from Small Wars Journal :
Major Hasan reintroduces 'Terror and Consent'
Posted by Robert Haddick on November 19, 2009 12:34 PM Permalink Print
The massacre at Fort Hood is a reminder that the War on Terror is not fought just in south Afghanistan or Mosul. It is a global war also fought in an office building inside a military base in Texas. Many counter-terror analysts focus on the Pakistan connection and preventing The Big One that could top 9/11. But the real problem may well be the self-motivated “small ball” players like Major Hasan or a future disciple of DC Sniper John Allen Muhammad. “Small ball” terrorism won’t have the economic, political, or strategic impact that 9/11 did. But if there is enough of it, the public will eventually find political leadership that will provide an adequate response to the problem.
What should be that response? How should Western societies respond to the generalized problem of terrorism, especially the domestic variety? Constitutional law professor and former National Security Council staffer Philip Bobbitt attempted to provide a comprehensive answer in his grandly ambitious book Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-first Century. In a message that ruffled feathers on every point on the political spectrum, Bobbitt argued that in order to defend Western values of liberty and the rule of law, both domestic and international law would need to become more muscular. Bobbitt rejected that there is a trade-off between civil liberties and government power. In a future world of “market-state terrorism” he fears we are headed to, Bobbitt argued that more law authorizing more surveillance and more foreign intervention would be the only way to protect basic liberties.
After an initial flurry of attention, Terror and Consent seems to have been shelved to collect dust. Without another 9/11 or even any small ball terrorism inside the U.S., no one has had any need for Bobbitt’s theories.
Major Hasan’s case may reintroduce us to Terror and Consent. Many want to know why the electronic surveillance over Hasan was not used to stop him in advance of his rampage. A fair question. Are there other Major Hasans who have similarly self-radicalized and are preparing to strike? Or about to self-radicalize even if they don’t know it yet? Is there a government agency responsible for monitoring and preventing this? If so, what should be an acceptable level of false positive identifications and apprehensions?
Bobbitt attempted to address these and other questions in a dense and theoretical way. But maybe it won’t be just theory for much longer.
Posted by Robert Haddick on November 19, 2009 12:34 PM Permalink Print
Comments (6)
http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2009/11/major-hasan-reintroduces-terro/
ALSO see
An Oath Violated
http://www.politicalislam.com/blog/an-oath-violated/
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Friday, November 6, 2009
‘Islam not responsible’ for Fort Hood massacre: US imam
Why?
because Islam means peace. That's what they claim. But . . .
An islamic miniature (one of many) that portrays muhamhead at a beheading. So if their guy is at killings, what is the big deal with associating islam with violence.
It's because it is TOO CLOSE TO THE TRUTH.
because Islam means peace. That's what they claim. But . . .
An islamic miniature (one of many) that portrays muhamhead at a beheading. So if their guy is at killings, what is the big deal with associating islam with violence.
It's because it is TOO CLOSE TO THE TRUTH.
www.practicalturkish.com/miniature-siyer-i-nebi--beheading.jpg
It shows Ali bin Abu Taleb beheading Nasr bin al-Hareth in the presence of the Prophet Mohamhead and his companions.
In 1995, this miniature (measuring just 7 by 9 inches approximately) fetched £ 42,000 at Sotheby's in London. the devil hates to be discovered for what the deceiver is.
http://www.zombietime.com/mohammed_image_archive/modern_satires/
above from http://www.finalcrusade.com/4.html
‘Islam not responsible’ for Fort Hood massacre: US imam
by sheikyermami on November 7, 2009
At last! Not a moment too soon: denial is a river in Egypt, but the kuffar-media is desperate to lap it up.
Debbie Schlussel:
Nidal Malik Hasan was just a "stressed out victim of Islamophobia."
King Kong Schlong: Its Islam, Stupid! Spare us the "Sudden ‘Camel Jockey’ Allahu Akbar Derangement Syndrome… Fake ’Dr’ Phil spouts this same BS line about stress and trauma being the reason, not that Islam actually was the reason.
Breitbart.com
Islam is "not responsible" for the bloodbath at an army base in Texas where Muslim-American army Major Nidal Malik Hasan allegedly gunned down 13 people, the prayer leader at the mosque where the officer regularly worshipped said Friday.
"We offer our condolences and prayers to the families that have a person who died," said Imam Mohammed Abdullahi over loud-speakers that carried the weekly Muslim prayer to several hundred worshippers gathered at the mosque.
"Islam is not responsible," he stressed.
http://sheikyermami.com/2009/11/07/islam-not-responsible-for-fort-hood-massacre-us-imam/
Former JAG Officer on CNN Tells Dr. Phil to Quit The "Psychobabble" & Deal With The Islamic Factor at Ft. Hood....
Lefties are working overtime to spin this one so Islam isn't the motive (he's mentally ill, Islamophobia drove him to do it, Bush's fault etc). The facts: Hasan's a Muslim and he killed infidels to please Allah. Deal with it.
http://www.weaselzippers.net/blog/2009/11/video-gold-former-jag-officer-on-cnn-tells-dr-phil-to-quit-the-psychobabble-deal-with-the-islamic-fa.html
Islam breeds hate, intolerance and great confusion about the human condition. It is necessary that one day it be nothing more than a testimonial relic of man's capacity for misdirection. I look forward to that day, though I may not live long enough to see it. It had better come, though, or a new dark age will descend upon mankind, courtesy of Islam.
