The 9/11 commission statement, Part 1

I'm reading over the statement released by the 9/11 commission, "Overview of the Enemy" and the word that comes to mind at the end of everything is "garbage." For a commission that purports to be looking into the intelligence failures that led up to the 9/11 attacks it would seem that the only success that has occurred here is to ensure that those errors are being perpetuated, at least until the next major terrorist attack on US soil.

As regular readers of Regnum Crucis know, I'm quite fond of doing a point-by-point critique (commonly referred to as "fisking" within blogosphere) because I think that this is the best way to formulate my argument as well as to avoid the temptation to caricature an opponent's position. A great deal of this critique is based primarily on published hard-copy reports as much as anything else, so this isn't going to be all that extensively sourced. If there is a particular item that I reference that you want documentation of, just let me know in the comments section and I'll do what I can to provide a link or point you to the relevant source.

With that being said, let us begin ...

Members of the Commission, with your help, your staff has developed initial findings to present to the public on the nature of the enemy that carried out the September 11 attacks. In this statement, we will focus on al Qaeda’s history and evolution, and how this organization came to pose such a serious threat to the United States. These findings may help frame some of the issues for this hearing and inform the development of your judgments and recommendations.

That is precisely why accuracy is so critical here - this commission is supposed to be a big deal and rightly so. In the short-term, understanding al-Qaeda is the best way to ensure that another major terrorist attack falls tragically short. This statement is not an accurate history of al-Qaeda for a whole host of reasons, which is why passing it on to policy-makers as an accurate assessment of the network and its capabilities is so dangerous within the current threat environment.

This report reflects the results of our work so far. We remain ready to revise our understanding of events as our investigation progresses. This staff statement represents the collective effort of a number of members of our staff. Douglas MacEachin, Yoel Tobin, Nicole Grandrimo, Sarah Linden, Thomas Dowling, John Roth, Douglas Greenburg, and Serena Wille did much of the investigative work reflected in this statement.

Unfortunately, the number of notable omissions, misrepresentations, and simple shoddy research that apparently went into this particular statement does not speak too terribly highly with respect to the abilities of the various individuals named above.

We were fortunate in being able to build upon a great deal of excellent work already done by the Intelligence Community. Several Executive branch agencies cooperated fully in making available documents and personnel for interviews.

If these are the conclusions of executive branch agencies, then I'm worried, though it certainly does explain why Doug Feith and his team ran up against the kind of resistance they did with respect to stating openly what pretty well looks like common sense to those of us outside of government. I figured that the intelligence community generally had a pretty good idea of the way things worked in the world of international terrorism but that various conclusions were not being publicized for political reasons (for example, the Saudi princes) and here again that may be the case here, but if these statements represent the genuine beliefs of people inside of government then I'm genuinely worried.

In the 1980s a large number of Muslims from the Middle East traveled to Afghanistan to join the Afghan people’s war against the Soviet Union, which had invaded in 1979. Usama Bin Ladin was a significant player in this group, then known as the “Afghan Arabs.” A multimillionaire from a wealthy Saudi family, Bin Ladin used his personal wealth and connections to rich Arab contributors to facilitate the flow of fighters into Afghanistan.

The complete lack of mention of Abdullah Azzam here is one of the first things that comes to mind. Azzam was bin Laden's mentor as well as the spiritual leader of the Afghan Arabs who were fighting the Soviets (I believe Hamas also claims him as one of their founders) and he was the man who first came up with the idea of establishing an Islamist internationale and helped to establish connections that went beyond traditional ethno-nationalist divisions that had previously divided various Islamist groups. There is also no mention of bin Laden's prior role in assisting the Saudi government in setting up jihadi groups to fight against the communists in South Yemen, which is how he first forged his ties to Prince Turki, who was then the head of the Saudi Mukhabarat. These would all seem to be rather important details.

He provided extensive financing for an entity called the “Bureau of Services” or Maktab al Khidmat. This Bureau operated a recruiting network in Muslim communities throughout the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Western Europe, and the United States. It provided travel funds and guest houses in Pakistan for recruits and volunteers on the road to the Afghan battlefield. Bin Ladin also used his financial network to set up training camps and procure weapons and supplies for Arab fighters. Major Afghan warlords who led forces in the battle against the Soviets also benefited from the use of these camps. Following the defeat of the Soviets in the late 1980s, Bin Ladin formed an organization called “The Foundation” or al Qaeda. Al Qaeda was intended to serve as a foundation upon which to build a global Islamic army.

Here again, there's no mention of the ISI role in supporting the Afghan Arabs in general or the Maktab al-Khidmat (MAK) in particular or Indian intelligence reports that bin Laden commanded a tribal militia in the late 1980s to suppress a Pakistani Shi'ite uprising. Also omitted is bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri's alleged conspiracy in assassinating Abdullah Azzam and assuming control of the Afghan Arabs. The long-standing links between MAK and Pakistani Islamist parties or the military dictatorship of General Zia ul-Haq prior to his untimely demise are likewise non-existent.

In 1989, the regime in Sudan, run by a military faction and an Islamic extremist organization called the National Islamic Front, invited Bin Ladin to move there. He sent an advance team to Sudan in 1990 and moved there in mid-1991. Bin Ladin brought resources to Sudan, building roads and helping finance the government’s war against separatists in the south. In return, he received permission to establish commercial enterprises and an operational infrastructure to support terrorism.

The Sudanese did a great deal more than just that, which is rather important when considering US policy with respect to Sudan. James Woosley once remarked that Sudan under the reigning National Islamic Front (NIF) as well as Afghanistan under the Taliban were better described as terrorist-sponsored states rather than state sponsors of terrorism and I think that's a pretty valid conclusion. Al-Qaeda ran (and still does?) a number of key Sudanese government agencies, including the secret police, counter-intelligence, and a number of a paramilitary organizations. Hassan Turabi, the Western-educated ideologue of the Sudanese government, was also key to creating al-Qaeda and convincing some of the more vehemently anti-Shi'ite members of the organization to adopt a much more ecumenical outlook with respect to battling the West.

Also, according to the last time we got a leaked US intelligence assessment on al-Qaeda's capabilities after the May 2003 Riyadh bombings, we learned that at least some of the al-Qaeda training camps that were active in Sudan during the 1990s had been reopened. If you want to know more, might I suggest that an enterprising journalist look into the origins of these Janjaweed Arab militias that are currently brutalizing the native inhabitants of Darfur.

By 1992, Bin Ladin was focused on attacking the United States. He argued that other extremists, aimed at local rulers or Israel, had not gone far enough; they had not attacked what he called “the head of the snake,” the United States. He charged that the United States, in addition to backing Israel, kept in power repressive Arab regimes not true to Islam. He also excoriated the continued presence of U.S. military forces in Saudi Arabia after the Gulf War as a defilement of holy Muslim land.

