Posted on 08/03/2002 7:58:20 AM PDT by aculeus
In this excerpt from the forthcoming completely revised and updated edition of Reaping the Whirlwind: The Taliban movement in Afghanistan, Michael Griffin traces Mohammed Atta's transformation from quiet but brilliant graduate student of urban conservation to Al Qa'ida terrorist.
"I see water and buildings. Oh my God! Oh my God!" - Madeleine Amy Sweeney, flight attendant, American Airlines Flight 11. [1]
Mohammed Atta set down his will in 1996 in Hamburg at the tender age of 28, when it seemed he was condemned to live the interminable half-life of a student after what had proven a demoralising search for work in his native Egypt. [2] He had studied engineering with distinction at Cairo University for five years before embarking, at his father's insistence, on a master's degree in urban planning at Hamburg-Harburg Technical University that would last a further seven. "I told him I needed to hear the word 'doctor' in front of his name," his father said.
Atta's thesis addressed the newly fashionable topic of how best to conserve traditional Moslem cityscapes in the face of modern encroachments. He used his bursary as a scholarship student to finance a visit to Istanbul in 1994, where he was photographed - tense, unsmiling and vigilant - decked in tropical shirt and faded jeans like any other young tourist. That winter was spent in Syria, studying the 15th century souk in Aleppo, the largest market in the world sprawling over four miles of garrulous streets and scented side-alleys. Back in Hamburg, he was hired as part-time draughtsman by the architectural consultancy, Plankontor: colleagues remarked on his diligence, reserve, the "careful elegance of his drawing". "He prayed in the office," recalled Helga Rake, "we'd never had anyone do that before." [3]
A devout Moslem since his teenage years, Atta's faith did not conflict with visiting Sharky's Billiard Bar - though he did not drink alcohol - or acquiring the technical skills required of a 20th century professional career. Contemporaries thought him a prime candidate for assimilation, despite his lack of a girlfriend, or even German male friends beyond the immediate circle of his faculty supervisors. But the hand-written will, discovered after his death, revealed an unsuspected interior world of ascetic disdain that would have shocked his mother, who had dandled him on her lap until the day he went to university. [4] That Atta was contemplating death four years into his course in Hamburg was distressing; that he had barred women from his burial, including his mother and three sisters, sounded suspiciously like invective. "Neither pregnant women nor unclean people should say goodbye to me," he wrote from Germany's most promiscuous port of call. "Women must not be present at my funeral or go to my grave at any later date." The 18-clause will gave instructions for the washing of his body and genitals, his funeral garments and the behaviour of mourners after his burial. "An animal should then be sacrificed," he declares, with a Biblical flourish, "and the meat be distributed among the needy." [5]
In late 1996, Atta moved into an apartment at 54, Marienstrasse with a 23-year-old electrical engineering student whom he called 'cousin', though there is no evidence of a blood tie between them. The son of a cleric in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Marwan Al-Shehhi was plump, devout and withdrawn, but their landlord esteemed them as quiet tenants who paid with cash on the nail. Soon they were joined by Ziad Jarrah, a Lebanese student of aeronautical engineering who, at 23, was already a qualified commercial pilot. Atta had taken to praying in the back room of a neighbourhood shop, the only Arabic-language mosque in a neighbourhood otherwise populated by more secular Turks. There he encountered a Yemeni-born cleric, Ramzi Binalshibh, with whom he formed a prayer group at university and who became the fourth tenant at 54, Marienstrasse. An Afghan neighbour, two floors up, remembered them murmuring from the Koran as he passed their door, where four pairs of shoes were always carefully aligned. Atta ran into the Syrian merchant, Marmoun Darkanzali, at around the same time. Darkanzali's business dealings had brought him into contact with two of bin Ladin's associates in Sudan, Wadih El-Hage and Mamdouh Mahmud Salim.
Atta took an unexplained leave of absence from Hamburg in November 1997 lasting 15 months, a period he may have spent training with Al Qa'ida in Afghanistan. On his return in early 1999, neighbours thought him changed beyond recognition. He dressed in shalwar khamis, wore an unkempt beard and rarely laughed now, but he threw himself with a vengeance into his long-neglected thesis on the mediaeval Arab city, winning the highest possible honours when it was submitted that August. "He was a very nice young man - polite, very religious and with a highly developed critical faculty," recalled his supervisor, Professor Dittmar Machule. [6] In November 1999, he disappeared again, telling his father he intended to polish his English skills in the US, but first he had business in Prague.
Forget and force yourself to forget that thing which is called the World; the time for amusement is gone and the time of truth is upon us. We have wasted so much time in our life. Should we not use the hours to offer actions that make us closer to God?
By late 1999, when he disappeared into an atmosphere thick with Millennial foreboding, Atta had made contacts that could not be explained as the fruit of his Hamburg years and whom, in all likelihood, he met in the months he went missing. Among them were two comfortably-off, Saudi passport-holders, Khalid Al-Midhar and Nawaf Al-Hamzi, veterans of the Chechen insurrection and Afghanistan's training camps who had resided in California in 1998. [7] US intelligence was aware of Al-Midhar's connection with Al Qa'ida as early as December 1999, when he booked two one-way tickets to Kuala Lumpur through a 'logistical centre' in Yemen with known connections to the terrorist network but, for some unaccountable reason, it decided to let him go. [8] Instead it asked Malaysian intelligence to shadow the two Saudis during their visit, in the hope - one can only surmise - that their trail would lead to the identification of more senior operatives in the Al Qa'ida heirarchy. And it did, with calamitous consequences.
On unspecified dates between late December 1999 and early January 2000, while US security was distracted by the scare in Seattle and the widespread pre-Millennium malaise, Al-Midhar and Al-Hamzi met in a Kuala Lumpur hotel with Tawfiq Al-Atash, or 'Khallad', architect of the African embassy bombings and the USS Cole attack, to discuss in outline the next 'martyrdom operation', while a Malaysian surveillance team took photographs. The CIA's brief to Malaysian intelligence was to watch and record, but not to intervene. By the time the pictures reached Fort Langley in mid-2000 at the earliest, Khallad was long gone, taking with him the CIA's best chance of disrupting the carnage to come. Widely cited then and since as compelling evidence of bin Ladin's involvement in terrorism, the pictures from Kuala Lumpur were never made public, with the result that Khallad's face - and the CIA's blunder - are more a mystery now than before the film was shot.