Yes, the situation is this dire. Islam is incapable of reform but very capable of creating repression, misery and death. Its theological blueprint is a menace to liberty as much as Marxism and Nazism were. And I'm running out of patience for those who blindly persist in not seeing this.
Wellington November 6, 2009 4:15 PM
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2009/11/when-nidal-hasan-came-calling.html
How many centuries has this been going on and we still reject that Islam is anything but peaceful? There has never been a time, anywhere in the world, that Islam was not the aggressor. No, not every Muslim is radical, but can anyone show me one instance, even within the Military, where Muslims personally want to put an end to Islam's threat to infidels?
We do not know the details of each and every Muslim serving alongside our Military. That's the problem. What are we asking Muslims to do when deployed to a war zone fighting the war on terror. We are asking Muslims to kill Muslims, knowing that their "faith" teachs that only Muslims can, and should, survive. I know many Muslims are serving this country, but, really, I ask again, will they tell you they want to put an end to Islam's threat to infidels? Will they?
http://findalismonkeyinthemiddle.blogspot.com/2009/11/cair-defends-islam-fort-hood-shooter.html
Cartoon thanks to http://barenakedislam.wordpress.com/2009/11/06/left-wing-political-correctness-killed-those-soldiers-at-fort-hood/
When you hear someone shout "allahu akbar!" shoot the bastard! http://islamicdangerstill.blogspot.com/2007/12/when-you-hear-someone-shout-allahu.html
Thursday, November 5, 2009
THE TRIUMPH OF ISLAM - HOW TRIBALISM TRUMPS RATIONALISM AND CIVILISATION.
by najistani
Viewed rationally, Islam is a non-starter. Its 'Holy' Book consists of half-digested fragments of Judeo-Christian theology, mixed with the bile of hatred, and spewed into the fair face of Christendom from the putrifying guts of a violent, deceitful, plundering pedophile. The Koran is full of historical, scientific and logical errors and even contradicts itself on numerous occasions. Not exactly the work of a Supreme Intellect!
And yet Muslims claim that these demented ramblings and rantings are the literal word of God Almighty, to be treated with utmost respect. They throw enormous tantrums when Korans are left in toilets or returned to libraries with bacon-rashers as bookmarks. In the Islamic paradise of Pakistan, damaging a Koran or insulting The Pedophile are punishable by death.
To understand Islam we need to look at the most primitive organisational state of mankind - Tribalism.
If we regard the Ummah as a tribe, and the Koran, the Pedophile and the Black Meteorite as the tribe's three main totems, we begin to get a better understanding of Islam. A tribe derives its identity and unity by displays of reverence towards supernatural totems, and feels insecure and threatened whenever the power of its totems is weakened, for example by the totems being 'humiliated' or 'polluted' . One of the surest ways of demoralising a tribe has always been to desecrate its totems.
This explains the rage at the Motoons, and the 'hate crime' of the Koran down the toilet. It also explains why the Saudi authorities made such a fuss when they found a Christian in Mecca. The precincts of the Holy Meteorite had been defiled by a najis kaffir.
Tribal culture and psychology are difficult for civilised people to understand. Most parts of Western Europe have not been organised tribally since the Dark Ages, so it's difficult to get inside Muslim mind and understand just how primitive and benighted are the psychological processes that go on there. For example:
- A tribe regards itself as perpetually at war with all other tribes - hence the Muslim worldview of Dar a-Harb in conflict with Dar al-Islam, and Ummah in conflict with Kaffir.
- The property and women of other tribes are there for the taking. Might is right - hence the Jizya, Razzia, white slaving etc which are all justified by the Koran. Tribalism also explains the chants of 'We will take your wives for booty' at the London Motoons demonstration - this is the typical behavior of the stone age savage.
- The ethics of reciprocity (do as you would be done by) only apply within the tribe. Hence the lack of any Golden Rule in Islam. The nearest you get to the Golden Rule in the Koran is desiring for your brother Muslim ('kin-selection') what you desire for yourself - in other words share out the booty equally.
- Loyalty to the tribe is of paramount importance - hence the punishment by death for apostates.
- The tribe must not mingle with other tribes or else it may lose its identity - hence the self-imposed ghettoisation and ethnic cleansing of Kaffirs from the periphery of the ghetto as seen in European cities.
- There is a great desire to destroy or humiliate the totems of other tribes, especially where they have phallic significance - hence the attack on the twin towers, and the plans for the MegaMosque whose minarets will be taller than any Christian building.
Muslims in the modern world are living fossils, though like dinosaurs suddenly set down on the streets of London, none the less dangerous for being so primitive. Islam appeals to the lowest and basest instincts of man, and in the absence of a strong, confident modern culture will gradually reduce its host society to a disfunctional state of anarchy where Islam can gain the upper hand.
Tribalism makes it impossible to defeat Islam by reason or appeals to decency. The Koran, the Pedophile and the Meteorite are not capable of being examined rationally or ethically - they are pre-rational symbols of tribal cohesion. And when that tribe is on a roll , and believes itself to be the strongest and fastest growing tribe winning the Jihad against all the rest, no rational argument will persuade its warriors to abandon the winning side.
