Note: this is an in-progress draft, and is not even formatted correctly yet.

World War IV
The Early Days

by Daniel Pouzzner,
written 2001-Sep-11 to 2001-Oct-?


binladen_pudding.pdf bottom line: the government disarmed the public, fomented the threat, gave the threat free reign through pathetically loose border control and FAA regulation, gutted its own capacity to gather effective intelligence on the threat, and obstructed (through onerous FDA regulation) attempts by the public to prepare to defend against biological terrorism, and now in the immediate wake of the horrendous attacks of Sept. 11, made possible by these affronts of their government, the public arrays itself in nearly unanimous support for that same government, even though it continues all of these affronts? "Still, the poll found that the public was not prepared for a more activist government. Despite the high profile of many government agencies since Sept. 11, people still favored a smaller government with fewer services over a bigger government with more services, 52 percent to 43 percent." -NYT 2001-Oct-31, Richard L. Berke and Janet Elder, "Survey Shows Doubts Stirring on Terror War" the suicidal terrorists were motivated directly and almost entirely by religious faith, and now much of the public, many of the nation's government authorities, and a great many public figures, are vigorously renewing their religious faith and proclaiming its importance (even taking prominent solace in the promise of the afterlife), despite the bloody and hopeless history of religions (centuries of horrors motivated by theistic faiths, and more recently, by Marxism's atheistic religion of earthly paradise and Naziism's theosophic religious mishmosh)? in any case, the geopolitical consequence of the Sept. 11 attacks is to emplace the long-envisioned new world order, in which the world's industrialized economies are integrated, and allied against a terrifying threat perpetually emanating from beleaguered third world nations. The allies are predominantly to the north, and the threat predominantly emanates from the south. The "West" and "East" are economically, and to a degree politically, integrated from Vladivostok to Vancouver and even Beijing to Los Angeles. the state as it is currently constituted cannot effectively combat terrorism, because terrorism is a clever, distributed criminal conspiracy, and the establishment has gutted the capacity of the state to challenge such organizations because the establishment is itself just such an organization. telltale signs of a new world alignment and world war: IRA announce they are disarming (ca. 2001-Oct-25), Basque separatists announce (2001-Oct-28) they are contemplating a similar move. TPDL 2002-Apr-1 *****The 1930s, Again
*****A hard rain is going to fall
*****By Victor Davis Hanson, author most recently of Carnage and Culture:
*****Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power.
*****March 25, 2002 8:30 a.m.
http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson.shtml


In some ways in our war against the terrorists we are like the democracies of the late 1930s. They knew that there was more to Hitler than his avowed quest for the return of the Sudetenland or the Alsace-Lorraine. They sort of suspected that an entire, venerable culture in Germany and Japan had gone off the deep end. And while there was a certain logic to Hitler's diatribes that a moralistic England had no more right to distant India than did Germany to nearby Danzig, most deep-down knew that such parlor-game banter simply masked a much larger dilemma — how to corral a very powerful dictatorship and its axis that wished dominance not coexistence, and whose fuel was brutal force and autocracy, not democracy and freedom.

For England, most of Western Europe, and the United States, reeling under recent economic depression and hardly recovered from the sheer horror of the First World War — carnage unlike any in the long history of warfare — the idea of forceful resistance was little short of insanity. Filmstrips of German Panzers, thousands of Japanese shouting "Banzai!," and even Mussolini's comically delivered, but hateful rants overwhelmed the senses.

How could one stop such madness? And might it just go away with proper diplomacy? And why did "militarists" in the West insist on rearming and thereby "provoking" war? And was not there some truth to German grievances and Japanese hurts? And did anyone really wish to risk millions of innocent Americans and British to kill equally innocent, although perhaps mesmerized, Germans? Who was stirring up such animosity?

We are in a similar dilemma — in our hesitation about Iraq, our pressure on Israel, and our worries about mission creep in pursuing the killers. Can't the Jews and Arabs just get along? If Israel would just give back all of the West Bank, wouldn't there be peace? Didn't we just fight in the Gulf a mere decade ago? How do we know that Saddam Hussein really has such dreadful weapons? Shouldn't our allies get involved too? Do these undemocratic Muslim countries really dislike us all that much? Who can trust polls anyway? Why are these saber-rattlers trying to get us into a war?

And so we Americans, like those 70 years ago who so wanted a perpetual peace, pray for a return of sanity in the Middle East. We chose to ignore horrific stories of Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia — the embryo of 9/11. We are more amused than shocked that madrassas have taught a generation to hate us. When mullahs in Iran speak of destroying Israel we wince, but also shrug. We want to see no real connection between madmen blowing themselves up to kill us in New York and the like-minded doing the same in Tel-Aviv. We put our trust in peace with a killer like Mr. Arafat, who packs a gun and whips up volatile crowds in Arabic. All the while, no American statesman has the guts to tell the Arab leadership that statism, tribalism, fundamentalism, gender apartheid, and autocracy — not America, not Israel — make their people poor, angry, and dangerous.

Rather than preparing for what our enemies are preparing for us, we look to gestures of appeasement. Does not the Islamic world appreciate the presence of General Zinni? Do we not give billions to Arab countries? Did we not save Kuwait and Muslims throughout the globe? Who in the Arab world could really think that the murderous Taliban were preferable to the present more enlightened government in Afghanistan? And although Middle Eastern males blew up our planes, people, and monuments, have we not had a national discussion about the evils of profiling those from the Middle East in our airports and stations? Don't Muslims tell their kindred back home how much freer they are in America than in Iraq or Syria?

Like the dashed hopes of the 1930s such faith is not only misplaced, but also dangerous. The efforts of countries like Iraq to acquire nuclear weapons might under the present pressures grow dormant, but they will not cease. A nuclear Pakistan is a tottering military dictatorship away from Armageddon. Bribed autocracies in Jordan and Egypt are allies only in the sense that their unelected leaders promise to jail their nuts and fundamentalists who otherwise might turn on them as well as on us. Polls everywhere in the Middle East reveal not mere anguish, but real enmity toward Americans. Public pronouncements in Iran are not any less hateful than what emanated from Berlin in 1936. Thousands of al Qaeda killers have escaped — and thousands more are angry over the death of the comrades and kin and planning carnage for us as we sleep.

Only a few of us Americans really take the Islamic world at its word — that one in three is reported to think (representing, say, a small number of around 200 million?) that the murder of 3,000 Americans was justified; that two of three believed no Arabs were involved; and that even higher poll numbers reflected real antipathy for the West.

After 30 years of listening to nauseating chanting from Teheran to Islamabad to Nablus, hearing the childish rants about "The Mother of All Battles" and "The Great Satan," and witnessing presidents from Carter to Bush burned in effigy, the ritual torching of the American flag, the misspelled banners of hatred, the thousands of paint-by-the-numbers posters of psychopaths from Khomeini to bin Laden, televised threats that sound as hideous as they are empty, Nazi-inspired anti-Semitism, embassy takeovers, oil-boycotts, hijacked planes, cars, and ships, lectures from unelected obese sheiks with long names and gold chains, peacekeepers incinerated in their sleep, murders at the Olympics, bodies dumped on the tarmac of airports, shredded diplomats, madmen in sunglasses in Iraq, Syria, and Libya, demented mullahs and whip-bearing imams in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, continual televised murders of Americans abroad, our towers toppled, our citizens butchered, our planes blown up, hooded Klansmen in Hamas and Hezbollah, killers of al-this and Islamic-that, suicide bombers, shrill turbaned nuts spouting hatred on C-SPAN broadcasts, one day the salvation of Kuwait, the next sanctions against the swallower of Kuwait, the third day fury against the sanctions against the swallower of Kuwait, the fourth day some grievance from 1953, the fifth another from A.D. 752; and all the time sanctimonious fingerpointing from Middle Eastern academics and journalists who are as bold abroad in insulting us as they are timid and obsequious under dictators at home in keeping silent, I've about had it. No mas. The problem is you, not us — you, you, you….

I don't listen any more to the apologies and prevarications of our whiney university Arabists, our equivocators in the state department, and the really tawdry assortment of oil men, D.C. insiders, bought and paid for PR suits, and weapons hucksters. The truth is that a large minority of the Middle Eastern world wishes a war with America that it cannot win — and much of the rest is apparently either indifferent or amused.

So we should stop apologizing, prepare for the worst, hope for the best, and accept this animosity — just as our forefathers once did when faced by similar autocrats and their captive peoples who threatened us in 1941. I don't know about the rest of America, but I am proud that thugs like Khaddafi, murderers like Saddam Hussein, inquisitionists like the mullahs in Iran, criminals in Syria, medieval sheiks in the Gulf, and millions of others who do not vote, do not speak freely, oppress women, and are not tolerant of religious, gender, or ethnic diversity don't like me for being an American. I would find it repugnant if they did.

No, their hatred is a badge of honor, and I would have it no other way. I am tired of the appeasers of the Middle East on our Right who fawn for oil and trade, and those pacifists and multiculturalists on the Left who either do not know, or do not like, what America really is. I'd rather think of all the innocent dead on 9/ 11 than give a moment more of attention to Mr. Arafat and his bombers.

The truth is that there is a great storm on the horizon, one that will pass — or bring upon us a hard rain the likes of which we have not seen in 60 years. Either we shall say "no more," deal with Iraq, and prepare for a long and hard war against murderers and terrorists — or we will have more and more of what happened on 9/11. History teaches us that certain nations, certain peoples, and certain religions at peculiar periods in their history take a momentary, but deadly leave of their senses — Napoleon's France for most of a decade, the southern states in 1861, Japan in 1931, Germany in 1939, and Russia after World War II. And when they do, they cannot be bribed, apologized to, or sweet-talked — only defeated.

In that context, we see much of a whipped-up Arab world entering this similar period of dangerous unreality. The problem is them and their unelected and unfree regimes, not us — just as it was Hitler, not us; Tojo, not us; Mussolini, not us; and Stalin, not us — just as it always is when unelected maniacs take control and hijack an entire country and culture. We can either step up and stop Islamic fundamentalism, Arab terrorists, and Middle Eastern dictators or we can step back and watch it all continue to grow. If 9/11 was the beginning of a war, then we should remember that wars usually end when one, not both sides, win.

from the Associated Press, 2002-Apr-21:

Saudi intellectuals say U.S. and Israel are axis of evil

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia - A group of Saudi intellectuals and writers has condemned the United States and Israel and described them as the axis of evil in the world - borrowing a phrase U.S. President George Bush has used for Iran, Iraq and North Korea.

The 113 Saudis, some of them prominent writers for respected Saudi papers, said the American role in the Israeli military operation against the Palestinians was "shameful" and said the "Israeli massacres do not differ in shape or form from what the Nazis did."

The writers called in a statement released Saturday on all Arab governments to severe diplomatic, political and economic ties with Israel and urged Arabs to boycott all American products.

"We consider the United States and the current American administration the nurturer of international terrorism with distinction and it, along with Israel, form the axis of terrorism and evil in the world," said the statement.

The statement said Arab governments should take "serious and responsible steps ... and apply all means of pressure on the American administration to make it feel that its huge interests in the Arab region are threatened."

It said failure to do so will lead to "national disasters that will include everyone."

Among the signatories were a writer for the widely respected Al-Hayat and a former undersecretary of the Saudi Interior Ministry.

The statement comes at a time when anti-American sentiment is at a high level over what Arabs see as U.S. support for Israel in the conflict with the Palestinians.

On Friday, the chief cleric of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Sheik Abdul Rahman al-Sudais, called on the Arabs to abandon peace efforts with Israel because they were "impossible."

Al-Sudais said Arabs should bid farewell to peace with the Jews, whom he described as "the scum of the human race, the rats of the world, the killers of prophets and the grandsons of monkeys and pigs."

He called on Muslims to stand with the Palestinians financially and in kind, saying that peace with Israel was futile because it only "accepts liquidating its opponent, taking over his land, making his people homeless and canceling his dignity. They want the state of Greater Israel. They want to eliminate the nation of one God and the Quran."

str-ti/db

1. the afghans lve being martyrs. the l^?simply adore it. they love bieng able to blame the wiest for their own misery-- not jsut httaliban, btu the indifvidauls. 2. this martyrdom comes form sle loathing for their own suckfulness. they know it, and they know htye suck, adn they know it is becuae they are rneothing, and they have nothing, and then they c^?get mad that we falunt that. but the loathing is thier own. must address the relief agency and celebrity fundraising blitz, opaque and empirically ineffective distribution of aid, and donors not making good on pledges soros_on_sept11_2001Oct24_cnbc_insana.mp3 starting around 2001-Oct-25, the feds and mass media outlets started floating the theory that the anthrax originates with a "midwestern right wing" group (as one TV news channel phrased it, noting that the media and the Democratic Senate majority leader were the targets). if this actually turns out to be true, it neatly underscores the extensive commonalities between Islamism (al-Qaeda in particular) and Christian fundamentalists here. Atta: raw hands, met with Iraqi intelligence agents

Some years ago, I lived in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, across the East River from midtown Manhattan. I could see the Empire State Building out my bedroom window. From my building's roof, I could see the whole skyline - the UN, the Chrysler Building, the World Trade towers. Living there was in many ways exhilarating, but for me, it also prompted a realization that everyone in the city was in danger. After this realization, I collected the rudimentary trappings of urban survival in the current era - a gas mask and chemical suit. I am now on a graded withdrawl from city life, passing back through Boston on my way to Portsmouth New Hampshire, from which I will some day soon depart for still more remote locales.

uk_al_qaeda_2001oct4.html openness is our trademark. becasue we are a democracy, we are ill-equipped to defend ourselves against people who are constantly searching for weaknesses in our society. paraphrase of judith miller, NYT arab world expert, ran 2001-oct-20 ca.18:12 MSNBC

Obviously, the al-Qaeda attacks on Manhattan's landmark twin towers did much to justify my impression of danger. So far, the public tip of our War on Terrorism iceberg is consistent with, though not necessarily indicative of, an effective strategy. In any case, an effective policy framework and strategy can be outlined succinctly:

Policy:

Strategy:

``this is as close as you can get to an attack from Mars'' Le Monde 2001-Oct-2 NATO reaffirms sept 22(?) article 5 (mutual defense) trigger 2001-Oct-4 NATO agrees to provide support for US action 2001-Sep-28: head of Taliban defends harboring Osama bin Laden, and vows to fight to keep him from falling into U.S. custody 2001-Sep-30: Taliban says Osama bin Laden under their control, and they will turn him over if allies negotiate, and produce evidence of his guilt 2001-Oct-2: Taliban renews offer to negotiate, with transfer of Osama bin Laden predicated upon delivery of proof of his guilt 2001-Oct-17: Louis Farrakhan, head of the Negroid-ancestry American organization ``Nation of Islam'', says Bush Admin should show proof of Osama bin Laden's guilt, saying there's no guarantee the govt isn't lying reported 2001-Sep-29, John Kyl "nothing is off the table" - nuclear retaliation for chemical or biological terrorism Friday the 28th: UN Security Council unanimously approves carte blanche for US response The so-called peace movement - largely, a marginal student cult - is a very ugly spectacle. These students are aggressive, belligerent, hateful, destructive zealots with fascist instincts, and they are largely aligned with al-Qaeda. There is much more below on this movement.

In the days since the al-Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the airwaves have been replete with declarations of war, but obviously we - the West, the United States - were already at war. We continue to be at war. The American public is now consciously aware of this war, for the moment. Many of us have for years been reading, writing, and speaking about America's profound vulnerability to terrorist attack, and our concern fell on deaf ears for the most part. However, now is a time our fellow citizens call on us for our expertise and guidance. ``I told you so'' and variants thereof help no one.

Many of us have for years been reading, writing, and speaking about shadowy, bizarre conspiracies in the US and international establishment. Clearly, the terrorists are a definitive such conspiracy, and validate our allegation that such conspiracies are a practical reality. In particular, the terrorists are likely a loose alliance of ideologically consonant agents, just as the establishment is. However, armchair conspiracy theories about the Sept. 11 attacks - in particular, that the mainstream consensus on the phenomenology of the twin tower collapse is in some sense suspicious - are patent tripe. Airliners with tanks topped off with jet fuel crashed into them, and the resulting conflagrations directly caused a structural failure which naturally cascaded right through the ground floor. This is not a mysterious or unpredictable consequence.

For their dramatic and total intelligence failure, CIA and FBI will be rightly raked over the coals and dragged into the bright light of outside scrutiny, like never before, and for a long time to come. The new Office of Homeland Defense operates above them, to a degree. On the 13th, Jack Kemp described the successful attacks as ``an intelligence failure of unbelievable proportions - DIA, CIA, NSA, FBI''. Since then, these sentiments have been echoed. If intelligence failures lead to additional catastrophes in the vein of the one on the morning of September 11th, it will become politically impossible for the CIA, FBI, and NSA, to survive in their current forms.

from TPDL 2001-Sep-27, from the Chicago Sun-Times, by Robert Novak:

Terror czar's first hurdle: haughty FBI

The monumental challenge facing Tom Ridge in battling terrorism on the home front is emphasized by a slowly emerging scandal. The FBI had advance indications of plans to hijack U.S. airliners and use them as weapons, but neither acted on them nor distributed the intelligence to local police agencies.

