Perfect Soldiers

Frontpage Interview's guest today is Terry McDermott, the author of the new book Perfect Soldiers: The Hijackers: Who They Were, Why They Did It. He is a national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times.

FP: Mr. McDermott, welcome to Frontpage Interview. It is a pleasure to have you here.

McDermott: Thanks for inviting me.

FP: What led you to write this book?

McDermott: As you mentioned, I'm a reporter at the Los Angeles Times. The book originated in an assignment from my managing editor. The assignment, made in mid-September, 2001, was to do a definitive profile of Mohamed Atta, then thought to be one of the masterminds of the 9/11 attacks. The editor's instructions were to go wherever I needed to go and stay as long as I needed to stay. I don't think either of us imagined at that point the reporting would take three years and require reporting in 20 counties on three continents. Reporting for that story made it clear to me that Atta was not capable of having master-minded anything. The story that resulted begged the question - If not Atta, who? That led me to the next story, on the structure of the 9/11 plot, then another story on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The book grew out of the stories.

FP: Your detailed biographies of the hijackers is riveting. Tell us what particularly struck you - perhaps something that you didn't completely expect when you first started studying their lives.

McDermott: Like, I imagine, most people, I assumed the hijackers were in some ways extraordinary individuals, that they otherwise couldn't have pulled off something this huge. The biggest surprise to me was they were nearly the opposite - all too common among young men in similar circumstances across the Muslim world. The obvious implication of them being ordinary is that there must be many more men just like them, waiting. I think there are.

FP: What was it like interviewing some of the people that knew these characters? Were some of them scared, confused, feeling guilty? Tell us some of your impressions and experiences with some of the people you interviewed.

McDermott: One of the consistent oddities of being a reporter has to do with the most fundamental aspect of it - people talk to you. Why? It always astonishes me that no matter what the event or circumstance, you can find people with relevant knowledge who will talk. Or at least that had been my experience prior to this book. In the instance of most disasters or other horrific events people often talk to reporters out of a sense of remorse or because they feel some slight responsibility. It's that, “if only” feeling: If only I had done this, Or, if only I had seen that. Because they feel this way, they are often persuaded to talk. In fact, they are often eager to talk, have been waiting to be asked. That wasn't true in this case. I interviewed more than 500 people for this book. Not five of them were eager to talk. In large part, this was because they didn't believe the men had anything to do with it, or, if they believed it, felt no remorse about it.

Apart from their willingness to talk, it was very difficult identifying and finding people who had relevant information. If you go back and review what had been written about these people, you'll find there is a huge quantity of words based on a miniscule amount of information. I noticed recently there were three books on the national bestsellers lists about Scott Peterson. There were none about these guys. The reason, pretty simply, is that information about them is scarce and very difficult to find. During many weeks in this project, I went backwards - lost information - rather than gained it. This was without question the most difficult reporting I've ever endured. And endurance is what was required. I am above all else stubborn and once I realized what it would take to get this information, I committed to the long haul. If it was there, I was going to get it, or exhaust all means in the attempt. Whatever success this book represents is the result of that stubbornness.

I think it's important to add what it was I was after. There are easily 50 books already published on the general subject of Sept. 11. Most of them, the overwhelming majority, are in some sense polemics - they are arguing a point of view on who to blame; these arguments often involve a conspiracy of some sort. I wanted, instead, to lay down a baseline of factual information, to find what was findable before it disappeared forever, which it would have. Much of the information in this book could easily have passed out of human experience if it hadn't been found and written down.

FP: Mr. McDermott, why do you think these people did what they did?

McDermott: The reasons are complex and many: the long historical decline of the Arab world; specific political motivations, for example, objections to Israel's role in the region; and, underlying everything, a radically fundamentalist interpretation of Islam. There is at the heart of contemporary Islam a cult. And it is a large cult, with maybe a million members, who choose to find within their religion's historical texts a rationale to attack, and kill, anyone who opposes them. They think they are at war. No, they are at war. These men saw themselves as soldiers in that war. They saw what they were doing as the obligations of a soldier, the righteous cause of an army with the winds of redemption at its back. For a long time in my reporting, I struggled to find who had recruited these men to this cause. In the end, I was forced to admit they weren't recruited. They were volunteers. They delivered themselves to the cause.