The Ummah may eventually have an 'Emperor's New Clothes Moment', but it will not come about by reviewing the evidence for a flat earth in the Koran. It is more likely to happen by military defeat in a European Civil War or World War III.
najistani
Tags: islam, Tribalism, Muslims
Viewed rationally, Islam is a non-starter. Its 'Holy' Book consists of half-digested fragments of Judeo-Christian theology, mixed with the bile of hatred, and spewed into the fair face of Christendom from the putrifying guts of a violent, deceitful, plundering pedophile. The Koran is full of historical, scientific and logical errors and even contradicts itself on numerous occasions. Not exactly the work of a Supreme Intellect!
And yet Muslims claim that these demented ramblings and rantings are the literal word of God Almighty, to be treated with utmost respect. They throw enormous tantrums when Korans are left in toilets or returned to libraries with bacon-rashers as bookmarks. In the Islamic paradise of Pakistan, damaging a Koran or insulting The Pedophile are punishable by death.
To understand Islam we need to look at the most primitive organisational state of mankind - Tribalism.
If we regard the Ummah as a tribe, and the Koran, the Pedophile and the Black Meteorite as the tribe's three main totems, we begin to get a better understanding of Islam. A tribe derives its identity and unity by displays of reverence towards supernatural totems, and feels insecure and threatened whenever the power of its totems is weakened, for example by the totems being 'humiliated' or 'polluted' . One of the surest ways of demoralising a tribe has always been to desecrate its totems.
This explains the rage at the Motoons, and the 'hate crime' of the Koran down the toilet. It also explains why the Saudi authorities made such a fuss when they found a Christian in Mecca. The precincts of the Holy Meteorite had been defiled by a najis kaffir.
Tribal culture and psychology are difficult for civilised people to understand. Most parts of Western Europe have not been organised tribally since the Dark Ages, so it's difficult to get inside Muslim mind and understand just how primitive and benighted are the psychological processes that go on there. For example:
- A tribe regards itself as perpetually at war with all other tribes - hence the Muslim worldview of Dar a-Harb in conflict with Dar al-Islam, and Ummah in conflict with Kaffir.
- The property and women of other tribes are there for the taking. Might is right - hence the Jizya, Razzia, white slaving etc which are all justified by the Koran. Tribalism also explains the chants of 'We will take your wives for booty' at the London Motoons demonstration - this is the typical behavior of the stone age savage.
- The ethics of reciprocity (do as you would be done by) only apply within the tribe. Hence the lack of any Golden Rule in Islam. The nearest you get to the Golden Rule in the Koran is desiring for your brother Muslim ('kin-selection') what you desire for yourself - in other words share out the booty equally.
- Loyalty to the tribe is of paramount importance - hence the punishment by death for apostates.
- The tribe must not mingle with other tribes or else it may lose its identity - hence the self-imposed ghettoisation and ethnic cleansing of Kaffirs from the periphery of the ghetto as seen in European cities.
- There is a great desire to destroy or humiliate the totems of other tribes, especially where they have phallic significance - hence the attack on the twin towers, and the plans for the MegaMosque whose minarets will be taller than any Christian building.
Muslims in the modern world are living fossils, though like dinosaurs suddenly set down on the streets of London, none the less dangerous for being so primitive. Islam appeals to the lowest and basest instincts of man, and in the absence of a strong, confident modern culture will gradually reduce its host society to a disfunctional state of anarchy where Islam can gain the upper hand.
Tribalism makes it impossible to defeat Islam by reason or appeals to decency. The Koran, the Pedophile and the Meteorite are not capable of being examined rationally or ethically - they are pre-rational symbols of tribal cohesion. And when that tribe is on a roll , and believes itself to be the strongest and fastest growing tribe winning the Jihad against all the rest, no rational argument will persuade its warriors to abandon the winning side.
The Ummah may eventually have an 'Emperor's New Clothes Moment', but it will not come about by reviewing the evidence for a flat earth in the Koran. It is more likely to happen by military defeat in a European Civil War or World War III.
najistani
Tags: islam, Tribalism, Muslims
Sunday, October 25, 2009
When will the Arabic-Islamic colonialism end?
by Jugurten
All the Amazighs (Berbers) in Algeria-the Kabylians, Chaouis, Touregs, Chenouis and the Mzabs-have always been and continue to be the victims of Islamist colonialism for 14 centuries, since the death of Dihia ( A Berber Queen who fought against the first Arabic-Islamic hordes which invaded Algeria).
Centuries and centuries of oppression, persecution, exploitation, murders, destruction and falsification have deprived this “redoubtable and numerous” people-as described by Ibn Khaldoun-of its civilisation and its identity to an extent that makes him doubt of himself and fell like he is nothing without being an Arabic Islamic.
Today, we are witnessing and living an Amazigh revival in all Tamazgha (North Africa), and it becomes more and more evident that the changing or even the downfall of North African Islamic regimes is unavoidable. Recently, a Touareg (Berber from South Algeria) told me that if his people weren’t afraid of the Arab government of Algiers which is able to impose a food embargo on them, they would struggle by using any means necessary to gain back their cultural, linguistic, identity and racial rights.
