In January 2006, apparently provoked once again by watching Bush on satellite television, Osama issued an audiotaped statement, which would be his last communiqué for a prolonged period.
“I had not intended to speak to you about this issue,” he began. “However, what prompted me to speak are the repeated fallacies of your President Bush, in his comment on the outcome of the U.S. opinion polls, which indicated that the overwhelming majority of you want the withdrawal of the forces from Iraq—but he objected to this desire, and said that the withdrawal of troops would send a wrong message to the enemy. Bush said: It is better to fight them on their ground than they fighting us on our ground.” This rhetoric, although mainly intended for domestic political audiences in the United States, plainly infuriated Osama:
Reality testifies that the war against America and its allies has not remained confined to Iraq, as he claims. In fact, Iraq has become a point of attraction and recruitment of qualified resources. On the other hand, the mujaheddin, praise be to God, have managed to breach all the security measures adopted by the unjust nations of the coalition time and again. The evidence of this is the bombings you have seen in the most important European countries of this aggressive coalition.
Osama then issued a warning:
As for the delay in carrying out similar operations in America, this was not due to failure to breach your security measures. Operations are under preparation, and you will see them on your own ground once they are finished, God willing.
As for himself, he said, “I swear not to die but a free man.”24
He fell into a long silence. On the sixth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, Al Qaeda’s revived media operation, Al-Sahab, or “The Clouds,” delivered a new videotape in which Osama donned a gold formal robe and read out a political essay to a single fixed camera. The images were blurry, but his eyes appeared a little baggy—hardly surprising for a man now almost fifty years old living under conditions that presumably carried some stress. The most striking aspects of his appearance reflected his unembarrassed middle-aged vanity: Since his last video, he had trimmed his long beard to a rounded shape and dyed its gray streaks black.
His speech again synthesized disparate and not particularly religious anti-American critiques. He managed to praise both Noam Chomsky, the linguist and ardently left-wing intellectual, and Michael Scheuer, the former CIA analyst whose professional life had once been devoted to killing him, because both men denounced in books they had recently published the business-influenced imperial strains in American foreign policy. Osama seemed clearly to be hiding in or near Pakistan, or somewhere else where English books were readily available, as he appeared to be using the considerable time on his hands to read in English, advancing the linguistic training he had first acquired from Irish and British instructors at the Al-Thaghr school. He also seemed, as before, to be watching and reading English-language news. Western media aggravated him: they were often worse “than the condition of the media of the dictatorial regimes which march in the caravan of the single leader,” a view that also placed him in the company of many Western leftists.
Yet when Osama watched American or British television, sequestered in his hideaway, he now gazed into a flattering mirror—the media might distort his image, but they also depicted him as one of the most pervasive and powerful political figures on earth. Through the events of September 11, and their cascading aftermath, he now considered himself the author of this singular achievement, as an instrument of Allah. America might be “the greatest economic power” and “the major state influencing the policies of the world,” and yet by recruiting nineteen young men to fly as suicide pilots and bodyguards, Osama had achieved the improbable: He had “changed the direction of its compass.”25
This was Osama in his later exile: A man who, although relatively young, lived continuously close to death, and who worried, considering the short time he might have left, about how he might be remembered. His speeches were political and religious oratory of a now familiar type, but his lines also seemed intended to draft or at least influence the themes of his own posthumous reputation. Osama lacked a valid passport. He spoke in a Saudi accent but had been stripped—and had stripped himself—of conventional Saudi identity, and he was almost certainly living, at least some of the time, in an area of western Pakistan that lacked a recognizable government. In this denationalized condition, he chose wardrobes and props for his video statements that suggested three overlapping strands of self-imagining: the formal gowns of a religious scholar; the assault rifle of a modern jihadi warrior; and the traditional dagger of his Hadhrami origins.
A century before, British colonial officers had struggled to understand the global Hadhrami diaspora from which the Bin Laden family and its wayward son later arose; the Hadhramis’ mobile and independent networks eluded or surprised the empire’s census takers because they spilled across diverse political territory, often indifferent to the border posts of imperial mapmakers. Osama constructed his life as a political fugitive after September 11 in territory of just this character—a mountainous moonscape inhabited by tribally organized Pashtuns whom neither British colonial armies nor their Pakistani and American successors could penetrate or subdue. The history of similar exiles in Pashtun territory suggested he would probably face betrayal, eventually, by one of his local hosts. In the meanwhile, each time his audio-or videotapes reached Al-Jazeera or CNN, Osama reemphasized, like a Barbary pirate with a marketing degree, the impunity that he still enjoyed, as well as his continuing capacity to plan and inspire mass violence by exploiting the channels and the ethos of global integration.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A large number of collaborators, friends, and generous strangers enabled the research for this book. I am grateful first and foremost to the many individuals who agreed to participate in interviews and reinterviews.
In Saudi Arabia, I owe special thanks to Faiza Ambah, Hatem Mohamed, and Adel Toraifi. The Faisaliyah Center for Research and Islamic Studies generously received me as an unpaid fellow during early 2005; thanks to Dr. Yahya Mahmoud Ibn Juniad, Syed Jameel, and Awadh Al-Badi. Prince Turki Al-Faisal graciously arranged my access to the center. Paul Dresch and Engseng Ho inspired me with their observations about the history of the Hadhrami diaspora and its relations with global empires. Fahd Al-Semmari at the King Abdulaziz Foundation provided valuable access to newspaper archives and research specialists. Erin L. Eddy in Jeddah was exceptionally helpful.
In Yemen, the governor of the Hadhramawt, Abdelqader Ali Al-Hilal, proved a gracious and an invaluable host. I owe thanks as well to Alawi Bin Sumait, Ali Mandanij, Megan Goodfellow, and Thomas Krajeski for supporting my research there.
In addition to Robin Shulman and Julie Tate, four part-time researchers made important contributions during the three-year life of this project. In Germany, Petra Krischok’s persistence at the Foreign Ministry archives unearthed valuable records. In London, Gita Daneshjoo reinterviewed overseas sources and provided other careful research. In the United States, Keach Hagey patiently developed and conducted interviews for chapter 36. Mohamed Elmenshawy provided elegant translations and acquired valuable materials during his travels to Egypt.