The Eleventh Day

  It is a fair guess that much if not all of this was disinformation, planted to suggest to the quarry that U.S. intelligence had lost the scent, had no strong lead as to where precisely bin Laden might be, and had no plan for an imminent strike against him.

  At 10:24 P.M. on the night of Sunday, May 1, 2011—an improbable hour—this bulletin came over the wires:

  Breaking News Alert: White House says Obama to make late-night statement on an undisclosed topic.

  Soon after, there was this from The Washington Post:

  Osama bin Laden has been killed in a CIA operation in Pakistan, President Obama will announce from the White House, according to multiple sources.

  At 11:35 P.M., the President appeared on television screens across the globe to say:

  Tonight I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al Qaeda and a terrorist who’s responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women and children.…

  The images of 9/11 are seared into our national memory.… And yet we know that the worst images are those that were unseen to the world. The empty seat at the dinner table. Children who were forced to grow up without their mother or their father. Parents who would never know the feeling of their child’s embrace. Nearly three thousand citizens taken from us.…

  Osama bin Laden avoided capture and escaped across the border into Pakistan.… Shortly after taking office I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority of the war against al Qaeda.… Then, last August, after years of painstaking work by our intelligence community, I was briefed on a possible lead to bin Laden.… I met repeatedly with my security team as we developed more information about the possibility that we had located bin Laden hiding within a compound deep inside of Pakistan. And finally, last week, I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action.…

  Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation.… A small team of Americans carried out the operation with extraordinary courage.… No Americans were harmed.… After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.

  It was a momentous victory. Jubilant Americans thronged in front of the White House, in Times Square, and at Ground Zero. For many days, there was wall-to-wall coverage in newspapers, television, and radio. The Internet hummed with information.

  In its haste to break the news to the world, apparently before personnel involved in the strike against bin Laden had been fully debriefed, U.S. government officials put out information that would turn out to have been inaccurate. An initial claim that bin Laden had used a woman as a human shield, and that she had been shot dead as a result, proved to be unfounded. A woman did die in the assault, but elsewhere in the compound.

  Contrary to an early statement giving the impression that bin Laden was armed and died fighting, presidential spokesman Jay Carney later said he had been unarmed. “Resistance,” Carney said, “does not require a firearm.” The al Qaeda leader had been in his nightclothes when confronted, it was reported later, clothing that could conceivably have concealed a weapon or explosives. The U.S. commandos involved, said CIA director Leon Panetta, “had full authority to kill him.”

  The rush to get the story out, albeit raw and insufficiently checked, had not been merely for maximum impact. U.S. officials had in part rushed to get their version out, it was reported, “before the Pakistanis pushed theirs.”

  The version of events that emerged from Pakistan was indeed different. A twelve-year-old daughter of bin Laden, who survived, was quoted as saying her father had been “captured alive and shot dead by the U.S. Special Forces during the first few minutes … in front of family members.” That provocative quote, significantly, was sourced as coming from “senior Pakistani security officials.”

  Pakistan was compromised by the strike, for bin Laden had been living—by all accounts for years, comfortably housed and well protected—in not just any Pakistani city. He had been living in the pleasant town of Abbottabad, where many serving and retired military officers live, and within shouting distance of the nation’s most prestigious military academy—the equivalent of America’s West Point. The ISI also had a presence there.

  Officials in Washington did not mince their words when these facts became public. The Pakistanis, CIA director Panetta said, had been either “involved or incompetent.” The President’s counterterrorism advisor, John Brennan, thought it “inconceivable” that bin Laden had not had a “support system” in Abbottabad. On CBS’s 60 Minutes, Obama himself speculated “whether there might have been some people inside of government, people outside of government, [supporting bin Laden] … that’s something we have to investigate, and more importantly the Pakistani government has to investigate.”

