"A few Arabs in the desert could not have pulled this off..." Why Osama is perfect for this attack.
Conspiracy theorists like to say "Some Arabs with box cutters couldn't have pulled this off." Let's forget for a minute how racist that statement is. (Arabs can do anything Americans can do) Let's also imagine that the hijackers didn't make it clear they had a bomb as well as the box cutters. The fact is they were the perfect ones to pull this off. Osama went to school for civil engineering at a time when the towers were being built. America thought enough of him to use him to hold off the USSR in Afghanistan. Most of the hijackers have college educations. Some had flight experience and trained with simulators.
An Airliner filled with jet fuel is just a very destructive flying car bomb. Is he really that smart or was the US government not smart enough to realize this? There is evidence some thought about this but failed to act quickly enough to stop it. Telling pilots not to open the cockpit doors under any circumstance and fitting the airliners with better cockpit doors may have stopped the attacks. Just as tellers in a bank are instructed to give money to bank robbers, pilots were under the old rules of letting hijackers do what they want. Any small group could have done what he did. Saying they were a few Arabs from the desert is appealing to the racist in us.
The conspiracy story suggests a few Arabs can't convince you they have a bomb and are dangerous. Remember that most hijackings ended in the past with hijackers making demands and sometimes people being rescued by specialists in hijackings. Now add the hijackers attacking and possibly killing crew members and you can easily conclude the passengers had little reason to risk injury or death. So you don't need any government intervention to carry out that part of the plan. If the passengers of the other airliners knew what was coming I'm sure the plan wouldn't have worked as well. We can draw that conclusion from flight 93.
The conspiracy story also suggests it would be impossible to evade radar without government help. As if there aren't 4,000 airliners in the air at any given time in America. There were hundreds in that area alone. It may have been easier to intercept an airliner with the transponder on but even that isn't easy due to the amount of airliners in the air at the time. One airliner that didn't have anything to do with the attack was thought to be a hijacking and people were planning an intercept. Can you imagine if that plane was brought down by accident? Conspiracy theorists want us to believe its easy to quickly find these flying "needles in the haystacks" when they can't even find photos of iron workers cutting columns at an angle during cleanup. Not even when it's on the same web site and they have all the time in the world to find it.
http://www.debunking911.com/thermite.htm Below is some history of Bin Laden and a link to a timeline of events concerning 911 and the hijackers and the evidence against them..
1957 Osama bin Muhammad bin Awad bin Laden is born in Riyadh. He is 17th of 52 children sired by Muhammad Bin Laden--Saudi Arabia's wealthiest construction magnate.
1979 Bin Laden graduates from King Abdul Aziz University in Jiddah with a degree in civil engineering.
1986-89 According to Islamic sources, bin Laden participates in numerous battles during the Afghan war against the Soviets as a guerilla commander, including the fierce battle of Jalalabad which led the Soviets to finally withdraw from Afghanistan.
1992 According to the current indictment against bin Laden, from 1992 on, bin Laden and other Al Qaeda members stated privately within the organization that a) Al Qaeda should put aside its differences with Shiite Muslim terrorist organizations, including Iran and its affiliated terrorist group Hezbollah, to cooperate against the perceived common enemy, the United States and its allies; B) the US forces stationed on the Saudi peninsula, including both Saudi Arabia and Yemen, should be attacked; and c) the US forces stationed in the Horn of Africa, including Somalia, should be attacked.
December 29, 1992 A bomb explodes in a hotel in Aden, Yemen, where US troops had been staying while en route to a humanitarian mission in Somalia. The bomb killed two Austrian tourists; the U.S. soldiers had already left. Two Yemeni Muslim militants, trained in Afghanistan and injured in the blast, are later arrested. US intelligence agencies allege that this was the first terrorist attack involving bin Laden and his associates (Source: New York Times 8/21/98).
1993 Sudan is placed on State Department's list of countries that sponsor terrorist activities (Source: Washington Post 8/23/98).
According to US government charges, bin Laden's followers try to obtain components of nuclear weapons and begin to work with Sudan's NIF to develop chemical arms (Source: US News and World Report 10/5/98).
February 26, 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
October 3 & 4th, 1993 Eighteen US troops are killed in an urban attack in Mogadishu, Somalia. American law enforcement, intelligence and national security officials are divided as to whether, as a federal indictment charges, bin Laden and his adherents helped train and arm the men who killed the US troops (Source: New York Times 2/8/99).
