Posted on 09/11/2001 10:09:22 PM PDT by JohnHuang2
Sept. 11 — Even as dust settled after the worst attack ever on U.S. soil, an inevitable question emerged: Who? The massive, severe scope of Tuesday’s terrorist strike left little doubt in officials’ and experts’ minds about a top suspect: Saudi exile Osama bin Laden, who has sought a role as the United States’ most hated enemy. By Tuesday afternoon, a senior U.S. intelligence official told NBC News that “information developed since the crash strongly indicates that bin Laden’s organization is responsible.”
PRESIDENT BUSH did not mention any possible suspects, but he was unequivocal in his early response to the attacks: “Make no mistake, the United States will hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts.”
Presidential adviser Karen Hughes said federal authorities were working “to identify and bring to swift justice those responsible for these attacks.”
Two senior Clinton counterterrorism officials told NBC that bin Laden’s al-Qaeda — a paramilitary set of terror cells spread across the globe — is the “only organization with motivation [and] capability to execute a mission like this.”
“No one else but bin Laden has the capability to do this,” one said. “No one.”
Private experts were similarly convinced that only one man could be responsible. It was “99.5 percent” likely that bin Laden’s organization was behind the strike, said terrorism expert Sean Anderson of Idaho State University.
Bin Laden, the wealthy son of a Saudi construction magnate, has been credited with building al-Qaeda into a global network. He largely began espousing his fervent beliefs — and rabid anti-American rhetoric — after his work with the mujahedeen during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. He has repeatedly vowed to wage an all-out terrorist war against the United States and its allies.
“It would be very surprising if it didn’t turn out to be bin Laden,” said Dr. Jerrold Post, director of the Political Psychology Program at George Washington University, who has interviewed dozens of terrorists.
Afghanistan’s Taliban government quickly condemned Tuesday’s attack but insisted bin Laden was not involved.
“We have tried out best in the past and we are willing in the future to assure the United States in any kind of way we can that Osama is not involved in these kinds of activities,” the Taliban’s foreign minister, Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, told reporters.
Another Taliban spokesman, Abdul Hai Muttmain, echoed that sentiment. “Such a big conspiracy, to have infiltrated in such a major way is impossible for Osama,” Muttmain told The Associated Press. He said bin Laden does not have the means to orchestrate such a major assault on the United States.
But Abdel-Bari Atwan, editor of the London-based al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper, said bin Laden’s organization was “almost certainly” behind the attack.
“Osama bin Laden warned three weeks ago that he would attack American interests in an unprecedented attack, a very big one,” Atwan told Reuters.
Key to the bin Laden link was the complex but precise nature of the attack — hijackings, multiple airplane crashes into the World Trade Center and on the Pentagon grounds, and another jet taken and crashed in Pennsylvania.
“What we see here is a very sophisticated operation,” said Cassady Craft, a national security expert at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “That probably helps out out in some sense. There’s only a certain number of groups who can pull off such a thing.”
Indeed — only one, according to U.S. intelligence, which has said many of bin Laden’s reported plans involve multiple strikes over multiple days, including a planned attempt to disrupt U.S. millennium celebrations. Algerian native Ahmed Ressam was caught and convicted of trying to plant explosives on targets in Los Angeles, and offered prosecutors evidence of a bin Laden link in the case.
Officials have said the millennium attacks had three components, a strike in Los Angeles and two in the Middle East — one in Yemen and one in Jordan. A later terror strike in Yemen succeeded in October 2000 when a boat filled with explosives rammed the USS Cole, killing 17 sailors. That attack was also reportedly linked to bin Laden.
In 1998, two U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were blown up — again by associates of bin Laden. U.S. intelligence reported that other blasts were planned for the same time in Uganda and Albania. Some 224 people died in the embassy attacks. In response, the Clinton administration used cruise missiles to destroy the site believed to be bin Laden’s camp in Afghanistan, as well as a chemical factory in Sudan. Bin Laden escaped.
“You’ve got an undeclared major war ... by an unknown, unidentified and unlocated enemy,” said Post, who testified in trials of bin Laden associates for the 1998 embassy bombings.
A Clinton administration official said it appeared “nothing on this scale” was ever discussed by U.S. intelligence in recent years.
Intelligence officials have described other attempted attacks by al Qaeda, including a January 1995 effort to plant bombs on 11 U.S. jetliners flying over the Pacific.
And according to testimony at the World Trade Center trial, bin Laden associates in 1993 contemplated flying a small plane into CIA headquarters in Langely, Va. — going so far as to train a pilot in San Antonio, Texas.
Anderson noted that bin Laden, in issuing a fatwa — or holy war edict — against the United States, said he saw no difference between military and civilian targets; as he told a reporter in 1998, “We do not differentiate between those dressed in military uniforms and civilians.”
“I think he’s carrying this out and it’s his idea of carrying on a holy war with the United States and Israel,” Anderson said.
If security officials had no advance notice of an impending strike, it could be what one official described to NBC News as “the worst intelligence failure since Pearl Harbor.” The official noted such attacks take “months, if not years” to plan.
Since the 1993 World Trade Center bombing that killed six — also tied to bin Laden — and the 1996 strike by Timothy McVeigh on a federal building in Oklahoma City, U.S. officials have been driven to shore up what has become known as homeland security, a broad rubric covering everything from nuclear defenses to eco-terrorism.
But most official efforts have been directed at so-called weapons of mass destruction, such as nuclear devices, or biological and chemical attacks. Though cities across the nation trained their emergency services to handle a strike similar to Oklahoma City’s, there has been a growing concern that more conventional methods of attack were disregarded.
“A lot of our attention was directed toward weapons of mass destruction,” Anderson said, “so that we just ignored things under our nose.”
Security at the World Trade Center has tightened enormously since the 1993 attack. But there is, quite simply, no way to protect a building against the sort of attack witnessed Tuesday. Still, it’s possible that the conventional nature of the attack will refocus attention on more traditional security issues, especially safety at airports.
“I hope that this will encourage us to think in new ways about the nature of our security threats,” former National Security Adviser Anthony Lake told NBC’s Tom Brokaw.
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