Another Chenouis from Tipaza told me someday: “Azul [Hello], I am sorry, I can’t talk to you in Kabylian language, because as you know this sad situation is due to the criminal Algerian Arabic-Islamic government which has always favoured our extinction, we, the children of Juba (Amazigh King), but one day they (the Arabic-Islamic governors) will pay for all their crimes and our cultural genocide.”
Actually, all the Amazighs feel the same injustice which has lasted too long. The Arabic-Islamic colonists have always kept a permanent watch on the Amazighs for centuries, since they first arrived in the country. After more than 14 centuries of colonisation, the relationships between the Arabic-Islamic colonists and the Amazighs have not known any change at all. We are, until today, still being mistreated, brutalized, imprisoned, persecuted or murdered every time we dare ask individually or collectively for the official recognition our millennium culture and identity. We, Kabylians, must do everything necessary to win our sovereignty (autonomy) because the survival and the salvation of the rest of the Amazigh people in Tamazgha depend on the success of our human initiative. Then, Kabylia will serve as an example and show the right way to follow for our Amazigh sisters and brothers in Tamazgha, caught in a destructive and fascist Arabic-Islamic trap.
JUG
Posted Thu, 09/11/2008 - 00:25 by Jugurten
http://www.kabylia.info/when-will-arabic-islamic-colonialism-end
All the Amazighs (Berbers) in Algeria-the Kabylians, Chaouis, Touregs, Chenouis and the Mzabs-have always been and continue to be the victims of Islamist colonialism for 14 centuries, since the death of Dihia ( A Berber Queen who fought against the first Arabic-Islamic hordes which invaded Algeria).
Centuries and centuries of oppression, persecution, exploitation, murders, destruction and falsification have deprived this “redoubtable and numerous” people-as described by Ibn Khaldoun-of its civilisation and its identity to an extent that makes him doubt of himself and fell like he is nothing without being an Arabic Islamic.
Today, we are witnessing and living an Amazigh revival in all Tamazgha (North Africa), and it becomes more and more evident that the changing or even the downfall of North African Islamic regimes is unavoidable. Recently, a Touareg (Berber from South Algeria) told me that if his people weren’t afraid of the Arab government of Algiers which is able to impose a food embargo on them, they would struggle by using any means necessary to gain back their cultural, linguistic, identity and racial rights.
Another Chenouis from Tipaza told me someday: “Azul [Hello], I am sorry, I can’t talk to you in Kabylian language, because as you know this sad situation is due to the criminal Algerian Arabic-Islamic government which has always favoured our extinction, we, the children of Juba (Amazigh King), but one day they (the Arabic-Islamic governors) will pay for all their crimes and our cultural genocide.”
Actually, all the Amazighs feel the same injustice which has lasted too long. The Arabic-Islamic colonists have always kept a permanent watch on the Amazighs for centuries, since they first arrived in the country. After more than 14 centuries of colonisation, the relationships between the Arabic-Islamic colonists and the Amazighs have not known any change at all. We are, until today, still being mistreated, brutalized, imprisoned, persecuted or murdered every time we dare ask individually or collectively for the official recognition our millennium culture and identity. We, Kabylians, must do everything necessary to win our sovereignty (autonomy) because the survival and the salvation of the rest of the Amazigh people in Tamazgha depend on the success of our human initiative. Then, Kabylia will serve as an example and show the right way to follow for our Amazigh sisters and brothers in Tamazgha, caught in a destructive and fascist Arabic-Islamic trap.
JUG
Posted Thu, 09/11/2008 - 00:25 by Jugurten
http://www.kabylia.info/when-will-arabic-islamic-colonialism-end
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Why Did So Much of India Fall Under Moslem Rule?
[an excerpt from Fjordman]
Muslim scholars did not seriously study other cultures with curiosity and describe them with fairness, the Persian universal scholar al-Biruni’s (973-1048) writings about Hinduism and India being one of very few exceptions to this rule. He had taken the trouble to learn enough Sanskrit to be able to translate in both directions between this language and Arabic (for him also a learned language). As author John Keay writes in his book India: A History, Muslims were viewed by Indians as just another group of foreigners, perhaps annoying but essentially marginal. This was a big mistake:
“There is no evidence of an Indian appreciation of the global threat which they represented; and the peculiar nature of their mission — to impose a new monotheist orthodoxy by military conquest and political dominion — was so alien to Indian tradition that it went uncomprehended. No doubt a certain complacency contributed to this indifference. As al-Biruni (Alberuni), the great Islamic scholar of the eleventh century, would put it, ‘the Hindus believe that there is no country but theirs, no science like theirs.’…his scientific celebrity in the Arab world would owe much to his mastery of Sanskrit and access to Indian scholarship….Unlike Alexander’s Greeks, Muslim invaders were well aware of India’s immensity, and mightily excited by its resources….Since at least Roman times the subcontinent seems to have enjoyed a favourable balance of payments….The devout Muslim, although ostensibly bent on converting the infidel, would find his zeal handsomely rewarded.”