Al-Midhar and Al-Hamzi slipped from view, scorning US vigilance by flying from Bangkok to Los Angeles on business visas on 15 January 2000, and going on to take an apartment in Clairemont, San Diego, where, true to their training, they were always prompt with the rent. They applied to Sorbi's Flying Club for instruction in piloting Boeings, but were told they had to learn to fly Cessnas and Pipers first. An instructor said Al-Midhar had trouble mastering the controls of the plane and became so terrified at times he started to pray. His more worldly companion asked their landlord to stick an advert for a Mexican wife on the internet for him, but there were no replies. [9]
Atta was in deep cover, and remained so for six months more, though a former lecturer spotted him one morning in early 2000 in a Hamburg shopping mall. [10] A fully-trained architect, with a justifiable interest in acquiring English, he faced no hardship in obtaining travel documentats for the US, but his plan entailed transporting the entire 'team' at 54, Marienstrasse to America, and Binalshibh had little to recommend him to the immigration authorities. In mid-May, the Yemeni mailed the first of four entry applications he made in 2000; all were refused in spite of a last-ditch effort to support his request by booking a pre-paid flying course in Florida. [11] Atta could wait no longer. On 2 June, he boarded the bus for Prague to meet Ahmad Al-Ani, an officer with Iraqi intelligence, in an encounter monitored by domestic security. [12] A Czech official suggested the meeting had been held to coordinate a terrorist strike on Radio Free Europe, a US station with headquarters in the capital, but it also served as a tripwire, exciting a flurry of activity culminating in the first of a series of financial transfers to Atta one month later.
The day after meeting in Prague, Atta flew to Newark, New Jersey to be reunited with Marwan Al-Shehhi. For the remainder of June, they were transient, living tracklessly on cash. They reconnoitered the Airman Flight School in Norman, Oklahoma, where bin Ladin's personal pilot, Ihab Ali, had earned his license, but returned to Manhattan to replenish their funds with money wired from the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Oklahoma was rejected as a base of operations in favour of Florida, a warmer, more congenial state where anonymity was the rule, not the exception. They chose Hollywood, cut from the coastal palmetto in the 1920s, near Fort Lauderdale and 25 miles from Miami International Airport. Like any newly-married couple, Atta and Al-Shehhi opened a joint account at the SunTrust Bank, receiving a first infusion of $10,000 on 19 July, and a further $100,000 in three staggered payments that ended on 18 September. [13] The final transfer of $69,985 caught the attention of a staff member at SunTrust, who filed a 'suspicious transaction report' with the US Treasury's money laundering agency, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, but to no avail. [14]
The first $10,000 transfer was for a 25 per cent deposit on two pilot courses on small planes at Huffman Aviation International Flight School in Venice, courses that cost $38,700 when they finished in November. Atta told instructors he was of royal Saudi lineage, and introduced Al-Shehhi as his bodyguard. He was remembered as an eager student, 'though not well-liked, whose reluctance to engage in conversation with others was sometimes resented'. [15] But he knew how to study, and was duly awarded a temporary pilot's license on 21 December.
At this comparatively advanced stage of the mission, it is far from conclusive that Atta, its commander in the field, was precisely aware of what he was expected to do, let alone how. All he knew was that it involved airplanes and cockpit skills. The Al Qa'ida veterans in the San Diego unit were responsible for communications with Khallad, the presumed coordinator, and kept contact with novice in Hollywood to a minimum to reduce the chance of interception. He was undeniably professional, committed and had the best of their trust, but the operation - whatever the target - brought them into an unfamiliar security landscape, patrolled by alien giants, with a pervasive technology and disdain for both faith and corruption, the saving graces of many previous operations.
The US mission was the first of a kind. It demanded techniques of dissimulation, camouflage and know-how that so far outstripped the expertise required for operations in the Africa and the Middle East that it must have seemed to the conspirators that they stood as much chance of success as an individual singlehandedly launching a moon shot. No executive team waited in the wings to ignite the fuse or drive the truck: their mission relied upon men with the ability to stay in character and maintain a punishing momentum for up to two years, while mastering tasks of the utmost complexity down to their finest details. Atta demonstrated his ignorance of its ultimate objective in August 2000, when he enquired about setting up a crop-dusting company in Florida, a query presumed to indicate an interest in dispersing biological or chemical agents by air over US cities. The same question was asked almost a year later in Oklahoma, this time by a freelance who nearly capsized the project. [16]
When the airplane starts moving and heads towards [takeoff], recite the supplication of travel, because you are travelling to God. May you be blessed in this travel.
Atta's Hamburg roommate, the pilot Ziad Jarrah, breezed into the US in June to attend a Boeing aviation seminar, but Binalshibh still faced insuperable problems obtaining a visa. [17] By October 2000, when he made his last unsuccessful application, the Yemeni's role had been downgraded from aspiring pilot to back-up financial coordinator. He wired a transfer to Al-Shehhi in September and, a year later, did the same for Zacarias Moussaoui, the 33-year-old Frenchman of Morrocan descent allegedly brought in to replace him. But Moussaoui was, arguably, as conspicuous as Binalshibh, or so French intelligence believed. He had left France in 1993 to take a master's degree in international business at London's South Bank University, where he attended Brixton Mosque and lived for the next seven years. In 1994, French authorities opened a file on a certain 'Zacarias', based in London, whom they suspected was paymaster to Algerian terrorists in France. The investigative judge Jean-Louis Bruguière travelled to London specifically to interview him and search his apartment, but he was refused permission by the Home Office. Moussaoui had never been arrested, either in France or Britain, so the investigation folded. But London friends had noted his politics harden and he was eventually asked to leave the mosque for preaching holy war. [18] In 1997, he traveled with a childhood friend to Chechnya and, one year later, was identified while training at Khalden terrorist camp alongside the Seattle bomber, Abdul Ressam. [19]
Somewhere along the way, Moussaoui acquired contacts in Malaysia, Khallad's base of operations for the USS Cole attack, and he visited it twice in September and October 2000 using money that was hard for a drop-out student to explain. On 29 September, Moussaoui emailed a course enquiry to the Airman Flight School in Norman from an internet cafe in Kuala Lumpur. On his second trip, he stayed with a local Taliban sympathiser, Yazid Sufaat, who gave him a letter of accreditation that introduced him as the North American marketing executive for Infocus Tech, a computer computer company in which his wife held shares, on a salary of $2,500 per month. [20] Back in London, Moussaoui received a visit from Binalshibh in the first week of December and swiftly returned via Pakistan to Afghanistan, where he remained for two months. By 7 February 2001, he was on the move again, flying to London for two weeks, before boarding a flight for Chicago, where he admitted on his customs declaration form to carrying $35,000 in cash. He arrived in Norman on 26 February, deposited $32,000 in a new account and started learning to fly. [21]
Stuck out in Oklahoma, Moussaoui was a loner by comparison with the two-man teams established in San Diego and Hollywood, but he was at least wired into the Hamburg cell through his acquaintance with Binalshibh. Hani Hanjour, a Saudi who arrived on student visa in December 2000, was a more complete outsider, with no known connections either to Hamburg or the training camps in Afghanistan. What he did have, inexplicably, was a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) license to pilot commercial jets, dating from 1999, though he impressed flight tutors - and, perhaps, his co-conspirators as well - as singularly hapless and accident-prone. Scarcely five feet tall and deeply introverted, Hanjour studied English in Tucson, Arizona in 1990, quitting three months later to return home and manage his family's date farm near the city of Taif. Five years on, he was suddenly gripped by the urge to learn to fly in the US. After six listless months in Florida and California, he signed up for a three-month course at the CRM Airline Training Centre in Scottsdale, Arizona, returning a year later for more tuition. Hanjour was considered a rotten student. "He'd be late, he wouldn't show up, he was unprepared, he didn't do his homework," recalled CRM's controller. When the school refused to readmit him for classes in 1998, Hanjour joined a flight simulator club at Sawyer Aviation in Phoenix, using the facilities for two summers, and then he "disappeared like a fog".