  Bin Laden, Pakistan’s President Zardari said helplessly, “was not anywhere we had anticipated he would be.” The ISI, long the principal object of U.S. suspicion, denied that it had shielded the terrorist or had known where he was. Former ISI chief Hamid Gul, the veteran supporter of jihad, declared it “a bit amazing” that bin Laden could have been living in Abbottabad incognito.

  Bin Laden had been tracked to Abbottabad, U.S. sources revealed as this book went to press, thanks to information on his use of couriers to hand-carry messages to his associates. Unmentioned in the coverage these authors have seen are facts about the link between Abbottabad and al Qaeda that former president Musharraf made public as long ago as 2006—five years before the U.S. caught up with bin Laden and killed him.

  Pakistan’s 2005 capture and transfer to U.S. custody of another very senior bin Laden aide—Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s successor, Abu Faraj al-Libi—Musharraf had written, had been achieved after a prolonged pursuit by Pakistani investigators. In the course of the hunt, according to Musharraf, the investigators discovered that Libi used no less than three safe houses—in Abbottabad. Far from being a place where one would not expect a top terrorist to be hiding, it turns out, Abbottabad has a track record for being exactly that.

  America’s eventual success in tracking down bin Laden, it is clear from the reporting, grew out of the intelligence gained from Libi back in 2005. It is possible—if the Musharraf account turns out to be accurate, and whatever role Pakistan may have played in the years that followed—that Pakistan deserves at least some of the credit for the outcome in 2011.

  According to CIA director Panetta, U.S. authorities gave the Pakistanis no advance notice of the 2011 strike that led to bin Laden’s demise—though the operation involved a highly sensitive incursion, an overflight of Pakistan’s airspace, and action on the ground deep inside Pakistani territory. “It was decided,” Panetta told Time magazine, “that any effort to work with the Pakistanis could jeopardize the mission. They might alert the targets.”

  Both U.S. and Pakistani officials, however, initially suggested that Pakistan may have been informed—“a few minutes” in advance. Some sources in the Pakistani capital claimed that they had been cooperating with the United States, and had been keeping the building in Abbottabad under surveillance.

  There is another wrinkle, one that may eventually illuminate the truth about the attitude of those in authority in Pakistan—whatever knowledge some Pakistani element may have had of bin Laden’s presence in the town. Ten days after the strike against bin Laden, it was reported that a decade ago—after 9/11—President Bush struck a deal with then–Pakistan president Musharraf. Under the deal, should bin Laden be located inside Pakistan’s borders, the U.S. would be permitted unilaterally to conduct a raid.

  “There was an agreement,” a former senior U.S. official was quoted as saying, “that if we knew where Osama was, we were going to come and get him. The Pakistanis would put up a hue and cry, but they wouldn’t stop us.” Musharraf has denied that the reported deal was made. A Pakistani official, however, reportedly offered corroboration for the story. “As far as our American f
riends are concerned,” he said, “they have just implemented the agreement.”

  Pakistan did, sure enough, protest the violation of its sovereignty after bin Laden was killed. Should anything similar occur in the future, Prime Minister Yousaf Gilani said sternly, his country would be within its rights “to retaliate with full force.” That, though, according to the U.S. source of the story, was merely the “public face” of the arrangement. Gilani himself had reportedly long since said of similar possible American action: “I don’t care if they do it, so long as they get the right people. We’ll protest in the National Assembly and then ignore it.”

  A full, authoritative account of the painstaking hunt for the world’s most wanted man, and an accurate telling of the circumstances surrounding his bloody end, lies in the future. Meanwhile, the certainty must be that Osama bin Laden is dead.

  His cadaver has not been seen publicly—U.S. officials say it was rapidly disposed of at sea following Muslim funeral rites. As of early June 2011, no photographs had been publicly released—President Obama said displaying “trophies” was not his administration’s way. Some members of the Congress, however, are said to have seen photographs and to accept that the face of the dead man depicted resembles that of bin Laden. DNA analysis has established the identification, according to the administration.

