The Looming Tower | Lawrence Wright | Talks at Google

Well, welcome everybody to Authors at Google. We're pleased to present today author, screenwriter and playwright Lawrence Wright to Google. He's a graduate of Tulane University and the American University in Cairo. His resume is incredibly impressive. So if you will indulge me for a minute. Mr. Wright's career began in journalism with a variety of publications throughout the southern United States, including Time as a contributing writer to rolling stone. In 1992, he joined the staff of the New Yorker where he remains and has published a number of award winning articles. His seventh book, the Looming Al Qaeda and the Road to 9 11, which hopefully you all have a copy of his history of Al Qaeda and was published with to immediate and widespread acclaim spanning eight weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. It was nominated for the National Book Award and won a whole variety of other awards, in particular the Pulitzer Prize. So Mr. Wright, in addition to all that acclaim, again I mentioned, that's the seventh book. He has six other books. He also co wrote the 1998 movie the Siege, which hopefully some of you saw. I really liked it with Denzel Washington, Bruce Willis and Annette Bening. Fits in my genre. And he has also written the Showtime movie Noriega, God's Favorite, as well as a recent play. He's a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and serves as the keyboard player in the Austin based blues band who do. Mr. Wright will give a brief talk about his book. He'll then take Q and A. Hopefully he'll do a little bit of book signing afterwards. And thank you for coming.