Hanour came to the attention of the local FBI as early as 1996, when Aukie Collins, a convert to Islam and veteran of the war in Chechnya, was asked by the Phoenix bureau to listen out for information about young Arabs taking flying lessons. "When I said there's this short, skinny Arab guy who's part of this crowd, drives such-and-such a car," he said, "I assumed that they would then, you know, start tracing him and see who his contacts were." [22] They didn't. When the Saudi returned to the US in December 2000, he was the first of a string of volunteers recruited not by Atta, but the mysterious Khallad, or his associates. He headed back to his old stamping ground in Phoenix to resume training at the Pan Am International Flight Academy. His instructors, disturbed by his continued inability to speak English, the first language of international aviation, alerted the FAA, which sent a representative to observe him practise. He was permitted to continue his training. [23]
Down in Hollywood, Atta had learned more about the nature of his task. On 5 November, more than a month before obtaining his pilot license, he purchased two global positioning devices from a Fort Lauderdale shop and flight-deck videos for the Boeing 747-200 and Boeing 757-200 from Sporty's Pilot Store in Batavia, Ohio. The $35 videos provide students with detailed information about customary inflight procedures, as well as extensive simulation techniques. On 11 December, he put in a second order for flight-deck videos for the Boeing 767- 300ER and Airbus A320-200, as did Al-Hamzi in San Diego. He spent $1,500 for three hours training on a Boeing 727 flight simulator at the SimCenter, Opalocka, near Miami, where a tutor said he "got a good feel for manoevering the airplane around, basically turning the airplane left and right, climbing and descending". [24]
But he had to leave the country to renew his visa. In January, he and Al-Shehhi flew to Madrid where they met Imad Eddin Barakat Yarbas, otherwise known as 'Abu Dahdah', a Palestinian with Spanish citizenship and connections with Al Qa'ida dating back to 1995 when he lived in Peshawar and helped Abu Zubaida, bin Ladin's fixer in Pakistan, process volunteers. Nothing is known of what was said in Madrid, but the two men had been in contact since Atta's Hamburg days, and Yarba's Spanish cell was then involved in planning additional attacks on the US embassies in Rome and Paris. He also had lines of communication with Abu Zubaida that were, arguably, less vulnerable to surveillance than those from the US. [25]
On their return, Atta faced a 57-minute grilling at immigration control in Miami International after he let slip his intention to study flying, which his visitor's visa proscribed. What Florida immigration failed to register was that Atta had overstayed his previous visa by more than a month and that the FAA was also threatening to investigate both men for abandoning a rented plane on a taxiway at the same airport when it broke down shortly after Christmas 2000. [26] They were allowed to proceed, however, and drove north to spend two weeks scouting flying schools in Decatur, Georgia, near Atlanta, briefly joining a health club. On 8 April, travelling alone this time, Atta flew to Prague for a second encounter with his intelligence contact at the Iraqi embassy, Ahmad Al-Ani, who was expelled from the Czech Republic two weeks later for other reasons. [27] As happened when the two men last met 10 months earlier, their conversation set off a frenzy of activity.
All the enemy's devices, and their gates and all their technology do not do benefit or harm, except with the permission of God.
Between 23 April, when Atta flew back to Florida, and 29 June, a second wave of 13 conspirators passed through US airports, seven in May, six more in June. They were a mixed assortment of mainly Saudi, former US residents, students of aviation or runaways with no clearly defined skills - or identities. Abdulaziz Al-Omari, allegedly a Saudi pilot and former flight engineer at John F Kennedy International Airport in New York, brought his wife and four children, building a convincing cover at Vero Beach, 300 miles north of Miami, though his real identity remains open to question. As does the actual name of the man who called himself Waleed Al-Shehri, allegedly the son of a former Saudi diplomat in Washington, who studied at Florida's Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in 1997 and lived in Dayton Beach. His presumed brother, Wail, was another qualified pilot who had left home in December 2000 to be treated for 'mental illness' in the shrine city of Medina, by his father's account. Two other Saudi pilots with the same family name, Ahmed Al-Ghamdi and Hamza Al-Ghamdi, lived in the 1990s at an apartment block in Pensacola, Florida housing foreign students of electronics, communications and computers at the nearby military training facility. The licence of yet another pilot, Fayez Ahmed, was registered at an address in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where Ahmed Al-Ghamdi allegedly obtained his, but a man with the same name as Ahmed had also attended a course at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas - as did another Saudi arrival, Saeed Al-Ghamdi, who may have been related to Ahmed and Hamza Al-Ghamdi, but who may not have been Saeed Al-Ghamdi at all.
Among these seven names, all with apparent expertise as pilots, six had records as students in programmes specifically created to meet the needs of Washington's military or commercial allies. Their bona fides are impossible to confirm, however. Men with the same names and histories later turned up alive in Saudi Arabia and North Africa, claiming to have lost their passports or had their identities stolen: if they did or had been, the thief was remarkably astute as to the type of profile needed for their substitutes to bypass US immigration controls - and where in the kingdom's military database such 'secure' identities could be acquired. Of the other six arrivals in May and June - Salem Al-Hamzi, Ahmed Al-Haznawi, Ahmed Al-Nami, Mohand Al-Shehri, Majed Moqed and Satan Al-Suqami - nothing is known for certain, though Mohand Al-Shehri could have been related to Waleed and Wail, and Salem Al-Hamzi to Nawaf Al-Hamzi of the San Diego cell. If true, they injected into their deadly enterprise the flavour of an extended family outing. [28]
The men dispersed to cheap apartments or hotels in Hollywood and the nearby resort of Delray Beach, where they lived unflagrantly, training in local gyms, visiting pizza-houses and making themselves discreetly agreeable to their neighbours. Ahmed and Hamza Al-Ghamdi took an apartment together with Ahmed Al-Nami in the Delray Racquet Club where, despite keeping a low profile, they impressed one resident as being drug dealers because she saw them at night, "carrying dark bags". [29] Abdulaziz Al-Omari, Mohand Al-Shehri and Saeed Al-Ghamdi occasionally trained in the FlightSafety aviation school at Vero Beach but, for the most part, the men were on stand-by: they were trained to fit into the landscape, disguise their identities and bide their time. In the same month the new recruits arrived, Atta and Al-Shehhi moved out of Hollywood to a condominium in nearby Coral Springs.
