the FBI’s plan to shatter efforts at leftist black-Jewish political coalition building. The FBI-fomented paranoia ultimately enabled the militant rabbi to paint himself as the only thing standing between Jews and a second Holocaust at hands of blacks, Arabs and their liberal Jewish donors.
On November 5, 1990, Kahane appeared at the Marriott East Side hotel in Manhattan for the founding conference of a group he called ZEERO, or the Zionist Emergency Evacuation Rescue Organization. In characteristic fashion, the rabbi conjured up a scenario of imminent doom for the Jews, urging his hundred or so supporters to abandon life in America before the flames of anti-Semitism consumed them. Their only sanctuary, he declared, was within the militarized frontiers of the self-proclaimed Jewish state.
Suddenly, a man dressed as an ultra-Orthodox Jew approached Kahane. With a crazed look in his eyes, he unloaded a .357 Magnum revolver into the rabbi’s torso. It was Nosair, demonstrating the tactics he had learned from years of training in Afghanistan and under the watch of Ali Mohamed. The fascist rabbi died that night. His funeral, held days later in Jerusalem, where he had served as a lawmaker in Israel’s Knesset, was the largest to date in that country’s history and was even addressed by Israel’s chief rabbi.
Martyred by a fellow religious fanatic, Kahane’s views moved steadily into the Israeli mainstream in the years after his death, particularly his proposals for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian citizens from Israel. The fallout from his killing demonstrated the success of the logic both Al Qaeda and his own followers embraced: terror begets extremism and collapses the fragile space where multi-confessional societies survive.
In Nosair’s home, FBI and NYPD investigators found the trove of documents stolen by Ali Mohamed from Fort Bragg, including classified dispatches from the Joint Chiefs to US embassies across the Middle East and Green Beret training manuals that Mohamed had translated into Arabic. They found Nosair’s notebooks containing detailed plans, in his words, for an attack “to be done by means of destroying—exploding—the structures of [America’s] civilized pillars such as the tourist infrastructure which they are proud of and their high world buildings which they are proud of and their statues which they endear and the buildings in which gather their leaders.” The investigators also discovered maps of the World Trade Center and audiotapes of the Blind Sheikh calling for holy war.
Besides training him in firearms, Mohamed had instructed Nosair in the use of dead mail drops, prompting him to register a post office box at a check-cashing store in Jersey City called Sphinx Trading. It was the same mailbox center that the 9/11 ringleaders relied on to exchange messages as the plot developed. Despite uncovering a massive cache of evidence that connected Nosair to an international terror network and suggested active plots underway in New York City, Nosair was tried as a lone gunman. His lawyer, the leftist firebrand William Kunstler, easily outmaneuvered a clumsy government prosecution team. In the end, Nosair got off with an illegal gun rap—a stinging defeat for the government.
The FBI had failed to stop Al Qaeda before it could metastasize into a major global force. Meanwhile, bin Laden was turning against his former patrons and preparing ambitious plans to wage war on a global scale.
When Iraqi president Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1991, a new chance for glory arrived on bin Laden’s doorstep—or so he thought. The wealthy scion had warned for years that Saddam would eventually threaten Saudi Arabia, and now, here he was, with his million-man army just miles from the kingdom.
Desperate for action after a year of dithering, bin Laden appeared in the office of the Saudi defense minister, Sultan bin Abdulaziz al-Saud. Bin Laden had brought battle plans and an entourage of Afghan war vets spoiling for a new fight. He beseeched Sultan to send his own private militia and a supplement of unemployed Saudi conscripts against the battle hardened Iraqi Republican Guard. Later, he made the same pitch to Prince Turki al-Faisal, one of the few principals who shared bin Laden’s resentment of Saddam. Turki left the meeting astounded by bin Laden’s arrogance and the harebrained quality of his plan, and sent him away almost as soon as the royal family welcomed the American military in as the protectors of its kingdom.
For bin Laden, the rejection revealed to him that his country’s army was little more than a neo-imperial shell and confirmed in his mind how its leadership acted as tools of the godless West—just as Utaybi, the millenarian coup leader, had described them back in 1979.
This offered bin Laden further fuel for his wrath against the United States. A few years earlier, he had celebrated them for supporting the anti-Soviet jihad, but now he echoed Reagan’s language about the Soviet Union, inverting it to slam the United States as an Evil Empire that had to be bled at its weakest points.
For Americans, thousands of miles away, the Gulf War unfolded for the first time on 24-7 cable network broadcasts, with commercial breaks. In a series of essays provocatively entitled The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, French philosopher Jean Baudrillard captured the way that round-the-clock cable news spoon-fed Americans a simulacrum of the actual event, an electronic war game of camera-tipped, laser-guided missiles, stealth bombers and embedded journalists. For Baudrillard, the war was “a virtual and meticulous operation which leaves the same impression of a non-event where the military confrontation fell short and where no political power proved itself.”
Widely misunderstood as a denial of the carnage and human toll of the war, Baudrillard had produced one of the most enduring critiques of the way post–Cold War conflicts were marketed to the Western public as clinical exercises in freedom-spreading. For most Americans, the digital abstraction of the war and the dual layer patina of patriotic hoopla and humanitarian goodwill overwhelmed their critical faculties and ensured their consent. The stage was set for the era of drone warfare that saw the United States carrying out robotic assassinations from Yemen to the Philippines with little political backlash at home.
Of the few Kuwaitis the American public got to know during the Gulf War, and the most aggressively promoted one, turned out to be a fraud. She was the product of a massive cash infusion from that country’s emir into at least twenty public relations firms through a front group called Citizens for a Free Kuwait. One of those firms, Hill & Knowlton, arranged for an anonymous young woman known as “Nayirah” to testify that she had seen Iraqi soldiers unplug the incubators of Kuwaiti babies. Another firm raking in $100,000-a-month from the Kuwaitis, the Rendon Group, relayed to the US media the girl’s testimony. The human rights group Amnesty International gave the story a veneer of legitimacy when it falsely claimed in a poorly sourced eighty-four-page report that “300 premature babies were reported to have died after Iraqi soldiers removed them from incubators, which were then looted.”
Nayirah arrived in Washington alongside Representative Tom Lantos, a neoconservative Democrat who brought her to testify before his Congressional Human Rights Caucus. At the time, his caucus was renting discounted office space from Hill & Knowlton and had taken a $50,000 payment from Citizens for a Free Kuwait. Before Nayirah appeared in Congress, she was coached by Hill & Knowlton’s vice president, who directed her to deliver false testimony. Reporters repeated the heart-wrenching story of Nayirah in a virtual feedback loop until President George H.W. Bush spun the tall tale during a national address. The star witness of interventionist forces was later revealed to be the Kuwaiti ambassador’s daughter—a fact that Lantos knew but knowingly concealed. In fact, the entire story she promoted was a fabrication. But by the time it was exposed, US boots were already on the ground in Kuwait.
“Of all the accusations made against [Saddam Hussein],” wrote John R. MacArthur, author of the seminal book on Gulf War propaganda, The Second Front, “none had more impact on American public opinion than the one about Iraqi soldiers removing 312 babies from their incubators and leaving them to die on the cold hospital floors of Kuwait City.”
For Americans consuming the war through the warped lens of cable news, the enemy appeared either in the form of an imposing Arab dictator or