Bin Laden Declared War on America Twice Before Anyone Listened

The enemy told us. In writing, twice, in public, in language so plain that a translation was hardly required. Most of the country did not read it, and the part of the government that did read it kept filing it under "rhetoric." That is the uncomfortable center of the story of how Osama bin Laden's organization went from a name few Americans had heard to the author of the worst attack ever carried out on American soil.

This post is a timeline. It runs from 1993 to the morning of September 11, 2001, one dated entry at a time, with a line on why each one mattered and how Washington answered. I am going to stay inside the record of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, the 9/11 Commission, whose 2004 report is the most thorough public account we have. Where I could not stand behind a detail, I have left it out. The goal is not to assign blame in the abstract. It is to see the pattern, because a pattern is what we missed.

A few terms before the dates

Three words appear again and again, so let me define them.

Al-Qaeda is the terrorist organization that Osama bin Laden helped found around 1988 in the aftermath of the Soviet war in Afghanistan. It is Arabic for "the base."

Fatwa is a religious ruling. A fatwa from a recognized scholar carries weight inside Islam. Bin Laden was not a recognized scholar, and many Muslim clerics rejected his rulings, which is one reason it is a mistake to call him a spokesman for a faith. He was a political militant using the language of religion.

Law-enforcement model versus war model. Through most of the 1990s, the American government treated terrorism chiefly as a crime. You investigated, you arrested, you indicted, you tried. The alternative was to treat it as war: strike camps, target leaders, deny sanctuaries. The tension between the two runs through every entry below.

The early warnings, 1993 to 1995

February 26, 1993: the first World Trade Center bombing

A truck bomb exploded in the underground garage of the north tower. Six people were killed and over a thousand were injured. The attackers had hoped to topple one tower into the other. They failed.

Why it mattered: It was the first major Islamist attack on the American homeland. The government answered as a law-enforcement matter, and it did so well on its own terms: investigators identified the conspirators quickly, and in 1994 four men were convicted in federal court. The ringleader, Ramzi Yousef, fled and was captured in Pakistan in 1995. The prosecutions worked. But the Commission observed that the success of the criminal case may have lulled officials into thinking the threat was a matter of individual conspirators, not an organized movement with a base and an ideology.

October 3 and 4, 1993: Mogadishu

American forces in Somalia fought a long street battle in the capital. Eighteen Americans died. The United States ended the operation that had sent the force and left Somalia.

Why it mattered: Bin Laden later cited Somalia as proof that Americans would flee after taking casualties. The Commission quotes him saying the United States "rushed out of Somalia in shame and disgrace". Whether or not his link to the fighting was as direct as he later boasted, the perception of American weakness became part of his case to recruits. Deterrence is a belief held in the mind of the adversary, and that belief had been altered.

The first declaration, 1996

January 1996: the CIA sets up a unit on bin Laden

The CIA created a special unit, staffed by about a dozen officers, dedicated to tracking him. This was a real step. For the first time a small team inside the agency focused on one man and his financial network.

Why it mattered: The government was now collecting information. It could not yet decide what to do with it. The Commission describes years of proposals, such as capturing him, killing him and handing him over to a foreign government, that stalled over legal doubts, concerns about collateral damage and disagreements about reliability.

May and August 1996: Sudan to Afghanistan, and the first public declaration

Bin Laden, who had been based in Sudan, left in May 1996 under pressure and moved to Afghanistan. In August of that year he issued a document commonly translated as a declaration of war against the Americans occupying the land of the two holy places, a reference to Saudi Arabia, where American forces were stationed after the Gulf War.

Why it mattered: It was the first time he announced the war in his own name. The declaration was long, poetic and aimed at Muslim audiences, which is part of why American officials treated it as a regional grievance and not a plan. The Commission notes that his message gradually gained an audience.

The second declaration and the first strikes, 1998

February 23, 1998: the fatwa

Bin Laden and other militants announced the formation of a "World Islamic Front" and published a statement saying that the killing of Americans, civilian and military, anywhere in the world, was an individual duty for every Muslim who could do it.

