Frankly, reading the title “Now It Begins,” sort of strikes a feeling of laughter inside me because I feel like that phrase has been used so many times up till now in a comical way that I don’t feel that sense of rush that it is supposed to invoke in this context. Anyways, clearly when it is put in the context of Bin Laden, we know nothing good is about to happen, especially after we learned about how he felt about the US. Today, I’ll be talking about the series of events occurring in, “The Looming Tower” by Lawrence Wright.
As we’ve previously learned, Bin Laden now for some odd reason (“definitely not” spontaneous in slightest and/or an attempt to take anger out on unrelated people) decided to target the US and blamed them for all his misfortunes. We also learned that Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri released a “fatwa” declaring that violence against Americans was acceptable. Obviously, the US found out about this and decided to take action against it. The US planned to kidnap Bin Laden and bring him to America for trial. The director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet requested that Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia aid the US in securing Bin Laden. Abdullah, upon the request, sent Prince Turki to do just that. Saudi Arabia tried to negotiate and even provided supplies but the Taliban did not decide to let go of bin Laden. In 1998, CIA intelligence managed to acquire extremely vital info on al-jihad and Al-Qaeda after kidnapping a close follower of al-Zawahiri who’s laptop contained the info. There was some debate that the CIA shared the info with the FBI but there was a huge department rivalry and one of the top intelligence agency John O’Neill who was one of main agents on the Bin Laden investigation, never got the info. This was perhaps one of the worst decisions ever made and one of the worst examples of bad coordination in US history. Anyways, around this time, al-Qaeda also attacked with a series of bombings on U.S embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. After, FBI officials inquired about a man named Khaleed Saleem bin Rasheed who gave info on the upcoming attacks planned by al-Qaeda. The US later did try to respond back with a series of attacks but they yielded little results. At this point though, the internal damage had already been done, and al-Qaeda had a field laid out for them.
This is probably like the 20th or so time I’ve heard the two words “internal conflict” when discussing the topic of 9/11 and al-Qaeda. Apparently 20 times wasn’t enough so the point once again is that if we hadn’t had such competitive intelligence agencies, maybe we could have done something about that scary attack, but no. We refuse to cooperate because of our selfish desires and that one moment in history is the result of it.