Posted on 08/21/2004 7:17:08 PM PDT by True Capitalist
Focus: the road to 9/11
Inside the mind of a terrorist
On the eve of the third anniversary of 9/11, a compelling new film goes inside al-Qaeda's Hamburg cell, the group of Islamic radicals who changed the world with their ruthless suicide attacks. Ronan Bennett, who wrote the film, explains what drove them to martyrdom
Ronan Bennett
Sunday August 22, 2004
The Observer
On the morning of 11 September 2001, a young man travelling from Newark, New Jersey, to San Francisco called his girlfriend in Germany.
She was in hospital, recuperating from a minor operation. He had, however, phoned her almost every day during his 15 months in America. Their relationship appeared to have survived early difficulties and their separation - he had made several long flights to visit her and she had once come to be with him in Florida - and they planned to marry. His parents were so pleased that they had already bought the couple a wedding present - a brand-new Mercedes.
The phone call from an airport payphone that morning was brief. The young man simply said 'I love you' three times. Nothing more. Then he hung up. Shortly afterwards he boarded United Airlines flight 93 and was shown to seat 1B in first class. Soon after take-off, at about 9.25am, he and three other passengers tied scarves around their heads, then seized control of the plane.
The young man was Ziad Jarrah, one of the team of 19 suicide bombers who, on that bright autumn morning, changed the course of the 21st century.
In the days after the attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, all of us had a lot to take in: the disaster-movie footage of the jets crashing into the towers and people throwing themselves to their deaths. Hardly had we time to process these images than we had to work out what it all portended. What organisation was behind the attacks? What would the Bush administration do?
With the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq came new and more complicated questions, of legality, morality, justice and political good sense. The story moved quickly on from Jarrah and his co-conspirators who, despite the millions of words written about 9/11, remain for the public little more than ciphers, recalled, if at all, only by mug shot.
Towards the end of 2001, I received a call from the London-based independent production company Mentorn, which asked if I would be interested in writing a drama telling the story of 9/11 from the point of view of the hijackers. Channel 4 was apparently keen to back the project.
Later I talked to the team behind the project. I considered myself reasonably well informed but, as I listened to Alice Perman, who later collaborated with me on the script, I became aware of how little I actually knew about the hijackers.
I found myself more and more curious. The idea was to focus on the 'Hamburg cell' of young Muslim radicals who chanced to come together in the German town and who were to supply three of the four 9/11 pilots and organise much of the logistical back-up for the operation. How did these young men turn from students into martyrs? To understand what is happening in the world now we need as full a picture as possible. I agreed to write the script.
The most promising point of entry into the closed world of the Hamburg cell, dramatically speaking, was in the shape of Jarrah. Drama's lifeblood is dilemma and conflict. The burning certainty possessed, say, by Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian hijacker who flew American Airlines flight 11 into the first of the twin towers, does not work well: the true believer never has to explain, he shouts down rather than debates, and never admits to doubt.
Jarrah was born on 11 May, 1975, into a well-to-do family with homes in Beirut and the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon. His parents were not observant Muslims, and young Ziad, an outgoing, friendly boy, went to private Catholic schools. Nothing suggested he took his nominal religion seriously. He went out with girls, drank alcohol and visited nightclubs.
In 1996 Jarrah and his cousin, Salim, went to Germany on student visas to continue their education. Arriving in the economically depressed town of Greifswald - his uncle, Assem, was already there - Jarrah's early impressions of Germany were not positive.
Jarrha was not much taken with his course, but fell in love with a fellow college student, a young woman of Turkish parentage, Aysel Senguen. There was an undertow of anti-immigrant feeling in the town. Bored, isolated and with few friends, Jarrah started to attend prayer meetings at the college organised by an older student, Abdulrahman al-Makhadi. This was to be his first step on the road to 9/11. Makhadi called Jarrah a 'weak Muslim' who didn't know how to say his prayers.
