Is the evidence against Osama bin Laden sufficient to unleash a war?
Julian Borger in Washington and Ewen MacAskill
As far as President George W Bush is concerned, Osama bin Laden is “wanted dead or alive” for the September 11 outrages.
The phrase harked back to a bygone Texan age when a lawman’s strong hunch would have been enough to dispatch a posse on the fugitive’s trail, but the question facing the international community now is whether it is sufficient to unleash a war.
United States intelligence officials describe the evidence as “overwhelming”. Almost every single lead points to him, they say. By the standards of most intelligence material, where every nuance counts, the clues are undoubtedly persuasive. But by the standards of a courtroom, it is all circumstantial so far, as even US intelligence officers admit.
Conclusive proof amounting to a “smoking gun” has not been found, and may not exist even if Bin Laden orchestrated every detail personally. His organisation, al-Qa’ida (the Base), is loose-knit and, by all accounts, the Saudi dissident does not risk making satellite calls himself.
Bin Laden was charged in May this year for the 1998 bombings of US embassies in east Africa, but that was on the basis of testimony provided by his former followers. As of Wednesday there was no sign that any of five people arrested or the 75 held for questioning had directly implicated him. An unnamed suspect arrested in New York’s JFK airport trying to travel on a bogus pilot’s licence is reported to have provided “useful information” pointing towards Bin Laden.
Unless and until one of the suspects in custody turns him in, the evidence against Bin Laden is likely to remain circumstantial. For the US, that will probably be enough. He is wanted after all for the embassy bombings, in which 224 people died. And he is a prime suspect, again on circumstantial grounds, in the bombing of the American warship USS Cole in Yemen last year. The rest of the world will have to decide if circumstantial is good enough.
In the eyes of intelligence experts, who sift through the evidence looking for patterns, behavioural “fingerprints” and coincidences, there is little room for doubt. Peter Bergen, Bin Laden’s biographer and the leading Western authority on the Saudi fugitive, said he was “99,99 recurring per cent” sure that he was behind last Tuesday’s attacks.
Perhaps the strongest evidence so far are the phone conversations intercepted by the US surveillance service, the National Security Agency, and German intelligence. In those conversations, people who were being watched and listened to because they were known to be members of al-Qa’ida, were heard to celebrate the attack in a way which suggested prior knowledge. In one intercept, one suspect was heard to declare: “We’ve hit the targets.”
There are no questions over motive in this case. In various decrees and television interviews over the years, Bin Laden has stated that he considers ordinary Americans legitimate targets.
In one edict in February 1998 he said Muslims everywhere should kill Americans wherever they found them, soldiers and civilians alike, “in accordance with the words of almighty God”.
Nancy Paterson, the US lawyer who drew up the indictment of Slobodan Milosevic at the Hague war crimes tribunal, said those statements were legally significant. “Any time you get the target [the suspect] making statements directly from his mouth, it’s extremely helpful,” she said.
Next on the evidence list is the identity of the hijackers. Of the 19 who seized control of the four airliners, 13 seem to have been Saudi nationals, mostly from the south where Bin Laden is from. Two are Yemeni (like Bin Laden’s family), three have generic Arab names whose nationality has not yet been pinned down, and one, Mohamed Atta, is an Egyptian.
The Saudi-dominated nature of the plot is a strong indicator of Bin Laden’s direct involvement. He is associated with terrorist groups from all over the world, but the core of al-Qa’ida, which is directly loyal to him, is Saudi and Yemeni. “This was a Praetorian inner circle,” Bergen said.
Atta is suspected of belonging to Eygptian Islamic Jihad, whose leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, is Bin Laden’s closest associate.
Atta is known to have met an Iraqi intelligence agent in Europe in the months preceding the attack, pointing attention to Baghdad. But so far, the evidence of an Iraqi connection is far outweighed by the links with Bin Laden.
The two possibilities are not mutually exclusive. Bin Laden has publicly expressed contempt for Saddam Hussein’s secular background, but according to US sources he did meet Iraqi intelligence agents in 1998, and may have accepted their offer of money.
Investigators are still tracing the movements of the suspects, but several of them are known to have made trips to Afghanistan in the years leading up to the attack. For example, one of them, Wail al-Shehri, spent some time at the al-Farouk training camp that Bin Laden runs in the Afghan mountains.
Zacarias Moussaoui, a French-Algerian who lived in Brixton, south London, before leaving earlier this year to take flying lessons in the US, is suspected of being part of another hijack team that failed to fulfil its objectives. He had been under surveillance by French intelligence as a suspected al-Qa’ida member, since making a series of trips to Afghanistan.
Early in 2000 several of the hijackers visited Malaysia, another known outpost of Bin Laden operations, where the Saudi heir to a construction fortune has been known to hold bank accounts. One of the hijackers, Khalid al-Midhar, was videotaped meeting Islamic radicals including members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad and a man who was later implicated in the attack on the USS Cole, and who also had links with Bin Laden.
Finally, there is the money trail. Investigators are examining bank transfers made by the hijackers to and from the United Arab Emirates, another state with Islamic banking practices which has been used in the past by Bin Laden to channel money to supporters.
In London, the Foreign Office said MI6 had established independently that Bin Laden was the prime suspect. None of the material that MI6 has provided to ministers is yet in the public domain, but it is believed that so far it is not sufficient to prosecute him in court with much hope of success.
The Foreign Office admitted as much, saying: “We have not made our final conclusion about the identification of the perpetrators. Many leads are still being followed so we can reach as definite a conclusion as possible.”
It is still quite possible that one of the suspects caught up in the FBI dragnet will give direct evidence on Bin Laden’s involvement. This year’s embassy bombings trial demonstrated that loyalty within the organisation is not always watertight.
Until such testimony emerges, the world will have to go by the existing circumstantial evidence. But Paterson, who drew up the case against Milosevic, pointed out that sometimes, even in a court of law, you do not need a “smoking gun”.
“You can prove the case circumstantially,” she said. “You get a lot of little pieces and put them together and then convince the court that the totality of the pieces meet the legal burden of proof.”
This time, it is not a court that will need convincing but world public opinion as well as governments who will have to decide whether they want to put their soldiers at risk on the basis of the existing evidence. That is a high benchmark. But the human cost of ignoring the evidence at hand may also be very high.