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Original Message
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Khalid Sheikh Mohammed: "Yes, we did it."
While the 9/11 conspiracists deny Al-Qaida involvement, Al-Qaida does not. The real 9/11 perpetrators Al-Qaida did claim responsibility for the attacks, and they did so more than once.
In April 2002, some eight months after 9/11, Al-Jazeera reporter Yosri Fouda had an exclusive interview with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the mastermind of the September 11 attacks. He looked Khalid in the eye and asked: "Did you do it?" Khalid didn't flinch. "No filming today," he declared. Then, with little fanfare, Khalid got down to business by making an announcement that hit Fouda like a sucker punch. "I am the head of the Al-Qaida Military Committee, and Ramzi is the coordinator of the Holy Tuesday operation. And yes, we did it."[49] KSM was referring to Ramzi Binalshibh, his close associate and trusted operational assistant, who was also present and equally claimed responsibility for 9/11. The Yemeni born Binalshibh was a prominent member of the terrorist cell in Hamburg formed in the Summer of 1999 and headed by 9/11 suicide pilot Mohammed Atta ("Abu Abdul Rahman"). Following Al-Qaida instructions Binalshibh fled to Afghanistan shortly before September 11 hijackings. There he was personally welcomed by Osama bin Laden. On September 7, 2006 Al-Qaida released a video of Osama bin Laden meeting Ramzi Binalshibh, and both of them were smiling.[50]
KSM told Fouda that "the planning for a martyrdom operation inside America" started "about two and a half years prior to the holy raids on Washington and New York." "As we were discussing targets, we first thought of striking at a couple of nuclear facilities but decided against it for fear it would go out of control." "It was eventually decided to leave out nuclear targets for now." "The attacks were designed to cause as many deaths as possible and havoc and to be a big slap for America on American soil."[51] Ramzi Binalshibh showed Fouda his Hamburg souvenirs: planning materials used by Mohammed Atta and the other hijack pilots as they plotted their attacks: flight manuals, an air navigation map of the American eastern seaboard, flight simulator CD-ROMS, a series of sophisticated illustrations on "How to perform sudden manoeuvres," a page with paragraphs underlined and appended with handwritten notes. Binalshibh explained that it was Atta's handwriting. Fouda: "Ramzi now spoke of how he had himself been eager to take part in the attacks. He had applied three times for a visa to enter America for flight training, but he had been turned down on security grounds."[52] While the visa applications of Atta and the other Hamburg suicide pilots Mohammed Al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah were not turned down, Ramzi Binalshibh had to stay behind to assist Atta and his team in any way possible. "As for the question of coordination," he told Fouda, "it is, in short, a process of linking the cells to one another, establishing a communication hub between these cells on the one hand and the General Command in Afghanistan on the other hand, and defining the priorities of action for these cells." He explained that the targets were referred to in coded communication between the hijackers and their Al-Qaida contacts as "The Faculty of Fine Arts" (Pentagon), "The Faculty of Town Planning" (Twin Towers) and "the Faculty of Law" (Capitol Hill). This part of the interview was broadcast by Al-Jazeera on 11 September 2002 and summarized in The Sunday Times.[53] Binalshibh said: "These are very apprehensive moments. You are going into an unconventional battle against the most powerful force on earth. You are facing them on their land, among their forces, and soldiers, you fight with a small group of 19 (hijackers)."[54] Khalid Sheikh Mohammed said the so-called muscle hijackers knew they were in for a martyrdom operation. "But to prevent any leakage of information, they were not informed of many details. We told that brother Abu Abdul Rahman (the lead hijacker Mohammed Atta) would provide them with details at a later stage." Binalshibh said that Al-Qaida never doubted the hijackers' loyalty. "They were never influenced by corrupt America... or temptations." (This is not true: two of the hijackers visited a striptease club the "Olympic Garden Topless Cabaret" in Las Vegas[55], and on the night of September 10, they watched a pay perview porn film in their motel room; no doubt they were already longing for the "virgins' in paradise.[56])
In 2002, The German Federal Criminal Office (Bundeskriminalamt or BKA) and the Public Prosecutor (Generalbundesanwalt or GBA) thoroughly investigated Mohammed Atta's terror network in Hamburg. (I summarized the BKA and GBA documents in my Dutch book on "Al-Qaida's Deadly Planning".) Flight manuals and flight simulation programs were discovered. And then there was something quite interesting about Marwan Al-Shehhi, one of the September 11 suicide pilots. In April 2000, Al-Shehhi was seen in a German public library. Between 6 December 1999 and 5 January 2000 Al-Shehhi had been in Afghanistan where he and the other Hamburg suicide pilots had been personally instructed by Osama bin Laden to prepare terrorist attacks on America. A female staff member of the library heard how Al-Shehhi was lashing out against America, saying: "You are going to see it, there will be thousands of deaths. And then you will think about me." He explicitly mentioned the World Trade Center in New York.[57]
Osama bin Laden: "I was responsible."
