9/11 Terrorists, Terrorism Investigations, Al Qaeda & Jihad History

When star Al-Jazeera TV reporter Yosri Fouda received an anonymous call summoning him to a secret interview in Pakistan with al-Qaeda, he knew he could be walking into a deadly trap, as Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl had done only months before. But he took the risk and hit pay dirt. For 48 hours, Fouda listened as two of the world's most wanted men, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, head of al-Qaeda's military committee, and Ramzi Binalshibh, the link between Mohammed Atta and the senior al-Qaeda leadership, proudly claimed responsibility for the 9/11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon – the first time al-Qaeda took direct responsibility. During the course of the in-depth interview, they detailed exactly how, over a two-year period, the plot was conceived, planned, and executed. Based on that interview and hours of follow-up investigation, MASTERMINDS OF TERROR also contains dramatic accounts of the subsequent seizure of both Binalshibh and Mohammed and analyzes al-Qaeda's attempts to justify its actions on what it calls 'Holy Tuesday.'

The only two brothers who died at the Pentagon on 9/11 were hijackers Nawaf and Salem al-Hamzi. Remains of two brothers were identified by DNA: "The DNA results strengthened the hypothesis that two of the terrorists were brothers, as indicated by other evidence. Two of the terrorist STR profiles aboard the AA Flight 77 gave a sibling index greater than 500. To further test the hypothesis of maternal relatedness, AFDIL sequenced the HVI and HVII regions of mtDNA for these individuals. The sequences generated did match in HVI and HVII, which is consistent with a maternal relationship between the two men."http://www.cstl.nist.gov/div831/strbase/pub_pres/Edson2004.pdf (p. 83)

"In interviews Saturday and Sunday, commission members said they were never told about the meeting despite hours of public and private questioning with Ms. Rice, Mr. Tenet and Mr. Black, much of it focused specifically on how the White House dealt with terrorist threats in the summer of 2001.

''None of this was shared with us in hours of private interviews, including interviews under oath, nor do we have any paper on this,'' said Timothy J. Roemer, a Democratic member of the commission and a former congressman from Indiana. ''I'm deeply disturbed by this. I'm furious.''

Another Democratic commissioner, the former Watergate prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste, said the staff of the Sept. 11 commission was polled in recent days on the disclosures in Mr. Woodward's book and agreed that the meeting ''was never mentioned to us.''

''This is certainly something we would have wanted to know about,'' he said, referring to the meeting. ''We asked broad questions which should have elicited this information.''

Excerpt: "Bin Laden's "legal" innovations are not minor. Following some other radicals, he frequently speaks of the war against Christians and Jews as an individual duty of every Muslim. But according to Islamic law, only defensive jihad is an individual duty; offensive jihad is a collective duty of the Muslim community, to be prosecuted only under the command of a responsible leader.

As classically understood, the law of jihad prohibits the killing of innocents. In 1996, bin Laden denied having targeted civilians, and in 1997 he condemned the United States government's hypocrisy in not calling the bombing of Hiroshima terrorism. Over time, though, bin Laden has come to endorse the targeting of civilians. In November 2001, for example, when asked in an interview whether the killing of civilians (including Muslims) on Sept. 11 was justified, he argued that revenge killings of Americans were justified, and pointed out that Islamic law allows believers to attack invaders even when the enemy uses human shields. But this classical position was originally intended as a legal justification for the accidental killing of civilians under very limited circumstances — not a basis for intentionally targeting noncombatants. Later, in an open letter to Americans posted on the Internet in 2002, bin Laden appears to have abandoned this pseudoscholarly argument in favor of the perverse claim that since the United States is a democracy, all citizens bear responsibility for its government's actions, and civilians are therefore fair targets.

The shift in authority away from the scholars and to the individual is sometimes seen as a feature of an Islamic reformation. If so, its harmful consequences need to be recognized alongside whatever promise it may hold. The individual duty of jihad and the targeting of innocents are the two indispensable pillars of the jihadi movement as it exists today. Bin Laden's move to supplant the scholarly tradition, arrogate authority to himself and embrace violence on a grand scale represents a power grab of historic significance. When bin Laden says he is engaged in a war of religion, he is doing more than trying to mobilize Muslims — he is trying to make himself their legitimate decision maker, and thus their leader.

Ultimately, bin Laden's innovations matter because they point the way to defeating his arguments. Attacks on Muslim civilians in Iraq and Jordan have begun to create some backlash, and the targeting of civilians is once again an issue among jihadis and other Muslims in a way it has not been since 9/11. In the long run, the only way to cut off the international jihadi movement at the root is for Muslims to conclude that their own religious tradition does not countenance the deviations of recent years.

Putting bin Laden's words on paper helps show him for what he is — a Muslim out of the mainstream, distorting the faith to justify murder. In the end, the most constructive thing one can do with a book like this one is to use it against itself, as a tool in the fight against terrorism."