Given Jarrah's indifference to religion, it was interesting to explore why he would seek the company of observant Muslims. Perhaps it was the special hospitality of the Arab world: where Greifswald offered at best indifference, and at worst racist hostility, the prayer group welcomed him as a brother.
The more I read of Islam and talked to observant Muslims, the more I was struck by the idea of brotherhood in the Koran's powerful social message. In the ideal version of Islam, all men are brothers, all women are sisters, and all are part of a community.
While making the film, I watched a Muslim adviser rehearse with the actors. He showed them how to line up for prayer, instructing them to put their feet together, side by side, touching, so 'nothing will come between you'. That way they would be strong enough to resist the devil. He told them: 'The Prophet said, "Always the help of Allah is with the group. Don't let yourself be alone."' It was in the prayer room that the lonely Jarrah found brothers and an authenticity he suspected his life had lacked. For all his spoilt-boy swagger, Jarrah was stricken by self-doubt ('a tree without roots' was how a relative would later describe him to our researchers).
The good-looking, wealthy, party boy had been brought up during Lebanon's vicious civil war. He had played football with kids from the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Chatila, before the camps were devastated by the Ariel Sharon-inspired massacres. Jarrah, of course, knew about the war and the massacres but, as a privileged child, he was not touched by them.
His new brothers included Palestinians, men who spoke fiercely about injustice and oppression experienced at first hand. Nothing in his experience could match the authenticity of Arab agony they talked of; all Jarrah could offer was zeal. 'I want my life to count for something,' he told a friend of Aysel.
He was changing and being pulled in two directions. He remained powerfully attracted to Aysel, and would not give her up, though their relationship was, in Muslim eyes, illicit. At the same time he was being drawn ever closer to his new brothers. It is tempting to portray his 'strange friends' - as Aysel would later call them - as manipulators cynically befriending a vulnerable young man.
During rehearsals, director Antonia Bird, Alice and I encouraged the actors to try to imagine the world from the viewpoint of the characters they were playing. From this perspective, Jarrah appears not as a potentially useful tool, but as someone who is lost and to whom his brothers owe a duty to bring back to God and God's laws. This is an important distinction. Without it, we cannot understand the attraction to serious young Muslims of the solidarity found in radical mosques and prayer groups.
We do not know exactly when Jarrah first came to Hamburg, but by early 1998 he had been introduced to two men who would have a dramatic impact on his fate: Mohamed Atta, a slightly older Egyptian who had come to the city in 1992 to further his studies after graduating in architecture from Cairo University; and Ramzi Binalshibh, a Yemeni asylum seeker who, in order to stay in Germany, had enrolled as a student. Both men were devout and, unlike Jarrah, lived strictly in line with the laws of Islam. To use the cell's terminology, they had 'put God at the centre of their lives'.
Together, Atta and Binalshibh held discussion groups and prayer meetings in rooms at the local al-Quds mosque, which was to become the hub of the Hamburg cell. It would be tempting to present them as lieutenants for terrorist masterminds, carefully grooming potential recruits, but Atta and Binalshibh were on their own journeys and, though they were further on than Jarrah, they still had some way to go.
While astonishingly single-minded, Atta and Binalshibh were in some respects quite naive. Binalshibh was an engaging, even charismatic young man, well liked by those who attended his meetings. Atta, by contrast, was strange and reserved. Most of the westerners who met him, in Germany and America, took an instant dislike to what they saw as his arrogant and aloof personality.
In trying to create characterisation from lives glimpsed from recollection, the writer looks for a set-piece or revealing exchange - sometimes banal - that seems to sum up the man. For me, this came in the account by two young Germans who shared student lodgings with Atta. They describe his utter indifference to creature comforts. For food, Atta would throw unpeeled potatoes into a pot and, when it boiled, mash them into a bowl. He would eat his fill, which was not much, then keep the bowl in the fridge, returning to it as his appetite demanded.
The image of Atta joylessly spooning cold mashed potato into his mouth, taken with everything else we know, strongly suggested a man for whom this world mattered little. By the time Jarrah met him, almost certainly in 1997, Atta was probably thinking of martyrdom.
