The September 11th attack
Soft-spoken bin Laden poses major threat
| • | Osama bin Laden profile |
Associated Press
CAIRO, Egypt — He is described as soft-spoken, a good listener and infused with the serenity of the deeply devout. His favorite hobby is riding Arabian horses.
He is said to enjoy playing traditional healer, dispensing honey and herbs to the sick.
But beneath Osama bin Laden's benign exterior burns a desire to rid Jerusalem and Saudi Arabia — home of Islam's holiest shrines — of the Israelis and Americans he regards as infidels.
"If the instigation for jihad (holy war) against the Jews and the Americans ... is considered a crime, then let history be a witness that I am a criminal," bin Laden told Time magazine in an interview published in January 1999.
That holy war, in Western eyes, amounts to cold-blooded slaughter: the 1998 bombing of two U.S. embassies in Africa in which 231 people died, most of them ordinary bystanders; and nearly 5,000 dead or missing from the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks.
"He clearly has declared war against the United States and has been carrying out systematic attacks against American facilities and Americans for the last several years," said Vincent Cannistraro, a former chief of counterterrorism operations for the CIA.
"So clearly the one who has been the most violent opponent of the United States and has expressed that violence in destruction is bin Laden. He is the most serious threat. This is clearly the big enemy."
Jamal Ismail, a Palestinian journalist, says a bin Laden aide called him after Tuesday's attack to say bin Laden denied being involved but "thanked almighty Allah and bowed before him when he heard this news."
Why would the son of a construction magnate, a man destined for a life of ease and riches, rejoice in the massacre of innocents?
Rage against America and its support for Israel, say people who have known or met him.
Thin, bearded and more than 6 feet tall, bin Laden was once a hero in his own country, gaining a reputation as a courageous and resourceful commander in the Afghan war against the Soviets in the 1980s.
When he returned home to Saudi Arabia, bin Laden was showered with praise and donations and was in demand as a speaker in mosques and homes. More than 250,000 cassettes of his fiery speeches were distributed, selling out as soon as they appeared.
"When we buy American goods, we are accomplices in the murder of Palestinians," he says in one of the cassettes. "American companies make millions in the Arab world with which they pay taxes to their government. The United States uses that money to send $3 billion a year to Israel, which it uses to kill Palestinians."
The tapes are now banned in Saudi Arabia.
Ismail, the Palestinian journalist, met bin Laden in the 1980s in Peshawar, a Pakistani town that was the staging ground for anti-Soviet attacks.
In an interview from Islamabad, Pakistan, Ismail said he would fly into Peshawar on a private jet loaded with gifts for the fighters. "He would train with his men, eat with them and never make them feel he's doing them a favor," Ismail said.
He said bin Laden, 47, tries to speak the classical Arabic of the Quran, Islam's holy book, instead of the vernacular, and peppers his conversations with pious references such as "bismillah," in the name of Allah.
It was in Afghanistan during the anti-Soviet fight that was supported by Washington that bin Laden's rage grew.
Among his visitors in Afghanistan were Palestinians who spoke to him about losing family members, friends and homes in confrontations with the Israelis.
"I have seen him sob several times upon hearing such stories," Ismail said.
In bin Laden's eyes and those of his followers, the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 did not mean the end of their struggle.
It was one infidel superpower down, another one to go. But opposing the United States put him at odds with the Saudi monarchy, which has close ties with Washington.
In 1990, U.S. troops landed on Saudi Arabian soil to drive Iraq out of Kuwait.
Bin Laden tried to dissuade the Saudi government from allowing non-Muslim armies into the land where the Prophet Muhammad is buried.
A one-time neighbor told the Associated Press in 1998 that bin Laden presented Prince Sultan, the Saudi defense minister, with a 10-page program to train Saudis to defend themselves and use equipment from his family's construction firm to fortify the border with Iraq.
But the Saudi leadership turned to the United States to protect its vast oil reserves. When he continued criticizing Riyadh's close alliance with Washington, bin Laden was stripped of Saudi citizenship.
Bin Laden's path to militant Islam began as a teenager in the 1970s when he got caught up in the fundamentalist movement then sweeping Saudi Arabia. He was a voracious reader of Islamic literature and listened to weekly sermons in Mecca.
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