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Overview
The bombings of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and of the World Trade Center in New York City have joined a long history of terrorists acts against the United States. In this newly updated edition of his book, Jeffrey Simon reaches back to the founding days of the Republic to tell a story that is both instructive and alarming. Simon uncovers the dynamics of a deadly conflict that affects all Americans. His in-depth interviews with terrorists and their victims, with reporters, government officials, and others bring to life a tale of presidents and terrorists, media and society, all entangled in a drama of international violence.
The Terrorist Trap explores the psychological, political, and social elements that make terrorism unlike any other conflict. With the end of the Cold War and the defeat of Saddam Hussein’s army in the Gulf War, many believed that the threat of terrorism had been significantly reduced. But Simon shows how terrorism grows out of political, economic, and social grievances that can never be fully resolved, as events in Israel and elsewhere continue to demonstrate. Living with terrorism will be an inescapable part of life in the twenty-first century. Simon calls on officials to move away from the useless rhetoric of defeating terrorism and to focus instead on achievable goals in combating this global problem.
“A solid, commonsense look at a phenomenon capable of producing the strongest emotions.” —Booklist
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253028266 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2021 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 484 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
JEFFREY D. SIMON is a foreign policy consultant and writer.
Read an Excerpt
The Terrorist Trap
America's Experience With Terrorism
By Jeffrey D. Simon
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2001 Jeffrey D. SimonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-02826-6
CHAPTER 1
Welcome to Reality
Siddig Ibrahim Siddig Ali, a Sudanese Muslim living in the New York area, did not know that the man he was talking to was an FBI informant. "The operation is to make them lose millions and that is what happened," Siddig Ali said. "This is a message. We want to tell them that you are not far from us, we can get you anytime." He was explaining the reason for the bombing of the World Trade Center; he would later be arrested in connection with a separate plot to blow up several other targets in New York City, including the United Nations headquarters. For Siddig Ali, terrorism was a useful tool for causing disruption and spreading fear. For most Americans, terrorism seemed to be a problem that occurred elsewhere around the globe. It took the World Trade Center bombing to shatter that illusion and bring America back to reality.
It was not as though the United States had never experienced terrorism before a small band of religious extremists exploded a bomb at the World Trade Center on February 26, 1993. As we will see later in this book, Americans have been a favorite target of terrorists abroad, and there have been numerous bombings and hijackings committed within the United States. But the continual wave of spectacular terrorist attacks that plagued the people of London, Paris, Rome, and countless other cities around the world was absent from the United States.
A myth of invulnerability thus grew in America as each year passed without a series of major terrorist incidents. Since international terrorists could find an abundance of U.S. targets overseas to strike with relative ease and avoid capture, it appeared as though they would be unwilling to risk traveling to the United States to carry out their violence. And those groups and individuals already in the country who might be inclined to terrorist violence would hopefully be deterred by the good record of U.S. law enforcement in capturing those responsible for domestic terrorism.
Yet it was only a matter of time before America joined the rest of the world in encountering terrorist assaults on its soil. The end of the Cold War increased such prospects, since there were now ethnic-religious conflicts sprouting up all over the globe, and America, the lone superpower, became a tempting target for extremists not happy with U.S. policy concerning their plight. The need to bring attention to their cause with a dramatic, unprecedented act of terrorism within the United States might be a risk they deemed worth taking. This could emanate from terrorists who managed to slip past U.S. immigration officials, or from those foreign nationals already in the United States, or even from American citizens who identify with a particular foreign grievance.
So it should not have been a surprise when a truck bomb exploded in the underground parking garage of the north tower of the World Trade Center. But the fact that it was a surprise underscores the state of denial in America concerning the threat of terrorism.
The bombing was the largest one ever to take place within the United States: 1,200 pounds of nitrate explosives hidden in a rental van. It caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage, as Siddig Ali had noted, although much of these losses to the New York economy were offset by insurance reimbursements, federal emergency assistance, and a surge of reconstruction work for local contractors. The real significance of the event, however, lay in the symbolism of the target. The terrorist message was clear: If they could launch a successful attack in one of America's most populated cities and against one of the world's most famous business and financial structures, then no city, building, or person in America could be considered safe from terrorists.
Adding to the drama were television pictures of frantic office workers trapped in the skyscraper as smoke rushed upward through the elevator shafts. More than fifty thousand people were believed to be in the 110story, twin tower World Trade Center at the time of the explosion, and many of them had to walk down scores of flights of stairs in darkness, as the blast blew out power for the elevators and for some of the lights. The continual flow of people being led to waiting ambulances — six people were killed and more than one thousand injured, most of them by smoke inhalation — made this terrorist incident a truly unforgettable one for the country.
It was also an unforgettable experience for Ptor Gjestland, a twenty-six-year-old trader with Sumitomo Bank in New York. Gjestland was at his desk on the ninety-sixth floor of the north tower, or tower one, when the bomb exploded. The lights flickered off for a second. "We were all just kind of looking around at each other and we all came to the same conclusion: lightning hit the building," said Gjestland. "There were no alarms. We figured if there was a fire and explosion there should be alarms going off."
