The Students of terror; The terrible consequences of the 9/11 attacks

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Aug 22, 2004 | by Torcuil Crichton

THE 9/11 Commission report into the cataclysmic events that have shaped this century starts with the lines: "Tuesday September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States. Millions of men and women readied themselves for work for those heading to an airport, weather conditions could not have been better for a safe and pleasant journey. Among the travellers were Mohammed Atta and Abdul Aziz al Omari, who arrived at the airport in Portland, Maine."

Even though we know what happens next, the unfolding, stylised narrative of the official US version of history reads like the opening of a thriller novel. But then the events of that day transcended our imagination to such an extent that it shouldn't come as any surprise that they lend themselves to dramatic treatment.

Within the context of the day that changed the world, a new Channel 4 drama documentary, Hamburg Cell, which opens at the Edinburgh International Film Festival this week, deals with the unknowns, the enigmas at the heart of the terror.

For all the media saturation, three years on from the event we have learned remarkably little about the men who carried out the act. They are dead and demonised and that is it, until now.

Although it treads warily around the 3000 dead, the film doesn't concentrate on the victims, instead it looks at the perpetrators, trying to imagine what drove the young men who hijacked the planes to send themselves and so many others to their death.

Anything that gives our demons a human disguise will be attacked and, with what on the surface is remarkably little material to go on, the film will inevitably draw ire, particularly if a deal with US cable channel HBO for American distribution goes ahead.

None of that ire should distract from what it has achieved.

Constructed out of out of what is available - from court transcripts and interviews with family and friends - Hamburg Cell delivers the first dramatic glimpse into the human heart and mind of al-Qaeda terrorism.

The film plot follows three of the 19 conspirators who boarded the planes: Mohammed Atta, who flew the first plane into the World Trade Centre; Ziad Jarrah, who was at the controls of United Airlines Flight 93 when it crashed in Pennsylvania; and Ramzi bin-al Shibh, who co-ordinated events from the eponymous city in northern Germany, having been refused a visa to enter the US.

Taking a full circle from the morning of September 11 back to Hamburg, several years earlier, the film introduces Atta, Jarrah and bin-al Shibh as students in Germany. It then traces their journey of radicalisation from study groups in Hamburg, where they meet the dark and strange Atta and are drawn deep into a corrupted form of Islam and on to the training camps of Afghanistan.

From there we follow their trajectory to martyrdom on that clear and crisp Tuesday morning, each one dealing with the doubt and crisis that accompanies their mission. We see plainly, for the first time perhaps, the political, psychological, religious and personal influences that propelled them to mass murder. We also witness the fine detail of their lives.

Before he boarded flight 93 Jarrah phoned his girlfriend from the airport, repeating, "I love you, I love you" down the line to Germany. Atta, generally viewed as the ruthless leader of the Hamburg cell, appealed to his domineering father to allow him to stay in Egypt instead of returning to his al-Qaeda handlers in Germany.

It was these humanising details, already extensively researched by his co-writer Alice Perman that drew award-winning Irish writer Ronan Bennett to the project, having initially rejected an approach by the film's producers Mentom "Here's the paradox," says Bennett, a novelist and screenwriter who's dealt with the twin themes of terror and love in previous works, such as the TV film Rebel Heart, documenting the Troubles in Ireland. "On the morning of September 11, these 19 guys got on to four different planes and killed 3000 people. Yet anyone who had any kind of dealings with them liked them. At the flight school in America Jarrah was a popular character, his flight instructor liked him, they invited him to a beach party.

"Likewise Ramzi bin-al Shibh, who would have been one of the pilots but couldn't get a visa to the US, was well liked in Germany. At parties children gravitated towards him. These were people who were normal and funny and liked, and somehow you have to reconcile the image of the fanatic with the reality that comes across from the research material."

Bennett's been accused of portraying terrorists sympathetically in his work, but he insists that everything you see on screen in Hamburg Cell can be accounted for.

Incredibly detailed research by Perman began before that fateful September in 2001 and carried on into the post-production phase. There were extensive interviews with the Jarrah family, with people who knew the members of the Hamburg cell in Germany and those who met them in America.

New evidence of who the 9/11 terrorists really were is still emerging all the time. In Germany the retrial of Mounir el- Motassadeq, a Moroccan accused of providing logistical help to the Hamburg cell, has changed perceptions of the conspirators again.