Bin Laden and al Qaeda

Osama bin Laden was the seventeenth of 57 children of a Saudi construction magnate. He went to Afghanistan in the 1980s to help the fight against the Soviet occupation, raising money and recruits and building the network of Arab volunteers that became al Qaeda in 1988. [1]

After the Soviets left, he fell out with the Saudi royal family over its decision to let US troops into the kingdom for the 1991 Gulf War. He moved to Sudan, where he ran businesses and camps, and lost his Saudi citizenship in 1994. Under American and Saudi pressure Sudan made him leave in 1996, and he flew to Afghanistan, where the Taliban were taking power. [1][2]

Sudan’s defense minister later said his government had offered to hand bin Laden to the United States. The 9/11 Commission “found no credible evidence that this was so”: the American ambassador had instructions only to push Sudan to expel him. [2] The FBI put him on its Ten Most Wanted list after the 1998 embassy bombings, for which he was indicted in New York. [3]

The February 1998 statement, signed by bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and leaders of Egyptian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi groups, listed three grievances: US troops in Saudi Arabia, the sanctions and bombing of Iraq, and American support for Israel. Its ruling was that “to kill the Americans and their allies — civilians and military — is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it.” [1]

The Commission describes the declarations as a call for a war meant to drive the United States out of the Muslim world and bring down the governments it supported, from Egypt to Saudi Arabia. [2]

In his October 2004 video bin Laden tied the decision to strike the towers to the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon: as he watched towers in Beirut destroyed, he said, “it entered my mind that we should punish the oppressor in kind and that we should destroy towers in America.” [3] Why people still read these texts, including the 2002 “Letter to America,” is in the motives file.

Five days after the attacks bin Laden issued a statement through Al Jazeera denying he had planned them. People who doubt the official account still quote it. [1]

In December 2001 the Pentagon released a videotape that US forces said they found in a house in Jalalabad. On it bin Laden talks with a visiting sheikh about the attacks, says “we calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy,” and says the destruction exceeded his estimates. The government’s translators said the sound was poor and their transcript was not word for word. Skeptics said the man on the tape looked heavier than bin Laden and that the tape could be a fake. No independent analysis has shown it is. [2]

The later evidence does not depend on that tape. In October 2004, in a video aired by Al Jazeera, bin Laden said he decided on the attack and explained why. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi Binalshibh and other captured planners described bin Laden approving the operation and choosing the hijackers. [3][4]