While most of a stunned world was still asking "why" after the world's deadliest terrorist attack destroyed New York's World Trade Center, Juan Cole was asking "how?"

What Dr. Cole, a scholar of Middle Eastern history at the University of Michigan, wanted to know wasn't how the airliners were hijacked or the plot concocted. Instead, he wondered how the hijackers had prepared mentally for certain death - and to kill themselves and civilians despite the Koran's injunctions against suicide and murder.

Since the events of 9/11, Cole and other academics have invested many research hours in answering such questions. What they have uncovered has to some degree defied conventional wisdom.

A careful study of the five-page hand-written document - or "doomsday letter" - found in Mohammed Atta's luggage has led Cole and others to conclude that blind rage and fanatical hatred of the values symbolized by the US did not alone motivate the hijackers.

Instead, they may have been manipulated by sophisticated psychological methods involving repetitive readings of selective passages of the Koran along with mesmeric techniques of Islamic mysticism.

On Sept. 27, 2001, the FBI released four of the five pages of text and a translation of the letter found in Atta's suitcase. In the burst of coverage that followed, news media variously dubbed the document a checklist, a manual, a prayer guide, a spiritual exhortation - even a suicide note. Yet the text defied easy classification.

Embedded in the document were subtle clues tantalizing to researchers with a deep knowledge of Arabic and Arab society.

Fluent in Urdu, Farsi, and Arabic, Cole had spent 10 years in the Muslim world. When the FBI posted the document on its website, he immediately logged on.

At first, it seemed an inscrutable list of practical and religious advice. The undercover operatives were directed to review their plans, sharpen their knives, read specific chapters from the Koran, endlessly repeat certain prayers, and be assured of God's pleasure with their actions.

Finally, after months of poring over the document, retranslating and dissecting it word by word, Cole in April presented his analysis on genocide at a Yale University conference in New Haven. (For further analysis, see www.juancole.com).

The letter was much more than a checklist, Cole concluded. It was a mechanism or tool for "autohypnosis" and "psychological manipulation."

Creating and maintaining a noble self-image was a critical function of the document. Suicide was redefined as martyrdom. To craft this self-image of martyrs, the document draws heavily on verses of the Koran pulled out of context, researchers say.

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