The Columbus Dispatch- business- Lawyer terrorism expert

Galvanized by 9/11

Lawyer finds calling in terrorism studies

Sunday, September 5, 2010 02:59 AM

By Chris Mondics



THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER



Evan Kohlmann practices law but is also an expert on Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida.PHILADELPHIA — Evan Kohlmann had just settled into his seat on his first day of law school at the University of Pennsylvania on Sept. 11, 2001, when he was overcome with a sense of foreboding.



Law school was going to be boring.



The course that day was civil procedure, an arcane body of law laying out rules for courts hearing civil lawsuits. Very important stuff in the legal world, to be sure, but the start of the class only confirmed Kohlmann’s sense, building for weeks, that legal studies really didn’t interest him and that he had made a terrible mistake.



As Kohlmann pondered the possibility of a disastrous career turn, someone suddenly announced that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center.



The class was postponed and the building closed for the day. Kohlmann, who had written his senior honors thesis at Georgetown University on Osama bin Laden and the Arab mujahedeen in Afghanistan and who had worked as an undergraduate for noted terrorism expert Steven Emerson, was jolted out of his seat.



“That was it,” Kohlmann said. “I turned to a friend sitting next to me and said, ‘This is Osama bin Laden. I’ve got to do something.’  ”



Now, nearly nine years later, the 31-year-old Kohlmann has become one of the country’s leading consultants on terrorism and fundamentalist Islam. He finished law school but continued his work with Emerson part time. Commuting between his apartment in Philadelphia and Emerson’s Washington offices, Kohlmann completed his well-received book, Al-Qaida’s Jihad in Europe, an authoritative account of al-Qaida’s spread from Afghanistan to the Balkans.



He testifies as an expert witness on behalf of U.S. Defense Department prosecutors in military trials in Guantanamo.



Kohlmann now works out of a small, sun-filled office in lower Manhattan, multiple computers perched on his desk.



His computers scan al-Qaida websites and social-networking media where al-Qaida operatives post information. His company has an office in Peshawar, Pakistan; staff there obtained a video of the Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad, boasting of the havoc he planned to wreak before his car bomb fizzled.



He and his colleagues also hang around militant rallies in the United States and in Europe, videotaping participants and collecting literature.



“For all the work I do, I do not own a house; I do not own my apartment. I don’t own a car. I am not exactly getting wealthy off of this. But that is not the point,” he said.



“This is a labor of love.”