Empathy for Osama bin Laden Has a Stopping Point. His Own Words Mark It.

Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

I read what bin Laden wrote and said to see how far understanding him goes. Some of his grievances were real. His answer to them was a choice, and the record shows where it starts.

Four days before the 2004 presidential election, Osama bin Laden sat in front of a camera and told Americans where the idea came from. He said it was not hatred of freedom. He said it was Beirut in 1982, when, in his telling, America let Israel invade Lebanon and he watched apartment towers come down. Looking at that rubble, he said, he decided to “punish the oppressor in kind” and destroy towers in America.

That tape is the closest thing on the record to bin Laden explaining himself, and most Americans have never read the transcript. Twenty-five years after September 11, I wanted to try something this country mostly refused to do in 2001: stand where he said he stood, read his words in order, and see how far empathy goes before it breaks.

Here is the result. Empathy, done straight, carries you a real distance with bin Laden. Some of his grievances were true, and the United States eventually removed the one he named first. Then it hits a wall, and the wall is built from his own sentences. Understanding him is useful work. It is the opposite of excusing him, and a country that skips the work leaves it to whoever gets there first.

Related coverage: for the attacks themselves, the timeline, the death toll and what changed afterward, read GSR’s 9/11: What Happened, What Changed, What Endures. That piece covers the day. This one covers the man who planned it and the reasons he gave.

What empathy means here

Empathy is the skill of seeing a situation the way another person sees it. It carries no approval. Detectives use it on suspects. Hostage negotiators use it on the people holding the gun. Sympathy is a different thing, a feeling of being on someone’s side, and bin Laden gets none of mine.

The September 11 attacks killed 2,977 people, according to the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. Two of the four hijacked planes, American Flight 11 and United Flight 175, took off from Boston’s Logan Airport, the airport a lot of Granite Staters drive to when they fly. Nothing in this piece softens that. The point of reading the man is to know the enemy, and you cannot know someone whose words you refuse to read.

The man in his own account

Bin Laden was born in Riyadh in 1957, one of more than 50 children of a Saudi construction magnate, according to the PBS Frontline chronology. After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in late 1979, he went to the Pakistani border and spent the early 1980s raising money and aid for the Afghan resistance.

The turn came in 1990. After Iraq invaded Kuwait, the 9/11 Commission found, bin Laden proposed to the Saudi monarchy that he summon mujahideen to retake Kuwait. The Saudis turned him down and agreed to let U.S. forces base in the kingdom. He opposed that publicly, and the government moved to silence him, including by taking his passport. By 1992 he was in Sudan. In April 1994 Saudi Arabia revoked his citizenship. In May 1996 Sudan expelled him under American and Saudi pressure, and he went back to Afghanistan.

Now run the exercise. A man who believes he helped beat one superpower offers to defend his own country. He is refused. He watches his king hand the job to a foreign army, whose soldiers are then stationed in the land of Islam’s two holiest mosques. He loses his citizenship and then his second country. You do not have to like him to see the humiliation in that sequence, or the rage it would feed.

His August 1996 declaration of war said it outright: there was no more important duty than “pushing the American enemy out of the holy land.”

Where the grievances hold up

The troops were real. They stayed after the Gulf War, through the 1990s, and through September 11. On April 29, 2003, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced that about 7,000 U.S. military personnel would leave Saudi Arabia that summer, with roughly 400 staying behind to train Saudi forces. The news coverage that day noted bin Laden had cited that presence to justify terrorism. Washington did not say it left because of him, and I will not claim it did. The narrower fact stands on its own: the deployment he called intolerable turned out to be optional.

Lebanon was real too. Israel invaded in 1982, and the destruction in Beirut was not something bin Laden invented. His claim that America “permitted” it is his characterization, and readers can weigh it.

Iraq is where his case starts to bend. Sanctions after the 1991 war were real and hard on Iraqis. The 1998 fatwa claimed the toll had passed one million. A 1996 bin Laden statement put the deaths of Iraqi children above 600,000. Those numbers rested on surveys run with Saddam Hussein’s government. In 2017, researchers at the London School of Economics, writing in BMJ Global Health, concluded that the key 1999 survey was rigged and that the surveys taken after 2003 show no unusual spike in child mortality between 1991 and 2003.