 From the moment of the Sept. 11 attacks, high-ranking federal officials insisted that the terrorists' method of operation surprised them. Many stick to that story. Actually, elements of the hijacking plan were known to the FBI as early as 1995 and, if coupled with current information, might have uncovered the plot.

This looks less like an intelligence failure than a law enforcement fiasco. While the CIA missed the conspiracy's overseas roots, the FBI did not share or interpret available information. [...]

from CNN, 2001-Sep-27:

Torricelli wants probe into 'stunning' intelligence failure

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Calling the September 11 terror attacks a "stunning failure" of U.S. intelligence, Sen. Robert Torricelli on Wednesday called for a board of inquiry to find out what went wrong.

"In the months ahead there must be a thorough inquiry into the actions of our intelligence agencies in the days and weeks leading up to September 11th," Torricelli said.

Speaking on the Senate floor, Torricelli, D-New Jersey, called for a "Board of Inquiry," patterned after the board authorized after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. "The goal of this inquiry would not be to assess blame and ruin careers," Torricelli said. "It would have a much more important goal: determining what went wrong so we can prevent it from happening again."

Torricelli offered few details about who would serve on the board, and a spokeswoman for Torricelli said it was unclear whether such a board would be authorized by legislation in Congress or by an executive order of the president.

yet:

from the New York Post, 2001-Sep-27, by Deborah Orin:

PREZ GOES TO BAT FOR CIA BOSS

September 27, 2001 -- WASHINGTON - President Bush went to the CIA yesterday to give the spy agency a pat on the back and say he has "a lot of confidence" in CIA chief George Tenet - despite calls from critics for his ouster.

"George and I have been spending a lot of quality time together. There's a reason. I've got a lot of confidence in him," Bush told CIA staffers.

"And I've got a lot of confidence in the CIA - and so should America."

Bush's vote of confidence for the CIA came after critics questioned the agency's competence and why, despite billions in taxpayer dollars for spies, there was no advance warning of America's day of terror.

Yesterday, on NBC's "Today" show, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, again questioned whether Tenet is up to the job.

find Shelby comments on CIA suckfulness

But consider the following:

from the Times of London, 2001-Sep-27, by James Doran:

Bin Laden's trail
Rushdie's air ban

The author Salman Rushdie believes that US authorities knew of an imminent terrorist strike when they banned him from taking internal flights in Canada and the US only a week before the attacks.

On September 3 the Federal Aviation Authority made an emergency ruling to prevent Mr Rushdie from flying unless airlines complied with strict and costly security measures. Mr Rushdie told The Times that the airlines would not upgrade their security.

The FAA told the author's publisher that US intelligence had given warning of ``something out there'' but failed to give any further details.

The FAA confirmed that it stepped up security measures concerning Mr Rushdie but refused to give a reason.

The failure of the Clinton Administration (particularly, former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger) to green light an actual mission to capture or eliminate bin Laden is yet another defect in the worst administration in living memory. But for the CIA, the failure is a sin of both omission and commission, reinforcing their (and our) moral obligation to dispose of terrorist organizations. Michael Moran noted in an MSNBC article of 1998-Aug-24 that, in a broader sense, the CIA helped launch the campaign of terrorism by underwriting Osama bin Laden:

from MSNBC, 1998-Aug-24, by Michael Moran, MSNBC's International Editor:

Bin Laden comes home to roost
His CIA ties are only the beginning of a woeful story

NEW YORK, Aug. 24, 1998 - At the CIA, it happens often enough to have a code name: Blowback. Simply defined, this is the term that describes an agent, an operative or an operation that has turned on its creators. Osama bin Laden, our new public enemy Number 1, is the personification of blowback. And the fact that he is viewed as a hero by millions in the Islamic world proves again the old adage: Reap what you sow.

Before you click on my face and call me naive, let me concede some points. Yes, the West needed Josef Stalin to defeat Hitler. Yes, there were times during the Cold War when supporting one villain (Cambodia's Lon Nol, for instance) would have been better than the alternative (Pol Pot). So yes, there are times when any nation must hold its nose and shake hands with the devil for the long-term good of the planet.

But just as surely, there are times when the United States, faced with such moral dilemmas, should have resisted the temptation to act. Arming a multi-national coalition of Islamic extremists in Afghanistan during the 1980s - well after the destruction of the Marine barracks in Beirut or the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 - was one of those times.

[...]

The connections are extensive, and some are recent.

from the Associated Press via the San Francisco Chronicle, 2001-Sep-26:

Senator says bin Laden had accounts in bank shut down in worldwide fraud scandal

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Investigators have learned that Osama bin Laden was among those with accounts in a bank shut down in 1991 in one of the world's biggest banking scandals, Sen. John Kerry said Wednesday.

The Bank of Credit and Commerce International was closed after bank regulators around the globe linked it to fraud, theft, secret weapons deals, terrorist financing and drug-money laundering.

Investigators didn't know it at the time, but it turns out bin Laden had accounts at BCCI, said Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat who led an investigation into the Third World bank.

[...]

(See ``Director Mueller, BCCI, and the CIA'', below)

George Tenet - directing bombing of Chinese embassy in Belgrade the IC has a vested interest in the perpetuation of bin Ladenesque threats - if they dry up, the IC's political leverage is greatly reduced. bottom line: CIA strategists do not count against an operation the possibility that an empowered foreign insurgent force might turn its sights on the first world.

from the New York Times, 2001-Apr-5, by Alan Feuer and Benjamin Weiser:

Translation: 'The How-to Book of Terrorism'

When testimony in the embassy bombings trial showed that three men had based their surveillance of the American Embassy in Kenya from an improvised darkroom in a cramped Nairobi apartment, it sounded like something taken from a manual called Terrorism 101.

As it turns out, that might be exactly what happened.

The manual has 18 chapters and runs about 180 pages. It is a thick and excruciatingly detailed document - part philosophical treatise, part training guide, part "Spy vs. Spy" from a back issue of Mad magazine.

[...]

The authorship of the manual has never been fully explained, but there are clues. The home in which it was found belongs to the fugitive Anas al- Liby, who has been accused of working closely with Ali A. Mohamed, a former sergeant in the United States Army assigned to Special Forces at Fort Bragg, N.C., from 1986 to 1989.

Prosecutors have said that Mr. Mohamed trained Mr. bin Laden's group in Afghanistan, where he also translated military manuals from English into Arabic. Agents have seized from Mr. Mohamed's home in California a computer file that resembles a digest of terrorist training methods, including the use of explosives, assassination and surveillance techniques.

[...]

The US president, George W. Bush, said on Tuesday Sept. 11 that the day's terrorism was ``an attack on freedom itself'', and on civilization at large, and that's exactly right. On 2001-Oct-1, Rudy Giuliani extended this thought, telling the UN General Assembly:

I believe I can take every one of you someplace in New York City and you can find someone from your country, someone from your village or town, that speaks your language and practices your religion. In each of your lands, there are many who are Americans in spirit by virtue of their commitment to our shared principles. It's tragic and perverse that it's because of these very principles, particularly our religious, political and economic freedoms, that we find ourselves under attack by terrorists. Our freedom threatens them because they know if our ideas of freedom gain a foothold among their people, it will destroy their power. So they strike out against us to keep those ideas from reaching their people.

The best long-term deterrent and approach to terrorism, obviously, is the spread of the principles of freedom and democracy and the rule of law and respect for human life. The more that spreads around the globe, the safer we will all be. These are very very powerful ideas and once they gain a foothold, they cannot be stopped. In fact, the rise that we've seen in terrorism and terrorist groups I believe is in no small measure a response to the spread of these ideas - freedom and democracy - to many nations, particularly over the past 15 years. The terrorists have no ideas or ideals with which to combat freedom and democracy. So their only defense is to strike out against innocent civilians, destroying human life in massive numbers and hoping to deter all of us from our pursuit and expansion of freedom.

[...]

The era of moral relativism between those who practice or condone terrorism and those nations who stand up against it must end. Moral relativism doesn't have a place in this discussion and debate. There's no moral way to sympathize with grossly immoral actions. And by so doing, and by trying to do that, unfortunately a fertile field has been created in which terrorism has grown.

First and foremost, the attacks of Sept. 11 were intended to erode our openness, freedom, individualism, privacy, science, and technology. Bernard Lewis explores the cause and nature of this ``Muslim rage'' in an article in the September 1990 Atlantic Monthly.

http://www.aynrand.org/medialink/terroristsvsamerica.shtml Released: October 5, 2001 What America Stands For and Why the Terrorists Hate Us Terrorists vs. America By Michael S. Berliner Like many Americans, I've been trying to find occasional respite from the horrors of September 11. And like many Americans, I found it through the video rental store. My wife and I watched a delightful Australian movie called "The Dish." Having seen part of it two months ago on an airplane, I thought it would be just what the situation called for: an absorbing, benevolent and inspiring story that would remind me that evil doesn't dominate. And it worked . . . for a while. The title refers to the radio-telegraph dish in a small Australian town that provided the television pictures of the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. The plot involves the struggle of the local crew to keep the dish operational. It is an innocent movie, not in the sense that it is naïve, but in the sense that the people are untouched by evil or even cynicism. With the exception of an unsympathetic, politically correct, cliché-spouting teenager, the cast of characters admires the space program and the human efficacy it represents. I found myself thinking of the crew and townspeople as personifying the traits that are quintessentially American and that represent the best in people of any nationality: optimism, common sense, independence, self-confidence. I was carried off into this benevolent world-until the dish's supervisor, reprimanding a complaining employee, said: "We are in the middle of the greatest feat ever attempted." Ironically, this beautiful insight brought me back to current events, because a horrible contrast suddenly struck me and stayed with me throughout the rest of the film. For the individuals involved in the moon landing, their greatest feat was an unprecedented scientific/technological achievement; but for the terrorists, their greatest feat was . . . pure destruction. The men and women of the space program, and their legions of scientific antecedents, spent countless hours acquiring the knowledge and developing the moral values that led to the moon landing. Not many years later, Osama bin Laden and his fellow terrorists also spent many hours of planning, sitting not in laboratories and libraries, but in tents and caves, with one goal: not to create, but to annihilate human creations. The scientists measured their success by how much they could produce. The terrorists measure their success by how much they can destroy. The space program represents life; bin Laden represents death. That is the philosophic choice the two sides represent-and the choice we all have to make. Many commentators, in and out of the government, note that the World Trade Center was targeted because it represented the American way of life. It did indeed represent the American way of life-more accurately, the Western way of life, a way of life found in individuals in various places, across the globe. And what does that mean? Like the space program, the Trade Center stood for the essential values of Western civilization: reason, science, production, self-esteem, freedom, success. Underlying our technological achievements is the conviction that success is possible, that if you put your mind to the task, you can accomplish great things, that through your own efforts you can forge a human way of life out of the wilderness. You are not the victim of chance or genetic makeup; you are not the plaything of the stars or some ineffable deity. You are a human being, able to think, act and produce on your own, able and worthy of living a joyous life here on earth. And that is precisely what the terrorists want to destroy. That is precisely why they hate us. There are too many terrorists worldwide for their actions to be explained as psychotic. Whether they are Osama bin Ladens or Ted Kaczynskis, they take their philosophy seriously. For them, evil lives in the form of Western man, in a capitalist society, using his own mind to reshape the world to achieve his own happiness. The terrorists want to destroy that. Their ideal world, the Eden envisioned by these nihilists, is a negation-a world absent of things: no skyscrapers, no space program, no science, no technology. It is a world devoid of the products of the rational, independent human mind. It is a world of self-abnegation, submission and subservience. It is a world of living death. The fundamental battle we face today consists not of bombs and rockets, but of ideas-the ideas of those who value human life on earth versus the ideas of those who oppose it. Dr. Berliner is a member of the board of directors of the Ayn Rand Institute in Marina del Rey, Calif. The Institute promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.

On the day after the attacks, Bush vowed ``we will not allow this enemy to win by changing our way of life or restricting our freedoms.'' These are promising words - though of course, we ought to change our standard operating procedures in various security-critical contexts. When Bush said ``freedom has a cost and we're willing to bear it'' (2001-Sep-17), he confirmed an understanding that a free and open society can unwittingly facilitate the machinations of criminals and terrorists, but that the price of abandoning freedom and openness is even greater. Making a very clear point of it, Bush's new head of homeland defense, Tom Ridge, on 2001-Oct-2 repeated Ben Franklin's warning that ``They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.'' On the day of his formal appointment (2001-Oct-8), Ridge said ``Liberty is what terrorists fear most''.

On 2001-Sep-22 Bush said ``They brought down a symbol of Americans' prosperity, but they did not touch its source. Our country's wealth is not contained in glass and steel, it is found in the skill and hard work and entrepreneurship of our people.'' This is quite right. The preeminent store of wealth in an economy is the people themselves. Bush has also asserted ``either you are with us or you are with the terrorists''. This is, in fact, also true. Neutrality is not acceptable. States that passively tolerate international terrorists indoctrinating, training, and equipping themselves within their borders, cannot be tolerated.

discuss predictable folly of the go-back-to-doing-what-you-were-doing refrain work in Zogby poll: 72% are glad GWB is President, 20% would prefer Bill Clinton be President.

The terrorists were not attacking empire as such. Perennial Libertarian Party presidential candidate Harry Browne concluded otherwise (and in error) when he wrote on 2001-Sep-12 that ``Our foreign policy has been insane for decades. It was only a matter of time until Americans would have to suffer personally for it.'' He capped off the introductory segment of that essay with an incitement to the horrible folly of pacifism, when he asked ``When will we learn that violence always begets violence?'' This is, of course, simply false. If one destroys the capacity of one's enemy to wage war, it will not wage war regardless of its desires. More generally, it is suicidal - and so, morally repugnant - to fail to answer violence with violence. A party that initates violence - particularly, terrorism - thereby advertises its insusceptibility to reason.

GOP News&Views 2001-Oct-21: Chuck Muth LP's Browne: Apologize & Repent America! "(Past) policies by our government have brought us to where there now are only two choices for the future. And you may not like either one of them. Choice #1 is to bomb Afghanistan 'back to the stone age,' and maybe Iraq, and maybe any other country our government accuses of harboring terrorists. . . . Choice #2 is for our President to be a man and acknowledge to the world that our government has made some horrible mistakes in the past -- but that our policy is changing. . . . Can I guarantee that Choice #2 will lead to peace? Of course not, but it is very likely to do so." - 2000 Libertarian Party presidential candidate Harry Browne, "Liberty Wire," 10/15/01 ******************************** LP in La-La-Land: This Is a War, Not a Crime "We also call on the United States government to publicly reveal the evidence that conclusively links bin Laden and his terrorist network to the September 11 terrorist attacks. While much circumstantial evidence is available, and while bin Laden has made statements condoning the September 11 attacks, the U.S. government has an obligation to conclusively demonstrate that he is guilty of mass murder." - Libertarian Party news release, 10/15/01

Of course, it must be conceded to Browne that US foreign policy has frequently been pathological since the end of World War 2. This is simply not the main motivation for the attacks. The terrorists fear and seek to destroy the America that reasons, discovers, invents, expresses, constructs, and generally achieves. These are, presumably, the aspects of America Browne esteems. If America were to rid itself of the institutions of government Browne (and I) condemn - which have for decades engaged in sporadic hegemony and murder - but perpetuate the economic systems he esteems, the terrorists would be unsatisfied and undeterred. What Harry Browne and all those like him spectacularly miss, is that the aspects of America they esteem are precisely the aspects of America the terrorists fear and despise. It is our economic success. As Jeane Kirkpatrick put it on Fox News (2001-Oct-2 12:14), ``They dislike us more for our virtues than our vices''. In fact, as noted by one of Judith Regan's guests on Fox News 2001-Oct-21, this is the intractable reason the terrorists despise Israel: the Islamic people of Arabia are mostly very poor, and until the West patronized the region's oil reservoirs, was all very poor. The people of Israel took the same scrappy land - in fact, a patch of it essentially devoid of natural resources - and in just a few decades, built the richest economy in the entire Middle East. Their success is intolerable; it is a standing indictment of Islam and the culture of its adherents.

Al-Qaeda itself objects strenuously to the cooperation of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and other Arab states, with the United States. This cooperation extends to military exchange programs (which some of the terrorists apparently participated in, a bitter irony). But when a group of states organizes itself by invitation and voluntary participation, it is an alliance, not an empire. Moreover, if the US were an Islamic state imposing shari'a on the population, the terrorists might actually support it and urge it to be more belligerent and expansion-oriented. Ironically, four recent major US military operations - in Kuwait, Somalia, Bosnia, and Kosovo - were undertaken to aid Muslims.

