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Fri. Jun 21, 2002

QuoteLog, 6/21

QuoteLog, 6/21 – "A recent report that airline reservations from the Kingdom [of Saudi Arabia] to the United States were 40 percent of what they were last year shocked me. I had hoped that the number of Saudis traveling to the United States this year would be only five percent of what they were last year [...] I have also been shocked by the normal level of sales of US products at shops in Jeddah. It is disappointing to note that people have returned to US fast-food restaurants, proving that either they are taken in by advertisements which emphasize that the restaurants are 100 percent Arab or tempted by the discounts offered there. People ignore the fact that the boycott is a form of jihad, involving a bitter struggle with oneself which will bring rewards from God. These people also seem to be unaware of the rulings banning both American and Israeli goods. We should shun these goods until substitutes are found to replace them [...] I would also pray for the success of businessmen such as Prince Amr Al-Faisal who canceled his business contract with an American company. He is a role model for all Arab and Muslim businessmen who are committed to the jihad aiming at the liberation of Palestine and Al-Aqsa Mosque [...] Some extremist groups in the US and Britain have declared their plans to avenge the deaths at the World Trade Center by attacking Arab tourists this summer. They warned that travelers to America or Britain would be targeted."

Nourah Abdul Aziz Al-Khereiji, Arab News

"U.S. officials have said they believe that bin Laden was in Tora Bora, and the Saudis confirmed this, saying they had seen him there. The Saudis told Moroccan authorities that with the U.S. stepping up military pressure, bin Laden ordered his headquarters moved south, to the area near the town of Gardez. The al Qaeda leader dropped from sight when the first U.S. bombs fell in Tora Bora in late November. The Saudis didn’t see him again. They were among many al Qaeda loyalists who sneaked out of Tora Bora and struggled across mountainous terrain along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border to the Gardez region. There, a senior bin Laden lieutenant assembled the members for final instructions [...] They were ordered to flee Afghanistan to whatever areas of the world they had previously operated from, including Asia, the Persian Gulf, Africa, Turkey and Europe. Bin Laden’s decree directed them to launch terrorist attacks once they had become established in familiar areas. ’Members who were very knowledgeable about one region had to go back to that region to prepare and perpetrate terrorist attacks,’ said a senior Moroccan official. Bilal specifically noted that operations against European targets could be launched from North Africa, and operations in the Persian Gulf from Yemen. Although some in Gardez received very general orders, others, such as the Saudis, two of whom were married to Moroccan women, were given specific targets. They were to go to Morocco and attack the ships. The Saudi prisoners described a final ceremony in which the men pledged allegiance to bin Laden and swore themselves to martyrdom through suicide operations, according to Moroccan officials."

Peter Finn, Washington Post

"When officials in both countries hailed the arrests as a model for partnership in the war on terrorism, it was more than mutual back slapping. In breaking up an active al Qaeda sleeper cell, Moroccan authorities working with American counterparts staged one of the most successful counter-terrorism operations since Sept. 11. And besides preventing a possibly deadly al Qaeda attack, the police work revealed important and disturbing insights into how Osama bin Laden’s operatives are regrouping for new terror operations despite their rout in Afghanistan. Moroccan sources describe the suspects as killers hardened by battles in Afghanistan, who were nonetheless capable of shaving off their beards and melting into the local scene. They came across as such decent young men that one recent Moroccan acquaintance protested their innocence to police saying, ’It is impossible that they are terrorists. They are so kind.’ So strong were there convictions, sources say, that they didn’t bother to deny their Al Qaeda connections when police questioned them. ’They are very convinced of their cause,’ explains one source. ’They don’t consider themselves terrorists, but missionaries.’ Adds a U.S. official: ’These are dangerous men.’ "

Scott Macleod, Time

"It must have been one of Jose Padilla’s proudest moments. He had spent his life chasing respect but rarely earning itmarking a dreary passage from a Chicago gang to juvenile detention to grownup prison to a Florida fast-food job and, finally, to a new life as a Muslim in the Middle East. And there he was, somewhere in Pakistan just six months after the Sept. 11 attacks, allegedly presenting an ominous proposal to Abu Zubaydah, Osama bin Laden’s operations chief. Padilla, 31, had prepped hard for his meeting, but his ambition outstripped his guile. Senior U.S. officials tell Time that Padilla, conducting research on the Internet, had come across instructions for building a nuclear bomb’an H-bomb,’ as a top official described it. The instructions were laughably inaccuratemore a parody than a planbut not recognizing that, Padilla took them to Abu Zubaydah and other al-Qaeda planners and said he wanted to detonate such a weapon in the U.S. ’He was trying to build something that would attain a nuclear yield,’ says a senior Bush Administration official monitoring Padilla’s case. In response, Abu Zubaydah apparently cautioned his eager job applicant to think smallerto get some training and attack America with a so-called ’dirty bomb,’ a conventional explosive packed with radioactive waste that would spew when the bomb blew up. ’They sent him to the U.S. to see what he could doplan and execute,’ the official says. What he did was get arrested as soon as he stepped off the plane on May 8, having come full circle, back to Chicago, the site of his first encounters with the law."

Amanda Ripley, Time