Tag Archives: Hani Hanjour

What Questions Remain About 9/11?

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 5 September 2018

In less than a week, it will be the seventeenth anniversary of al-Qaeda’s “Plane’s Operation”, the assault on the United States. It is a vertiginous enough reflection that many of us have been alive more years since 11 September 2001 than before it, and positively alarming that many of those who will soon move into the government, media, and other leading societal institutions will have been born after an event that still shapes so much of the international scene. As Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan put it in The Eleventh Day: The Ultimate Account of 9/11 (2011), we are left with “the brief name ‘9/11’,” the context and meaning stripped away all this time later. The book is a useful overview of an event that should always be to some degree fresh in mind, though it is not without its problems in its analytical sections. Continue reading →

Profile of a 9/11 Planner: Muhammad Atef

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 5 February 2018

Al-Qaeda’s military leader Muhammad Atef at a press conference in Afghanistan, 26 May 1998 (image source: CNN)

Muhammad Atef, best-known as Abu Hafs al-Masri, but who also went by the names Taseer Abdullah or Taysir Abdullah and Subhi Abu Sitta, was al-Qaeda’s military leader between 1996 and 2001, and one of the three people most responsible for the terrorist attack in the United States on 11 September 2001. Continue reading →

America Escalates the War Against Al-Qaeda in Syria

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By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on November 11, 2016

On the right: Abdullah al-Muhaysini (source)

The United States and therefore the international Coalition is about to step up its operations against Jabhat Fatah al-Sham (JFS), al-Qaeda’s recently rebranded Syrian branch. This is a necessary policy, but pursued in isolation—without replacing the capacities that JFS provides to the insurgency—this action will strengthen the coalition supporting the regime of Bashar al-Assad, the actors chiefly responsible for the humanitarian abomination in Syria that has deliberately given rise to the security menace of the Islamic State (IS) and the flow of refugees into Europe that has destabilized Western security. Assad’s coalition also includes the Islamic Republic of Iran, a more significant global terrorism threat than IS which has repeatedly attacked the West. Continue reading →