The developing response to the attacks may lead to an arrangement that more closely resembles an empire, as the US and its intimates deliver ultimatum after ultimatum to state after state. In a way, we are witnessing a reinvigoration of the ``New World Order'', though a reasonable person cannot complain about the apparent objectives. Rhetoric continues to suggest the US will openly undermine and remove states to which its leadership objects - indeed, states that tolerate terrorists within their borders must be coerced or toppled. Some rhetoric continues to suggest a war between ``The West'' and the other - obviously dangerous, if understandable and fundamentally correct. Listen to a portion of the 2001-Oct-9 statement by Al Qaeda spokesman Sulaiman Abu Ghaith (128kbps mp3, 2 minutes 49 seconds).

reduced bitrate (24kbps mp3) Al Qaeda spokesman Sulaiman Abu Ghaith on al-Jazira via CNN, 2001-Oct-9 Ghaith is a Kuwaiti expatriate and onetime school teacher. What The U.S. Isn't
By Michael Kelly
Wednesday, October 24, 2001; Page A25
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A42660-2001Oct23.html


Because this war was forced on us, and because it has brought us death and fear, it is natural to see this moment only in terms of painful burden. It is that, but it is also one of extraordinary opportunity.

The best-case scenario is, in the short term, victory. Short-term victory means the destruction of al Qaeda, the defeat of the Taliban and the establishment of a government in Afghanistan that is not hostile to the United States. It means also accomplishing these goals without creating an environment that leads to ancillary disaster, notably the takeover in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia by radical anti-American Islamicists.

This is a result that is not guaranteed but is reasonable to hope for. The early indications in Afghanistan all augur well. The U.S. campaign, largely waged from the air, appears well on the way to destroying much of the Taliban's military infrastructure. With its command centers, its airplanes, its tanks, forts and artillery wrecked, the Taliban may well fall to the forces of the rebel Northern Alliance. The odds of success here are improved by the reports of significant defections from the Taliban ranks.

And, so far, ancillary disaster does not seem to loom. While there have been fairly widespread demonstrations against the United States and in support of al Qaeda throughout the Middle East and even into the Far East, there have not been (yet, at least) any signs of popular unrest sufficient to cause the toppling of any regime.

Cassandras see a victory in Afghanistan as a defeat in waiting. Look, they say, at what happened to the Russians when they tried to run that place with a puppet government. But here is exactly where the opportunity for a transformative moment occurs: The United States is not the Soviet Union.

Specifically, it is not an imperial or colonial power; it has no desire (because its people have no desire) to conquer Afghanistan, to occupy it, to own it by proxy. It simply wants Afghanistan to be run by people who will not use it as a base for terror against the United States. It is perfectly content, after that, to let Afghanistan do with itself what it will -- indeed to help Afghanistan.

The Afghans don't know this, of course, and neither do a lot of other people in the Middle East. The idea of the United States as Europe came to know it -- a great power that was also a good power; a liberator and a protector but not a conqueror or an occupier -- is news still to much of the Eastern world. (For that matter, it is news still to many on the left in the Western world.) Bernard Lewis, the great Islamic scholar and author, argues that, generally speaking, the United States is seen in the Middle East in terms of a continuum that stretches back through several hundred years as just the latest in a series of Western, white, Christian powers (France, Britain, now America) whose interests in the region were materialistic and imperialistic.

In this view, America's interest in the affairs of Arabic and Islamic states is (like that of the European colonial powers) entirely selfish and corrupt, and the proof of this may be found in America's support for selfish and corrupt regimes, notably Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. America (again, like the Europeans) is chronically duplicitous, always willing to betray trusts and allies as its interests shift. And finally, in this view, America is a paper tiger; technologically superior but at bottom cowardly, and thus in the end susceptible to defeat by a more courageous foe.

Lewis believes that the United States had one great chance to show the Middle East that it was different: the Gulf War. Here, America had an opportunity to rescue a captive people -- not the Kuwaitis but the Iraqis -- from a terrible and much-hated regime. In failing to do this, and in the process shamefully betraying the Kurdish and Shiite Iraqis whom it had encouraged to rebel, the United States confirmed the Middle Eastern long view.

The battle of Afghanistan gives America a rare second chance. Start with the radical assumption that Afghans do not like starving in poverty under the rule of psychopaths. What would happen if the United States made it possible for them to live, not under American rule, but under a sane self-rule, with material assistance from this nation? What would happen, in short, if the United States rescued the Afghans?

We have a shot at that here. Long-term victory for the United States lies in convincing the people of the Middle East of the great and simple truth: America is not the Britain of old; it is not the France of old; it is different.

One of the terrorists' chosen targets (the World Trade Center) was intensely multinational, assuring a broad and vigorous global alliance would seek to root them out. Notably, over two hundred Pakistanis died. Many hundreds of Muslims died. 29 of 34 Organization of American States (OAS) nations lost citizens. 96 Russians, 23 Australians, more than 20 Chinese, 24 Japanese, 20 Malaysians, 21 Indonesians. In all, at least 80 countries lost nationals ``almost 80'', Colin Powell noted on the morning of the 24th ``at least 80'', GWB said at APEC on 2001-Oct-20 . In the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Africa, most of the casualties were African Muslims. The Al Qaeda agenda can thus best be viewed as separatist. They condemn Muslims who tolerate, mix with, or (most vehemently) cooperate with infidels.

Since the terrorists directly impacted people in the preeminent centers of American power - Washington DC (government), New York City (finance), Boston (education), Los Angeles (media and entertainment), and the San Francisco Bay Area (technology) - they assured a rapid and thorough recruitment of political support for the decisive dismantling of the organizations behind the terrorism, and uniform deprecation of their cause. Conceivably, these organizations might be subconsciously pursuing their own demise, believing it inevitable and in effect subsidizing the process (westernization of Islamic civilization) they are widely believed to be working to retard or reverse. It's also possible - indeed, probable - that the terrorists are ignorant of American socio-political dynamics, or simply stupid. On 2001-Sep-27, Fox News reported that investigators revealed they have evidence that prominent structures in Washington DC (White House and Capitol), Boston, San Francisco (TransAmerica Tower), Los Angeles, Seattle (Space Needle), Atlanta, Chicago (Sears Tower), Dallas, Houston, and possibly Las Vegas, may also have been intended direct targets on the campaign launched on the 11th, but those attacks were foiled by the FAA's rapid flight grounding action. It was reported on 2001-Oct-2, with greater certainty, that another campaign was planned by al-Qaeda operatives, targeting the European Parliament in Strasbourg, NATO headquarters Brussels, the US embassy in Paris, and the US mission in Marseille. On 2001-Oct-4, authorities reported that the massive and deadly chemical plant factory explosion in France was in fact a terrorist attack. If these reports are accurate, they confirm the impression that the terrorist movement is fundamentally stupid or insane. If all these attacks had succeeded, an immediate and massive thermonuclear response would have become possible, if not certain.

TPDL 2001-Oct-16 THE OTHER BLOWBACK By JOHN PODHORETZ New York Post October 16, 2001 -- http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/31860.htm MANHATTAN has now been attacked twice - once on Sept. 11 and once with the NBC anthrax. This choice of target may have been a gross miscalculation on the part of the al Qaeda terror network, because Osama bin Laden has turned a city with an anti-war tradition going back more than a century into a nest of bloodthirsty hawks. The same miscalculation may have been at work in the decision to send anthrax through the mails to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. Since the mid 1960s, Washington's Democrats have been chronically suspicious of the global projection of American military power. Being a hawk really doesn't come naturally to Daschle, even though he has been absolutely stellar since Sept. 11. There was some reason to believe that if the going got tough in the war on terrorism, Daschle might head for the hills. Not any more. Somebody just tried to kill Daschle, and it was his personal staff that got exposed. When Tom Brokaw was interviewed on Friday night about the anthrax sent to him, he said the hardest thing about the incident was knowing that the infected woman only got sick because she worked for him. There were tears in Brokaw's eyes - but they were tears of rage, not of grief. The Brokaw incident suggests yet another miscalculation. In the wake of Vietnam, the media have been very much like Washington's Democrats - suspicious of or downright hostile to the use of force by the United States. But now the media (a term that describes both NBC and American Media, which publishes supermarket tabloids) are under a very specific threat. And the only way to end the threat is to do what President Bush says must be done: Smoke them out of their holes from Trenton to Kabul. There's an old saying: A conservative is a liberal who's been mugged. Well, a hawk is a liberal who's been targeted for death by al Qaeda. It happened last year in Israel, after the Palestinians rejected then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak's dangerously generous offer for a homeland and then launched a new intifada: The Israeli peace movement fell apart due to the unambiguous nature of the threat against every Jewish life. Three comparable centers of American wobbliness - New York City, the mainstream media and the Senate Democratic leadership - may now become the centers of a forthright 21st-century American aggressiveness toward terrorism. New Yorkers and media types have often seemed to hold themselves apart from the rest of the country - indeed, to consider ourselves superior to the yahoos beyond the Hudson (and, for Washingtonians, beyond the Beltway). Well, now we know that no matter how cosmopolitan we think we are, we are Americans first and foremost. Indeed, in the eyes of those who want to destroy America, we are the most representative of Americans. We affluent New Yorkers and media types aren't sitting in comfort while the children of the working class go off to war, the way our elders did during Vietnam. This time, we are ourselves on the front lines. We are living in an atmosphere of steady anxiety not entirely dissimilar to the clammy fear felt (so I am told) by military men. Only, unlike those in the military, we have not been through basic training. We have no mindless and comforting rituals to practice to help us through the fear. We are not divided into platoons, we have no shipmates. We're struggling our way through as best we can. In the weeks following the Sept. 11 attacks, a few isolationist e-mail correspondents asked me churlishly whether I thought the news coverage would have been as comprehensive if the terrorists had struck Kansas. The question speaks to the bitterness felt by heartland Americans about the way they feel ignored by the media. But the terrorists didn't crash planes into Kansas office buildings. If they had, far fewer people would have died. New York and Washington are the primary battlefields of this war, fought by plane bombs and poison in the mails and God knows what else is coming next. OpinionJournal.com PEGGY NOONAN
Profiles Encouraged Under the cirumstances, we must be wary of young Arab men. Friday, October 19, 2001 12:01 a.m. It was Sept. 14 at 9 p.m., and I was on Fifth Avenue, directly across the street from St. Patrick's Cathedral. I was standing, that is, directly in front of the statue of Atlas holding up the world, at the entrance of Rockefeller Center. I was with my 14-year-old son. We were waiting for friends who were going to accompany us downtown to see the memorials that had sprung up in Washington Square and other places. Our friends were a few minutes late. We waited together on the quiet, near-empty street. New York had been attacked only days before, and our city was quiet; people were home. Suddenly to our right, on the sidewalk, we saw two "Mideastern looking men," as we all now say. They were 25 or 30 years old, dressed in jeans and windbreakers, and they were doing something odd. They were standing together silently videotaping the outside of St. Pat's, top to bottom. We watched them, trying to put what we were seeing together. Tourists? It was a funny time of day for tourists to be videotaping a landmark--especially when the tourists looked like the guys who'd just a few days before blown up a landmark. We watched them. After a minute or so they finished taping St. Pat's and turned toward where we were. We were about 20 feet away from them, and we eyeballed them hard. They stared back at us in what I thought an aggressive manner: a deadeye stare, cold, no nod, no upturned-chin hello. They stared at us staring at them for a few seconds, and then they began to videotape Rockefeller Center. We continued watching, and I surveyed the street for a policeman or patrol car. I looked over at the men again. They were watching me. The one with the camera puts it down for a moment. We stared, they stared. And then they left. They walked away and disappeared down a side street. Let me tell you what I thought. I thought: Those guys are terrorists. And then I thought: Whoa, wait a minute. I must be experiencing what people experienced after Pearl Harbor, when all of a sudden they'd see a young Asian guy with a camera and get all excited. You can get paranoid. You can get unfair. I thought: The guys I just saw weren't breaking the law, in any case there are no cops around, and if I drop a dime to overburdened 911--"I saw two Mideastern men taking pictures!"--they'd brush me off. So I just filed it away, as did my son. But neither of us could shake it.

Ten days later I am to be a guest on the Oprah show, where we are going to talk about the events of Sept. 11. A car picks me up in the early afternoon at my apartment to take me to a studio in midtown where I'll talk to Oprah in Chicago. As we drive south down Park Avenue, the driver chats with me, and he seems jumpy. "You bothered like everyone else at what's going on?" I ask. He says--I paraphrase--"Yeah, I am. I been feeling funny since a thing I saw the other day. I'm standing with a bunch of limos and drivers, we're waiting outside that big building, 520 Madison. And suddenly--we're all hanging around talking--and suddenly we see these two guys, Mideastern guys, in turbans. And they're videotaping 520 Madison Avenue top to bottom. Right in front of us. So we look at them and they look back--and then they keep doing it! So one of our guys starts to walk toward them, and the guys with the camera got outta there quick. And I'm telling you, it gave me the creeps!" I get to the Oprah studio, do the show, get home, call the FBI tip line. I tell them my name, what I do for a living, say I'm going to tell them something that sounds small but may be big. The FBI tip line guy is polite, takes notes, thanks me. He asks me to get the limo driver's name, I call around, get the number of his car company. The tip line guy calls me back, takes the number, thanks me again. I say, "You guys must be getting 1,500 tips an hour." He says yes, but they're all appreciated and if I see any more Mideastern looking men videotaping I should call. I figured: They're busy taking other, more urgent tips, this isn't going anywhere. Then I remembered an FBI agent I'd met in the neighborhood, tried to reach her, couldn't get her at her office or home. I leave messages, hear nothing, figure she's out chasing the bad guys. Now jump to this past week. Two things happen. My son is surfing Internet chat rooms last Sunday and goes to a conservative site, where he sees an interesting thing. A man or woman has written in to say--again I paraphrase--"The oddest thing happened at work the other day. I work at a petrochemical company, and these two Mideastern looking guys come in and say they want to videotape the inside of the plant for a college course they're taking. They were approached and asked for identification by the manager. They became surly, angry, and left. Later the manager phoned the school they claimed to be students at--and they weren't even registered!" My son calls to me, we read it and look at each other. I decided to call the FBI again. But the next morning my phone rings and it is the FBI, and it seems to be a real agent, not a telephone answerer. My initial tip line report has, apparently, trickled up into the "check it out" category. Or maybe they've gotten enough reports like mine that a discernable pattern has emerged. At any rate, the agent asked me to go through my story and the driver's story, and then I threw in the report on the Internet, and he gave me his name and number and asked me to call if I saw anything else.

All this, of course, has me thinking. Maybe it has you thinking, too. I will share some of my thoughts. They are not original or unusual, but I feel they should maybe be said. Again, they are only thoughts and hunches. I think there are a lot of "sleeper cells"--not a few, as we all hope, but a lot. I think some them are in Queens and Brooklyn and Manhattan, and in Jersey City and elsewhere in New Jersey . Boston, too. Maybe some are in the capital or Virginia or Maryland. Maybe some of those who delivered anthrax to the U.S. Capitol took a taxi. Maybe on the other hand they took the shuttle from LaGuardia. Certainly we know some cell or cells are in Florida. I think some cell members may not be sure what their next move is. They're not sure of their next assignment. They haven't been told, or they haven't, perhaps, chosen. I think cell members have been going around taking home movies of potential targets. I suspect they've been downloading them into computers and shooting them off to Osama and his lieutenants in the caves. I suspect they've been building a video library of places they might hit over the next few months and years and decade. And I think once they take one of the targets down they'll happily return to the scene of the crime, take a nice tourist-type videotape of the crater they made--they'll tell the cops they want to record the brave rescue workers--and send it triumphantly home. That's all based on nothing but hunches. But there are things we know. As individuals, these men--for they are men, between roughly 17 and 45, which is to say they track in terms of sex and age group American criminals in American jails--are not only "hate filled" and "evil," though they are these things. They are also, obviously, emotionally and intellectually primitive. Their minds, if quick and highly focused, are also limited, stunted. And their young-man's arrogance is both a strength and their potential undoing. (Young male criminals of whatever sort tend to showy arrogance, and it is often their undoing.) And I think as we attempt to find the bad guys in Afghanistan and elsewhere, we should all be thinking a little more, as citizens, about the search going on here, in America. The people who are trying to kill us with bombs and biological weapons are not from Canada, Chile, China, India, Ireland, Tanzania, Congo, New Zealand or the island of Jamaica. They are from the Arab Mideast. They are not Israeli. They are men, and not women. They are young men. That is, they are not old men, and they are not children. So: We know the profile of the bad guys. I think I saw some of them that night across from St. Pat's, and I continue to regret not confronting them, questioning them and, if I had to, tackling them and screaming for help. I could have gotten us all arrested. If they had been innocent tourists I would have apologized, begged their forgiveness and offered to buy them a very nice dinner. If they had not been innocent, I would have helped stop some bad guys. In the past month I have evolved from polite tip-line caller to watchful potential warrior. And I gather that is going on with pretty much everyone else, and I'm glad of it. I was relieved at the story of the plane passengers a few weeks ago who refused to board if some Mideastern looking guys were allowed to board. I was encouraged just last night when an esteemed journalist told me of a story she'd been told: Two Mideastern-looking gentlemen, seated together on a plane, were eyeballed by a U.S. air marshal who was aboard. The air marshal told the men they were not going to sit together on this flight. They protested. The marshal said, move or you're not on this flight. They moved. Plane took off. Good news: Everything went safely and calmly. Bad news: The two men were probably Ph.D.'s from Yale on their way to a bioethics convention. They made it clear they resented being split up, and I understand their resentment, and would feel real sympathy if they told me about it. You would, too. But you know what? I think we're in the fight of our lives, and I think we're going to need their patience. And I think those who have not yet developed patience are going to have to grow up and get some.