Atta's two fellow students also recall him being so upset by a poster of a Degas nude that he asked them to remove it from the wall. Atta never had sex, and displayed no serious interest in women. Muslim girls, he said, were too forward, wearing their hijabs as fashion items rather than garments of modesty.
In his will, Atta expressly prohibited any woman from coming to his grave. He ordered that his genitals must not be touched during the preparation of his corpse. To a man so at odds with his body, so uncomfortable with the carnal, the idea of immolation, the complete destruction of the sinful reality of his own flesh, must have appealed: there would be no corpse to view and, one suspects the reasoning went, no imperfections for his enemies to mock.
In Hamburg, where he enrolled to study aeronautical engineering, Jarrah continued to live a double life. His relationship with Aysel was difficult. The two underwent a marriage ceremony in a Hamburg mosque - their parents were not told - but did not even live in the same town (Aysel had moved from Greifswald to Bochum). She resented the time he spent with his new friends and was fearful of their influence over him. As she continued to live a western lifestyle, he rebuked her for not being a good Muslim. They quarrelled often and there were periods of separation. Once he hit her.
Jarrah was spending an increasing amount of time with the group around Atta and Binalshibh, which now included Marwan al-Shehhi, a student from the United Arab Emirates who would pilot the second plane into the twin towers. Their circle was closed and mutually reinforcing. They prayed and talked politics, they listened to the preaching of favoured imams, and watched videos, made and distributed by radical Islamic groups, showing atrocities committed against Muslims in Bosnia, Chechyna and Palestine.
In our film, we show only the briefest of clips, for the carnage on display is so sickening that most western viewers simply wouldn't be able to stomach it. For Jarrah and his friends, however, the images were sickening in a different sense: here was evidence of a new holocaust, against Muslims and denied by the world. The question for Jarrah and the others then became: what were they going to do about it?
Radical Islamists argue there is a Koranic obligation on every able-bodied Muslim male to train for jihad. For many years this was academic, as it was hard to find somewhere to train. But once the Taliban took power in Afghanistan, thousands of young Muslim men - many of them from Britain - went to train in camps set up by the Taliban, al-Qaeda and other fundamentalist organisations.
Their popular image is of dedicated fighters perfecting their combat skills. But for a large proportion of the recruits, training for jihad was little more than a rite of passage. After they had fulfilled their obligation, they returned home - to Birmingham, Marseille or Hamburg - not as terrorist sleepers waiting to be re-activated, but as law-abiding citizens.
A minority, however, were prepared to go on to fight God's enemies, in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Chechnya. An even smaller minority were prepared to go all the way. At the end of 1999, Ziad Jarrah took a momentous step on his journey to 9/11. He followed Atta, Binalshibh and Shehhi in volunteering for a martyrdom operation, as yet unspecified.
For one man, the timing was perfect. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, or KSM, al-Qaeda's director of operations, had been considering using planes as missiles. In the spring of 1999 Osama bin Laden approved the plan and introduced KSM to two men who, like Jarrah, had volunteered for martyrdom: they were Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, both Saudis who had fought in Bosnia.
KSM initially envisaged putting a blizzard of planes into the sky, attacking simultaneously on the east and west coasts of America. The problem was finding enough suitable men. Any number of jihadis were willing to blow themselves up, but KSM's operation required technical competence, familiarity with western manners, reasonable English and steady nerves. They would have to get into the US, surviving visa background checks. This drastically reduced the number of potential candidates.
Jarrah was perfect, however. Re-emerging in Germany after training in Afghanistan, he went to see Aysel. At first, she angrily demanded to know where he had been. Jarrah told her he had been in Afghanistan to fulfil his obligation to train for jihad. His duty done, they could now have a proper wedding in front of their parents and start a family. He would get a job: he was going to America to train as a pilot.
