Free Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden--From 9/11 to Abbottabad by Peter L. Bergen Page B

the ’70s and ’80s, and resulted in the rise of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, but it was destroyed after 9/11.” For a longtime intimate of bin Laden and a major jihadist strategist to say publicly that the attacks on Manhattan and Washington had resulted in the wholesale destruction of much of al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and allied militant groups was quite significant.
    Some in al-Qaeda continued to push the idea that 9/11 and itsaftermath had been a great success for the movement. In an internal “after-action” report about the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, an anonymous al-Qaeda writer applauded the strategic wisdom of the attacks: “Targeting America was a very smart choice strategically because the conflict with America’s followers in the Islamic world showed that these followers cannot stay on top of their tyrant regimes without America’s support. So why keep fighting the body when you can kill the head.” The after-action report also celebrated the media attention that the 9/11 attacks had generated: “The giant American media machine was defeated in a judo-like strike from Sheikh bin Laden. CNN cameras and other media dinosaurs took part in framing the attacks and spreading the fear, without costing al-Qaeda a dime.”
    Similarly, Saif al-Adel, one of the group’s military commanders, explained in an interview published four years after the fall of the Taliban that the attacks on New York and Washington were part of a diabolically clever plan to get the United States to overreact and attack Afghanistan: “Our ultimate objective of these painful strikes against the head of the serpent was to prompt it to come out of its hole.… Such strikes will force the person to carry out random acts and provoke him to make serious and sometimes fatal mistakes.… The first reaction was the invasion of Afghanistan.”
    This was a post facto rationalization of al-Qaeda’s strategic failure. The whole point of the 9/11 attacks had been to get the United States
out
of the Muslim world, not to provoke it into invading and occupying Afghanistan and overthrowing al-Qaeda’s closest ideological ally, the Taliban. September 11, in fact, resembled Pearl Harbor. Just as the Japanese scored a tremendous tactical victory on December 7, 1941, they also set in motion a chain of events that led to the eventual collapse of Imperial Japan. So, too, the 9/11 attacksset in motion a chain of events that would lead to the destruction of much of al-Qaeda and, eventually, the death of its leader.
    I T WAS CODE-NAMEDGREYSTONE , and was arguably the most expansive covert action program in the history of the CIA. Authorized by President Bush in the wake of 9/11, the program encompassed the aggressive pursuit of al-Qaeda suspects around the globe,dozens of whom were snatched from wherever they were living and then “rendered” in CIA-leased planes to countries such as Egypt and Syria, where they were tortured by the local security services. The program introduced the use of what the CIA called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” including waterboarding, and led to the establishment of a secret CIA prison system in eastern Europe for “high-value” prisoners. Top CIA lawyer John Rizzo says, “The consensus of the experts, the counterterrorism analysts, and our psychologists, was that for any interrogation program of high value, senior al-Qaeda officials—and we’re talking here about the worst of the worst, the most psychopathic but knowledgeable of the entire al-Qaeda system—that for any interrogation to have any effect, it was essential that these people be held in absolute isolation, with access to the fewest number of people.” The presidential authorization also allowed the CIA to kill the leaders of al-Qaeda and allied groups using drones.
    The urgency of finding bin Laden was underlinedwhen the CIA discovered that he had met with retired Pakistani nuclear scientists during the summer of 2001 to