  In a statement on the websites on which it habitually posted messages, moreover, al Qaeda acknowledged that bin Laden is dead. His blood, it threatened, will not have been spilled in vain. “We will remain, God willing, a curse chasing the Americans and their agents.… Soon, God willing, their happiness will turn to sadness. Their blood will be mingled with their tears.”

  AFTERWORD

  IN THE TEN YEARS SINCE THE ATTACKS ON THE UNITED STATES—THE last four and more of them dominated for us by the writing of this book—there have been momentous events that grew out of the catastrophe—and resolution of virtually nothing.

  “We are sure of our victory against the Americans and Jews, as promised by the Prophet,” bin Laden had said three years before 9/11. In 2009, in a letter to the military judges at Guantánamo, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed said the attack had been “the noblest victory known to history over the forces of oppression and tyranny.”

  Victory? Amid all his flowery verbiage, the essential elements of what bin Laden demanded are clear. He called for: the “complete liberation of Palestine”; an end to the American “Crusaders’ occupation of Saudi Arabia”; an end to the U.S. “theft” of Arab oil at “paltry prices”; and the removal of [Arab] governments that “have surrendered to the Jews.”

  A decade on, we are witnessing a great upheaval across the Middle East. Two Arab dictatorships have been toppled, six others to one degree or another rocked by rebellion or protest. Oil, which bin Laden had variously said should retail at $144 a barrel and “$100 a barrel at least,” at one point since 2001 peaked at $146. In early spring 2011, it stood at $124.

  As for the presence of U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia, all were gone by fall 2003. Only conditional upon a subsequent pullout, reportedly, had Crown Prince Abdullah permitted the use of Saudi bases for the invasion of Iraq. The Palestine issue, though—a constant in bin Laden’s rhetoric from the start and so far as one can tell the primary motivation for KSM and the principal operatives involved in the 9/11 attacks—festers on.

  How much the activity of bin Laden and al Qaeda had to do with what has changed is another matter. Though rumors swirl, there is no good evidence that Islamist extremism is playing an important role in the latest turmoil across the region. The price of oil vacillates not so much according to doctrine as according to the law of supply and demand. On the other hand, the threat of more terrorist attacks—in both America and Saudi Arabia—was surely a factor in the decision to remove the U.S. military from Saudi territory.

  The decade has seen some American pressure applied to Israel over its persistent occupation of Palestinian territory and its overall treatment of the Palestinians. It has been ineffectual pressure, though, and the United States’ commitment to Israel seems undiminished. Few people, it seems, are even aware that the Palestine issue was a primary motivation for the perpetrators of 9/11.

  The true effect of the 2001 onslaught is less what it achieved than what it triggered. Bin Laden and some of those closest to him had fervently hoped to goad the United States into retaliating. “We wanted the United States to attack,” his military chief Mohammed Atef said after an earlier attack. “… They are going to invade Afghanistan … and then we will start holy war against the Americans, exactly like the Soviets.” The notion was that the United States could be bled into defeat, literally and financially, as the Soviets had been in Afghanistan, and bin Laden shared it.

  Then there was Iraq. “I am rejoicing,” he said in 2003, “that America has become embroiled in the quagmires of the Tigris and Euphrates. Bush thought that Iraq and its oil would be easy prey, and now here he is, stuck in dire straits.”

  A decade after 9/11, even with bin Laden dead we cannot know the end of the story. The invasion of Afghanistan that some al Qaeda leaders had desired brought disruption and death both to the organization and to the country that hosted it. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, however, the United States and its allies remain bogged down—though not necessarily as fatally as bin Laden hoped. Human casualties aside, however, the dollar cost of the “war on terrorism”—Afghanistan, Iraq, and other post-9/11 operations—was as of last year estimated to have been $1.15 trillion. That, a Congressional Research Service report indicated, made it second only to the cost of World War II, even with adjustments for inflation.

  A recent Pew Research survey indicated that support for the cause bin Laden and al Qaeda have espoused had faded in the Muslim countries studied. “Brand bin Laden,” a U.S. business journal reported of a previous poll, is “dying fast.” Those fighting terrorism are not banking on it.