Here again, it's a tad more complicated than that and it's really a shame that so many opponents of the Iraq war don't bother to familiarize themselves with the actual history of the organization whose mindset they think they understand so well. After Iraq invaded Kuwait, bin Laden initially went to the Saudi royals with a plan to use al-Qaeda to fight the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, but the princes instead preferred to request Western military assistance in the form of the United States. This infuriated bin Laden, but it was also during this time according to Posner and others that he and Prince Turki sat down and ironed out a deal whereby bin Laden would leave Saudi Arabia in return for receiving clandestine financial support from the Saudi government as well as his various backers in the Kingdom. It was probably Turabi and Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, however, that put him on the course to attacking the United States rather than simply focusing on fighting "heretic" Arab regimes, though al-Qaeda did a good deal of this as well during that period.

In Sudan, Bin Ladin built upon the al Qaeda organization he had established back in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda had its own membership roster and a structure of “committees” to guide and oversee such functions as training terrorists, proposing targets, financing operations, and issuing edicts-purportedly grounded in Islamic law-to justify al Qaeda actions.

The leadership structure of al-Qaeda is more or less the old MAK bureaucracy merged with the sophisticated terrorist and religio-ideological impetus of the two largest Egyptian Islamist groups, Ayman al-Zawahiri's Egyptian Islamic Jihad and Rifa Ahmed Taha's Gamaa al-Islamiyyah. And as I noted above, by this point al-Qaeda was already running a solid chunk of the Sudanese government (as well as coordinating several major insurgencies on two continents), so it had to have a very far-reaching and sophisticated organizational structure.

Included in the structure were:
bq. The “Shura” or Advisory Council, an inner circle of Bin Ladin’s close associates, most of whom had longstanding ties with him going back to the formative days in Afghanistan; Emir (al Qaeda Shura/ Advisory Council) Foreign Purchases Committee Sharia and Political Committee Finance Committee Training Subcommittee Camp Admin Subcommittee Security Committee Military Committee Information Committee Islamic Army

That's fairly thorough listing, but it doesn't explain in much detail what any of these various committees actually did within the broader organizational structure of al-Qaeda. Let me try to help, here:

• Shura Council: Also called the Shura Majlis, this is al-Qaeda's board of directors with bin Laden serving as the chairman and al-Zawahiri as the CEO. Contrary to the popular perception of bin Laden as a dictator and his lieutenants as his generals, members of the Shura all view one another as peers, with bin Laden being accorded a first-among-equals status. If the US ever succeeds in capturing or killing bin Laden, it is from his fellow Shura members that a replacement will be drawn. Because of the far-ranging nature of al-Qaeda, there are a number of absentee members. For example, al-Muqrin, who holds the honorary position as the figurehead Shura member representing the organization in Saudi Arabia, is one such absentee member.

• Emir Committee: This is actually a different group than the Shura Council and is more of an informal association than anything else. The Emir committee consists of the various terrorist leaders whose organizations are part of the broader al-Qaeda network within the framework of the International Islamic Front that was formally created in 1998 in Khost, Afghanistan.

• Foreign Purchases Committee: The weapons procurement and logistics group, which has long-standing ties to the Russian, Ukrainian, Turkish, Italian, and Indo-Pakistani mafia groups, particularly the notorious Indian mobster Dawood Ibrahim. In addition, they operate in as far-flung regions as Hong Kong, West Africa, the Triple Border of Latin America and likely have contacts with Russian, Central American, South African, and Israeli arms dealers.

• Shari'ah and Political Committe: Also called the religio-legal committee, this is where al-Qaeda's ideology is formulated and its actions are justified by select team of ideologues, propagandists, and select Islamic clerics. This group also coordinates with the Supreme Council of Global Jihad, who are the key drivers of Salafism worldwide and are even nice enough to provide a roster of their members on their website.

• Finance Committee: Al-Qaeda is one of only a handful terrorist groups (the others being Hezbollah, the LTTE, FARC, and Aum Shinrikyo) that actually maintained its own accountants' division. This is probably a holdover from the MAK days, when everything had to be carefully managed to the satisfaction of the organization's Saudi and Pakistani patrons. In addition to allocating cash for logistics or terrorist attacks and managing salaries, the finance committee also controls an elaborate web of NGOs as well as front or legitimate businesses that have been created or co-opted by al-Qaeda to serve its needs.

• Training Subcommittee: The committee is responsible for revising and editing The Afghan Guide to Jihad, the organization's training manual, as well as setting up requirements and curriculum for training courses dealing with everything from the finer points of Salafist doctrine to the creation of cyanide or sarin gas.

• Camp Administration Subcommittee: This might seem to be better lumped together with the training subcommittee, but the training camp instructors are all extremely important people within the organization - Zarqawi, for example, was formerly one of them. Camp instructors separate out the educated or intelligent recruits from the cannon fodder and are responsible for writing up assessments or devising plans that are then sent on to the military committee for approval.

• Security Subcommittee: Al-Qaeda is the only terrorist organization that I am aware of that maintains its own formal counter-intelligence service for the purpose of identifying and eliminating suspected intelligence agents or collaborators. Within the framework of al-Qaeda, members of individual cells, particularly those located in Western nations, are required to spy on one another and submit regular audio or written reports to their handlers or immediate superiors. In addition, the security subcommittee is also responsible for recruiting elite members of the organization into bin Laden's 200-500 strong personal bodyguard. Membership in the bodyguard is generally a prerequisite for obtaining a position within the Shura - think of it as an especially brutal form of The Apprentice if you like.

• Military Committee: All acts of terrorism, elaborate or otherwise, originate here. Whenever the Shura members want to blow something up, the military committee are the people who decide what and then make it happen. Members of the military committee and in particular the person of the chairman are extremely key members of al-Qaeda as far as throwing a monkey wrench into the nuts and bolts aspect of the group.

• Information Committee: This is the place where al-Qaeda propaganda originates, whether it's the belief that the organization was responsible for last summer's blackout or the claim that the US plans to resettle Jews in Iraq. Sadly, most of this committee is based in large part out of Western Europe, with a particular though unfortunate emphasis on London.

• Islamic Army: In addition to its considerable terrorist force, al-Qaeda also maintains several thousand widely dispersed irregular fighters that have been utilized everywhere from Algeria to the Philippines and from Bosnia to Uganda in the service of the network and affiliate organizations. The "Islamic Army" is actually the original term that bin Laden used for al-Qaeda before he started calling it the International Islamic Front - al-Qaeda only started referring to itself by that name after the United States popularized the term in the wake of the 1998 embassy bombings.

The absence of Project al-Zabadi, al-Qaeda's non-conventional weaponry program, is somewhat disconcerting.

Hopefully you got more out of that little primer then you did out the scraps of information produced by the commission.

