Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad

From: Travis
Date: Fri, Sep 19, 2008
Subject: Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad




Jacob Laksin

The Cutting Edge - September 15th 2008



Cutting Edge Contributing Writer

Book Covers - Andrew McCarthy



Andrew C. McCarthy. Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad. (Encounter
Books. New York. 2008).

Before he was the notorious Blind Sheikh, the spiritual advisor and
instigator of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers and convicted terrorist in
his own right, Omar Abdel Rahman was a guest of the American government.
Between 1986 and 1989, the Egyptian-born Rahman applied at least four times
for a U.S. tourist visa-such visas typically last 90 days. Already a
credentialed militant, in 1987 he earned a place on the State Department's
terrorist watch list for his fatwa years earlier, urging the assassination
of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and for his relentless preaching of
jihadist violence. Only once did the U.S. refuse him a visa. But by then, it
was too late.

Andrew McCarthy was the lead federal prosecutor of the World Trade Center
bombing conspiracy trial in 1995 and the man who would put Rahman away for
life. When he invokes "willful blindness" in the title of his absorbing new
book, it is this depressing history-a fatal mixture of bureaucratic bungling
and strategic shortsightedness-that he has in mind. Part survey of Islamic
terror in the 1980s and nineties, part memoir of the nine-month trial that
brought the World Trade Center bombers to justice, Willful Blindness is a
bracing chronicle of the first major terrorist attack on American soil and a
valuable reminder that radical Islam was a real and present threat to the
United States long before September 11.

It would be difficult to document every government failure in the run-up to
the 1993 bombings, but McCarthy's meticulous account surely comes close.
Consider the case of Mahmud Abouhalima. Later to become the plot's de facto
leader, he received a residency visa as an "agricultural worker" under the
1986 immigration bill-this despite the fact that he was employed as a cab
driver. Perhaps, as McCarthy aridly notes, he was "tending to the fecund
fields of Brooklyn." But oversights like this one are mere peccadilloes next
to the FBI's craven 1989 decision to stop monitoring the men who would
become the World Trade Center bombers. No sooner did the terrorist trainees
charge that their surveillance by FBI agents-at a firing range in Long
Island, no less-constituted religious harassment, than the agency hurriedly
closed the book on the investigation. Nothing to see here, folks: just a few
pious citizens taking their AK-47s out for target practice.

Still, at least there was an investigation. Not so in November 1990, when an
Egyptian radical named Sayyid Nosair, his skills honed at the shooting
range, gunned down Jewish Defense League leader Rabbi Meir Kahane. Had the
FBI pursued leads in the assassination, it would have discovered Nosair's
involvement in the conspiracy to attack the World Trade Center and other
American locations. Instead, the agency deferred to the unsound judgment of
the New York Police Department, which pronounced Kahane's murder the work of
a lone gunman. The bombing plot went forth as planned.

Most damning, perhaps, is the studious inattention that the Bureau and the
entire national security bureaucracy paid to the Blind Sheikh. For years
before the 1993 bombing, Rahman played a double game, disavowing terrorist
strikes in public while winkingly blessing attacks by his zealous followers.
Cleverness finally caught up with him when an FBI informant, an erratic
Egyptian named Emad Salem, recorded the sheikh as he approved terrorist
attacks against the United Nations and urged strikes against the U.S. Army.
These directives would prove critical to McCarthy's successful case against
Rahman.

Lest one give the FBI too much credit even here, McCarthy points out that
Salem's breakthrough nearly didn't happen. Fearing the fallout if a bombing
were to occur on its watch, the FBI at one point instructed Salem that he
could talk about bombs but not assist the conspiracy by touching actual bomb
parts. A shrewd caveat, one might think-except that Salem's cover as a bomb
expert would have been blown had he followed the directive. In any case,
before that could happen, a feud between the informant and his FBI handlers
drove Salem away just before the bombing, though he reemerged in the
aftermath to help prosecute the plotters.

McCarthy does not exempt himself from harsh criticism. Like so many
government officials in the years before Osama bin Laden became a household
name, McCarthy admits, he began with a serious blind spot about Islam.
Initially believing that preachers like Rahman could be discredited as
"fundamentalist crazies," he came to realize with dismay that their
justifications for terrorism were taken directly from foundational Islamic
texts. On the legal front, McCarthy blames himself for allowing the bombing
conspirator Ahmed Abdel Sattar to escape prosecution. Deeming the evidence
too weak for a conviction-a conclusion he now regrets-McCarthy declined to
prosecute Sattar. Savoring his reprieve, Sattar spent the next ten years
helping the imprisoned Rahman direct his terrorist followers in Egypt. He
was not apprehended until 2005.

For McCarthy, the institutional failures of the 1990s were not accidental.
Rather, they were the inevitable consequences of treating terrorism as a
criminal matter. Indeed, central to McCarthy's narrative is his view that
the U.S. criminal justice system, for all its virtues, was woefully
unprepared to defend the country against Islamic terrorism. At the time of
the 1993 bombing, for instance, there was no special provision in the law
covering bombing conspiracy-meaning that at most the terrorists could get
five years under a federal conspiracy statute. Prosecutors also had to prove
that a "substantial step" had been taken to commit a crime-a measure that
created a perverse incentive to let terrorist conspiracies proceed until the
last possible second.

During the trial, too, there was no shortage of trouble. In complying with
discovery rules, McCarthy had to turn over his list of hundreds of
unindicted co-conspirators to the individuals named therein. These included
one Ali Mohamed, whom McCarthy suspected of being a terrorist. Presciently,
as it turned out: upon receiving the list, which included Osama bin Laden's
name, Mohammed relayed it to al-Qaida operatives, giving them a valuable
glimpse into the state of U.S. intelligence. Civil liberties absolutists who
demand due-process rights for terrorist captives, ignoring the consequences
for national security, would do well to study McCarthy's chapters on the
trial.

Compelling as his book is, one wishes that McCarthy had advanced some
alternatives to the flawed criminal-justice strategy he so powerfully
exposes. Legal scholars like Jack Goldsmith, for example, have urged the
creation of national security courts as an alternative to the traditional
variety. Administered by independent rather than military judges, but
governed by rules of evidence that would not compromise national security,
these courts could conceivably satisfy both sides of the national-security
debate. McCarthy's background would make his view of such proposals worth
hearing.

Such omissions are the exception, however, in this impressively detailed
book. Willful Blindness sometimes makes for painful reading, returning as it
does to a time when, to adapt Trostky's line, the U.S. was not interested in
Islamic jihad but Islamic jihad was very much interested in the U.S. But
then, it is precisely because the temptation to do nothing is ever-present
that, 15 years after the World Trade Center bombing, McCarthy's chronicle of
opportunities missed reads like such a contemporary tale.

Jacob Laksin is a senior editor for FrontPage Magazine. He is a 2007
Phillips Foundation Journalism Fellow. This article was adapted from a
review that appeared in Frontpage Magazine, City Journal and History Network
News.

http://www.thecuttingedgenews.com/index.php?article=762&pageid=23&pagename=A
rts