One man busier than the rest of the new recruits was the pilot calling himself Fayez Ahmed, a citizen of the UAE. Shortly before entering the US, Ahmed opened an account at the Standard Chartered Bank in Dubai, UAE on the same day that a known associate of bin Laden, Mustafa Ahmed, opened another at the same branch under the name Mustafa Ahmed Al-Hawsawi. Mustafa Ahmed, otherwise known as 'Sheikh Sayeed', was almost certainly the conduit - if not exactly the source - of the $110,000 transferred to Atta's SunTrust account the previous year; the $35,000 Moussaoui brought from Pakistan; and the funds that Ramzi Binalshibh, the other member of the Hamburg cell, wired or transferred on various occasions from Europe to Moussaoui, Atta and Al-Shehhi. Somewhere outside the bank, the two men met or conferred and this, and subsequent transactions, suggest Fayez Ahmed had greater responsibility than the 12 other new arrivals, amounting perhaps to the role of financial coordinator. Soon after landing in Florida, Ahmed and eight colleagues opened individual accounts at the SunTrust Bank, using cash brought in as travel expenses. Three weeks later, Ahmed gave power of attorney over his account to the faceless financier in Dubai, who arranged for the shipping of his credit cards to Florida. The day the two Dubai accounts were opened was also the fifth anniversary of the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers complex in Saudi Arabia. The National Air Traffic Controllers Association in Hawaii warned: "The airlines are at risk." [30]
While the conspirators settled in to their briefest of new lives, the operation was again nearly stopped in its tracks after a single, crucial oversight by an over-confident Atta. He was pulled over by a Florida highway patrol car on 26 April for driving without a valid licence and then ducked the subsequent court hearing, which issued a warrant for his arrest on 28 May. In principle, he could have been picked up, expelled and barred from re-entering the US at any time between then and early July, when he again left for Europe. In practise, legislation that would have allowed immigration, police and the motor vehicle authorities to pool information had been introduced to Congress during Clinton's second administration, but never passed. [31]
Know that Paradise has raised its most beautiful decoration for you, and that your most heavenly brides are calling you - 'Come, O follower of God' - while wearing their most beautiful jewellery.
The penury of public information about the true identities of members of the conspiracy renders analysis of each individual's role in it next to impossible, but log entries from commercial sources, such as aviation schools, banks and restaurants, allow for a certain amount of reasonable deduction. Question: how many of the 20 acknowledged participants were truly licensed pilots, rather than cyphers who had travelled on the falsified or stolen documents of bona fide graduates from US military and commercial flying schools? Among the first wave were Atta and Al-Shehhi, who graduated the previous December; their Hamburg roommate, Ziad Jarrah from Lebanon; and Khallad's confidants in the San Diego team, Khalid Al-Midhar and Nawaf Al-Hamzi - though there is no record they concluded their courses at Sorbi's Flying Club. Elsewhere were Zacarias Moussaoui and Hani Hanjour, more remote from the operational axis, whose isolation may have been designed to insulate them in the event that the Hollywood and San Diego cells were destroyed and they were needed to replace the main protagonists at short notice. However, in a tribute to Khallad's foresight, a third contingency group existed, composed of Fayez Ahmad, Abdulaziz Al-Omari and Waleed and Wail Al-Shehri, who all emerge from the miasma of shifting identities as probable pilots, with similar names and skills to the ones enscribed on their visa applications forms.
Toward the end of June, with the second wave safely esconced in Hollywood and Delray Beach, the senior conspirators converged on Las Vegas for a summit of aviators, one of six held between May and August. The venue, convenient to San Diego but 2,179 miles flying distance from Florida, suggests the mission's powerhouse lay in the west, but the city also provided opportunities for a hedonism now permitted to martyrs whose lives could be measured in weeks: the Vegas visits, in short, became working holidays. Al-Shehhi paid $20 to Samantha, a lap dancer at the Olympic Garden Topless Cabaret who, in retrospect, thought he looked "cheap", though one her three colleagues - also, interestingly, called Samantha - remembered his group as "quiet, well-groomed, polite, light drinkers - and the opposite of big spenders". Atta, Al-Shehhi, Ziad Jarrah, Hani Hanjour and Nawaf Al-Hamzi stayed at the cheap end of The Strip, in the Econo Lodge, where they worked through an agenda that included gripes about expenses, their training progress, the new arrivals, their strengths, their weaknesses and the next phase of the plan. [32] Several had already joined gyms, though Jarrah went one step further by hiring a personal trainer to teach him to kickboxg and fight with a knife. Some evenings, Jarrah rented a car and they drove out to the desert to listen in the silence and pray.
