al-Qaeda's Membership Pledge

An excerpt from Peter Bergen's book at Vanity Fair

The pledge of God and his covenant is upon me, to listen and obey the superiors, who are doing this work, in energy, early-rising, difficulty, and easiness, and for his superiority upon us, so that the word of God will be the highest, and His religion victorious.

From a Vanity Fair interview with Bergen:

I don't think he's dead. If bin Laden had died, the people around him wouldn't be hiding it, because then he would finally be a shahid—he'd be martyred—and they'd make a big song and dance about it. So in the absence of any evidence that he is dead, I'm presuming he's alive. And I don't think he's in poor health. There was some discussion that he maybe had kidney problems, but I don't think that's true—and most of the people I talked to in the book don't think that's true. But in the last videotape he looked about as good as I've seen him look in a long time. I also don't think he's living in a cave. In the last videotape he was well dressed, it's well lit, he's sitting behind a desk. Clearly he was in a place that had electricity, with basic access to news via the radio, the Internet.

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[Q]Do you think there's a danger that he's been hiding for the past year, planning another attack against the U.S.?

[A]I'm sure they'd want to do it, but I don't think they have the capacity right now for two reasons. First of all, the United States is in a different posture. It's much more security-conscious. Secondly, al-Qaeda has been disorganized by the post-9/11 attacks on it. In Karachi recently, a Kentucky Fried Chicken blew up, killing three people. In Indonesia, a bomb went off and killed 23 people in October, in Bali. They can do things like that very easily—these are undefended targets. One of the kind of unsung stories of the post-9/11 world is that American Muslims have really rejected this al-Qaeda ideology completely. I don't think they have sleeper cells here.

The real story is what's going on in Europe, which is not a reason to say, Hey, now it's just a European problem. Because people with European passports can visit this country pretty easily. Mohammed Atta, the hijacker, for instance, was radicalized in Hamburg, Germany. Richard Reid, the shoe bomber who tried to blow up the American Airlines jet after 9/11, is a British citizen. The fact that the problem is mostly in Europe doesn't mean that there aren't problems potentially for the United States. If one of those British people in the London bombing decided they would do a suicide bombing in the United States, that is certainly possible. But something like 9/11? I don't think so.