In bin Laden’s ‘Message to the American People,’ sent to Al Jazeera on October 30, 2004, he said: “The events that affected me personally began in 1982, when America gave the Israelis the green light to invade Lebanon and the American Sixth Fleet helped them. …many were killed and injured. …I cannot forget those unbearable scenes of blood and severed limbs, those corpses of women and children strewn everywhere, houses destroyed along with their occupants…rockets raining down on our land without mercy. …And as I looked at those demolished buildings in Lebanon, it entered my mind that we should punish the oppressor in kind and destroy the towers of America, so that they could experience some of what we had experienced, and so that they would stop killing our women and children. …I realized that killing innocent women and children is a deliberate American policy. …State terrorism is called freedom and democracy, while resistance is terrorism and intolerance. This means that millions of people must suffer oppression and embargo until death results, as inflicted by [President] Bush Sr. in Iraq in the greatest mass slaughter of children ever. It means millions of children are subjected to mass bombardments because [President] Bush Jr. wanted to overthrow a former ally and replace him with a new puppet to assist in the theft of Iraq’s oil and other crimes.”
– Gilles Kepel and Jean-Pierre Milelli, eds., Al Qaeda In Its Own Words, Pages 72-73