http://www.guardian.co.uk/alqaida/story/0,,1857021,00.html 'I knew exactly what I was doing'
Richard Reid, the so-called shoe-bomber, is serving a life sentence in a US jail for his plot to kill 198 people on a transatlantic flight in 2001. The following year, lawyer Peter Herbert was given unprecedented access to him in prison. This is his first account of that meeting Thursday August 24, 2006 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/> The Guardian In December 2001 I received a call from the mother of Richard Reid, the failed shoe-bomber. Reid had been arrested after trying to blow a passenger jet out of the sky en route from Paris to the United States. He had attempted to detonate explosives hidden in the hollowed-out sole of his shoe. Mrs Reid needed help in dealing with the fallout from her son's attempt at mass murder: for her, a librarian from a small town in the West Country, this was an unusually dark and unfamiliar world. She contacted me through the Society of Black Lawyers and asked for advice on how to handle the media; she also wondered if there was any way I could check up on her son and his welfare, as he was now incarcerated in the US as one of the country's most notorious prisoners. I contacted British officials in the US and by February 2002 it was agreed that I could visit Reid in jail. A month before, in his state of the union address, President Bush had denounced Reid and hailed the aircrew who overpowered him as he fumbled with matches, attempting to light his shoe-bomb. Security officials say the device, if successfully lit, would have punched a hole in the side of the plane, American Airlines flight 63, causing it to crash and kill all 184 passengers and 14 crew. Coming months after the September 11 2001 attacks on the US, it would have been a major propaganda victory for al-Qaida, and the psychological effects on the west would have been profound. To reach the Plymouth penitentiary in Massachusetts, where Reid was then being held, you pass the spot where the first pilgrims arrived in the US. The prison comprises low-rise buildings set in carefully tended lawns. I was met at the doors by a British consular official. After 25 minutes, Reid appeared in an orange jumpsuit. He shuffled awkwardly as he was in leg irons, although these were removed for the visit. Prison guards ushered us into a large and sparsely furnished room. I introduced myself to Reid, explaining that his mother had asked me to check up on him. But the first order of business for Reid was getting the British consular official to help him track down books on Islam, politics and the US. He recited a list of items he wanted, and the British official promised to call an Islamic bookshop in New York which Reid suggested would stock most of the titles. The man before me seemed so different from the picture of him issued after the arrest, in which he looked almost deranged and unbalanced. He was tall, lean and bearded and came across as calm, speaking softly with a south London accent. After about 40 minutes the British consular official offered to leave us alone, and for the next hour-and-a-half we talked together. I wanted to find out about him, and what had taken him from the London suburb of Bromley to be a soldier in the jihad against the west. Reid, who was 28 when I met him, said he was being well treated, although he had received some threats of violence when he first arrived at the prison. Some inmates knew who he was, and Reid said that he had told prisoners "not to mess" with him as he had nothing to lose. He made it clear to them that he would fight back if he was attacked, and his time spent in Feltham young offenders' institution in west London, for a string of muggings, had given him some skills to survive in prison. He contrasted his decent treatment and conditions in the US, as a man charged with a terrorist offence, with the "barbaric" conditions of Guantánamo Bay, where hundreds are kept in brutal conditions without charge. His identification with al-Qaida was revealed when he commented: "Guantánamo Bay will provide us with thousands of recruits the longer it is maintained." I was conscious that the floor upstairs was covered by a metal grille and that it was likely that our conversation was being listened to. Because of this, I kept any discussion about the offence itself to a minimum. But Reid talked a little about it, and revealed a contrasting mix of apparently genuine sorrow about the idea of killing innocent people, and a lack of remorse about the plan, because he believed it was right. "I am not crazy as they suggest, but I knew exactly what I was doing," he said. "Of course I would have been sad to have those people die, but I knew that my cause was just and righteous. It was the will of Allah that I did not succeed." His motivation for turning to violence, he said, was the foreign policy of the US government, which, he said, had resulted in the murder of thousands of Muslims and oppressed people around the world from Vietnam to southern Africa to Afghanistan and Palestine. One issue that baffles those trying to counter al-Qaida is why young men will kill