'We were overjoyed when the plane hit the building'

US releases Bin Laden video

The Guardian, UK/December 13, 2001

By Simon Jeffery

The US government today released a video tape in which Osama bin Laden, chief suspect for the September 11 attacks on Washington and New York, explains how the strike was coordinated.

Speaking to a room of supporters, possibly in the Taliban's former stronghold of Kandahar, Bin Laden said that none of the 19 hijackers knew the details of the operation until just before they boarded the planes.

"The brothers who conducted the operation, all they knew was that they have a martyrdom operation and we asked each of them to go to America, but they didn't know anything about the operation, not even one letter.

"But they were trained and we did not reveal the operation to them until they are there and just before they boarded the plane," he added.

He confirms that Mohammed Atta was the leader of the group.

The first part of the video, believed to have been filmed in mid-November, is a conversation between Bin Laden and another man referred to only as Shaykh.

In the most incriminating segment, which may finally provide a "smoking gun" to link Bin Laden to the deaths of nearly 4,000 people, he says he calculated in advance the number of casualties.

"We calculated that the floors that would be hit would be three or four floors. I was the most optimistic of them all.

"Due to my experience in this field, I was thinking that the fire from the gas in the plane would melt the iron structure of the building and collapse the area where the plane hit and all the floors above it only. This is all that we had hoped for," he said.

Bin Laden tells Shaykh that he had received notification on September 6 of the time and date of the planned attacks, and, after finishing work on September 11, switched on his radio at 5:30 PM local time.

"I was sitting with Dr Ahmad Abu-al-Khair," he said. "Immediately, we heard the news that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. We turned the radio station to the news from Washington.

"They were overjoyed when the first plane hit the building, so I said to them: be patient."

In the video, Bin Laden describes the attacks as "deeds [...] speeches that overshadowed all other speeches made everywhere else in the world [and] are understood by both Arabs and non-Arabs - even by Chinese."

The tape, amateurish in quality, was released as part of a US government effort to support claims that Bin Laden was the mastermind behind the attacks.

The translation of the Arabic conversation was provided by George Michael, a translator in the US diplomatic language services; and Kassem Wahba, an Arabic language program coordinator at Johns Hopkins university.