The eighteen-page letter, dated January 8, 2015 and written while Mohammad was serving time in Guantanamo, was obtained by the Miami Herald from Mohammad’s lawyers after a court-ordered thirty-day review period to remove any sensitive information. The letter lays out Mohammad’s grievances against the United States and makes clear what we have long known from other terrorists’ testimonies: that it’s a decades-long, destructive and largely bipartisan Washington foreign policy that drives such men to commit acts of terror, not the supposedly malevolent influence of a fundamentalist version of Islam. [...]
A large part of the letter is devoted to answering the question, “Why did 9/11 Happen? And Why May it Happen Again?” Central to the causes of such attacks, according to Mohammad, is Israel’s nearly seventy-year old occupation of Palestine and its continued apartheid policies against the Palestinian people.
“The war crimes perpetrated in Palestine since 1948, and those taking place in Gaza today, are the clearest indication of why 9/11 happened, and why it may happen again in the future,” Mohammad writes immediately after posing the question.
Indeed, resentment at Israel’s policies, and continued US support for said policies, is shot through the letter. Dozens of angry references to Israel, Gaza, and the plight of the Palestinians line its text, including Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, its slaying of four children on a Gaza beach in 2014, and its continued domination over Palestinian airspace, waters, and movement. Enclosed with the letter is a map of Palestinian loss of land between 1946 and 2010. [...]
As Thomas Hegghammer has pointed out, bin Laden and al-Qaeda spent the years before and after 9/11 railing against Israeli occupation of Palestine, as well as other Israeli actions. His earliest public speeches in the 1980s called for a boycott of US goods over its support for Israel. In a 2008 speech, he said that “the Palestinian cause has been the main factor that, since my early childhood, fueled my desire, and that of the 19 freemen [the September 11 bombers].”
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