Responsibility for the September 11, 2001 attacks

Responsibility for the September 11, 2001 attacks has been found to lie with al Qaida and that group's leader Osama bin Laden. However in the immediate aftermath of the attack, there was some uncertainty and initial claims by other groups.

Table of contents

1 Initial Claims
2 al Qaida
3 Jemaah Islamiah
4 U.S. culpability

Initial Claims

There were reports that the Palestinian group DFLP (Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine) took responsibility for the crashes, but this was denied by a senior officer of the group soon after. There are filmed reports of celebrations on the West Bank, although according to articles in the German magazine Stern and the Swedish daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter at least one of them was staged. Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat denounced the attacks, saying it was counterproductive to any peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

Next in line to claim responsibility were the Taliban of Afghanistan. The Taliban government subsequently denounced the attack and claimed that it was not connected to Osama bin Laden, the terrorist living in Afghanistan whom the U.S. government declared the prime suspect.

Virtually all world leaders, including traditional enemies of the United States such as Libyan president Moammar Qadhafi, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, Iranian president Khatami, and the Afghanistan Taliban government, denounced the attacks and expressed sympathy for the American people. An exception was Saddam Hussein, then ruler of Iraq, who called the attacks the fruits of U.S. crimes against humanity.

Various Arab- and Muslim-world news sources carried opinion pieces and articles that pointed to some form of Zionist conspiracy to frame the Arab world to the benefit of Israel. It is interesting to note that in a Gallup survey of 10,000 inhabitants of sample countries with a Muslim majority, only 18% believed that Arabs were responsible.

al Qaida

Intelligence experts speak of a "short list" of prime suspects -- groups that possess both the means and the motive to carry out the crime. It appears certain that all hijackers have Arabic origins, and none are Afghani; moreover, both in their immense scale, careful planning and refraining from claiming responsibility, the attacks are reminiscent of Al-Qaida's previous attacks such as the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings that killed over 200 people.

Although bin Laden's Al-Qaida organization has never explicitly claimed responsibility, it has praised the attacks and hinted that it was behind them and planning more. The group's spokesman, Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, said in a video sent to al-Jazeera and broadcast in October 2001: "Americans should know, the storm of the planes will not stop. ... There are thousands of the Islamic nation's youths who are eager to die just as the Americans are eager to live."

In November 2001, U.S. forces recovered a videotape from a destroyed house in Jalalabad, Afghanistan which showed Osama bin Laden talking to Khaled al-Harbi. In the tape, Osama seems to admit planning the attacks. Translations from the tape include the following lines:

"we calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy, who would be killed based on the position of the tower. We calculated that the floors that would be hit would be three or four floors. I was the most optimistic of them all...We had notification since the previous Thursday that the event would take place that day. We had finished our work that day and had the radio on...Muhammad (Atta) from the Egyptian family (meaning the Al Qa?ida Egyptian group), was in charge of the group...The brothers, who conducted the operation, all they knew was that they have a martyrdom operation and we asked each of them to go to America but they didn?t know anything about the operation, not even one letter. But they were trained and we did not reveal the operation to them until they are there and just before they boarded the planes."[1]

Later Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh were captured. Both were known al Qaida members and both admitted participating in the planning of the attacks. They also indicated bin Laden direct participation. Mohammed was the principal planner of the attack basing it on the failed Operation Bojinka. Binalshibh may have been picked as a hijacker but, after failing to get into the U.S., worked on financing the operation. Among the details they revealed under interogation was that the original plan had called for more aircraft but that bin Laden had scaled it down and that bin Laden had attempted to advance the timing of the attacks after events in Israel.

As of 2004, several person such as Mohammed, Binalshibh and Mohamed al Kahtani, the 20th hijacker, were being held by the U.S. as enemy combatants; however, the United States had no one on trial for the attacks. In Germany, Mounir El Motassadeq was convicted of over 3000 counts of accessory to murder for helping finance the hijackers but the verdict was put aside and a new trial scheduled. Abdelghani Mzoudi was acquited in Germany on the same charges.

Jemaah Islamiah

While Jemaah Islamiah leader Riduan Isamuddin, better known as Hambali, would not get the spotlight in the United States until after the Bali nightclub bombings, he had a hand in the planning of September 11. His front company, Konsojaya, which was founded in 1994, helped fund Manila-based Operation Bojinka, which was a massive planned terrorist attack that was foiled on January 5, 1995, when Filipino police found the project on Ramzi Yousef's laptop after a chemical fire broke out in his apartment. Yousef would get arrested in Pakistan the following month, but Khalid Sheik Mohammed escaped, and used the plans and lessons learned to help shape September 11. Hambali's company was overlooked, so Hambali was able to go underground. He later met with two of the September 11 hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi in the 2000 Al Qaeda Summit in January 2000. He also gave money to alleged "20th hijacker" Zacarias Moussaoui. Hambali was arrested in Thailand on August 11, 2003.

U.S. culpability

Worldwide, a significant minority see the attack as an outcome of past United States involvement in the Middle East and surrounding area. They believe that such acts of terrorism are only to be expected given the economic and cultural power of the United States and the multinational corporations which are identified with it. The creation of pockets of hatred, according to this viewpoint, is an inevitable consequence of the overwhelming outside economic pressure placed on poor countries with minimal control of their political destiny. Notwithstanding this, the majority of people in most nations also believe this attack to be an evil act, and that cause does not equal justification. However, some people who believe this also criticize the U.S.'s War on Terrorism, fearing that a violent response will only continue the cycle.