Pulitzer Winner Lawrence Wright on 'The Looming Tower'

DATE April 17, 2007 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Pulizer Prize winner Charlie Savage of Boston Globe
talks about President Bush' use of signing statements to assert
his right to bypass laws without issuing vetoes
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

The 2007 Pulitzer Prizes were awarded yesterday, and on today's show, we're
going to listen back to interviews with two of the winning journalists.
First, let's hear from Boston Globe correspondent Charlie Savage. He won the
Pulitzer for national reporting for his series on the Bush administration's
use of presidential signing statements, a way of constitutionally challenging
laws and claiming the authority to bypass laws without issuing vetoes. I
spoke with Charlie Savage last May, at which point Bush had already challenge
more statutes through the use of signing statements than any president in
history, 750. In contrast, his father, George H.W. Bush, challenged 232 laws
in his four years, and Bill Clinton bypassed 140 laws with signing statements
in his eight years as president. Although President George W. Bush issued a
record number of signing statements, he didn't veto a single bill until five
and a half years into his presidency when he struck down Congress' bid to lift
funding restrictions on human embryonic stem cell research.

I asked Charlie Savage to explain what a signing statement is.

Mr. CHARLIE SAVAGE: A signing statement is not a proclamation in which he
says, `This is a great bill. This is going to help America. Thank you,
Congress, for your hard work.' He also issues those with great fanfare. A
signing statement, in contrast, is a technical, legal document, which he files
in the federal record on the day that he signed the bill. It contains his
interpretation of what the law means and what it doesn't mean and instructions
to the federal bureaucracy or the military how they are to implement the law
now that it's taking force. Often in these signing statements, he is making
constitutional objections to statutes and provisions that he thinks intrude on
his own powers as a commander in chief or the head of executive branch to run
the government as he sees fit. He has challenged more than 750 laws in the
last five years, saying that the executive branch can ignore all of them
because, in his view, they conflict with the Constitution.

GROSS: And he hasn't usually challenged the whole laws but rather sections of
the law?

Mr. SAVAGE: Well, this is a problem of nomenclature. You know, if you have
a giant bill that is thousands of pages long, contains many different laws
within it, many different statutes within it, sometimes you refer to the whole
thing as a law, but in fact each section is a law in and of itself, and the
Supreme Court might, for example, strike down one law as unconstitutional but
the rest remains.

GROSS: Is there any pattern to the laws that the president has written
signing statements for?

Mr. SAVAGE: Many of the laws that he has challenged involve rules and
regulations for the military and national security. Most famously, he has
challenged the constitutionality of law that forbids US interrogators from
using torture or other forms of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment against
detainees anywhere in the world. He said that as commander in chief, only he
has the power to set aside that torture ban if he thinks it would assist in
preventing terrorist attacks.

He has also, however, challenged a range of laws which have nothing to do with
national security. He has challenged numerous statutes requiring
congressional oversight committees to be given information about how the
government is conducting a certain area of its business. He's challenged
affirmative action provisions that require the government to try to make sure
that minorities receive a share of contracts and grants and jobs. He's
challenged whistle-blower statutes, which allow members of the executive
branch to speak out about government wrongdoing without fear of losing their
jobs if they tell Congress about it. He said that only he, as the head of the
executive branch, can decide what information Congress receives. He's
challenged safeguards against political interference in federally funded
research. All these things have nothing to do with national security but are
also the kinds of laws that President Bush has said over the last five years
he's not bound to obey.

GROSS: One of the laws that he issued a signing statement for included the
creation of an inspector general for Iraq, and this is somebody who has
oversight on how money is being spent in Iraq and how projects are developing.
The president wrote that the inspector shall refrain from investigating any
intelligence or national security matter or any crime the Pentagon says it
prefers to investigate for itself. But isn't part of what the inspector
general is investigating the Pentagon itself and how it's using money?

Mr. SAVAGE: That's correct. The Congress set up a broad-ranging inspector
general. In fact, they did this twice: once for the initial phase of the
occupation and again after the formal transfer of power. Congress set up an
inspector general position that would have the power to go around and uncover
any kind of wrongdoing by US forces and US officials in Iraq. And they
specifically said that no official could get in the way of any inquiry,
investigation or subpoena that this inspector general wanted to issue. And in
one case also, that if anyone over there tried to interfere in any way or did
not cooperate with this person's inquiries, he was immediately to tell
Congress about it. When President Bush signed the bills containing these
inspector general statutes, he--first of all, as you read--severely curtailed
what kinds of investigations this inspector general could look at. And,
secondly, he said that the inspector general could not, of his own will, tell
Congress anything without the permission of the president and his appointees.