It is likely that most of the conspirators had details of the plot drip-fed to them as the need arose. It is equally likely that they speculated on the nature of their mission, and - putting martyrdom and planes together - had a fair idea of what they would be asked to do. It was only a question of when and where.
Incriminating visas and entry stamps in the passports of Jarrah, Atta, Binalshibh and Shehhi had to go. The passports were replaced with clean documents, and the men applied for visas to enter the US. Only Binalshibh was refused. Over the summer of 2000 Jarrah, Atta and Shehhi arrived in America and went to Florida for flight training.
The two separate groups - Atta's in Florida, al-Hazmi and Mihdhar in San Diego - learnt to fly. KSM, with Binalshibh who commuted between Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the UK, Malaysia and Spain, organised support, money and men to subdue passengers and crew once the jets had been seized.
KSM realised the lack of suitable people meant cutting the number of targets, which were finalised in discussions with bin Laden. By the end of 2000 Jarrah, Atta and Shehhi had pilot's licences. They felt ready to strike, but KSM had problems. A new pilot, Hani Hanjour, had to be sent after al-Hazmi and Mihdhar broke off their training. Other key operatives were unable to get visas.
Now simmering tensions between Atta and Jarrah - always unlikely comrades - came to the boil in the summer of 2001, principally because Atta disapproved of Jarrah's relationship with Aysel. Jarrah made several trips to Ger many and to see his family in Lebanon, and Atta suspected he wanted to pull out. It took all Binalshibh's persuasive powers to get him to stay.
One inevitably speculates on their state of mind. They were living under sentence of death, albeit self-imposed. Atta was not strongly attached to this life. Little in it seemed to please him. But if we can read anything into a photograph used by the media after 11 September, he seemed under acute pressure, his eyes hollow and shadowed, his face gaunt. Yet Shehhi, it seems, was cheerful to the last, often dreaming of the paradise promised to martyrs.
Jarrah's last days suggest he lived a fantasy in final calls to Aysel and his parents. He was due to fly to Lebanon to attend a wedding. He told his father he had the ticket and had bought a new suit. In calls with Aysel he continued to plan their future. It was all a lie.
On the morning of 11 September, he and three accomplices left the Day's Inn Hotel in Newark and caught the shuttle to the terminal. Ziad Jarrah was setting out on his final journey.
· 'The Hamburg Cell' by Ronan Bennett and Alice Perman, directed by Antonia Bird, is to be screened at the Edinburgh Film Festival on Wednesday and Thursday. Ronan Bennett's new novel, 'Havoc, In Its Third Year' is to be published by Bloomsbury on 6 September.
Nope, no audience for that, huh? Nah, let's glorify and salute in film...the Terrs.
Gee, it's almost as if Hollywood wanted us to forget a war was even going on, or why it started.
....He sounds pretty messed up.
....He sounds pretty messed up.
Grind up his body and mix it with pig guts, then feed to the pigs. . .and you have pig doo that smells worse than before.
redrock
Opponents should never rank as "intriguing" until after they are soundly defeated.
I missed the explanation why incidents in Germany, and Bosnia and Chechnya made him attack New York. Though I see a gratuitous "it's the Jews" remark or two.
Kind of lefty wish fulfillment about why they should hate us, but tempered with some nods to reality.
Didnt James Miller the photojournalist who made the pro- pali doc on HBO work for channel 4?
How sad and depressing is it that these most pampered and fawned over of Americans cannot even muster the moral certitude to acknowledge that we are in a war, and who started that war? That they will, instead of "offending" a few small activist (and Terr-connected) groups, ignore the monumental sacrifices and overwhelming valor of our armed forces, who are the sons, daughters, husbands and wives of ALL Americans?
The WWII depictions were moving in their portrayal of Soldiers, so much so that they undoubtedly contributed mightily to the overwhelming celebration those brave men recieved upon their victorious return, and the gratitude they recieved from all America.
That the history of American films, which contains so many outstanding war movies, will NOT have anything of note to remind us all of this most recent and brutal chapter in our country's history is nothing less than a crime.
