The Bin Ladens

running away, we go after it.”²⁴

Also in Boston, Sanaa Bin Laden, a half-sister of Osama’s who spent much of her time in New England, had joined the flight. She had worked on children’s cultural exhibitions in Boston. She was about forty years old, one of several middle-aged Bin Laden mothers now on the plane. Blum noticed that the older women tended to dress more conservatively—usually headscarves or something similar. Even more striking, as they neared Paris, all the Bin Laden women, young or old, in Western designer clothes or not, prepared to cover themselves in full black abayas. Blum learned that they would transfer in Paris to a Saudi government plane for the last leg home. When they stepped onto that Saudi aircraft, they would effectively reenter the kingdom; some of the women waited as long as possible, as they crossed the Atlantic, to transform themselves appropriately.

ONE BIN LADEN stayed behind: Abdullah, the longtime Harvard law student who lived in Boston. He was thirty-five years old and had now spent the majority of his adult life in the United States. He retained some faith in the resilience and tolerance of American society. After the attacks, he told his younger nieces and nephews, the ones who had been pulled out of college in Boston, “Believe me, if any society is going to understand your case, is going to differentiate between good and evil, it is here.” He later told a reporter, “I’m here, a member of my family is being accused, and still I’m being treated as a human being.” In the weeks following the evacuation flight, Abdullah traveled between Boston, New York, Washington, and London, searching for a public relations strategy that might salvage some of their standing in the United States and Europe.²⁵

He contacted Steven Goldstein, a communications strategist in New York who happened to be Jewish. They met at a cafe in New York City. The Bin Ladens had no previous connections with his firm. Abdullah said the family was looking for a way to publicize the fact that they had previously renounced Osama, Goldstein recalled.²⁶

He did not know where his half-brother was hiding, Abdullah said. Goldstein asked if Osama had always been “a madman.” Abdullah said that while Osama had never loved America, something in the mid-1990s had made him snap.

Abdullah said he regarded Goldstein’s Jewish heritage as “a plus.” He also asked, according to Goldstein, “Do you know any Jewish lawyers?” Goldstein bristled and tried to keep his composure. Abdullah seemed oblivious to the possibility that his preference for Jewish representation might be offensive. At best Abdullah’s approach was naive—an insensitive attempt to associate the Bin Ladens with American diversity and values. Perhaps he harbored less attractive thoughts—that Jews were always for hire at the right price, or that he could leverage their supposedly hidden powers in America to aid his family. In any event, Goldstein turned Abdullah down.²⁷

IN AFGHANISTAN, Osama Bin Laden held two lengthy and reflective conversations with sympathetic visitors during the first two months after the September 11 attacks. Both conversations were recorded, although neither was broadcast immediately.

The full transcripts suggest that like his adversaries in America, Osama had spent many hours after the attacks glued to a television, watching news report after news report, commentary after commentary. Osama seemed particularly vulnerable to feelings of aggravation about President Bush’s language and attitude. He also apparently was infused by feelings of defensiveness about the accusation, so often repeated in American and some Arab news broadcasts, that whatever the merits of Al Qaeda’s political grievances, Osama had discredited himself by taking the lives of so many innocents.

On October 20, 2001, he sat down with the Syrian-born, Spanish national Taysir Allouni, a reporter for Al- Jazeera. In the first part of their interview discussion, Osama performed in a familiar manner, and he sounded some of his stock themes: America was a paper tiger; its economy and political system would collapse in the face of determined jihad, as had happened to the Soviet Union. He reeled off a series of calculations based on the reported figures of Wall Street stock market losses after September 11. He sounded as if he had recently been sitting in front of his television or his computer, furiously scribbling down numerical estimates:

According to their own admission, the share of the losses on Wall Street market reached sixteen percent. They said that this number is a record…The gross amount that is traded in that market reaches $4 trillion. So if we multiply 16 percent by $4 trillion…it reaches $640 billion of losses from stocks, with God’s grace, an amount that is equivalent to the budget of Sudan for 640 years…The daily income of the American nation is $20 billion. The first week they didn’t work at all as a result of the psychological shock…So if you multiply $20 billion by one week, it comes to $140 billion…If you add it to the $640 billion, we’ve reached how much? Approximately $800 billion… ²⁸

On he went, swerving between accountancy and the poetical rhetoric of a typical tenor. Then the interview took a striking turn.

“What about the killing of innocent civilians?” Allouni asked.

“It is very strange for Americans and other educated people to talk about the killing of innocent civilians,” Osama answered.

“I mean,” he continued, “Who said that our children and civilians are not innocents, and that the shedding of their blood is permissible. Whenever we kill their civilians, the whole world yells at us from East to West, and America starts putting pressure on its allies and puppets…There is a strong instinct in humans to lean towards the powerful without knowing it, so when they talk about us, they know we will not answer them…”

“So you say that it is an eye for an eye? They kill our innocents, so we kill theirs?”

“Yes, so we kill their innocents—this is valid both religiously and logically. But some of the people who talk about this issue, discuss it from a religious point of view…They say that the killing of innocents is wrong and invalid, and for proof, they say that the Prophet forbade the killing of children and women, and that is true…”

“This is precisely what I’m talking about!” Allouni interrupted. “This is exactly what I’m asking you about!”

“…But this forbidding of killing children and innocents is not set in stone, and there are other writings that uphold it.”

Now Osama embarked on a different justification, one that seemed to contradict his own argument: He defended himself by saying that he hadn’t actually intended to kill people who should be classified as innocents. “[We] didn’t set out to kill children,” he said, “but rather attacked the biggest center of military power in the world, the Pentagon, which contains more than 64,000 workers, a military base which has a big concentration of army and intelligence.”

“What about the World Trade Center?”

“As for the World Trade Center, the ones who were attacked who died in it were part of a financial power. It wasn’t a children’s school! Neither was it a residence. And the general consensus is that most of the people who were in the towers were men that backed the biggest financial force in the world…And those individuals should stand before God, and rethink and redo their calculations.”

Immediately, however, Osama returned to his first argument: Even if they were innocent, his attack was justified on the basis of retribution: “We treat others like they treat us. Those who kill our women and our innocent, we kill their women and innocent, until they stop doing so.” These were the evasions of a man who had apparently not expected to be criticized or questioned on the issue.

A little later, Osama assessed Bush’s ill-considered use of the word “Crusade” to describe America’s response to September 11: “So Bush has declared in his own words: ‘Crusade attack.’ The odd thing about this is that he has taken the word right out of our mouth…People make apologies for him and they say that he didn’t mean to say that this war is a Crusade, even though he himself said that it was! So the world today is split into two parts, as Bush said: Either you are with us, or you are with terrorism. Either you are with the Crusade, or you are with Islam. Bush’s image today is of him being in the front of the line, yelling and carrying his big cross.”²⁹

There was something striking and authentic in this entire exchange—perhaps it was the absence of Osama’s self-mystifying verses, and the absence, too, of archaic language, Koranic justification, or reference to ancient maps. Here was a well-informed, up-to-date media consumer and amateur political analyst defending the violence he sponsored through straightforward argument, as if he were appearing at a mosque debate or on a televised