[excerpt from Fjordman's http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2009/10/why-did-europeans-create-modern-world.html]
Muslim scholars did not seriously study other cultures with curiosity and describe them with fairness, the Persian universal scholar al-Biruni’s (973-1048) writings about Hinduism and India being one of very few exceptions to this rule. He had taken the trouble to learn enough Sanskrit to be able to translate in both directions between this language and Arabic (for him also a learned language). As author John Keay writes in his book India: A History, Muslims were viewed by Indians as just another group of foreigners, perhaps annoying but essentially marginal. This was a big mistake:
“There is no evidence of an Indian appreciation of the global threat which they represented; and the peculiar nature of their mission — to impose a new monotheist orthodoxy by military conquest and political dominion — was so alien to Indian tradition that it went uncomprehended. No doubt a certain complacency contributed to this indifference. As al-Biruni (Alberuni), the great Islamic scholar of the eleventh century, would put it, ‘the Hindus believe that there is no country but theirs, no science like theirs.’…his scientific celebrity in the Arab world would owe much to his mastery of Sanskrit and access to Indian scholarship….Unlike Alexander’s Greeks, Muslim invaders were well aware of India’s immensity, and mightily excited by its resources….Since at least Roman times the subcontinent seems to have enjoyed a favourable balance of payments….The devout Muslim, although ostensibly bent on converting the infidel, would find his zeal handsomely rewarded.”
[excerpt from Fjordman's http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2009/10/why-did-europeans-create-modern-world.html]
Thursday, October 1, 2009
STOP ISLAMIZING THE WEST!
[S]top referring to Islam as a religion and stop the mass immigration from Muslim countries.
--Geert Wilders
See MORE at . . .
Geert Wilders presents a 10 step plan for stopping the Islamization of the West.
http://barenakedislam.wordpress.com/2009/10/01/must-see-a-warning-to-america-from-geert-wilders/
--Geert Wilders
See MORE at . . .
Geert Wilders presents a 10 step plan for stopping the Islamization of the West.
http://barenakedislam.wordpress.com/2009/10/01/must-see-a-warning-to-america-from-geert-wilders/
Saturday, September 26, 2009
The Plot Against America
Review by DEXTER FILKINS
Published: August 6, 2006
Reprinted from http://islamic-danger.blogspot.com/2007/03/plot-against-america-review-by-dexter.html?zx=a44486c44649c66
When Mohamed Atta and his four Saudi confederates commandeered a Boeing 767 and steered it into the north tower of the World Trade Center, they began a story that still consumes us nearly five years on, and one that seems, on bad days, to promise war without end.
But the events of Sept. 11, 2001, were in many ways less the start of a tale than the end of one, or at least the climax of one, begun many years before in many different precincts: in the middle-class suburbs of Cairo, in the mosques of Hamburg, in Jidda, in Islamabad, in the quiet university town of Greeley, Colo.
In its simplest terms, this is the story of how a small group of men, with a frightening mix of delusion and calculation, rose from a tormented civilization to mount a catastrophic assault on the world’s mightiest power, and how another group of men and women, convinced that such an attack was on the way, tried desperately to stop it.
What a story it is. And what a riveting tale Lawrence Wright fashions in this marvelous book. “The Looming Tower*” is not just a detailed, heart-stopping account of the events leading up to 9/11, written with style and verve, and carried along by villains and heroes that only a crime novelist could dream up. It’s an education, too — though you’d never know it — a thoughtful examination of the world that produced the men who brought us 9/11, and of their progeny who bedevil us today. The portrait of John O’Neill, the driven, demon-ridden F.B.I. agent who worked so frantically to stop Osama bin Laden, only to perish in the attack on the World Trade Center, is worth the price of the book alone. “The Looming Tower” is a thriller.
And it’s a tragedy, too.
In the nearly five years since the attacks, we’ve heard oceans of commentary on the whys and how-comes and what-it-means and what’s nexts. Wright, a staff writer for The New Yorker — where portions of this book have appeared — has put his boots on the ground in the hard places, conducted the interviews and done the sleuthing. Others talked, he listened. And so he has unearthed an astonishing amount of detail about Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Mullah Muhammad Omar and all the rest of them. They come alive.
Who knew, for instance, that bin Laden, far from being a warrior-stoic fighting against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, was actually a pathetic stick-in-the-mud who would fall ill before battle? That the combat-hardened Afghans, so tired of bin Laden’s behavior, declared him and his Arab associates “useless”? Or that he was a permissive father and indulgent husband? Or that he is only six feet tall?
More important, who knew — I sure didn’t — that bin Laden had left behind such a long trail of words? Wright has found them in books, on film, in audio recordings, in people’s notebooks and memories. This has allowed him to draw an in-depth portrait of bin Laden, and to chart his evolution from a self-conscious step-child growing up in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, to the visionary cave-dwelling madman who mimics the Holy Prophet in his most humdrum daily habits.
Wright takes the title of his book from the fourth sura of the Koran, which bin Laden repeated three times in a speech videotaped just as the hijackers were preparing to fly. The video was found later, on a computer in Hamburg.
“Wherever you are, death will find you, Even in the looming tower.”
There is poetry, too. Here is a particularly chilling bit, found on another videotape, which bin Laden had read aloud at the wedding of his 17-year-old son, Mohammed. The celebration took place not long after a pair of Qaeda suicide bombers, riding in a tiny boat filled with explosives, nearly sank the billion-dollar guided missile destroyer Cole. At least with regard to his abilities as an author, bin Laden was unusually modest: he let someone else write the words. “I am not, as most of our brothers know, a warrior of the word,” he said.
