primarily by a religious ideology—and not by opposition to American policies—rejected mentioning the Israeli- Palestinian conflict in the Report. In their view, listing U.S. support for Israel as a root cause of al Qaeda’s opposition to the United States indicated that the United States should reassess that policy.
“To Lee, though, it was not a question of altering support for Israel but of merely stating a fact that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was central to the relations between the Islamic world and the United States—and to bin Laden’s ideology and the support he gained throughout the Islamic world for his jihad against America.” The commissioners resolved their differences by settling on vague language that circumvented the issue of motive.
All the evidence, however, indicates that Palestine was the factor that united the conspirators—at every level. Bin Laden, who repeatedly alluded to it, would at one point try to get KSM to bring forward the 9/11 attack date to coincide with a visit to the White House by Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon.
For KSM, concern about Palestine had been a constant ever since his return from college in the United States. He believed a 9/11-style attack would make Americans focus on “the atrocities that America is committing by supporting Israel.” Separately, in captivity, he has claimed responsibility for the planning or execution of seven attacks on buildings, planes, and other targets, either in Israel or because they were Israeli or “Jewish.”
KSM’s nephew Ramzi Yousef, the 1993 Trade Center bomber, said in the only interview he has been allowed that he believed he—and Palestinians—were “entitled to strike U.S. targets because the United States is a partner in the crimes committed in Palestine.… It finances these crimes and supports them with weapons.”
“If you ask anybody,” Yousef’s accomplice Abdul Murad told police in the Philippines, “even if you ask children, they will tell you that the U.S. is supporting Israel and Israel is killing our Muslim brothers in Palestine. The United States is acting like a terrorist, but nobody can see that.”
Palestine was certainly the principal political grievance—the only clearly expressed grievance—driving the young Arabs in Hamburg. As reported earlier in this chapter, Atta regularly sounded off about the Palestine issue. So did Binalshibh, who would speak of a “world Jewish conspiracy.” A woman with whom he had a brief affair recalled how stridently he condemned the United States for its support for Israel. His “great-grandparents, his grandparents, his parents,” he said, “hated the Jews and if he should have children, they would hate them too.”
Shehhi, though generally a cheery fellow, could on occasion appear saturnine. Asked by an acquaintance why he and Atta seemed rarely to laugh, he responded with a question of his own. “How can you laugh,” he wondered, “when people are dying in Palestine?”
Jarrah also felt strongly about the Palestine issue. “He enlightened me,” his lover Aysel Sengun would remember, “about the problems Muslims have in the Middle East. He also spoke about the intifada. I wouldn’t have known what the intifada meant at that time, because I don’t have a political background. When I asked, Ziad explained it was the freedom struggle of the Palestinians against Israel.”
In his set-piece statement in 1998, bin Laden had issued a call to arms. “With God’s permission,” he had said, “we call on everyone who believes in God … to kill the Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is an individual duty incumbent on every Muslim in all countries … in order to liberate the Al Aqsa Mosque [in Jerusalem] … wars are being waged by the Americans for religious and economic purposes, they also serve the interests of the petty Jewish state, diverting attention from its occupation of Jerusalem.”
In October 1999, at the mosque for the marriage of a member of their group, Binalshibh made a speech— political in spite of the happy occasion—that echoed bin Laden. “The problem of Jerusalem is the problem of the Muslim nation … the problem of every Muslim everywhere.… Every Muslim has the aim to free the Islamic soil from the tyrants and oppressors.”
By that fall, Binalshibh and Atta and their group had become closer than ever. They met together, prayed together, did jobs to earn money together, and spent much of their time together at the three-room apartment on Marienstrasse in Harburg that Atta had rented late the previous year. They called it Dar al-Ansar—House of the Followers—entered the name in their phone books, even scrawled it on the monthly rent check. It mirrored, almost exactly, the name of the guesthouse bin Laden had established, long ago, to house recruits in Pakistan.
