One Year Later We Are Able To Look Back On Those Days. I Just Hope
Every Time We Look Back It Will Be Like These Times And We Will And
They Will, The People In The Future, For They Are Who We Are Truly
Fighting For, See And Remember Our Actions.
- Me
†Sept. 11 2002
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One Year Later — From the corner of Broadway and John Street in downtown Manhattan there is a clear view of the Hudson River to the west. A year ago, the water was blocked by two 110-story towers filled with tens of thousands of people working or eating and shopping at one of the dozens of stores and restaurants inside the World Trade Center.
IT IS NOT JUST THE VIEW that has changed here since the Twin Towers fell. More than 100,000 workers were killed or displaced in the September 11 attacks. Few have returned. These days, most of the people walking along these streets are wearing souvenir NYFD T shirts and toting cameras and maps. Many walk by this intersection en route to what one downtown worker calls euphemistically “The Hole.” That’s easier than thinking about the nearly 3,000 people who perished there—some of whom used to be his regular customers.
For those who continue to work here, every day is a reminder of what was lost last September. Business is down by as much as 50 percent in some of the stores near Ground Zero; one retailer says that for months at least one customer a day used to break down in tears as he looked out the window to where the towers once stood.
We visited three merchants along Broadway: a record store, a high-end jeweler and a clothing retailer. One of them is struggling to stay afloat, another is barely breaking even and the third recently announced that it will soon close its doors for good. We also stopped by the recently reopened Century 21, a discount department store that spent more than million to renovate and repair its four-story outlet across the street from Ground Zero. The store used to be bustling from the moment it opened until the doors closed at night. But even this popular retailer is struggling to bring back business.
We’ve profiled each of these businesses and included audio interviews with store owners and employees as well as iPIX images of an ash-covered section of one store that has been preserved as it was directly after the attacks. We also interviewed the chief executive of TenantWise.com, a real-estate consulting firm that has published six special reports on the businesses that were located in and around the World Trade Center. Only a handful of them have returned downtown. Here are some of their stories.
By Jennifer Barrett
© 2002 Newsweek, Inc.
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It’s not just Osama bin Laden who remains at large. So do most of the key Qaeda operatives who planned and financed the September 11 attacks
INFATUATED WITH a young dentist, he called her from a cell phone one day and told to her look in the sky. When she did, she saw Majid, waving from the cockpit of a hovering helicopter.
It wasn’t until much later that police, after interrogating his former girlfriends, would conclude that fun-loving Majid was actually Khaled Shaikh Mohammad, a radical jihadist on a mission to destroy America. His “friend” Basit was in fact his nephew—Ramzi Yousef—then wanted for his part in planning deadly attacks on the United States. Together, U.S. officials say, the two men may have plotted the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and drew up an even more ambitious plan to blow up commercial airliners. Ramzi Yousef was arrested before the plot could be carried out, and is now serving a life sentence in a U.S. prison. But Khaled Shaikh Mohammad eluded capture and disappeared. In the years that followed, Mohammad’s plans grew more sophisticated: intelligence officials now believe that he was a principal architect of the September 11 attacks.
A year after the terrorist strikes, Osama bin Laden is still the man the United States most wants to find—dead or alive, as President George W. Bush has said. And as he debates whether to take the war to Iraq, the president also faces unfinished business with Al Qaeda. Officials who have spent months trying to unravel the plot are worried about key figures in the 9-11 conspiracy who got away. Khaled Shaikh Mohammad and at least three other men whom investigators have identified as planners and financiers of the attacks are in hiding—where they may be mapping future strikes.
INTELLIGENCE DISAGREEMENTS
Intelligence and law-enforcement officials are in constant disagreement over how dangerous Al Qaeda actually is today. Some believe the massive U.S. retaliation has all but destroyed the group’s ability to carry out well—-coordinated attacks like September 11. “The training camps have been eliminated; the structure has been pretty well disrupted,” Dale Watson, the FBI’s retiring chief of counterterrorism, told NEWSWEEK. Internally, the FBI estimates that Al Qaeda’s hard-core membership has dwindled to 200 worldwide. “Are they capable of pulling off a simultaneous big-event attack again? The most obvious answer is no.” But the FBI has been wrong in the past about what terrorists are going to do. No one is counseling complacency. As many as 5,000 training-camp recruits are still active, according to some estimates. “The danger is very real,” says a CIA official. “September 11 demonstrated to us that you don’t need a large number of people or a huge infrastructure to do a lot of damage. There are still a lot of people out there who can do real harm.”
