Living in terror's shadow: Gannett News Service special report

CAIRO, Egypt -- It doesn't matter that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak says he warned America one week prior to Sept. 11 that an al-Qaida attack was imminent.

It doesn't matter that long before the terrorist attacks, Osama bin Laden had declared war on America and its citizens.

Or that bin Laden was later heard on videotape saying of Sept. 11: "We calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy who would be killed based on the position of the tower."

The lanky Saudi is innocent. This is the view of several Egyptian intellectuals who insist the United States is chasing the wrong guy. These are not marginal players or half-cocked ideologists; they are some of the deepest thinkers in what is widely considered the Middle East's center of gravity and rational thought.

"Stop with the bin Laden questions. This thinking is primitive," snapped Egyptian author Amin Al-Mahdy, who believes Sept. 11 was the work of Arab governments attempting to place blame on the Palestinians.

With increasing violence between Israelis and Palestinians, Arab citizens might direct their anger outward instead of examining their own inadequate rights and governments, said Al-Mahdy, a secularist and Middle East peace activist.

"The timing, the detail, the study," he said. "It was all done by very professional people, not people of ideology. Not bin Laden."

Such denials can cause history to repeat itself, warned Egyptian native Mary-Jane Deeb, an Arab specialist with the U.S. Library of Congress and a professor of international development at American University in Washington.

"If you deny responsibility, then there will not be any real soul-searching about ... the reasons behind (terrorism)," she said. "Is it the responsibility of the people in those countries who are not teaching children tolerance and openness? Have they failed in the educational realm, in the economic realm, in the political realm?"

Deeb, who stressed that she speaks only from her own experiences and not for the Library of Congress, was in Kuwait on Sept. 11. In the three weeks that followed, she traveled to Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates. She found sadness and shock -- and denial -- in all.

Then, like now, the fingers of blame from intellectuals and the general Arab public were pointed toward spies in the Israeli Mossad, the White House and even Japan and its kamikaze pilots, she said.

American deceptions and double standards

The belief is that the United States is dishonest; its government deals in deceptions and double standards. It drops bombs alongside care packages in Afghanistan. It preaches human rights then kills Afghan civilians caught in its crossfire. It allows Israel to occupy Palestinian territory but then labels only the Palestinians as terrorists.

It surely could doctor videotapes of bin Laden to make it appear he was involved in Sept. 11.

Even the Egyptian intellectuals who hedge their theories today about Sept. 11 -- reluctant to engage in guesswork or afraid of being labeled by the West as conspiracy theorists -- roll their eyes at the suggestion that al-Qaida and bin Laden are to blame.

Muhammad Al-Hudaibi weighed the question of bin Laden and Sept. 11 carefully. He is the deputy general of Egypt's outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's oldest and largest Islamic political movement.

Thirty seconds passed with only the sound of traffic whirring past his office window.

"Honestly, this question is difficult," he said, finally, appearing to err on the side of caution. "We only have access to what the media publishes. But there are some things we don't know."

In Cairo at the Mustafa Mahmoud Mosque -- a temple so crowded at Friday prayers that hundreds of Muslims spill outdoors onto mats laid in the streets -- the revered mosque founder laughs at the gullibility of Americans.

"Bin Laden could never do such a thing. He has not got the power or the mind. ... It is all fabrication," said Mustafa Mahmoud, 70, a surgeon, writer, host of a religious Egyptian TV show, and a builder of mosques. "It is a lie. America is fooling the world, fooling the whole world."

No Arabs did such a murderous thing, and certainly no Muslims, he said.

How then does he explain the descriptions by cell phone of Arab hijackers aboard the Sept. 11 flights? Or the incriminating trails leading to Cairo native and devout Muslim Mohamed Atta?

"All lies, lies," Mahmoud said, deflecting debate. "Read Thierry Meyssan."

Meyssan, a French conspiracy theorist, claims that Sept. 11 was orchestrated and executed by the U.S. government with remote-controlled planes and bombs in an attempt to justify war with Afghanistan and Iraq. Bin Laden, he says, works for the CIA. His book, "L'Effroyable Imposture" ("The Horrifying Fraud") is a bestseller in France.

Waco, McVeigh, the Mossad

Seven months earlier, Mahmoud told the New Yorker magazine that surviving Branch Davidians and "the (Timothy) McVeigh people" were responsible for Sept. 11. They had been aided, he said, by the Israeli Mossad.

But that was before the French writer convinced him that the U.S. government itself was to blame.

"The assault on America is nothing but America," said Mahmoud, a frequent contributor to Al-Ahram, the largest and most influential daily newspaper in Egypt.

Rising to leave the temple office, Mahmoud hobbled, then stopped and straightened. "We don't believe what your papers say," he said angrily, poking an American reporter firmly in the arm. The terrorism "is self-made to cover the ugly aggressions of America."

There is a positive aspect to this kind of denial, Deeb said. The Egyptians, Saudis, Kuwaitis and such who cannot believe Arabs were responsible for Sept. 11 are revealing their disdain for the attack.

"It is good that people feel it is so terrible of an act that they cannot be associated with it," she said.

After Mahmoud left, his deputy Ahmed Adel Nor El-Din confessed that he did not agree with his boss. America surely did not plot to kill its own, said El-Din, a plastic surgeon who completed a one-year fellowship in 1991 at the University of Michigan.

"I loved America. I like the American style. I like the American people. Everyone who goes there should admire them," he said.

So then who is responsible for Sept. 11?

"Maybe Atta and his group," he said, then added that bin Laden did not have a hand in it.

"Do you think he had the power to plan for this? I don't think so. This would make him a superstar, and he is no superstar."