But then he disappeared. The CIA had taken him to a "black site" where "enhanced interrogation techniques" were used. Mohammed was waterboarded at least times, something described as "near drownings". He was subjected to rectal rehydration, stress positions, sleep deprivation, forced nudity, and told his children would be killed. He would confess to multiple plots during that time.
But a Senate report later found that much of the intelligence supposedly produced had been made up by the detainee. After details of the CIA's detention programme were revealed, "high value detainees" like Mohammed were moved to Guantanamo Bay in The FBI were finally allowed access. In January Frank Pellegrino came face-to-face with the man he had pursued for so long. The former FBI man won't disclose the details of what was said but conceded "he's a very engaging guy with a sense of humour, believe it or not".
KSM has often been seen "grandstanding" at hearings in Guantanamo and Pellegrino describes the world's most infamous terrorist suspect as "Kardashian" in his craving for attention but says he shows no remorse.
Would he confess or want to make the most of a trial? After six days of talking Mohammed finally said he had had enough. A plan to hold a trial in New York faltered after public and political opposition. Keep him down in Guantanamo,'" says Pellegrino, himself a New Yorker. Next came a military tribunal at Guantanamo. But procedural delays, compounded by the Covid pandemic closing the base, have made it a long-drawn out process.
More hearings are taking place this week but an end looks a long way off. These US embassy bombings did not only prioritize Al-Qaeda and Bin-Laden to western intelligence agencies and introduce them to the global media, it also enhanced their credibility to aspiring jihadists, helped raise funds, and recruited supporters. Although Bin-Laden had seen military action against the Soviets in Afghanistan, he had subsequently avoided frontline conflict, returning to Jeddah before migrating to Khartoum in having been invited by the new National Islamic Front NIF to set up business there.
Asked to leave Sudan in , Bin Laden arrived at Jalalabad in Afghanistan by air with more than of his supporters and their families. But those Sudan years had seen Al-Qaeda gradually transform into a more active jihadist group — fundraising via successful commercial enterprises and running jihadist training camps. The Al-Qaeda franchise is still vibrant in Africa as a resilient and attractive jihadi affiliation in several countries where it first emerged.
View more opinion on CNN. In addition, tens of thousands of soldiers from countries allied to the United States died, as did hundreds of thousands of ordinary Afghans, Iraqis, Libyans, Pakistanis, Somalis, Syrians and Yemenis who were also killed during the so-called "war on terror.
Al-Qaeda's leader is one of the few people of whom it can truly be said that he changed the course of history. Just as an account of Nazism would be nonsensical without reference to the persona and worldview of Adolf Hitler, or a history of France after the revolution of would make no sense without an understanding of the goals and personality of Napoleon Bonaparte, so too our understanding of al-Qaeda and the ideology and violence it spawned would be incoherent without reference to bin Laden.
This is an unapologetically old-school view of how history is actually made, which posits certain individuals are able to ride the tide of human events and shape them in new and unexpected ways.
Of course, that is not to deny the importance of circumstance. Nor could Napoleon have become Napoleon without the opportunities presented to him by the chaos of post-revolutionary France. But it's impossible to understand World War II and the Holocaust without understanding Hitler's ambitions and ideology, just as it's impossible to understand why the largest army hitherto assembled in Europe marched into Moscow in September just weeks before the onset of the brutal Russian winter without understanding the vast ambitions of Napoleon.
Bin Laden also came of age at a time of important historical changes. As a young man, he lived through a period of great ideological ferment in the Muslim world.
During the s, the early promises of socialism and Arab nationalism had delivered little in the way of prosperity or peace in the Middle East, and a new interest in religion gripped the region, a period of Islamic awakening that peaked in — the first year of a new century on the Muslim calendar — with three seismic events. As the evacuation of the tower and its twin got underway, television cameras broadcasted live images of what initially appeared to be a freak accident. Then, 18 minutes after the first plane hit, a second Boeing —United Airlines Flight —appeared out of the sky, turned sharply toward the World Trade Center and sliced into the south tower near the 60th floor.
The collision caused a massive explosion that showered burning debris over surrounding buildings and onto the streets below. It immediately became clear that America was under attack. The hijackers were Islamic terrorists from Saudi Arabia and several other Arab nations. Some of the terrorists had lived in the United States for more than a year and had taken flying lessons at American commercial flight schools.
The 19 terrorists easily smuggled box-cutters and knives through security at three East Coast airports and boarded four early-morning flights bound for California , chosen because the planes were loaded with fuel for the long transcontinental journey.
Soon after takeoff, the terrorists commandeered the four planes and took the controls, transforming ordinary passenger jets into guided missiles. Jet fuel from the Boeing caused a devastating inferno that led to the structural collapse of a portion of the giant concrete building, which is the headquarters of the U.
Department of Defense. All told, military personnel and civilians were killed in the Pentagon, along with all 64 people aboard the airliner.
Less than 15 minutes after the terrorists struck the nerve center of the U. The structural steel of the skyscraper, built to withstand winds in excess of miles per hour and a large conventional fire, could not withstand the tremendous heat generated by the burning jet fuel.
At a. Only six people in the World Trade Center towers at the time of their collapse survived. Almost 10, others were treated for injuries, many severe. Because the plane had been delayed in taking off, passengers on board learned of events in New York and Washington via cell phone and Airfone calls to the ground. Knowing that the aircraft was not returning to an airport as the hijackers claimed, a group of passengers and flight attendants planned an insurrection.
One of the passengers, Thomas Burnett, Jr. I love you, honey. Sandy Bradshaw, a flight attendant, called her husband and explained that she had slipped into a galley and was filling pitchers with boiling water.
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