In southern England, former Huffman student pilot Ann Greaves recognized Atta’s picture the moment it was shown on television. “It was the sort of face that once you’d seen it you would never forget it,” she remembered. “His bearing was that of someone very much in command.”
Rudi Dekkers, the Dutchman who ran Huffman, was soon besieged by journalists from around the world. He said he had assumed Atta and Shehhi had been at the school, like his many other foreign students, just to get their pilot’s licenses. There had been no reason to inquire about their longer term plans.
BY MIDNIGHT on September 11, agents had evidence that appeared to dispel any doubt as to the suspects’ guilt and what their purpose had been—in Mohamed Atta’s luggage. Atta and Omari had checked two suitcases when they arrived at Portland Airport, a green one and a black pull-along. When they made their connection to American 11 at Boston, however, the suitcases did not. The baggage reached the plane too late to be loaded. Atta, already on board and waiting for takeoff, had apparently been concerned about the bags—a flight attendant, presumably at his behest, had asked ground staff whether the bags safely made the transfer. If Atta did worry that the suitcases would be found later and searched, he worried with good reason.
Atta’s pull-along bag turned out to be a window on his life—and on the nature of the 9/11 attacks. It contained his Egyptian passport and ID, which revealed his full name, a report card from the Faculty of Engineering at Cairo University, and an addressed envelope indicating that he had lived in Germany. There were videotapes of Boeing 747 and 757 operating procedures, flight simulator information, and a flight computer in a case. A copy of the Qur’an, a prayer schedule, and Atta’s will—written and signed when he was only twenty-seven—revealed him to be intensely religious.
The significance of all that, however, paled beside that of another document. Seventeen days after the attacks, the FBI released four pages of Arabic script that had also been found in Atta’s bag. Further copies were recovered, moreover, one in the car Hazmi abandoned at Dulles Airport, another—apparently a remnant—at the United 93 crash scene in Pennsylvania. Neither the 9/11 Commission Report nor a Commission staff document—released later—even mentions the find. An obscure footnote lists the various other contents of the retrieved baggage, but not the document.
The omission is extraordinary, unconscionable, for the telltale pages were important evidence. Scholars who have translated and analyzed them have described them as nothing less than a “Spiritual Manual” or “Handbook” for the 9/11 attacks. Intensely religious in tone from beginning to end, the document is a mix of counsel, comfort, inspiration, and practical instruction—complex in many ways, replete with references obscure to the non-Muslim Westerner—but its thrust is clear. The pages offered the hijackers detailed advice on how to prepare for the attacks—and for death.
The manual opens with instructions for its readers’ “Last Night,” a time to stay awake, to meditate, pray, renew the “mutual pledge to die,” to contemplate “the eternal blessing God has prepared for the believers, especially for the martyrs.”
As physical preparation, readers were reminded of the importance of “shaving off excess hair from the body and perfuming oneself” and “Performing the greater ritual ablution [washing thoroughly].” The manual urged the old custom of nafth—spitting—to bring protection. Readers were to spit on “the suitcase, the clothing, the knife … equipment … ID … tdh [probably an abbreviation of tadh-kira, ticket] … passport … all your papers.” “Each one of you must sharpen his knife.”
The car journey to the “m” [the abbreviation, probably, of matar, airport] was to include further prayers, the prayer for travel, the prayer for arriving. Then the prayer: “O God, protect us from them … O God, we throw you against their throats and we seek refuge in you from their evil … Those who are enchanted by Western civilization are people who have drunk their love and reverence with cold water … Therefore do not fear them; but fear you Me, if you are believers” [Qur’an 3:175].
The “Spiritual Manual,” apparently written to steel the resolve of the hijackers for the 9/11 attack.
Readers were to recite repeatedly the first part of the Islamic creed, la ilaha illa llah—“There is no god but God.” Care was to be taken, however, to appear to be silent, to ensure that “nobody takes notice.” “Don’t show signs of confusion or tension, but be happy, cheerful, bright and confident, because you carry out an action that God loves and approves … Smile in the face of death, young man, for you will soon enter the eternal abode.
