The September 11 attacks are a recent, contested reference point in 2666: they heighten the shock of a Harlem group marching with Osama bin Laden’s image, then become the focus of an interview in which its spokesman replaces public explanations with elaborate conspiracy claims. The episode also throws into relief the book’s treatment of attention and violence: while the attacks command immediate notice, the killings of women in Santa Teresa repeatedly fade from public view, and Oscar Fate’s effort to report on them meets editorial resistance.

Public Shock and the Harlem Demonstration

Less than six months after the attack on the World Trade Center, Fate sees the Mohammedan Brotherhood at a pro-Palestine demonstration in Harlem. The group is small, but its members march beneath a large poster of bin Laden, turning their presence into an unmistakable provocation. Television crews and newspaper photographers take notice; the image magnifies the group’s visibility, and the demonstration becomes a scene of public confrontation rather than an ordinary march.

Fate follows the group after its members leave in a planned maneuver, then arranges to meet them. At a basement gathering, he asks Khalil why they carried bin Laden’s portrait. Khalil presents bin Laden as someone who understood the nature of their struggle and describes the Holy War as a voice for people who have lost the power of speech. The attack therefore appears not as an isolated historical reference but as material the group uses to frame its own politics and grievances.

Conspiracy Claims in Fate’s Interview

Khalil disputes the accepted account of the attacks. He suggests that the destruction benefited people with incriminating papers or interests in arms sales, questions whether Mohamed Atta was aboard one of the planes, and claims Atta and the other alleged perpetrators were killed and their bodies destroyed. When Fate asks who flew the planes, Khalil proposes a succession of alternative perpetrators, including people recruited from mental hospitals or volunteers who had been brainwashed.

These claims belong to Khalil’s account, not to the novel’s confirmed explanation of the attacks. Their importance lies in how the interview stages a conflict over knowledge: Fate presses for names and explanations, while Khalil’s answers widen the conspiracy rather than establish verifiable facts. His account draws on disappearance, secrecy, and distrust of institutions, making the attacks an occasion for a broader theory of hidden power.

Competing Claims on Attention

The attacks’ prominence contrasts with the persistent, less visible violence in Santa Teresa. During his stay there, Fate learns of the killings of women and tries to persuade his editor that the story merits more than his assigned boxing coverage. He proposes investigating the possibility that one or two people committed the crimes, alongside drug trafficking, the border, police corruption, and the city’s rapid growth. His editor refuses to change the assignment, insisting that Fate is there to cover a boxing match.

The book also shows how attention to the Santa Teresa murders rises and recedes. Chucho Flores tells Fate that each increase in the numbers brings renewed news coverage and public discussion, but that the story swells and then disappears as people return to work. In an earlier conversation, a boy tells Jean-Claude Pelletier and Manuel Espinoza that more than two hundred women have been killed since 1993 or 1994, perhaps many more; Espinoza reflects on their initial disbelief. These accounts do not make the two kinds of violence equivalent. Instead, their juxtaposition emphasizes how public recognition is shaped by spectacle, news cycles, and the limits placed on reporting.

The Attacks as a Contested Narrative Reference

The September 11 attacks are not narrated as a direct action scene in the supplied passages. They are recalled through Fate’s reporting and through Khalil’s claims, with the distance between public event and disputed account left visible. Fate’s questions expose the instability of the interview without resolving it: Khalil’s increasingly elaborate assertions remain assertions, and the narrative offers no confirmation of them.

That uncertainty sharpens the contrast at the center of Fate’s assignment. The attacks are immediately legible as a world-historical shock and become a powerful symbol in the Brotherhood’s rhetoric; Santa Teresa’s killings, despite their scale, are repeatedly treated as a story whose visibility can expire. Fate’s attempt to redirect his work toward those killings is blocked by the magazine’s priorities. The episode thus connects a global catastrophe to the novel’s broader concern with what gets reported, whose account is heard, and which ongoing violence is allowed to recede.