Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the man who conceived and directed the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, was motivated by his strong disagreement with American support for Israel, according to the final report of the Sept. 11 commission.
Mohammed conceived the initial outline of the attack six years before its execution and brought the plan to Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden because he thought he did not have the resources to carry it out on his own.
The Sept. 11 report, released Thursday, largely reaffirms what has been known about the basic overview of the attacks -- much of it first revealed by the commission's interim reports -- and contains no revelations about the plot to attack the World Trade Center and government buildings in and around Washington. But it adds fresh details about the people who conceived and executed it.
The report contains the fullest accounting of Mohammed's overarching role from original conception to supervision of details. Bin Laden, too, was fully involved, selecting all or most of the participants, ordering the substance and the location of their training, and contributing to the timing of the attacks and the selection of targets, the report says.
The report makes a strong case that Al Qaeda accomplished the attacks without any hint of state sponsorship.
The report also appears to lay to rest the notion -- long alluded to by administration officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney -- that hijacker Mohamed Atta traveled to the Czech Republic to meet an Iraqi intelligence operative in the spring of 2001. In addition to repeating evidence that Atta was in the United States at the time, the report reveals that the Iraqi agent also was not in Prague when the meeting was alleged to have occurred.
Much of the report's detail comes from interrogations of Al Qaeda operatives in U.S. custody, including Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh. Some of that information is contradictory; much of it is difficult to corroborate. One CIA analysis cited in the report, for example, is titled "Khalid Shaykh Muhammed's Threat Reporting -- Precious Truths, Surrounded by a Bodyguard of Lies."
The report -- in particular, its depiction of Mohammed's role -- argues against the view that Al Qaeda was a huge, sophisticated organization with boundless resources and skills.