It would seem that the days of such honorable luminaries as Clark Gable, John Ford, James Stewart, Lee Marvin, and Henry Fonda (ALL of whom VOLUNTARILY served in the Armed Forces), just to name a few; and such others as John Wayne, who portrayed the American Soldier with such obvious respect and admiration, are long gone. Notice, that in the wake of Black Tuesday, exactly ZERO Hollywood "stars" volunteered to suspend, even temporarily, their pampered, million+ dollar-a-movie lives to serve the country which made it all possible. NONE, not actors, not directors, and not screenwriters, are even TRYING to do this war the justice that those fighting it deserve. Its beginning, its implications, and its ultimate results mean nothing to them.
I ask again, for the millionth time it seems, how did we get to this? Was it the '60s generation and its aftermath? Because so many of them chose to desert their country, and then to offer ludicrous rationalizations for their cowardice, that ANY conflict, no matter how justified and righteous, is now "tainted" in the eyes of the elites?
As an American Seviceman myself, far now from my home and family, I count this as nothing less than a betrayal of my service and my country. My country in particular, as there are MILLIONS of Americans out there whose children and spouses and parents' exploits will not be honored in film. How many millions of dollars is THAT, Hollywood? Can the Terr-allied CAIR match THOSE dollars, you ignorant, mercenary bastards? If you cannot bring yourselves to practice patriotism for its own sake, what about the money, Honey? Are you so desperately afraid that by making films honoring those men and women battling right now for YOUR liberties that it will make You, the serial-marrying, coked-out gigolos and gutter sluts with glitter about you, seem so smalll that people might finally see you for what you are, depite the money?
There is more pure honor and decency and pure AMERICA in the lowliest, grease-covered aircraft maintainer in my squadron than there is in ten million of you. One Sailor, Marine, Soldier, or Airman in his uniform is more admirable and worthy of respect than any thousands of you in your Armani and body-waxed fakery. Obviously, he is far more dependable in a bad time, too.
Enjoy your wealth and priviledge, dogs. Wallow in your laughable, screwed-up-like-Hogan's-goat personal lives. Snort up Peru if it numbs the truth to you, and let the personal trainers give you a body that at least LOOKS tough. However, remember well exactly WHY you get to live that way. Remember who it is that enable your pampered, sycophant-slobbered lives as you spit on them. And remember, WE will remember, too.
We'll remember when we return home, once again, to a silent airfield or pier. We'll remember when we decide whether to see yet ANOTHER remake-of-a-remake of a classic from the days you still had consciences. And we'll remember when and if we by chance see one of you out among the "little people" you swear to "care" about, but truly despise in your hearts. We'll remember, all right...to spit on YOU.
After all, turnabout is fair play, mongrels.
Bottom line is, Hollywood WON't make any Terror War films. They do not wish to "offend" anyone (like the Terrs), and do not wish to do anything which might bolster the President. Oh, and they do not wish to "inflame" the populace.
Far cry from WWII.
Filmmakers and actors occupy an almost Royalty-like position in our society. Should they make films which laud the actions of members of society they consider "beneath" them, they fear that that status will be lessened, and they will be seen for the overpaid fops that they are.
In their own minds, they do.
Thanks for serving. And thanks for sharing your thoughts.
We're dealing with a cult.
The alienation from family and friends and the downward spiral into dying for the "religious" belief are characteristic.
My only question is whether the cult consists of Islam itself in its extreme manifestations, or of an actual subgroup such as Takfir wal-Hijra, within Islam. The answer to that question determines whether we are at war with some sort of schismatic extremist cult that has cropped up, or with Islam itself.
Mass-murder-worshiping-leftwinger ping.
The author neglects to mention where they were going on their final journey. Hell, where terrorists check in but they don't check out. They are now way too busy griping about the heat index to give interviews. And they've got to listen to Yassin bitch about the uncomfortable floor he's sitting on. After all, his cushy wheelchair stayed behind and became a shrine.
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