Why it mattered: Notice the progress. In 1996 he declared war on forces in a particular land. In 1998 he declared that every American was a target. A government that reads the 1996 document as a local complaint ought to have read the 1998 document as a change in category. The language is the language of a campaign against civilians. The 9/11 Commission treated the statement as a clear statement of intent.

August 7, 1998: the embassy bombings

Truck bombs exploded almost simultaneously outside the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The attacks killed 224 people, including twelve Americans, and wounded thousands, most of them local citizens.

Why it mattered: This was the first time the organization carried out a strike on the scale it had promised. It was coordinated, it was planned for years, and it targeted American diplomatic missions in two countries on the same day. That is not the signature of a ragged band.

August 20, 1998: the cruise-missile response

President Clinton ordered strikes on camps in Afghanistan associated with bin Laden and on a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan that the administration believed was linked to chemical weapons. The camps were hit. Bin Laden was not there.

Why it mattered: Here was the war model, briefly. But the strikes were one-off, the Sudan target became controversial, and the attack did not become a campaign. The Commission recounts the difficulty: the intelligence for hitting a person at a particular moment was thin, and the political price of getting it wrong was high. The enemy drew his own conclusion from a response that was loud and brief.

November 4, 1998: the indictment

A federal grand jury in New York indicted bin Laden for the embassy bombings and for conspiracy to attack American targets.

Why it mattered: The case against him was now public and legal. It also reflected the old model: a man in a cave in Afghanistan, beyond the reach of any marshal, was under indictment. It is a useful thing to have in a file. It is not a strategy.

The near miss and the Cole, 1999 and 2000

December 14, 1999: Ahmed Ressam is caught

An Algerian man named Ahmed Ressam drove a car off a ferry at Port Angeles, Washington. A border agent was suspicious, and a search found explosives. He had been planning to attack Los Angeles International Airport around the millennium.

Why it mattered: It was luck combined with an alert officer, not the result of a system working. The Commission treats it as a case of an alert official at the right place, not a comprehensive defense. The millennium alert period also shows how effective the government could be when it recognized the threat and mobilized, and how the effort faded when the dates passed.

October 12, 2000: the USS Cole

A small boat packed with explosives came alongside the destroyer Cole while it was refueling in the harbor of Aden, Yemen. Seventeen American sailors were killed, and the ship was badly damaged.

Why it mattered: It was an attack on a warship of the United States Navy. The Commission records that the CIA's preliminary judgment, on December 21, 2000, was that al-Qaeda had supported the attack, that no military retaliation followed, and that the incoming administration inherited the question. An attack on an American warship with no response is, to the adversary, an answer. The question for the reader is what a serious power would have done, and I would ask you to compare it with Operation Praying Mantis and the Day the Navy Answered Iran in 1988, where the Navy did respond to an attack on its ships.

The last year, 2001

January 25, 2001: Richard Clarke's memo

Richard Clarke, the White House's counterterrorism coordinator, a career official who stayed on into the new administration, sent a memo asking for an urgent meeting of the cabinet-level principals on al-Qaeda, and proposing a more aggressive posture.

Why it mattered: The memo urged a decision. The Commission found that the principals did not meet on al-Qaeda as a group until September 4, 2001, just a week before the attacks. The new administration had begun a policy review of the issue. But the process was a policy process, and the enemy was running an operation.

August 6, 2001: the President's Daily Brief

The briefing that the President received on August 6, 2001 was titled "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US." It was declassified in 2004. It reviewed what was known about the organization's intentions and noted reports of suspicious activity consistent with preparations for hijackings.

Why it mattered: It is tempting to treat this one page as a smoking gun, and it was not. It was a historical summary with some current reporting, and it did not identify a date, a method or a target. Much of the argument about it is partisan, and I would urge conservatives to read the document itself instead of the argument about it. The Commission's overall conclusion is that the government had plenty of generalized warning and lacked the specific information, or the integrated picture, to act on it. That is a harder charge than negligence, and a more useful one.