This organizational structure should not be read as defining a hierarchical chain of command for specific terrorist operations. It served as a means for coordinating functions and providing material support to operations. But once a specific operation was decided upon it would be assigned to a carefully selected clandestine cell, headed by a senior al Qaeda operative who reported personally to Bin Ladin.

They're generally correct about al-Qaeda not being a strict hierarchial organization - Joe I think once compared it to an evil government granting agency, however it's not a truly headless organization either. There are so many models that one can fit al-Qaeda into, ranging from the mafia, a multi-national corporation, an NGO, ect., that I think that the best way to look at it is as neither a single group or a coalition of terrorist organizations, but rather as a diverse network comprised of core bases, a satellite network of terrorist cells, a conglomerate of Islamist political parties, a collection largely autonomous affiliate terrorist or guerrilla groups, and two massive networks of NGOs and legitimate or front companies. The leadership of all of these subsections are co-opted into what I refer to as the core network or the high command of between 200-3,000 individuals whose existence is essential for the operation of the network. This core network controls everything through a vertical leadership structure that provides strategic direction and tactical support to the various horizontal structures listed above.

With al Qaeda as its foundation, Bin Ladin sought to build a broader Islamic army that also included terrorist groups from Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Saudi Arabia and Oman, Tunisia, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Morocco, Somalia, and Eritrea. Not all groups from these states agreed to join, but at least one from each did. With a multinational council intended to promote common goals, coordinate targeting, and authorize asset sharing for terrorist operations, this Islamic force represented a new level of collaboration among diverse terrorist groups.

Actually, bin Laden was largely successful in his goal unifying most Sunni Islamist groups in the Middle East under a single banner and strategy. While only the two Egyptian groups (Gamaa al-Islamiyyah and Egyptian Islamic Jihad) were formally integrated into the core network, groups from Libya (Libyan Islamic Fighting Group), Algeria (GIA, GSPC, and to a certain extent FIS), Saudi Arabia (Ahfad al-Sahaba, Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia), Tunisia (Islamic Combatant Group), Jordan (Bayyat al-Imam, al-Tawhid), Iraq (probably at this time referring to the Islamic Movement of Kurdistan or the Second Souran Unit), Lebanon (Dinniyeh, Asbat al-Ansar), Morocco (Salafi Jihad), Somalia (al-Ittihaad al-Islamiyyah, Islamic Union of Ogaden), and Eritrea (Eritrean Islamic Jihad) all agreed to join bin Laden's International Islamic Front, which first went public in 1998. CNN even managed to get ahold of most of the videotapes that these respective groups sent back to al-Qaeda in Afghanistan so that the leadership could see what use their money, troops, and expertise were being put to.

Contrary to popular understanding, Bin Ladin did not fund al Qaeda through a personal fortune and a network of businesses. Instead, al Qaeda relied primarily on a fundraising network developed over time. Bin Ladin never received a $300 million inheritance. From about 1970 until approximately 1994, he received about $1 million per year—a significant sum, but hardly a $300 million fortune that could be used to fund a global jihad. According to Saudi officials and representatives of the Bin Ladin family, Bin Ladin was divested of his share of his family’s wealth. Bin Ladin owned a number of businesses and other assets in Sudan, although most were small or not economically viable.

This is all quite accurate, but here again incomplete. Bin Laden "only" inherited $30,000,000, but he reaped a tidy profit through a number of shrewd investments and both legitimate and illegitimate businesses. However, the vast majority of al-Qaeda's financing comes from a huge financial network primarily composed of both Wahhabi NGOs and the drug trade. In particular, there are a dozen or so key Saudi magnates that I first noted in my Riyadh bombings retrospective who are the key bankrollers of the network. The top seven are, according to a UN report, Khalid bin Mahfouz, Saleh Abdullah Kamel, Suleiman al-Rajhi, Adel Abdul Jalil Batterjee, Mohammed Hussein al-Amoudi, Wael Hamza Julaidan, and Yasin al-Qadi, all of whom are still free men in the Kingdom. And according to al-Qaeda documents recovered in Bosnia, members of the very same bin Laden family that the commission consulted are also responsible for bankrolling their alleged black sheep's global jihad. While it's all very good for the commission to knock down some of the common urban legends concerning bin Laden, it might behoove them to tell those of us who don't follow his activities or know his history to explain where he does get all of his money.

As for bin Laden's business portfolio in Sudan, they were never intended to economically viable so much as they were to give him a legitimate cover under which to operate, but small they were almost certainly not. El-Hijrah for Construction and Development Ltd., for example, helped to build a new airport at Port Sudan as well as a 1,200 kilometer highway from Port Sudan all the way to Khartoum. Other businesses owned by bin Laden included the Wadi al-Aqiq import-export firm, Taba Investments Ltd., and the el-Shamal Islamic Bank in Khartoum.

Bin Ladin set up training camps and weapons and supply depots in Sudan. He used them to support al Qaeda and other members of the Islamic army. Bin Ladin’s operatives used positions in his businesses as cover to acquire weapons, explosives, and technical equipment such as surveillance devices. To facilitate these activities, Sudanese intelligence officers provided false passports and shipping documents. At this time al Qaeda’s operational role was mainly to provide funds, training, and weapons for attacks carried out by allied groups.

The report doesn't date this section chronologically, so I have no way of knowing when exactly "at this time" is supposed to be, though I'm assuming it's at some point in the early 1990s. It's also largely incorrect, as it ignores al-Qaeda's role in supporting the Algerian, Egyptian, Eritrean, and Ugandan Islamists or the thousands of al-Qaeda fighters who were sent to Kashmir to bolster the local Muslim separatists or to Nagorno-Kabarakh during the Armenia-Azerbaijan War to fight alongside the Azeri military. Similarly, no mention is made of the role of Iranian and in particular IRGC and VEVAK military advisors in assisting al-Qaeda in setting up the 23 or so training camps that it operated in Sudan or Hassan Turabi's role in convincing bin Laden to work across sectarian and ideological lines.

A December 1992 explosion outside two hotels in Aden, Yemen—a stopover for U.S. troops en route to Somalia—killed one Australian tourist but no Americans. U.S. intelligence would learn four years later that the attack was carried out by a Yemeni terrorist group whose leader was close to Bin Ladin, and whose members reportedly trained at a Bin Ladin-funded camp in Sudan that was run by a member of the al Qaeda Military Committee.