Thank you, John. Can you guys hear me without my standing here at the mic? Okay. Because I'm mic'd up. Okay. I have a weak voice, so if you don't hear me, let me know or move forward. And in the spirit of Google and how casual everything is, I think I'll just do this standing up. And if I forget something, I've got my speech in here so that I can consult it if I get really screwed up. Well, thank you. I came in on the space shuttle today and I arrived at Google Intergalactic Airport. It's quite a, quite, quite a perk you guys have gotten. I went for a little walk on your walking trail up to the golf course and it was really beautiful. So it's a wonderful idyllic spot. But I'm comparing it in my mind to yesterday I got up at reveille at Camp Pendleton and talked to 1200 Marines who are, I don't think I met a single One that had not already been to Iraq or Afghanistan three times and was about to go again. And, you know, I can't shake those guys out of my head. And so some of my remarks will reflect the mood that I still carry away from that. I'm going to talk to you a little bit about Al Qaeda, who these guys are, where they came from, where they hope to go. 30 years ago I taught English at the American University in Cairo and there was a distinguished sociologist there named Saadin Ibrahim and he was doing a study in the early 70s of the radical young Muslims that were filling up the prisons in Egypt at that time. He wanted to know who are these guys? And to his surprise, he found that they were ambitious and well educated young men. They were drawn to the fields of science and engineering, very much like you. He called them model young Egyptians. Then in the 1990s, another man, Mark Sageman, who is a was a case officer for the CIA during the jihad against the Soviets and is a psychiatrist. There's an unusual combo. Mark decided to do a similar study about the young men who had gone into the Qaeda camps in the early 90s. His studies largely mirror those of Saada Dean. These were not impoverished social failures. They were, many of them from intact families. They were middle to upper class. They had not studied in religious schools. Many of them had been educated in Europe or America. There were no obvious mental disorders. Some of them spoke as many as five or six languages. Interesting to me, many of them weren't even very religious when they joined Al Qaeda. In other words, they were a lot like us. So what is it? What is it draws these young men into radical Islam? If you go back to Saad Ad Din's study of the young radicals in Egypt in the 70s, he found that the thing that they had most in common is that they joined radical Islamic groups when they were going to college. They were mostly from the villages or the rural areas of Egypt and they were streaming into the university towns, these massive universities in Egypt, in Cairo, Alexandria, Mansoura. They were away from their roots. They were away from their homes, often for the first time in their lives. And it made them more vulnerable, more susceptible to radicalization and recruitment. Sagemen found exactly the same thing. The most common element for young men, and they're almost all young men joining Al Qaeda, is that they are away from their home. 90% of these young men joined the jihad in a country other than the one in which they were reared. And this was just as true for Pakistanis in the UK as it was For Yemeni laborers in Saudi Arabia, the common element was they were away from their roots. And he called this phenomenon displacement. How did I do that? This is not part of my show. Now the theory of displacement is that, you know, that young men away from their homes file into these radical groups. But look at these recent plots that have taken place in the uk. Last year, the, the planes operation where they were going to blow up a dozen American airliners over the Atlantic. Recently, the doctor's plot. These are not, that's me, okay? These are not first generation immigrants. They are native born British citizens. They're a second or third generation. So I don't think that that word that Mark Sageman came up with displays placement really captures what we're talking about. I think a better word would be marginality. Marginality means, in my definition of the word essential, a lack of attachment to the culture that you're a part of, a sense of social impotence. These young men in these plots in the UK did not feel authentically British or authentically Pakistani. They were torn. They were somewhere in between. Let's take the example. I think, well, we're not talking about a clash of civilizations. We're talking about, I think, a clash of identities within a civilization. If you take the example of Belgium, the number one name for a child born today in Belgium is Muhammad. It's not that surprising. It's the number one given name in the whole world now. But if you're of Flemish ancestry, let us say, no doubt you're thinking, where is this going? What's going to happen to my country's precious place in history, our language, our little place in the world? And if you're Mohammed, you're probably thinking, these people don't want me. I'll never be one of them. And maybe Muhammad doesn't speak Arabic and maybe Muhammad has never been to Morocco. He's lost. There's practically no one in the world as lost as he is. And so it's not surprising that he would go to the mosque where he would meet other angry and alienated young men just like him. And for them, Islam would become more than a religion, it would become an identity. Now let me say something briefly about how different it is in this country. We're so blessed with our Arab and Muslim community. By comparison with Europe, the average American Muslim makes about the average American wage, is just as likely to be rich or poor as the average American is, is as likely to go to college or graduate school as the average American is far less likely to go to Prison. Compare that to the situation in Europe where you have these impoverished Muslim communities on the outskirts of these affluent cities. Look at France, where about 10% of the population is Muslim, 50% of the prisoners are. What a stark measure of the degree of alienation and marginality in that society. So we are much, much more blessed. A few years ago, I was having iftar with a group of radical Islamists in Birmingham, England. Iftar is the meal you take to break the fast at the end of the day in the month of Ramadan. And one of my companions at the meal said that he supported the kidnapping and beheading of aid workers in Iraq. Some of you may remember Margaret Hassan, who was the director of Iraqi Care International. She had just been kidnapped in Baghdad and was still alive at the time. And I looked around and I thought, this guy's dangerous, and we have people like him in this country. But as I looked around the room, I saw these nodding heads. And I thought, that's what's really dangerous, are those nodding heads. Because they surround this individual with a community of approval and they allow him to think these thoughts and maybe act on them and recruit others to his cause. That's what we haven't had in this country until now. But we're not immune to a homegrown terrorist movement in our country. Just look at the recent plots in New York, in New Jersey, the Fort Dix. They're going to try to attack Fort Dix. Imagine, blow up jfk. Okay, these plots may have been unrealistic and they were foiled early on, but those were American citizens making those plans. A recent Pew poll of Muslim Americans found that most Muslims in America feel that things have gotten much worse for them since 9 11. And only 40% of them believe that Arabs carried out 9 11. Those feelings of anxiety