Al Qaeda: The Looming Terror
COOPER: Good evening. I'm Anderson Cooper. Tonight, we are going to take a hard look at al Qaeda and the men who built it into a killing machine. More than six years after 9/11, many experts believe al Qaeda has regrouped, reorganized. The videotapes and audiotapes keep coming, promising more attacks. The people who know al Qaeda best say the only chance we have to defeat it is to understand its past, see where its strengths lie today, and know where it wants to go in the future. Tonight, we are going to slice through the myths and uncover the facts. Joining me is Lawrence Wright, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11," also CNN terrorism analyst Peter Bergen, one of the few journalists to have actually met Osama bin Laden. He's also the author of "The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History." You're watching a special edition of 360: "Al Qaeda: The Looming Terror." Six years on from 9/11, do we know who our enemy is? I mean, have we done a good job of identifying and explaining who the enemy is?</s>LAWRENCE WRIGHT, AUTHOR, "THE LOOMING TOWER: AL QAEDA AND THE ROAD TO 9/11": No. I think they know us very well, but, in terms of our understanding of the enemy is -- is minimal. We -- very few Americans know where they came from, what they are fighting for, what their grievances are against America. I have to say, our level of ignorance of our enemy is about as great as it was on 9/11.</s>COOPER: And why is it important to -- to understand the enemy?</s>WRIGHT: Well, how are you going to defeat the enemy if you don't know the first thing about them? And that's not just true of ordinary Americans. It's true through much of the American intelligence community. The head of the FBI's counterterrorism bureau testified under oath that he didn't know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite, and that he thought that was an irrelevant question. Well, if you don't know the first thing about your enemy, you will always have a failure of imagination, an inability to connect the dots.</s>COOPER: President Bush has often said, well, they hate our freedom. It's not that simple, though. Let's talk about the underpinnings of it, the seeds of al Qaeda.</s>COOPER: And, I mean, to do that, you really have to start even before al Qaeda ever existed many years in the past. Where did this begin?</s>WRIGHT: I would start it in -- in Egypt with Sayyid Qutb, the Islamist philosopher behind this movement. This is the guy who wrote the book "Ma'alim fi-l-Tariq," which means "Milestones," that everybody read. It's the book that Ayman al-Zawahri, the number-two guy in al Qaeda, read, and the book that Osama bin Laden read. He came to America in 1948.</s>COOPER: This guy Qutb came to America in '48?</s>WRIGHT: Yes. But he hated America. Everything he saw, he hated. The -- you know, he couldn't even get his hair cut in a way that he liked. But the things that were -- women, he was very threatened by American women, their sexuality, their openness. He was a middle-aged virgin. He was very undermined by their sexuality.</s>COOPER: And it's interesting, because it's not as if this guy was hanging out, you know, in -- in Time Squares in New York.</s>WRIGHT: No.</s>COOPER: He was at a -- at a -- what, a Midwestern college somewhere?</s>WRIGHT: In Northern Colorado, a place in Greeley, Colorado, a little educational school there, where he spent most of the time that he was here. If you read his writing about what he says about the women in America, you can see his just -- his longing is so high and his -- and his fear of them is so great.</s>COOPER: So, why is Sayyid Qutb important, Peter?</s>PETER BERGEN, CNN TERRORISM ANALYST: Well, basically, you know, the book that Larry referred to, "Milestones," it's -- it's a very timeless book, because it essentially said, look, every Muslim country around the world is not really being governed by Islamic law. Your government is not really running a proper Islamic state. And we're living in a state of pagan ignorance, he called -- a state called jahiliyya, and that they -- and the implication being that you have the right -- in fact, you should overthrow your government. And, in fact, he -- in the book, he says, it's not just about defensive wars. You actually have to, like, do jihad in an offensive way. So, this is a book that, you know, you can read now, many decades later, and you can -- it's basically a handbook for jihadists to overthrow regimes, attack non-Muslims.</s>COOPER: I mean, why is it important to know who Sayyid Qutb is? Knowing that, what does it change or how does it inform how we should look at al Qaeda now?