The group in question here is the Islamic Army of Aden, which ran an al-Qaeda training camp at Mudiyah and would later perpetrate the attack on the U.S.S. Cole. The Islamic Army was run by the duo of Qaed Salim Sunan al-Harethi and Mohammed Hamdi al-Ahdal and they basically set up their own fiefdom in northern Yemen (bin Laden's ancestral homeland) that served as a refuge for Egyptian Islamists during the 1990s and acted pretty much the way that northern Pakistan does for the organization today. When a US Predator drone killed al-Harethi in November 2002, we described him as the top al-Qaeda leader in Yemen. Once one accepts that the line between being a member of an al-Qaeda affiliate group and being card-carrying member is at best a matter of semantics (a fact that has yet to be grasped by the commission, judging from this and other statements made in the report), one can certainly see how the US arrived at that conclusion.

In October 1993, two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down and 18 U.S. soldiers were killed in Mogadishu, Somalia. U.S. intelligence learned in the ensuing years that Bin Ladin’s organization had been heavily engaged in assisting warlords who attacked U.S. forces in Somalia. The head of the al Qaeda Military Committee, from a command center set up in Nairobi, Kenya, reportedly sent scores of trainers into Somalia, including experts in the use of rocket propelled grenades, the same kind of weapon used to shoot down the helicopters. Operatives dispatched to Somalia were told their mission was “to kill U.S. troops, incite violence against U.S. personnel, and undermine the success of the U.S. mission.” Sources have described several of these operatives bragging that their work had caused the defeat of the Americans. Bin Ladin and his senior associates touted the subsequent withdrawal of U.S. forces from Somalia in March 1994 as a victory for the mujahidin and a demonstration that the Americans could be forced to retreat.

Al-Qaeda sent its three highest-ranking military commanders, Abu Ubeidah al-Banshiri, Mohammed Atef, and Saif al-Adel to Somalia to assist al-Ittihaad al-Islamiyyah in fighting the UN peacekeepers. Maulavi Masood Azhar and Fazalur Rehman, two prominent Pakistani Islamists who were then the heads of the Harakat ul-Ansar and the Harakat ul-Mujahideen, also sent fighters into Somalia at bin Laden's behest. Al-Qaeda's operations in Somalia were bankrolled by sympathetic royals from UAE and the organization also killed Belgian and Pakistani peacekeepers in addition to the most famous engagement in which 18 US servicemen were killed in Mogadishu. Various equipment that were on the bodies of those servicemen were kept by al-Qaeda fighters as tokens of their victory and turned up in Afghanistan. The Somali and Ethiopean Islamists regularly cited bin Laden's patronage after his international debut in 1998 as a way to frighten local governments or rival warlords.

Two additional attacks on U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia took place during 1995-96 for which the evidence of Bin Ladin’s involvement is ambiguous.

Only to the intellectually obtuse. Or perhaps, a member of the 9/11 commission ...

On November 13, 1995, a car bomb exploded in Riyadh outside the Office of Program Management of the U.S.-trained Saudi Arabian National Guard. Five Americans and two officials from India were killed. Saudi authorities arrested four suspects, whom they quickly convicted and beheaded. The Saudis televised confessions of three perpetrators indicating that their actions had been influenced by Bin Ladin, but there was no charge that Bin Ladin was directly involved.

I don't tend to place much stock in the Saudi interior ministry or the way they torture people into making confessions on state TV, but in this particular case it makes sense. The alleged perpetrators claimed to have been inspired by bin Laden and after his "victory" over the United States in Somalia it would be entirely consistent for him to believe that inflicting similar losses on US personnel in Saudi Arabia would cause them to withdraw. In addition, bin Laden himself had been the target of an assassination attempt in February 1994 that he evidently believed to be the work of Saudi intelligence, as well as an earlier attempt on the life of his son. Such an attack on the Saudi National Guard, which is charged with the protection of the royal family, could easily be intended as a message for the princes that he was still quite capable of carrying out attacks at the most secure locations inside the Kingdom.

Later, in a March 1997 CNN interview, Bin Ladin denied responsibility for the attack but said he was sorry he had not been a participant.

And if you can't trust Osama bin Laden, who can you trust?

By this time U.S. intelligence learned that a year-and-a-half before the bombing of the Saudi National Guard facility, al Qaeda leaders and members of other aligned groups had decided to attack U.S. targets in Saudi Arabia and directed a team to ship explosives there. The shipment was a case study in collaboration: Bin Ladin supplied the money for purchasing the explosives; the Sudanese Ministry of Defense served as the conduit for bringing them into Sudan; they were stored briefly in the warehouse of one of Bin Ladin’s business facilities; transported in a Bin Ladin company truck under the cover of Ministry of Defense invoice papers; moved to a warehouse provided by the Ministry of Defense at Port Sudan on the Red Sea; and then transported on a Bin Ladin-owned boat to Islamic army operatives residing in Yemen. From there they were moved by land to the eastern part of Saudi Arabia. Bin Ladin and his organization’s role in this attack remains unclear. The attack, however, was consistent with the described purpose of the shipment.

Now all of this is quite accurate as far as how the explosives got into the Kingdom, but the commission is more or less recoiling from the obvious conclusion: that the explosives were received either directly or through intermediaries by the al-Qaeda underground in Saudi Arabia, which then used it to carry out the bombing. If not, then why does the commission believe that bin Laden was smuggling explosives into Saudi Arabia? Then again, judging from the commission's statements, they probably think that Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia is a grassroots anti-monarchist movement rather than an al-Qaeda front ...

One other point is that the mastermind for this attack (one of them, anyway) was Hassan al-Sarehi (As-Sarehi), a fellow Afghan Arab who was trained at al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan at fought with bin Laden during the Battle of Jaji.

On June 26, 1996, an explosion ripped through a building in the Khobar Towers apartment complex housing U.S. Air Force personnel in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. Nineteen Americans were killed and 372 others were injured. Subsequent investigation concluded that the attack had been carried out by a Saudi Shia Hezbollah group with assistance from Iran. Intelligence obtained shortly after the bombing, however, also supported suspicions of Bin Ladin’s involvement. There were reports in the months preceding the attack that Bin Ladin was seeking to facilitate a shipment of explosives, to Saudi Arabia. On the day of the attack, Bin Ladin was congratulated by other members of the Islamic army.

I'm not entirely certain that Saudi Hezbollah is an actual terrorist group, to be quite honest. Ignoring the fact that the group sounds like a made up name and has done absolutely nothing since (thereby indicating that it was probably a convenient name adopted by somebody else at the time of this particular attack), this attack needs to be placed very much in contrast with al-Qaeda's other activities with Iran at the time of the attack. After the failed 1993 World Trade Center bombing (which the commission apparently doesn't believe was perpetrated by al-Qaeda ...), bin Laden sent an elite team of his top lieutenants and instructors to Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, where they received advanced explosives and other terrorist training techniques from Hezbollah and IRGC instructors in addition to all of the generic stuff that the Iranians had already provided them in Sudan.

