According to a January 11, 1999 Newsweek article, “When Osama bin Laden was asked why he targets American and British civilians around the world, when Islam prohibits its followers from killing civilians in war, he replied: ‘If the Israelis are killing the small children in Palestine and the Americans are killing the innocent people in Iraq, and if the majority of the American people support their dissolute president, this means the American people are fighting us and we have the right to target them.’ Any American taxpayer is a target, he says, ‘because he is helping the American war machine against the Muslim nation.’ ”
– Simon Reeve, The New Jackals, Page 4