Yosri Fouda on 9/11

Peter Bergen’s book is called The Osama bin Laden I Know. Does he know him?

Yes. This book is very comprehensive. It’s just about the best reference book in America when it comes to bin Laden, as far as the establishment is concerned. Bergen met bin Laden once – he was a producer for CNN and he arranged the meeting with local people who gave him access. He took along the correspondent, Peter Arnett, and they talked in some detail. The idea of the book is that he interviewed many people who knew bin Laden personally and who studied him and who followed him. It’s a personal account and it makes it more vivid for people and helps them to relate to it more.

I don’t think the average reader knows why bin Laden decided to leave life and the world and all that it offered, especially as he came from this famous, rich family, and why he decided to live off bread and water in a cold cave. Peter Bergen believes, even now that al Qaeda is dismantled, that bin Laden is very important. I agree that he is important, but I disagree in the sense that if you focus only on him then you miss the people on the ground like Mohammed Atta. Bergen thinks it’s the leadership, but I think that without Mohammed Atta 9/11 wouldn’t have happened. It’s the small people on the ground willing to die, but there are a lot of those. If they are willing to die and capable of pulling something together then you have a deadly combination. I don’t think al Qaeda recruited Mohammed Atta. I think Mohammed Atta recruited al Qaeda. It suited him and he needed an umbrella for his frustration. There is never a shortage of people who want to die, but al Qaeda was shopping for people of this kind of calibre.

When I met Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the real mastermind of 9/11, he said there was no shortage in what he called ‘the department of martyrs’ – the problem he had was keeping a lid on them. What he needed but what he didn’t have was people who read and speak English, who know the lifestyle, who can integrate and are intelligent but frustrated perfectionists. Before they had Mohammed Atta they had these two Saudi guys in California who were referred to everywhere as ‘Dumb and Dumber’(Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi).

This book is a great reference when it comes to the mindset of al Qaeda.

What did motivate bin Laden to abandon his background for bread, water and terrorism?

Well, he started highlighting the problems of the ruling family in Saudi Arabia and he moved on to looking at corrupt Arab leaders who were supported by America. He found that you can’t get through to the corrupt leaders if America keeps interfering. He is not interested in hurting the US just for the sake of it. He’s a Caliphist – he’s interested in purifying Islam in his own way, going back to the early days of Islam, pure and free of corruption.

This book is a great insight into bin Laden and what he believes in, how he developed and how he came to express himself in the end. You will hardly come across anyone in the Arab world who would disagree with what, but you will hardly come across anyone who would agree with how.

Now Lawrence Wright’s book, The Looming Tower.

I have just interviewed him for my show, actually. He is an old friend. This book has similarities with the first, but Lawrence is aware of how to tell a story, how to make it appeal to an audience. He lived in Egypt in 1969-1971 and then in Saudi Arabia where he wrote the book. The title is a quote from the Quran: ‘Wherever you are, death will find you, even in the looming tower.’ He did five years of research and met over 600 people. It is a vast research on how we arrived at 9/11, the circumstances and the mindset. It has a huge scope. He studies the socio-economic background to 9/11 and the people who knew Osama. He had 6,000 pages of notes…

And does he draw any conclusions?

It’s not like the last few pages are the conclusions he comes to, but you get a kind of picture. He talks about the socio-economic dependency of women, and the hypocrisy you get in this part of the world. I would like him to have highlighted, or refuted, if that’s what he found, the influence of the political situation and why people would feel strongly enough to kill themselves for a cause, the relationship between the Arab world and the West, the Palestinian situation, Israel. But it’s more about the culture of hypocrisy that doesn’t produce the best. A culture that produces frustration rather than hope.

Karen Greenberg’s The Least Worst Place.

Greenberg is the director of the Centre on Law and Security at NYU and she’s very critical of the Bush era and all the practical aspects of it, especially detention. She’s done some great work here on Guantanamo and its first 100 days.