Summer 2001: the pieces scattered across agencies

Without turning this into a full list, the Commission documented several moments when the system came close. In July 2001, an FBI agent in Phoenix wrote a memorandum raising the concern that individuals with ties to Islamist extremism were enrolled in flight schools. In August 2001 the FBI's Minneapolis field office opened an investigation of Zacarias Moussaoui, who had raised suspicions at a flight school, and he was detained on an immigration charge. And two of the eventual hijackers had been known to the CIA since early 2000 as al-Qaeda associates, but were not placed on the watch list until August 24, 2001.

Why it mattered: In each case a piece of the picture sat in one office, and the other piece sat in another. The Commission's phrase for the underlying condition was a failure to connect the dots across agencies. The follow-up, The 9/11 Commission Found a Failure of Imagination, Read Its Real Lessons, takes that finding apart in detail.

September 11, 2001

Nineteen hijackers seized four airliners. Two struck the towers of the World Trade Center in New York, one struck the Pentagon, and one crashed in a field in Pennsylvania after passengers fought back. Nearly three thousand people died, not counting the hijackers.

Why it mattered: It is the date that gave every earlier entry its meaning. The long record had been telling a single story. After the attack, it was read in order.

What the order teaches

I promised a lesson, and here are the numbered premises.

1. Take an enemy at his word. When a man publishes a declaration of war, and then another that widens the category of targets, and then he carries out an attack consistent with the words, you do not need a decoder ring. The words were the plan. Policy debates that treated them as theatre were mistaken.
2. A crime model alone cannot answer a war. Indictments, trials and convictions are essential tools. They deliver justice, and when they work they incapacitate individuals. But a federal court cannot reach a training camp in another country. The 1990s showed that a government that has only the law-enforcement tool will use it even when the problem is larger. See Boumediene v. Bush and the Day Habeas Corpus Reached Guantanamo Bay for the courtroom-versus-battlefield question as it later developed.
3. A response that is brief or absent teaches the enemy. The 1998 strikes were one-off, and there was no strike after the Cole. Whether you think each judgment was defensible at the time, the cumulative lesson to an adversary was that the cost of attacking America was modest. That is the logic of Deterrence Fails When an Enemy Thinks You Will Not Pay the Price.
4. Information has to be connected, not just collected. The government had pieces, and the pieces were in different places. Technology did not fail. Organization did.
5. Both parties share the record. The decisions covered here span two administrations, one of each party, and the Commission, with five Republicans and five Democrats, declined to name a single guilty party. Conservatives who know this history should resist the temptation to use it as a partisan weapon, because the lesson is about the system.

The best counterargument, stated fairly

Defenders of the 1990s approach make an argument worth hearing. Before September 11, they say, the American public had no appetite for a war against a shadowy group in a far-off country. Military action required political support that did not exist, and the intelligence for precision strikes was not good enough to justify the risk of killing civilians or hitting the wrong target. Hindsight, they add, makes a signal look clearer than it was amid thousands of other warnings.

Each of those points has force. The Commission itself warns about hindsight bias. And I will concede that political will was not there; it takes leadership to build it, and that is precisely the point. The argument for a stronger response does not rest on knowing the date of the attack. It rests on the proposition that an organization that declares war on you in writing and then carries out attacks on embassies and warships deserves to be treated as a belligerent, and that the political will is something leaders build, not something they wait for. The same logic applies to later debates over the open-ended authority for those wars, which is why Sixty Words Passed in 2001 Still Carry America's Wars, and That Is a Problem matters.

The case in brief

1. Al-Qaeda announced its war in an August 1996 declaration and widened it in a February 23, 1998 fatwa, and the attacks that followed matched the words.
2. The 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1998 embassy bombings and the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole were met mainly with prosecutions, one set of missile strikes and no retaliation for the Cole.
3. The 9/11 Commission found that the government had abundant general warning but did not connect the specific pieces held by different agencies.
4. Treating terrorism only as crime left the nation without a way to reach training camps and sanctuaries, and the pattern of weak response shaped the enemy's expectations.
5. The record belongs to both parties, which is a reason to read it carefully rather than use it as a cudgel.

What you can do: read the Executive Summary of the 9/11 Commission Report, which is free and short, and then ask your senators which of its recommendations they think remain unfinished.