Twenty-nine.
Over the course of eight years, from the bombing of the World Trade Center on February 26, 1993, through the destruction of that iconic American complex on September 11, 2001—in suicide hijackings that killed nearly 3,000 Americans, struck the Pentagon, and would have obliterated a target in the U.S. capital, probably the Capitol itself, were it not for the heroism of Flight 93’s doomed passengers and crew—jihadist terrorists repeatedly attacked American installations at home and overseas.
In our history-challenged times, as the nation pauses for 9/11’s solemn 25th anniversary, the events of even that horrific day lie beyond the memory of the generation coming of age, never mind the atrocities that preceded it. For the generation before, though, it was the predominant story of the post-Cold War: The WTC bombing followed quickly by an even more ambitious plot—thankfully thwarted—to bomb New York City landmarks; the 1994 plot to bomb aircraft in flight, codenamed “Bojinka,” that presaged al Qaeda’s 9/11 strategy; the 1996 bombing of U.S. barracks in Saudi Arabia’s Khobar Towers; the near-simultaneous 1998 bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania; and in Yemen, the near-sinking of an American destroyer, the USS Cole in 2000 (following a similar but failed attempt to bomb the USS The Sullivans a year earlier).
The 9/11 attacks were not a standalone. They were the culmination of an intolerable juxtaposition: A ruthless, ideologically driven foreign enemy, capable of an attack more devastating in scale than Pearl Harbor, waged war against us; yet our government responded with subpoenas and arrest warrants, as if the challenge were merely a crime wave. Hence the reference to 29. That’s the number of jihadists the Justice Department managed to prosecute during the eight-year pre-9/11 terror wave. And about half of those were related to the attacks and plots of 1993—some carnage, such as the Cole bombing that killed 17 Navy sailors, resulted at the time in no response at all, not even an indictment. Only after the mass slaughter of 9/11 did the world’s remaining superpower come to its senses, shifting from a criminal prosecution paradigm to a war-footing.
This is essential history, particularly if one seeks a reckoning of the erratic fits and starts of that transformation. And that is the problem with Second Wave, an account of plots that comprised the follow-on strikes that Osama bin Laden’s terror network strove to carry out even as it evaded the American military response to 9/11.
The author, Michael Lebowitz, is an Iraq war veteran and Army lawyer who prosecuted terrorists in the ultimately futile U.S. military commission system. From that perspective, he offers an occasionally rambling narrative of an investigative enterprise so farcical that we’ve just been told Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the brains behind 9/11 and the “second wave,” may finally be tried in… yes… 2028—a quarter-century after his apprehension in Pakistan. Lebowitz takes us through the now-notorious episodes of post-9/11 counterterrorism—enhanced interrogation techniques (which Lebowitz, after some initial lawyerly caution, settles on labeling “torture”), enemy combatants, extraordinary rendition, CIA “black sites,” indefinite detention, and so on. Still, there is scant recognition that these were quandaries at a murky crossroads between civilian criminal justice and the laws of war.
Second Wave is mainly the story of Saifullah Paracha, a self-made success who rose from poverty in Pakistan to run a cross-continental business empire based in Manhattan and Karachi. Paracha, a self-proclaimed moderate Muslim, builds an import-export business with an orthodox Jewish business partner. As he flourishes, Paracha dabbles in Pakistani real estate, motion pictures, and financial ventures, grooming his oldest son, Uzair, to follow in his footsteps.
The elder Paracha’s wealth is his entrée into the elites of Pakistani society and government. That turns out to be a mixed blessing. Pakistan is an overwhelming Muslim-majority country of nearly 250 million people. It has proved a vital yet undependable counterterrorism ally of the United States because its military and intelligence (ISI) services, which dominate the government, are ambivalent about fundamentalist Islam and the jihadism it inevitably breeds. Not surprisingly, then, Paracha’s teeming roster of friends and business associates includes both Hamid Gul, the powerful ISI chief, and bin Laden, the emir of al Qaeda.
The enigma at the heart of the story is: Just how friendly was Paracha with bin Laden and “Mir”—an acquaintance he makes through the bin Laden connection who turns out to be KSM? While bin Laden (killed by U.S. forces in 2011) is rightly remembered as a monster, Muslims in Pakistan and elsewhere first knew him as a key financier of the intrepid Afghan mujahideen who, with covert American military aid, outlasted the Soviet Army in the 1980s. But by the time Paracha meets him in Afghanistan in 2000—on philanthropic business, he maintains—bin Laden is already infamous, having publicly declared war on the United States and then bombed our East African embassies.
