Former Bin Laden Associate Recalls Meetings with UBL, Ayman al-Zawahiri:
During the summer of 2000, Noman Benotman stood face-to-face with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, listening as the al-Qaeda kingpin described, in detail, his plans for an upcoming major operation against the United States that would later be known simply as “9/11.”
Benotman, a former top commander of an Islamic terrorist organization called the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), was one of 200 global jihadist leaders summoned to Afghanistan by bin Laden one year before 9/11 for a meeting to discuss strategy.
Benotman’s participation in that fateful terrorist summit was no coincidence; he was held in high regard by al-Qaeda’s hierarchy as a veteran mujahid, or holy warrior, and trusted confidante.
Now, nearly a decade later, I was standing face-to-face with Benotman in a London hotel room.
Benotman, who says he left the jihadist world behind shortly after 9/11, had agreed to meet with me to discuss, among other things, his former close associations with both bin Laden and al-Qaeda’s second-incommand, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Throughout my hour-long interview with Benotman, he recounted face-to-face meetings with bin Laden and Zawahiri in which the two al-Qaeda leaders gleefully discussed murdering American civilians with a bloodlust that seemed insatiable.
According to Benotman, his warnings to Zawahiri that a major operation on U.S. soil would provoke an overwhelming American response were greeted with laughter and quickly dismissed. Today, ten years after the 9/11 attacks sparked an American “War on Terror” that has seen al-Qaeda’s leadership severely weakened and the group’s operatives pursued to the ends of the earth, Zawahiri’s flippant response to Benotman’s concerns sounds unbelievable. How could al-Qaeda have been so confident that the most powerful nation in the world would take 9/11 lying down?
Simple: Benotman told me that, based on their study of recent history, both Zawahiri and bin Laden firmly believed America was a “paper tiger” that would respond weakly when attacked. Indeed, the roll call of U.S. fecklessness in the face of Islamic terror up until 9/11 was shameful and well documented: from the Iranian hostage crisis to the Beirut Marine barracks massacre; from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing to Black Hawk Down in Somalia; and from the Khobar Towers attack to the African embassy bombings and the attack on the USS Cole destroyer in Yemen, in which seventeen U.S. sailors were killed by an al-Qaeda suicide bomber.
In each case, the U.S. response was either to cut and run, issue a “strong” condemnation, or simply not to respond at all. The lone, pitiful exception was the Clinton administration’s response to the 1998 African embassy bombings, which consisted of lobbing a few cruise missiles into Afghanistan and into an empty pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. During Clinton’s presidency we witnessed no fewer than five major Islamic terrorist attacks against U.S. interests, each of them gradually escalating in their ferocity and boldness. Yet the most Clinton could muster in the face of this growing terror onslaught by al-Qaeda and its surrogates were those cruise missiles to nowhere. Is it any wonder, then, that by the summer of 2000, bin Laden and the boys were confident that the United States would take 9/11 on the chin?
Yet that attack would finally propel our political class into action, with the 9/11 Commission exposing the defective institutional mindset that caused American leaders to ignore the Islamic terrorist threat for so long. And what did the commission identify as the root cause of the 9/11 attacks? Notably, they didn’t cite the supposed reasons so often trumpeted by the liberal political establishment and media elites, such as poverty, mental illness, or lack of education. Nor did they blame the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, that other trusty crutch of the Left’s arguments on national security.
No, what motivated the 9/11 attackers, according to the bipartisan 9/11 Commission, was a seductive jihadist ideology rooted in Islamic law that had been lying dormant during the decline of the Ottoman Empire, but had been revived and renewed in the twentieth century.
My numerous interviews with current and former Islamic terrorists and radicals over the years have repeatedly confirmed this point. Ideology is the lubricant that makes the international Islamic terrorist machine operate.
During our interview, Noman Benotman stated that jihadist ideology did not represent some new, distorted interpretation of Islam, as Obama administration officials have steadily maintained. Benotman argued it was rooted in the Koran itself:
“If any Muslim appears and says ok, there is no jihad in Islam whatsoever, please believe me, he is a liar. A pure liar. People, they need to face it because it is a serious issue. Jihad, it’s part of Islam because it is something that’s in the Koran. There are more than 40 verses, I think, in the Koran that mention jihad. Not just one or three or ten. From a Muslim perspective, the Koran is not a book written for someone or a constitution. It’s the words of God.”
When it comes to jihadist ideology and what motivates terrorists, who are you going to believe: a former Islamic terrorist like Noman Benotman who has rubbed shoulders with al-Qaeda’s leadership, or those two noted Islamic scholars, Eric Holder and Janet Napolitano? Call me crazy, but for a realistic assessment of the jihad threat, my money is on Benotman.
*Excerpted from The Terrorist Next Door: How the Government Is Deceiving You about the Islamic Threat (Regnery Publishing 2011) by Erick Stakelbeck, pp. 177-180.