Just as dramatic as the portraits of bin Laden and Zawahiri is Wright’s account of the roots of Islamic militancy — the intellectual, spiritual and material world from which the plotters came. Wright draws a fascinating picture of Sayyid Qutb, the font of modern Islamic fundamentalism, a frail, middle-aged writer who found himself, as a visitor to the United States and a student at Colorado State College of Education in Greeley in the 1940’s, overwhelmed by the unbridled splendor and godlessness of modern America. And by the sex: like so many others who followed him, Qutb seemed simultaneously drawn to and repelled by American women, so free and unselfconscious in their sexuality. The result is a kind of delirium:
“A girl looks at you, appearing as if she were an enchanting nymph or an escaped mermaid,” Qutb wrote, “but as she approaches, you sense only the screaming instinct inside her, and you can smell her burning body, not the scent of perfume, but flesh, only flesh. Tasty flesh, truly, but flesh nonetheless.”
It wasn’t much later that Qutb began writing elaborate rationalizations for killing non-Muslims and waging war against the West. Years later, Atta expressed a similar mix of obsession and disgust for women. Indeed, anyone who has spent time in the Middle East will recognize such tortured emotions.
WRIGHT shows, correctly, that at the root of Islamic militancy — its anger, its antimodernity, its justifications for murder — lies a feeling of intense humiliation. Islam plays a role in this, with its straitjacketed and all-encompassing worldview. But whether the militant hails from a middle-class family or an impoverished one, is intensely religious or a “theological amateur,” as Wright calls bin Laden and his cohort, he springs almost invariably from an ossified society with an autocratic government that is unable to provide any reason to believe in the future. Islam offers dignity, even in — especially in — death. Living in the West, Atta and the others felt these things more acutely, not less. As Wright notes:
“Their motivations varied, but they had in common a belief that Islam — pure and primitive, unmitigated by modernity and uncompromised by politics — would cure the wounds that socialism or Arab nationalism had failed to heal. They were angry but powerless in their own countries. They did not see themselves as terrorists but as revolutionaries who, like all such men throughout history, had been pushed into action by the simple human need for justice. Some had experienced brutal repression; some were simply drawn to bloody chaos. From the beginning of Al Qaeda, there were reformers and there were nihilists. The dynamic between them was irreconcilable and self-destructive, but events were moving so quickly that it was almost impossible to tell the philosophers from the sociopaths. They were glued together by the charismatic personality of Osama bin Laden, which contained both strands, idealism and nihilism, in a potent mix.”
In John O’Neill, bin Laden almost met his match. The supervisor of the F.B.I.’s New York office and of the team assigned to track Al Qaeda in the United States, O’Neill felt, as strongly as anyone in the government, that Al Qaeda was coming to America. He was a relentless investigator, a volcanic personality and sometimes his own worst enemy. In the end he broke himself on a government bureaucracy that could not — and would not — move as quickly as he did. O’Neill and others like him were in a race with Al Qaeda, and although we know how the race ended, it’s astonishing — and heartbreaking — to learn how close it was.
Some of the F.B.I.’s field agents, as we now know, had premonitions of what was coming. When the supervisor of the Minneapolis field office was admonished, in August 2001, for expressing fears that an Islamic radical attending flight school might be planning a suicide attack, he shot back defiantly that he was “trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing into the World Trade Center.” Amazing.
The most gut-wrenching scenes are the ones that show F.B.I. agents trying, as 9/11 approached, to pry information from their rivals inside the United States government. The C.I.A., Wright says, knew that high-level Qaeda operatives had held a meeting in Malaysia in January 2000, and, later, that two of them had entered the United States. Both men turned out to be part of the team that hijacked the planes on Sept. 11. The C.I.A. failed to inform agencies like the F.B.I. — which might have been able to locate the men and break up the plot — until late in the summer of 2001.
The fateful struggle between the C.I.A. and F.B.I. in the months leading up to the attacks has been outlined before, but never in such detail. At meetings, C.I.A. analysts dangled photos of two of the eventual hijackers in front of F.B.I. agents, but wouldn’t tell them who they were. The F.B.I. agents could sense that the C.I.A. possessed crucial pieces of evidence about Islamic radicals they were investigating, but couldn’t tell what they were. The tension came to a head at a meeting in New York on June 11, exactly three months before the catastrophe, which ended with F.B.I. and C.I.A. agents shouting at each other across the room.
In one of the most remarkable scenes in the book, Ali Soufan, an F.B.I. agent assigned to Al Qaeda, was taken aside on Sept. 12 and finally shown the names and photos of the men the C.I.A. had known for more than a year and a half were in America. The planes had already struck. Soufan ran to the bathroom and retched.
Great stuff. I just wish Wright had given us something, even a chapter, on the hijackings themselves; as it is, he takes us right up to the moment, and then straight to the burning towers. Perhaps he felt that ground was too well-trodden. My other complaint is more substantive. Through the enormous amount of legwork he has done, tracking down people who worked with bin Laden and Zawahiri over the years, Wright has drawn up verbatim reconstructions of entire conversations, some of which took place more than a decade ago. Many of these conversations are riveting. Still, in some cases, it’s hard to believe that memories are that good.