</s>WRIGHT: There are two concepts that Sayyid Qutb brings to the table which are important in terms of understanding al Qaeda's mind- set. One is the one that Peter mentioned, jahiliyya, the idea that, before Islam, the world lived in a kind of pagan chaos, and -- and Islam came along and changed that. But, Qutb says, now we are back to that original state. And, in order for us to be real Muslims, pure Muslims, we have to return to that state of pure Islam. That is essential to understanding their view of the world. The other also you can credit Sayyid Qutb on is takfir. That -- the word means excommunication. And it's not a word that...</s>COOPER: Takfir?</s>WRIGHT: It's not a word that he used. But it -- it entitles one Muslim to say that another Muslim is not really a true Muslim. And this happened when Sayyid Qutb was in prison in Egypt. A number of Muslim brothers were rounded up, and they were thrown into a cell. And, one day, some of the guards went in and just opened up them with -- with machine guns. Qutb was in the prison hospital when some of the injured were brought in. And he said to himself, what kind of Muslim would do this to another Muslim? And his answer was, they are not Muslims. In his mind, he excommunicated them. And it's that example that Zawahri and others have used to justify the killing of thousands and thousands of Muslims.</s>COOPER: And, so, who -- who read that book, and how did it lead to al Qaeda?</s>WRIGHT: The first person I would point to is Ayman Al-Zawahri. And he was -- his uncle was Sayyid Qutb's lawyer and protege and the last person to see Sayyid Qutb alive before Gamal Abdel Nasser hanged him in 1966. And that was the year that Ayman Al-Zawahri started a cell to overthrow the Egyptian government.</s>COOPER: And he was, what, 15 years old?</s>WRIGHT: Fifteen years old. This is a man who has never deterred from that path since he was a -- a middle teenager.</s>COOPER: And, at the age of 15, he wanted to overthrow the Egyptian government because they were not Islamic enough?</s>WRIGHT: Yes.</s>COOPER: And how did all Zawahri become -- go from being this 15- year-old kid to the -- the terrorist that he is today?</s>WRIGHT: He began at a very early age to organize schoolmates, and eventually army officers, police officers, technical men like him -- he's a medical doctor -- into a sophisticated underground cell. And it was one wing of that cell that assassinated Anwar Sadat in 1981. Following that, Zawahri and hundreds of other Islamists were rounded up and put in Egyptian prisons, where they were able to communicate with each other and -- and form networks. But they were also brutally tortured.</s>COOPER: So, we -- we have all seen the video of the assassination of -- of Sadat...</s>WRIGHT: Yes.</s>COOPER: .. at the parade grounds that the shooting breaks out. So, those were followers of Zawahri?</s>WRIGHT: Some of them were, but they were all followers of Sayyid Qutb. And they were all inspired by his example.</s>COOPER: And, so, after that assassination, hundreds were rounded up?</s>BERGEN: Yes, including Zawahri, who spent three years in jail. Basically, anybody who was involved in this movement, they are thrown in jail. And Zawahri was on the fringes of the -- of the assassination plot, but, I mean, he had -- clearly, he was a militant. And, of course, as Larry said, a lot of the treatment that these guys got in prison made them more radical. And, of course, they met like-minded people, swapped business cards, became even closer. And, once these guys left, like al-Zawahri, who left in -- he -- you know, he was more militant probably than he had been when he had actually gone into prison.</s>COOPER: So, where does -- Zawahri is in prison. They become further radicalized. He has his own organization, but it doesn't -- he doesn't quite have the charisma of a bin Laden?</s>WRIGHT: Not at all. I mean, in fact, he was a terrible leader for his own organization. He was constantly running them into trouble. They are innumerable accounts of the -- the key person with the computer with all the names on it was captured, and his group was all rounded up. And he would start over again, and the same thing would happen. He's non-charismatic. He's -- he's -- he had no money. He had no real personal loyalty. But what he had was a driving commitment and an eye for talent. And that's why, when he spotted bin Laden -- I always think it's sort of like Colonel Parker seeing Elvis for the first time. And he's thinking, I can do something with this young man.</s>COOPER: When we come back, we're going to talk more about Osama bin Laden, look at the early days of bin Laden, how he became this terrorist mastermind, and dispel some of the myths of bin Laden, as well -- when this special edition of 360, "Al Qaeda: The Looming Terror," continues.