The Eleventh Day

should remind him that this operation is for the sake of God.…

“When the true promise and zero hour approaches,” the manual’s readers were told, “tear open your clothing and bare your chest, welcoming death on the path of God. Always mind God, either by ending with the ritual prayer—if this is possible—starting it seconds before the target, or let your last words be, ‘There is no God but God, and Muhammed is his Prophet.’ After that, God willing, the meeting in the highest Paradise will follow.”

So powerful is this document, so revelatory of the planning for the 9/11 hijackings—and the religious mind-set that drove them—it seems incomprehensible that the official U.S. account did not mention it at all. Professor Hans Kippenberg, coauthor of the most thorough study of the hijackers’ manual, has a theory.

“To those who investigated the events of September 11,” said Kippenberg, who is professor of Comparative Religious Studies at Jacobs University in Bremen, Germany,

the terrorists were people without any conscience or moral compass, intentionally attacking civilians. In fact, far from being devoid of morality, the terrorists had an excess of it. They sought to bring summary justice to bear on those who—the way they saw it—inflicted injustice on their people.

Civilians did die in the process. But the real targets, in the hijackers’ minds, were the power centers of the United States: the financial hub by striking New York’s Trade Center, the military hub by hitting the Pentagon, and —if as many think the plane that crashed in open country was meant to hit the Capitol or the White House—the heart of political power. I don’t think the Americans could quite handle the concept that the attackers went ahead with what they did impelled by what they believed their religion required. No one who reads the hijackers’ “manual,” though, can do so without seeing that it, certainly, is totally driven by faith.

ALL OTHER EVIDENCE ASIDE, the “Spiritual Manual” must surely close off all doubt as to whether Atta and his comrades committed the hijacking. How the attacks were planned, and who was behind them, was another question. Was Osama bin Laden the eminence grise of 9/11, as President Bush’s advisers had promptly told him?

In the days and weeks after 9/11, the man himself issued a string of denials, equivocations, and lofty comments. “We believe,” bin Laden said the very day after in a message sent through an associate, “what happened in Washington and elsewhere against Americans, it was punishment from Almighty Allah. And they were good people who have done it. We agree with them.” According to the go-between, bin Laden had “thanked Almighty Allah and bowed before him” on hearing the news, but had “no information or knowledge about the attack.”

Four days later, on the Qatar-based television channel Al Jazeera, an announcer read out a first-person statement from the exiled Saudi: “I would like to assure the world that I did not plan the recent attacks, which seem to have been planned by people for personal reasons,” it said. “I have been living in the Islamic emirate of Afghanistan and following its leader’s rules. The current leader does not allow me to exercise such operations.” A spokesman for the Taliban regime, for its part, said it accepted bin Laden’s denial.

Late in September, he denied it yet again. “As a Muslim,” he told a Pakistani newspaper, “I try my best to avoid telling a lie. I had no knowledge of these attacks.… Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent women, children and other people … even in battle.… We are against the American system, not against its people.”

A few weeks later, though, the denial was blurred, the outright rejection of killing civilians dissipated. “Whenever we kill their civilians,” he told Al Jazeera, “the whole world yells at us from East to West.… I say to those who talk about the innocents in America, they haven’t tasted yet the heat of the loss of children and they haven’t seen the look on the faces of the children in Palestine and elsewhere.… Who says our blood isn’t blood and their blood is blood?”

For bin Laden, the 9/11 hijackers were heroes. “As concerns [America’s] description of these attacks as terrorist acts,” he said, “that description is wrong. These young men, for whom God has created a path, have shifted the battle to the heart of the United States.… We implore God to accept those brothers within the ranks of the martyrs, and to admit them to the highest levels of Paradise.… They have done this because of our words—and we have previously incited and roused them to action—in self-defense, defense of our brothers and sons in Palestine and in order to free our holy sanctuaries. If inciting for these reasons is terrorism, and if killing those that kill our sons is terrorism, then let history witness that we are terrorists.”

Three weeks after 9/11, a single intelligence report—leaked to the media—seemed to speak as loud as the man’s own denials. On the very eve of the attacks, The New York Times and NBC News reported, bin Laden had made a telephone call to his mother, Allia. He had always spoken affectionately of her, and she for her part had visited him in Afghanistan. She was on vacation in Syria in early September, and reportedly hoped he might be able to join her there. In the phone call, though, bin Laden said he would not be joining her.

“In two days,” he reportedly told his mother, “you’re going to hear big news.” After the big news broke, he added, “You’re not going to hear from me for a long time.”

The story seemed loaded with sinister implication, but was it true? NBC could quote only “sources” who said the information—apparently gleaned by electronic eavesdropping—came from “a foreign intelligence service.”

Just weeks later, in a rare interview, bin Laden’s mother said the story was false. Her son had not risked phoning for the past six years. “I would never disavow him,” she went on. “Osama has always been a good son to me … very kind, very considerate and very sweet … I love him and care about him.” Allia was convinced, she said, that bin Laden was not responsible for 9/11.

In November, two months after the attacks, bin Laden gave the Pakistani newspaperman Hamid Mir a lengthy interview—one of only two interviews he granted in the past decade. He had talked with Mir twice before, seemed to think his reporting had been fair, and arranged for the journalist to be brought to him—trussed up and blindfolded during a lengthy jeep ride—at a secret hideout.

Bin Laden responded to most of the journalist’s forty prepared questions, but on occasion made it clear he did not wish to go on the record. “I asked Osama whether he had done 9/11,” Mir said in 2009, “and he asked me to turn off my recording machine. Then he said, ‘Yes.’ But when I turned on my machine again, he said, ‘No.’ ”

FIFTEEN

THE TRUTH OFFICIALDOM GAVE US, THAT YOUNG MEN LOYAL TO al Qaeda and bin Laden were responsible for carrying out the attacks, is not the full story. The 9/11 Commission varnished the story for public consumption, spared the American people knowledge of troubling factors and issues—perhaps because they were highly sensitive, perhaps because pursuit of them involved banging on doors that seemed best left closed, perhaps simply because they remained unresolved.

The Nation’s David Corn, rightly dismissive of most of the skeptics’ ramblings, has made the point that serious matters have yet to be explained. “Without conspiracy theories,” he wrote, “there is much to wonder about September 11th … Official answers ought not to be absorbed automatically without questions.” Others agreed that what Corn saw as the failings of the U.S. government and the intelligence community should be exposed—and this well after publication of the 9/11 Commission Report.

No one at all, reportedly, has been held accountable for the mis-steps that preceded the September 11 attacks. There were no known dismissals, demotions, or even formal reprimands—at any level in the government or in government agencies. “No one has taken the fall for the failure to prevent attacks that killed 2,819 people,” former Bush White House aide Richard Falkenrath noted following publication of the Report. “They could perhaps have been prevented … the starting point in any after the fact analysis should always be the concept of personal responsibility.”

“Why did 9/11 happen on George Bush’s watch,” Senator Patrick Leahy asked in 2006, “when he had clear warnings that it was going to happen? Why did they allow it to happen?” Just what the President and his senior aides had been told, when they had been told it, and how they responded, had long been a vexatious issue. Why did CIA director Tenet tell the Commission that he had not briefed Bush in August 2001, only for it to emerge that he in fact saw him twice?

The previous month, according to Tenet, he and top aides had met with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to deliver a dire warning that a major al Qaeda attack was imminent. According to one of America’s most distinguished reporters, she responded by giving them the “brush-off.” Rice said she could not recall the meeting. The record shows the 9/11 Commission was told of the meeting, but there was no mention of it in the 9/11 Commission Report. Why not?