September 11 Attacks

Names on a Wall, Questions in the Air

At the place where the towers once stood, plans for memorial services focused on the unforgiving number: 2,606 lives lost inside the World Trade Center.^[2] The ceremonies were meant to be about remembrance, not geopolitics.

Bin Laden’s War in His Own Words

Weeks after the attacks, journalist Hamid Mir was escorted to an undisclosed location close to Kabul, Afghanistan, where he spent two hours interviewing Osama bin Laden.^[1] Parts of that interview appeared in Urdu in the Daily Ausaf and in English in Dawn, a Karachi-based paper.^[1] Mir told reporters that more material from the interview would be released in the coming days.^[1]

In that conversation, bin Laden framed himself not as a mass-murderer but as a commander in a defensive holy war. He said that after the American bombing of Afghanistan began on 7 October, he had told Al‑Jazeera that the 11 September attacks “had been carried out by some Muslims.”^[1] The Americans, he said, had released a list of suspects; he claimed those named were involved, were all Muslims, and were all passengers on the planes.^[1]

He added a stark detail: 15 of the suspects on that list, he said, were from Saudi Arabia, two from the United Arab Emirates, and one from Egypt.^[1] America, he noted, called them hijackers.^[1] He claimed mourning rites—Fateha—had already been held for them in their homes.^[1]

Yet even as he acknowledged that “some Muslims” had carried out the attacks, bin Laden insisted that America did not have “solid proof” against him and possessed only “surmises,” calling it unjust to start bombing on that basis.^[1] If the Americans had charges against him, he said, “we too have a charge sheet against them.”^[1]

A Theology of Reprisal

In Mir’s account, bin Laden built a moral scaffolding around 9/11. He said that if an enemy occupies Muslim territory and uses common people as human shields, it is permitted to attack that enemy.^[1] Muslims, he argued, had the right to attack America “in reprisal.”^[1]

Defying Clerics, Threatening Deterrence

Even within the Muslim world, bin Laden faced criticism. He said the head of Egypt’s Jamia Al‑Azhar had issued a fatwa declaring that his views and beliefs had nothing to do with Islam.^[1] He brushed that aside, saying the fatwa of any “official cleric” had no value for him, and accusing some religious scholars of justifying usury, the occupation of Palestine by Jews, and the presence of American troops near Islam’s holy places.^[1] The “true” ulema, he claimed, supported jihad against America.^[1]

He described Israeli forces as occupying “our land” and American troops as being on “our territory,” saying they had no option but to launch jihad.^[1] Afghanistan, he declared, was the only Islamic country; he said Pakistan followed English law and that he did not consider Saudi Arabia an Islamic state.^[1]

Bin Laden also alluded to weapons of mass destruction. He said he heard President George W. Bush warn European countries that bin Laden wanted to attack with such weapons.^[1] If America used chemical or nuclear arms against them, he said, “they may retort with chemical and nuclear weapons,” claiming, “We have the weapons as deterrent.”^[1] When asked where those weapons came from, he reportedly replied, “Go to the next question.”^[1]

He presented himself as a man on a divinely mandated mission. He said he and his followers were carrying on the mission of the Prophet Muhammad, whose purpose he described as spreading the word of God, “not to massacre people.”^[1] He insisted he had not chosen this life out of personal considerations.^[1]

From that hidden Afghan room, bin Laden was offering a justification, not an apology. Far from soothing the rage of grieving families, his words would sharpen the focus on everyone who had failed to stop the men he praised.

What the Spymasters Knew—and Didn’t Share

While bin Laden framed the attacks as a theological response, a different battle unfolded inside the U.S. security apparatus: a fight over who knew that future hijackers were in America, and why that information never reached the people positioned to act on it.

