Jonah’s post on the likelihood, or rather the unlikelihood, of Team Clinton’s being directed by its principals to rough up Jim Webb (playing off Jim Geraghty’s intriguing column) put me in mind of how the Blind Sheikh’s terror cell worked in the early Nineties — i.e., back when the country was getting its first glimpses of Team Clinton.
Before anyone makes a silly claim to the contrary, I am of course not equating the Clintons with terrorists. But if they are to succeed, enterprises that practice intimidation will have to adhere to some common principles, even if the degree and kind of intimidation practiced are wildly different. And while criminal liability and political damage are very different things, the incentives to avoid them are similar. So one common principle is: Keep the boss insulated.
Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman’s M.O. was to make broad declarations: e.g., “America is the enemy of Islam,” “If a few operations like the one in Beirut [Hezbollah’s 1983 Marine barracks bombing] were done, America would retreat from the Middle East,” “Mubarak is an apostate lapdog of the Great Satan,” etc. He would not state them in isolation; rather, he’d place them in a sharia framework (often developed in long sermons), instructing that Islamic law calls for violent jihad against Islam’s enemies, for Western occupiers of Muslim territory to be driven out by any means necessary, for apostates to be killed, etc.
The idea was to rely on his followers to put two and two together without his having to spell things out or become enmeshed in the details of specific plots. Plus, the Sheikh was an iconic figure in Islamist circles, meaning subordinates wanted to be in his good graces, which gave them influence. So they understood what needed to be done, and had incentive to do it, without having to be told. We were never able to prove conclusively, for example, that Sheikh Abdel Rahman ordered or pre-approved Sayyid Nosair’s 1990 murder of JDL founder Meir Kahane; but there was no question that Nosair knew he wanted it done, that the Sheikh was very pleased at its being done, and that Nosair’s prestige was thus greatly enhanced for doing it.
Because the Sheikh was highly surveillance-conscious, few things got him angrier than being asked squarely for permission to carry out specific plots. As you might imagine, this can be problematic in the practice of jihadist terror since an authoritative fatwa (i.e., a sharia edict from a recognized scholar that a course of conduct is permissible) is generally a prerequisite to violent acts. Once, when pressed to green-light a plan to kill Hosni Mubarak (then president of Egypt), he dressed down a subordinate, growling, “It doesn’t need a fatwa! The answer is obvious!” Of course, it was obvious precisely because he had made it so: Not only had he repeatedly made clear his view that Mubarak should be killed and that killing him was an Islamic duty; he also bragged about having issued the fatwa approving the murder of Mubarak’s predecessor, Anwar Sadat. (Taking credit for this infamous act was important to his standing as leader of the international jihad, and it was safe for him to do since he’d already been acquitted in Egypt.)
Unless he was speaking to trusted confidants, and in places he believed were not bugged, it was the Blind Sheikh’s wont to say things like, “Anyone who wants to do a good deed for Allah, the path is clear!”
And so it was.