They helped the Yemen communists against the southern Yemeni Muslims and are helping [Yasser] Arafat’s regime fight Hamas After it insulted and jailed the ulema … the Saudi regime lost its legitimacy.” Bin Laden paused to see if I had listened to his careful if frighteningly exclusive history lesson. “We as Muslims have a strong feeling that binds us together.. We feel for our brothers in Palestine and Lebanon. The explosion at Khobar did not come as a direct result of American occupation but as a result of American behaviour against Muslims…”When 60 Jews are killed inside Palestine [in suicide bombings in 1996], all the world gathers within seven days to criticise this action, while the deaths of 600,000 Iraqi children [under UN sanctions] did not receive the same reaction Killing those Iraqi children is a crusade against Islam. We, as Muslims, do not like the Iraqi regime but we think that the Iraqi people and their children are our brothers and we care about their future.”But it was America that captured bin Laden’s final attention.

“I believe that sooner or later the Americans will leave Saudi Arabia, and that the war declared by America against the Saudi people means war against Muslims everywhere. Resistance against America will spread in many, many places in Muslim countries. Our trusted leaders, the ulema, have given us a fatwa that we must drive out the Americans. The solution to this crisis is the withdrawal of American troops… their military presence is an insult to the Saudi people.”I’ve been thinking a lot about that last statement this week American forces are still in Saudi Arabia. And about his earlier remark in July, 1996 – after a truck bomb had killed 19 Americans – that this incident marked “the beginning of the war between Muslims and the United States”. Of the later bombing and the killing of 24 US servicemen, he was to tell me that it was “a great act in which I missed the honour of participating”.

He spoke then in a chilling, lower voice of his hatred of the American “occupiers”.Intelligent – and eloquent in Arabic – bin Laden undoubtedly is. But his understanding of foreign affairs is decidedly eccentric. At one point, he even suggested to me that individual US states might secede from the Union because of Washington’s support for Israel But the historical perspective was deeply disturbing. “We believe that God used our holy war in Afghanistan to destroy the Russian army and the Soviet Union,” he said.