and denial are really more characteristic of alienated, marginalized populations than of assimilated ones. By far the most alienated group of Muslim Americans are black Muslim Americans, Native African American Muslim Americans who have very little connection to the Middle east. But only 36% of them disapprove of Al Qaeda. Only 5% of Muslim Americans overall disapprove of. But in a population of two and a half million Muslims, that's 125,000 people, enough of a base, I would submit, for a radical group to arise should that happen in this country. Now, that's the situation in the West. I'm talking right now about the radicalization in the West. Let me. I think that, as I said earlier, it's. These are questions of identity of young men looking for an identity and a cause. And they find it in radical Islam. The situation is different, I think, in the Muslim world. Arab world. In the Muslim world. Let's take the Arab world to start with. The Arab world reaches from Morocco to the Persian Gulf, larger than the United states. There are 300 million Arabs, about the same number there are Americans. Now, if you took oil out of the Arab economies and only a few of the 22 Arab countries actually produce an appreciable amount of oil, the 300 million Arabs produce less for export than the 5 million Finns, essentially less than the Nokia telephone company, which is the main export of Finland. This is the little Nokia I carried around with me when I was in Saudi Arabia. You see what an antique it is, you know, the Saudis wouldn't let me in as a journalist after 9, 11, I spent a year and a half appealing for a visa. And finally it became obvious they were never going to let me in as a reporter. So I took a job. I became an expat worker. And it was the best piece of bad luck because the job I got was teaching young reporters at a newspaper in Jeddah, Osama bin Laden's hometown. And instead of sitting in a hotel making calls, trying to get appointments, I had an apartment, I had a car, I had a job I had to go to every day. And I had all these wonderful young reporters who were teaching me so much more about their society than I could ever have learned on my own. But I often thought that this one product outweighs the industrial output of the entire Arab world. Now let's expand the pool to talk about the Muslim world. There are 1.3, 1.4 billion Muslims in the world. They're one fifth of the world's population. They're one half of the world's poor. Their preponderance of the Muslims live in the 57 countries that are members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference. The gross national product of those 57 countries is less than that of Germany. I want to go back to the Arabs for a moment because I forgot another statistic which I had taken oil out of those economies. Remember that? Let's put oil back into the Arab economies. If you do that, the gross national product of those 22 Arab countries is less than half of your state of California. So we're starting from the fact that these are barren economies that offer their young people very little to look forward to. They don't give them very much hope. They don't have the jobs they oftentimes can send, they can turn out students by the million, but then when they come out, they have no place to go. Now, I want to talk about some other factors that I think contribute to radicalization, but they're not as easy to quantify as economic ones. One is civil society. What is civil society? This is we're citizens coming together to talk about a problem, to talk to each other, to discuss things that are on our mind. If you were one of my Saudi reporters, let me tell you what your life would be like. There are no movies, no theaters, no plays, no. No nightclubs, no music, Very few parks or museums. There's no dating, women can't drive. There's no political life. There's no political parties, no unions. That entire space of life that we call civil society simply doesn't exist. There's nothing between the government and the mosque except shopping. Recently in Jeddah, a new Ikea furniture store opened its doors and it was such a thrilling event that 15,000 people showed up. Two were trampled to death. Imagine how you would feel in such a society. How bored, how frustrated, how hopeless, how depressed. And all my reporters were depressed. They would bite their fingernails down to the nubs. Their legs jiggled out of nervousness. They couldn't sleep at night. One of my reporters did a story about a study of depression. It was done at King Abdulaziz University, where Bin Laden studied management. Of the 2,000 students surveyed, 65% of the boys and 72% of the girls showed symptoms of depression. 67% of the girls, Muslim girls in a strict Muslim country, admitted that they had attempted suicide. Another factor, difficult to quantify, profoundly important, I think, and it varies across Arab and Muslim countries. I don't want to aggregate them all, but I'll tell you the experience. In Saudi Arabia, this meeting wouldn't happen because the women wouldn't be here. Women and men are strictly segregated. Men grow up without the company and the solace of female companionship. They're untrained. They haven't spent their adolescence molding their behavior around pleasing girls, which is a lot of what civilization really is. It's not so easy to be a terrorist if your girlfriend won't let you. So all of these factors play in to the radicalization of the Muslim world. Now, there's one other factor that I'd like to talk about that is even more difficult to quantify, but is profoundly important. Some of you may have seen bin Laden's videotape that you other last week. Actually, there are two, but let's Talk about the first one. He calls it the solution. And his solution is that you all convert to Islam. But in there, he uses the word humiliation. It's one of the most common words in his vocabulary. Now, many Muslim men have been humiliated. I mean, physically humiliated. Take the example of Ayman al Zawahri, the number two man in Al Qaeda. A doctor, a surgeon from a distinguished family in an exclusive suburb of Cairo after 1981. He was picked up after the Sadat assassination and thrown into prison along with hundreds of other radical Islamists and brutally tortured, locked in a cage with starving wild dogs. When he came out, he had an appetite for carnage. That is something that sets Al Qaeda apart from any other terrorist organization. Most terrorist groups are theatrical in nature. And I'm not saying Al Qaeda is not theatrical. It's the most theatrical of any terrorist group in history. But. But no other terrorist group had the desire to kill as many people as possible, which is what Al Qaeda hopes to do. And I think it was born in the humiliation of those Egyptian prisons, because Al Qaeda is really an Egyptian organization with a Saudi head. But bin Laden, rich, young, charismatic, from one of the finest families in the kingdom, he was never humiliated. So why does he use this word? And why does it resonate so powerfully to millions of young Muslims who feel humiliated? I think he's speaking to a sense of cultural loss that every Muslim knows. Once there was only one great superpower, and it was Islam. It reached from Arabia to Spain to southern China. You can date the moment that Islam began its long retreat and this sullen isolation it finds itself in now, ironically enough, to September 11, 1683, which is the date the King of Poland arrived to relieve the Ottoman siege of Vienna and turning back the furthest advance of Muslim armies in Europe. That's the moment the tide turned. This sense of cultural loss, historical retreat, is augmented by images of Muslims under siege in Lebanon, in Palestine, in Iraq. I watched the.

