecutor’s skill at weaving intricate plot-lines involving numerous suspects into a coherent and dramatic story. The most fascinating character in his tale is the undercover informant, Emad Salem, a former Egyptian-army officer. This mercurial, cunning, but remarkably brave man had volunteered his services to the FBI — the big piece of luck that helped make it possible for the bombers of the World Trade Center to be apprehended and the later plot to be uncovered. One of the most dramatic moments in Salem’s undercover work took place when the informant, who had a recording device in a briefcase, attended a meeting with Abdel Rahman. He held the case up “near the sightless cleric’s face, careful not to let it sway even slightly lest his sharp ears pick up the creaking sound, yet praying that no one would barge in and tell Abdel Rahman what he was doing.” The recording proved critical for the conviction of Abdel Rhaman, who was caught on tape soliciting the bombing of American military installations.

Despite some mishandling by the FBI, and despite Salem’s self-aggrandizing stubbornness and occasional paranoid recalcitrance, Salem’s tenacity and courage saved thousands of American lives. And he could have prevented the bombing of the WTC in 1993 — except that he had been relieved of his duties by the FBI a few months before the attack. Concerned for his own and his family’s safety, he had refused to abide by what McCarthy calls the “completely unrealistic protocols” designed to protect the liability of the agency should something go wrong. His resistance on this point led the FBI to conclude, McCarthy reports, that despite the intelligence Salem had provided suggesting that a major bombing was being planned, “the sly, untamable informant [might be] more trouble than he was worth.” The more he resisted FBI control, the greater was “the temptation to rationalize that maybe the threat had been wildly overblown.” Along with Salem, the agency “lost his access to the battalions of Islam, and soon lost its interest in the battalions of Islam.”

Numerous other errors contributed to our intelligence agencies’ failure to see what was unfolding under their noses. Sayyid Nosair was a follower of Abdel Rahman who regularly associated with some of the eventual WTC bombers. Galvanized by Abdel Rahman’s continual calls for jihadist action rather than talk, in November 1990 Nosair murdered Jewish Defense League Founder Meir Kahane in New York. Nosair was wounded by a Postal Police officer and apprehended, but — in an egregious examples of jury malfeasance — was acquitted of murder even as he was convicted, reports McCarthy, “of assault and coercion in the course of the shootings for which [the jury] had exonerated him, and unlawful possession of the firearm proved beyond cavil to have fired at all three victims.” Nosair immediately entered “the pantheon of iconic jihad warriors,” and a steady stream of jihadists — including the WTC plotters — trekked to his jail cell in Attica.

As McCarthy writes, “it required no intensive scrutiny . . . to grasp that Nosair was part of something bigger than himself.” If nothing else, the “47 boxes of documents, photographs, ballistics, and other items” seized by the police from Nosair’s home and work locker would have revealed the extent of the jihadist consipiracy that would culminate three years later in the WTC bombing. Yet, ignoring this mountain of evidence, the New York police department and the FBI both decided that the Kahane murder had been carried out by a “lone, deranged gunman” (as the NYPD’s chief of detectives put it). In conformity with Western determinist superstitions, Nosair’s actions were attributed to Prozac, his unfulfilling menial jobs, and a workplace accident. The “mountain of evidence seized from Nosair’s home,” which included cassettes of Nosair’s “bantering with Abdel Rahman about Egyptian breeding habits and paramilitary training for jihad,” were simply ignored. But the most significant and forboding evidence left unexamined was a detailed notebook in which Nosair asserted the need “to break and to destroy the morale of the enemies of Allah” by “exploding the structure of their civilized pillars,” including “their high world buildings which they are proud of.”

Worse yet, before the ‘93 bombing, the FBI and the Joint Terrorism Task Force, searching for evidence that would corroborate Salem’s information and justify a wire-tap, ignored those same 47 boxes, whose contents included “reams of documents describing bomb construction and detonation; assassination techniques, the duty to perform jihad; the destruction of America’s skyscrapers and political symbols,” and much else. “This information,” McCarthy writes, “was treated as if it didn’t exist.” The result was the loss of an opportunity to apprehend the World Trade Center bombers before their attack.

Something else, however, blinded the authorities, and many other Americans as well, to the enemy within: a failure to take seriously the terrorists’ religious motivations and the role of jihad in Islamic theology. Abdel Rahman was no nutty cult leader like David Koresh, whose beliefs were obvious distortions of Christianity. Abdel Rahman had a doctorate, with distinction, in Koranic studies from Cairo’s famed al-Azhar University, the Islamic equivalent of Harvard or Oxford. As McCarthy’s brief analysis of jihadist doctrine illustrates, Adbel Rahman’s preaching on jihad was completely in line with traditional orthodoxy as set out in the Koran, the Hadith, the four schools of Islamic jurisprudence, and later theorists like the 13^th-century traditionalist Ibn Taymiyyah. Yet like many Americans and apologists today, an analyst for the government waved this tradition away and indulged in fantasies about the “lesser jihad” and the “greater jihad” — the latter, defined as internal self-improvement and growth in faith, considered the true jihad. Unfortunately, as McCarthy notes, “many hundred of millions of Muslims did not get the memo”: They continue to believe that jihad means exactly what Mohammed and fourteen centuries of mainstream Islamic belief think it means — war against the infidel.

This jihadist ideology motivated Abdel Rahman and the 9/11 jihadists, and continues to motivate Islamic terrorism today. But then and now, this obvious traditional belief is ignored or rationalized away by those entrusted with our security: The Secretary of State publicly croons that Islam is the “religion of peace and love,” and the State and Homeland Security departments instruct their employees not to use words like “jihad” or “mujahedeen” (holy warrior) in its communications. In contrast to this delusional thinking, McCarthy bluntly, and correctly, states the obvious: “Islam is a dangerous creed. It rejects core aspects of Western liberalism: self-determination, freedom of choice, freedom of conscience, equality under the law.” We refuse to face the truth about Islam, and thus we disarm ourselves before “a doctrine that rejects our way of life and a culture unwilling or unable to suppress the savage element it breeds wherever it takes hold.”

The power of the jihadists’ spiritual motivations is what makes the criminal approach to terrorism so dangerous and ineffective. As McCarthy persuasively argues, providing terrorists with the protections arising from legal principles the terrorists themselves disdain is folly. Unlike the judicial system, the purpose of national security is not to inhibit the government from violating the rights of its citizens, but rather to protect the lives of its citizens from enemies who want to destroy them and their freedom. Yet “terrorism prosecutions create the conditions for failure, and thus for more terrorism.” Disclosure rules, for example, put into the hands of the enemy “a staggering quantum of information,” much of it disastrous for the government’s ability to gather intelligence, but highly useful for terrorists still at large. Throw in the lengthy trials and even lengthier appeals, and it is no wonder that in the eight years between the two World Trade Center bombings, fewer than three-dozen out of hundreds of active jihadist terrorists had been put out of action by criminal prosecution.

Our refusal to acknowledge the true nature of the enemy and the appropriate methods for defeating him suggests that too many Americans are still asleep, even seven years after the carnage of 9/11. Fortunately for us, Andrew McCarthy is wide awake, and he sounds the alarm in this brilliantly written, relentlessly argued book.