The Great War for Civilisation (171 page)

No, Israel was not to blame for what happened on September 11th, 2001. The culprits were Arabs, not Israelis. But America's failure to act with honour in the Middle East, its promiscuous sale of missiles to those who use them against civilians, its blithe disregard for the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi children under sanctions of which Washington was the principal supporter—all these were intimately related to the society that produced the Arabs who plunged New York into an apocalypse of fire. And I began to regard the response of the United States administration and the British government as a form of cowardice. If September 11th, 2001, really did “change the world,” then bin Laden had won the moment the hijackers boarded their four airliners. In the days that followed the attacks, I felt it ever more necessary to oppose this chicanery. Bush wanted to persuade the world that it had changed for ever so that he could advance a neo-conservative war— cloaked in honourable aspirations of freedom, democracy and liberty—that would plunge the Middle East into further chaos and death. But why must I let nineteen Arab murderers change
my
world?

While Bush and Tony Blair prepared their forces for an inevitable attack on Afghanistan—whose Taliban priests predictably declined to surrender their “guest” bin Laden—they went on explaining that this was a war for “democracy and liberty,” that it was about men who were “attacking civilisation.” Bush informed us that “America was targeted for attack because we are the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world.” But this was not why America was attacked. If this was an Arab–Muslim apocalypse, then it was intimately associated with events in the Middle East and with America's stewardship of the area. Arabs, it might be added, would rather like some of the democracy and liberty and freedom that Mr. Bush was telling them about. Instead, they got a president who had just won a Saddam-like 98 per cent in Egyptian elections
¹⁸¹
—Washington's friend, Hosni Mubarak—and a Palestinian police force, trained by the CIA, that tortured and sometimes killed its people in prison. The Syrians would like a little of that democracy. So would the Saudis. But their effete princes are all friends of America—in many cases, educated at U.S. universities. No, it was “our” democracy and “our” liberty and freedom that Bush and Blair were talking about, our Western sanctuary that was under attack, not the vast site of terror and injustice that the Middle East had become.

Yes, it was shameful of Arabs to rejoice at the horrors in New York and Washington. Not only did Palestinians express their satisfaction in the streets of Ramallah, they handed out celebratory sweets to motorists in the Lebanese city of Sidon. Arab friends told me later that these comparatively small demonstrations were not the only manifestations of their kind. On a bus carrying officials to the Egyptian opera in Cairo, there was cheering and hand-clapping when news of the carnage was broadcast over the bus radio. “We didn't believe that Americans deserved this, no,” one of those present told me later. “But we were thinking to ourselves: ‘Now
they
know what it's like.'” And as Palestinians would point out, America's name is literally stamped on the missiles fired by Israel into Palestinian buildings in Gaza and the West Bank. In August 2001, I had identified one of them as an AGM 114-D air-to-ground rocket made by Boeing and Lockheed-Martin at their factory in—of all places—Florida, the state where some of the September 11th suiciders trained to fly.

Now at last, the suicide bomber had made his way west. Partly because of the suicide bomber, the Israelis had retreated from Lebanon in 2000. Specifically because of a suicide bomber in 1983, the Americans fled Lebanon. Now the suicide bomber was here to stay. It was an exclusive weapon—it belonged to “them,” not us—and no military power appeared able to deal with this phenomenon. As long as “our” side will risk but not “give” their lives—cost-free war, after all, was partly an American invention—the suicide bomber is now the other side's nuclear weapon. The suicider did not conform to a set of identical characteristics. Many of the callow Palestinian youths blowing themselves to bits—and, more often than not, the most innocent of Israelis—had little or no formal education, a poor knowledge of the Koran but a powerful sense of fury, despair and self-righteousness to propel them. The Hizballah suiciders were more deeply versed in the Koran, older, often with years of imprisonment to steel them in the hours before their immolation.