No one likes "racial profiling," "ethnic profiling," "religious profiling." But I see it this way: If groups of terrorists took out two huge buildings and part of the Pentagon and killed 5,000 people and then decided to unleash anthrax and it emerged that those terrorists were all middle-aged American blond women who tend to dress in blue jeans and T-shirts and like to go by Catholic churches and light candles, I would be deeply upset not only because the terrorists had done what they'd done. I would also be upset because they were just like me! I fit their profile! I look like them! I act like them! Everywhere I went people would notice me and give me hard looks and watch what I was doing. I would feel terrible about this. But you know what else I'd do? I'd suck it up. I'd understand. I wouldn't like it, but I'd get it, and I'd accept it. Because under very special circumstances--and these are special circumstances--you sometimes have to sacrifice. You have to drop your burly pride a little and try to understand and be accepting and accommodating and generous-spirited. I think we're going to require a lot of patience from a lot of innocent people. And you know, I don't think that's asking too much. And when it's not given, I think we should recognize that as odd. About as odd as videotaping a great cathedral in the dark.

Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal. Her new book, "When Character Was King: A Story of Ronald Reagan," will be published by Viking Penguin this fall. Her column appears Fridays.

TPDL 2001-Oct-24 Racial Profiling' and Terrorism
By Jason L. Riley
Wall Street Journal
http://interactive6.wsj.com/articles/SB1003877266267022040.htm


Of the 19 hijackers responsible for last month's calamity, all were Arabic, all were practitioners of Islam and all came from known state incubators of terrorism in the Middle East. Of the 22 suspects on the FBI's "most wanted" list of international terrorists, all are Arabic, all are practitioners of Islam and all come from known state incubators of terrorism in the Middle East.

Not "some" of them, or a "disproportionate number" of them. All of them.

Those numbers dictate that any sensible domestic effort to expose terrorist cells would include concentrating on particular groups in particular communities associated with a particular culture. To ignore the fact that America's enemies in this war share a faith and ethnicity -- and that their actions, by their own reckoning, are ethnically and religiously inspired -- would be self-deluding and foolish.

The public is already responding to Attorney General John Ashcroft's call for "each American to help us defend our nation in this war." People have flooded law enforcement with information about suspicious activities and individuals, and law enforcement has responded accordingly -- some 1,000 people have been detained and more than 4,000 subpoenas issued. If there exists any hesitancy or guilt about the appropriateness of this patriotic endeavor, it derives from that unfortunate label it goes by: racial profiling.

Many topics of our national conversation prior to Sept. 11 -- stem-cell research, slavery reparations, wayward California congressmen -- have been moved to the backburner. Talk of "racial profiling," by contrast, has not only survived the terrorist attacks but intensified as a result of them.

Before last month's events, those Americans who favored profiling were few in number, and those willing to say so aloud were fewer still. President Bush and Mr. Ashcroft had gone on record condemning racially motivated police stops, which surprised no one. To the public and the media, racial profiling was a major no-no; it evoked images of state troopers targeting black highway motorists for traffic violations in order to search for drugs.

Not much effort has gone into distinguishing between our pre-September understanding of this controversial police procedure and our current effort to pre-empt future terror strikes on the basis of all we know about the perpetrators. Instead we get polls purporting to show a shift in public attitudes about profiling, even among groups who ostensibly stand to lose the most in such a shift.

Two respected pollsters have reported that blacks, the frequent targets of profiling, are now more likely than other racial groups to favor it. Seventy-one percent of black respondents to a Gallup poll, and 54% in a Zogby poll, said they want Arab-looking travelers singled out for extra scrutiny at airports. And when the Detroit News, whose readership includes one of the nation's largest Arab-American enclaves, conducted its own survey last month, it found that even Arabs want look-alikes checked out more closely; 61% said "extra questioning or inspections are justified."

In part, what the polls speak to is the uselessness of the term "racial profiling," which has joined other muddled expressions like "affirmative action," "racist" and "diversity" in the abyss of politically charged racial cant. Regardless of what the polls say, blacks haven't suddenly decided that "driving while black" is no longer a problem that needs addressing, and Arabs haven't suddenly acquired a collective self-hatred.

More plausibly, both groups, to their credit, are making a distinction that the media is ignoring. Whatever you want to call it, they're saying, what's happening now is a logical and legitimate response given our knowledge of the adversary, and quite different from previous debates we had over whether random black drivers were stopped along the highway.

But more than semantics is at stake here, says Jackson Toby, a professor sociology at Rutgers University who's written extensively on racial profiling. "There's an important political distinction to be made," he says. "If the people who think that civil liberties violations are occurring on the turnpike ally themselves with people who call this wartime effort racial profiling, they are saying something so unacceptable to Americans in this political climate that they're killing their own case."

Testifying before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights this month, Timothy Edgar of the American Civil Liberties Union complained that "virtually every secret evidence case that has come to public attention [since the attacks] has involved a Muslim or an Arab, raising the specter of racial profiling." Mr. Edgar apparently sees something sinister going on here, even though our suspect lists are comprised entirely of Muslims and Arabs.

Similarly, Sen. Russ Feingold and Rep. John Conyers, two liberal Democrats who had sponsored bills to address racial profiling before Sept. 11, have now decided there's no difference between the "driving while black" problem and what they've dubbed "flying while Arab."

But there are differences. The nation is at war. By all means, let's continue to debate the extent to which we want race and ethnicity employed by law enforcement in their efforts to stop lead-footed drug runners and the like. But let's not confuse that effort with the current one to prevent another Sept. 11. Doing so helps neither case.


A Sampling of International Response

On Sunday the 23rd, CBS's 60 Minutes included a segment investigating the response in the Middle Eastern press and community to the Sept. 11 attacks. Among the findings: Qatar's al-Jazira (``The Island'') TV network (sometimes transliterated al-Jazeera), which broadcasts the most popular show in the region (a news panel call-in show), recently considered the question ``Does America deserve what happened to it?'' and concluded ``Yes.'' In a poll, 80% in the Arab world agreed that ``America is not an enemy of the Arab people, it is the enemy.'' It was to al-Jazira that a 2001-Sep-24 message claimed to be from Osama bin Laden was faxed, which sought to polarize the conflict into the West vs. Islam. Listen to this NBC News segment on al-Jazira (128kbps mp3, 2 minutes 38 seconds). reduced bitrate version (24kbps mp3) if the Islamists succeed to any degree in polarizing the world - particularly, if they manage to install Taliban-like regimes in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, east and north Africa (particularly, Egypt), Indonesia, Malaysia, and other demographically Islamic nations - then total world war, probably global thermonuclear war, is entirely inevitable, and in fairly short order. it will be a war for survival between two worlds - geographically north and south, rather than east and west - each of whose existence is incompatible with that of the other.

from the New York Post, 2001-Oct-22, by Daniel Pipes:

MUSLIMS LOVE BIN LADEN

WHAT do Muslims think of Osama bin Laden?

Ask Westerners and you'll hear how marginal he is. President Bush says bin Laden represents a "fringe form of Islamic extremism . . . rejected by Muslim scholars and the vast majority of Muslim clerics." American specialists on Islam agree. "Osama bin Laden is to Islam like Timothy McVeigh is to Christianity," says Mark Juergensmeyer of the University of California. Karen Armstrong, author of a bestselling book about Islam, reports that the "vast majority of Muslims . . . are horrified by the atrocity of Sept. 11."

Well, that "vast majority" is well hidden and awfully quiet, if it even exists. With the exception of one government-staged anti-bin Laden demonstration in Pakistan and very few prominent Islamic scholars, hardly anyone publicly denounces him. The only Islamic scholar in Egypt who unreservedly condemns the Sept. 11 suicide operations admits he is completely isolated.

American officials are still waiting for Muslim politicians to speak up. "It'd be nice if some leaders came out and said that the idea the United States is targeting Islam is absurd," notes one U.S. diplomat.They don't because the Muslim world is bursting with adulation for the Saudi militant.

* "Long live bin Laden" shout 5,000 demonstrators in the southern Philippines.

* In Pakistan, bin Laden's face sells merchandise and massive street rallies have left two persons dead. Ten thousand march in the capitals of Bangladesh and Indonesia.

* In northern Nigeria, bin Laden has (according to Reuters) "achieved iconic status" and his partisans set off religious riots leading to 200 deaths.

* Pro-bin Laden demonstrations took place even in Mecca, where overt political activism is unheard of.

Everywhere, The Washington Post reports, Muslims cheer bin Laden on "with almost a single voice." The Internet buzzes with odes to him as a man "of solid faith and power of will." A Saudi explains that "Osama is a very, very, very, very good Muslim." A Kenyan adds: "Every Muslim is Osama bin Laden." "Osama is not an individual, but a name of a holy war," reads a banner in Kashmir. In perhaps the most extravagant statement, one Pakistani declared that "Bin Laden is Islam. He represents Islam." In France, Muslim youths chant bin Laden's name as they throw rocks at non-Muslims.

Palestinians are especially enamoured. According to Hussam Khadir, a member of Arafat's Fatah party, "Bin Laden today is the most popular figure in the West Bank and Gaza, second only to Arafat." A 10-year-old girl announces that she loves him like a father. Nor is she alone. "Everybody loves Osama bin Laden at this time. He is the most righteous man in the whole world," declares a Palestinian woman. A Palestinian Authority policeman calls him "the greatest man in the world & our Messiah" even as he (reluctantly) disperses students who march in solidarity with the Saudi.

Survey research helps us understand these sentiments. In the Palestinian Authority, a Bir Zeit poll found that 26 percent of Palestinians consider the Sept. 11 attacks consistent with Islamic law. In Pakistan, a Gallup found a nearly identical 24 percent reaching this conclusion.

Even those who consider the attacks an act of terrorism (64 percent of both Palestinians and Pakistanis) show respect for these as acts of political defiance and technical prowess. "Of course we're upset that so many died in New York. But at the same time, we're in awe of what happened," said a young Cairene woman.

An online survey of Indonesians found 50 percent seeing bin Laden as a "justice fighter" and 35 percent a terrorist. More broadly, I estimate that bin Laden enjoys the emotional support of half the Muslim world.

That America's politicans and experts on Islam insist on seeing bin Laden as an isolated McVeigh-like figure is worrisome; they miss the danger that bin Laden's militant Islam poses to existing governments - perhaps their greatest challenge of recent times. Their fear of him goes far to explain why the authorities so heavily discourage pro-bin Laden sentiments (forbidding posters of him, arresting militant Islamic leaders, blocking street gatherings, closing schools and universities, patrolling streets with loaded machine guns, and even shooting demonstrators).

The wide and deep Muslim enthusiasm for bin Laden is an extremely important development that needs to be understood, not ignored.

Daniel Pipes, the director of the Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum, can be reached via www.DanielPipes.org.

from Agence France-Presse, 2001-Sep-27:

Two weeks after US terror, Iran once again cries "Death to America"

TEHRAN - After a two-week hiatus since the attacks on the United States, loud cries of "Death to America" rang out again in Iran on Wednesday as its leaders firmly ruled out joining a US-led anti-terror coalition.

Privately, several ordinary Iranians felt Tehran had missed the boat for patching up relations with Washington.

"You, who have always caused blows to Iran's interests, how dare you request help (from us) in order to attack the innocent Muslim nation of Afghanistan which has suffered and which is our neighbour," Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said.

"The Islamic Republic of Iran will not participate in any move which is headed by the United States," he said ending days of speculation on whether ties would thaw with Washington, which was one of Tehran's closest allies up until the 1979 Islamic revolution that led to links being severed.

Khamenei's address drew, for the first time since the September 11 terror attacks on New York and Washington, loud cries of "Death to America" broadcast repeatedly by the Iranian state media.

[...]

but on 2001-Oct-17, Iran promised it would rescue any US military personnel in its territory.

from the Times of London, 2001-Sep-26:

Diplomacy
State sponsors of terrorism

Friend or foe? In the current round of diplomacy, Jack Straw has visited Iran and Tony Blair has telephoned President Assad of Syria. Here is how the US State Department describes those countries, which it includes on a list of ``state sponsors of terrorism''

Iran: ``Despite the victory for moderates in Iran's Majles elections in February . . . Iran has remained the most active state sponsor of terrorism in 2000. Its involvement in terrorist-related activities remained focused on support for groups opposed to Israel and peace between Israel and its neighbours. Iran continued to encourage Hezbollah and the Palestinian groups to co-ordinate their planning and to escalate their activities against Israel. Iran also provided a lower level of support - including funding, training and logistics assistance - to extremist groups in the Gulf, Africa, Turkey and Central Asia.''

Syria: ``Syria continued to provide safe haven and support to several terrorist groups, some of which maintained training camps or other facilities on Syrian territory. The Syrian Government allowed Hamas to open a new main office in Damascus in March 2000. Ahmad Jibril's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, the Palestine Islamic Jihad, Abu Musa's Fatah-the-Intifada, and George Habash's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine maintained their headquarters in Damascus.''

TPDL 2001-Oct-2 With Carl Limbacher and NewsMax.com Staff For the story behind the story... Monday, Oct. 1, 2001 Where's Mexico? http://www.newsmax.com/showinsidecover.shtml?a=2001/10/1/115749 It wasn't long ago that President Bush and Mexico's President Vicente Fox were pledging undying friendship between the two nations, with Bush telling Fox, "The United States has no more important relationship in the world than our relationship with Mexico." Fast-forward to the days following the Sept. 11 disaster and that relationship seems to have faded away, to be replaced by widespread Mexican indifference to the horrors suffered north of the border, if not outright hostility toward the United States. Despite such stirring pledges as Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castinada's "We cannot deny [the U.S] our support," Mexico seems to have averted its gaze from the Black Tuesday massacre and its aftermath. According to the Sept. 22 issue of The Economist, "Americans living in Mexico wonder aloud why the country has held no official memorial ceremony or mass vigils as Canada and some European countries have." Shockingly, many Mexicans, "notably well-educated, well-off ones," the Economist reports, excuse their failure to express sorrow by saying the U.S. simply got what it deserves. "It isn't our fight," they say. "They had it coming for all the things they've done to the rest of the world." Others remark, "Now they know what a real disaster feels like." According to one poll, barely 22 percent of Mexicans would support contributing troops to any military reprisal for the attack, and only 31 percent would support sending any aid. Observers attribute Mexico's cold shoulder to resentment of tough new restrictions on immigration from south of the border and hard-nosed inspections of all traffic at border crossing points. Moreover, many Mexican resent the fact that the Black Tuesday debacle has put a serious crimp in planned reform of the U.S.-Mexico immigration policy and solution of other long-standing problems between the nations.

from the Times of London, 2001-Sep-27:

The coalition
Berlusconi says West is superior to Islam

Breaking ranks with allies reaching out to the Muslim world, Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister, said last night that Western civilisation is superior to Islam. He also said that he hopes the West will conquer Islam.

The conservative billionaire's remarks were instantly disavowed by more moderate politicians in Italy, who called them both ill-timed and offensive.

Signor Berlusconi made the comments after talks in Berlin with Gerhard Schröder, the German Chancellor, and President Putin of Russia.

He told a news conference that ``we must be aware of the superiority of our civilisation, a system that has guaranteed wellbeing, respect for human rights and - in contrast with Islamic countries - respect for religious and political rights''.

Signor Berlusconi went on to say that he ``trusts the West will continue to conquer peoples, like it conquered communism'', even if it means a confrontation with ``another civilisation, the Islamic one, stuck where it was 1,400 years ago''.

The reaction in Italy to Signor Berlusconi's comments was swift and sharp. Piero Fassino, a prominent member of the centre-Left opposition, called them ``mistaken and, above all, inopportune''.

but then again, TPDL Islamic Scholars Say U.S. Muslim Soldiers Must Fight for Country
By Caryle Murphy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 11, 2001; Page A22
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A40545-2001Oct10.html


A group of prominent Islamic legal scholars in the United States and the Middle East has ruled that Muslims serving in the U.S. armed forces have a duty to fight for their country even if it means combat against other Muslims.

