Although  Bin Laden, Atef, and KSM initially contemplated using established al Qaeda members to execute the planes operation, the late 1999 arrival in Kandahar of four aspiring jihadists from Germany suddenly presented a more attractive alternative. The Hamburg group shared the anti-U.S. fervor of the other candidates for the operation, but added the enormous advantages of fluency in English and familiarity with life in the West, based on years that each member of the group had spent living in Germany. Not surprisingly, Mohamed Atta, Ramzi Binalshibh, Marwan al Shehhi, and Ziad Jarrah would all become key players in the 9/11 conspiracy. Mohamed Atta was born on September 1, 1968, in Kafr el Sheikh, Egypt, to a middle-class family headed by his father, an attorney. After graduating from Cairo University with a degree in architectural engineering in 1990, Atta worked as an urban planner in Cairo for a couple of years. In the fall of 1991, he asked a German family he had met in Cairo to help him continue his education in Germany. They suggested he come to Hamburg and invited him to live with them there, at least initially. After completing a course in German, Atta traveled to Germany for the first time in July 1992. He resided briefly in Stuttgart and then, in the fall of 1992, moved to Hamburg to live with his host family. After enrolling at the University of Hamburg, he promptly transferred into the city engineering and planning course at the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg, where he would remain registered as a student until the fall of 1999. He appears to have applied himself fairly seriously to his studies (at least in comparison to his jihadist friends) and actually received his degree shortly before traveling to Afghanistan. In school, Atta came across as very intelligent and reasonably pleasant, with an excellent command of the German language. When Atta arrived in Germany, he appeared religious, but not fanatically so. This would change, especially as his tendency to assert leadership became increasingly pronounced. According to Binalshibh, as early as 1995 Atta sought to organize a Muslim student association in Hamburg. In the fall of 1997, he joined a working group at the Quds mosque in Hamburg, a group designed to bridge the gap between Muslims and Christians. Atta proved a poor bridge, however, because of his abrasive and increasingly dogmatic personality. But among those who shared his beliefs, Atta stood out as a decisionmaker. 

Question: "What group did Atta join that failed at trying to bring together two religions?"

Answer: "Muslim student association"

Response: no


After becoming disabled in a machete attack on a visit to his native Haiti, Jean-Claude Joseph needed help persuading his landlord to move him from a fifth-floor apartment to one on the ground floor. Isaac Benjamin became ensnared in a bureaucratic snafu that took away his Social Security disability payments for more than two years. The story of Martha, a woman from Sierra Leone, was more compelling. Beaten, raped and tortured in her politically repressive homeland, she knowingly used someone else's passport to escape to America, but was caught by immigration authorities upon her arrival. She desperately sought political asylum. Not the kind of cases that lead to ground-breaking upheavals in the law, but the kind of cases that are handled day in and day out by lawyers for the legally disenfranchised who have no where else to turn. The work of attorneys from Legal Services of New Jersey will be highlighted in a onehour documentary, "Quest for Justice," to be aired 9 p.m. today on New Jersey Network. Produced by NYD2, a communications firm based in Somerset, the documentary features case histories of clients whose needs ranged from housing to fighting off deportation. Joseph, a 54-year-old naturalized citizen, turned to Legal Services when the landlord of his federally subsidized apartment complex in Elizabeth turned a deaf ear to his request for a ground-floor apartment. Having lost the use of his left arm in warding off the machete attack during a robbery attempt, Joseph said he found it increasingly difficult to negotiate the five flights of stairs lugging groceries or laundry on the frequent occasions when the building's elevator was out of order. "With this, it became impossible for me to stay upstairs," he said, pointing to the scars on his forearm. "If I cannot carry my groceries or my laundry, how can I live?" "It was a compelling case," said Legal Services attorney Stephen St. Hilaire. "The key for us -- and we have to make tough decisions all the time on whether to take a case -- was visualizing what he had to do to get to the fifth floor, struggling with a bag of groceries," he said. Benjamin, 53, of Jersey City had been collecting Social Security disability after undergoing double bypass surgery when the checks stopped coming. He said the agency claimed he had failed to return a form updating the condition of his health. "But what got me was they didn't let me know they didn't get it, they just cut me off," he said, adding he found it impossible to negotiate the Social Security bureaucracy himself. 

Question: "Why did Martha come to America?"

Answer: "Beaten"

Response: yes


To make certain the U.S. was aware of the danger, in July 1939, a few months before the beginning of World War II in Europe, Szilard and Wigner visited Einstein to explain the possibility of atomic bombs, which Einstein, a pacifist, said he had never considered. He was asked to lend his support by writing a letter, with Szilard, to President Roosevelt, recommending the U.S. pay attention and engage in its own nuclear weapons research. A secret German facility, apparently the largest of the Third Reich, covering 75 acres in an underground complex, was being re-excavated in Austria in December 2014 and may have been planned for use in nuclear research and development. The letter is believed to be "arguably the key stimulus for the U.S. adoption of serious investigations into nuclear weapons on the eve of the U.S. entry into World War II". In addition to the letter, Einstein used his connections with the Belgian Royal Family and the Belgian queen mother to get access with a personal envoy to the White House's Oval Office. President Roosevelt could not take the risk of allowing Hitler to possess atomic bombs first. As a result of Einstein's letter and his meetings with Roosevelt, the U.S. entered the "race" to develop the bomb, drawing on its "immense material, financial, and scientific resources" to initiate the Manhattan Project. It became the only country to successfully develop an atomic bomb during World War II. For Einstein, "war was a disease ... [and] he called for resistance to war." By signing the letter to Roosevelt he went against his pacifist principles. In 1954, a year before his death, Einstein said to his old friend, Linus Pauling, "I made one great mistake in my life--when I signed the letter to President Roosevelt recommending that atom bombs be made; but there was some justification--the danger that the Germans would make them ..." 

Question: "How many years before Einstein's death did he begin the quest toward creating a nuclear weapon?"

Answer: "He began his quest 26 years before his death"

Response:
no