FP: In your book, you show how Atta hated to eat - it was boring for him and he often just ate mashed up potatoes. He obviously rejected all earthly pleasures: women, entertainment, socializing, etc. In this cult, in this submission to the death-cult, there is a clear rejection of this world and all the beauty it has to offer. You even demonstrate that Atta almost never smiled or laughed. Joy and cheer in this world is also an enemy for these "perfect soldiers." They are distractions from the need to destroy what they need to destroy (i.e., the enemy, themselves, etc.) Can you paint the psychology of the suicide bomber here? It is clearly a death wish. They do not accept this world and anything it has to offer, even the wonderful things of pleasure: great food, sex, friends, community, etc. Kindly sketch a profile of the psyche here.

McDermott: I think it's impossible to generalize personalities, especially if you use Atta as a starting point. He is without question one of the oddest characters I've encountered in 25 years of journalism, more a point of departure than synthesis. In fact, two other of the men in the Hamburg group - Ramzi bin al Shibh and Marwan al-Shehhi - were nearly the opposite of Atta in personality. Both were laid-back, almost fun-loving men who loved to sing and laugh. I think the significance of this is that men drawn to radical Islam are a diverse lot. There is what you rightly call a cult at the heart of this interpretation of Islam, but it is not a suicide cult. Rather than abnegation, the men who volunteer for suicide missions often see the act as a signification of their life, not the losing of it.

I also think portraying them as motivated by this one thing or the other is understandable, but misleading. The forces that drove the men in the 9/11 plot are many and complicated; they include broad historical trends, specific political objections, devout if wholly misguided religious belief, psychological alienation and self-aggrandizement.

FP: It is very difficult for me not to revile the Attas of the world, let alone understand them. And I don't mean just because they are suicide bombers. I mean the ones who even look at the world the way an Atta does.

I come from the Soviet Union. When I came to America, I had no choice but to fall in love with it: the freedom, the entertainment, the bountiful style of life, the endless choices, the consumer goods, the popular culture, the individualism, and all that comes with it.

For me it was always just common sense that for a foreigner, especially from an oppressive and poor environment, spending one day in the United States would be enough: just the taste of freedom and all it had to offer, would convert one into a pro-American for the rest of one's life. But I take it what made me love America and its individualism and material affluence and all the love and cheer and joy of life that becomes possible in America, well, let's just say these are not the things that attract an Atta. So my question is: how the hell to do we dissuade these people from terrorism? Telling them about the possibility of a San Antonio-Detroit rematch in the NBA Finals next year just isn't going to do it. What will?

McDermott: That's the heart of the matter, isn't it? It's the central question going forward and one I feel we're going to be struggling to answer for decades. You can't have spent as much time as I have studying these people without wondering what to do and, yet, I haven't found a solution that satisfies. Perhaps that's because there is no single answer. Just as there are many causes that brought these men together, so are there many reasons that drive them apart from us. Like you, I come from a foreign country, as well, although mine happens to be in the middle of America. I grew up in the rural Midwest in a time and place that now seems to have been the last refuge of innocence. When I left home I did so with a naïve optimism so deeply written in my being it took decades of various hard knocks in various hard places around the world for the realization to dawn that my perception of the world was utterly different from that of almost everybody else.

There are people - probably billions of them - who don't share our embrace of what constitutes a good life. Some number of them - a small but still a significant percentage - belong to this cult that lies within the fringes of Islam. The cult, not accidentally, is centered in Saudi Arabia and the explicitly political and allegedly literal interpretation of Salafist Wahabism embraced there. Whatever else is done to combat terrorism, this interpretation of Islam has to be confronted.

FP: What exact vision of the world did you have growing up in the rural Midwest? What were the assumptions that rested beneath what you call your “naïve optimism”? When you say that several hard knocks made you realize that your “perception of the world was utterly different from that of almost everybody else” it is a bit ambiguous. Are you saying your vision was distorted and naïve or that everyone else's is wrong? Kindly clarify what your vision was at that time and what was illegitimate about it - if there was anything illegitimate about it.

McDermott: As someone told me long ago, I'm completely oblivious to the hostility others might feel toward me. My naïve boyhood assumptions, so naïve I didn't even know I had them, included the fundamental idea that people generally act for beneficent causes and mean to do good. They might have different conceptions of what constitutes good, but would basically act in pursuit of it. In other words, I thought people would like me. It's that same naïve optimism you spoke of. I had no idea that there were people who would dislike me simply for being an American. But there are. And, as it turns out, there are a great many of them.