The religious opinion, or fatwa, was issued Sept. 27 in response to a question put to one of the scholars, Taha Jabir Alwani, of Leesburg, by a Muslim chaplain serving in the U.S. military, Army Capt. Abdul-Rasheed Muhammad.

Muhammad posed the question several months ago, but it is clear from the text of the ruling that the answer was written after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.

"All Muslims ought to be united against all those who terrorize the innocents, and those who permit the killing of non-combatants without a justifiable reason," the ruling states. "Islam has declared the spilling of blood and the destruction of property as absolute prohibitions until the Day of Judgment" and it is "incumbent upon our military brothers in the American armed forces" to make this Islamic position clear to their commanders and peers, the jurists added.

The ruling is significant because it means "that Muslims who are in the military have no question about where their loyalty lies," said Charles Butterworth, a scholar of Islam at the University of Maryland in College Park.

The document is also important because of the stature of its authors. Most prominent among them is Sheik Yusuf Qaradawi, who lives in the Persian Gulf nation of Qatar and has been critical of U.S. foreign policy, especially in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Other signatories of the fatwa include three Egyptians who have been critical of U.S. policies in the Middle East as well as of their own government: Tariq Bishri, a retired judge; Muhammad S. Awa, a lawyer and law professor; and Fahmi Houaydi, a writer. The other signatory is Haytham Khayyat, an Islamic scholar in Syria.

Although the Pentagon estimates that 4,100 Muslims serve in the U.S. military, Muhammad said he and others believe there are "three times that many."

The issue of whether Muslims can fight other Muslims "is a question that's been a concern not only of mine but of many people in the [U.S.] armed services for quite some time," Muhammad said yesterday in an interview. "We decided it was time to get the experts' opinion on this."

He said that "as chaplains, soldiers would come to us to claim conscientious objector status and commanders would seek us out for advice. . . . I needed the jurists to give me the Islamic advice in this matter."

Muhammad, 48, the first Muslim chaplain ever appointed in the U.S. armed forces, is a chaplain at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He said he approached Alwani because he is the head of the School of Islamic and Social Sciences in Leesburg, which vouches for the Islamic credentials of Muslims who apply to become U.S. military chaplains.

Referring to the attacks of Sept. 11, the jurists said in their ruling that it is "necessary to apprehend the true perpetrators of these crimes, as well as those who aid and abet them through incitement, financing or other support. They must be brought to justice in an impartial court of law and [punished] appropriately."

As a result, it is "a duty of Muslims to participate in this effort with all possible means," they added.

Addressing the "uneasiness" of many Muslims about inadvertently harming innocents in combat, the scholars said that when "a Muslim is a citizen of a state and a member of a regular army . . . he has no choice but to follow orders, otherwise his allegiance and loyalty to his country could be in doubt. This would subject him to much harm since he would not enjoy the privileges of citizenship without performing its obligations."

The jurists also said that Muslims could ask to serve in noncombatant positions "if such requests are granted by the authorities, without reservation or harm to the soldiers, or to the other American Muslim citizens." But Muslims should not make such requests if it would "raise doubts about their allegiance . . . [or] shed misgivings on their patriotism.

"To sum up, it's acceptable -- God willing -- for the Muslim American military personnel to partake in the fighting in the upcoming battles, against whomever, their country decides, has perpetrated terrorism against them," the scholars concluded.

It is now well-known that some Palestinians cheered and rallied in the streets when they learned of the Sept. 11 attacks. Less known is that various other groups did too. During a moment of silence at a soccer game in Greece, members of the crowd jeered anti-American slogans. On 2001-Sep-27, 2000 Greeks demonstrated against the US reacting to the attack on its citizens. Two Chinese mainland journalists were in the US at the tiem of the attacks and happened to be watching TV on the morning of the 11th. When they saw the airliners crash into the World Trade Towers, they cheered. There is widespread sentiment in mainland China that the US deserved the Sept. 11 attack. James Webb, writer and former Secretary of the Navy, notes (C-SPAN2, 2001-Sep-24 cablecast of 2001-Sep-20 appearance) that China has been courting the Muslim world since his tenure as Secretary of the Navy in the late 1980s. All of this suggests stormy relations ahead.

In contrast to China, Russia has good reason to align itself with the United States, and probably the number of people there who cheered the attacks is similar to the number here (nearly none). It is already (2001-Sep-23) supplying the anti-Taliban Afghan northern rebels with cut rate munitions. President Putin is apparently rallying support (2001-Sep-24) for the anti-terrorism campaign in Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan, and reports he has secured permission from Tajikistan and Uzbekistan 2001-Oct-12: Uzbekistan authorizes use of airspace and an airbase in Khanabad for offensive operations against Taliban . All of this may set Russia on a collision course with China, destroying what was a budding and potentially very dangerous political and military alliance. Russia's defense minister has, however, provisionally ruled out Russian participation in any military operation against the Taliban. On the 27th, the Bush Administration aligned itself with Russia and against the terroristic Chechen rebels (who are Islamist),

putin 2001-Sep-24: share intel Use of Russian air space for humanitarian and search and rescure flights. continue to funnel munitions to northern alliance lobbying to gain authorization for US use of former Soviet air bases in republics that border Afghanistan Russia/Putin 2001-Oct-7: fully support allied attack taj and uz authorize combat ops 2001-Oct-9: Tajikistan confirms authorization to US to use Tajik airbases to launch anti-terrorist strikes Kazakhastan ``stands ready to support US campaign'' ``support with all available means'' 2001-Sep-29: Schroeder (Germany) pledged full support 2001-Oct-3: France authorizes military overflight, pledges military cooperation including Navy 2001-Oct-7: Blair and Bush say Canada, Australia, Germany will join USUK in operations 2001-Oct-7: Shroeder: Germany approves of attacks, and will participate with ground troops if asked 2001-Oct-7 Berlusconi/Italy, France/Chirac promise to commit ground troops if asked 2001-Oct-7 France/Chriac promises military support including if asked 2001-Oct-7 Pakistan/Musharraf spokesman: ``The president is part of the international effort to combat terrorism and fully supports the action taken today.'' 2001-Oct-8 Turkey expresses support China 2001-Oct-7: "urges strictly targeted strikes" Israel 2001-Oct-7: offers support, calls launch of attack phase by Bush "brave decision" Iranian foreign ministry 2001-Oct-8: ``These attacks will result in loss of life among civilians, and therefore, they are not acceptable.'' 2001-Oct-8 Iraq condemened the attack which it said "targeted a coyuntry and people who are among the poorest int eh world" and Hussein said the attacks will only lead to more instability and lawlessness in the world 2001-Oct-11 Saddam Hussein calls strikes "treacherous aggression" 2001-Oct-8 Lebanon condemns allied attack 2001-Oct-8: Cuba calls US strikes "a war in favor of terrorism" 2001-sep-9: Iraq wants Muslim condemnation of US attacks 2001-Oct-8: Egypt and Saudi Arabia silent on strikes 2001-Oct-12: crowds in South Africa shout "death to America" and storm the US embassy in Cape Town 2001-Oct-13: 14 killed in anti-US in Kano, Nigeria; curfew imposed: 7pm-6am, order shoot to kill violators; 2001-Oct-14 Christian vs. Muslim rioting in Lagos (roughly 50/50 christian/muslim) 2001-Oct-19: 10k Muslims hold anti-US demonstration in Bangladesh 2001-Oct-19: on the occasion of Friday prayers, Saudi clerics denounce US and call for jihad, some praise Osama bin Laden as true Muslim hero 15 of the 19 Sept-11 hijackers were Saudi. Fox News / AP 2001-Oct-7 World Leaders React to U.S.-British Airstrikes The physical explosions of the U.S.-British airstrikes were felt and heard in the cities of Afghanistan, but the political reverbations of the first attack in the war on terrorism rattled capitals across the world. "We are supported by the collective will of the world," President George W. Bush said in a televised speech from the Treaty Room in his White House residence. "Every nation has a choice to make." "In this conflict, there is no neutral ground," Bush said. "If any government sponsors the outlaws and killers of innocents, they have become outlaws and murderers themselves. And they will take that lonely path at their own peril." The Taliban, which rule Afghanistan, said it was ready for a holy war and vowed to fight "to the last breath." A senior spokesman for Hamas, the militant Palestinian group, cast the U.S. as the villain in the Sunday attacks. "What America has done is pure terrorism against an innocent people when there was no proof they were involved in the Sept. 11 attacks" Hassan Youssef told Reuters. Iran, no friend to either the U.S. or the Taliban, called the assault "unacceptable," BBC reported. Most of the initial responses were supportive of the actions taken by Washington and London. British Prime Minister Tony Blair said the military strikes did not weaken but actually strengthened the coalition in what Bush called a "war against terrorism." "The world understands the danger in acting, but the danger of inaction is far greater," he said. In Britain, which Bush called America's "best friend" and "staunchest" ally, the support came in the form of missiles fired from two British submarines in coordination with the U.S. attacks. "The attacks represented the worst terrorist act against our citizens, but even if no British citizen had died, it would be right to act," Blair said in an address to his countrymen. "This atrocity was an attack on us all." French President Jacques Chirac said French forces were poised to enter the fray alongside American and British soldiers, sailors and airmen. Blair and Bush said Australia, Canada and Germany will also take part in the military strikes. Russian President Vladimir Putin fully backed the anti-terrorism attacks, with a Foreign Ministry spokesman reading a statement on Russian television that Afghanistan had become an "international center of terrorism and extremism." "It is time for decisive action with this evil," he said. "Terrorists wherever they are - in Afghanistan, Chechnya, the Middle East, or the Balkans - should know that they will be taken to justice." German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder was among the first to offer his support, pledging Germany's "unreserved" backing against what he called "terrorist targets" and stressing his country's "unlimited solidarity" with the United States. At least as important was the encouraging statements coming from Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. "The president is part of the international effort to combat terrorism and fully supports the action taken today," a spokesman for Musharraf said. Pakistan, Afghanistan's eastern neighbor, allowed military planes to fly in its airspace on specific routes, but no Pakistani air bases were used in the attacks, U.S. military officials told Fox News. But some Muslim leaders in Pakistan condemned the attacks, saying they targeted innocent Afghan civilians and warning that the U.S. would find itself in a difficult place with the Muslim world. Musharraf's spokesman said there could be a backlash from Islamic extremists in Pakistan for supporting the U.S., and that many locations in the country are on a heightened state of alert. In Indonesia, a hardline Muslim group on Monday called for Muslims to "besiege" the U.S. embassy in Jakarta, and threatened to hunt down foreigners and destroy foreign interests unless the government cuts off ties with the U.S. Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres called the U.S. attack on Afghanistan on Sunday a "brave decision" by President George W. Bush. "I think that all us, first of all, are praying for the welfare of the American army and its allies," he said on Israel's Channel Two television. A governmental delegation that planned to visit Washington later in the week will not do so, but not for security reasons, Tel Aviv said. The Israeli government was cancelling the trip because it did not want to distract from the matter at hand, it said. China's official news service, Xinhua, issued a statement saying that the country opposed terrorism in any form, and that Beijing hoped there would be no civilian casualties. In Tokyo, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said early on Monday that Japan supported the air strikes against Afghanistan and added that he was ordering a tightening of security nationwide. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi also publicly supported the attacks. The U.S. had kept its allies abreast of its planes, with Bush telephoning other world leaders an hour or so before the strikes were launched. Spokesmen for Putin, Chirac, Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien and Schroeder all said their nation's leaders were informed that the airstrikes were imminent. Though it was not clear how far in advance Musharraf knew of the coming bombardment, Pakistan had begun moving the 20,000 Afghan refugees just on their side of the Afghan border away from the boundary just before nightfall, several hours before the attacks In a sign of the changing times, Russian air defense units did not go to a heightened alert status after the bombing, staying instead in normal mode. In the Cold War years, Soviet air defenses were automatically put on heightened alert following any military activity by the United States. The New York Times October 8, 2001 THE ALLIES European Leaders Voice Support By SUZANNE DALEY PARIS, Oct. 7 - European leaders quickly voiced support for the military operations begun today by the United States and Britain against targets in Afghanistan, with France and Germany saying they could eventually take part as well. In Russia, which used to put its air- defense system on alert whenever American forces made significant moves, the Foreign Ministry instead issued a statement of support, saying the "time had come for decisive action" against terrorism. In France, President Jacques Chirac, looking somber, went on national television to announce the attacks. France has already pledged to open up its airspace, and French ships are providing logistical support in the Indian Ocean. But in his brief speech, Mr. Chirac indicated that French participation would go further. He said that military operations to "punish the guilty and destroy the infrastructure of the terrorist networks in Afghanistan" would take a long time, and added, "Our forces will take part in that." "In recent days the United States have made further requests to us for military participation," he said. "We will play our part in a spirit of solidarity and responsibility." In Germany, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder said in a statement that his government supported the attacks "without reservation." Later, in a televised address to the nation, he added that Germany's solidarity with the United States was "unlimited" and "did not exclude a military contribution if it is requested." However, he added, "Until now, we have received no such concrete demand." He dismissed questions about the conditions under which German soldiers might be brought into military action. But, he warned, "It should be clear to everyone that the conflict will last a long time." He added that although there was no concrete evidence of specific threats against Germany, the level of danger had grown higher. In Italy, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi put his country on a state of alert shortly after the attacks started. He set up a crisis center at his offices in Rome's Palazzo Chigi under the command of a general. Italian television showed troops putting concrete barriers at the entrance to a major NATO base near Naples. "Italy is on the side of the United States and of all those who are committed to the fight against terrorism," Agence France-Presse quoted Mr. Berlusconi as saying. In Rome today, hundreds of protesters, many waving Palestinian and Communist Party flags, marched through central Rome to denounce the American attack on Afghanistan, the Reuters news service reported. In Brussels, the European Union expressed "full solidarity" with the United States and Britain. Belgium's prime minister, Guy Verhofstadt, who holds the rotating presidency, said he was informed in advance of the attacks by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and by Foreign Secretary Jack Straw of Britain. In Moscow, the Kremlin said that President Bush had called President Vladimir V. Putin before the attacks began to tell him what was happening and that Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain had called afterward. Mr. Blair visited Mr. Putin in Moscow last Thursday evening, one of a series of visits he made to foreign leaders in recent days. Unlike in the past, the Russian military apparently did not put its air-defense system on alert, according to the Interfax news service. In a statement read on Russian Public Television, the Foreign Ministry supported the American strikes, saying "the world community is unanimous in understanding that the threat to world peace and international security coming from terrorist acts must be withstood in accordance with the United Nations charter and using all means." "What is happening there is a direct consequence of the policy of the Taliban regime," the statement said. "This policy turned the country into the world center for international terrorism and extremism. The time has come for decisive actions to fight this evil. Terrorists, no matter where they are, in Afghanistan, Chechnya, the Middle East or the Balkans, must be aware that justice will get them." Mr. Verhofstadt, the European Union president, said he was told by the United States and Britain that today's military action would be aimed essentially at military command centers, antiaircraft installations and terrorist training camps. He said the European Union deplored the failure of the Taliban to turn over Osama bin Laden despite repeated appeals that it do so. In a separate statement, Romano Prodi, president of the European Commission, the union's executive branch, said, "All Europe stands steadfast with the United States and its coalition allies to pursue the fight against terrorism." The reaction was similar among allies in other parts of the world. Prime Minister Jean Chrétien of Canada confirmed that his country would meet Mr. Bush's request for a military contribution, The Associated Press reported. In a message to the nation, he said military units were being told to report for duty.

In Saudi Arabia, ths homeland of Islam, there is every appearance of a power struggle between pro-US and anti-US factions. On 2001-Sep-23, the country announced it would not participate in any military action against the Taliban. The previous day, it announced it would not allow a newly operational US-Saudi joint command center to be used in any such action. Yet Saudi Arabia said on the 23rd that it was considering joining the United Arab Emirates in de-recognizing the Taliban, and on the 24th, actually did so. Also on the 24th, the Saudi ambassador denied reports that his government had denied US access to airstrips and other facilities the US wants to use in its prospective military campaign. On the 25th, Saudi Arabia severed all ties with the Taliban, and the 27th, shuttered the Afghan embassy in Saudi Arabia. All of this was amid rumors that King Fahd (Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Fahd Bin Abdul Aziz Al-Saud, for sticklers) had fled to Switzerland - probably false. Fahd is the acknowledged architect of Saudi Arabia's rapprochement to the West, and his displacement would probably mark the beginning of a retreat, eventually culminating in complete alienation and open conflict. On the 27th, Reuters reported that its facilities in Saudi Arabia had come under attack by fundamentalist Islamic rabble, and reported westerners in the country had come under attack by them. On the 28th, Saudi Arabia agreed to allow military assaults targetting Osama bin Laden and his protectors to be launched from a US base within the Saudi borders. Then on the 30th, this news:

from Fox News, by Fox News and the Associated Press, 2001-Sep-30:

Saudis: Don't Use Us to Attack Muslims

The fragile United States coalition being constructed for the fight against terrorism was weakened somewhat Sunday, as Saudi Arabia's defense minister said that his country would not be used to launch attacks on Arabs or Muslims.

