Berlusconi or we will truly burn Italy." The Internet warriors have been emboldened, although it is impossible to know how seriously to take their threats.
Appeasement is a foolish strategy for dealing with Al Qaeda. Last year, many Saudis were stunned when the terrorist group struck Western compounds in Riyadh-shortly after the United States had announced that it would withdraw troops from Saudi Arabia, fulfilling one of bin Laden's primary demands. The Saudis now realize that Al Qaeda won't be assuaged until all foreigners are expelled from the Arabian Peninsula and a rigid theocracy has been imposed. Yet some of the countries on Al Qaeda's hit list will no doubt seek to appease terrorists as a quick solution to a crisis.
Intelligence officials are now trying to determine who is the next target, and are sifting through "chatter" in search of a genuine threat. "We see people getting on the Internet and then they get on their phones and talk about it," a senior FBI official told me. "We are now responding to the threat to the U.S. elections." The idea of attacking before Election Day, the official said, "was born out of Madrid." Earlier this year, an international task force dubbed Operation Crevice arrested members of a bomb-making ring in London. During the investigation, officials overheard statements that there were jihadis in Mexico awaiting entry into the United States. That coincided with vague warnings from European imams about attacks before the elections. As a result of this intelligence, surveillance of border traffic from Mexico has been increased.
Even though Al Qaeda has been weakened by the capture of key operatives, such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the 9/11 attacks, it is hardly defunct. "There is a replacement for Mohammed named Abu Faraj," the FBI official said. "If there is an attack on the United States, his deputy, Hamza Rabia, will be responsible. He's head of external operations for Al Qaeda-an arrogant, nasty guy." The official continued, "The most dangerous thing now is that no one is in control. These guys don't have to go back to bin Laden or Zawahiri for approval."
One of the most sobering pieces of information to come out of the investigation of the March 11 bombings is that the planning for the attacks may have begun nearly a year before 9/11. In October 2000, several of the suspects met in Istanbul with Amer Azizi, who had taken the nom de guerre Othman Al Andalusi-Othman of Al Andalus. Azizi later gave the conspirators permission to act in the name of Al Qaeda, although it is unclear whether he authorized money or other assistance-or, indeed, whether Al Qaeda had much support to offer. In June, Italian police released a surveillance tape of one of the alleged planners of the train bombings, an Egyptian housepainter named Rabei Osman Sayed Ahmed, who said that the operation "took me two and a half years." Ahmed had served as an explosives expert in the Egyptian Army. It appears that some kind of attack would have happened even if Spain had not joined the Coalition-or if the invasion of Iraq had never occurred.
"The real problem of Spain for Al Qaeda is that we are a neighbor of Arab countries-Morocco and Algeria-and we are a model of economy, democracy, and secularism," Florentino Portero, a political analyst at the Grupo de Estudios Estrategicos, in Madrid, told me. "We support the transformation and Westernization of the Middle East. We defend the transition of Morocco from a monarchy to a constitutional monarchy. We are allies of the enemies of Al Qaeda in the Arab world. This point is not clearly understood by the Spanish people. We are a menace to Al Qaeda just because of who we are."
Lawrence Wright is the author of five books of nonfiction (most recently, Twins) and one novel (God's Favorite). He is also a screenwriter (The Siege and Noriega: God's Favorite). He has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1992.
Since 9/11, I have been working on a history of Al Qaeda, so I was in Afghanistan when the bombs went off in Madrid on March 11, 2004. One of the fascinating details that did not get published in the article concerned the origin of the legend of Al Andulus, the Islamic Camelot. Washington Irving, America's first internationally famous author, arrived in Spain in 1826, to write a biography of Christopher Columbus. While he was in the country, he befriended the Gypsies who were living in the ruins of the Alhambra, and he drew from them stories of the Moorish reign. Published in 1832, Irving's book The Alhambra was an immediate international success, capturing, as it did, the splendid sense of decay and lost glory that so animated the nineteenth-century romantic sensibility. The myth of Al Andalus, that of an Islamic empire of tolerance and justice, encompassed by a superb appreciation of beauty in all its manifestations in art and nature, was created in part by the same man who had drawn so imaginatively upon the ghost stories and fairy legends of upstate New York. Irving was so associated with the boom in Spanish tourism that followed that he returned ten years later as the American ambassador. He eventually published a two-volume biography of the prophet Mohammed.
Craig Horowitz
Anatomy of a Foiled Plot
from New York magazine
On a rain-soaked Saturday morning, nine days before the start of the Republican convention at Madison Square Garden, an Egyptian known as Dawadi left his house on Staten Island to pick up two friends. They had plans to spend the day together and to take care of a little business.
Dawadi wore a baseball cap pulled down over his eyes. He looked as if he were heading out to do some weekend errands. He drove to Rossville, a middle-class Staten Island neighborhood, where he picked up James Elshafay, an unemployed nineteen-year-old Tottenville High School dropout. The two men greeted each other warmly. Though they had known each other for less than a year, Dawadi had become a mentor to the naive, sometimes confused younger man. Mature, well-educated, and religious, Dawadi was, some would say, even a father figure for Elshafay, who had grown up in a house with just his mother and an aunt.
Driving cautiously toward Queens in the heavy rain, the two men passed the time discussing the best way to handle the day's primary activity-a careful examination of the Herald Square subway station in preparation for planting a bomb.
After considering a variety of targets, they had decided on the subway station. Now they needed detailed information to put together a plan. They wanted to know the number and location of cops on the platforms at different times of the day. Which areas were covered by video cameras? Since the likeliest place to hide a bomb was a garbage can, they needed to know how many there were, where they were located, and when they got emptied. And they needed to find the best path to go in and then get out quickly after planting the device.
When they reached Thirty-fourth Avenue in Astoria, Shahawar Matin Siraj, a twenty-two-year-old Pakistani national, came down from his apartment and got in the car. Siraj, who entered the United States illegally nearly six years ago, was wearing a do-rag and baggy jeans. He had said when they planned their recon maneuvers that he wanted to disguise himself. He didn't want to "look Arabic." In English so thickly accented it can make him difficult to understand, he said he wanted to "look hip-hop, like a Puerto Rican."