My Share of the Task(250)
only a fraction of their size: Eight thousand seven hundred soldiers from the 2nd Infantry Division replaced the 101st in January 2004. Eric Hamilton, “The Fight for Mosul,” Institute for the Study of War, 7–8.
left my key TF 714 staff behind: My recollection of this October trip and helicopter flight was confirmed in interviews with team members present.
the administration’s official line: That week President Bush said, “The more progress we make on the ground, the more free the Iraqis become, the more electricity is available, the more jobs are available, the more kids that are going to school, the more desperate these killers become.” “Week of Violence,” NewsHour, PBS, October 31, 2003.
Sunni stronghold after the invasion: Eric Hamilton, “The Fight for Mosul,” 4.
sandbags, burlap sacks: These processes were described in interviews with participants.
at 4:30 P.M.: Langewiesche, “Welcome to the Green Zone.”
KAMAZ flatbed truck: Sameer N. Yacoub, “FBI: Deadly U.N. Headquarters Bomb Made from Materials from Saddam’s Old Arsenal,” Associated Press, August 20, 2003.
“they can rape the land”: “The Insurgency,” Frontline, PBS, February 21, 2006. Zarqawi later claimed responsibility for the U.N. attack, among others, saying, “God honored us and so we harvested their heads and tore up their bodies in many places.”
during East Timor’s independence: Abu Omar al-Kurdi, an Al Qaeda in Iraq operative, said Zarqawi targeted Vieira de Mello specifically as “the person behind the separation of East Timor from Indonesia.” Quoted in Samantha Power, Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (Penguin Press, 2008), 514.
a cap attributed to Secretary Rumsfeld: Interview with senior military official.
critical step to secure authority: Interview with participant.
CHAPTER 8: THE ENEMY EMERGES
a framed exhibition case: Don Van Natta, “Hussein’s Gun May Go on Display at Bush Library,” New York Times, July 5, 2009.
three concentric circles: This understanding of Al Qaeda’s structure appears in Coll, Ghost Wars, 474. Coll notes that by the late 1990s, such a description of the terrorist group was “common” at the CIA.
core was a bureaucracy: Commission members and staff: Thomas H. Kean, et al., “Overview of the Enemy: Staff Statement No. 15,” National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, June 16, 2004, 2–3 (hereafter, “Overview of the Enemy”).
“centralization of decision”: Khalid al Hammadi, “Bin Ladin’s Former ‘Bodyguard’ Interviewed on Al-Qaida Strategies,” Al-Quds al Arabi, trans. by the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, August 3, 2004. The article quotes Abu Jandal (a former “personal guard” to bin Laden) explaining this operational model in 2004. Since then, this statement has been cited by both Lawrence Wright (The Looming Tower, 359) and Peter L. Bergen (The Osama bin Laden I Know, 253). The organization, as Steve Coll describes it, “was tightly supervised at the top and very loosely spread at the bottom” (Ghost Wars, 474).
top-level Military Affairs Committee: Al Hammadi, “Bin Ladin’s Former ‘Bodyguard.’”
staying to clean their tracks: “Overview of the Enemy,” 8.
in Europe, and elsewhere: Contrary to reports, bin Laden did not personally finance Al Qaeda; estimates of his fortune were chronically inflated, and determining his actual wealth was a persistent difficulty for the intelligence community. Steve Coll, The Bin Ladens, 347–48, 488–96.