Since June, 2002, when U.S. officials first identified Mohammed as the “mastermind” of 9/11, he has become one of history’s most famous criminals. Yet, unlike Osama bin Laden, he has remained essentially unknown. Efforts to uncover more than the outlines of his biography have produced sketchy and sometimes contradictory results. (These include my own, for my book “Perfect Soldiers,” published in 2005.) Even basic facts have been in doubt; there are, for example, at least three versions of his birth date. For almost the entire decade before he was captured, in early 2003, Mohammed was a fugitive, deliberately obscuring his tracks. Bin Laden, meanwhile, was hosting television interviewers, giving speeches, and distributing videos and text versions of his proclamations to whoever would have them.
Insofar as we know Mohammed, we see him as a brilliant behind-the-scenes tactician and a resolute ideologue. As it turns out, he is earthy, slick in a way, but naïve, and seemingly motivated as much by pathology as by ideology. Fouda describes Mohammed’s Arabic as crude and colloquial and his knowledge of Islamic texts as almost nonexistent. A journalist who observed Mohammed’s appearance at one of the Guantánamo hearings likened his voluble performance to that of a Pakistani Jackie Mason. A college classmate said that he was an eager participant in impromptu skits and plays. A man who knew him from a mosque in Doha talked about his quick wit and chatty, glad-handing style. He was an operator.
In at least one important way, though, his boasts are accurate. Mohammed, not Osama bin Laden, was the essential figure in the 9/11 plot. The attacks were his idea, carried out under his direct command. Mohammed has said that he went so far as to resist swearing allegiance to bin Laden and Al Qaeda until after the attacks, so that he could continue pursuing them if Al Qaeda lost courage.
The United States intends to try Mohammed, in a venue and a jurisdiction yet to be determined. The specifics of the trial—where it should be held, and whether it ought to be a military or a civil hearing—have been the subject of intense debate. In the absence of bin Laden, it is hard to imagine a more spectacular legal proceeding; even without a location or a prosecutor, it has been called the trial of the century. Wherever Mohammed may be tried, he seems to have done much of the prosecution’s work for it, describing himself as a righteous, relentless executioner whose version of making war knows no bounds. But the process will be aimed at assessing guilt, not causes. It will not tell us much about who Mohammed is, or about the forces that shaped him, which are, to an alarming extent, still at work in the places where he came of age.