"We will not accept in our country even a single soldier who will attack Muslims or Arabs," Defense Minister Prince Sultan bin Faisal bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud said in an interview published in the government-controlled Okaz newspaper.

It is possible Sultan's comments might have been intended only for domestic consumption.

U.S. officials said on condition of anonymity Friday that they have been discreetly assured that U.S. commanders will be allowed to use Saudi bases to stage military actions against Saudi exile Usama bin Laden, thought to be responsible for the Sept. 11 terror attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., and his Taliban hosts in Afghanistan.

A compromise might be that attack forces might be launched from other countries while the entire operation would be conducted from the Prince Sultan Air Base in al-Kharj, a vast compound in a remote stretch of desert south of the Saudi capital of Riyadh.

Bin Laden's Al Qaeda organization is made up largely of Arabs from Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and while Afghans themselves are not Arabs, the ruling Taliban militia follows an extreme interpretation of Islamic law similar to the that followed by the Saudi royal family.

The Taliban's ambassador to Pakistan on Sunday declared that bin Laden was being hidden by the Taliban for his own safety, reversing earlier declarations that they did not know where he was.

The presence of U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia is one reason bin Laden, a Saudi national by birth, has declared war on the United States. Saudi officials have in the past simply denied there is a U.S. military presence in their nation.

In the Okaz interview, Sultan, a prince of the ruling al-Saud family, said there are 40 U.S., British and French airplanes in the kingdom as part of the U.N.-approved patrols of the southern Iraq "no fly" zone. He did not acknowledge that foreign soldiers are in the kingdom as part of the patrols.

About 4,500 U.S. soldiers and an undisclosed number of U.S. warplanes involved in the patrols are based at the Prince Sultan Air Base.

Predictably, Pakistan (birthplace of the Taliban) and Egypt (in which Islamic fundamentalists aligned with Osama bin Laden are a major political force) have ruled out participation in any anti-terrorist military campaign. A poll of the Pakistani public reported on 2001-Oct-21 found that 83% opposed the US and favored the Taliban shortly before 2001-Oct-23: 75% of Egyptians oppose US campaign in Afghanistan However, Pakistan's government, led by Pervez Musharraf, has shared intelligence and granted air space clearance, and on the morning of 2001-Oct-8, Gen. Musharraf gave a lengthy public address, in English, in which he articulated a clear and specific defense of allied operations against Taliban emplacements, and reassured the international community that Pakistan is open for business. Musharraf tempered his endorsement of the allied campaign with reassurance that Pakistani military facilities did not participate, and he reiterated that the root causes of terrorism must in due course be addressed - causes he described as the sense of powerlessness in improverished Islamic nations, and a perceived absence of just redress wherever conflict exists between the Islamic world and the kafir world. He also gave a warning that the ``Northern Alliance'' (which calls itself the ``United Front'') must not exploit the Afghan power vacuum, replacing the Taliban as a follow-on illegitimate regime. xxx Moreover, Egypt hosted large scale multinational wargames starting October 8 ("Bright Star", annual shindig, 70k troops (23k US), 10 nations). On King Abdullah of Jordan has promised full support - particularly significant, since Jordan is part of Palestine as originally delineated by the British. Iran has promised (2001-Oct-1) to confront allied aircraft attempting overflight, but has also announced material support for the Northern Alliance.

apparently, Iranians in a supportive vigil shortly after the sept. 11 attacks, at the Swiss embassy in Tehran (Switzerland rep's US there), were besieged and beaten by Iranian police note on Shi'ite vs. Sunni: Shi'ites maintain that the king-person must be designated by his predecessor, and be a direct descendent of Mohammed. Sunni reject both of these tenets. Shi'ite, then, formalize an utter inseparability of state and religion, whereas Sunni don't. another note on Shi'aism: "martyrdom is more important than victory" is their creed. "Half the members of Kuwait's 50-strong elected parliament urged the United States Tuesday to end its military campaign against Afghanistan." - Reuters, 10/23/01 TPDL 2001-Oct-10 India helped FBI trace ISI-terrorist links MANOJ JOSHI TIMES NEWS NETWORK http://www.timesofindia.com/articleshow.asp?art_id=1454238160 EW DELHI: While the Pakistani Inter Services Public Relations claimed that former ISI director-general Lt-Gen Mahmud Ahmad sought retirement after being superseded on Monday, the truth is more shocking. Top sources confirmed here on Tuesday, that the general lost his job because of the "evidence" India produced to show his links to one of the suicide bombers that wrecked the World Trade Centre. The US authorities sought his removal after confirming the fact that $100,000 were wired to WTC hijacker Mohammed Atta from Pakistan by Ahmad Umar Sheikh at the instance of Gen Mahumd. Senior government sources have confirmed that India contributed significantly to establishing the link between the money transfer and the role played by the dismissed ISI chief. While they did not provide details, they said that Indian inputs, including Sheikh's mobile phone number, helped the FBI in tracing and establishing the link. A direct link between the ISI and the WTC attack could have enormous repercussions. The US cannot but suspect whether or not there were other senior Pakistani Army commanders who were in the know of things. Evidence of a larger conspiracy could shake US confidence in Pakistan's ability to participate in the anti-terrorism coalition. Indian officials say they are vitally interested in the unravelling of the case since it could link the ISI directly to the hijacking of the Indian Airlines Kathmandu-Delhi flight to Kandahar last December. Ahmad Umar Sayeed Sheikh is a British national and a London School of Economics graduate who was arrested by the police in Delhi following a bungled 1994 kidnapping of four westerners, including an American citizen. taj ibntel sharing

Recent Roots of the Attack

The movement behind the Sept. 11 attacks was fostered by the US intelligence community (IC) during the cold war, to develop an unconventional, asymmetric asset with which to threaten the USSR. In the coming days, the IC will expect Americans - citizens at large, and officials in the Department of Defense and other state organs in particular - to trust them. Any such trust would be grossly misplaced.

A strong case can be made that the IC, the international banking community, and the international drug trade, converge in Afghanistan. Until this year, the CIA-supported Taliban tolerated large scale poppy cultivation, and they still have large quantities stockpiled. Moreover, according to the UN, poppy cultivation has recently resumed. In fact, the CIA openly recognizes Afghanistan as the world's largest producer of opium. Trade in the exported product (opium) generates revenue for international banking interests that launder the resulting money. The Halala eastern money laundering network to launder opium trade proceeds - is a diffuse network in which operatives honor agreements to take in or pay out funds. Some of the money reaches the Taliban itself, and Osama bin Laden himself as alleged on the 21st by Dennis Hastert. Furthermore, Osama bin Laden finances the Taliban, to some degree. The Taliban tolerates (and almost certainly participates in) not just the poppy trade, but also the trade in terrorism - in the form of al-Qaeda. This tight little package traces most of its ancestry (at a minimum, the CIA, the drug laws, and much of the international banking activity at issue) to the House of Rockefeller.


The Horrors of Religion

Samson pulling down roof of philistine temple on all their heads defilement of the temple - Jesus goes on violent rampage

Religious leaders and adherents have been doing damage control ever since Sept. 11. They have to: logic inescapably leads to the (entirely correct) conclusion that religion is the underlying motivation for the mass murders perpetrated by al-Qaeda agents on that day. The many prominent figures who have claimed that the attacks have nothing to do with Islam or religion evidence a remarkable level of intellectual corruption and/or dishonesty.

The lesson reinforced by the Sept. 11 attacks is that religious fanaticism is horrendous and murderous, and that selflessness (in this case, obedient suicide) and mystic faith (particularly, faith in an immortal afterlife) are horrible and directly enable the horrors of religious fanaticism. CNN reported 2001-Oct-22 that Taliban leader Mullah Muhammed Omar declared ``We are not afraid of death... martyrdom is a great gift of God.'' The terrorists were Islamic fanatics, but in another time (past or future) might have been Christian fanatics, Hindu fanatics, Buddhist fanatics, or Jewish fanatics. The common fault is mystic faith (belief without evidence) and religious fanaticism (total subordination of all goals to a tight bundle of mystical tenets).

It is a grim and bitter irony that by Friday Sept. 14, at Bush's urging, America had resorted to quasi-official religion (a ``day of prayer and remembrance'') and trumpeting of faith in the afterlife and ``return to the god of this universe'' (as a chaplain at the Pentagon put it). At the Friday midday service in the National Cathedral, Bush said ``May he bless the souls of the departed, may he comfort our own, and may he always guide our country. God bless America.'' Indeed, Bush laid his hand on the table when he called the planned US response to the attacks a ``crusade''. This was not just a metaphor for him - he certainly views a vigorous response as, first and foremost, a religious imperative. But these are the principles that guided the suicide bombers. Holy war ends only when either the other, or the faith, is completely annihilated. Faith is insusceptible to argument, because it is formed with cause (a circumstance of psychology and neurophysiology) but without reason.

Bill O'Reilly starkly exemplifies the oxymoron, with his talking points of Friday the 14th: ``I hope one of the results of the terrorist attacks will be a renewed acceptance of spirituality, no matter what form it takes.'' The terrorist attacks were, foremost, expressions of spirituality. ``These people are not rational'', says O'Reilly, but spirituality is definitionally not rational. ``You can have differences with rational people'' [but not with irrational ones, because they're potential homicidal maniacs], says O'Reilly, but that's mostly backwards. Rational people tend toward not having conflicting values (because there is only one reality, and reasonable people take it for what it is), whereas two people who adhere to conflicting religions cannot resolve their differences with argument, but instead must do so with murder. The Reverend Lou Sheldon, one of O'Reilly's guests, said ``God wants an individual offended by another individual to turn the other cheek, but when a nation is offended, it must retaliate.'' He thus laid naked a violent anti-individualism he shares with all religious leaders. Anti-individualism is a prominent motivation for the terrorists' actions on Tuesday, so the alignment of the religious leaders with the terrorists is obvious.

On Monday the 24th, O'Reilly revisited the issue of religion, in an attempt to propagandize against those who attribute the Sept. 11 attacks to religion. See the transcript, below, under the heading ``Bill O'Reilly's religion''. On 2001-Oct-2, O'Reilly went right to the point, bringing on two Islamic leaders to confront the question of violent incitement in the Koran. The predictable consensus O'Reilly and his guests reached was, of course, that the Koran is not a violent document. To come to this conclusion, O'Reilly had to dismiss the long list of violent Koranic excerpts he brought with him. But he had to - he knows that if any religion is convicted, it puts all religions on trial.

In his address to the UN General Assembly on 2001-Oct-1, Rudy Giuliani said ``We're defined as Americans by our beliefs, not by our ethnic origins, our race or our religion. Our belief in religious freedom, political freedom, economic freedom - that's what makes an American. Our belief in democracy, the rule of law and respect for human life.'' This is an entertaining mishmosh indeed. A person's religion substantially defines his beliefs. Religions are arbitrary systems of belief that can be mutually incompatible with respect for the religious, political, or economic freedom of other people. Religion cannot be tamed or reconciled, and so is intractably problematic. All religions are evil.

Giuliani said ``Let those who say that we must understand the reasons for terrorism come with me to the thousands of funerals we're having in New York City - thousands - and explain those insane maniacal reasons to the children who will grow up without fathers and mothers and to the parents who have had their children ripped from them for no reason at all.'' But really, he - and other god-fearing men - don't want us to think about their motives because to do so would tend to impugn and undermine religion. On the other hand, if our objective is to win the war, then it behooves us to understand everything we can about the enemy. Bill Maher, in his 2001-Oct-5 show, explained this by reference to Sun Tzu's Art of War: ``If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.'' The translation continues, ``If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.'' and is followed by this note: ``[Chang Yu said: "Knowing the enemy enables you to take the offensive, knowing yourself enables you to stand on the defensive." He adds: "Attack is the secret of defense; defense is the planning of an attack." It would be hard to find a better epitome of the root-principle of war.]''.

The worst among the Christian leaders veritably cheerlead the terrorists. In a Thursday statement Pat Robertson said ``[...] God Almighty is lifting his protection from us [...] the only thing that is going to sustain us is the umbrella power of Almighty God. That is the only thing that we have going for us.''. Of course, there is no such thing as ``God'', except as a dangerous delusion in the minds of a great many fools (such as the terrorists), and Americans have many methods of hardening their society against terrorism without depriving themselves of the individual rights described in the Bill of Rights.

Jerry Falwell said ``The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way -- all of them who have tried to secularize America -- I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.' [...] God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve.'' Falwell - like Robertson - sought to exploit the horrific tragedy, aligning himself squarely with the terrorists, whose complaints about America are nearly identical.

The left wing offers its own versions of vicious anti-Americanism. Reuters is refusing to call the hijackers ``terrorists'', a policy someone at CNN (on the 27th) aped, though by the 28th someone else at CNN was dismissing as erroneous. Kamalesh Sharma, the Indian ambassador to the United Nations, noted on 2001-Oct-3 before the General Assembly that according to the eleven standing international conventions on terrorism, the Sept. 11 attacks did not constitute terrorism, because of definitional loopholes. This underscores the gross malformation of the international instruments - instruments that have been relentlessly caressed and cooked so that terrorism committed by states would be exempt.

On the evening of the 14th (2001-Sep-14 19:44EDT), arch-liberal Bill Press (CNN Crossfire) was the first I saw on a TV news outlet state that a campaign that results in American military casualties is unacceptable to the public (by distorting the results of a poll). This position, if followed by the Administration, obviously makes meaningful and effective response impossible, assuring terrorism will take a greater toll on America than it otherwise would. In short, Bill Press and any who take his position are aiding the terrorists in a fairly direct fashion. By Friday night, CNN was soliciting viewer answers to the question ``Should the U.S. retaliate?'' This is not a legitimate question. On Monday the 24th, both FNC and CNN ran interviews with members of the immediate families of victims of the WTC and Pentagon attacks, who cast their votes against retaliation or, indeed, any military action to root out terrorists. It's hard to understand why these interviews were aired - is it simply sensationalism? Do they seek to dilute the public's unanimity of resolve, to give the establishment space for strategic and political maneuvering?

October 27, 2001 -- THE comments of Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Sen. Joe Biden that a long bombing campaign would "play into every stereotypical criticism" of the United States as a "high-tech bully"

By Thursday the 20th, college students were gathering in campuses across the country to root against the western and civilized world - or should I say, to root for the terrorists. Harvard Yard and other bastions of unsophisticated, folksy common sense rang out with the tocsin of fundamentalist pacifism. On Friday the 21st, a gradeschool girl on CNN's ``Talkback Live'' was given a microphone with which she expressed opposition to any use of violence to answer the terrorist threat. On the 22nd, the Pope (speaking in Kazakhstan) said that ``all controversies between nations must be resolved by negotiations and dialogue, not force of arms''. In contrast, Tony Blair roundly repudiated this doctrine of fundamentalist pacifism, as reported in the London Times (2001-Sep-15, ``Blair warns of rogue nuclear strikes''): ``he said that `turning the other cheek' would not appease the terrorists but lead to a still greater danger.'' On the 26th, after moving on to Armenia, the Pope backpedalled, saying a ``just right'' to act in self-defense against global terrorism. Then on October 1st, New York's Cardinal Egan, saying ``we have to examine our conscience'', concluded retaliation must have no part in the US response, roughly restating the Pope's original view.

On Saturday the 29th, activists demonstrated again in Washington DC. This demonstration was originally planned to protest the World Bank meeting - and it must of course be conceded that friends of freedom are not friends to the World Bank. However, the activists at issue do not differentiate between the hegemonical modus operandi of the World Bank and IMF, and a free global marketplace. Whatever the unsavory (and unfree) reality of the business that went on inside the World Trade Center, it was attacked because it was the world's preeminent symbol of the free global marketplace, within which the United States is by far the most prominent single nation. The alignment of the militant pacifist activists with al-Qaeda and likeminded terrorist organizations is plain.

It is probably only a matter of time before multiculturalism-minded campus denizens defend the Taliban outright. ``Taliban'' means ``student'' (specifically, religious scholar), and the organization started as a student movement, and there is a lesson in this: youths are unusually susceptible to fundamentalism and cults. The real spectacle is that the American campus denizens at issue are mostly radical feminists, yet under the Taliban regime, Afghan women are treated as slaves. These loonies are clearly among the 2% that reacted unfavorably to Bush's address to the joint session on Thursday the 20th, and the 95% who reacted favorably are so overwhelming a majority that they represent a working consensus.

from the Washington Post via MSNBC, 2001-Sep-26, by Michael Kelly:

The negative impact of pacifism
A moral argument against those who would seek no revenge

WASHINGTON, Sept. 26 —  Pacifists are not serious people, although they devoutly believe they are, and their arguments are not being taken seriously at the moment. Yet, it is worth taking seriously, and in advance of need, the pacifists and their appeal.