Then, from June 21-23 of 1996, bin Laden sent his top aides Mohammed Ali Ahmad and Ahmad Salah (the latter, being a leader of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, already had excellent relations with the Iranians) to Tehran to attend a major terrorist summit (like the one the Iranians recently hosted earlier this last year) where everyone from Hezbollah to the PKK was present. At that summit, al-Qaeda reached an agreement with VEVAK external operations director Mahdi Chamran to create a three-person committee of bin Laden, Chamran, and Salah for the express purpose of targeting Americans in the Persian Gulf. The Khobar Towers attack, which almost certainly a direct result of this meeting, occurred just 2 days later. The two congradulations that bin Laden received on the day of the attack that were intercepted by US intelligence were from none other than Ayman al-Zawahiri and Ashra al-Hadi, a member of Islamic Jihad who had also attended the meeting in Tehran. Given all of this, how in God's name can there be any ambiguity as to who was responsible for the Khobar Towers bombing? Oh wait, that's right ... Shi'ite and Sunni extremists don't work together.

As you can see:

In light of the historical animosity between Shia and Sunni Muslims, the confirmation of the Hezbollah role in the attack led many to conclude that Bin Ladin’s Sunni-populated organization would not have been involved. Later intelligence, however, showed far greater potential for collaboration between Hezbollah and al Qaeda than many had previously thought. A few years before the attack, Bin Ladin’s representatives and Iranian officials had discussed putting aside Shia-Sunni divisions to cooperate against the common enemy. A small group of al Qaeda operatives subsequently traveled to Iran and Hezbollah camps in Lebanon for training in explosives, intelligence and security. Bin Laden reportedly showed particular interest in Hezbollah’s truck bombing tactics in Lebanon in 1983 that had killed 241 U.S. Marines. We have seen strong but indirect evidence that his organization did in fact play some as yet unknown role in the Khobar attack.

This is all correct, although if these commissioners had bothered to do their research they would have known that the Hezbollah that carried out the Khobar Towers attack is supposed to be an entirely different organization than the Lebanese group that blew up the US marine barracks in Lebanon back in 1983 (there is also a Turkish Hezbollah, for example, but it's a Sunni rather than a Shi'ite organization). More to the point, the whole reason behind bin Laden's desire to perfect his organization's use of large car and truck bombings was a direct result of the failure of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. So if the commission is aware of bin Laden's desire to perfect his group's techniques, why the heck can't they recognize why he felt such perfection was necessary?

More to the point, according to the 1998 court testimony of Jamal al-Fadl and Ali Mohammed, two formerly senior members of al-Qaeda, bin Laden did forge an alliance with both Hezbollah through Imad Mughniyeh and Iran through the IRGC and VEVAK during this period of time for the purposes of attacking American interests, which is why that claim made its way into the original 1998 indictment of bin Laden.

Bin Ladin also explored possible cooperation with Iraq during his time in Sudan, despite his opposition to Hussein’s secular regime.

According to Indian intelligence, it was Zarqawi's wing of the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi organization that was closest to the Iraqi Mukhabarat at this point in time, since the Iraqis had used the LeJ as pawns to kill Iranians and Pakistani Shi'ites during the Iraq-Iran War. This led to complications between bin Laden and Zarqawi, which almost cost the latter a place in the leadership of the International Front.

Andrew McCarthy, a former chief assistant US attorney general, explained how these overtures actually occurred in a recent piece for National Review, the relevant excerpts of which are as follows:

bq.As testimony at the commission's public hearing Wednesday revealed, the allegation in the 1998 indictment stems primarily from information provided by the key accomplice witness at the embassy bombing trial, Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl. Al-Fadl told agents that when al Qaeda was headquartered in the Sudan in the early-to-mid-1990s, he understood an agreement to have been struck under which the jihadists would put aside their antipathy for Saddam and explore ways of working together with Iraq, particularly regarding weapons production.

On al Qaeda's end, al-Fadl understood the liaison for Iraq relations to be an Iraqi named Mahmdouh Mahmud Salim (a.k.a. "Abu Hajer al Iraqi"), one of bin Laden's closest friends.

I'm assuming, here again, that the "weapons production" bit refers to the still-unretracted US allegations concerning the alleged Iraqi role in assisting al-Qaeda to produce precursors for VX nerve gas at the al-Shifa plant in Sudan. Given that Zarqawi was indeed granted a place of honor among the al-Qaeda brass and that both al-Tawhid and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi were allowed into the International Islamic Front, it would appear at the very least that bin Laden's pragmatism overruled his dogmatism on this one.

Bin Ladin had in fact at one time sponsored anti-Saddam Islamists in Iraqi Kurdistan.

This isn't Ansar al-Islam or its evolutionary predecessor Jund al-Islam, the latter of which which didn't even exist prior to September 2001. My guess is that this is the Second Soran Unit, a small force of 350-400 fighters that has existed in one form or another under Aso Hawleri ever since 1991 until it finally merged into Ansar al-Islam. Several of their commanders are reputed to have been Afghan-trained and al-Qaeda maintained training camps in both southern Afghanistan and northern Pakistan (the latter of which are still in operation under Lashkar-e-Taiba auspices) ever since 1989.

The Sudanese, to protect their own ties with Iraq, reportedly persuaded Bin Ladin to cease this support and arranged for contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda.

This here again the impact of Turabi's desire to create a unified anti-Western coalition regardless of ideological differences on the formation of al-Qaeda.

A senior Iraqi intelligence officer reportedly made three visits to Sudan, finally meeting Bin Ladin in 1994. Bin Ladin is said to have requested space to establish training camps, as well as assistance in procuring weapons, but Iraq apparently never responded.

This is likely supposed to be a reference to Farouk Hijazi, who is in US custody. Documentation of this meeting and what bin Laden requested is actually contained in the Feith memo, incidentally. Given how lawyered this whole document is, I'm curious as to the use of the phrase "apparently" is used here. Either Saddam Hussein replied or he didn't and if not, why isn't this known definitively?

Of course, both ABC News and the Feith memo now claim that Zarqawi was receiving all kinds of toys from the Iraqi Mukhabarat during his stay in Baghdad.

There have been reports that contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda also occurred after Bin Ladin had returned to Afghanistan, but they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship.

This here again is the famous meeting between Farouk Hijazi and bin Laden in 1999 in which Hijazi reportedly offered bin Laden assylum in Iraq. Bin Laden, eager to protect his own independence rather than become another puppet of Saddam Hussein's, declined Hijazi's offer. Here again, this is also contained in the Feith memo, leading one to suspect that maybe, just maybe, there might be something to the document. But after all, Doug Feith is a neocon, so we all know that can't have been the case ...

Two senior Bin Ladin associates have adamantly denied that any ties existed between al Qaeda and Iraq.