GROSS: So isn't that kind of like saying, if the president doesn't want the
inspector general to investigate the Pentagon, he can ask the Pentagon to
investigate itself instead?

Mr. SAVAGE: That's right. It's a way to keep the inspector general from
being a free agent who might conduct some kind of investigation that would get
out of control from what the president and his appointees wanted to have
investigated. And the context of the second law with the inspector general,
in fact, was five months after the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal. It was
part of a large set of new rules and regulations that Congress passed the next
time they made a major military bill in response to that scandal. One of them
was this inspector general law. Another was saying that prison guards around
the world in the military had to be retrained in the Geneva Conventions and
the limits on the treatment of prisoners, the humane treatment of prisoners.
A third was that the Pentagon had to create stronger rules for the use of
private contractors, including conducting background checks on private
contractors and barring them from any sort of criminal justice role. And, of
course, part of the Abu Ghraib scandal was the use of private contractors as
interrogators.

All of those rules and regulations that Congress passed in that bill were
flagged by President Bush, who said that despite what the Constitution said
Congress could do as far as passing rules and regulations for the military,
only he as commander in chief could make such restrictions, and so he could
ignore those laws.

GROSS: Do you know what the process is that the president goes through before
issuing a signing statement? Who does he consult with? Who actually writes
it?

Mr. SAVAGE: Yes. Obviously, President Bush himself is not reading long
bills and singling out provisions that conflict with his interpretation of the
Constitution. Within the White House there is an office called the Office of
Management and Budget, which oversees the crafting of these things, and they
farm out bills to all the various agencies which will be affected by the bill.
And they also have lawyers within the White House Counsel's Office and, in the
Justice Department, the Office of Legal Counsel, who are also charged with
reviewing these laws and finding these provisions. And then sometimes they
argue amongst themselves about what should go in and what should go out, and
eventually there is a final signing statement that is drafted up for the
president to sign. So, in a sense, this is President Bush doing these. It is
certainly in first person and it's his signature on it, and it's his approval
that makes it work. But behind the scenes, it is the product of his legal
team. This is the same legal team which has had a very aggressive view of
presidential power in other aspects that we've seen over the last five years,
including the famous torture memo in which the team came up with the theory
that President Bush, or any president as the commander in chief, could set
aside a pre-existing torture ban, an older torture ban, in the interest of
national security, or could authorize interrogators to use whatever techniques
he felt necessary despite the ban. That memo was a secret, and then after the
Abu Ghraib prison scandal, it was leaked, and it caused such an uproar that
the administration had to set it aside. It's the same lawyers that are
drafting things like that that are also drafting these signing statements.

GROSS: Well, speaking of Abu Ghraib, you write that five months after the Abu
Ghraib story broke, Congress passed a series of new rules and regulations for
military prisons. The president signed that and then said he could ignore
them.

Mr. SAVAGE: That's right. Congress passed a series of new laws in reaction
to the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, about five months later. The laws did
such things as require the retraining of military prison guards around the
world in the humane treatment requirements of the Geneva Conventions. It
required the military to perform background checks on the contractors that
they had to assist them, because, of course, contractors were some of the
interrogators at Abu Ghraib, as opposed to people who were actually in
uniform. It also required contractors to be banned from most criminal justice
functions. It would keep them out of places like Abu Ghraib. And it set up
an inspector general who was to be charged to look wherever he wanted in Iraq
and no one would be allowed to interfere with whatever investigations that he
wanted to launch. Bush challenged all of these laws. He said that only he as
commander in chief could set rules and regulations for military contractors or
decide what kind of training prisoner guards needed to have. And he declared
that the inspector general shall not investigate anything to do with
intelligence, national security or anything that the Pentagon had decided that
it would investigate itself.

GROSS: What's the writing like in these statements?