It is worth it, first of all, because the idea of peace is inherently attractive; and the more war there is, the more attractive the idea becomes. It is worth it, secondly, because the reactionary left-liberal crowd in America and in Europe has already staked out its ground here: What happened to America is America’s fault, the fruits of foolish arrogance and greedy imperialism, racism, colonialism, etc., etc. From this rises an argument that the resulting war is also an exercise in arrogance and imperialism, etc., and not deserving of support. This argument will be made with greater fearlessness as the first memories of the 7,000 murdered recede. It is worth it, thirdly, because the American foreign policy establishment has all the heart for war of a titmouse, and not one of your braver titmice. The first faint, let-us-be-reasonable bleats can even now be heard: Yes, we must do something, but is an escalation of aggression really the right thing? Mightn’t it just make matters ever so much worse?

Pacifists see themselves as obviously on the side of a higher morality, and there is a surface appeal to this notion, even for those who dismiss pacifism as hopelessly naive. The pacifists’ argument is rooted entirely in this appeal: Two wrongs don’t make a right; violence only begets more violence.

There can be truth in the pacifists’ claim to the moral high ground, notably in the case of a war that is waged for manifestly evil purposes. So, for instance, a German citizen who declined to fight for the Nazi cause could be seen (although not likely by his family and friends) as occupying the moral position. But in the situation where one’s nation has been attacked — a situation such as we are now in — pacifism is, inescapably and profoundly, immoral. Indeed, in the case of this specific situation, pacifism is on the side of the murderers, and it is on the side of letting them murder again.

In 1942, George Orwell wrote, in Partisan Review, this of Great Britain’s pacifists:

“Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, ‘he that is not with me is against me.’ ”

England’s pacifists howled, but Orwell’s logic was implacable. The Nazis wished the British to not fight. If the British did not fight, the Nazis would conquer Britain. The British pacifists also wished the British to not fight. The British pacifists, therefore, were on the side of a Nazi victory over Britain. They were objectively pro-Fascist.

An essentially identical logic obtains now. Organized terrorist groups have attacked America. These groups wish the Americans to not fight. The American pacifists wish the Americans to not fight. If the Americans do not fight, the terrorists will attack America again. And now we know such attacks can kill many thousands of Americans. The American pacifists, therefore, are on the side of future mass murders of Americans. They are objectively pro-terrorist.

There is no way out of this reasoning. No honest person can pretend that the groups that attacked America will, if let alone, not attack again. Nor can any honest person say that this next attack is not at least reasonably likely to kill thousands upon thousands of innocent people. To not fight in this instance is to let the attackers live to attack and murder again; to be a pacifist in this instance is to accept and, in practice, support this outcome.

As President Bush said of nations: a war has been declared; you are either on one side or another. You are either for doing what is necessary to capture or kill those who control and fund and harbor the terrorists, or you are for not doing this. If you are for not doing this, you are for allowing the terrorists to continue their attacks on America. You are saying, in fact: I believe that it is better to allow more Americans — perhaps a great many more — to be murdered than to capture or kill the murderers.

That is the pacifists’ position, and it is evil.

On Wednesday the 12th NPR broadcast an interview with an American gradeschool girl who said that the enmity for America shown by the terrorists follows from America's conduct with respect to the Kyoto accord and the recent Conference on Racism, and an attitude of omnipotence she alleged America has. The irony, of course, is that the terrorists despise the student's religion of leftism, and will bomb our cities with equal zeal whether or not we let ourselves be cowed by the horrific vision this girl shares with many other radical leftists. Youths want the world to make sense, to be clearly ruled, so that injury and death of victims is punishment of the guilty. This suits their instincts; such an orderly Utopian circumstance would make it possible to avoid injury and death by simply following the rules. All doubt would be removed. This is precisely the allure of fundamentalist Islam for those youths who become suicide bombers. They believe with absolute certainty that, by obeying the edicts of the religious leaders they recognize, they will be automatically and certainly immortalized in heaven. Youths are largely uncertain, and uncertainty is largely painful.

There is another revealing commonality. The West's radical left includes a contingent of radical environmentalists opposed to industry, and in many cases opposed to all modern technology. Prominent in this movement are Earth First! and Unabomber Ted Kaczynski - himself once a professor at UC Berkeley, a hotbed of radical leftist authoritarianism. Earth First! is a terrorist organization, and Kaczynski is a terrorist. al-Qaeda is similarly opposed to technology (presumably, because it is an expression of western virtuosity, and as they see it, is the work of kafir - non-believers), but - like Kaczynski - use it readily and extensively in their terroristic exploits. The radical environmentalists claim to be acting in defense of the environment, but they single out the western world for their condemnation, even though it is far more respectful of the environment than are third world nations. In truth, this movement acts out of hatred for western principles and lifestyle, just as al-Qaeda does.

There is, therefore, a vast and diverse constellation of related movements that seeks to destroy western civilization in general and the United States in particular. Prominent in this constellation are fundamentalist Christianity (e.g. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson), fundamentalist Islam (e.g. Osama bin Laden and Imad Mughniyeh), radical leftism (e.g. Barbara Lee D-CA), and radical environmentalism (e.g. Ted Kaczynski). Proponents of fundamentalist capitalism (e.g. Harry Browne and Alan Greenspan) aren't much better.


The Horrors of Islam

In the days since the Sept. 11 attacks, we in the US have been treated to a torrent of propaganda assuring us that Islam is a great and peaceful religion. This is false. Religions are all horrible, but Islam is unusually so. Islam is aggressively expansionistic, prompting an endless train of religious wars; currently at least a dozen flame worldwide. The attacks of Sept. 11 are a natural consequence of Islamic doctrine. It is quite possible that, eventually, the whole of the West (with other aligned industrialized nations) will eventually be at war with the whole of the Islamic world. Louis Rene Beres, Professor of Political Science at Purdue University, explains it thusly (in a short essay published 1996-Feb):

In Muslim parlance, all war dictated by the shari'a is necessarily "holy." Yet, the Arabic word jihad, which has the literal meaning of "effort," "striving," or "struggle," ought not to be taken lightly. A basic commandment of Islam, jihad - still a favorite term of "President" Arafat - is an obligation imposed on all Muslims by God, and is unambiguously military in intent.

Derived from the universality of Muslim revelation, jihad calls upon those who have accepted God's message and God's word to strive (jahada) relentlessly to convert, or, at a minimum, to subjugate those who have not been converted. Regarding the State of Israel, this obligation is not bounded by limits of time or space. Indeed, this obligation must continue until the whole world has accepted Islam or has submitted to the power of the Islamic state.

What is the prevailing Islamic worldview for the interim? It is that the world remains divided in two: the House of Islam (dar al-Islam) and the House of War (dar al-Harb). In the House of Islam, of course, Muslims rule and the law of Islam already prevails. In the House of War, which comprises the rest of the world, a constant struggle against the unbeliever is morally, legally and religiously obligatory. No authentic political compromises are possible! No conclusion to the struggle is acceptable short of a final and total military triumph. Significantly, the law books permit the state of war to be interrupted, when expedient, by an armistice or truce or treaty of limited duration. This state of belligerency can never be terminated by a peace that is not founded upon a final victory.

Many Islamic authorities hold that a Muslim's foremost goal is to bring the House of War into the House of Islam - even through demographic subterfuge, through waves of immigration and breeding. This has happened both historically, and recently befell Lebanon - where only a few decades ago, Christians and Muslims lived in equal numbers. Before it fell to the House of Islam, Lebanon was a democracy with a vibrant economy. It is now impoverished and oppressive.

Here is an excerpt from a CNN essay on Osama bin Laden's background and motivation, published in early 2001, by Douglas S. Wood, Nancy Peckenham, and Peter Bergen:

The son of a Saudi Arabian businessman, bin Laden has called for a Muslim jihad, or holy war, against the United States. He has encouraged Muslims to kill all the Americans -- civilian or military -- they can.

His rage stems from the decision by Saudi Arabia to allow the United States to use the country as a staging area for attacks on Iraqi forces in Kuwait and Iraq. After the victory, the U.S. military presence became permanent.

To fundamentalists like bin Laden, the U.S. presence is anathema because Saudi Arabia is home to "the two most holy places" in Islam -- Mecca and Medina. Mecca is the birthplace of Mohammed and the location of the Great Mosque of Mecca, considered by Muslims to be the most sacred spot on Earth.

Mecca also is the destination of the hajj, the pilgrimage that is one of five tenets of Islam. All Muslims who are physically and financially able are expected to perform the hajj at least once.

One of the rituals of the hajj is to circle the Kaaba, a black-draped, oblong stone building located inside the mosque. The Koran says the Kaaba is the oldest house of worship in the world and during the hajj pilgrims circle it seven times. It is toward the Kaaba -- believed to rest on the spot where, in the Bible, Abraham was prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac before God stayed his hand and substituted a ram -- that Muslims face to pray.

In an interview bin Laden gave to CNN in 1997, he said the ongoing U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia is an "occupation of the land of the holy places."

In February 1998, bin Laden issued a "fatwa," a religious ruling, calling for Muslims to kill Americans and their allies. Three other groups, including the Islamic Jihad in Egypt, endorse the ruling.

"The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies -- civilians and military -- is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim," the statement, issued under the "World Islamic Front" name, read. It was published three months later in the London newspaper "Al-Quds al-'Arabi."

Islam's stage of development is similar to that of Christianity some 600 years ago - an interval that coincidentally corresponds to the time that elapsed from the traditionally accepted founding of Christianity, to that of Islam. However, the Islamic world is largely regressing, into a medievil social and economic model. In fact, 600 years ago the Islamic world was more open, had more religious freedom, more intellectual freedom, and a more vibrant artistic and academic culture, than did the Christian world.

Islam demands intense subordination of its adherents. They prostrate themselves dramatically in prayer daily, and usually publicly, where peers can monitor adherence. Because of its incoherent pantheon of prophets and its array of convenient chauvinistic exceptions, Islam is probably more susceptible than other major religions to defeat by reason and reasoned investigation. Thus, to survive it must be more oppressive, deterring exploratory thought patterns. The shari'a system is also inherently totalitarian: unlike the western world, the Islamic world recognizes no distinction between state and religion, so the religion permeates every aspect of society and economy. This is socially and economically catastrophic, since religion is inherently senseless and destructive.


Answering the Immediate Threat

2001-Oct-7 air campaign begins 2001-Oct-19 US special forces direct action ground campaign begins

The rapid recruitment of the nearly unanimous support of the American public is impressive, but since it suggests support might collapse or devolve with similar rapidity, it is faintly worrisome. President Bush has put on a virtuoso performance thus far, appearing to secure at least a couple months of popular patient determination with sound objectives. On Sunday Sept. 23rd, Gallup announced a 90% approval rating for his handling of his job as President, the highest rating ever recorded for a sitting president. On the 29th, the Washington Post reported a new poll that 9 in 10 Americans back robust military response. Again, on 2001-Oct-7 in the hours following the launch of the attack phase of operation Enduring Freedom, two separate polls by CNN/Gallup/USA Today and MSNBC/Wall Street Journal both found a 90% national approval of the attacks, and overwhelming tolerance of an extended campaign involving US military and civilian (terroristic) casualties, and civilian casualties (collaterals) in the overseas theaters. On 2001-Oct-20, another poll announced 88% approval of GWB's job performance. ca.2001-Oct-12 Zogby poll shows 69% of Arab Americans support all-out war against nations that harbor terrorists, higher than the % of population at large. newsweek poll, oct 25-26, "does the US have a well-thought-out plan for combatting terrorism?" 48% yes, 43% no However, if the attempt to harden against and uproot terrorism sputters and is ineffective, the population will likely feel guilty for failing, and in response, will tend to support politicians and policies that are self-flagellative, accelerating the erosion of American institutions and wealth. On the other hand, if in their determination to prevail the population is swept away by militaristic impulses, then through pressure on their elected representatives they might precipitate indiscriminate slaughter overseas, alienating the international community, and wholesale fascistification of American society, alienating us from ourselves and annihilating vital American institutions and wealth.

actual crisis at first burns away nonsense, because nonsense doesn't work and in a crisis people demand and try to deliver what works. reducing divide between establishment and counter-establishment forcing liberals who customarily act in a manner destructive to this country Those who have wondered how the establishment would respond to a dire catastrophe now have a taste. Consistent with the incrementalist method, no dramatic switches were thrown cutting off telecommunications, dispersing paramilitary troops, suspending constitutionally guaranteed rights, etc. The American establishment is largely built around the principle of continuity of government, and continuity of government in term is built around the rule of law. take a guess at the effect of the incident on the progress of the establishment plan - its timetable, in particular. There is, nonetheless, a certain threat that Congress will be emboldened in its gradual assault on communications freedom and privacy. omnibus wiretap in Senate terrorism bill - not necessarily unreasonable, but clearly susceptible to abuse. The bill's provision authorizing indefinite detention of non-citizens without charge, on the Attorney General's (or Commissioner of the INS's) subjective certification that the party represents a terrorist threat, is violently unconstitutional. the House version of the bill, finalized 2001-Oct-1 and set for voting the week of 2001-Oct-7, tempers this provision by limiting the period of chargeless detention to 7 days (though if deportation is impossible, the detention is still extended indefinitely). The Administration sought a standard of ``reason to believe'' the subject is involved in terrorism, which would exempt detentions from judicial scrutiny (having the rather remarkable total result that the executive branch by itself would be able to imprison people indefinitely without charge), but the House bill predicates detention on ``reasonable grounds'', a standard which allows for judicial review of a detention. financial policing will have limited effectiveness in crippling al-Qaeda and any group that operates in a similar fashion. Osama bin Laden deliberately has his operatives self-finance, through work or crime. That methodology will now be expanded. national ID card: ineffective in stopping terrorists the national ID card thing, like I already said, is a no-op because everybody already has one (driver's license or DMV-issued ID card), the terrorists included. Manhattan's experiment with requiring more than one person in any car allowed to enter the city "Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said yesterday that the police would bar cars carrying only one person from crossing into Midtown and Lower Manhattan on weekday mornings, starting tomorrow, a response to crushing traffic jams that have spread for miles as a result of security checkpoints." already underway as of 2001-Sep-25: random searching of cars and trucks entering Manhattan Starting circa 2001-Sep-26: forbidden to take photos/video of WTC area, threat of confiscation arming pilots: airliners are 50 ton incendiary bullets. poll of public, results announced 2001-Sep-29: 68% yes, 28% no, to question "should pilots carry guns?" Gephardt opposed. Judd Gregg opposed. Dick Armey wants stun guns, not firearms. Bob Smith, R-NH (and so an immediate colleague of Judd Gregg) introduced a bill on 2001-Sep-26 allowing pilots to carry firearms. airline security bill signed into law on or about 2001-Nov-19 includes provision the the dept of transportation can authorize pilots to frangible ammo does not threaten integrity of cabin pressurization, but even if a bullet passed through the fusilage, the pressurization system could easily compensate, and the hole could easily be plugged with a rag.

Some of the usual suspects in the establishment have taken the bait cast by the terrorists, and uttered despicable mantras against American ideals. Brent Scowcroft said ``We must sacrifice our civil liberties'', and this sentiment was echoed by Dan Quayle, as did Bill Richardson, and Madeleine Albright. Trent Lott said ``When you are at war, civil liberties are treated differently.'' New Hampshire senator Judd Gregg ``called for a global prohibition on encryption products without backdoors for government surveillance'' (summary by Declan McCullagh). Contrast with Ben Franklin: ``They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.'' George Bush Sr. said ``we need stability and predictability.'' Contrast with Grover Cleveland: ``The United States is not a nation to which peace is a necessity.''