And two others of arguably equal stature (as well as apparent electronic intercepts) say likewise, but we won't let little things like that get in the way of repeating this meme, which has been around ever since the New York Times first "broke" the story. Except several months later we got our hands on the Feith memo, which states quite clearly that at least in the case of Zubaydah, what he told interrogators was hardly an "adamant denial."

We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States.

Do tell. Now if this were the only statement I disagreed with inside this entire document, I wouldn't be inclined to judge the commission too badly. After all, lots of people within government with access to far more information than I have appear to be able to adopt one position or the other, though not always in an intellectually consistent manner.

In addition, this is pretty much the same thing that the US intelligence community has been saying for awhile, namely that there was no "operational relationship" between Iraq and al-Qaeda. The problem is that the entire issue is being framed to the public as a false dilemma between there either being an operational relationship between the two organizations or there being no connection whatsoever between the two entities. By that standard, there's no operational relationship between al-Qaeda and Saudi Arabia either, but I very much doubt that few would suggest that the absence of such a relationship means that we should just ignore the Saudis' bankrolling bin Laden because they leave it to him to figure out the nuts and bolts relationship of where and what to blow up. As the experts are all so fond of reminding us, this is a decentralized organization. By that standard, of course, bin Laden didn't cooperate with Mohammed Atta in launching the 9/11 attacks because he left much of the nuts and bolts planning of the operation to his subordinates once the hijackers were deployed in the United States.

In any case, any credibility the commission has is blown straight to hell in this whopper:

Whether Bin Ladin and his organization had roles in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center and the thwarted Manila plot to blow up a dozen U.S. commercial aircraft in 1995 remains a matter of substantial uncertainty.

No, it isn't, at least not to anyone who is even reasonably aware of the individuals and organizations involved in planning both failed attacks.

Ramzi Yousef, who was a lead operative in both plots, trained in camps in Afghanistan that were funded by Bin Ladin and used to train many al Qaeda operatives. Whether he was then or later became a member of al Qaeda remains a matter of debate, but he was at a minimum part of a loose network of extremist Sunni Islamists who, like Bin Ladin, began to focus their rage on the United States.

*Sigh*

Leaving out the Mylroie school of thought altogether, Ramzi Yousef has been working for bin Laden ever since at least 1988, when he attended one of the first al-Qaeda training camps in Peshawar. His maternal uncle is none other than Zahid Sheikh Mohammed (the brother of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed), a Kuwaiti millionaire who ran the Mercy International and the Lajnat al-Dawa, two Islamist NGOs that funded first MAK and later al-Qaeda and have had their assets in the US frozen as such by the US. At the Peshawar camp, Yousef served as an electronics instructor from 1988-1990, which probably means that he swore an oath to bin Laden at some point or another, though this may have been an innovation that Mohammed Atef and Saif al-Adel introduced later after witnessing similar practices among the Hezbollah recruits in the Bekaa Valley. At any rate he was a paid employee of al-Qaeda during this period, which generally makes you a member by most reasonable definitions, and he was recruiting many of the very same people who would later assist him in perpetrating the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

When he returned to Pakistan in late 1991, he joined the Sunni sectarian group Sipah-e-Sahaba (SeS), which is basically the Pakistan version of the Klan with Shi'ites substituted for African Americans. He met future Abu Sayyaf leader Abdurajak Abubakar Janjalani during this time and at bin Laden's request returned with him to the Philippines in December 1991 with his aides Abdul Hakim Murad and Wali Khan Amin Shah, who helped to set up an Abu Sayyaf training camp at Madin on Basilan island in the Philippines until May 1992, at which point the trio set out for the United States to work with the network that the Blind Sheikh (who was the spiritual leader of Gamaa al-Islamiyyah) had already established in New York and New Jersey to perpetrate the World Trade Center bombing. When Yousef fled the United States, he returned to Pakistan and stayed at al-Qaeda guesthouses that were managed by bin Laden's representatives. After a failed attempt to assassinate Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto at bin Laden's behest, Yousef returned to the Philippines to plan Oplan Bojinka with his uncle Khalid and after that plot was foiled, he returned to Pakistan yet again and stayed at other al-Qaeda guesthouses in Peshawar and Islamabad before he was arrested by the FBI in February 1995.

How there can be "substantial uncertainty" on any of this strikes me as quite mind-boggling, considering that most of this can be discovered just from reading court documents from Yousef's trial and then retrospectively connecting the links with what we know now about them. But far be it from the commission to indulge in such arcane practices ...

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who provided some funding for Yousef in the 1993 WTC attack and was his operational partner in the Manila plot, later did join al Qaeda and masterminded the al Qaeda 9/11 attack. He was not, however, an al Qaeda member at the time of the Manila plot.

This is the same kind of obtuse semantics that are frequently employed by the press with regard to Zarqawi in order to "prove" that he's not really an al-Qaeda member and that his self-apparent deference and cooperation with them is little more than an elaborate veneer. In the case of Khalid, and Gunaratna's updated edition of Inside Al-Qaeda contains a fairly extensive biography of the man, he was a founding member of both the organization and the military committee as well as one of the first members of bin Laden's bodyguard as far back as 1989. I'm not sure what standard is for membership on this one, but I suspect that the commission is relying on whether or not Khalid swore an oath of allegiance to bin Laden, as was apparently done by later operatives. The problem is, as I noted in the case of Yousef, that this aspect of the training curriculum was not added for several years.

More to the point, Yousef and Khalid's two key facilitators in the Philippines were none other than Abdurajak Abubakar Janjalani and Mohammed Jamal Khalifa. Janjalani was almost certainly an al-Qaeda associate, as anyone with any basic understanding of how Abu Sayyaf was created will tell you. As for Khalifa, he bankrolled the whole of Oplan Bojinka and is none other than bin Laden's brother-in-law! And if filial relations aren't enough in this regard, he also ran the Filippino branch of the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO) and a number of other NGOs that acted as (and still do?) a means by which al-Qaeda could transfer cash to Abu Sayyaf, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), and Jemaah Islamiyyah, its 3 major affiliates operating in Mindanao.

The only thing resembling a rational explanation for these claims is that the commission is using a much later date for al-Qaeda's founding than is generally used. The traditional and I think more sensible data is that it was founded shortly prior to Abdullah Azzam's November 24, 1989 assassination at the al-Farooq camp in Khost, Afghanistan. Khost had previously been location where new Afghan Arabs were ideologically doctrinated to fight the Red Army, and it was there that bin Laden, al-Zawahiri, and most of their top lieutenants first established the organization. The commission may, for some improbable reason, be using the date of February 23, 1998, which is when the two went public with their declaration of war and basically announced to the rest of the planet what it now faced.

A number of other individuals connected to the 1993 and 1995 plots or to some of the plotters either were or later became associates of Bin Ladin. We have no conclusive evidence, however, that at the time of the plots any of them was operating under Bin Ladin’s direction.