Mr. SAVAGE: It's extremely difficult to deconstruct. President Bush does
not say, `I'm the commander in chief. I have to protect national security so
regardless of what Congress says, I can waive the torture ban.' It's full of
terms like "the unitary executive theory," `the executive branch shall
construe this clause consistent with my constitutional authority to,' you
know, `run the unitary executive and as commander in chief to the armed
services.' You say, what does that mean? Eventually, you recognize the code
words for `I'm the commander in chief' or `I have absolute control over
executive branch officials, and Congress cannot fracture that control despite
numerous Supreme Court Rulings from the '30s to the '80s saying that Congress
can't, in fact, give executive branch officials independence.'

So it's not something that can be done easily. And in addition, it does not
say, you know, `This provision says I can't torture but I can.' It says, you
know, `Section 506 pertains to the treatment of detainees or purports to
acquire information.' And you have to go and look at those sections. And
you're like, `Oh, this is the torture ban.' Or `This is a whistle-blower
statute.' And so even though they are public documents, they're written in
very vague ways and very dense ways which interferes with the ability, I
think, of people to easily grasp what they're talking about, which may explain
in part why Congress paid so little attention to them over the last five
years.

GROSS: My guest is Charlie Savage of the Boston Globe. He won a Pulitzer
Prize yesterday for his series on presidential signing statements.

More after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

GROSS: My guest is Boston Globe reporter Charlie Savage. Yesterday he won
the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for his series of stories on
President Bush's expanded use of signing statements. When his series was
published earlier last year, President Bush had never exercised his veto power
although he subsequently vetoed one bill. But he's challenged more than 750
laws through the use of signing statements, more than any other president in
US history. When I spoke with Savage last May, I asked if there was a
connection between the record number of signing statements and the low number
of vetoes, which was then zero.

Mr. SAVAGE: When you read these signings statements going back for five
years and you deconstruct what it is that they are talking about, it starts to
become clear that, in a way, these are better than vetoes, because, first of
all, one can use them to take out selected bits and pieces of the bill that
one does not like while keeping the rest. Whereas, in a real veto you have to
take it all or get rid of it all.

Secondly, Congress has the power to override a real veto, which is one of the
checks and balances that the founders put into the Constitution. A signing
statement is a unilateral final word on what's going to count and what might
as well not have been in the law in the first place.

And the third way in which a signing statement is more powerful or more
attractive to a president than the veto power that the Constitution gives him,
is that, in practice, signing statements generally pass without notice in the
public, the media and the Congress. Nobody reads these things, such that you
could see that if President Bush vetoed the torture ban, he would have faced
some political flack for that, a great deal of political flack for that, but
by doing it in the signing statement, he was able to do it almost without
notice.

GROSS: And with these signing statements, does the president basically
reserve the right to be the final arbiter of what is constitutional as opposed
to letting that question be settled by the courts?

Mr. SAVAGE: Yes. And this is one of the ways in which President Bush's use
of the signing statements is different than what has come before. In addition
to the fact that he's crushed all previous records in terms of the frequency
with which he's challenging laws, he's also doing so largely in areas that
will never get into court, areas such as national security, in which there's
not going to be a plaintiff who has standing to sue and therefore to get a
question before the Supreme Court.

GROSS: So do you have any idea who the president informs after he issues a
signing statement? Does he tell the agencies that are involved with the
statement? Does he tell Congress? Does Congress know when Bush has a signing
statement that he appends to legislation?

Mr. SAVAGE: Congress could know if they chose to look. The signing
statements are public documents. They are filed in the federal record. If
one wanted to, one could go download them all and laboriously read through
them, as I did. But, by and large, Congress has not chosen to do that, or
even thought to do that, because these have not been a normal part of our
government system until now to this degree. That does not mean that inside
the executive branch people are not paying very close attention to them,
because if you're ordered to carry out a law in a certain way, you can look to
the signing statement for instructions. Outside of the executive branch,
though, until recently, very few people even knew these existed.

GROSS: How does President Bush's use of these signings compare to a line-item
veto?

Mr. SAVAGE: Well, some would argue that he has, in fact, used these as a
line-item veto, an override-proof line-item veto. Technically, the line-item
veto that Congress tried to create in the '90s and which the Supreme Court
ruled was unconstitutional was a more public document, and it was aimed more
at financial matters, budget lines than substantive law, like these are aimed
at. The way that worked was President Clinton would say, `I don't think we
should spend, you know, whatever, a quarter billion dollars on a bridge to
nowhere.' He would strike it out and send it back to Congress, and then
Congress would have noticed that he had done that and a chance to override it.
Even despite that check and balance built into it, the Supreme Court said,
`No, it's unconstitutional.' The way the Constitution works is Congress writes
an entire bill, and the president either takes it or he leaves it. He has to
veto the whole thing or accept it all.