War.

In Iraq on Fox and Al Jazeera, two rather similar news organizations, and each had a particular narrative that they were trying to tell on Fox. It was America's liberation of the oppressed Iraqi people. Al Jazeera. It was the continuing humiliation of the Arabs. There were countless shots of surrendering Iraqi troops shuffling. You remember this scene. There was one scene that I saw first on cnn. You may have seen it, too. It was of a pair of U.S. marines who were knocking on the door of a house that they intended to search. And a retired American general on CNN was commenting to the television audience about the Proper way in which the soldiers were conducting the search, he says. Notice their stance on either side of the door as the father is made to bring out his wife and children. Notice the proper placement of their hands on the outside of the trigger guard, ignoring the faces of three little girls who lips are quivering and whose eyes are so wide with fright they could explode. Notice the way the soldiers have taken control of the situation, the general said as the families were made to kneel in front of the Americans. Well, it's one thing to see this on cnn. It's a different experience to watch that on Al Jazeera where that scene was captured and rebroadcast endlessly, obsessively, because it expresses so poignantly the theme of the war from the Arab perspective. I think I want to leave time for some questions, but I just want to finish this talk by talking a little bit about my experience with the CIA. The CIA came to me because I'm a screenwriter and asked, would I write a scenario for what if they captured Osama bin Laden? Okay, I'd love, who thinks that we can do that now? Or the CIA would be capable of it. But you know, just what if, what would they do with him? And I said, well, I'm, I'm also a reporter and as much as I would like to write a screenplay for the CIA, I just can't do that. But I will tell you what I think in the form of an op ed for the New York Times. First of all, let's realize bin Laden is the most famous man in the world. He's going to be one of the most famous men in history. So you can't just deal with Osama bin Laden the man. You have to deal with bin Ladenism and the legacy that he's going to leave for countless generations. So if you catch him, don't kill him. That's what he wants, martyrdom. It'll seal his fate for all eternity. But don't bring him to America, at least not yet. Take him first of all to Kenya where on August 7, 1998, he set off a bomb in front of an American embassy, killing 211 people. More than 150 people were blinded by the flying glass. Let him sit in a courtroom in Nairobi and tell 150 blind Africans that he was just striking at a symbol of American power. Then you could take him to Tanzania where on the same day he set off another bomb in front of another American embassy, killing 11 people, all of them Muslims. Al Qaeda excuses that because it was Friday and good Muslims would be in the mosque. I think that would be an excellent venue to ask what is a good Muslim? Then you can bring him to America. Let him answer for the death of 19American sailors on the USS Cole and the 3,000Americans who died on 9, 11 after that. You could take him so many places. You could take him to Madrid, London, Casablanca, Tunisia, Jakarta, Bali. There are so many places you could take him. Just take him one last place. Take him home. Take him back to Saudi Arabia. Try him under Sharia law, the only law that he and his followers would respect. And if he's convicted, it's Saudi custom that he'll be taken to a square in downtown Riyadh called Chop Chop Square. The executioner is a big man with a large sword. And there's a custom in Saudi Arabia where the executioner walks out to the crowd which are composed of the families of the victims, and he beseeches them to forgive this man. And if they can't do it, then the executioner does his job and bin Laden will be taken, buried in an unmarked Wahhabi graveyard. And I think in that way you can begin to roll back some of his awful legacy. Well, thank you. And I'll be happy to take your questions. I'll call on you if you don't raise your hands. There you go. So please use the microphone. Oh, sorry. I'll let you go first. All right.

So I was wondering. Well, first I'd like to say thank you for coming here. I read your book a while ago and found it very convincing. I was wondering what you thought of Osama bin Laden's latest video compared to his previous ones. Because it seemed very different in tone and frankly, just bizarre. He seemed to be trying to, like, convince people to turn against democracy, capitalism and everything rather than his previous goals of freedom for Palestine and getting the US out of the Middle East. So what's going on there?

I think that I appreciate your asking me that question. It used to be that al Qaeda had a political agenda. Mainly it was to get the American troops out of Saudi Arabia, the Holy Land. And that was achieved. In March of 2003, the Bush administration announced they were withdrawing their troops from Saudi Arabia. The very next month, Al Qaeda began its assault on the Western housing compounds. If you listen to bin Laden, you know, for instance, in that videotape, he complained for the second time that I know of, that the US had not signed the Kyoto Treaty. Has anybody ever heard of Al Qaeda's environmental policy? I mean, this is an organization. We have thousands and thousands of pages of internal Al Qaeda documents. You can go online, you can Google them, the harmony documents, and many of them have been translated into English. There's the Al Qaeda constitution, there's the Al Qaeda employment contract, which is, you know, at the time you had monthly salary, you had free health care, you had a month long paid vacation. It was a good job for a lot of these guys. If you had all those pages, you would not see a single page in there devoted to the politics of Al Qaeda. If Osama bin Laden came to Google probe for the day and you had the opportunity to ask him, Mr. Bin Laden, suppose you have Egypt, suppose you have Saudi Arabia, what are you going to do about the real problems of the Muslim world? Joblessness, illiteracy, how are you going to. By the way, what kind of economic model do you follow? You're a Marxist, a Keynesian, a free marketeer. He's never thought of those things. Al Qaeda doesn't believe in politics because it doesn't believe in the future. It has no political agenda. It is really only interested in one thing, which is always the case with the radical Islamists. They only are interested in purity, they're interested in purification. And where that is the agenda, you'll find terror created close at hand. Yes, sir.

