GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — In saying final week that the chief of Al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahri, had been killed in a U.S. drone strike in Kabul, Afghanistan, President Biden described the long-sought terrorist as “a mastermind” behind the U.S.S. Cole bombing in 2000.
Mr. Biden additionally stated that al-Zawahri was “deeply involved in the planning” of the assaults of Sept. 11, 2001.
There is little doubt that al-Zawahri was the chief of a terrorist motion whose world jihad has killed 1000’s of individuals. He was the deputy to Al Qaeda’s founder, Osama bin Laden, and took over the group in 2011.
But as a matter of historic accuracy, Mr. Biden’s phrases went properly past how the authorities and terrorism specialists have described al-Zawahri’s document with regard to these two notably infamous assaults.
Mr. Biden’s portrayal of al-Zawahri as a key plotter of the Sept. 11 assaults was echoed in lots of information accounts about his speech, including in The New York Times. But it shocked counterterrorism specialists, as did the characterization of al-Zawahri’s position in the Cole bombing.
The remarks additionally raised new questions in the Sept. 11 and U.S.S. Cole death-penalty circumstances, which have been mired in pretrial hearings for greater than a decade. By Friday, attorneys in each circumstances stated that they had formally requested proof from prosecutors to assist Mr. Biden’s statements.
Marc Sageman, a former C.I.A. officer who labored with Islamist fighters battling the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the Eighties and later wrote a number of books about terrorism networks and radicalization, stated he was puzzled by Biden’s portrayal of al-Zawahri and puzzled the place the purported position got here from.
“Zawahri is a legitimate target,” he stated on Tuesday, a day after the president’s deal with. “But the justification they gave yesterday was inaccurate. I doubt it. I strongly, strongly doubt it.”
The official, who spoke on the situation of anonymity to talk about the delicate matter, defended Mr. Biden’s characterization of al-Zawahri’s document in relation to the particular assaults as correct. The Justice Department had charged al-Zawahri, along with Bin Laden and many others, as a conspirator in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the official famous, including that the authorities noticed “a through line from that to Al Qaeda’s major attacks in 2000, 2001 and beyond.”
During a briefing with reporters shortly earlier than Mr. Biden delivered his remarks, a distinct senior administration official described al-Zawahri as Bin Laden’s “deputy during the 9/11 attacks,” which isn’t in dispute. That official didn’t point out the Cole.
Prosecutors in federal civilian courtroom and in the army commissions system at Guantánamo Bay have filed a number of indictments towards Qaeda operatives accused of serving to plot the Cole bombing. Those paperwork are dozens of pages lengthy, laying out the authorities’s understanding of the individuals, conferences, monetary transfers and different strikes that made up the conspiracy.
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They don’t painting al-Zawahri as a mastermind of the operation, a suicide bombing by two males in a skiff that killed 17 American sailors.
A Saudi prisoner, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, is described that approach in a death-penalty case at Guantánamo Bay. A C.I.A. profile at the time of his transfer in 2006 referred to him as “the mastermind and local manager of the bombing in October 2000.” His charges point out al-Zawahri as one of 26 individuals in a Qaeda conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism basically, however not as the mastermind.
A military charge sheet filed in 2012 towards 5 Guantánamo detainees who have been accused of conspiring in the Sept. 11 attacks talked about al-Zawahri just for his joint declaration of battle with Bin Laden in 1998, in describing the group’s historical past.
Within hours of President Biden’s announcement, former President Barack Obama used similar language on Twitter, calling al-Zawahri “one of the masterminds” of the Sept. 11 assaults.
But protection attorneys stated the language didn’t match the descriptions in the case at Guantánamo.
“The 9/11 charges, discovery and proof so far make almost no mention of al-Zawahri,” stated James G. Connell III, a capital protection lawyer for Ammar al-Baluchi, the nephew of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is often described as their architect of the assault.
The senior army protection lawyer in the Cole case, Capt. Brian L. Mizer of the Navy, stated that al-Zawahri figured in pretrial proof solely as a deputy in Al Qaeda, not as somebody who had a particular position in the operation.
Ali Soufan, a former F.B.I. agent who investigated Al Qaeda in the interval surrounding each assaults, stated al-Zawahri was not the operational mastermind of both plot. But as a senior chief, he stated, al-Zawahri helped set the strategic course for Al Qaeda’s main actions throughout that point.
“He was involved in greenlighting operations and advising Bin Laden,” Mr. Soufan stated.
Specifically, Mr. Soufan stated, there may be proof that at a council assembly of senior Qaeda leaders, some opposed the Sept. 11 plot, fearing repercussions for his or her secure haven in Afghanistan, however al-Zawahri backed Bin Laden’s need to go ahead with it.
Emile Nakhleh, a retired senior intelligence service officer and director of the Political Islam Strategic Analysis Program at the C.I.A., stated al-Zawahri was completely an essential goal. “We don’t put $25 million on the head of a small fish,” he stated.
But he thought-about al-Zawahri to be extra of a “strategic thinker of Al Qaeda.”
The senior administration official who defended Mr. Biden’s remarks additionally pointed to feedback by Kirk Lippold, who commanded the Cole at the time of the assault. Mr. Lippold said on a news program last week that al-Zawahri, together with Bin Laden, had been “intimately involved in the planning.”
But Mr. Lippold, who declined to remark for this text, didn’t cite any particular foundation for portraying al-Zawahri as intimately concerned in the planning. In his 2012 memoir about the incident, “Front Burner: Al Qaeda’s Attack on the U.S.S. Cole,” Mr. Lippold talked about Bin Laden about two dozen occasions however didn’t point out al-Zawahri.
Mark Fallon, who was the commander of a Navy process drive that investigated the Cole bombing and later oversaw investigations in the army commissions system, stated he recalled hypothesis that al-Zawahri may need been concerned in planning each assaults, however he was not conscious of proof supporting a direct hyperlink.
“It’s just not a factual narrative that they’re telling,” he stated. “It’s a talking point.”