So this seems to be something like a line-item veto on substantive grounds
since he's not knocking out money for things; he's knocking out restrictions
on what he can do or regulations for the military and the executive branch
that he thinks are his prerogative only to foster. But he, again, he's
saying, you know, `This section, which would be turned into this statute, no.
The rest is OK.' In that sense, it is like a line-item veto, except Congress
doesn't generally have notice that he's done it, and they have no chance to
override his judgment.

GROSS: Has the White House had any response to your articles about the
president's signings?

Mr. SAVAGE: When I was preparing, as I said, the torture act story back in
January--sorry, the torture ban story, I was able to get on the phone with an
attorney in the White House, have a genuine conversation about what was being
said here and why. After that, they've been very uninterested in explaining
themselves any further.

They have a talking point that each time I call them and I say, `All right.
I'm doing another story on this. What would your response be? You know,
would you like to talk about it?' The talking point is: `Previous
administrations have done this as well, and the president intends to
faithfully follow these laws in a manner that is consistent with the
Constitution.' Both of those talking points, of course, are misleading because
`the president intends to follow a law in a manner consistent with the
Constitution' means he intends not to follow the law if he thinks it's
inconsistent with the Constitution, and he's affording himself the right to
interpret the Constitution as he sees fit. And previous presidents have done
this, that's true, but no previous president has done this anywhere near as
frequently or as aggressively as this president. And no previous president
has done this while also abandoning their veto power.

GROSS: Charlie Savage of the Boston Globe recorded last May. Yesterday he
won a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for his series on President Bush's
unprecedented use of signing statements. Earlier today our producer, Monique
Nazareth, called Savage on his cell phone at Boston Logan Airport.

Ms. MONIQUE NAZARETH: Based on your story, Congress decided to look into
this issue. Do you know where that stands right now?

SAVAGE: Well, the House Judiciary Committee, when Congress reconvened under
Democratic control in January, made as its first oversight issue signing
statements, and Chairman John Conyers held a hearing on it and said that this
was going to be the first of many and that he was convening a new oversight
investigative team to, among other things, try to make sense of all these
different laws the administration has said it could disobey and whether or not
it's actually followed through on that threat, as it were, because so much of
it happens in the realm of national security, where it's hard to say what
they're doing behind closed doors.

However, because of the exploding controversy over the US attorney firings at
the Justice Department, I think that the signing statements effort has been
put on the backburner for now, because everything in the judiciary oversight
committee has just been consumed with trying to make sense of what happened
with those prosecutors who were fired.

Ms. NAZARETH: Have you still been looking into this story? Is the president
still doing a lot of these signing statements that you're aware of?

Mr. SAVAGE: I've actually been on book leave for the last six months. I've
been writing a book on presidential power, which is called "Takeover" and
should be out this September if all goes well, and because of the researching
and writing of that, I have not been following day-to-day events quite as
closely as I was before. However, I do know that because of the new Congress
that took over in January, there's not been a lot of legislation yet that has
reached the president's desk, and so we have not yet had a chance to see
whether with a different political balance in Washington, whether that may
affect the White House's approach to the use of planning statements or not.

Ms. NAZARETH: Charlie, congratulations on winning the Pulitzer, and thanks
again for talking to us while you're there at the airport.

Mr. SAVAGE: Thank you very much.

GROSS: Charlie Savage, talking to FRESH AIR producer Monique Nazareth. We'll
hear from Lawrence Wright who also won a Pulitzer Prize yesterday in the
second half of the show.

I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

(Announcements)

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Interview: Pulitzer Prize winner Lawrence Wright talks about Osama
bin laden and how al-Qaeda started
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

We're hearing from Pulitzer Prize winners today. Lawrence Wright spent nearly
five years researching al-Qaeda, interviewing more than 600 people, including
members of al-Qaeda and related jihadist groups, as well as friends and
relatives of Osama bin Laden. The result--his book, "The Looming Tower:
Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11"--was widely lauded even before winning a
Pulitzer yesterday. It won the Lionel Gelber Prize, the J. Anthony Lukas
Book Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award.

