ABSTRACT
This chapter collects terrorist biographies from various sources, mostly from the records of trials. The trial that took place in New York in 2001 in connection with the 1998 embassy bombing, for instance, was 72 days long and had a wealth of information, 9,000 pages of it. The 400 terrorists on whom the author has collected data were the ones who actually targeted the "far enemy", the United States (US), as opposed to their own governments. In Khartoum, the Salafists theorized that the reason they had been unable to overthrow their own government was because it was propped up by the "far enemy"—the US In the early 1990s, when Bin Laden began to change his mind about who he should be focusing his attack on and became convinced that it was the US, he had no Quranic justification. With Ibn Tamiyya as the justification, Bin Laden called the US the greater unbelief, the bigger enemy.