So the topic of the day is Iraq, right?

Yes.

So it seems like listening to President Bush's speech that Al Qaeda dominates the Iraqi insurgency. But I've heard that in fact, you know, Al Qaeda has little to do with the Iraqi insurgency. And in fact, you know, the. Yeah, and so what's up with that? You know, are there, you know, are there actually Al Qaeda elements in Iraq or are they fairly minor?

Here's the history of Iraq and Al Qaeda. First of all, Saddam Hussein wanted to work with Bin Laden. He had an idea that Al Qaeda could function for Iraq and for him the way that Hezbollah does for Iran. And he sent overtures to Al Qaeda when they were in Sudan in their exile in 92 to 96, and then also to Afghanistan, asking if they'd like to work together. And Bin Laden spurned him. He hated Saddam Hussein, so he would have nothing to do with him. When I was working on my book, I was struck by the fact that most of the people in Al Qaeda were Saudis, Egyptians, Gulf Arabs, a couple of Libyans. You know, there was an Iraqi or two, but where were the Syrians, the Jordanians, the Palestinians? I couldn't figure it out. And it wasn't until I learned about Abu Musab al Zarqawi, who became eventually, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, he had a competitive group in Afghanistan at the same time Al Qaeda was being formed. And that's where all those guys were. And they eventually went to Iraq and set up their own terror organization. And he's the one who started the Islamic civil war that you see raging now by bombing those Shiite mosques while hundreds of people were at prayer. It was a deliberate action on his part in order to create an Islamic civil war that would undermine any attempt to create a democratic and unified Iraq. After that, he made application to join Al Qaeda. And it took about a year for bin Laden to consider his request. And he finally accepted. And so he appointed Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the leader of Iraq and Mesopotamia. And they really do have a formal affiliation. The leaders of Al Qaeda in Iraq are primarily Egyptian. They come from the Zawahiri wing of Al Qaeda. Most of the fighters in it are Iraqi. Most of the suicide bombers are poor Saudi kids who've gone up to Syria, came in to join the jihad. They're wired up and blown up the day they get there. So that's pretty much the structure of it. There was no connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq before we went into Iraq in 2003. Now there is the. The monster that we were afraid of is the one that we created. Yes.

Given your suggestions to what the CIA should do should they catch bin Laden, I was wondering what you thought of the handling of the capture of Saddam Hussein.

Oh, God, that was such a tragedy. You know, what a missed opportunity to give a sense of justice to the Iraqi people. And, you know, nobody asked me for my scenario on what we'd do to catch Saddam Hussein. But it would have. You know, I wanted the Iraqi people to have the opportunity to try them themselves. It's just that it got to be such an expression of the partisan hatred that is so typical of that country right now. Yes, ma'. Am. Hi.

You're very clearly very committed to researching and reporting on this entire topic. And I was just wondering if you could talk a little about what first sparked your interest in that, and then if you could also tell us a bit about how you sort of turn it off at the end of the day to have time to be in a band.

Like every American. I was shocked and angry on 9 11. And I recognized that this was, you know, as a reporter, the story of my generation. And I had certain things, you know, that other reporters I had lived in the Arab world. I spoke some Arabic, and I had written this movie, the Siege, which in really creepy ways, anticipated the effects of the events on 9 11. So I felt kind of obligated to look into it. And it's true that writing about terrorism, color is your mood. I would like to turn to musical comedy, but I'm kind of trapped. I know so much more about it than. I'm not bragging, unfortunately, than most members of the intelligence community and certainly the average American. And I think it's a very important right now. Terrorism has changed our society more than anything else you can think of. You know, I think, you know, we look at things on the horizon, like global warming and so on, that are really massive changes. But just think about how miserable it is for you to travel. Think about all the money that we spend, you know, going through and pulling out people's shaving cream and so on. Think about the. The image of you as an American that is now allied with torture, with Guantanamo, with the intrusion on our civil liberties, prying into your mail and listening to your phone calls. Who asked you if the government could do that in your name? I don't think we've had that conversation. And yet we've gone through. We're now in our third presidential cycle since time terrorism came up on the list as a big topic. And it's almost never seriously addressed, but it's warping our society. So, you see, I can't get away from it right away, but I do love playing music with my friends. So thank you. Go ahead.