There is likewise no evidence that any number of post-9/11 attacks, from the Djerba synagogue bombing to Bali to the Mombasa attempt to shoot down an Israeli jetliner to the most recent suicide bombings in Iraq are operating under bin Laden's direction. That doesn't mean that any or all of the above can't or shouldn't be classified as al-Qaeda attacks. Part of the problem that so many people in government have is that while they're repeatedly telling us that this is a decentralized organization seem incapable of recognizing that it is quite capable of operating without bin Laden micromanaging it. In this case, both Khalifa and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed were working with Yousef in the Philippines at the time of the attacks and here in the United States the Blind Sheikh and his Gamaa al-Islamiyyah minions (as well as other people who were then referred to as "Afghan Arabs") were working with Ramzi Yousef to bring down the World Trade Center. To even pretend that this is a matter of ambiguity just because bin Laden wasn't masterminding all of this from a video conference chamber at his mansion in Khartoum in some Dr. Doom-esque fashion is irrelevant to whether or not these were al-Qaeda attacks.

What is clear is that these plots were major benchmarks in the evolving Islamist threat to the United States and foreshadowed later attacks that were indisputably carried out by al Qaeda under Bin Ladin’s direction.

This "Islamist threat" is not an amorphous entity, nor is it simply violent manifestation of the famous Angry Arab Street™. It has a name, the International Islamic Front, which I treat as more less synonymous with al-Qaeda for reasons of terminology and while the organization only went public in 1998 at the press conference in Khost, it had already existed as well as carried out attacks for many years prior to this.

Like the later attacks, they were aimed at demolishing symbols of American power and killing enormous numbers of Americans.

This is a misconception. Al-Qaeda is not simply interested in killing large numbers of Americans. As the events of the Algerian civil war or even Zarqawi's more recent indulgence in nihilistic mass murder in and out of Iraq should illustrate, al-Qaeda is more less out to kill anyone they do not regard as being either an ally or sympathetic to their agenda. This category covers the majority of the planet and arguably a majority of Muslims' positions and as such they are more than happy to kill large numbers of those they deem either kufr or munafiqeen. One of the chief concerns that many Westerners in general do not seem to understand is that this is a global war and that al-Qaeda's efforts in, say Russia or Uzbekistan or Pakistan are every bit as deadly as its actions against the United States. While that side rant is somewhat unrelated to the actual statement made by the commission, it is an important thing to be noted nevertheless.

Like Bin Ladin, Yousef was willing to employ any means to achieve these ends, and contemplated use of non-conventional weapons. In one of his television interviews Bin Ladin characterized Ramzi Yousef as a “symbol and a teacher” that would drive Muslims suffering from U.S. policy to “transfer the battle into the United States.”

And in private, according to Gunaratna and several others, bin Laden regarded Yousef and his sidekick Abdul Hakim Murad, which is precisely why, when Abu Sayyaf got ahold of several American hostages in 2001, they demanded the release of Yousef and the Blind Sheikh in return for allowing their American captives to go free. Here again, this point is being missed by the commission's refusal to acknowledge who Yousef and his murderous relations are and what they do.

In May 1996, Bin Ladin left Sudan and moved back to Afghanistan. His departure resulted from a combination of pressures from the United States, other western governments, and Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Libya, all three of which faced indigenous terrorist groups supported by Bin Ladin. The pressure on Sudan intensified in April 1996 when the UN sanctioned Sudan for harboring individuals from the group that had attempted to assassinate Egyptian President Mubarak in June 1995.

The Sudanese interior ministry denied pressuring bin Laden to leave, of course, but that is to be expected under the circumstances. Egypt and was the main driver in the Arab world in convincing Sudan to expel bin Laden, though Libya also got onboard after FIG, the Libyan al-Qaeda affiliate, nearly assassinated Colonel Qadaffi with the assistance of MI6. The report is also whitewashing the Sudanese role in the attempted assassination President Mubarak, however, as Egyptian authorities charged that the Sudanese AKK (External Security Service) was actually complicit in the assassination attempt along with members of Gamaa al-Islamiyyah and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Given that the AKK was one of the various Sudanese agencies that al-Qaeda more or less ran for the NIF, this quite likely. There is no mention, however, of bin Laden's stop in Qatar en route to Afghanistan or the US failure to apprehend him and most of his top lieutenants there.

At the time of Bin Ladin’s move to Afghanistan, the U.S. intelligence community had uncovered many details of his financial and business structures and their use to support terrorist groups. It was not until later in 1996, however, after he was back in Afghanistan, that new sources disclosed the nature of his organizational structure, his commitment to attacking the United States, and the involvement of his organization in attacks that had already been carried out.

The reference here is to two men, Jamal al-Fadl and Ali Mohammed, who were the first high-ranking al-Qaeda operatives that the US really got its hands on who were willing to talk. One of the failures of keeping high-ranking operatives like Yousef, Murad, and the Blind Sheikh within the criminal justice system and trying them as common criminals is, to put it bluntly, most high-ranking al-Qaeda operatives are well aware of their rights in Western nations and some are even familiar with counter-interrogation training. As such, they know that they won't have to talk about the intricate nature of their networks and as such don't unless they can be turned through something resembling a plea deal. Yousef, Murad, and the Blind Sheikh all know that no such deal is going to occur in their cases (though Ali Mohammed did choose to take this route) and such don't talk. Not to turn this into another debate over how best to deal with terrorists, but there are advantages to declaring these folks illegal combatants.

Bin Ladin’s departure from Sudan marked a setback for him. The Saudi government had frozen his assets three years earlier, and the Sudanese government expropriated his assets there after he left Sudan. The financial stresses contributed to strained relations with some of his associates, who used the move back to Afghanistan as an occasion to break from al Qaeda.

I see. The Sudanese don't seem to mind holding the several hundred million dollars in gold that was moved to Sudan from Afghanistan after the Taliban fell and they continued to host a dozen al-Qaeda training camps until Hassan Turabi fell in early 2001. Now, according to the US intelligence assessment leaked after the May 2003 Riyadh bombings, the Sudanese only host one, and you'll forgive me if I think that that's too many for comfort. I'm also not entirely certain which "associates" are being referenced here, since if anything the move to Afghanistan only provided bin Laden a means through which to reestablish his ties to the Pakistani Deobandi religious establishment as well as to exploit the poor security situation through in the former Soviet Union. The only possible reference here that would seem to fit the bill would be Antar Zouabri and the GIA, which went Khmer Rouge in mid-1996 and started indulging a series of mass killings (to the tune of tens of thousands of innocent civilians) that likely killed any serious prospects for an Islamist Revolution in Algeria. The Bosniak and Albanian nationalistgroups might be another possible instance of this occurring, as well maybe any ties bin Laden had to the Moro National Liberation Front. All of the key Middle Eastern groups that had allied themselves with bin Laden and tied their fate to his in the early 1990s in Sudan, however, stayed with him.