Bin Ladin later claimed in a video for private consumption that the 'brothers' knew nothing about the operation, "not even one letter... until they are there and just before they boarded the planes". [33] But an operation on so ambitious a scale required detailed reconnaissance by a skilled pilot, able to time an aircraft's flight path, judge when it had reached cruising altitude and observe what visual landmarks could be used to substitute for the crew's navigational equipment and guide a successful hijack to its target. At the barest minimum, a stop-watch and compass would serve to plot the course, but global positioning devices produce preciser results. While the choice of which flights to seize, each taking off in a narrow time-band and with a full load of fuel, could be left to a planner not directly involved in executing the last phase of the mission, one or more of the pilots were needed to reconnoitre the selected flights, since familiarity with each one's flight plan was crucial to knowing the exact moment to take control. [34] There were admittedly security concerns, particularly with regard to those who stood outside the charmed Hamburg circle, but Atta could vouch for Al-Shehhi and Jarrah while Al-Hamzi was situated even closer to Khallad, its organisational head. Though no evidence was ever revealed to prove the supposition, it is more than likely that, in the months after the Las Vegas conference, both Atta and Al-Hamzi flew first-class more than once from Boston to Los Angeles, Newark to San Francisco and Washington to Los Angeles, under assumed names and on tickets purchased through a bank account not yet identified with their operation. What the record does state is that between 27 June and 3 July, Atta flew to both Boston and Newark airports with the express intention of at least studying the plan of the departure areas, if not actually plot the course changes of individual flights. [35]
Atta and Al-Shehhi flew from Miami to Zurich on 8 July, withdrawing $1,000 in Swiss francs from a bank machine. Because they intended to spend only two-and-a-half hours at the airport before catching another flight to Madrid, their true destination, they may have met an accomplice to hand over the cash. While waiting for departure, Atta purchased two Swiss army knives and a set of box-cutters, either as gifts or to test security. Once in Madrid, the men rented a car and disappeared for a week. Given their previous friendship and conversations bugged by Spanish police three weeks later, it seems natural that they spent time with Yarbas, the Spanish cell leader, who was aware of his visitors' reasons for being in the US and, anyway, had his own operation to mount, and so could make use of Atta's expertise. Atta's motives for travelling to Madrid are harder to discern. It was convenient for a meeting with his old friend, Ramzi Binalshibh from Hamburg; the latter had longstanding links with Madrid and, when forced to flee Germany in September, it became his first port of entry. But Spain was also a good location to meet more senior Al Qa'ida members, perhaps Khallad himself, men who were barred from entry into the US or otherwise under surveillance - while enjoying a little relaxation: In the last seven months, Atta had made eight, risky round-trip flights and a unknown number of reconaissance trips by air, as well as attending to a rigorous schedule of flight training and the provision of homes, documentation and money to a dozen subordinates. Atta and Al-Shehhi checked into a tourist hotel at Salou, south of Barcelona, on 16 July, where police suspect they may have met two unidentified men on undisclosed business. [36] Three days later, more cautious after Atta's previous experience at immigration, they returned to the US through Atlanta, avoiding Miami altogether. [37]
Oh God, may you make my entry to this car a safe entry and my exit a safe exit. May you make my journey an easy one, and may you grant me support and success in all my endeavours.
Al Qa'ida's field forces in the west seemed immune to detection in early 2001, apart from the arrest by Italian police of a six-man cell in Milan in January suspected of planning to bomb the US embassy in Rome. With the arrest of Djemal Beghal in Dubai on 28 July, however, the survival of the entire European network fell into jeopardy when the Frenchman succumbed to torture and fully confessed. His background was similar to Moussaoui's and the two may well have met. Sons of North African immigrants to France, both had been active sympathisers of Algeria's Groupe Islamique Armee (GIA) in the early 1990s, until French intelligence surveillance forced them across the English Channel where they melted into the Islamist ghettoes in London and Leicester. Beghal travelled to Pakistan in November 2000, taking his pregnant wife and two children. Unusually for a 'westerner', he underwent training near Kandahar, where he claimed to have learned of a pact between the Taliban and bin Ladin that resulted in the closure of all training camps not directly affiliated with Al Qa'ida. The pact, he told police, was more of a leadership merger. "None of the terrorist operations of Al Qa'ida," he said, "could have been decided after May 2001, except with the accord of the Taliban and their chief, Mullah Omar." [38] After giving baiyat to Abu Zubaida, Beghal received the singular honour of three gifts from bin Ladin: a string of prayer beads, some incense and a toothpick. Abu Zubaida ordered him to organise a bomb attack on the US Embassy in Paris, with the help of Al Qa'ida sympathisers in the Netherlands, Spain and Belgium.
Beghal's confession, which he later retracted, led to 12 immediate arrests, and sharpened surveillance of Islamists in all three countries, including France, for months after. [39] Spanish intelligence had tapped Yarbas' telephone since 1997 without making any major breakthrough. Finally, on 6 August, he received a cryptic call from a man called 'Shakur', who was identified as an intimate of the Hamburg group, though clearly not one of Atta's men for the calls continued throughout September. "I have cut off all my old contacts and in one month I may see you," Shakur said in code, adding: "I have prepared some threads and other things that you will like." [40]
Despite racking up 57 hours flying time in Norman, Zacarias Moussaoui had not managed a single minute flying solo, a feat achieved by most students in less than half the time. After three months at Airman, Moussaoui quit without his coveted license. Both his funds and nerves were wearing thin. [41] On 29 July, and over the next two days, he made a number of calls to Binalshibh in Dusseldorf, who contacted the financier, Mustafa Muhammad Ahmed, aka 'Sheikh Sayeed'. Ahmed wired $15,000 to Binalshibh, who forwarded it to Moussoui from the railway stations in Hamburg and Dusseldorf. A week after the funds arrived, Moussaoui packed his things and hitched a ride with a friend to Minneapolis where, on 10 August, he paid a $6,300 cash deposit on a $19,000 course in flying Boeing 747s at Pan Am International Flight School in the suburb of Eagan. Pan Am owned the school in Phoenix where Hanjour was training and the SimCenter near Miami, where Atta took computer simulated lessons in flying 727s. [42]
In Coral Springs, Atta and Al-Shehhi prepared for the last, frenetic furlong. On 6 August, they rented a car from Pompano Beach, Florida and disappeared for a week to research accomodation in the Washington area, returning on 13 August to take another flight to a meeting in Las Vegas with Hani Hanjour and Nawaf Al-Hazmi. [43] Atta flew back from Las Vegas a day later through Houston where, in spite of the warrant for driving without a license, he rented another car for a five-day trip with Al-Shehhi into unknown country. The two men clocked up 3,000 miles in five days, enough for a return trip to Washington, but only half the distance to the west coast and back. [44] Minneapolis was no longer an option. A Pan Am flight instructor became suspicious of Moussaoui three days into the course, when his new student became 'belligerent and evasive' and proved ignorant of basic skills, despite enrolling in an advanced course in flying commercial jets. Reports that he asked only to learn how to steer a jumbo, but not to take off or land it were dismissed by his supervisors as fiction. [45]
Pan Am relayed their instructor's concerns to the Minneapolis division of the FBI, which detained him for overstaying his visa on 17 August. In his possession, they found knives, binoculars, fighting gloves, shin guards, a hand-held aviation radio, flight manuals, flight simulator programmes, pilot software for the 747 and written evidence linking him to the Hamburg and Malaysia cells. On 26 August, French intelligence notified the FBI of Moussaoui's links with Al Qa'ida, but the bureau denied the Minneapolis office's increasingly insistent requests for a warrant to search his computer hard drive and telephone records. There was insufficient evidence, they determined, that Moussaoui was either a member of a terrorist organisation or the agent of a foreign power, as was required under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Six weeks earlier, agent Kenneth Williams in the FBI office in Phoenix had written to headquarters in a similar vein warning of an "effort by bin Laden to send students to the US to attend civil aviation universities and colleges"; he referred to Middle Eastern men enrolled in flying classes at Embry-Riddle University, not to Hanjour who was then training at a Pan Am subsidiary college in Phoenix. Williams' alert was also ignored but the Minneapolis office, "in a desperate 11th hour measure to bypass the FBI [headquarters] roadblock", notified the CIA's Counter Terrorist Centre of its anxieties - receiving nothing more than a stern rebuke from their supervisor for their pains. [46] Moussaoui stayed in the custody of the immigration authorities until 11 September, when the pieces began to fall into place. On an unspecified date later that August, the FBI and CIA received information from Israeli intelligence that as many as 200 terrorists had already slipped behind US defences and were planning to attack a 'large-scale target'. [47]
Moussaoui was not a major link in the information chain, and so had fewer secrets to impart, but his determination to not collaborate with the US authorities spoke of a resolution that rarely came into focus in the rest of his career. Atta had rented a Piper Archer on 16 August, spending three days unconcernedly trawling the blue skyways over Palm Beach county, and Jarrah followed a similar pattern further south over Fort Lauderdale. Atta may not have heard of Moussasoui's arrest until days after when, in a possible reaction to the loss of a key operative, the mission kicked into high gear. Jarrah drove to Miami and purchased a global positioning device and a manual of the cockpit instrumentation for a Boeing 757. From 25 August through till 29 August, beginning with Al-Midhar in San Diego, 14 of the remaining 19 conspirators booked one-way, first-class tickets on breakfast-time flights out of Boston, Newark and Washington, by internet or with cash, at a cost of around $4,500 each - for a total of $84,500 for the entire group. Atta bought a knife. [48]
On 25 August, bin Ladin told a Middle East TV crew - with a "significant and knowing smile" - that the US was going to "get a surprise". [49] Two days later, the CIA finally received word that two Al Qa'ida terrorists - Khalid Al-Midhar and Nawaf Al-Hamzi - had re-entered the US in July, but intelligence could track them no further than a room at the false address they gave in the Marriott Hotel, New York. [50] Shakur called Yarbas the same day. "I am taking classes," he told him. "it will take a month or so... In the class, we've come to the part on aviation and we have even cut the throat of the bird." [51]
Check the suitcase, the clothes, the knife, your tools, your ticket... your passport, all your papers. Inspect your weapon before you leave.
