Four days before the U. Appearing healthy and looking directly into the camera, Bin Laden said that neither President Bush nor his Democratic rival, Sen.
John F. Kerry, held the keys to American security. Your security is in your own hands and each state which does not harm our security will remain safe.
The tape, portions of which were aired first on the Arabic-language Al Jazeera satellite television channel, marked the first time in a year that the Al Qaeda leader had appeared on videotape.
It was also the first time since December that Bin Laden had made a lengthy address on videotape. In the tape, Bin Laden said the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington had been inspired by his anger over the U. He had admitted his role in the attacks in a videotape in December The tape added an uncertain element to the waning days of the presidential campaign and prompted quick responses from the candidates.
For months, Bush and Kerry have made the U. At a campaign stop in West Palm Beach, Fla. They are barbarians. And I will stop at absolutely nothing to hunt down, capture or kill the terrorists wherever they are, whatever it takes.
After a campaign rally in Toledo, Ohio, Bush read a short statement on the airport tarmac. He took no questions. In a separate television interview, Kerry renewed his attacks on Bush for failing to capture the Al Qaeda leader during the battle of Tora Bora in Afghanistan in late Bin Laden was dismissive of both major candidates, although most of his scorn centered on Bush.
It was also unclear whether it portends a new attack. Does concern remain high? He based that on our withdrawal from Vietnam, our withdrawal from Beirut in after the attacks on the Marine barracks and our withdrawal from Mogadishu after the Black Hawk Down incident. His idea was we would pull out of the Middle East, and the regimes [the U. ISIS admires bin Laden. This ideology is going to be hard to kill unfortunately. SC: He was this sort of producer, who was commissioned by the executive producer, bin Laden, to imagine this attack.
When you see the story of his evolution, and the diabolical, almost Hollywood-influenced theatrical, egotistical side of his contribution to this plot, then you can see where this moonshot really came from—the ambition of it, the sheer ambition and the ego. More hijackings, and in the last one, he lands at an airport and gives a press conference.
Who is this guy? I think a lot of people will be surprised to find that he went to school in North Carolina for a part of his education. SC: He was born in Pakistan but grew up in Kuwait. He got involved with politicized Islamic activity as a teenager in Kuwait, as a member of the Muslim Brotherhood—a typical kind of Islamist teenage-radicalization story.
But having this way of thinking about politics and Jihad and faith, he went to the United States for higher education in North Carolina. He fell in with a group of other Muslim students, who studied engineering there. You get the sense throughout the story of how he became more and more violent, and more and more ambitious.
Peter described bin Laden as low key, a very characteristic Saudi Arabian or Gulf cultural style of not thumping the table and not demanding attention. You can sense that part of the story that he played. JM: Afghanistan for him played a role as well—in his transformation into someone who might be objecting to the United States policies, objecting to American culture in some way. From when he was a year-old who was fasting twice a week and praying seven times a day and chanting religious songs about Palestine, even in Saudi Arabia in the s.
I think for bin Laden this was really ideological. PB: He likes the action. Bin Laden had big ideas, they were wrong ideas…. Bin Laden wrote down his ideas repeatedly, and positioned himself as an ideologue. These convictions were the basis of his decision making.
SC: Well, the FBI agents who were chasing him found that some of their best sources were nightclub girls in the Philippines. SC: There are lots of what-ifs in the detective work that could have prevented the attacks. It would have required some different decisions, it would have required some luck, it would have required any number of threads being pulled—and in a timely way.
They got lucky. If the scale of this attack had been prevented—even if the hijackings had been limited to a single one—it would not have changed the course of American history the way September 11 did.
The capacity that they brought to this, the long planning cycle, the multinational conspiracy, the ability to operate without detection, crossing borders, living in the United States. That turned out to be their highest military achievement. If it had been prevented, history might have turn in a different way. But the U. The U. At that point, radical Islamist groups were not much of a threat to the Americans.
They were more concerned with maintaining the balance of power through its allies and ensuring its economic and strategic presence in the Middle East. As well, they attacked the USS Cole in For the now-deceased bin Laden, it was scandalous that Saudis tolerated the presence of a non-Muslim foreign military in the land which was home to the sacred sites of Mecca and Medina.
At first, bin Laden refrained from perpetrating attacks on Saudi soil. Instead, he concentrated his attacks on U. The Clinton administration and the CIA were now worried that the head of the terrorist organization could perpetrate an attack on U.
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