"The Looming Tower" explores the development of al-Qaeda, as well as the
efforts of FBI agents to crack the organization before it carried out the
September 11th attacks. Wright is currently performing "My Trip to al-Qaeda,"
a stage presentation based on the book. Wright is a staff writer for The New
Yorker and has authored six previous books. He also cowrote the screenplay
for "The Siege," a 1998 film starring Bruce Willis and Denzel Washington about
the nation's reactions to a band of Islamic terrorists.

Our guest host Dave Davies spoke with Lawrence Wright last year after "The
Looming Tower" was published.

DAVE DAVIES, host:

Well, Lawrence Wright, welcome to FRESH AIR. You know, Osama bin Laden is
known to a lot of people as a man who really made his bones in Afghanistan in
the 1980s, recruiting and leading Arabs in the fight against the Russian
invasion there. Your book looks at that in some detail. How significant was
bin Laden and his Arab recruits? How significant was their role in their war?

Mr. LAWRENCE WRIGHT: It was utterly insignificant. In fact, they were an
obstacle to victory, if anything. The Afghans were mystified by these
death-seeking Arabs who came seeking martyrdom to Afghanistan when the Afghan
people really were seeking liberation, so they had completely different
objectives. The Arabs when they arrived had no idea that the Soviets might
actually be defeated. They were only looking to engage in jihad and find
their way to paradise, so oftentimes they would rush into battle and
complicate things immensely and get killed in great numbers as they did, but
they really contributed nothing to the eventual outcome, which was the
withdrawal of the Soviet forces.

DAVIES: However, their exploits were, in fact, sold in the Arab world as
pretty remarkable, right?

Mr. WRIGHT: Oh, they--bin Laden in particular was a wonderful spinmeister,
and after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, the entire Soviet
Union fell apart, and so the mythology just grew that, you know, this band,
this legend of--this small band of men that rushed in to defend Islam and then
slay the mighty superpower so thoroughly that it completely disappeared, that
grew up around bin Laden, and he did a lot to create that mythology himself.

DAVIES: Now, even though bin Laden and his fellow Arab fighters weren't
effective as a military force and were often left out and ignored by the real
Afghan fighters, you write that bin Laden himself began to develop a vision of
maintaining a core of Islamic fighters for future efforts. What exactly was
he conceiving of then?

Mr. WRIGHT: Originally, he was an anti-communist. His goal was to drive the
Soviets out of Afghanistan and then on through central Asia, and also he was
particularly attached to his ancestral homeland, Yemen, which had a communist
government at that time. So his conception was that he was going to create a
Muslim--specifically an Arab--foreign legion that could be on-call, to go
wherever in the world Muslims were oppressed, especially by communists. And
when the Soviet Union then proceeded to fall apart, there was bin Laden with a
small army but no enemy.

DAVIES: Now, he makes his way back to Saudi Arabia after the Russians retreat
in 1989. What is his status in the country then?

Mr. WRIGHT: He was a really paradoxical figure in Saudi Arabia which is a
place where, you know, the royal family really hoards all the glory. You
know, there are no photographs, no portraits of anyone other than the leading
princes. All the hospital wings are named after them, the streets and so on,
so if you're not royal, you may be rich but you're really not anyone. You're
just living--you're a guest in the house of Saud, and here came this young man
who was rich, who was glamorous, who was ambitious, who had a small army at
his disposal, and he became Saudi Arabia's first celebrity, which was a
category they hadn't had to contend with before that.

DAVIES: Did he see himself then as a jihadist or was he a guy who was going
to raise his children and stay with his wives?

Mr. WRIGHT: After bin Laden came back to Saudi Arabia in 1989, he settled
down. He was investing in companies in Jeddah and Medina, and something
happened, though, that disrupted that kind of peaceful idyll. In 1990 Saddam
Hussein invaded Kuwait, and the Iraqi army was poised on the Saudi border.
And, of course, the kingdom was in a panic about what to do, and bin Laden
went to the defense minister and proposed that he would use his organization,
al-Qaeda, to defend the kingdom, along with several hundred thousand
unemployed Saudi youth and the bulldozers and caterpillars that were at his
disposal at the Saudi Bin Laden company. Of course, the Iraqi army had a
million men. It was one of the largest tank corps in the world, and the
defense minister just laughed at him, and the king, you know, then invited the
Americans to come save them from the Iraqi threat. Bin Laden was really
offended by this, offended by his treatment, offended that the Saudis would
turn to heretics and apostates, as he saw the Americans, and bring them onto
the Holy Land of Saudi Arabia where as the prophet said on his death bed,
`There should be no two religions in Arabia.' He saw this as a huge offense
against Islam.