February/March 1995 Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing, is captured in Pakistan and extradited to the United States. A search of his former residences leads investigators to believe he is financially linked to bin Laden. Also, he had stayed at a bin Laden financed guest house while in Pakistan.
June 1995 Unsuccessful assassination attempt on the life of the President of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, in Addis Ababa. U.S. intelligence sources believe bin Laden was somehow linked.
August, 1995 Bin Laden wrote an open letter to King Fahd of Saudi Arabia calling for a campaign of guerrilla attacks in order to drive U.S. forces out of the kingdom.
November 13, 1995 Five Americans and two Indians are killed in the truck bombing of a US-operated Saudi National Guard training center in Riyadh. Bin Laden denies involvement but praises the attack (Source: Washington Post 8/23/98).
May 1996 The Sudan expels bin Laden because of international pressure by the United States and Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden then moves back to Afghanistan. (Source: Jane's Intelligence Review 10/1/98)
May 31, 1996 The four Saudi men accused of bombing the Saudi National Guard training center in Riyadh are beheaded in Riyadh's main square. Before their execution, they are coerced by the Saudi's into a public confession. In the confession, they claim to have read bin Laden communiqués.
Spring 1996 President Clinton signed a top secret order that authorized the CIA to use any and all means to destroy bin Laden's network.
June 25, 1996 A large truck bomb devastates the US military residence in Dhahran called Khobar Towers, killing 19 servicemen. The US military initially linked bin Laden to the attack but now believe a Saudi Shiite group was responsible (Source: Washington Post 8/23/98). U.S. investigators still believe bin Laden was somehow involved.
August 23, 1996 Bin Laden signed and issued a Declaration of Jihad outlining his organization's goals: drive US forces from the Arabian Peninsula, overthrow the Government of Saudi Arabia, liberate Muslim holy sites, and support Islamic revolutionary groups around the world. He declares that Saudis have the right to strike at US troops in the Persian Gulf.
November, 1996 Gwynne Roberts conducts interview of bin Laden for the British documentary program Dispatches. Bin Laden threatens to wage an Islamic holy war against the United States and its allies if Washington does not remove its troops from the Gulf region (Source: Reuters 2/20/97).
May 1997 CNN airs an interview with bin Laden in which he criticizes US "occupation of the land of the holy places."
July 1997 According to Islamic sources, a US-backed multinational mercenary force is formed with the aim of abducting or killing bin Laden. Witnesses claim to see 11 black Land Cruisers crossing into the Afghan city of Khost along with 2 helicopters. A source said force was composed of 1000 non-US mercenaries. (Source: Mideast Mirror 7/14/97--al-Hayat & al-Arab)
February 1998 Bin Laden issues joint declaration with the Islamic Group, Al Jihad, the Jihad Movement in Bangladesh and the "Jamaat ul Ulema e Pakistan" under the banner of the "World Islamic Front," which stated that Muslims should kill Americans including civilians--anywhere in the world.
May 1998 ABC's John Miller interviews bin Laden in Afghanistan.
June 1998 A raid is conducted in Albania against a cell of an Islamic terrorist movement by security personnel from the U.S. and Albania. Two suspected employees of bin Laden are arrested. The CIA takes custody of a van-load of documents and computer gear. Two weeks later, another raid was conducted and two more suspected bin Laden associates arrested. They were Egyptian nationals and were turned over to anti- terrorist officials in Egypt. All were associated with the Islamic Revival Foundation. (Source: Washington Post 8/12/98)
June 8, 1998 The grand jury investigation of bin Laden, initiated in 1996, issues a sealed indictment, charging Bin Laden with "conspiracy to attack defense utilities of the United States." Prosecutors charge that bin Laden heads a terrorist organization called al Qaeda, the base, and was a major financier of Islamic terrorists around the world.
August 6, 1998 The Egyptian Jihad group sent the United States a warning: they would soon deliver a message to Americans "which we hope they read with care, because we will write it, with God's help, in a language they will understand." (Source: New York Times 8/21/98)
Two simultaneous explosions at US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The bomb in Nairobi, Kenya kills 213 people, including 12 US nationals, and injure more than 4,500 . The bomb in Dar es Salaam kills 11 and injures 85. No Americans died in the Tanzania bombing.
