Message #216693

[Mikolon]

On September 12, for example, this twofold point was made on bin Laden’s behalf by one of his aides, who told Al Jazeera that bin Laden had had “no information or knowledge about the attack” but that he had “thanked Almighty Allah and bowed before him when he heard this news.”29 Continuing to deny responsibility in the following days, bin Laden himself told Al Jazeera on September 16: “I stress that I have not carried out this act, which appears to have been carried out by individuals with their own motivation.”30 On October 7, he praised the “vanguards of Islam . . . [who] destroyed America," but he did not withdraw his earlier statements denying involvement.31

 

During the Al Jazeera interview of October 21, bin Laden made this same twofold point. On the one hand, he expressed his approval of the attacks in New York and Washington, calling them “great on all levels” and saying, in particular, that “the collapse of the twin towers is huge.” On the other hand, he denied responsibility. After saying that the designation of him as a terrorist was unwarranted, he responded to the American government’s claim that it had convincing evidence of his complicity in the attacks by stating: “We never heard in our lives a court decision to convict someone based on a ‘secret’ proof it has. The logical thing to do is to present a proof to a court of law.”32

 

At this point, however, bin Laden did - contrary to Al Jazeera’s statement that there was nothing new in this interview - go beyond what he had previously said in public statements: Having denied direct responsibility for the attacks, he suggested that he might have been indirectly responsible.  Speaking of “the brave guys who took the battle to the heart of America and destroyed its most famous economic and military landmarks,” bin Laden said:

    “They did this, as we understand it, and this is something we have agitated for before, as a matter of self-defense, in defense of our brothers and sons in Palestine, and to liberate our sacred religious sites/things.”33

His point was that he had encouraged (“agitated for”) Muslims to strike back at Americans and Israelis, as an act of self-defense against their attacks on Muslim holy places and people. This striking back was self-defense, he argued, because Americans and Israelis would quit killing Muslims only if Muslims killed enough of them in return to make them stop: Having spoken of the killing of Muslims in Palestine and Iraq, where “more than 1 million children died . . . and others are still dying,” bin Laden said: “If they kill our women and our innocent people, we will kill their women and their innocent people until they stop."