The September 11th suicide bombers created a precedent. There were nineteen of them. Did they all know each other? Did they all know they were going to die? They must have had a good working knowledge of the fly-by-wire instrument panel of the world's most sophisticated aircraft. It was the number that kept recurring to me in my exhaustion. If only four of them knew they were going to die, we had never seen this kind of suicide-cooperation before. In the Middle East, the suicide bomber is admired by millions of Arabs. Not because he is a mass killer— which he is—but because something invincible, something untouchable, something that has always dictated the rules without taking responsibility for the results, has now proved vulnerable. What if the numbers went on increasing? What if the school of self-immolation could produce a suicider a day, or two or three a day, calling them up Wal-Mart-style and deploying them against Western targets? It would take just twenty-two years from the first suicide bombing in Lebanon in 1982 for this fearful possibility to become reality. Iraq proved that suiciders could be summoned off-the-shelf, constantly replaced, repeatedly activated.

I studied the notes which Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian leader of the September 11th killers, supposedly left behind. They were fearful, grotesque—but also very, very odd. If the handwritten five-page document that the FBI said it found in Atta's baggage was genuine, then the murderers believed in a very exclusive version of Islam—or were surprisingly unfamiliar with their religion. “The time of fun and waste is gone,” Atta, or one of his associates, is reported to have written in the notes. “Be optimistic . . . Check all your items—your bag, your clothes, your knives, your will, your IDs, your passport . . . In the morning, try to pray the morning prayer with an open heart.”

Part theological, part mission statement, the document raised more questions than it answered. Under the heading of “Last Night”—presumably the night of 10 September—the writer tells his fellow hijackers to “remind yourself that in this night you will face many challenges. But you have to face them and understand it 100 per cent . . . Obey God, his messenger, and don't fight among yourselves where [
sic
] you become weak . . . Everybody hates death, fears death . . .” The document begins with the words: “In the name of God, the most merciful, the most compassionate . . . In the name of God, of myself, and of my family.”

The problem was that no Muslim—however ill-taught—would be likely to include his family in such a prayer. He would mention the Prophet Mohamed immediately after he mentioned God in the first line. Lebanese and Palestinian suicide bombers have never been known to refer to “the time of fun and waste”— because a Muslim would not have “wasted” his time and would regard pleasure as a reward of the afterlife.
¹⁸²
And what Muslim would urge his fellow believers to recite the morning prayer—and then go on to quote from it? A devout Muslim should not need to be reminded of his duty to say the first of the five prayers of the day—and would certainly not need to be reminded of the text. It was as if a Christian, urging his followers to recite the Lord's Prayer, felt it necessary to read the whole prayer in case they didn't remember it.

However, the full and original Arabic text was not released by the FBI. The translation, as it stood, suggested an almost Christian view of what the hijackers might have felt—asking to be forgiven their sins, explaining that fear of death is natural, that “a believer is always plagued with problems.” A Muslim is encouraged not to fear death—it is, after all, the moment when he or she believes they will start a new life—and a believer in the Islamic world is one who is certain of his path, not “plagued with problems.” There were no references to any of Osama bin Laden's demands—for an American withdrawal from the Gulf, an end to Israeli occupation, the overthrow of pro-American Arab regimes—nor any narrative context for the atrocities about to be committed. If the men had an aspiration—and if the document was above suspicion—then they were sending their message direct to their God.

The prayer/instructions may have been distributed to other hijackers before the massacres occurred—
The Washington Post
reported that the FBI found another copy of “essentially the same document” in the wreckage of the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania. No text of this document was released. In the past, CIA translators have turned out to be Lebanese Maronite Christians whose understanding of Islam and its prayers may have led to serious textual errors. Could this be to blame for the weird references in the notes found in Atta's baggage? Or was there something more mysterious about the background of those who committed these crimes against humanity? American scholars had already raised questions about the use of “100 per cent”—hardly a theological term to be found in a religious exhortation—and the use of the word “optimistic” with reference to the Prophet was a decidedly modern concept.