Khaled Shaikh Mohammad is one of the most dangerous. Intelligence officials still aren’t sure why the 37-year-old ethnic Pakistani chose terrorism as his calling. As a young man, he traveled widely and sources say he even studied at two small U.S. colleges. But by the early ’90s, he was already helping to plan large-scale attacks. The most audacious plot—code-named “Bojinka,” Serbo-Croatian for “explosion”— envisioned Mohammad and Yousef’s blowing 12 commercial airliners out of the sky on a single day.
The plan was ruined when Yousef’s collaborators accidentally blew up the Manila apartment where they were mixing explosives. But the Bojinka plot may have first given Mohammad the idea of using airliners as weapons. In the aftermath of the Manila explosion, one captured Bojinka conspirator named Abdul Hakim Murad told interrogators that he and Yousef discussed hijacking a commercial airplane and crashing it into CIA headquarters. According to a 1995 Philippine police report, “There will be no bomb or explosives ... It is simply a suicide mission.”
Agents didn’t realize quite how important Mohammad was in planning the September 11 attacks until April, when they captured Abu Zubaydah, the suspected Qaeda operations chief. Inside Zubaydah’s safe house, they discovered a large cache of information about the plot, and sources say Zubaydah himself confirmed to investigators that Mohammad was one of the key 9-11 conspirators. Officials also say information in Zubaydah’s files has allowed them to obtain search warrants against nearly 100 suspected Qaeda operatives in the United States.
9-11 CONNECTIONS?
Investigators are still trying to figure out how and when Mohammad hooked up with bin Laden. His connections to the 9-11 plot’s other leaders are also hazy—though his travels took him to places where conspirators were living. In 1999, intelligence reports indicate, Mohammad paid several visits to Hamburg—a key base of operations in the years and months before September 11. (German officials say they have no proof he was there.) Several of the terrorists, including lead hijacker Mohamed Atta, lived together in a suburban apartment.
Atta’s housemates included some of the men authorities are now urgently trying to capture. One, Said Bahaji, acted as the cell’s computer geek. Sources suspect Bahaji exchanged encrypted messages with Qaeda higher-ups in Afghanistan. Another roommate, a Yemeni radical named Ramzi Mohammad Abdullah Binalshibh, was a leader of the Hamburg cell. In November 1999, he went to Afghanistan with three of the future hijackers for training. German authorities now say there is evidence that members of the Hamburg cell were already planning the suicide strike on the United States as early as October 1999. Last week German prosecutors charged Mounir El Motassadeq, a 28-year-old Moroccan, with helping to plan and finance the operation.
Investigators say there is strong evidence that Binalshibh was originally supposed to have been the 20th hijacker. But the State Department repeatedly turned him down for a U.S. visa to attend a Florida flight school. Instead, he became a fixer back in Hamburg. U.S. intelligence sources tell NEWSWEEK that he had played a significant role in an earlier bin Laden attack, the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. For years authorities have scoured the globe looking for the one-legged Qaeda operative alleged to be the architect of the Cole strike: Tawfiq bin Attash, a.k.a. “Khallad.” Some investigators now suspect Binalshibh and Khallad met at a terrorist summit in Malaysia 10 months earlier.
One of the fugitives in the September 11 plot remains almost a total mystery. Mustafa Ahmad Adin Al-Husawi, allegedly the mission’s chief financier, sent thousands of dollars to hijackers in the months before the attacks. But intelligence sources admit they know little about his true identity—or even if Al-Husawi is his real name. Authorities believe he is a Saudi, and a deputy to bin Laden’s Egyptian moneyman, Sayyid Shaikh Al-Sharif. In the week before September 11, several of the hijackers sent unused money back to Al-Husawi. The day of the attacks, he flew to Pakistan and vanished.
Intelligence sources suspect some of the missing conspirators might still be hiding in Afghan caves, or along the lawless Pakistan border—if they weren’t killed in the U.S. bombing raids. Investigators have reason to believe that at least one of the men, Khaled Shaikh Mohammad, is not only alive, but hard at work. U.S. officials say they have evidence linking Mohammad to the April bombing of a Tunisian synagogue, which killed 21 people. The suicide bomber phoned Mohammad just three hours before detonating himself. A senior official tells NEWSWEEK that U.S. intelligence believes Mohammad had a powerful collaborator in planning the strike: Saad bin Laden, one of Osama’s sons. Whether or not Osama bin Laden is alive or dead, Khaled Shaikh Mohammad is already working to secure a place in the family business. What the Pentagon brass has called the “long shadow war” has only just begun.
By Mark Hosenball
© 2002 Newsweek, Inc. |
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