American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us by Steven Emerson

Qaeda military commander. In 1996, however, Banshiri drowned, or was drowned. El-Hage investigated the death with Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, who later became an at-large indictee for the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
    Eventually, el-Hage would make false statements in September and October 1997 to both the FBI and the grand jury that was investigating Osama bin Laden regarding his role in al Qaeda. At some date prior to this, el-Hage had returned to the United States. El-Hage would be questioned again by the FBI on August 20, 1998, following the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania on August 7. Again he would lie to the federal agents regarding his connections with al Qaeda. He then would commit perjury before the federal grand jury in New York on September 16, 1998. Wadih el-Hage would be initially indicted for this act of perjury; later the indictment would be expanded to include charges of conspiring to kill U.S. nationals, eight counts of perjury before the federal grand jury, and three counts of making false statements to federal law-enforcement officers while being questioned pursuant to a grand jury investigation.
    Testimony provided in the trial of el-Hage and others for their role in the bombing of the U.S. embassies has provided a good deal of information into Osama bin Laden’s rise. Bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia for a brief interval after the Afghanistan victory of the mujahideen. By this time, the Gulf War turned him against the Saudi regime, and his criticisms caused the regime to strip him of his Saudi passport. Set loose upon the world again, bin Laden found refuge in the country that was rapidly becoming the worldwide center of international terrorism—Sudan.
    A desert nation directly south of Egypt, Sudan was governed by the National Islamic Front party under Dr. Hassan al-Turabi, who seized power through a military coup in 1989. Al-Turabi did two things: he imposed a fundamentalist regime almost identical to the Ayatollah Khomeini’s rule in Iran except based on Sunni principles, and he opened up Sudan to worldwide terrorists. Al-Turabi’s comrade-in-arms in the coup that established the Islamic state in Sudan, Sudanese president Omar Bashir, personally welcomed al Qaeda to the country. He gave the terror organization special permission to avoid taxes and import duties and even exempted it from local law enforcement. (Sudan was not alone in sponsoring al Qaeda. Hizzbollah was happy to contribute. Hizzbollah officials arranged special advanced weapons and explosives training for mujahideen in Lebanon. Among the items on the curriculum were instructions on how to blow up large buildings.)
    Soon Sudan was hosting an entire spectrum of radical Islamic groups that would plague both the Middle East and the West and foster political unrest around the world. As low-cost, low-tech weapons became more accessible, Sudan-based terrorists found it easier to export death and destruction worldwide, including to the most technically advanced nations.
    To pick a random list, Sudan-based terrorists instigated:
     
 
Suicide bombings in Israel
     
The attempted assassination of the president of Egypt
     
A brutal military campaign of near-genocidal proportions against the black non-Muslim tribal minorities in southern Sudan
     
Attacks on American forces in Somalia
     
Unparalleled get-togethers of the world’s most militant Islamic terrorist leaders
     
Training camps for weapons and explosives
     
Training camps for Iranian Revolutionary Guards—who in turn trained street militias called the Popular Defense Forces, who carry out vigilante violence
     
Use of the Sudanese diplomatic pouch to transport explosives
     
Support of terrorist attacks in Ethiopia
     
Support for, advance knowledge of, and critical involvement with the second series of planned terrorist attacks in Manhattan following the original World Trade Center bombing
     
    Although Iran sponsored more terrorism