In middle to late August, the San Diego group, including Hani Hanjour, flew east, converging on the low-cost Motel Valencia, outside Laurel, Maryland, 25 minutes from Washington DC and an hour from Dulles International. They were joined by three of the men from Florida, Salem Al-Hamzi, Majed Moqed and Mohammed Atta, but Atta quickly flew home from Baltimore. The remaining five moved into a one-room, self-catering apartment at the Motel Valencia on 2 September, paying $280 a week, though an instructor at Gold's Gym where they worked out said they walked around with 'wads' of cash. When he asked Hanjour the meaning of his first name, he was told it was the Arabic for 'warrior'. Hanjour flew over the area three times in a plane rented in Bowie and, on 7 September, the five checked out of the Valencia, not to be seen again until they stepped into the departure area at Dulles. [52]
Back in Florida, it was time for the intense friendship that had made Atta and Al-Shehhi all but inseparable since June 2000 to bend to operational necessity. On or around 3 September, Al-Shehhi drove with three of the other conspirators to the resort town of Deerfield Beach, where they took rooms in the Crystal Cay Motel. Al-Shehhi stayed at the nearby Panther Motel with a second group of unidentified men, though it probably included Fayez Ahmed, Ahmed Al-Ghamdi, Hamza Al-Ghamdi and Mohand Al-Shehri, all members of his team. Atta had other business to attend to. [53] On 4 September, he made the first in a series of transfers to 'Mustafa Ahmed' of what remained in the mission's bank accounts before they fell into disuse forever: after Fayez Ahmed, Waleed Al-Shehri and Marwan Al-Shehhi chipped in the balance of their accounts, a little over $42,000 was preserved for future Al Qa'ida operations. [54] On the same day, a security camera captured a white Mitsubishi circling a restricted parking area at Boston's Logan International at least four times in as many days, a sign that Atta, or his New England support team, had begun to survey the airport's best means of access. As if by clockwork, Ramzi Binalshibh and two other members of the Hamburg cell quietly left Germany on 4 September for Madrid, where they caught a plane to Istanbul, another to Karachi and a third to Quetta and the safety beyond the Afghan border. [55]
On 7 September, the day the Maryland team checked out of the Valencia in Laurel, Atta met Al-Shehhi and a third man at Shuckum's Oyster Pub and Seafood Grill in Hollywood. Atta played video games and drank what the barman recalled was cranberry juice for four hours at one end of the bar, while Al-Shehhi and the other customer knocked back cocktails and seemed to argue. But it was Atta who let fly when the waitress put the bill for $48 on the bar, taking her gesture as a doubt they were good for the money. "You think I can't pay my bill?", he shouted, "I'm an American Airlines pilot." He was either very drunk or deadly sober, but he ripped a bill from a bundle of $50s and left. Further along the coast, another group of Arabs got tight and nasty at Red-Eyed Jack's in Daytona Beach. "Wait till tomorrow," one said, "America is going to see bloodshed." [56]
Al-Shehhi checked out of the Panther on 9 September, leaving behind a bag containing aeronautical maps, a protractor and a Boeing 757 flight manual. Atta returned his rented car to the agency, pointing out helpfully that the oil indicator light did not work. On 10 September, the three teams in Florida flew to Newark and Logan airport in Boston where the white Mitsubishi waited, along with another vehicle. Atta drove the Mitsubishi west along the Massachusetts Expressway to Exit 13 where, in another reckless confrontation with authority, he loudly refused to pay the $3.10 toll. The booth operator wrote down his license number as he sped away. [57] Eight of the Boston group registered at hotels in groups of two, as Atta and Al-Omari got a change of car and then drove 110 miles north, checking into the Comfort Inn close to Portland International Jetport, "Maine's Gateway to the World". During a round of last-minute chores, the men were caught on security cameras at a petrol station, two bank machines and a Wal-Mart shopping centre. They ate pizza and returned to their room to observe the 15 rituals of self-preparation outlined in a handbook for martyrs, copies of which were found afterwards in Atta's suitcase, Nawaf Al-Hamzi's Mitsubishi and in the wreckage of United Airlines 93 at Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
The five-page document, taken down by a woman from dictation according to handwriting experts, gives the suicide bomber guidance on how to spend his last night on earth as it inches through the darkness into the measured but heightened reality of a real operation. Intended to stiffen the martyr's resolve, the notes prescribe ceremonies for the purification of the body, readings from the Koran and invocations specific to every step of a mission in progress, from the donning of shoes and the prayer to say as the vehicle nears its destination to how to execute bystanders with a glad heart - though the targets of this operation, for security reasons, are disguised in by initials: 'M', for matar, or airport, and 'T', for ta'irah, or airplane. Aspirants are urged to consider themselves the true descendants of the companions of the Prophet, whose war for Islam in the 10 years after his expulsion from Mecca, is not unlike their own. [58]
Clench your teeth, as did your predecessors before going into battle. In combat, hit firmly as the heroes do, who do not wish to come back to the worldly life. And say aloud 'God is Great,' for saying it causes terror to enter into the hearts of the disbelievers
Atta was nearly late on the dawn of his martyrdom, passing through Portland security with Al-Omari at 5.53, scarcely 15 minutes before their flight was due to depart for Boston. The bag that he checked in never made their connecting plane, American Airlines 11 (AA11), due to take off at 7.59 from Logan for Los Angeles with a light load of 92 passengers. As he approached his seat in row 8, Atta scanned the faces in business class to confirm that the other members of his squad were present. Then he sat down and called Marwan Al-Shehhi on his cell phone, seated in 6C on United Airlines 175 (UA175), a little ahead on the taxiway and due to leave for Los Angeles at 7.58. [59] Atta's closest friend confirmed his team was aboard, though a last-minute dispute with a driver over parking the white Mitsubishi had nearly upset their plan. [60] Two minutes after AA11's departure, United Airlines 93 (UA93) took off from Newark for San Francisco and, at 8.10, American Airlines 11 (AA11) was in the air, flying from Dulles to Los Angeles. Within a span of 12 minutes, four planes, each carrying the four tonnes of jet fuel needed for a cross-country flight, had taken off with 272 passengers from three airports.
