In “CAIR-Less with the Truth,” by Jake Tapper (Oct. 7), an error in the translation led to the misattribution of a quotation to Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). It was not Mr. Awad but the interviewer, Sanaa Al-Said of the Egyptian newspaper El-Osboa, who said of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, “My belief is that the beneficiary is behind the attack and the biggest beneficiary of the September 11th event is certainly Israel, as it took advantage of it in a wide scale.” Mr. Awad replied to this comment as follows: “There are theories leading in this direction. In my meeting with President Bush and during my conversation with him after last September’s events, I said to him that there is talk in the region leading to [the belief that] what happened could not have been carried out by the hand of Muslims or Arabs, due to the gravity and strength of planning and the efficiency of its execution. So he told me, ‘The door is wide open for speculation.’ I said what indicates that Muslims are not behind this operation is the big contradiction between what was said in the biographies of the suspects, that they were drinking alcohol and sleeping with women, and the behavioral biographies of Bin Laden’s group. So Bush said, ‘This means that if those that carried out the attack were Arabs, then non-Arabs and non-Muslims could be behind them.'” (The White House denied the content of this conversation.) We regret the mistake and apologize to Mr. Awad and CAIR for the misattribution.