The first inclination Gjestland had that something was wrong was when a business associate who worked in tower two of the trade center made a frantic telephone call to him. "He came screaming over my line, 'Pete, there's smoke coming out of your building." Gjestland said. He then ran over to the window and could see smoke pouring out from the lower floors. There were also fire trucks in the street. While some of his colleagues immediately left, Gjestland remained at his desk, thinking the situation was under control since no alarms were sounded. But when he began to smell smoke, he knew it was time to go.
By the time Gjestland left his office, smoke was already flowing from the elevators. The stairwell was packed with other workers. "People were just walking down, no one was really worried yet," said Gjestland. "But then it became a point where you weren't really moving. There were so many people trying to get in all at once. Everybody is running out [of their offices] at that point. You have a couple of people [who] start whimpering, and other people getting worried about it, and other people are [saying], 'We're never going to get out of here.' And then the hysteria just kind of builds."
Gjestland and his small group of fellow traders thought they would only have to walk down to the seventy-eighth floor, where they could then take another set of elevators that operate from the first floor to the seventy-eighth. But when they got there they found smoke once again pouring from the elevators. They now realized that they had no choice but to continue the trek by foot. Confusion and concern were growing by the minute. "You just kind of follow people down. And this is when people start getting worried because the smoke is really bad. Everyone is starting to cough. The people who are really heavy are having problems. They're having problems breathing. People start crying, and we're still in the seventies [floors]," said Gjestland.
As he continued his descent, he passed by more people who had given up hope. "People [were] sitting down [saying], 'What do we do? We're not going to get out of this,'" Gjestland said. With his eyes burning and vision impaired from the smoke, Gjestland continued the journey. At around the fiftieth floor, those who were trying to direct the evacuation told people to rest and get some fresh air through broken windows. Gjestland and his group would have no part of that. "We just said, 'Forget it, we're not waiting around.'" They took off and continued down the stairs. "We knew it was getting really weird because there was actually a mink coat lying in the stairwell," Gjestland said.
People had discarded their briefcases and heavy coats as the ordeal of the flight down the stairs took its toll. At around the fortieth floor there was complete darkness. "So all we did is we put our hands on each other's shoulders in front of you," said Gjestland. "And we just walked down, we just counted the steps. And we just kind of did like [a] double-, triple-time kind of deal. And then when we got down on the eighteenth floor we finally saw a fireman coming up. And we said, 'Is there any fire?' And [he] said, 'No,' and we knew [then] we were going to get out."
The climb down the ninety-six floors took Gjestland approximately two-and-a-half hours. Those who rested and who moved slower did not get out of the building for about four or five hours. By the time Gjestland reached the first floor, he was dead tired. He had soot all over him; his white shirt was now black. But despite the trauma of the long descent, he was not prepared for the sight that awaited him when he opened the door at the last stairwell and entered the lobby of the trade center. "When we got out [at] the first floor, it looked like a war zone," said Gjestland. "I had never seen anything like it, the haze of the smoke, the broken glass, everywhere. It was like a movie set. It was just surreal."
The magnitude of the situation now hit him. "This was the first time we realized what had happened," said Gjestland. "The fireman [had] told us there had been an explosion and now we could see where it was. We were [saying], 'Oh, my God. What could have really happened to us!' Because we didn't really know [previously] what had really happened. And then you see what the devastation was. And you're [saying], 'Oh, my God, the building could have fallen over, who knows.'"
After realizing a bomb caused the explosion, his thoughts turned to terrorism. "You always thought, well, America, no one touches us," said Gjestland. He could not understand why the terrorists would want to inflict so much death and destruction. "Why do they want to blow us up?" Gjestland asked himself. And he reflected the sentiment of the nation when he noted, "Basically, you're upset. You know, like this stuff shouldn't happen in America. It never does. What's going on?"
Terrorists had struck America, and the public was understandably anxious. But whereas most people throughout the world had long ago learned that terrorism was an unfortunate yet inevitable part of life, a threat that needed to be combated but one that they knew could never be completely defeated, Americans somehow could not accept this reality. The postmortem on the World Trade Center bombing thus became a national search for blame. Something had to have gone wrong for this event to have taken place. Perhaps it was lax security at major office buildings, some critics argued. Others put the blame on police and law enforcement officials for failing to prevent the attack. Still others pointed to U.S. immigration laws, since several of those arrested in connection with the bombing were Islamic extremists who had emigrated to the United States.
The level of alarm over the bombing was fueled by an endless stream of pundits who appeared on television talk shows or wrote Op-Ed articles in newspapers. The title of one of these articles best captured the growing anxiety in the country: The piece was bluntly headlined "The Terrorists among Us."
Then, while the investigation into the World Trade Center bombing was continuing, the other shoe dropped. The FBI announced the arrest in June 1993 of eight more Islamic extremists for plotting to blow up four targets in New York on or near Independence Day. "The subjects were actually mixing the witches' brew," James Fox, the head of the FBI's New York office, told reporters, describing the scene as agents raided the terrorists' hide-out in Queens, New York, as they were making their bombs. Their plan was to set off car bombs at the United Nations headquarters, the Lincoln and Holland tunnels that carried thousands of motorists, and the Federal building in Manhattan that houses the FBI and other government agencies.