“The Looming Tower” ends near the Pakistani border, where Zawahiri, or someone who looked like him, rode through a village on horseback and then disappeared into the mountains. It’s not a definitive ending; there is no closure. And that’s the point. For as amazing as the story of Al Qaeda and the road to 9/11 is, it’s not over yet.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/06/books/review/06filkins.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5090&en=0e30be2935673b53&ex=1312516800&partner=rssuserland&emc=rsspagewanted=1&ei=5090&en=0e30be2935673b53&ex=1312516800&partner=rssuserland&emc=rssFirst Chapter: ‘The Looming Tower’ (August 6, 2006)
_________________________________________
*THE LOOMING TOWER
Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. By Lawrence Wright.
Illustrated. 469 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $27.95.
Published: August 6, 2006
Reprinted from http://islamic-danger.blogspot.com/2007/03/plot-against-america-review-by-dexter.html?zx=a44486c44649c66
When Mohamed Atta and his four Saudi confederates commandeered a Boeing 767 and steered it into the north tower of the World Trade Center, they began a story that still consumes us nearly five years on, and one that seems, on bad days, to promise war without end.
But the events of Sept. 11, 2001, were in many ways less the start of a tale than the end of one, or at least the climax of one, begun many years before in many different precincts: in the middle-class suburbs of Cairo, in the mosques of Hamburg, in Jidda, in Islamabad, in the quiet university town of Greeley, Colo.
In its simplest terms, this is the story of how a small group of men, with a frightening mix of delusion and calculation, rose from a tormented civilization to mount a catastrophic assault on the world’s mightiest power, and how another group of men and women, convinced that such an attack was on the way, tried desperately to stop it.
What a story it is. And what a riveting tale Lawrence Wright fashions in this marvelous book. “The Looming Tower*” is not just a detailed, heart-stopping account of the events leading up to 9/11, written with style and verve, and carried along by villains and heroes that only a crime novelist could dream up. It’s an education, too — though you’d never know it — a thoughtful examination of the world that produced the men who brought us 9/11, and of their progeny who bedevil us today. The portrait of John O’Neill, the driven, demon-ridden F.B.I. agent who worked so frantically to stop Osama bin Laden, only to perish in the attack on the World Trade Center, is worth the price of the book alone. “The Looming Tower” is a thriller.
And it’s a tragedy, too.
In the nearly five years since the attacks, we’ve heard oceans of commentary on the whys and how-comes and what-it-means and what’s nexts. Wright, a staff writer for The New Yorker — where portions of this book have appeared — has put his boots on the ground in the hard places, conducted the interviews and done the sleuthing. Others talked, he listened. And so he has unearthed an astonishing amount of detail about Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Mullah Muhammad Omar and all the rest of them. They come alive.
Who knew, for instance, that bin Laden, far from being a warrior-stoic fighting against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, was actually a pathetic stick-in-the-mud who would fall ill before battle? That the combat-hardened Afghans, so tired of bin Laden’s behavior, declared him and his Arab associates “useless”? Or that he was a permissive father and indulgent husband? Or that he is only six feet tall?
More important, who knew — I sure didn’t — that bin Laden had left behind such a long trail of words? Wright has found them in books, on film, in audio recordings, in people’s notebooks and memories. This has allowed him to draw an in-depth portrait of bin Laden, and to chart his evolution from a self-conscious step-child growing up in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, to the visionary cave-dwelling madman who mimics the Holy Prophet in his most humdrum daily habits.
Wright takes the title of his book from the fourth sura of the Koran, which bin Laden repeated three times in a speech videotaped just as the hijackers were preparing to fly. The video was found later, on a computer in Hamburg.
“Wherever you are, death will find you, Even in the looming tower.”
There is poetry, too. Here is a particularly chilling bit, found on another videotape, which bin Laden had read aloud at the wedding of his 17-year-old son, Mohammed. The celebration took place not long after a pair of Qaeda suicide bombers, riding in a tiny boat filled with explosives, nearly sank the billion-dollar guided missile destroyer Cole. At least with regard to his abilities as an author, bin Laden was unusually modest: he let someone else write the words. “I am not, as most of our brothers know, a warrior of the word,” he said.
A destroyer, even the brave might fear,“The Looming Tower” is full of such surprising detail. Al Qaeda’s leaders had all but shelved the 9/11 plot when they realized they lacked foot soldiers who could pass convincingly as westernized Muslims in the United States. At just the right moment Atta appeared in Afghanistan, along with Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Ziad al-Jarrah and Marwan al-Shehhi, all Western-educated transplants, offering themselves up for slaughter. The game was on.
She inspires horror in the harbor and the open sea,
She goes into the waves flanked by arrogance, haughtiness and fake might,
To her doom she progresses slowly, clothed in a huge illusion,
Awaiting her is a dinghy, bobbing in the waves.
Just as dramatic as the portraits of bin Laden and Zawahiri is Wright’s account of the roots of Islamic militancy — the intellectual, spiritual and material world from which the plotters came. Wright draws a fascinating picture of Sayyid Qutb, the font of modern Islamic fundamentalism, a frail, middle-aged writer who found himself, as a visitor to the United States and a student at Colorado State College of Education in Greeley in the 1940’s, overwhelmed by the unbridled splendor and godlessness of modern America. And by the sex: like so many others who followed him, Qutb seemed simultaneously drawn to and repelled by American women, so free and unselfconscious in their sexuality. The result is a kind of delirium:
“A girl looks at you, appearing as if she were an enchanting nymph or an escaped mermaid,” Qutb wrote, “but as she approaches, you sense only the screaming instinct inside her, and you can smell her burning body, not the scent of perfume, but flesh, only flesh. Tasty flesh, truly, but flesh nonetheless.”