August 12, 1998 The Small Group of presidential advisors meet with Clinton, reportedly with evidence that bin Laden is looking to obtain weapons of mass destruction and chemical weapons to use against US installations (Source: New York Times 9/23/98). US intelligence also reportedly intercepted a mobile phone conversation between two of bin Laden's lieutenants that implicated them in the embassy bombings. (Source: Newsweek 8/31/98)
August 20, 1998
US retaliation against bin Laden--cruise missiles attack a suspected terrorist training camps in Afghanistan and Al Shifa, a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum. US intelligence claims that Al Shifa is tied to the production of chemical weapons for bin Laden. The Sudanese government vehemently denied these claims.
US adds bin Laden's name to list of terrorists whose funds are targeted for seizure by US Treasury in order to shut down the financial pipelines that allegedly subsidize bin Laden's terrorist activities. (Source: Washington Post 8/28/98)
September 23, 1998 US senior administrative officials admit that they had no evidence that directly linked bin Laden to the Al Shifa factory at the time of retaliatory strikes on Aug 20. Intelligence officials found financial transactions between bin Laden and the Military Industrial Corporation--a company run by the Sudan's government. (Source: New York Times 9/23/98)
November 4, 1998 A new superceding indictment is issued against bin Laden, Muhammad Atef and a host of other suspects. They are charged with bombing of two US embassies and conspiring to commit other acts of terrorism against Americans abroad. Two rewards of $5 million each are offered for Atef and bin Laden. Atef is described as bin Laden's chief military commander.
January 16, 1999 The US Attorney's office files its most complete indictment to date of Osama bin Laden and 11 other suspected members of his terrorist organization. The grand jury charges the men for conspiring to kill American nationals. The first count of the indictment charges that several of the co-defendants, acted with other members of "al Qaeda," a worldwide terrorist organization led by bin Laden, in a conspiracy to murder American citizens. The objectives of the terrorist group allegedly include: killing members of the American military stationed in Saudi Arabia and Somalia; killing United States embassy employees in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; and concealing the activities of the co-conspirators by, among other things, establishing front companies, providing false identity and travel documents, engaging in coded correspondence, and providing false information to the authorities in various countries.
May 29, 2001 Four followers of Osama bin Laden are found guilty of charges stemming from the 1998 US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. Mohamed Rashed Daoud Al-Owhali, Khalfan Khamis Mohamed, Mohammed Saddiq Odeh, and Wadih El Hage are convicted of charges including murder, conspiracy and perjury after a nine-week federal trial during which prosecutors called over 90 witnesses, including al Qaeda informants and survivors of the bombings. Owhali and Mohamed face the death penalty at their sentencing, while Odeh and El Hage face life in prison.
Bin Laden's Confession...
Praise be to Allah who created the creation for his worship and commanded them to be just and permitted the wronged one to retaliate against the oppressor in kind. To proceed:
Peace be upon he who follows the guidance: People of America this talk of mine is for you and concerns the ideal way to prevent another Manhattan, and deals with the war and its causes and results.
Before I begin, I say to you that security is an indispensable pillar of human life and that free men do not forfeit their security, contrary to Bush's claim that we hate freedom. If so, then let him explain to us why we don't strike for example Sweden? And we know that freedom-haters don't possess defiant spirits like those of the 19 may Allah have mercy on them.
No, we fight because we are free men who don't sleep under oppression. We want to restore freedom to our nation, just as you lay waste to our nation. So shall we lay waste to yours.
No one except a dumb thief plays with the security of others and then makes himself believe he will be secure. Whereas thinking people, when disaster strikes, make it their priority to look for its causes, in order to prevent it happening again.
But I am amazed at you. Even though we are in the fourth year after the events of September 11th, Bush is still engaged in distortion, deception and hiding from you the real causes. And thus, the reasons are still there for a repeat of what occurred.
So I shall talk to you about the story behind those events and shall tell you truthfully about the moments in which the decision was taken, for you to consider.
I say to you, Allah knows that it had never occurred to us to strike the towers. But after it became unbearable and we witnessed the oppression and tyranny of the American/Israeli coalition against our people in Palestine and Lebanon, it came to my mind.
The events that affected my soul in a direct way started in 1982 when America permitted the Israelis to invade Lebanon and the American Sixth Fleet helped them in that. This bombardment began and many were killed and injured and others were terrorised and displaced.
I couldn't forget those moving scenes, blood and severed limbs, women and children sprawled everywhere. Houses destroyed along with their occupants and high rises demolished over their residents, rockets raining down on our home without mercy.
The situation was like a crocodile meeting a helpless child, powerless except for his screams. Does the crocodile understand a conversation that doesn't include a weapon? And the whole world saw and heard but it didn't respond.