Excerpted from The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda by Ali H. Soufan with Daniel Freedman. Copyright © 2011 by Ali H. Soufan. With permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
.
Prologue
So it is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will win a hundred times in a hundred battles.
—Sun Tzu, The Art of War
.
“You can’t stop the mujahideen,” Abu Jandal told me on September 17, 2001. “We will be victorious.” We sat across a rectangular table from each other in a nondescript interrogation room with unadorned white walls in a high-level national security prison in Sanaa, the capital of Yemen. The prison was operated by the country’s central intelligence agency, the Political Security Organization (PSO), the complex also serving as its headquarters. PSO officials in traditional Yemeni dress were ranged on plastic chairs along one wall, observing the conversation. Abu Jandal—the name means “father of death”—was the most senior al-Qaeda operative in custody; he had served as Osama bin Laden’s personal bodyguard and trusted confidant. We got to him through Fahd al-Quso, a Yemeni al-Qaeda operative involved in the October 12, 2000, bombing of the USS Cole. Quso had identified, in a photograph shown to him the previous evening, a man whom we knew to be Marwan al-Shehhi, who was on board United Airlines…
.
To read the full article please click on the link below:
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/09/read-an-excerpt-of-ali-soufans-book-the-black-banners/