These were young men who had long talked of martyrdom. “It is the highest thing to do, to die for jihad,” Binalshibh would say. “The mujahideen die peacefully. They die with a smile on their lips, their dead bodies are soft, while bodies of the killed infidels are stiff.” Jarrah, in some ways the odd man out, had declared early on that he was “dissatisfied” with his life, hoped to find some meaning—“not leave Earth in a natural way.”
The notion of dying for the faith was parroted at the mosque all the time. These men, however, were eager not merely to talk but to act. Jarrah left behind clear evidence on that score, evidence that shows he had long since been hanging on bin Laden’s every word.
Hamburger Mietvertrag fur Wohnraum
Three years earlier, in his Declaration of “Jihad” against the Americans, bin Laden had spoken of the brave young Muslims who “love death as you love life,” who “have no intent but to enter Paradise by killing you.”
In a note dated October 1999, found among his possessions after 9/11, Jarrah used almost the identical phrase: “The morning will come,” he wrote. “The victors will come, will come. We swear to beat you. The earth will shake beneath your feet.” And then, days later: “I came to you with
“Paradise,” Atta and Binalshibh would say, “is overshadowed with swords.” A South African–born Muslim convert who hung out with the group, Shahid Nickels, questioned all the talk about fighting for the cause of Palestine. “Muslims,” he said, “are too weak to do anything against the U.S.A.”
“No, something can be done,” replied Atta. “There are ways. The U.S.A. is not omnipotent.” The exchange took place in November 1999, and—that month and early the next—Atta, Binalshibh, Shehhi, and Jarrah did do something.
They left for bin Laden’s headquarters in Afghanistan.
THE FUTURE HIJACKERS traveled separately, probably for security reasons, to Karachi in Pakistan and on to Kandahar in Afghanistan. There is no doubt they were there. A former bin Laden bodyguard has recalled meeting Atta, Jarrah, and Shehhi. Another jihadi, a man who had also come from Germany, recalled encountering Binalshibh. A handwritten note on Atta was recovered after 9/11 in the bombed-out ruins of a house military chief Mohammed Atef had used.
Apparent proof that the German contingent went to Afghanistan—a link in the chain that the 9/11 Commission did not have—is a videotape reported to be in the hands of the U.S. government. Almost an hour long, it is said to show Atta and Jarrah at Tarnak Farms near Kandahar—the very camp where the CIA had once hoped to have bin Laden kidnapped and spirited away to the United States.
In still photos reportedly taken from the footage, both men are shown neatly bearded and smiling widely—in Atta’s case, an image utterly unlike the grim visage the world was shown after 9/11. Jarrah wears a white robe, apparently over Western clothing, Atta dark trousers and a brown sweater. Atta dons an Afghan-style hat, looks at the camera, takes the hat on and off, then chucks it away. Then he reads to the camera for perhaps ten minutes, to be followed by Jarrah doing likewise.
The video is reportedly silent, but the pair were evidently recording statements to be preserved until after their deaths. The words “al wasiyyah,” Arabic for “will,” can be clearly seen on a paper that Jarrah holds up for the camera before speaking. As he does so, he and Atta both laugh. Then they turn serious as they read out their statements. Clearly recognizable on the tape, seated on the ground among a crowd of about a hundred, is Ramzi Binalshibh.
A segment of the footage depicts the arrival of a very tall, robed figure, surrounded by bodyguards. Bin Laden, of course. If authentic, the videotape is unique evidence of the future hijackers’ presence in Afghanistan.
BOTH KSM and Binalshibh, the sole survivor of the group from Germany, have described the visit to Afghanistan. Except for Shehhi, who left early—he had been suffering from a stomach ailment—they stayed for several weeks, weeks that put them irreversibly on course for 9/11.
For bin Laden, Atef, and KSM, the trio must have seemed, in the true sense of that phrase, sent from God. KSM had only “middling confidence” in Mihdhar and Hazmi, the two remaining pilot hijacker candidates that bin Laden had initially picked. Committed and courageous though they might be, they spoke virtually no English, had no
