What was bin ladens motive

Taliban News. This story is from September 11, Caught in a pandemic, New Yorkers will be holding staggered ceremonial prayers for the victims of the terror attack. Within two hours after the crash, both story towers collapsed.

A third plane crashed into the Pentagon the headquarters of the U. Department of Defense in Arlington County, Virginia, which led to a partial collapse of the building's west side. The fourth plane was initially flown toward Washington DC but crashed into a field in Stonycreek Township, Pennsylvania after passengers thwarted the hijackers.

Attempting to understand what is fuelling violent Islamist extremists does not mean anyone condones terror attacks.

Instead, understanding their perspectives may help us counter their ideologies. When western governments regard all Muslims as suspicious and an entire religion as malevolent, they are falling in line with Islamic State propaganda. Standing idle in the face of discrimination and anti-Muslim bigotry will only widen the chasm that already exists between people, engendering greater fear and suspicion, and leading to further isolation from each other — and, sadly, the risk of further violence, misery and despair.

Edition: Available editions United Kingdom. Become an author Sign up as a reader Sign in. In this photo from Sept. These convictions were the basis of his decision making. SC: Well, the FBI agents who were chasing him found that some of their best sources were nightclub girls in the Philippines.

SC: There are lots of what-ifs in the detective work that could have prevented the attacks. It would have required some different decisions, it would have required some luck, it would have required any number of threads being pulled—and in a timely way. They got lucky. If the scale of this attack had been prevented—even if the hijackings had been limited to a single one—it would not have changed the course of American history the way September 11 did.

The capacity that they brought to this, the long planning cycle, the multinational conspiracy, the ability to operate without detection, crossing borders, living in the United States. That turned out to be their highest military achievement. If it had been prevented, history might have turn in a different way. PB: And of course the U. Something else would have happened, but it might not have been of this scale. The fact that there were two members of al Qaeda known to the CIA, living in the United States, who were two of the hijackers—and the FBI was only told about this about two weeks before the actual attack?

It was a different era. The whole intelligence community was organized in stove pipes. That was just the way it worked. Some of them are wracked by guilt or at least regret.

JM: Are there lessons that have been learned and absorbed into how intelligence is gathered now? PB: The environment for intelligence collection around terrorism and every other subject is now much more oriented towards signals intelligence. Human recruiting and detective work is still a part of the landscape, but the bulk of where the opportunities lie is now in the digital world. SC: Everything has changed. I think mostly for the better. There was no national counter-terrorism center, there was no Department of Homeland Security, there was no TSA, there were relatively few joint terrorism taskforce members.

Overkill sometimes is fine. It is true that certain members of the intelligence and national security community had warned that violent Islamist terrorists might strike the United States.

But, the U. Similarly, U. While they could identify terrorist groups, they could neither predict the evolution of religious sources for violence nor the internecine violence between Islamist groups. Foreign Policy New York: Continuum, Eric Patterson, Ph.

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