DAVIES: So Osama bin Laden comes into conflict with the royal family of Saudi
Arabia because he condemns them for their invitation of US troops. It
eventually reaches the point where he has to leave and makes his way to Sudan.
How did he come to resettle in the country of Sudan?

Mr. WRIGHT: Well, Sudan had just gone through an Islamic revolution and led
by this philosopher-king named Hassan al-Turabi, and Turabi had sent
emissaries to bin Laden to invite him to come to Khartoum because he knew that
bin Laden was very rich and involved in the construction business, and he
wanted someone like that to come invest in Sudan. At the time, the Sudanese
government opened the country to anyone who said he was a Muslim, and
consequently a number of different terrorists groups who were unwanted in
their own countries began streaming into Khartoum, and it became a haven for
the PLO, the PFLOP, Abu Nidal group. You know, every known terrorist group
seemed to have a foothold, if not a headquarters, in Khartoum, and it was into
this nest of, you know, very dissident factions that bin Laden arrived in
1992, bringing this kind of straggly band of al-Qaeda fighters from
Afghanistan and other points to reassemble there and set up camps.

GROSS: We're listening to Lawrence Wright speaking with Dave Davies, who
frequently guest hosts FRESH AIR. Wright won a Pulitzer Prize yesterday for
his book, "The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11."

We'll hear more of the interview after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

GROSS: Lawrence Wright won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction
yesterday for his book, "The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11."
We're listening back to the interview he recorded with our guest host Dave
Davies when the book was published.

DAVIES: You know, the retreat of the American forces from Somalia has been
cited as another example in which Islamic fighters stood up to the United
States and forced it to retreat. You said earlier that Osama bin Laden had
done a great job of spinning his role in Afghanistan. Did he exaggerate his
role in Somalia as well? How did he describe his role and the role of his
compatriots in Somalia?

Mr. WRIGHT: Well, he often takes credit for things that he doesn't really
deserve, and then sometimes he denies having done things. But in Somalia,
they seem to have had very little to do with the actual fighting. They
probably did have something to do with some of the training of the Somali
tribesmen. But bin Laden took credit for having shot down, or at least having
sponsored that, and shot down the Black Hawk helicopters, and the lesson he
drew from that was that just a small strike against the Americans will send
them running. They were not a frightening foe. All they had to do was kill a
few servicemen, and then they would drag their tail out of there as quickly as
they can.

DAVIES: Well, in the late '90s, Osama bin Laden is compelled to leave Sudan,
and he's been a man without a country. It's remarkable to read, you know, we
think of him as a rich and powerful guy, but he ends up making his way to
Afghanistan, and he's essentially broke and powerless, right?

Mr. WRIGHT: That's right. The Saudis had cut off his allowance from the
Saudi bin Laden group, his father's company, which was essentially the only
way he made any money. When he went to Sudan, he was worth about $7
million--that's about how much his portion of that company was worth. And he
had an annual allowance that sometimes amounted to as much as half a million
dollars. That was a substantial amount of money in Sudan, and so, at that
time, you know, the legend of him being a billionaire had spread around. He
was not anywhere near that, but when he left Sudan, all of his investments
were essentially stolen by the Sudanese government. He was almost penniless.
He may have had--one Sudanese intelligence officer told me that he might have
had about $50,000. But bin Laden's business manager, a man named Abu Rida
al-Suri, said he was penniless. So when he got to Afghanistan, he was--he had
to throw himself on the mercy of some of the old warlords that he used to
fight with.

DAVIES: So he's in Afghanistan with his followers, with his family, and he's
broke. He's cut off from the wealth that his family's construction business
had generated in Saudi Arabia. What turns around his fortune? Where does he
get the money to once again become a threat and a force?

Mr. WRIGHT: Well, first of all, he made an alliance with the Taliban. When
the Taliban were sieging--besieging Kabul and bin Laden had arrived, he
thought that they were probably communist. He had no idea who the Taliban
really were. But the Taliban took care of him for a while. You know, he had
old alliances in the Saudi kingdom and friends who would bring him some money,
and he didn't need much. This is one of the things about al-Qaeda that's so
striking is how cheaply they were able to operate. He sent several operatives
down to Africa to start a cell in Kenya and one in Tanzania, and they had to
earn their own living. They went into the fishing business, for instance.
And very, very marginal, but when he was able to bomb the two American
embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August of 1998, that was, you know, a very
dramatic event, but our response to that event, to send 56 cruise missiles
over that did a lot of harm but no damage to al-Qaeda, that elevated him, you
know, in the eyes of many disaffected Muslims in the world, and it completely
restored his fortunes with him.