Similarly, the KSM who thereafter shows up as “Mir” on Paracha’s Pakistani doorstep is already an accomplished terrorist (he’d been indicted by the Justice Department in 1996). U.S. suspicion descends on Paracha because after the 9/11 attacks, which Paracha plausibly maintains he condemned, investigators discover that KSM used Paracha’s office space for mysterious meetings in the weeks prior to 9/11 and that Paracha even helped him exploit a fraudulent bank account and move money—at the very time KSM was funding the suicide hijackers. During the coercive interrogations of KSM and other 9/11 figures, moreover, came the revelation that KSM hoped to execute a second wave of attacks. Investigators struggle to divine whether that plan involves conventional explosives, a radiological dirty bomb, or nuclear weapons that al Qaeda covets but never seems to obtain; it does appear, however, that thought was given to using Paracha’s import/export business and real estate venture as cover for shipping explosives and moving money.
Alas, it remained maddeningly unclear to investigators whether Paracha was a knowing jihadist (not insignificant evidence cuts against that proposition) or a dupe who vaguely knew the acquaintances he was helping were terrorists but was neither cut in on their schemes nor adherent to their ideology. The waters got muddier still when Paracha induced his son, Uzair, to meet some KSM associates and help one of them, Majid Khan, with an immigration problem; the help involved fraud in reestablishing Khan’s U.S. residence, a problem for Uzair—even though he resisted Khan’s effort to recruit him to al Qaeda—because Khan had been tasked by KSM to be a terrorist sleeper agent in the United States.
Finally, Uzair was taken into custody by the FBI in March 2003. Knowing he was not a terrorist and smugly convinced he could talk his way out of his troubles, Uzair made matters worse by evasively answering the bureau’s questions: The shiftiness made him look guilty and his answers conceded enough to prove he materially supported terrorists even if he wasn’t one of them. He foolishly turned down a generous 5-year plea deal only to be found guilty by a jury and sentenced to 30 years’ imprisonment (a judge dubiously nullified the conviction in 2018, and he was allowed to return to Pakistan).
Paracha père had a worse fate. He was apprehended in Bangkok in 2003. Lebowitz strongly suggests this owed to Paracha’s aforementioned business partner, who helped the FBI lure him out of Pakistan, where the government had shielded him from American inquiries. (The partner is described pseudonymously because aspects of the matter remain classified.) Paracha was never tried; rather, he was designated an enemy combatant and detained without trial at Guantánamo Bay for 19 years until he was finally released by the Biden administration in 2022.
Lebowitz focuses on the questionable credibility of testimony coerced by forcible means (which renders it inadmissible regardless of whether the coercion meets the exacting legal definition of “torture”) and on infighting between FBI and military investigators, which contributed to the failure to resolve the degree of Paracha’s culpability. The author makes solid points about the capriciousness by which the government chose to treat some captives (e.g., Uzair Paracha) as defendants afforded civilian due process while others (e.g., the elder Paracha) were detained as enemy combatants and stuck in the commission system’s dysfunction.
What’s missing, however, is how it got to be that way.
It was obvious before 9/11 that ordinary law enforcement processes were woefully insufficient to quell a threat from foreign terrorist organizations headquartered in overseas badlands where our agencies and courts have no authority. Nevertheless, the Justice Department actually erected internal procedures (the mid-1990s “wall” preventing criminal investigators and intelligence agents from sharing information) that made terror conspiracies even harder to detect. It took the murder of almost 3,000 to convince the government that it needed to change tacks.
Consequently, it’s a troubled legacy. The government was forced to investigate the most atrocious terrorist attack in history, and what then appeared the likelihood of a second wave, while trying to connect the prior five years’ worth of unconnected dots. And while it is one thing to recognize the need to shift from civilian due process to wartime protocols, it is quite another to overhaul the nuts and bolts of complex legal processes on the fly (and with the organized legal profession fighting the transition at every step).
It’s worth remembering that the point of invoking the laws of war is to win the war, not to prioritize due process for the enemy or impede the flow of intelligence derived from interrogation. Indefinite detention denies the enemy resources; military commissions, it was theorized, would deprive the enemy of information that would otherwise be disclosed under judicial procedures. If the assessment of the post-9/11 legacy highlights the travails of detainees and the missteps of government that are on display in Second Wave, the verdict seems indecorous. On the other hand, the jihadist second wave did fail; and a quarter-century later, a hybrid of law enforcement and war footing has made American counterterrorism exponentially more effective than the 2001 vintage. That’s an achievement.
Second Wave: Inside Al Qaeda’s Post-9/11 Attack Plan and America’s Secret Effort to Stop It
by Michael Lebowitz
Diversion Books, 320 pp., $32
Andrew C. McCarthy is a contributing editor at National Review and a former assistant U.S. attorney who led the terrorism prosecution of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and 11 others in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and subsequent plot to bomb New York City landmarks.
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