Richard Clarke had been the White House counterterrorism adviser under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.^[2] In 2009, authors John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski interviewed him on video while working on their book The Watchdogs Didn’t Bark: The CIA, NSA, and the Crimes of the War on Terror.^[2]

In that interview, Clarke said top CIA officials, including director George Tenet, had withheld crucial information from him about Al‑Qaeda’s plotting and movements.^[2] He said the withheld material included the arrival in the United States of two men who would later be identified as future hijackers: Khalid al‑Mihdhar and Nawaf al‑Hazmi.^[2]

At first, Clarke told the authors, he believed that only “one or two” low-level desk officers at the CIA had known about Hazmi and Mihdhar’s movements.^[2] But his view changed. Later, he said, he concluded that about 50 CIA officers knew this information—and that the circle included Tenet and others who spoke directly to him.^[2]

The Theory That Split the Counterterrorism World

Clarke and some other insiders went further than accusing the CIA of negligence. They suspected there had been a compartmented plan inside the agency to recruit Hazmi and Mihdhar as double agents—and that the CIA had deliberately kept their presence in the United States from the FBI to avoid the bureau arresting them.^[2]

If true, it would recast one of the worst intelligence failures in U.S. history as something closer to a rogue operation gone disastrously wrong.

But Tenet and two of his top counterterrorism deputies, Rich Blee and Cofer Black, forcefully rejected that idea. They issued a statement calling Clarke’s theory “reckless and profoundly wrong.”^[2]

Duffy and Nowosielski found that not everyone in law enforcement accepted Tenet’s explanation at face value. They reported that former FBI counterterrorism agents and officials harbored “deep doubts” about his story.^[2]

Ali Soufan, one of the FBI’s lead counterterrorism agents, said the CIA had kept him in the dark about the movements of future Al‑Qaeda hijackers.^[2] Another FBI agent, Mark Rossini, said agency managers had “mysteriously” blocked him and a colleague from informing FBI headquarters that future Al‑Qaeda plotters were present in the United States in 2000 and again in the summer of 2001.^[2]

Even among veterans of the same agency, there was disagreement about where any deliberate withholding might have occurred. Dale Watson, former FBI deputy chief of counterterrorism, told the authors that if there had been a conscious effort not to tell the bureau, it was probably carried out below Tenet, Blee, and Black—by managers in the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit.^[2] Pat D’Amuro, another senior former FBI counterterrorism official, said he believed the withholding went higher than those unit‑level managers.^[2]

No consensus has emerged. Between Clarke’s account, the internal CIA summary about who read what, and Tenet’s insistence that no one had truly absorbed the warning, the official narrative of pre‑9/11 intelligence remains fractured.

The Saudi Question

Families vs. the Kingdom

Eventually, several hundred families of 9/11 victims took their suspicions to court. They filed suit against the Saudi government in federal court in New York, seeking unspecified monetary damages related to the attacks.^[2]

Their attorney, Andrew Maloney, focused in part on the same two future hijackers whose movements had been the subject of CIA cables: Khalid al‑Mihdhar and Nawaf al‑Hazmi. Maloney said Saudi intelligence had admitted they knew who Hazmi and Mihdhar were when the two men arrived in Los Angeles.^[2]

The Saudi kingdom turned over roughly 6,800 pages of documents, mostly in Arabic, to Maloney’s team.^[2] He said he planned to return to court in October to press for more records.^[2]

Maloney also sought to question Fahad al‑Thumairy, a former Saudi consular official in Los Angeles who had served as imam at a mosque in nearby Culver City attended by the hijackers.^[2] In 2003, according to Newsweek, Thumairy was intercepted after landing in Los Angeles on a flight from Germany and deported from the United States “because of suspected terrorist links.”^[2]

Saudi officials have long denied that their government played any role in supporting the attackers. Between the 9/11 Commission’s institutional exoneration and later investigative claims that individual Saudi officials facilitated the hijackers’ early days in California, the truth of what Riyadh’s representatives on the ground knew or did remains bitterly contested.^[2]

Memory, Silence, and Vanishing Trails

More than two decades on, what happened to the 2,606 people who died in the World Trade Center towers is not in doubt.^[2] Their names are spoken at memorials; their faces live in framed photos and fading newsprint.

But around them swirl unresolved questions. How many U.S. intelligence officers truly knew that future hijackers were inside the country, and why didn’t that knowledge reach the agents who might have stopped them?^[2] Did Saudi officials in California knowingly help men who were already on the path to mass murder, and if so, at whose direction?^[2]

Clarke’s accusation of a hidden CIA recruitment gambit, Tenet’s dismissal of that theory as “reckless and profoundly wrong,” and the open skepticism of former FBI counterterrorism officials have left the public with competing versions of history rather than a single, settled account.^[2]

In the background, the record itself is eroding. Some online news pages about the attacks and their aftermath now return only error messages—“404 PAGE NOT FOUND,” or apologies that the link is “either broken or no longer exists.”^[3]