April 12, 2020 "Information Clearing House" - How do you get off a “terrorist” list? It seems that hard cash helps.

Take Sudan. Its ministry of justice has just announced that it’s finalised a February deal with the families of the 17 US sailors killed in the suicide attack on the USS Cole in Aden harbour in October 2000. The dead Americans left 11 children behind them and so the reported $70m (£59m) settlement will care for them too. The relatives claimed that Sudan, under its then war criminal president Omar al-Bashir, had provided support to al-Qaeda, which claimed the attack.

Who knows? The US listed Sudan as a “state sponsor of terror” in 1993 – the same year I first met Osama bin Laden in the Sudanese village of Almatig, surrounded by his unarmed warriors and Sudan’s very well-armed security cops. But he was expelled to Afghanistan three years later. That’s four years before two al-Qaeda suicide bombers in an explosives-heavy fibreglass boat smashed into the hull of the four-year-old Aegis-class guided missile destroyer Cole as it lay moored, refuelling, off Aden harbour. Omar al-Bashir took power in Khartoum in 1989.

Now that he has been overthrown, Sudan’s transitional government desperately needs debt relief and international funding. The ministry of justice was quite frank about that this week: “Removing Sudan’s name from this list is necessary to remove the stigma of terrorism off the people of Sudan and to reintegrate Sudan back in the international community.”

The government, it seems, first negotiated with the families of the dead sailors, then with the US administration to compensate for al-Qaeda attacks in east Africa.

But it isn’t that simple. The head of the two-bomber unit which attacked the Cole was a Yemeni named Jamal al-Badawi, killed in a US air raid last year. According to the US, however, the man who planned the attack on the Cole was Abd Rahman al-Nashiri, a Saudi currently imprisoned in Guantanamo. Needless to say, Saudi Arabia – having never been involved in any attack on anyone, ever – got off the hook. As it did seven years after the Aden bombing, when 15 of the 19 hijackers of 9/11 turned out to be Saudi citizens. But that’s not quite the point.

The most interesting aspect of the money to be paid out by Sudan – blood money, in Arab eyes – is that Sudan still does not regard itself as responsible for the Cole attack, or any other “terrorist” act.