The sources conflict, and the later work is stronger: it checks the old figure against several surveys done after Saddam fell, instead of one conducted under his eye. That means bin Laden built part of his indictment of America on a number a dictator manufactured. You can understand his anger and still refuse his arithmetic.

Where empathy runs out

In February 1998, bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and three others signed a statement under the name World Islamic Front. It declared “the ruling to kill the Americans and their allies — civilians and military” an individual duty for every Muslim able to do it. The 9/11 Commission noted that none of the five signers were scholars of Islamic law. It also found that the decision to bomb the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania had already been made by the time the statement went out. The religious ruling arrived after the plan. Those August 1998 bombings killed 224 people, most of them in Nairobi.

Then there is the 2002 “Letter to America,” the document a new generation found on TikTok in 2023. It argues that because Americans elect their government and pay taxes, they are the ones who fund the attacks against us, in his words, and so are fair game. In the same letter he claims Jews control American policy, media and the economy, calls the creation of Israel a crime that must be erased, and lists his first demand: that Americans convert to Islam. He condemns homosexuality and lending at interest along the way.

This is where the exercise ends for me. I can follow bin Laden from a refused offer, to a foreign army on his soil, to a fury I can recognize. I cannot follow him from that fury into the North Tower, because he did not take that step out of grief. He took it on a theory, that every taxpayer is a soldier and that Jews run America, and the theory was his to choose. In the 2004 tape he asked why al-Qaeda had never struck Sweden, to prove his war was about policy and not freedom. Take him at his word on that. Then take him at his word on the rest of the letter.

What happens when nobody does the work

When the letter went viral in November 2023, The Guardian took down the transcript page from its site, saying it had been shared widely on social media without the full context. I understand the impulse. I think it taught the wrong lesson.

A document read without context needs the context, and pulling the page supplies none of it. People who met bin Laden’s grievances for the first time on a phone screen met them with nobody pointing at the paragraph about Jews, or at the Iraqi child-mortality figure that did not hold up. They got the half of him that sounds like a foreign-policy critic and none of the half that planned mass murder first and found a ruling for it later. GSR has written about what TikTok’s algorithm can do to public debate and about platforms deciding what people get to see. Deleting a primary source is the same move from the other direction. That gap exists because the country treated the question of motive as suspect for years after 2001. If responsible people will not read the man closely in public, the first person to do it on camera gets to define him.

What understanding buys

Knowing why someone fights is how you shrink the pool of people willing to join him. When President Obama announced on May 2, 2011, that U.S. forces had killed bin Laden at a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, he said the United States “is not — and never will be — at war with Islam.” That line only works if Americans know what bin Laden was selling and to whom: a story about humiliation, foreign troops, and dead children, with the hard numbers wrong and the hatred left in. It also only works if lawmakers here act like they believe it. This year a New Hampshire House committee voted 13-3 to send an anti-Sharia resolution, HR 34, to interim study, and it died when the session ended. That was the right outcome for a resolution that should not have been filed.

Bin Laden argued that paying taxes made every American a legitimate target. That was a lie built to excuse murder. There is a true version sitting underneath it. Paying taxes makes every American an owner of what this government does overseas, and owners are supposed to know what they bought. When the U.S. and Israel went to war with Iran this winter, New Hampshire’s average gas price rose 21 cents in a week, to $3.06 a gallon, the Boston Globe reported on March 5. GSR covered the local hit the same week. The bill for foreign policy always comes home. Empathy for bin Laden ends at the North Tower. The duty to understand why he found recruits does not end at all.

— Dexter Dow, Granite State Report

Fact check

Editor’s note. Every factual claim above was checked against the sources listed; see the fact-check table. All bin Laden quotations are from English translations published by Al Jazeera, the Federation of American Scientists, PBS Frontline and The Observer; Granite State Report did not review the Arabic originals. Iraqi sanctions-era mortality figures are disputed; this piece relies on the 2017 BMJ Global Health analysis for the reasons stated in the text. The article does not claim the 2003 troop withdrawal from Saudi Arabia was a response to bin Laden. The audio version is narrated by an AI voice from the published text. Chart bars are drawn to scale from the figures cited. This is an opinion piece built on documents; no new interviews were conducted. Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a note identifying what changed and when.