he straw that broke the camels back for me was that night he announced to the world that America was going to invade Afghanistan and “you’re either with us or you are with the terrorists” Not only was diplomacy out the window, but George Bush, with the complete backing of the American people, was now issuing an ultimatum, a threat, to every country in the world which in essence said “you either back our actions or you are our enemy”. Not only is it simplistic dualism to draw such a line in the sand – its outright dangerous. Very few things in life are black and white and certainly 911 wasn’t, but most importantly, this irresponsible statement polarized the populous. Now every citizen and every country had to choose sides.

It was blatantly obvious that someone was very mad at the United States of America. Why was no one asking why? There was certainly a very big problem somewhere so why was America not trying to find out what the problem was and how it could be resolved peacefully? That’s what civilized people do. Instead, before the facts were on the table, America was issuing ultimatums to the world in, not only a show of complete and utter arrogance, but one of force, that potentially could ignite a much bigger problem.

There were also many unanswered questions surrounding the events of that day that were troubling. Although I never bought into the “conspiracy theories” per se, there had to have been at very least a whole lot of mistakes that happened to allow an event of this magnitude to occur on US soil. There was no real evidence that linked Osama bin Laden to this crime and in fact he denied his involvement shortly afterwards and many in the Arab world did not believe he even had the capability to pull it off. How was it that Bin Laden, who by this time was painted in the press daily as a camel riding ignoramus, hiding in the remote caves of Afghanistan, was able to carry out such a sophisticated and complex operation? The logistics alone appeared impossible, let alone the coordination and numerous checks and balances that would have had to occur in order to carry out simultaneously attacks. To implode just one tower would required in-depth knowledge of the structure, sophisticated mathematical calculations of wind, velocity and altitudes and umpteen other things and to carry out all of the events of that day would have required a large tactical team - not one man and a couple of handfuls of Saudi youth it seemed to me. The official story and the outcome didn’t add up and even more so when combined with the rush to invade Afghanistan.

That night, I sat at my computer and typed the words “Osama bin Laden” into Google. Who is this guy and what does he want? I was still at my desk in the morning when staff arrived for work and this became the norm in the months that followed.

The American propaganda machine lost me for good that night. From then on, as those who worked with me will validate, I became obsessed with finding out what was really going on. In the early days of my research, I remember sitting at five in the morning, exhausted, after going from link to link to link to link, starring at the face of Osama bin Laden. This man does not have the face of a cold blooded killer. This is not a Charles Manson. There has to be something more.

I began to search out his material and the first that I read was his 1996 Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places. I couldn’t understand what he was talking about when he wrote that the blood of Muslims was spilled in Palestine, Iraq, Tajikistan, Burma, Kashmir, Assam, the Philippines, Fatani, Ogadin, Somalia, Erithria, Chechnya and Bosnia Herzegovina. As an informed individual who gleaned my information on world events each day from American nightly news, I had no knowledge of this. I started cross references events that took place in these countries between American, European and Middle Eastern press. What I discovered that Muslims by the thousands were being wiped out either by US-backed governments, under the guise of the United Nations or as the result of simply turning a blind eye. This was just the tip of the iceberg.

Many of the Muslim sites were shut down after 911 and soon I discovered the Internet archives. I began to access more “radical” sites from there and would pull specific accusations of violations against Muslims, search them out in the archives of main stream press and cross reference them in international press. The story being told in America and the West was a much different one than in Europe and another version entirely was coming from the Middle East and South East Asia. The more I dug into this history the worse it got.

A good number of Muslim sites were in Arabic so I used translation software to interpret these. I called every high level tech I knew for techniques to obtain hard to get information. I bought every book ever published in English on Islamic terrorism, Osama bin Laden, Al-Qaida, Holy Warriors and anything else that was relevant that I could get my hands on, I had material shipped from the UK and as far away as South East Asia. At the same time, I began to dig into American Foreign Policy from the Carter administration on.