Osama bin Laden on the 9/11 attacks

I would like to assure the world that I did not plan the recent attacks, which seems to have been planned by people for personal reasons…  I have been living in the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan and following its leaders’ rules. The current leader does not allow me to exercise such operations.

I have already said that I am not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States.  As a Muslim, I try my best to avoid telling a lie.  Neither I had any knowledge of these attacks nor I consider the killing of innocent women, children and other humans as an appreciable act.  Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent women, children and other people. 

I have already said that we are against the American system, not against its people, whereas in these attacks, the common American people have been killed.  The United States should try to trace the perpetrators of these attacks within itself; the people who are a part of the US system, but are dissenting against it. 

Or those who are working for some other system; persons who want to make the present century as a century of conflict between Islam and Christianity so that their own civilization, nation, country or ideology could survive.  Then there are intelligence agencies in the US, which require billions of dollars worth of funds from the Congress and the government every year…  They need an enemy.

~ Osama bin Laden, interviewed by the Urdu newspaper Karachi Ummat, September 28, 2001

(As quoted by Pepe Escobar, "9/9 and 9/11, 20 Years Later," LewRockwell.com, September 11, 2021.)