Al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden repeatedly claimed responsibility for the September 11 attacks, most recently on May 23, 2006: "I was responsible for entrusting the 19 brothers Allah have mercy upon them with those raids."[58]
In his first interview after 9/11 Osama bin Laden said "that the events that happened on Tuesday September 11 in New York and Washington are truly great events by any measure." They were "successful and blessed attacks." "We implore God to accept those brothers (who carried them out) within the ranks of the martyrs, and to admit them to the highest levels of Paradise."[59] Bin Laden was interviewed on October 20, 2001 by Al-Jazeera Bureauchief Taysir Alluni (Kabul). Alluni himself, who also had a Spanish passport, has been linked by Spanish prosecutors to Al-Qaida. (I saw some of the Spanish documents and they looked pretty convincing, but Alluni strongly denied these accusations in court.) At the end of December 2001 bin Laden sent his "Christmas message" to the world. It was about "nineteen post-secondary students who shook America's throne" the 9/11 hijackers, most of whom were from Saudi Arabia. "Those young men," bin Laden continued, "did a very great deed. God rewarded them and we pray that their parents will be proud of them, because they raised Muslims' heads high and taught America a lesson it won't forget, with God's will." He also warned: "What is yet to come will be even greater."[60] "From Saudi Arabia fifteen young men set out we pray to God to accept them as martyrs. They set out from the land of faith, where lies the Muslims' greatest treasure, where faith returns, as our prophet rightly said, to Medina, just as the snake returns to its hole. Another two came from the Eastern Peninsula, from the Emirates (Marwan Al-Shehhi, V.), another from the Levant, Ziad Al-Jarrah, and another from the land of Egypt, Mohammed Atta, may God accept all of them as martyrs." "God opened the way for these young men to tell America, the head of global unbelief, and its allies, that they are living in falsehood. They sacrificed themselves for There is no god bur God'."[61]
Three years later, in October, 2004, Al-Jazeera received a videotape from the "Al-Sahab Institute of Media Production," Al-Qaida's propaganda department. Bin Laden's new message was broadcast by Al-Jazeera on October 29, 2004, four days before the presidential elections in the United States. And again, bin Laden heaped praise on his 9/11 operative Mohammed Atta: "For your information, we agreed with the general commander Muhammed Atta, may God bless his soul, to carry out all operations within twenty minutes, before Bush and his administration could be aware of them, and it did not occur to us that the Commander-in-Chief of the American armed forces would leave fifty thousand of his citizens in the two towers to face this great horror on their own, just when they needed him most. It seems that a little girl's story about a goat and its butting was more important than dealing with aeroplanes and their butting into skyscrapers. This gave us three times the amount of required time to carry out the operations, praise be to God."[62]
In mid-November 2001, Osama bin Laden spoke to a room of supporters in Afghanistan and his comments were taped with the knowledge of bin Laden and all present. The video tape was later obtained by U.S. forces in Jalalabad, Afghanistan in late November and subsequently released by the Defense Department on December 13, 2001. Among his close friends bin Laden freely discussed the 9/11 attacks: "We calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy, who would be killed based on the position of the tower. We calculated that the floors that would be hit would be three or four floors. I was the most optimistic of them all. Due to my experience in this field, I was thinking that the fire from the gas in the plane would melt the iron structure of the building and collapse the area where the plane hit and all the floors above it only. This is all that we had hoped for."[63] Bin Laden then explained that he heard on the radio that a plane had just hit the World Trade Center. "After a little while, they announced that another plane had hit the World Trade Center. The brothers who heard the news were overjoyed by it."
A number of 9/11 conspiracists have argued that this Bin Laden tape is a fraud. It is of very poor quality. The man the Defense Department claims is Osama bin Laden is barely audible, so the translations must have been manipulated. "The man in the video looks and acts nothing like bin Laden," says a commentator in the documentary Loose Change.[64] There is a small problem, however. The translations have been thoroughly checked, the tape was broadcast on CNN in Arabic and subtitled in English. Any Arabist could check what was being said and very few if any argued that the translations fully contradicted what bin Laden was saying. I myself am in possession of a high quality television tape. Opinions may differ on details, the essential parts of the translations have not really been contested. In addition, bin Laden himself never distanced himself from the tape. To my knowledge (if I am wrong, please correct me) he never denied it was him who was saying all these things while meeting friends and close associates in Kandahar or Jalalabad. So, there no conclusive proof that the tape was a fraud or that it has been manipulated.
The first time I saw bin Laden's name in the Arab press was in May/June 1995 when he was trying establish a major media institution in London. In the Summer and Autumn of 1995 I was too busy with reporting on other things and I could not concentrate. Between February and April 1996 I began to write a book in Dutch on "Islamic Fundamentalism and Terrorism." I heard more about bin Laden and did some additional research on him and in March 1997 my book was finally published. Ten years later I am happy that I proceeded with this project and paid attention to bin Laden's role in international terrorism in my book. Five or four years before 9/11 few western journalists and terrorism experts were aware of the existence of a man named Osama bin Laden. I know about one journalist who tried to trace him in Sudan. Now, ten years after I did my first researches on bin Laden, I am, of course, much more worried about him. The fact that he has never been caught, worries me tremendously. It was a grave error that the Americans let him escape from Tora Bora.
September 7-11, 2006
[link to www.militantislammonitor.org]
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