themselves for such a cause. Reid compared himself to the suicide bombers of Hamas. They did not have rockets or tanks or F16 jets to fight with, he said, and had to fight with the tools at their disposal. "What do you expect people to do?" he added. He was fatalistic about his future. "I have to accept that what has happened is set," he said, a reference to the fact that sitting in a US jail, having failed in his suicide mission, meant he would almost certainly never be released. But he missed his family, especially his mother, and felt remorse about what she now faced because of his notoriety. "I do feel sorry for my mum having to see me here. I had not wanted to see her, to protect her from all this, but [I] will see her if she travels to see me." Reid is the son of two non-Muslims, a white mother and a Jamaican father, with whom his relationship was poor. Reid had converted to Islam after his spell in Feltham. He said that in prison Islam had helped him to understand better the world around him. He also said that racism played a large part in the life he had experienced as a young person. For those wanting to understanding radicalisation, this is important. Reid's journey to violent jihad was not just fuelled by radical Islamist propaganda - he talked about the case of Stephen Lawrence and how that exposed discrimination in society. After his release from Feltham, Reid visited mosques in London. He said that he had been heavily influenced by the imams he had listened to in the UK and abroad. He named the mosque in Brixton, south London, where Sheik Abdullah el-Faisal had preached. The sheikh was jailed in 2003 in Britain for incitement to kill Jews. Reid said he had also attended the Finsbury Park mosque in north London, where Abu Hamza used to deliver his sermons. Hamza was jailed this year for incitement to racial hatred and incitement to kill. Attending those mosques did not make Reid a jihadi, he claims, but it helped him along the way. He said he was already heading in that direction through his own reading, experience and thinking about the world around him. But the sermons of Hamza and others gave him a greater understanding of how to interpret his faith in a way that supported the use of violence. It also reinforced his view about the scale of US aggression and that the intent of Washington's actions was to oppress Muslims around the world. He said he could "see the injustices against Islam committed by the west with my own eyes". Some have claimed that Reid is educationally impaired, but he did not seem so in his talk with me. He was able to express himself and came across as someone who had passed through the state education system and then supplemented his knowledge with a large amount of self-teaching through reading books. Reid's views had led him to take part in a carefully planned and skilful plot. He was supposed to attack a plane together with another Briton, Saajid Badat, who pulled out at the last moment. Both were being "handled" by Nizar Trabelsi, a former footballer who is now serving 10 years in a Belgian jail for plotting to bomb a Nato airbase. The ideology he believed in was classic al-Qaida, but he did not mention the need to overthrow democracy, or opposition to globalisation. He made references to various teachings of the Qur'an, but did not have enough knowledge to quote from it. According to French authorities, Reid's passport showed he had visited Egypt, Israel, Turkey, Pakistan, Belgium, the Netherlands and France. He is believed to have trained in the same camp in Afghanistan as Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker in the September 11 attacks. Moussaoui was earlier this year convicted in the US of conspiring to hijack aircraft and also found to be eligible to face the death penalty. It is clear from what Reid said that he had received some basic instruction on how to handle and operate with explosives, most likely from his time in the Afghan camp near the border with Pakistan, believed by British authorities to be called Khalden. As I got up to leave, he gave the clenched fist "respect" handshake commonly used among many black youth and men in the UK and the US. Anti-terrorism officers knew I was going to visit Reid, and on my return I told the then Metropolitan police commissioner Sir John Stevens that I had seen Reid and talked to him. But no one from the counter-terrorism community has ever asked what Reid had told me. Reid went on to plead guilty of trying to explode a bomb on a plane, and a year after I met him was sentenced to life imprisonment. He was the first Briton to try to crash a plane in the name of Islamist extremism. · Peter Herbert is a member of the Metropolitan police authority and a human rights barrister. He was talking to Vikram Dodd. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? Head on over to our discussion list, [EMAIL PROTECTED] -------------------------- Brooks Isoldi, editor [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.intellnet.org Post message: [email protected] Subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. 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