  National Counterterrorism Center director Michael Leiter believed even before the strike on bin Laden that the greatest terrorist threat to the United States was posed by Anwar Aulaqi—the “spiritual adviser” to two key 9/11 terrorists who professed innocence and ignorance after the attacks, then made a getaway at his leisure.

  Aulaqi eventually took refuge in Yemen, where he was still believed to be active as of spring 2011. Days after bin Laden was killed, Aulaqi was targeted by a U.S. drone. He reportedly got away.

  AT HOME in recent times, there has been crass posturing and prolonged squabbling, with predictably tragic results.

  In Florida, after months of threatening to do so—and after many appeals that he desist, including one by President Obama—the pastor of a fringe church he calls the Dove World Outreach Center burned a copy of the Qur’an. He had earlier held a mockery of a “trial” at which the Muslims’ holy book was found guilty of “crimes against humanity.” A “jury” convened by the pastor, Terry Jones, had chosen burning over three other ways of destroying the sacred text: shredding, drowning, or firing squad.

  In Afghanistan, when news of the burning of the Qur’an spread, thousands of protesters took to the streets. Seven United Nations employees were killed, two of them by beheading, when a mob overran one of the organization’s compounds. Violence over three days resulted in further deaths and dozens of injuries. Back in Florida, Jones said that he did not feel responsible, and that the time had come “to hold Islam accountable.”

  In New York City, there has been protracted discord over whether a new mosque and Muslim community center should be allowed on a site two blocks from Ground Zero. Its sponsors say it will be a symbol “that will give voice to the silent majority of Muslims who suffer at the hands of extremists.” Opponents say the center would be “sacrilege on sacred ground,” a “gross insult to the memory of those that were killed.” As of the spring of this year, the dispute was unresolved.

  So were more melancholy disagreements centered on what really is and always will be hallowed ground—the memorial at Ground Zero, with which we opened
this book. Seventy feet below ground, in what will be the September 11 Museum, the steel bases of the Twin Towers stand exposed at the point of bedrock, preserved by order of the federal government. Nearby, sheathed in a climate-controlled covering, will stand the last steel column removed from the debris of the World Trade Center, a column that in the aftermath of 9/11 served as a memorial in and of itself.

  The plan, as of this writing, is that the museum will hold something else, the collection of some 9,000 fragments of humanity, the remains of the 1,122 people whose body parts cannot be identified. They would repose, hidden from the public eye yet hauntingly present. The plan’s proponents maintained that the presence of the remains would enhance the sanctity of the memorial, making it a place where generations would come to pay their respects and reflect. Its opponents objected to what is left of their loved ones being turned into what they saw as a lure for tourists. Placement in the museum space, relatives thought, was tantamount to creating “a freak show” put on for “gawkers.”

  Two thousand miles away, in Phoenix, Arizona, state senators were voting to remove wording on the city’s 9/11 memorial that they deemed objectionable. A memorial, one senator said, should display only “patriotic, pro-American words.” The inscribed words he and others found upsetting included “VIOLENT ACTS LEADING US TO WAR”; “MIDDLE EAST VIOLENCE MOTIVATES ATTACKS IN US”; “YOU DON’T WIN BATTLES OF TERRORISM WITH MORE BATTLES”; “FEELING OF INVINCIBILITY LOST”; “MUST BOMB BACK”; “FOREIGN-BORN AMERICANS AFRAID”; and “FEAR OF FOREIGNERS.”

  The fury that flamed across America after 9/11 was shot through with fear, fear of a foe few citizens could even begin to understand, fear of the unknown, fear that more was coming. Wisdom still holds, as that three-term President told the nation almost eighty years ago, that the only thing to be feared is fear itself. Yet fear, unspoken, remains pervasive, in airports and train stations, in the places where great issues are debated, in the living rooms of families across the nation.