It’s my first time reading it. In those early days and years after the attacks, as a kid, I found it difficult to find exactly this though I was looking for it. Probably, it wouldn’t have been hard to find if I’d tried a little harder, given how old this major newspaper article is, but certainly nothing like this ever graced the airwaves or was circulated in print via Australian media in my home country. When I asked people what exactly this guy really wanted the answers were split between the ridiculously obviously bullshit line about terrorists hating freedom (which somehow also encapsulated Australian freedom but resulted in America getting attacked); and the more sympathetic view about American and western hypocrisy and bombing people. The latter might have seemed like the answer was there but it was vague, probably because people were unlikely to have read this and there were so many similar acts of violence and hypocrisy it’d be hard to say which ones specifically. That never quite explained it to me either because while less self serving and favourable, I found it unlikely that our hypocrisy in the west would annoy someone half a world away enough to carry out violence any more than our “freedom” would unless more specific “damages” had been inflicted because of that hypocrisy. The letter is enlightening because even though it’s mostly the same answer, because it’s more concrete in its specific grievances. At least at first blush.

That said, it does read, as you say as kind of lip service to each and every cause celebre listed as part of a general anger and to an extent it also kind of showed me that at least to a degree “democracy” and “freedom” sort of were mentioned in there as part of the rationale for jihad. This was curious because there seems to be a contempt in there for democracy as a system and its values combined with decrying how it has been undermined and corrupted by America and Americans and phrased in a way which seems unaware that the implication is that if America and the west were more true to their professed values there wouldn’t be a problem, even though he seems to an extent to actually have a problem with those values themselves.

I think people are duly interested and surprised to read this and to discover that it’s actually reasonably easy to understand and contains at times points that are understand-able in the sense that one could sympathise because while it probably was easy enough to find if really looking, this hasn’t in my experience been given much daylight. People have always spoken for Osama Bin Laden and his ilk and the vagueness has always given his motives an air of mysteriousness because they morphed in to the views of whatever puppeteer was speaking for him at any time. It made him inscrutable and for me made his actual reasons something I could assume were very complex. This sets it out mostly pretty clearly with the occasional steering in to rantings of an old angry religious guy. Our media, whilst presumably never banning or censoring this, (this is the guardian after all, it’s pretty major) tended to keep it pretty quiet despite exhaustive coverage of experts saying what they thought it was all about. It makes the popularisation of this much later feel a bit like discovering a hidden text, even if hidden in plain sight.

It’s interesting what you said about Saudi Arabia, but then if that was what really set him off enough to escalate things to this new level, why didn’t he mention it? It seems given everything else that warranted a mention this could have been framed as he saw it and continue to support his point.