I read your book and enjoyed it as well. I really think it's one of the best in the genre and compares favorably with the 911 report, even though they look at different things. But my question is, the last poll I saw said that 40% of Americans, Americans, not people outside in the rest of the world, actually don't believe that Al Qaeda was behind 911 or that the US government somehow played a role. And I mean, this drives me crazy. And I'm sure you have to deal with this much more than I do.

But what do you.

I mean, it seems like it's getting worse. How do you think we got this? Do you think it's a problem and what can we do about it?

It is a huge problem because first of all, you know, I've been dogged by these conspiracy nuts, you know, almost everywhere I go. And I tried for a long time to hold a dialogue with them because, I mean, it's consequential. It's not just, you know, that like some of my Saudi friends, they were pretty accepting of the fact that, you know, they have some cultural responsibility for what happened on 9 11. And then you get some of these documents like Loose Change and that French book about the missile hitting the Pentagon. And they say, well, you guys are saying that you did it to yourselves. Why should we accept the blame? That's very important. Now, I grew up in Dallas during the Kennedy assassination, so conspiracy thinking has been a part of my life all along. I've been dealing with conspiracy ideas since I was a teenager. And I don't. The thing is that people have a need to believe things on which there is no evidence. And you consider their argument. It requires believing that the American government was working hand in hand with Osama bin Laden, that the American government, to ensure the success of 9 11, stockpiled explosives in both of the towers, fired a missile into the Pentagon. I wonder which commander would turn his missiles on his own headquarters. And that, you know, where are the, you know, the crew and the passengers of Flight 77? You know, I mean, there's so many inconsistencies. If there's some. If there's some missing gaps in the understanding of what actually happened on 9 11. That's always going to be true in a massive tragedy like that. But it doesn't compare to the idiocy of, you know, saying just because of this, then we can believe all of that. I think it is a deep psychological expression of something else, you know, a need to find. Locate the evil somewhere else. Yes. Can you just elaborate a little bit on the suicide bombers, the psychology behind it and what drives someone to do that? It just seems to be spreading not just in the Middle east, but everywhere. Thank you. Suicide bombing. It's such a paradox that this has become an expression of Islam. If you read the Koran, it says, do not kill yourselves. It could not be clearer. The Prophet Muhammad himself said that the specific punishment for suicide would be to spend all of eternity in the act of killing himself with the same instrument he used to die. This is the words of the Prophet. This is the word of God in the Koran. And how do they get around this? Well, the genius of that is Ayman Al Zawahri, who. He's the one who improvised the use of suicide bombers in Egypt in 1993 when he tried to kill the Interior minister with suicide bombers. And then this is before Palestine started having suicide bombers. And then in 1995, he blew up the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, with suicide bombers. And even his own followers were very upset, you know, about the death of innocent Muslims and the intentional suicide of the bombers. And his argument is the justification for Al Qaeda's use of suicide. First of all, he agrees there were innocent Muslims, there were children that died in the embassy bombing in Islamabad. But Islam is so weak and its enemies are so strong that in such an emergency, the rules against the slaughter of innocents must be relaxed. The question of suicide was obviously more difficult because of those prohibitions that I just outlined for you. So Wofre compared the suicide bombers to the martyrs of Christianity. He said that the only example he could find in Islamic history was a group of believers who had been captured by idolaters and forced to renounce their religion or die. And they chose to become martyrs to their beliefs. He says that was a suicidal choice. They were acting for the glory of God and the greater good of Islam. And therefore anyone who gives his life in the pursuit of the true faith, like these bombers, is to be considered not a suicide who will spend all of eternity in hell, but as a martyr whose sacrifice will earn him the joys of paradise. It's sophistry, it's pathetic. But in my opinion, it offers an outlet to some people who might want to commit suicide anyway. But in a culture that is so, where it's so strictly prohibited, this gives them an outlet. I think that's the case of some of the young bombers going to Iraq who know they're going to die. It's also curious, even in Palestine, if you look at, there's an appreciable number of suicide bombers who kill no one but themselves. Now, I don't know what the percentage is, but how hard would it be to walk in a crowded room and then blow yourself up? But it's often the case that people blow themselves up just outside the range when they're going to kill anybody else. So I think that there's a. There is a. Well, what I was thinking of is when I was in Peshawar, Pakistan, which is where Al Qaeda was born, in August 98, I went met a Pakistani reporter named Rahimullah Yousafzai and he said he was covering the jihad against the Soviets in the 80s and he came upon an encampment of these Arab fighters in white tents on an open field. First of all, the Arabs contributed nothing to the jihad against the Soviets. They were a negligible force, never more than 3,000 of them who went to fight the Soviets and only a few hundred ever got in battle. It's just Bin Laden's genius for myth making that has elevated them into this. You know, the slayer of the Soviet Union. But Rahu Mullah comes upon this group of fighters in white tents on an open field and he says, what are you thinking? The Soviet Air Force can easily see you, you'll be wiped out. And one of the Arabs responded by saying, but we came to die. And I have talked to dozens of these Jihadi veterans and they'll always tell you it was death that summoned them to fight in Afghanistan, not victory. They never expected to win. They went to die, they went to become martyrs. And that's the soil in which Al Qaeda was planted. Al Qaeda offers these young men who oftentimes will never have a way of having a fulfilled and purposeful life. It offers them a purposeful death.

