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This is an archive article published on July 24, 2004

All Qaeda men don’t swear by Laden: Report

If the mastermind of the September 11 attacks had known that Zacarias Moussaoui, an Al Qaeda operative now charged as a conspirator in the p...

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If the mastermind of the September 11 attacks had known that Zacarias Moussaoui, an Al Qaeda operative now charged as a conspirator in the plot, had been arrested in August, he might have cancelled the mission.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the main strategist behind the attacks, did not find out until after 9/11 that Moussaoui was jailed in Minnesota on immigration charges.

That revelation, from an US interrogation of one of Mohammed’s top deputies, Ramzi Binalshibh, is among many new details about the planning and execution of the attacks contained in the Commission’s 567-page report. The report draws on intelligence reports not previously made public.

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Commission members believe Moussaoui was to have been among the September 11 hijackers. Mohammed told interrogators that Moussaoui was going to be part of a second wave of attacks, the report said.

The report provides similar glimpses of other terrorists associated with the attacks, including Mohammed, who is referred to in the report as ‘‘KSM,’’ and who promoted the idea of using the jetliners as missiles. Mohammed originally conceived of crashing nine airliners while he would hijack a 10th himself, killing the male passengers and landing to give a speech ‘‘excoriating’’ repressive Arab governments and US support for Israel.

The report found that not all those working with Osama bin Laden accorded him undivided devotion. Abd Al-Rahim Al-Nashiri, who became head of Al Qaeda operations on the Arabian peninsula and orchestrated the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen was asked to swear loyalty to bin Laden but ‘‘found the notion distasteful and refused,’’ the report said.

He was not alone — Mohammed also refused, as did Hambali, the leader of Jemaah Islamiah who accepted bin Laden’s offer in 1998 to form an alliance ‘‘in waging war against Christians and Jews.’’

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The report reveals that bin Laden was most interested in hitting the White House, even though Mohamed Atta thought it was too difficult.

The report also discloses that several months before the 9/11 attacks, Hizbollah appeared to have been shadowing three of the hijackers as they flew from Saudi Arabia to Lebanon and onward to Iran.

The Commission concluded that Al Qaeda did not have operational ties with Iraq or that Iraq had any foreknowledge of the 9/11 hijackings.

The Commission also said that Iran probably did not have an inkling of the pending disaster. But the report details circumstantial evidence suggesting that the arrival and departure of three hijackers in November 2000 was of keen interest to Hizbollah and urges ‘‘further investigation by the US government’’.

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‘‘Hizbollah officials in Beirut and Iran were expecting the arrival of a group during the same time period,’’ says the report, citing three intelligence reports prepared shortly after the attacks.

—LAT-WP

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