D3. 9/11 COMMISSION REPORT, EXCERPTS TOUCHING ON THE ROLE OF U.S. POLICY TOWARD ISRAEL IN THE 9/11 ATTACKS, WASHINGTON, DC, 28 JULY 2004.
The bipartisan commission's 565-page report was issued after many months of investigating, reviewing documents, interviewing hundreds of individuals, and hearing testimony. Much of the material concerning the actual planning of the attacks comes from captured al-Qa‘‘ida operatives, and particularly from the man identified in the report as the ““principal architect of the 9/11 attacks,”” Khalid Shaykh Muhammad (KSM), a Kuwaiti national raised in Pakistan who earned a degree in mechanical engineering in the United States. The report notes (p. 147) that according ““to his own account, KSM's animus toward the United States stemmed not from his experiences there as a student, but rather from his violent disagreement with U.S. foreign policy favoring Israel.”” The following brief excerpts touch upon the importance attached to U.S. policy toward Israel in generating the attacks. The references are both in the narrative body of the report and in the more prescriptive chapter ““What to Do?? A Global Strategy,”” where the commission offers suggestions on how the United States can ““Prevent the Continued Growth of Islamist Terrorism””; the paragraph excerpted from this forty-page chapter is the only reference to the impact of U.S. policy with regard to Israel. The excerpts appear respectively on pp. 250, 362, and 376––77 of the report. The full report is available from the U.S. Government Printing Office online at www.gpoaccess.gov/911.