Yeah, you made a clearer feelings about the wackier conspiracy theories about explosives at the Trade center and so on.

That.

To call it gentler theories I wouldn't think of as conspiracy necessarily. But say John o' Neill and his frustration with progress of the investigation. Can you say a little bit about the things that others might feel are a little conspiratorial or suppressed investigation? Is there anything there that you do give credence to in the story?

There was a conspiracy and it was in the CIA. And this, this is one of the things that I have never gotten out of my system. One of the heroes of my book is Ali Sufan. In October of 2000 when the coal was bombed, he was one of eight Arabic speaking agents in the FBI. There are six. Now I will say that the intelligence community is trying to address this problem of hiring first and second generation native speaker speakers of Arabic and Pashtu Dari, you know all the languages. But he was one of eight. And nobody came closer than Ali Soufan to stopping 9 11. He was John O' Neill's guy. And John had the wisdom to appoint a 26 year old agent to be the case agent on the USS Cole. Now while Ali is interrogating these Qaeda guys, he begins to learn about a meeting that was held in Malaysia in January of 2000. And three times he formally queried the CIA. Tell me what you know about this meeting. Do you know anything about this? Three times the CIA refused to answer him. This set aside the fact of 911 for a moment. He was investigating the death of 19American sailors and the CIA refused to answer him. They were essentially obstructing justice. And they knew about the meeting in Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur where two future hijackers were attending and the bombers of the USS Cole, the they were all there together meeting and conspiring. And after that the bombers Went. The bombers went elsewhere. But two of the hijackers, future hijackers, flew from Kuala Lumpur to Los Angeles and then to San Diego in January of 2000. And in March of 2000, the CIA learned that Al Qaeda was in America. Wait a second. 18 months before 9, 11. And they refused to tell the FBI. They refused to tell John O'. Neill, they refused to tell Ali Sufan, who directly, formally, from a letter from the Director of the FBI to the director of the CIA. What do you know about this? They refused. And I tried everything I could to talk to the guys in the CIA who had done that, and the CIA stuck stonewall me. And they told me I was barking up the wrong tree and da, da, da, da, da. And I knew after my book came out that the inspector General of the CIA had done a report about the CIA and its culpability in that. And I was calling for that report to be released to the public. And it was about two months ago. And it turns out I was wrong. It wasn't a handful of guys in the CIA. Fifty to 60 analysts inside the CIA knew that Al Qaeda was in America in March of 2000. And they failed to tell the FBI, which had all the authority it needed to because these guys would be subsumed by the bin Laden indictment. They could follow them, they could clone their computers, they could tap their phones, they could. They didn't have to do anything illegal. Everything they needed they had, except the knowledge that Al Qaeda was in America. And the CIA refused to tell them. Yeah.

So I have a question about the.

Statements you made earlier about the Arabic.

World not being civilized.

It seems like if that's the root cause of terrorism, that would be relatively easy to attack. We sort of managed to export Western.

Culture everywhere else in the world.