It was a classic terrorist strategy. Follow up one attack with an even more spectacular one to ensure public and government attention and reaction. America now had two major terrorist episodes to worry about, with the prospect of more attacks looming. Who, then, were these "terrorists among us," and what did they really want?
The Old Man from Jersey City
Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman cut an unlikely figure for a terrorist guru. In fact, most Americans probably would have helped the Muslim cleric to cross a street had they run into him in any city in the country. Rahman was blind and diabetic, and with a gray beard and slow gait, appeared much older than his fifty-five years. Yet he had a loyal following that consisted of militant and alienated youths from the Middle East who were living in the New York area and a much larger group in Egypt.
The faithful flocked to his sermons in a mosque in Jersey City, just across the Hudson River from New York, and also to one in Brooklyn where he occasionally preached. His stature was such that Siddig Ali, the Sudanese Muslim arrested on terrorism charges, told the FBI informant, "I don't make a step unless I check with the law of our religion from Sheik Omar."
How the Sheik wound up in the United States in the first place was a source of embarrassment for the U.S. government. Rahman was tried, but acquitted, in Egypt for involvement in the 1981 assassination of President Anwar Sadat. One of the people executed for the murder testified that Rahman issued a fatwa, or religious blessing, for the assassination, but the Egyptian government could not prove the charges. Rahman was tried in 1989 for instigating a riot that left hundreds of people dead, but he was once again acquitted.
Rahman, who remained the spiritual leader of the extremist al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya (the Islamic Group) in Egypt, was deported to Sudan in 1990. He was given a visa at the American embassy in Khartoum to enter the United States despite being on a State Department list of suspected terrorists. He was then issued a green card to remain in the United States as a religious worker. U.S. government officials claimed that the visa and green card were issued in error.
Once in the United States, Rahman lost no time in preaching against the evils of Western life. He called for a jihad, or holy war, and for the overthrow of the secular Egyptian government. One of his followers was El-Sayyid Nosair, who, like Rahman, worked on behalf of the Afghan rebels in their war with Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s. He was arrested in 1990 for the assassination of Rabbi Meir Kahane, an ultranationalist in Israeli politics. Although Nosair was acquitted of the murder, he was convicted on related charges. Siddig Ali visited him in prison, as did another Rahman follower, Mohammed Salameh.
The twenty-five-year-old Salameh came to the United States from Jordan in 1987 in the hopes of building a better life for himself. Instead, he gained the distinction of being the first person arrested for the World Trade Center bombing. It was Salameh who rented the yellow van that carried the explosives into the parking garage. After investigators retrieved the vehicle identification number from the wreckage, they traced the van to a New Jersey rental office of the Ryder Corporation. There, they discovered Salameh's name on the rental papers. Using his own name to rent the vehicle was not a very smart move by the young man. He then compounded his error by reporting the vehicle stolen after the bombing in an effort to get back his $400 deposit. Salameh was taken into custody when he appeared at the rental office, and the roundup of Rahman's followers soon began.
Several people arrested for the World Trade Center bombing had worshiped at Rahman's Jersey City mosque. The same was true for those apprehended for plotting to blow up the four targets in New York. But Sheik Rahman was not initially arrested for any terrorist-related activity. Instead, he was detained in July 1993 for falsifying his visa application — he lied about a prior arrest in Egypt for check forgery — and for being a polygamist, both grounds for deportation. A federal judge in August 1993 upheld the deportation order and also denied the sheik's request for political asylum, calling Rahman "a danger to the security of the United States." Then, as the legal fate of the sheik was being determined — Egypt had earlier requested his extradition while Rahman was reportedly requesting Afghanistan as his final destination — a federal grand jury indicted Rahman for being the leader of a group that conspired to engage in terrorism.
Sheik Rahman was only the latest in a long list of adversaries that has marked America's experience with terrorism. We will see in the following pages how the Khomeinis and Qaddafis of the world have continually frustrated America in its battles against terrorism. While Rahman did not have the full powers and resources of a government to call upon, he did have a fervent following that felt morally justified in its actions. Rahman and his supporters caused a great deal of havoc in the United States — although labeling him a threat to U.S. national security greatly exaggerated his capabilities. America was not going to fall from the actions of any group of terrorists. But what the World Trade Center bombing and the additional terrorist plot clearly demonstrated was that America was going to be caught up in the cycle of violence and revenge that marks current ethnic and religious conflicts throughout the world.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Terrorist Trap by Jeffrey D. Simon. Copyright © 2001 Jeffrey D. Simon. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Preliminary Table of Contents:
Introduction to the Second Edition
Prologue
1. Welcome to Reality
2. The Endless Nature of Terrorism
3. The Threat Emerges
4. The Setting of the Terrorist Trap
5. Tough Talk on Terrorism
6. The Mother of All Hostage Takers
7. Media Players
8. Roots
9. Future Trends
10.Lessons Learned
Epilogue
Interviews
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index