Osama bin Laden is seen in this video footage recorded "very recently" at an undisclosed location in Afghanistan aired by the Qatar-based satelite TV station al-Jazeera October 7, 2001.
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When the four cells arrived at their takeoff airports on Tuesday morning, they no longer needed the karate and flight manuals investigators would later discover. Two teams of five rendezvoused at Boston's Logan, a third group of four at Newark and the last five men at Dulles, with their knives and their box cutters either stashed in their shoulder bags or perhaps already concealed onboard. Wail Alshehri, Waleed Alshehri, Mohamed Atta, Abdulaziz Alomari and Satam Al Suqami boarded American Airlines 11 and drove it square into the World Trade north tower at 8:45 a.m. A few minutes later, Marwan Al-Shehhi, Fayez Ahmed, Mohald Alshehri, Hamza Alghamdi and Ahmed Alghamdi departed on United Airlines 175 and rammed it through the corner of World Trade south tower 21 minutes later. Khalid Al-Midhar, Majed Moqed, Nawaq Alhamzi, Hani Hanjour and Salem Alhamzi embarked on American Flight 77 out of Dulles and swung it around to smash into the Pentagon at 9:40 a.m. The cockpit voice recorder that might have clarified whether this plane intended to take out the White House or the Capitol was found too badly damaged to provide any information. Only the kamikazes who got on United 93 in Newark were thwarted, after determined passengers decided to die "doing something about it" rather than let the terrorists crash the plane into their apparent Washington target.
What we know now is only the surface. The unidentified support structure worries intelligence officials just as much. Officials want to know too the whereabouts of others from the Muslim world who enrolled at the same flight schools, trained with the kamikazes and perhaps connected to field supporters of the operation. More than 100 names of acquaintances of the hijackers have been forwarded to 18,000 law-enforcement agencies in the U.S. and 20 overseas FBI offices in hopes that a few will help identify terrorists still living. Some raw intelligence led to speculations there might be a phase-two operation, maybe involving car bombs. Some leads suggest a fifth suicide effort was aborted when its target air flight to L.A. was canceled in the wake of the other terrorists' successes.
What we still need to know is the deeper connections: the radical affiliations of the hijackers and the links that connect those 19 dedicated death seekers to the men who ordered them to do it, and the men who would like to emulate them. Their personal agendas are less important than who recruited them, financed them, oversaw their mission. As Secretary of State Colin Powell said Wednesday, "When you are attacked by a terrorist and you know who the terrorist is and you can fingerprint it back to the cause of the terror, you should respond." Now the public tips and paper trails, worldwide investigation and local canvassing need to hunt down that fingerprint.
Nearly everyone in Washington has all but concluded the whorls and ridges belong to bin Laden. President Bush named him the "prime suspect" on Saturday. When you look at the point of this attack, who better does it serve? The faceless enemy needs no claim of responsibility to get his message across; he has no agenda that can be met. What he wants is to make a statement: to carry out attacks to prove that he can. What better recruiting poster than that searing image of a plane shearing through the south tower: it tells the faithful, Look at me, look what we can do, join me.