AA11 was due to fly west across Massachusetts out of Logan traffic control and into the jurisdiction of Cleveland, both of which received bomb threats by telephone at around 8.15, just as the Hudson valley became visible through the windows in business class. Atta shouted the signal and his squad marched on the cockpit, cutting the throat of one passenger and stabbing two flight attendants en route. Flight attendant Madeleine Amy Sweeney called Logan to report a hijack but, even as she related what was happening, Atta and his men broke into the locked cockpit. One of the pilots switched on a relay microphone as the hijackers burst in. "We have more planes," Logan controllers heard a man say. "Don't do anything foolish... you won't be hurt." [61] At 8.28, the transponder, which allows a plane's route to be monitored, was switched off. Seated in front of the airplane's controls, Atta banked hard to the left, straightening up the the Boeing-767 only when its nose pointed along the gun sight of the Hudson towards Manhattan.
UA175 had taken off a minute before AA11, but its route was south to northern New Jersey, before taking a gentle turn west towards California. Al-Shehhi's team had waited until the World Trade Centre, visible 50 miles away on a morning as clear as 11 September, came into view of the right-hand side of the plane. Once this was sighted, his squad pulled out blades known as box-cutters, and slashed at flight staff until they reached the pilots' cabin. At around the same time as Atta was completing his unexpected turn south along the Hudson, traffic controllers noticed something was wrong with UA175, now banking in a full circle east over central New Jersey, instead of west, until it lined up to approach New York harbour from the south. Just as suddenly, its light vanished from the screens as the transponder was cut out. [62]
"Anybody know what that smoke is in Lower Manhattan?" asked an unidentified pilot over the common frequency at 8.50. [63] Two minutes earlier, flying at 494mph, a speed at which the plane risked breaking apart in mid-air, Atta had crashed AA11 into the North Tower between floors 94 and 99. Al-Shehhi, always the junior partner in their relationship, exceeded his friend's flying skills at the end of it, tilting the 60-tonne Boeing-767 at it hurtled towards the World Trade Centre at 537mph so that it was angled like a dagger as it plunged into the South Tower between the 78th and 84th floors at 9.03. The South Tower took only 56 minutes to collapse: the North Tower stood for 102 minutes. [64]
Minutes after AA11 struck the North Tower, traffic control in Indianapolis tried to contact AA77, which had failed to respond. Just after crossing the Ohio-Kentucky border at 8.56, the transponder was turned off so its exact flight path is unknown. [65] At 9.30 Khalid Al-Midhar, the hijackers' leader, told passengers they should call home because they were all going to die. [66] One of them, political commentator Barbara Olson, whose book on Clinton's departure from the White House, 'The Final Days', was about to be published, called her husband from the locked toilet. "She said they had knives. They had rounded the passengers up at the back of the plane." [67] At 9.33, an unidentified object rapidly approaching the prohibited airspace over the White House and the Capitol alerted Reagan National Airport, which ordered a military cargo plane to intercept and identify it. The crew said it was a Boeing-757, "moving low and fast". As AA77 flew over the Pentagon with Phoenix-trained Hani Hanjour at the controls, it began to turn 360 degrees to the right, descending nearly to ground level. A pilot who witnessed the crash said the Boeing was in power-drive as it accelerated into the west side of the Pentagon at a speed well over 500mph. [68]
Far more is known about the hijackers' modus operandi on UA93, flying from Newark to Los Angeles with 37 passengers, many of whom held long telephone conversations with loved ones as the plane flew to its doom. With Moussaoui under arrest, the suicide squad was down to four men, with the Lebanese Ziad Jarrah shouldering the role of both team leader and pilot. According to passenger accounts, three men in red bandanas - presumably to identify one another during the scuffle that followed - broke into the cabin and threatened to detonate a 'red box' strapped to the waist of one of them, that they claimed was a bomb. At 9.35, controllers in Cleveland heard the sounds of a fight and screams on the radio link to the cockpit, which remained open as an accented voice said: "This is your captain. There is a bomb on board. We are returning to the airport." Before Cleveland, UA 93 turned 180 degrees to the left and headed for Pittsburgh, flying low and erratically. Inside the plane, one man was stabbed as crew and passengers were herded to the rear by three of the hijackers, including the one with the red box. Jarrah was now alone at the controls. Five of the passengers resolved to tackle the man with the 'bomb' and then storm the cockpit. "Are you ready, guys?" said one of them. "Let's roll." The plane continued southeast, but eyewitnesses said it was so out of control that it was almost flying upside down. At approximately 10.06, 31 minutes after the hijack, UA93 crashed into the Pennsylvania woods, 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, killing all on board. The pilot's last words were was only heard after the flight's black box recorder was recovered from the rubble. There was a "very noisy sound of a confrontation" and a voice, probably Jarrah's, screaming "Get out of here! Get out of here!" [69]
Notes