It wasn’t much later that Qutb began writing elaborate rationalizations for killing non-Muslims and waging war against the West. Years later, Atta expressed a similar mix of obsession and disgust for women. Indeed, anyone who has spent time in the Middle East will recognize such tortured emotions.
WRIGHT shows, correctly, that at the root of Islamic militancy — its anger, its antimodernity, its justifications for murder — lies a feeling of intense humiliation. Islam plays a role in this, with its straitjacketed and all-encompassing worldview. But whether the militant hails from a middle-class family or an impoverished one, is intensely religious or a “theological amateur,” as Wright calls bin Laden and his cohort, he springs almost invariably from an ossified society with an autocratic government that is unable to provide any reason to believe in the future. Islam offers dignity, even in — especially in — death. Living in the West, Atta and the others felt these things more acutely, not less. As Wright notes:
“Their motivations varied, but they had in common a belief that Islam — pure and primitive, unmitigated by modernity and uncompromised by politics — would cure the wounds that socialism or Arab nationalism had failed to heal. They were angry but powerless in their own countries. They did not see themselves as terrorists but as revolutionaries who, like all such men throughout history, had been pushed into action by the simple human need for justice. Some had experienced brutal repression; some were simply drawn to bloody chaos. From the beginning of Al Qaeda, there were reformers and there were nihilists. The dynamic between them was irreconcilable and self-destructive, but events were moving so quickly that it was almost impossible to tell the philosophers from the sociopaths. They were glued together by the charismatic personality of Osama bin Laden, which contained both strands, idealism and nihilism, in a potent mix.”
In John O’Neill, bin Laden almost met his match. The supervisor of the F.B.I.’s New York office and of the team assigned to track Al Qaeda in the United States, O’Neill felt, as strongly as anyone in the government, that Al Qaeda was coming to America. He was a relentless investigator, a volcanic personality and sometimes his own worst enemy. In the end he broke himself on a government bureaucracy that could not — and would not — move as quickly as he did. O’Neill and others like him were in a race with Al Qaeda, and although we know how the race ended, it’s astonishing — and heartbreaking — to learn how close it was.
Some of the F.B.I.’s field agents, as we now know, had premonitions of what was coming. When the supervisor of the Minneapolis field office was admonished, in August 2001, for expressing fears that an Islamic radical attending flight school might be planning a suicide attack, he shot back defiantly that he was “trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing into the World Trade Center.” Amazing.
The most gut-wrenching scenes are the ones that show F.B.I. agents trying, as 9/11 approached, to pry information from their rivals inside the United States government. The C.I.A., Wright says, knew that high-level Qaeda operatives had held a meeting in Malaysia in January 2000, and, later, that two of them had entered the United States. Both men turned out to be part of the team that hijacked the planes on Sept. 11. The C.I.A. failed to inform agencies like the F.B.I. — which might have been able to locate the men and break up the plot — until late in the summer of 2001.
The fateful struggle between the C.I.A. and F.B.I. in the months leading up to the attacks has been outlined before, but never in such detail. At meetings, C.I.A. analysts dangled photos of two of the eventual hijackers in front of F.B.I. agents, but wouldn’t tell them who they were. The F.B.I. agents could sense that the C.I.A. possessed crucial pieces of evidence about Islamic radicals they were investigating, but couldn’t tell what they were. The tension came to a head at a meeting in New York on June 11, exactly three months before the catastrophe, which ended with F.B.I. and C.I.A. agents shouting at each other across the room.
In one of the most remarkable scenes in the book, Ali Soufan, an F.B.I. agent assigned to Al Qaeda, was taken aside on Sept. 12 and finally shown the names and photos of the men the C.I.A. had known for more than a year and a half were in America. The planes had already struck. Soufan ran to the bathroom and retched.
Great stuff. I just wish Wright had given us something, even a chapter, on the hijackings themselves; as it is, he takes us right up to the moment, and then straight to the burning towers. Perhaps he felt that ground was too well-trodden. My other complaint is more substantive. Through the enormous amount of legwork he has done, tracking down people who worked with bin Laden and Zawahiri over the years, Wright has drawn up verbatim reconstructions of entire conversations, some of which took place more than a decade ago. Many of these conversations are riveting. Still, in some cases, it’s hard to believe that memories are that good.
“The Looming Tower” ends near the Pakistani border, where Zawahiri, or someone who looked like him, rode through a village on horseback and then disappeared into the mountains. It’s not a definitive ending; there is no closure. And that’s the point. For as amazing as the story of Al Qaeda and the road to 9/11 is, it’s not over yet.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/06/books/review/06filkins.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5090&en=0e30be2935673b53&ex=1312516800&partner=rssuserland&emc=rsspagewanted=1&ei=5090&en=0e30be2935673b53&ex=1312516800&partner=rssuserland&emc=rssFirst Chapter: ‘The Looming Tower’ (August 6, 2006)
_________________________________________
*THE LOOMING TOWER
Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. By Lawrence Wright.
Illustrated. 469 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $27.95.
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