FP: Can you tell us about a particular moment when researching this book that something overwhelmed you and made a very powerful impression? Something that hit you unexpectedly and took you some time to digest in your psyche? Something that really carved out an indelible mark in your consciousness? Maybe made you depressed or scared or troubled? Perhaps an interview, perhaps a fact you discovered etc?

McDermott: I wouldn't say I was overwhelmed, but I was distressed to discover the degree to which much of the Arab world view is shaped by mythic beliefs about the way the world operates. I say mythic in the same sense that Karen Armstrong uses it to describe the nature of belief among fundamentalists in all religions, that the nature of their beliefs are pre-rational and unshakeable by the existence of contrary fact. For example, I must have been told a hundred times during my research that 9/11 could not have happened without the connivance, indeed, the active execution, of either or both the American CIA and Israeli Mossad. There is a view that the United States is omnipotent and, therefore, nothing of this scale could happen unbeknownst to us. All evidence the contrary - which is depressing in its own way - matters not a bit. I was repeatedly told no Jews died in the World Trade Center. One of my own interpreters, an upper middle class Cairene whose career goal was to come to the United States and open a chain of Lasik eye surgery clinics, in other words, a very Westernized Arab, would ask me every two or three days why the Jews stayed home that day. I couldn't persuade him otherwise.

The hold of such myths is broad and deep and not easily challenged. It is a serious impediment to any reform.

FP: If I had to go in front of, let's say, grade 4 or 5 kids in elementary school, and my assignment was to try to explain 9/11 to the students, and one of the students raised their hands and asked: “Why did these hijackers do this?” I would answer: “Because America is a good and beautiful country. It is a free society and it supports freedom throughout the world. And there are some people who hate freedom and they are evil and they want to kill innocent people, especially innocent people who live in America.”

Yes, I know that I will be laughed at my many “sophisticated” people for this George W. Bush-like interpretation, but when you get to the heart of it, that is what I really believe. When all said and done, that is how simple I think this really is and that is what I would answer to this class. What would you say in front of the class when asked this question?

McDermott: I don't agree that the 9/11 attackers were primarily motivated by hatred of America. Ramzi bin al Shibh, the young Yemeni man who wanted to take part in the attacks but was unable to get a visa, dreamed of coming the United States to study electronics. Atta had friends attending American universities. Hani Hanjour had relatives living in the U.S. The men behind the plot, bin Laden, Zawahiri and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, might well have hated the United States, but I don't think they did so necessarily because they hate freedom or some other American ideal. They did so largely as a result of specific American policies. That's not the same thing. It might lead to the same end, but it begins in a different place.

FP: I guess it would be an understatement to say that you and I are in complete disagreement on this particular point, but I guess a debate on this matter belongs in another forum my friend.

So tell me, what are some of the reactions you have received to this book? Have there been reactions and/or criticisms that took you off guard? Do you regret something you wish could have been added to the book? Are you happy with the job you accomplished and the portraits you painted?

McDermott: The book has largely received a very generous response. Reviewers for the most part seem to have understood what I was trying to do, which was to bring some facts to the discussion. I'm not sure anyone comprehends how truly difficult such a modest goal was, but most people have applauded the effort. Several critics have complained that I didn't do more, that is, that I didn't fit the facts into a larger argument. I think I have. What I tried to do was make the facts be the argument, but I can understand why this is not satisfying to everyone.

Obviously, given the emphasis I put on facts, I wish I had a lot more of them. My information was imperfect. I knew from the start it would be, so was prepared for some disappointment but I seriously underestimated how scarce the information in fact was and how difficult it was to unearth.

I'm generally pleased with the portraits of the Hamburg group. I'm less than pleased with the amount of information I was able to gather on the Saudi hijackers. The Saudi government would not allow me to do the sort of on the ground reporting there that I needed to do.

FP: What are some of your future projects?

McDermott: I just finished researching a profile of Mohammed al-Fizazi, a Moroccan imam who seems to have links to 9/11, the Casablanca and Madrid bombings.

FP: Mr. McDermott, it was a pleasure talking to you today. Thank you for joining us.