DAVIES: Give us a sense of what kind of a leader Osama bin Laden was. I
mean, he does not, from your account, to--appear to be a riveting orator, and
yet he somehow did inspire people. What kind of--how was he effective as a
leader?

Mr. WRIGHT: Well, certainly in the beginning, he was not an effective
leader. He was under the spell of Abdullah Azzam, a very charismatic
commanding figure, but bin Laden always had this dream of creating this Arab
legion, and there was another man that saw in bin Laden the possibilities for
real leadership, and this man was Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian who had
spent three years in Egyptian prisons and had emerged a hardened propagandist.
He saw bin Laden and knew what to do with him, a little like maybe Colonel
Parker saw in Elvis. You know, I mean, he saw the possibility here. He saw
that this young man, at the time, had a lot of money. He was a Saudi which
has great standing in the Muslim world because they're seen as being the most
holy of people. And he was rich, and here he was living in these deprived
circumstances fighting jihad. All of those things had not occurred to bin
Laden that they could become iconic but Zawahiri immediately recognized their
utility. He put them to use, so when bin Laden began to talk about creating
al-Qaeda, Zawahiri surrounded him with his own Egyptian leaders, people that
were military men, policemen, technocrats, engineers, the kind of people that
could really put together that operation, and by that, he really captured bin
Laden and his dream and steered it into the organization that it is now.

I would have to say I'm not intending to slight bin Laden and his leadership,
because if it weren't for bin Laden, we wouldn't have the al-Qaeda we have
now. Most of these groups, these jihadi groups, are nationalistic in focus.
It was bin Laden that decided to make this kind of international umbrella and
put them all under one tent and directed them mainly towards America.

DAVIES: When he first came to Afghanistan, conditions were very sparse.
After the successful bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, money and recruits came
in at a much larger scale, and you describe an al-Qaeda which was quite a
large-going concern and some of the procedures they had--they actually had
what--salaries? They had policies?

Mr. WRIGHT: Right. Paid vacations. A monthlong vacation and the
health-care benefits, and you get a round-trip ticket home each year. It was
all very bureaucratic. I--one of the things that bin Laden brought to the
world of terror is a lot of managerial expertise and kind of bureaucratic
overlay. You know, you had to fill out forms in triplicate in order to buy
new tires, for instance. But all of this imposed a certain discipline that
hadn't been present in that kind of organization before.

DAVIES: During this time, bin Laden and this organization is responsible for
incredible savagery. There were the attacks--the bombings of the embassies in
Kenya and Tanzania and the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen. Where did the
idea for the 9/11 attack come from?

Mr. WRIGHT: Well, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was, first of all, not a member of
al-Qaeda at the time, and he came to visit bin Laden in 1996. His nephew
Ramzi Yousef had been the mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing in
1993, which killed six people, and it really actually sent more people to the
hospital. It was a terrible incident. It doesn't seem so big in retrospect
but there were more people hospitalized by that than any other civil action
since the Civil War, so it was, you know, a very bad bombing, and he became
kind of legendary in these underground jihadi circles.

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, his uncle, had fled the Philippines after the
Philippine police had caught on to their plotting to destroy these airliners
over the Pacific, and so he found his way to Afghanistan to try to sell his
vision of this airline plot, very similar to the recent one in Britain where
they were going to get on 12 American airliners, mix some chemicals together
on-board and blow them up over the Pacific.

So this is the scenario that he was trying to peddle to bin Laden, and bin
Laden at the time thought it was too complicated and yet he wanted Khalid
Shaikh Mohammed to join al-Qaeda, and he wouldn't do that at that time, but a
few years passed, and he did come back in and begin working with bin Laden.
They refined the plot over a couple of years. Started out with, you know,
`We're going to hijack these airlines in the Pacific,' but then bin Laden
started thinking about another alternative, which was to train these men to
actually be the pilots and to use the aircraft as weapons, not just as bombs.