Well, I didn't really mean to imply that the Arab world is not civilized. It's just some of the men are not so civilized by the presence of women. But that does bring me to something I've been chewing over and I wanted to talk to you guys about. And I haven't really formulated this, but it goes back to those Marines that I was talking to yesterday. A week ago, I was in Washington and I was talking to the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency Agency, James Clapper, General Clapper. And I said, General, wartime is usually a period of great technological advances. Think of World War II, you know, shorter war than the one that we've been engaged in now. But In World War II, we got radar, we got jet engines, we got the atomic bomb. Just to name three very significant things. What have we done in this war on terror and the war in Iraq to, you know, what kind of game changing technology do we have? And he said, well, you know, I remember when I was a young soldier in Vietnam and you know, I just came back from Afghanistan, I said there were some eye watering things out there. I mean, they had, you know, our troops had laptop computers and cell phones. I said, well, Al Qaeda has laptop computers and cell phones. You know, we down at their level, fighting at their level and they're doing a much better job of it than we are. And the reason I bring this up is that our government has failed to provide the kind of technological advances that would help us win this war on terror. And as pleasant as it is to be here and have your free haircuts and your, and the chef salad and all this sort of thing, there is a force in the world that really wants to stop that and it can do a lot of damage. I don't know that Al Qaeda can destroy America. I'm not saying that. But they intend to hurt you and they will do everything they possibly can. And it would. And our government is not doing a good job. We have cultural, institutional failures that are not political. Not just political. I mean, if you look at the failure of the army after our invasion in Iraq, if you look at the failure of our intelligence community to appreciate the threat that Al Qaeda posed, if you look at the failure of homeland security after Katrina, that's not just politics, that's social. You know, we're having a social problem right now and electing a new president isn't going to make all that much difference, which is why I turn to you guys at Google. I think I would like to plant the idea in your mind that there are things that you can perhaps do that the government is not capable of thinking about, doesn't have the expertise to think about. One thing I think of, you know, the despair that is so evident in the Muslim world, which I think jobs and transparency, which is the essence of Google accountability, you know, Muslim outreach, all of those things you can do, but also technological fixes if your mind is fit that way. Think about those Marines that are going to go be out there fighting for you and think about the threat that you really do face that doesn't seem like it's present right now, but really is. Think about those things and what kind of things you can do here. Thanks.

Hi. I was wondering if you could expand on the sort of the psychological environment that you talked about at the beginning because while the things you discussed seemed like they were powerful elements, they didn't quite seem, seem sufficient. And I was wondering if you thought there was some sort of tipping point. I'll sort of give two counterexamples. I mean you have the situation of black poverty and black men in jail in the United States and there hasn't been a sort of terrorist organization of note other than, you know, and you know, the Danish ruled northern Europe from 800 to 1200 AD. And you don't see a lot of Danish suicide bombers. So, you know, it couldn't just be empire. What was the tipping point for Islam?

Is that what you were asking?

Or for the terrorist movement?

The tipping point? I think the tipping point was really in 1990 when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.

And.

Bin Laden went to the.

Minister.

Of Defense and he said, you have to realize who Bin Laden was at that point. He had just come back from the jihad against the Soviets. He was Saudi Arabia's first celebrity. Now in Saudi Arabia there is a royal family and there is everybody else. You know, in Saudi Arabia the streets are named after the royal family, the universities, the hospitals. And they not only own the country, they hoard all the glory. And here comes Osama Bin Laden. He's rich, he's young, he's charismatic, he's ambitious. He's got a small army at his command. There's never been anybody like him in Saudi Arabia. He's a celebrity, but he's not royal. He didn't fit anywhere. It made him an awkward person to deal with. And he went into the Minister of Defense and he said, after Saddam invades Kuwait and amasses troops on the Saudi border, I'll defend the kingdom with Al Qaeda. Which must have been about 200 guys along with 100,000 unemployed Saudi youth and the earth moving equipment of my daddy's construction company. And the Minister of Defense laughed him out of the office. I mean they were facing a million man Iraqi army with one of the largest tank corps in the world. That was a psychologically humiliating moment for Osama Bin Laden. Now think about the level of delusion in that young man who thought that he could walk into the Minister of Defense. Really? Come on, you've got Al Qaeda, you know, you have been a negligible force in Afghanistan. He himself was a pathetic leader in combat. He actually gave up his military command over Al Qaeda. He's got a couple hundred guys.

And.

He'S going to defend the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It's breathtaking to think about, isn't it? So when the Saudis turned to America and coalition forces instead. The only sensible alternative. This really inflamed him because every, every Muslim knows that on his deathbed, the Prophet Muhammad said, let there be no two religions in Arabia. And in the mind of stricken Wahhabis like Bin Laden, that means the whole Arabian Peninsula has to be wiped clean of non Muslims. And so when you have half a million Christians and Jews and even worse women coming in to defend the Holy Land, it was really galling. That, I think, was the moment when he really turned. Listen guys, you've been great. I've had a wonderful time talking to you, and I can't tell you how thrilled I am to finally be at Google World headquarters. So thanks for your time.