Saturday, Sep 6, 2008
As the African embassy bombing trial begins, Osama bin Laden casts a long shadow.
Feb 12, 2001 | Want to listen to a terrorist talk shop in your own back yard? If you're in New York, hop on the 4 train, get off at City Hall and make your way into the federal courthouse at 40 Centre Street.
For much of the next year, downtown Manhattan will be ground zero for America's latest salvo in its low-grade war against alleged terrorist mastermind Osama Bin Laden, the Saudi exile presumed to be camped somewhere inside Afghanistan, under the protection of the Taliban.
After a three-year, multimillion-dollar investigation, the federal government opened its case last week against four Bin Laden associates, accusing them of criminal acts in connection with the bombing of two American embassies in East Africa on Aug. 7, 1998. That morning 224 people died and thousands were wounded in almost-simultaneous car bomb attacks in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
On Tuesday, inside Room 318 of the Federal District Courthouse, a Sudanese man with a light beard and a skullcap named Jamel Ahmed Al-Fadl spent the day recalling his former life as an Islamic warrior with Osama Bin Laden. Al-Fadl's English was poor and he spoke in nervous bursts, but sometimes his words were devastatingly clear. At one point, prosecutors mentioned the U.S. military involvement in Somalia in 1993 and asked Al-Fadl to tell jurors Bin Laden's take on it. "The snake is America," he recalled Bin Laden saying. "We have to cut their head and stop them. Right here, in the horn of Africa.'"
The 1998 embassy bombings were the stated reason for President Clinton's decision to launch cruise missile strikes into Afghanistan and Sudan six weeks later. None of the 70-odd missiles managed to take out Bin Laden, although they did manage to destroy a pharmaceutical plant outside Khartoum, as well as further erode Clinton's already strained credibility, coming as they did just three days after he told the nation that he had deceived everyone about "that woman."
More recently, officials suspect Bin Laden was involved in last year's bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. Last month, his name was mentioned after the U.S. Embassy in Rome closed for two days in response to threats of a terrorist attack. And Wednesday, CIA Director George Tenet visited Capitol Hill and called Bin Laden's group, Al Qaeda, the No. 1 challenge to America's security. "Osama Bin Laden and his global network of lieutenants and associates remain the most immediate and serious threat," Tenet told senators. "His organization is continuing to place emphasis on developing surrogates to carry out attacks in an effort to avoid detection, blame and retaliation."
Now America is turning to a jury of 12 New Yorkers to apportion at least some of the blame and to deliver judicial retaliation for what is said to have been Al Qaeda's most deadly day of terrorism yet. The case, appropriately enough, is named U.S. vs. Bin Laden, yet the alleged leader himself, along with 16 others named in the indictment, is not in the dock on trial. This time, at least, the U.S. is trying an eclectic group of mid-level operatives: two alleged bombers, Bin Laden's personal secretary and another member of Al Qaeda with no direct connection to the bombings.
In that sense, at least from the outset, this embassy bombing trial has the look and feel of the recently completed Lockerbie trial. In the Netherlands, two Libyans stood trial for a terrorist act that court testimony demonstrated could not have been the act of two individuals acting alone. The case ended with one conviction and one acquittal, and it left victims' families and some observers dissatisfied, questioning the capacity of such trials to truly deliver justice and contribute in any meaningful way to a decrease in terrorism.
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