There were, nonetheless, some benefits to the move. In an effort to reduce external pressures, Sudan had made some efforts to keep Bin Ladin under control and prohibited him from making public diatribes. Afghanistan’s lack of a central government gave him greater latitude to promote his own agenda. Moreover, al Qaeda had never entirely left the region: even when headquartered in Sudan, it had used Pakistan and Afghanistan as a regional base and training center supporting Islamic insurgencies in Tajikistan, Kashmir, and Chechnya.

The Sudanese reason for keeping bin Laden's diatribes under wraps had more to do with Hassan Turabi's belief that the Islamist coalition shouldn't move until it succeeded in forming a unified front as well as obtaining some kind of non-conventional weapons capability. Initially upon returning to Pakistan, bin Laden returned to his old offices in Peshawar and worked with his colleagues in the Deobandi religious establishment as well as the Markaz ud Dawa wal Irshad (MDI), the Wahhabi religious organization that serves as the civilian wing of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, the only one of the Pakistani groups fighting in Kashmir that can claim a truly international reach. I'm pleasantly surprised that the commission mentions al-Qaeda's role in the Tajik Civil War as well as in the ongoing insurgencies in Kashmir and Chechnya, as this is an area that is all too frequently ignored by most Western observers. There is no mention of the al-Qaeda role in fueling or fighting in Bosnia, the Philippines, or any of the Sub-Saharan African nations, however, and this is a rather unfortunate omission.

The Afghan camps were all basically larger versions of the old MAK facilities at Darunta, Jihad Wal, Khalden, Sadeek, Khalid ibn Walid, and al-Farooq and were run by former US Special Forces soldier Ali Mohammed while bin Laden was Afghanistan. Bin Laden was good friends with Afghan warlord and later Taliban commander Jalaluddin Haqqani, who was more than happy to let al-Qaeda work in peace in return for a regular payment.

In August 1996, Bin Ladin made public his war against the United States. In his “Declaration of Holy War on the Americans Occupying the Country of the Two Sacred Places” (Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia), Bin Ladin called on Muslims worldwide to put aside their differences and join in deadly attacks against U.S. forces to compel their withdrawal from the Arabian Peninsula.

Unfortunately, this letter was widely ignored at the time, along with bin Laden himself, even though it came shortly after the Khobar Towers bombing, because the initial perpetrators were believed to be Shi'ites. Ah, the wonders of US intelligence ...

A month after this declaration, the Taliban, an Afghan faction supported by Pakistan, seized control of Kabul, the nation’s capital. Bin Ladin began cementing his ties with the Taliban, and they soon forged a close alliance.

Notably absent here is any mention whatsoever of bin Laden's existing ties to the Pakistani military-intelligence establishment, without whose support the Taliban would never have aligned with al-Qaeda. I suspect that this was left out because it could prove to be politically embarrassing to Pakistan, as I hope the commission isn't so stupid as to ignore their (and the Saudis') role in ensuring that the Taliban remained allied with al-Qaeda through thick and thin.

The Taliban paid a great price for this alliance in the form of outside pressure, isolation, UN sanctions, and, after 9/11, the destruction of its regime. But prior to 9/11, the Taliban also benefited from its relationship with al Qaeda: Bin Ladin provided significant financial support to the Taliban, and supplied hundreds, if not thousands, of fighters to support the Taliban in its ongoing war against other factions in northern Afghanistan. From al Qaeda’s perspective, the alliance provided a sanctuary in which to train and indoctrinate recruits, import weapons, forge ties with other jihad groups and leaders, and plan terrorist operations. Al Qaeda fighters could travel freely within the country; enter and exit without visas or any immigration procedures; and enjoy the use of official Afghan Ministry of Defense license plates.

Al-Qaeda created Brigade 055, an elite irregular military force of between 2-5,000 fighters, to assist the Taliban in defeating its enemies, personified by Ahmed Shah Masood and his Northern Alliance (which they actually call "Jaish Shah Masood" in northern Afghanistan). In addition to "paying the rent," as it were, to their Taliban hosts, Brigade 055 (in which John Walker Lindh was serving when he was captured) also served as a very Darwinian means through which to ensure that those camp graduates that later went to serve the organization in other insurgencies would have already been "blooded" on the Northern Alliance. Still no mention of the Pakistani role in all of this, though ...

There were also ideological ties. Both the Taliban and Bin Ladin espoused the vision of a pure Islamic state.

The latter, however, was completely willing to make use of modern technology before returning the rest of the planet to something akin to the Bronze Age.

Bin Ladin reportedly swore an oath of loyalty to Taliban leader Mullah Omar.

*Snort.*

If anything, it was the other way around. Bin Laden was the Man Who Knows People and he likely had more than enough contacts or fundraising to depose Omar if the Taliban didn't dance to his tune. He certainly held the purse strings in the relationship and towards the middle of 2001 even started acting as the Taliban's unofficial defense minister.

Relations between Bin Ladin and the Taliban leadership were sometimes tense, and some Taliban leaders opposed the al Qaeda presence.

The main source of opposition within the Taliban to al-Qaeda was Maulavi Wakil Ahmed Mutawakil, the Foreign Minister, who, having actually been outside of Afghanistan and South Asia unlike most of the Taliban leadership, was well aware of the destructive power that could be brought to bear against the movement if they persisted in following bin Laden. He was also purportedly tipped off about 9/11 in advance by the leadership of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan.

In the end, however, Mullah Omar never broke with Bin Ladin and al Qaeda.

That also had to do with the fact that high-ranking ISI and senior Deobandi clerics who visited Afghanistan shortly after 9/11 told him not to in blatant contradiction of Musharraf's orders. Not that the commission seems to have recognized that fact just yet ...

Similarly, Pakistan did not break with the Taliban until after 9/11, although it was well aware that the Taliban was harboring Bin Ladin.

Some inside the country, notably the MMA party and the Lashkar-e-Taiba, don't seem to have gotten around to breaking with him just yet. It's only been nearly 3 years ...

The Taliban’s ability to provide Bin Ladin a haven in the face of international pressure and UN sanctions was significantly facilitated by Pakistani support. Pakistan benefited from the Taliban-al Qaeda relationship, as Bin Ladin’s camps trained and equipped fighters for Pakistan’s ongoing struggle with India over Kashmir.

That's as close as they come to suggesting that elements of the Pakistani military-intelligence apparatus were in cahoots with al-Qaeda, which is of course true, especially in the case of the ISI. They really should go more in-depth to al-Qaeda's connections to the Pakistani groups, particularly the Lashkar-e-Taiba and even underground sectarian groups like the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, as these are the organizations that have allowed the network to continue to operate there with impunity post-9/11.