“When you board the ‘t’ [the abbreviation, probably, for ta’ira airplane],” the manual continued, “proceed with the prayer … and consider that it is a raid on the path [of God] … When the ‘t’ begins to move slightly and heads for the ‘q’ [perhaps standing for the Arabic word for ‘takeoff position,’ or perhaps for Qiblah, the direction of Mecca, toward which the planes did point once diverted], recite the prayer of travel because you are traveling to God the Most High, for you are traveling to Allah … This is the moment of the encounter of the two camps. Recite prayers … ‘Our Lord, pour out upon us patience, and make firm our feet, and give us aid against the people of the unbelievers.’
“Pray for victory, assistance and the hitting of the target for yourself and for all your brothers, and don’t be afraid. And ask God to grant you martyrdom … In close combat, strike firmly like heroes who do not wish to return to this world. Exclaim loudly Allahu akbar, because the exclaiming of Allahu akbar strikes fear into the unbelievers’ hearts … the heavenly virgins are calling you, saying, ‘O friend of God, come!’
“And when God grants any of you a slaughter,” the text counseled, “you should dedicate it to your father and mother.”
Those to be killed were the passengers and crews of the airliners. The Arabic word used for “slaughter” in the text is dhabaha—the word used for the cutting of an animal’s throat.
“If everything has come off well, each of you is to pat his apartment brother on the shoulder. And in the m [airport] and in the t [plane] and in the k [perhaps the abbreviation for kabina—cockpit] (each of you) 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 f
aith.
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 éminence 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 missteps 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?
“As each day goes by,” Senator Max Cleland had said shortly before resigning as a member of the 9/11 Commission, “we learn that this government knew a whole lot more about these terrorists before September 11 than it ever admitted.” Such doubts proved durable.
The agency most directly responsible for protecting the almost two million people who took flights every day in the States, the Federal Aviation Administration, seems to have been at best ineffectual, at worst fatally irresponsible, in the months and years before the attacks. The 9/11 Commission heard shocking testimony, which went unmentioned in its Report, from an experienced FAA team leader whose job it was to conduct undercover tests on airport security.
After September 11, said Bogdan Dzakovic, “officials from FAA as well as other government agencies made defensive statements such as, ‘How could we have known this was going to happen?’ The truth is, they did know.… FAA very deliberately orchestrated a dangerous
facade of security.… They knew how vulnerable aviation security was. They knew the terrorist threat was rising, but gambled nothing would happen if we kept the vulnerability secret and didn’t disrupt the airline industry. Our country lost that bet.”
In the spring and summer of 2001, half of the FAA’s daily summaries had mentioned bin Laden or al Qaeda. In July, it had “encouraged” all airlines to “exercise prudence and demonstrate a high degree of alertness.” There was little or no real drive to ensure that better security was enforced, however, no sense of urgency at the level that mattered.
The US Airways ticket taker who checked in Atta and Omari in Portland for the first leg of their journey, Michael Touhey, would recall having had a “bad feeling” about them. They arrived just minutes before departure and carried expensive one-way, first-class tickets—though most business travelers fly round-trip. Had he received instructions to be more vigilant, he said later, he thought he would have acted differently. He might have ordered a search of the men’s bags, which could have turned up suspicious items. There had been no such instructions, however, and Touhey let the men go on their way.
“I’ve been with American for twenty-nine years,” said Rosemary Dillard, whose husband died aboard Flight 77. “My job was supervision over all the flight attendants who flew out of National, Baltimore or Dulles. In the summer of 2001, we had absolutely no warnings about any threats of hijacking or terrorism, from the airline or from the FAA.” A key part of the FAA’s mandate is to keep air travelers safe, and in that it signally failed.
The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden Page 18