1 Los Angeles Times, 22 September 2001 [Back] 2 Times, 3 October 2001 [Back] 3 New York Times, 15 September 2001; Observer, 23 September 2001; New York Times, 11 October 2001 [Back] 4 New York Times, 11 October 2001 [Back] 5 Times, 3 October 2001 [Back] 6 Guardian, 15 September 2001 [Back] 7 CBS News, 27 September 2001 [Back] 8 Newsweek, 20 September 2001 [Back] 9 CBS News, 27 September 2001 [Back] 10 New York Times, 14 September 2001 [Back] 11 Grand Jury Indictment of Zacarias Moussaoui, December 2001 [Back] 12 Associated Press, 27 October 2001 [Back] 13 Grand Jury Indictment [Back] 14 Financial Times, 29 November 2001; Grand Jury Indictment [Back] 15 New York Times, 15 September 2001; Guardian, 17 September 2001; www.wilkipedia.com [Back] 16 Grand Jury Indictment [Back] 17 ABC News, 27 September 2001 [Back] 18 CNN.com/world, 11 December 2001 [Back] 19 CBS News, 19 December 2001 [Back] 20 Grand Jury Indictment; Los Angeles Times, 2 February 2002 [Back] 21 Grand Jury Indictment [Back] 22 ABC News, 23 May 2002 [Back] 23 Guardian, 17 September 2001; International Herald Tribune, 21 September 2001; Washington Post, 15 October 2001; Grand Jury Indictment; Minneapolis-St Paul Star Tribune, 21 December 2001 [Back] 24 New York Times, 15 September 2001; Grand Jury Indictment; Associated Press, 12 December 2001 [Back] 25 New York Times, 20 November 2001; Associated Press, 26 November 2001 [Back] 26 International Herald Tribune, 17 October 2001 [Back] 27 Associated Press, 27 October 2001; CNN.com, 9 November 2001 [Back] 28 International Herald Tribune, 21 September 2001; ABC News, 27 September 2001; CBS News, 27 September 2001 [Back] 29 Time, 22 September 2001 [Back] 30 Guardian, 1 October 2001; New York Times, 12 December 2001; Grand Jury Indictment; www.hcfhawaii.com/news/terror_risk.htm [Back] 31 www.mondaytimes.com.mv/issue46/atta46.htm [Back] 32 San Francisco Chronicle, 4 October 2001 [Back] 33 Video of Osama bin Ladin in conversation with Khalid Al-Harbi, released 13 December 2001 [Back] 34 'The Hijackings: A pilot's view', www.ict.org.il/articles/articledet.cfm?articleid=381 [Back] 35 www.abc.net.au/4corners/atta/maps/timeline.htm [Back] 36 CNN.com/WORLD, 13 October 2001 [Back] 37 Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 26 September 2001 [Back] 38 USA Today, 3 October 2001 [Back] 39 Nouvel Observateur, 18 October 2001; New York Times, 28 October 2001; Newsday, 29 October 2001 [Back] 40 www.abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/WTC_Investigation011120a.html [Back] 41 Minneapolis-St Paul Star Tribune, 21 December 2001 [Back] 42 Grand Jury Indictment [Back] 43 www.abc.net.au/4corners/atta/maps/timeline.htm [Back] 44 www.abc.net.au/4corners/atta/maps/timeline.htm [Back] 45 Minneapolis-St Paul Star Tribune, 21 December 2001 [Back] 46 Le Monde, 15 September 2001; Washington Post, 14 May 2002; Time, 21 May 2002; Fortune, 22 May 2002 [Back] 47 Los Angeles Times, 20 September 2001 [Back] 48 www.abc.net.au/4corners/atta/maps/timeline.htm; Grand Jury Indictment [Back] 49 ABC News, 14 September 2001 [Back] 50 Los Angeles Times, 18 October 2001 [Back] 51 abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/WTC_Investigation011120a.html [Back] 52 Los Angeles Times, 20 September 2001; Los Angeles Times, 27 September 2001 [Back] 53 Los Angeles Times, 27 September 2001 [Back] 54 Grand Jury Indictment [Back] 55 Time, 28 January 2002 [Back] 56 USA Today, 14 September 2001; Observer 16 September 2001; Los Angeles Times, 27 September [Back] 57 Newsday, 30 September 2001 [Back] 58 New York Review of Books; 17 January 2002; CBS News, 1 October 2001 [Back] 59 New York Times, 4 November 2001 [Back] 60 ABC News, 14 September 2001 [Back] 61 Observer, 16 September 2001 [Back] 62 www.ict.org.il/articles/articledet.cfm?articleid=381 [Back] 63 New York Times, 16 October 2001 [Back] 64 CBS News, 23 February 2002 [Back] 65 New York Times, 16 October 2001 [Back] 66 Observer, 16 September 2001 [Back] 67 Sunday Times, 16 September 2001 [Back] 68 New York Times, 16 October 2001; www.ict.org.il/articles/articledet.cfm?articleid=381 [Back] 69 Observer, 16 September 2001; Newsweek, 22 September 2001; New York Times, 16 October 2001; www.ict.org.il/articles/articledet.cfm?articleid=381 [Back]
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If the "safe" Muslims are Turks who smoke and drink, whose wives hold jobs and let their hair blow free, are they really Muslims at all?
Who are the "real" Muslims, the Attas and Bin Ladins and their millions of followers who pray 5 times a day and memorize the Koran, or the quiet Muslims (who can't quite seem to condemn terrorism?)
This is very confusing for us, and for now, we just can't trust ANY Muslims.
If you want to help the cause of good honest "safe" Muslims in the USA, tell us how to find the Attas among the rest. We can't tell, so we must look at ALL Muslims as potential Attas.
Or a remote-piloting system and someone(s) on ground.
Good read.....TM, thanks for the bump. I remember watching in amazement the number of Saudis who would make a "whisky" run to Bahrain or make sidiki ,arabic for my friend and slang for moonshine, in their home stills yet swear they were dedicated 100% to their faith.
Stay Safe !
And I'll bet every single pasty-faced, besuited rodent in along the trail of arrogance, incompetence and stupidity leading to the deaths of thousands of Americans is still holding its cushy job in the Government (all bow...).
And the solution put in place by the Bush administration is, of course, is to strip-search grandmothers in wheelchairs in the airports.
Wish I had been at Red Jack's that night...it would have got ugly.
Who wrote this?
Who, exactly - What person - or thing - wrote all of the quotes of supposed "religious counsel" quoted in this piece?
I'm sure no one knows, but what bothers me is that no one seems to care.
Somewhere, at the core of this "al-Quaida", and maybe at the core of the "Islamic fundamentalist" phenomenon, is someone - or some thing - who is specifically inspiring these acolytes to immolation in the name of Jihad.
We need to find him, her, or it - and kill it, unceremoniously. We need to kill him/her/it for merely holding such beliefs, and for espousing its beliefs, and for disseminating its beliefs - and we need to make sure we do not apologize to anyone for so doing.
Hanour came to the attention of the local FBI as early as 1996, when Aukie Collins, a convert to Islam and veteran of the war in Chechnya, was asked by the Phoenix bureau to listen out for information about young Arabs taking flying lessons.
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