Working for the CIA, James A. Mitchell spent thousands of hours speaking with al-Qaeda leaders in American custody, especially Khaled Sheikh Mohammed (in shorthand, KSM), mastermind of the September 11 attacks. In his new memoir, Mitchell describes the experience and explains what he and his colleagues learned. Marc Thiessen writes in his review:

[P]erhaps the most riveting part of the book is what KSM told Mitchell about what inspired al-Qaeda to attack the United States—and the U.S. response he expected. Today, some on both the left and the right argue that al-Qaeda wanted to draw us into a quagmire in Afghanistan—and now Islamic State wants to do the same in Iraq and Syria. KSM said this is dead wrong. Far from trying to draw us in, KSM said that al-Qaeda expected the United States to respond to 9/11 as we had to the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut—when, KSM told Mitchell, the United States “turned tail and ran.” He also said he thought we would treat 9/11 as a law-enforcement matter, just as we had the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and of the USS Cole in Yemen—arresting some operatives and firing a few missiles into empty tents, but otherwise leaving him free to plan the next attack. . . .

But KSM said something else that was prophetic. In the end, he told Mitchell, “We will win because Americans don’t realize [that] we do not need to defeat you militarily; we only need to fight long enough for you to defeat yourself by quitting.”

KSM was right. For the past eight years, our leaders have told us that we are weary of war and need to focus on “nation-building at home.” We have been defeating ourselves by quitting—just as KSM predicted. But quitting will not bring us peace, KSM told Mitchell, explaining that “it does not matter that we [Americans] do not want to fight them.”

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.