Is bin Laden a terrorist mastermind --
or a fall guy?
BY LOREN JENKINS
The Clinton administration accuses Saudi renegade Osama
bin Laden of being directly responsible for almost every
terrorist act of the last decade. But where's the evidence?
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"Our target was
terror. Our
mission was clear."
-- President
Clinton, Aug. 20,
1998
To the litany of terrorist acts that President Clinton
laid at the feet of renegade Saudi millionaire Osama
bin Laden in justification of his cruise missile attacks
on Afghanistan and the Sudan last week, the
administration has now alleged a murky plot to
assassinate the president as well.
The alleged plot against Clinton was to have taken
place when he was to have visited Pakistan. The
anonymous intelligence sources that have made such
an industry in bin Laden revelations this week
acknowledge that the plot never went beyond the
coffee-shop talking stage.
But the charge helped to reinforce the president's
claims that bin Laden is "perhaps the preeminent
organizer and financier of international terrorism in
the world today," and that there was "compelling" -- if
unrevealable -- evidence that a network of terrorist
groups he controlled was planning "further attacks
against Americans and other freedom-loving groups."
At a time when presidential veracity is at an all-time
low, one might have wished that the president and his
national security advisors had laid out in detail just
what was the "compelling evidence" that led the United
States to launch some 75 missiles at two sovereign
nations.
As it is, the public, both here in the United States and
in the more critical world at large, is being asked to
take a giant Kierkegaardian leap of faith in the
president's claims. Given Clinton's recent track record
in the "trust me" department, this is a lot to demand.
For while there is little doubt that bin Laden is a sworn
enemy of the United States with the financial means to
put some teeth in that enmity, his exact role in
anti-American terrorism is unclear. The
administration's claims are based more on conjecture
-- mostly bin Laden's own braggadocio and the bad
company he apparently keeps -- than hard and
convincing evidence.
Clinton and his security staff have now blamed bin
Laden for being behind almost every terrorist act in the
past decade -- from plotting the assassinations of the
pope and the president of Egypt to the planned
bombing of six U.S. jumbo jets over the Pacific, with
massacres of German tourists at Luxor and the killings
of U.S. troops in Somalia, fatal car bombings of U.S.
military personnel in Saudi Arabia and this month's
truck bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and
Dar es Salaam thrown in. Not since the '70s heyday of
the terrorist Carlos has there been such a Prince of
Darkness, if the allegations are to be believed.
But so far, for all of the accusations, no government,
not even that of the United States, has established
enough credible evidence against bin Laden to
conclusively prove his direct participation in, much
less leadership of, any of the ugly plots and acts he
stands accused of. To date no formal request for his
extradition has ever been made, either to the Sudanese
government that once housed him or to his current
hosts, Afghanistan's Taliban leaders.
Though it was suddenly leaked this week that a federal
grand jury's continuing investigation into the World
Trade Center bombing in New York City in 1993 had
belatedly handed up a sealed indictment against bin
Laden in June, the indictment is understood to be only
for "sedition," that is, incitement to violence, not the
violence itself. That is the same charge under which
the Unites States previously convicted Egyptian cleric
Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the Trade Center bomber's
spiritual leader.
The only link between bin Laden and the World Trade
Center bombing seems to be the fact that the
mastermind of the bombing, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef,
was eventually detained by U.S. agents while living in a
guest house in Pakistan reportedly rented by bin Laden.
The Saudi was also implicated in a failed 1994 plan to
blow up American jumbo jets over the Pacific because
the plot mastermind, Wali Khan Amin Shah, reportedly
was a "close friend" of bin Laden's.
If bin Laden's fingerprints were to be found on any
terrorist acts of the last decade, they should have been
on the two attacks against U.S. military personnel
carried out in the years when he was still living in his
Saudi Arabian homeland. Bin Laden, a wealthy Saudi
engineering graduate who became a radical Muslim
after joining the war against Russia's occupation of
Afghanistan in 1979, became virulently anti-American
after U.S. troops were stationed in Saudi Arabia during
the 1991 Gulf War.
To him the American presence in Saudi Arabia, home
of the holy Islamic sites Mecca and Medina, is a
sacrilege he has vowed to reverse, along with toppling
the "corrupt" Saudi royal family that has allowed it.
Thus, when a car bomb exploded at a Saudi National
Guard office in Riyadh in 1995, killing five
Americans, and another blew up at the Khobar Towers
Barracks in Dhahran a year later, killing another 19, bin
Laden seemed the most likely suspect.
But neither the FBI, the CIA nor the Saudi intelligence
services has ever been able to establish bin Laden's
links to those crimes after years of trying. What
evidence that has emerged from those ongoing
investigations points the finger at dissident Saudi
Shiites, perhaps with the logistic support of the
Lebanese Hezbollah organization, or even Iran.
Though much has been made of the fact that from his
safe-houses in Afghanistan bin Laden has forged a
loose alliance with perhaps a dozen different Islamic
groups in the Muslim world from Algeria to
Bangladesh, he seems to be more of a spiritual leader
and financier than the sort of terrorist mastermind
being alleged.
"Bin Laden is a true believer and a funder of Islamic
causes, rather than a planner and active participant,"
says Professor Shibley Telhani, a Middle East scholar
from the University of Maryland who has followed his
career. "His real influence is not as a mastermind of
terrorism but as a person who is using a personal
fortune to encourage others to wage war against the
American interests in the Middle East he finds so
objectionable."
Indeed the sealed federal indictment just handed up, it
would appear, is not based on any evidence directly
linking him to either of those plots or others. Instead,
it seems to have been motivated by a public call to
arms against Americans that bin Laden published in the
London Arabic newspaper Al-Quds al-Arabi last
February. Issued as an Islamic Fatwa, or holy order,
even though bin Laden has no religious authority
whatsoever, the broadside by bin Laden and other
signers from various Islamic groups called for
Muslims to "kill Americans and their allies, civilians
and military" wherever they find them.
These are strong words indeed. But they are words, not
deeds. And though it is all too likely that those words
have inspired others to such actions as the bombings of
the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam last
month, bin Laden himself is unlikely to have
personally ordered those bombings or carried them
out.
Unless the Clinton administration can come up with
some hard evidence that bin Laden is in fact calling the
shots of a vast new anti-American terrorist network, all
the present allegations and faceless
intelligence-source leaks claiming facts too secret and
explosive to be revealed should be taken with a grain of
salt.
Bin Laden may be a dangerous anti-American zealot
with a mouth as big as his bankroll. But the evidence so
far does not support him being a cerebral Islamic Dr.
No moving an army of terrorist troops on a vast world
chessboard to checkmate the United States.
SALON | Aug. 27, 1998
Loren Jenkins, senior foreign editor of National Public Radio, is
an occasional contributor to Salon.
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