Inside an al Qaeda in Istanbul murder plot

Washington Post:

About a week before Sept. 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden sat down to a breakfast meeting in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar. His Turkish guests had arrived with a plan for a spectacular terrorist strike, but according to accounts two of the visitors later gave investigators, there was no talk of business over the meal.

Instead, bin Laden held forth for an hour about the injustices Muslims were suffering at the hands of Israel and the United States, standard motivational remarks tailored slightly for the occasion: He told the visitors that one of his grandmothers was Turkish.

Afterward, outside the one-story house guarded by high walls and men with Kalashnikov rifles, it was al-Qaeda's military commander who gave the visitors $10,000 in cash and crucial words of guidance.

So began a plot that ended in November 2003 with the staggered detonation of four powerful truck bombs in Istanbul, Turkey's largest city. The attacks, which killed 58 people and wounded 750, may have been the last terrorist strikes specifically authorized by bin Laden. Two months after breakfasting with the Turks, bin Laden was making for his base at Tora Bora as U.S.-led forces attacked across Afghanistan.

In the fevered days after the Istanbul explosions, Turkish investigators swept up suspects by the dozens. In police interrogation rooms, many spoke at length about the conspiracy and the motivations driving it. Transcripts of those interrogations, as entered into evidence in the continuing trial of about 70 defendants in Istanbul, provide a rare, fine-grained look at the inner workings of a terrorist bomb plot. This report is based on those documents and interviews with those who knew the accused plotters.

"The aim of this organization is to take action against American and Israeli targets and to break their dominance over Islamic countries," said one suspect, explaining a conspiracy conceived long before the United States sent troops to Iraq.

"The Islamic umma are being oppressed," said another, using the Arabic word for the global Muslim community.

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There is much more to this story.

One of the reoccurring themes of bin Laden is this false sense of victimhood. They act like the US and Israel are out to get them and because al Qaeda attacked us now we are. The victim theme seems to be pretty strong throughout the militant Islam organizations. Hezballah and the Palestinian organizations actually plan victim offensives to create victims for the media. They deliberately use human shields in the hope that many will become victims that will inspire yet more attacks. Militant Islam has become one big self pity party.