From the start, the hole in the story was the reported behaviour of the hijackers. Atta was said to have been a near-alcoholic, while Ziad Jarrah, the Lebanese hijacker of the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, had a Turkish girlfriend in Hamburg and enjoyed nightclubs and drinking. Was this why the published text referred to the “forgiveness” of sin? The final instruction, “to make sure that you are clean, your clothes are clean, including your shoes,” may have been intended as a call to purify a “martyr” before death. Equally, it may reflect the thoughts of a truly eccentric—and wicked—mind. The document found in Atta's baggage ended with a heading: “When you enter the plane.” It then urged the hijackers to recite: “Oh God, open all doors for me . . . I am asking for your help. I am asking you for forgiveness. I am asking you to lighten my way. I am asking you to lift the burden I feel . . .” Was this an attempt to smother latent feelings of compassion towards the passengers on the hijacked planes—especially the children—or towards the thousands who would die when the aircraft crashed? Did the nineteen suicide bombers say these words to themselves in their last moments? Or didn't they need to?

And how did these perverse men—and perhaps “perverse” was the very opposite of their persona—fly these aircraft with such painless accuracy into three of their four targets? Within days, we would learn of their flight-training programmes, their desire to learn only how to fly an airliner once it had taken off. I was travelling from Beirut to Paris in late September and sought the reflections of my friends on the flight deck, by chance the same crew with whom I'd flown into Dhahran in 1990 when the United States sent its soldiers to Saudi Arabia. “Eighteen months? You think it takes eighteen months to learn how to fly a Boeing 757 once it's in the air?” the pilot asked. Far below us, the clouds of central Europe passed like a white screen, faint ripples of emerging cumulus climbing from the plateau of mist in the afternoon sun. “I can teach you how to fly this in two minutes. At least, I can teach you all you need to know in order to become a hijacker.” As evening drew in, the instruments began to shine green in front of us. The co-pilot had laid his maps across his lap. His colleagues tut-tutted. “A hijacker doesn't need these maps,” he said. “All he needed to do was code in the exact location of the World Trade Center Twin Towers. On automatic pilot, the plane will follow these instructions. He switches off the transponder [identifying aircraft for ground control]—this knob—and the plane will head for his chosen destination.”

The pilot leaned forward. The code word for the setting was punched in as “FISK” along with a series of numbers, in this case 123456789, so that the plane would fly itself to its “target.” “The hijacker probably couldn't put an airliner through a take-off—but he doesn't have to,” the pilot said. “The hijackers in America let the flight-deck crew do that. They wait until the 757 is at its cruising altitude, say 35,000 feet, then they burst into the cabin, murder the pilot and take over. Most of their work has already been done for them.” It dawned on me then that faith, however perverted, had now connected with modern technology—in just the same way as the volumes in those Algerian bookshops, works on Islam and works on science, had been placed next to one another.

A pattern of towns emerged like white and yellow blood vessels in the body of darkness below us. “Your hijacker has now reached the area west of New York, and he lets the plane take him to within sight of the city,” the pilot says. “Then he just presses this button to cut the automatic pilot and flies the plane himself. He can see the Twin Towers. In broad daylight, it's easy—every pilot into New York would see the Trade Center. Then he pushes the wheel forward and starts his dive.” Middle East pilots had already discussed the last moments of the two aircraft to hit the Twin Towers. They had studied the photographs in the news magazines, watched and listened to the videotapes. On our flight deck, the crew had a set of press photographs of the last moments of the American Airlines and United Airlines jets.

“On the videotape that was made of the first plane to hit, you can clearly hear the twin engines,” the pilot says. “They are so loud that someone in the street looks up. The engines are over-powered, they were never meant to be flying the plane that fast, they are under immense pressure.” And he makes a noise like a jet through his teeth. “The way the plane is plunging—he's pushing it down with the wheel [control stick], remember, it's now flying way forward of its permitted speed. I reckon that first aircraft hit the tower at maybe nine hundred—even one thousand—kilometres an hour.”