Der Spiegel - Inside 9-11: what really happened

Significant days in world history are like turning points of fate; people remember them for years and even decades later, telling each other over and over again where they were, and what they were doing and thinking at a specific moment in time. Those who turned on their television on the morning of September 11 around 9 A.M. Eastern time and saw United Flight 175 crash into the South Tower of the World Trade Centerthe North Tower of which was already burning from the explosion caused by American Airlines Flight 11and who later saw both towers collapse will never forget those images. People will still be talking about September 11 at this centurys end.

What they will say will of course be determined by what happens in the intervening years. It may be that September 11, 2001, will be seen as no more significant than the night of April 15, 1912, when the Titanic sank. How good that would be. It may be that September 11 will enter history as the day mankind first began to learn how the nations of the world could eliminate the sources of terror. That would be even better. It may be that September 11 will be seen as the beginning of a long and increasingly violent battle between irreconcilable forces. That would be historys most terrible judgment.

Nothing will ever be the samethese words were repeated everywhere after September 11, so widely that they lost meaning. In fact much is the same as it was before the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Yet a great deal of what we knew or assumed before the attack is no longer of much use. And those unaware of what they dont know are useful tools to terrorists.

Terrorists want to spread fear through violence, and thus to force us to think about things we havent thought about. In this, the September 11 hijackers have succeeded: we now think about Islam and about terror. We understand that Muslims living in Arab countries may view globalization as Americanization, may feel debased by arrogance, marginalized by prevailing economic trends, and isolated from the world. We understand that Islam is a religion that has appealed to the worlds dispossessed, and that Muslim extremists have learned how to channel frustration into rage and rage into action.

When the Islamicist movement first gained power in Iran in 1979, some of us thought it of no great concern because we understood nothing about religion. When terrorists tried to topple the World Trade Center in 1993failing because they misunderstood how the buildings were constructedwe might have dismissed it as an act of insanity. Seven times (that we know of) over the succeeding years, Muslim extremists have tried to blow up airplanes, tunnels, or ships, in an effort to kill as many people as possible. They have succeeded three times. In the other four the attacks were discovered in time.

By 1996 Osama bin Laden stopped concealing the true targets of his attacks: America and its allies, soldiers, and citizens. The goal was first to clear Saudi Arabia and its oil fields of American military personnel, then to take over Pakistan and its atomic arsenal, and finally to make the world tremble in fear and terror until the Islamicist agenda dominated public life in many nations.

The attack was an attack on our way of thinking. New questions emerged from the ruins in New York and Washington. We now know that a troop of unobtrusive yet fanatically committed Islamic terrorists roams the world, willing to sacrifice their lives for what they believe. The questions are, How can we stop them from growing in number and from viewing us as their enemy? What has gone so badly wrong with life in their native lands? Is it a matter of too much globalization, or too little? How quickly will we understand that no two Muslim countries are alike? Did the attack create an opportunity for globalization? Or will it turn the United States into the worlds policeman?

The questions seem endless. But a tragedy of the dimensions of September demands new answers. Such terror is very different from the social revolutionary terrorism of the twentieth century. Acts of religious terror are not done for the sake of farmers, workers, students, or oppressed and hopeless peoples; they are done in the name of God. But God will not reply to them, This is not what I had in mind . Allah does not make demands, and so terrorists who kill in His name need not negotiate with any earthly power. Their goal is to eliminate the unfaithful, not to convert them. But is that the extent of what the hijackers wanted? Did they, could they, think about the consequences of their deed?

By looking at the hijackers stories, and listening to what people have to say about them, this book seeks some answers. The terrorists were not raving lunatics, or starving, or desperate. They did not emerge from caves. They were, as we all are, children of globalization. They spoke several languages and they knew something of the world.

They differed in the degree of intensity of their religious beliefs but were united in their world view. That view was that the West had been corrupted by greed, sin, and selfishness. And that the Islamic world was an oasis of faith and culturebut an oasis threatened and humiliated by the West, and by the United States in particular. They misunderstood the West as they misunderstood Islam; in one they saw only destruction, in the other only decline.

They took themselves for the servants of God. As His earthly deputy, Osama bin Laden was the perfect agent to enthrall them: educated, rich, worldly, charismatic, fanaticnot someone who had to fight; someone who chose to fight. You could find his likeness among some of the nineteen hijackers, holy warriors for whom jihad was something like what doing drugs, or body piercing is to Western youth.

Who among the hijackers was merely following orders? Who formulated the plan to commit mass murder? Where did the money for the nearly two years of preparation came from? All this remains unclear. Even the videotape of bin Laden found in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, raises more questions than it answers. The tape has the feel of a staged performance, as if in this conversation with his dinner guest, the Saudi Arabian comrade-in-arms Ali Saeed al-Ghamdi, bin Laden is trying to show that all along he had been the one pulling the strings of the September 11 attack. Yet he seems to know less about the operation than those who did it. For example, he says he had already learned on September 6 that the planes were going to hit the World Trade Center on September 11. However, the hijackers began buying their tickets for these flights as early as August 26.

The theater of destruction offered to the world on September 11 was larger than structural engineer bin Laden could ever have dreamed. Shock is of course one goal of terrorism; the greater the number of people in shock, the better. That is why the attacks of September 11 are to date the most perfect act of terror in history. First you attract the media to a place like the World Trade Center with the crash of the first plane, then you deliver unforgettable images of terror twenty minutes later with a second plane. It was an idea that almost could have been thought up by the Hollywood screenwriters from whom the Bush Administration sought advice about potential terrorist scenarios after September 11.

Describing in detail the preparation and execution of an act of such cold-blooded calculation may help us understand exactly what sort of enemy threatens us.