DAVIES: As the 9/11 attack approaches, you describe bin Laden in Afghanistan
gathering his followers and retreating to a kind of a mountain hideout. I
guess this was Tora Bora, right, and bringing a satellite receiver and a TV
set because he knows the attack is coming.

Mr. WRIGHT: Right.

DAVIES: Most of those around him do not, and you write that he and a number
of al-Qaeda members are beset by vivid dreams involving the airplanes.

Mr. WRIGHT: Yes. You know, these premonitory dreams were just rife. People
were imagining dreams of pilots playing soccer, for instance, and
dreams--actual dreams of airplanes hitting buildings. And there was a culture
in al-Qaeda where people would come to tell bin Laden or one of the other
leaders about their dreams, and they would just sit around and discuss them
and what kind of premonitory events these might presage, and bin Laden finally
told them, `No more dreams about airplanes.' He didn't want the plot to be
given away in this supernatural fashion.

DAVIES: Well, Lawrence Wright, thanks so much for speaking with us.

Mr. WRIGHT: It was a pleasure. Thank you.

GROSS: Lawrence Wright spoke with Dave Davies last year after the publication
of Wright's book, "The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11."
Yesterday the book won a Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. The Pulitzer
for music went to Ornette Coleman for his CD, "Sound Grammar." Kevin Whitehead
will review it after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

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Review: Jazz critic Kevin Whitehead reviews jazz saxophonist and
composer Ornette Coleman's CD, "Sound Grammar"
TERRY GROSS, host:

We're hearing from Pulitzer Prize winners on today's show. Yesterday the
Pulitzer for music was awarded to the 77-year-old jazz saxophonist and
composer Ornette Coleman for his live album "Sound Grammar." It was cited for
its "elastic and bracing music." When Coleman came along in the 1950s, his
detractors said his rough and wayward jazz was too crazy to stand the test of
time. The Pulitzer is the most recent example of how wrong they were. We're
going to listen to the review our jazz critic Kevin Whitehead recorded last
year when the CD was released.

(Soundbite of music)

Mr. KEVIN WHITEHEAD: When Ornette Coleman first stepped out on record in
1958, his tone was as raw as a bumpkin's feet in new shoes. But gradually, so
slowly, folks barely noticed, his tone got more urbane, sleeker, more seasoned
and conventionally beautiful. The reason few noticed is that the lines he
played had barely changed. The open vowels of Texas field hollers and country
blues still sing through after his 48 years as a New Yorker. His sound is
wonderfully voicelike, full of schoolyard shouts, laughter, sobs, prayers, joy
and pain mixed together, like real life. But his solos are most always
orderly. He'll introduce a scrap of melody and turn it this way and that
before picking up another. He keeps things moving and takes his sweet time.

(Soundbite of music)

Mr. WHITEHEAD: Ornette's live album "Sound Grammar" is his first in nine
years, though he's been gigging with the new quartet for the last three. He's
always had an ear for great base players. This band has two of them, who
divvy up the chores to avoid collisions. One plucks, the other bows that big
violin. Greg Cohen's the picker, and after umpteen tours playing fake Ornette
with John Zorn's Masada, this is a cakewalk. Classical whiz Tony Falanga's
bass sings, echoes Ornette's alto, or scrapes out extra rhythm, recalling his
great predecessor David Izenzon. Throw in a drummer taught by the boss from
scratch, son Denardo Coleman, they're good to go.

(Soundbite of music)

Mr. WHITEHEAD: Coleman needs musicians attentive to but unfazed by his
little detours or shortcuts through a tune. This rhythm section holds him up
without hemming him in, as when he bobbles a quote from "Beautiful Dreamer"
and goes back to get it right.

(Soundbite of music)

Mr. WHITEHEAD: A quote that deliberate deserves a footnote. "Beautiful
Dreamer," Stephen Foster, 1862, a late career tune with a built-in sub. I
hadn't made that Foster connection before Coleman made it for us, but it makes
sense. By now Ornette does belong on the list of our great sentimental
melodists. He's that big, skies-of-America size.

(Soundbite of music)

(Soundbite of applause)

GROSS: Kevin Whitehead teaches English and American Studies at the University
of Kansas. He reviewed Ornette Coleman's CD "Sound Grammar." Yesterday the CD
won the Pulitzer Prize for music.

Congratulations to all of yesterday's Pulitzer Prize winners.

I'm Terry Gross.

(Soundbite of music)

(Announcements)
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