I, like many others, suspected from the start that the attacks of September 11th were launched by Islamic fundamentalists (centrally, by Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network). rooting them out is extremely difficult 19 people, living for a year or longer among us in America, were so consumed by their mystic faith that they committed mass suicide, murdering over 5000 Americans in the process. sleeper agents maker of "Welcome to Afghanistan - Abandon All Hope", Len Sherman: 75,000+ trained by bin Laden's organization "this is a war that won't last 5 years, it could last two generations." diffuse persecution of arabs is inevitable importance of deterring persecution of Muslim residents and residents of Arab ancestry military action against states that tolerate international terrorists within their borders in defense of conferential internationalism - tends to prevent world government economic threat - psychology of siege mentality: hording behavior, generalized risk aversity fear-driven decision making process across the board Bush: ``victory is when freedom defeats fear.'' Reagan National Airport still closed indefinitely as of 2001-Sep-27, but on 2001-Oct-1, Bush promised it would reopen, probably with reduced functionality. 2001-Oct-2, he announces it will reopen on the 3rd. reopens 2001-Oct-4, 10%-15% normal flight load, low passenger occupancy, fingerprinting everyone going through security checkpoints at Reagan national airport and tying in to the FBI db in realtime to get an all-clear, and using Invision tomographic scanners. downturn in airline passengers now probably due largely to this draconian (yet cosmetic) pseudosecurity: laws directing totalitarian disarmament of airline passengers significant inconsistencies between checkers and between airports items not permitted are simply forfeited in some places: FAA-mandated pat-down searching of all passengers and dump-searching of all carryons National Guard security in airports Pan Am announces 2001-Sep-25 all carryons banned, pat-down searching of people who fail metal detector wider/mandated national carryon ban in works ease of bringing non-metallic long blade, or non-metallic firearm, onboard story of fellow New Hampshirite jailed for having a varminting .22 in his jacket pocket at Logan checkpoint, which he had forgotten was there 2001-Sep-27 South Dakota governor announces shoot-first policy in airports there - officers carrying automatic rifles, instructed to shoot to kill anyone they determine to be mounting a terrorist attack 2001-Sep-27 Administration delegates to two generals and an admiral the ability to authorize shoot down of non-responding commercial airliners threatening a city AP 2001-Sep-27: ``Maj. Gen. Larry K. Arnold at Tyndall Air Force Base, Fla., would have authority to order the downing of a threatening commercial flight over the 48 contiguous states. Lt. Gen. Norton A. Schwartz at Elmendorf Air Force Base, Alaska, would have authority for Alaska.'' 2001-Sep-28: Airport beat officers nationwide now toting AR15s. TPDL 2001-Sep-28 NWA pilot gets in heated argument over confiscated clippers Associated Press Published Sep 28 2001 http://www.startribune.com/stories/1576/719791.html [Editors Note: From the ridiculous to the sublime?] Northwest Airlines is investigating a report that one of its pilots apparently became furious when his fingernail clippers and scissors were confiscated at Rapid City Regional Airport in South Dakota. ``We are concerned by the reports that we've heard,'' said Northwest spokesman Curt Ebenhoch. ``We will fully investigate the matter and follow up with appropriate action.'' Airport officials, police and witnesses confirmed the confrontation with the pilot, which occurred about 7:10 a.m. Wednesday. Torrance Richardson, operations officer for the airport, said the pilot and a few passengers were going through the security checkpoint to board a Northwest flight to Minneapolis. Baggage screeners would not let the pilot take the clippers and scissors through, making him angry. Witnesses said police officers stationed at the airport had to intervene. ``It was a very abusive situation. There was a lot of commotion, like he was throwing a tantrum,'' said witness Alice James of Rapid City, who was at the airport to drop off her daughter and grandson for the flight to Minneapolis. ``It wasn't very comforting to know that he was the pilot of the aircraft that was taking my daughter and grandson away,'' James said. Neither Northwest nor the airport would identify the pilot. Richardson said the incident was reported to the Federal Aviation Administration. Officials at Huntleigh Corp., which runs the security checkpoint under contract with the airlines, declined to comment. The airlines share the cost of screening passengers, usually contracted to another company. The FAA has ordered strict security measures put in place since the deadly terrorist attacks on the East Coast on Sept. 11. Among them is a rule that no one - including flight crew members - can pass through security checkpoints with box-cutters, fingernail files and other items that could be used as weapons. Hal Myers, a pilot and spokesman for the Air Line Pilots Association, said the security directives are being interpreted differently at various airports, which has been frustrating for pilots and other crew members. Security operations in some airports may decide nail clippers are OK, while other airports may ban them, Myers said. The same thing has happened with safety razors, he said. Myers said President Bush's federalization of airport security should eliminate disparities from airport to airport. ``One of the absurdities of this is that the pilot who had his nail clippers removed probably could have walked through security after he had them confiscated and he probably could have gone to a gift shop and bought another pair,'' he said. ``It's a real overreaction,'' Myers added. ``We're in favor of anything that truly enhances security and reduces real threats, but taking people's nail clippers away is not it.'' ``The same pilot who had his nail clippers confiscated is going to go into the cockpit where he has access to the crash ax. How much sense does that make?'' emotional need to mount substantive response beyond domestic hardening William Strauss and Neil Howe, "The Fourth Turning" - crisis precipitating thoroughgoing psychosocial and economic transformation Howe interviews 2001-Sep-27 on CNN militant conformism - Bill Maher's ``cowards'' comments ACLU refuses to comment!!! NY Post: WHITE HOUSE RIPS 'POLITICALLY INCORRECT' STAR By DEBORAH ORIN September 27, 2001 -- WASHINGTON - President Bush's spokesman yesterday blasted late-night funnyman Bill Maher for painting the U.S. military as more "cowardly" than the kamikaze terrorists who killed over 6,500 civilians. "It's a terrible thing to say, and it's unfortunate," White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said during his daily briefing. "This is not a time for remarks like that. It never is." Even before the White House weighed in, insiders said the future of Maher's ABC-TV show, "Politically Incorrect," was in doubt because angry sponsors canceled ads and some affiliate stations now refuse to air it. Sources say senior brass at Disney, ABC's parent company, are livid and may kill Maher's show. Maher touched off the storm on his first show after the terror attacks - six days later - when he agreed with conservative commentator Dinesh D'Souza that the hijackers were "warriors" because they were willing to die. "We have been the cowards," Maher fumed. "Lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away, that's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it - not cowardly." Federal Express and Sears, the show's two major prestige advertisers, yanked their commercials in outrage, and as many as 12 ABC affiliates refused to air Maher's show. A few days later, Maher apologized, via his publicist, saying he only meant to target the U.S. government, "politicians" and Bush's missile-defense plan. Maher said he never meant to suggest that U.S. troops in uniform "are anything but courageous and valiant." Salon 2001-Sep-27 Jake Tapper White House whitewashers Bush staffers chastise NBC for a Clinton interview, Fleischer whacks Maher and the Bush-was-in-danger story falls apart. Tension mounts between the White House and the media. [...] Fleischer added to the tension on Wednesday when asked about Maher's statement that the U.S. has "been the cowards lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's cowardly." Fleischer didn't refrain from comment, as he frequently does when asked about such pop culture issues. Nor did he note that even President Bush had been critical of President Clinton's 1998 retaliatory strike against Osama bin Laden through missile strikes -- "When I take action, I'm not going to fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt. It's going to be decisive," Bush told four senators on Sept. 14, according to Newsweek. No, Fleischer called Maher's comments "a terrible thing to say, and it's unfortunate." His ominous follow-up remarks, that "Americans ... need to watch what they say, watch what they do, and this is not a time for remarks like that; there never is," would seem to portend further strains in the relationship between the White House and even its loyal opposition as the nation moves toward war. industrial subsidies, e.g. airline bailout Layoffs in the airline and aircraft industries are already approaching a quarter million, and this will inevitably spill over to the hotel and tourism industries. cyberterrorism threat is prominent, and cryptography is mandatory to defend against it. terrorists in hotel room covering up painting then gawking at bikini-clad women around the hotel pool. the state must appear to do as much as possible, and must rapidly deliver tangible results. the political penalty for failing in this regard is for the people to eventually retreat from the establishment and embrace the counter-establishment. would be good to spring the trap before normal air traffic resumes. Apparently, on only one airplane (flight 93, the one that crashed in a field in western Pennsylvania) did the terrorists meet decisive resistance. On at least one airplane, there is evidence that the pilot conversed with and carried out flight instructions issued by the terrorists after the terrorists had announced their plan to crash the aircraft into a populated target. The hijackers were crudely armed, with weapons no more intimidating than screwdrivers. terrorists used makeshift knives, and apparently studied unarmed (karate) martial arts thus the cause of second amendment rights was possibly bolstered culture of passivity and helplessness is what most urgently needs to deprecated and relegated. (Israel's reaction to terrorist attacks on grade schoolers: arm the teachers.) terrorism is a systems threat, and a systems response is necessary. NBC threat a "national emergency" officially declared, and an abstract war on terrorism unofficially declared, but no plausible future condition would trigger a deescalation. reformative measures: easy: armed aircrews, ballistic cockpit bulkhead and fire-back ballistic transparent cockpit door (with curtain on cockpit side), portable toilet in cockpit (so that air crew never leaves cockpit), cockpit and forward-looking cameras, constant realtime ATC-receivable camera, doctrine of tossing around plane to throw hijackers off balance, possibly calmative gas and/or partial depressurization in cabin, ground facilities pre-warning system hard: scrupulous border control, distributed low altitude anti-missile system, chemical and biological weapon detection and defense systems deployed widely in urban settings, qualitatively improved cargo/baggage scanning, microphone, and telemetry feeds, autopilot panic button and ATC remote control, and vital systems inaccessible from cabin and cockpit. very hard: dispersion of urban concentrations, massive shift to telecommuting and satellite office organization "scripted mental trauma" repeating the minutes of and following the impacts themselves, like PTSD

A Surveillance Catastrophe in Waiting

postal CBR threat makes the Internet utterly indispensable teva par rand-boxy

In the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, the IC (prominently, the National Security Agency through its proxies) and its allies in Congress have vigorously renewed their lobbying for dramatically enlarged domestic surveillance capabilities, including the implementation of a government master key (GMK) system giving the IC the ability to read the contents of any message sent by a law-abiding citizen. Judd Gregg R-NH is a prominent proponent of GMK as such. The Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA), which was expected to be introduced by Fritz Hollings D-SC and Ted Stevens R-AK the week of Sept. 10, is technologically equivalent, though it is proposed as a mechanism for totalitarian enforcement of copyrights. Such systems are obviously repugnant to the constitution of the United States and those of the states, and constitute the foundation of a totalitarian police state, but a crushing case against it can be made against them even without resorting to a moral or constitutional argument.

As long established by careful analysis, any such arrangement has consequences far graver than the contingencies it seeks to mitigate. For example, Congressmen must realize that if the IC has the technical capacity to monitor all electronic communications, it will inevitably monitor the congressmen's communications, facilitating wholesale blackmail that utterly subverts representational democracy.

The organized terrorists whose threat is the ostensible justification for such measures are not law-abiding citizens, and will always be completely unaffected by the measures - in fact, they will be empowered, by an increased domestic susceptibility to cyberterrorism. Thus the IC is, to a great degree, aligned with the terrorists. The corruption of the IC is, of course, almost a given.

A truly frightening circumstance is a public willingness - even eagerness - to embrace policies like GMK. CNET reports (2001-Sep-18, ``Americans back encryption controls: 72 percent say new laws could help prevent repeat of attacks'') ``that 72 percent of Americans believe that anti-encryption laws would be "somewhat" or "very" helpful in preventing a repeat of last week's terrorist attacks [...] The poll, conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates on Sept. 13 and 14, reveals that the question of banning encryption tools without "backdoors" for government interception is under serious debate in the United States.''

a major problem with GMK is access by terrorists and organized criminals to the master keys, by penetrating the government or its safeguards. They would need only to blackmail someone with access to the keys, with a credible threat to kill him and his entire extended family, for example. In practice, no one can resist such a tactic. In this scenario, terrorists can blackmail Congress and the rest of the government. This vulnerability is hardly just theoretical.

William Safire, in his New York Times column of Sept. 13th (``Inside the Bunker''), writes:

A threatening message received by the Secret Service was relayed to the agents with the president that "Air Force One is next." According to the high official, American code words were used showing a knowledge of procedures that made the threat credible.

(I have a second, on-the-record source about that: Karl Rove, the president's senior adviser, tells me: "When the president said `I don't want some tinhorn terrorists keeping me out of Washington,' the Secret Service informed him that the threat contained language that was evidence that the terrorists had knowledge of his procedures and whereabouts. In light of the specific and credible threat, it was decided to get airborne with a fighter escort.")

[...]

The most worrisome aspect of these revelations has to do with the credibility of the "Air Force One is next" message. It is described clearly as a threat, not a friendly warning - but if so, why would the terrorists send the message? More to the point, how did they get the code-word information and transponder know-how that established their mala fides?

That knowledge of code words and presidential whereabouts and possession of secret procedures indicates that the terrorists may have a mole in the White House - that, or informants in the Secret Service, F.B.I., F.A.A. or C.I.A. If so, the first thing our war on terror needs is an Angleton-type counterspy.

Note that the Bush Administration is now (2001-Sep-26) flatly denying that secret codes were compromised. I believe this to be a lie, plain and simple.

DEBKAfile reports (``Digital moles in White House? Terrorists had top-secret presidential codes'', 2001-Sep-21):

``The terrorists' message threatening Air Force One was transmitted in that day's top-secret White House code words. As the clock ticked away, the Secret Service reached a frightening conclusion: The terrorists had obtained the White House code and a whole set of top-secret signals. [...] The terrorists had also obtained the code groups of the National Security Agency and were able to penetrate the NSA's state-of-the-art electronic surveillance systems. [...] [U.S. intelligence agencies] also believe that terrorists are in possession of all or part of the codes used by the Drug Enforcement Administration, the National Reconnaissance Office, Air Force Intelligence, Army Intelligence, Naval Intelligence, Marine Corps Intelligence and the intelligence offices of the State Department and Department of Energy.''

If even one of these allegations is true, it demonstrates that the worst fears regarding GMK are very well-founded indeed.

The DEBKAfile article continues ``Intelligence and counter-terror sources report that, while rescuers in New York and Washington were sifting through rubble inch by inch, US government experts were changing codes one-by-one - and in even more difficult, replacing procedures and methods of encryption.'' It's difficult and time-consuming to do this within a highly structured command hierarchy; it's even more difficult to do coordinate an update on every personal and business computer in every home and office in a country of over a quarter billion people. the nature of govt master key is that it is practically impossible for corporations and individuals to respond rapidly to a compromise event. all previous communications would be permanently compromised.

For those who find the DEBKAfile report unconvincing, or who accept the Administration's subsequent claim that no codes were compromised, consider this:

from TPDL 2000-May-1, from the Wall Street Journal, by Oliver "Buck" Revell:

Secrets Aren't Secure On Clinton's Watch

Mr. Revell, a former associate deputy director of the FBI, is the author of "A G-Man's Journal: A Legendary Career Inside the FBI" (Pocket Books, 1998).

The State Department has experienced yet another major security lapse -- the loss of a laptop computer belonging to its Bureau of Intelligence and Research. The computer apparently contained "code word" material that is more sensitive than even "secret" documents. Yet officials did not promptly report the loss. Last week, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright took some belated disciplinary action, but sources and methods used in the analysis of weapons proliferation intelligence could be at great risk.

This is part of a disturbing trend of security lapses in the Clinton administration. In December, an intelligence officer assigned to the Russian Embassy in Washington was expelled from the U.S. after he was discovered operating a listening device in a seventh-floor conference room at the State Department. No one has yet explained how the "bug" was planted in such a sensitive location or who planted it.

The problem extends far beyond the State Department. The Central Intelligence Agency was severely embarrassed when it found out that its former director, John Deutch, had placed highly classified information on his personal computer and then used this computer to send and receive unsecured e-mail. This made all of the data contained in the computer subject to compromise. Once again, this breach of security was not promptly reported.

It gets much worse. The apparent loss to the People's Republic of China of highly classified data on American nuclear weapons from one or more of our national laboratories is one of the most egregious security breaches in our history. We still don't know much about these security lapses. Are those responsible for espionage within the Energy Department still there? What damage has already been done? What we do know is disturbing. An initial assessment by the U.S. intelligence community determined the following:

China obtained by espionage classified U.S. nuclear information that probably accelerated its program to develop more advanced nuclear weapons.

China obtained at least basic design information on several modern U.S. nuclear re-entry vehicles, including the Trident II.

China obtained information on a variety of U.S. weapon designs, including the neutron bomb.

The administration has been lax in correcting these lapses. Senior officials at the Justice Department denied the FBI's request to search the laptop computer belonging to Wen Ho Lee, a Los Alamos nuclear scientist -- even though Mr. Lee had signed a waiver allowing a search any time. Even in the unlikely event that evidence obtained in the search was held to be inadmissible in court, it's vitally important to prevent sensitive information from being transmitted or compromised.

Then we have the sorry spectacle of Chinese influence-peddlers and, in at least one instance, a Chinese military official being paraded into the White House to meet President Clinton in return for significant campaign contributions. I cannot recall a single instance in my 35 years of government service when senior National Security Council staffers would have hesitated to inform their superiors of intelligence about a foreign government's attempt to influence our political process. But that is exactly what happened with information developed by the FBI concerning illegal campaign contributions by intermediaries of the Chinese government.

The Cold War may be over, but there can be no doubt that our adversaries are many, and they have increasingly effective methods to penetrate even our most closely held secrets. We need a vigorous program at all levels of government to protect classified information. Unfortunately the Clinton administration has failed at this task. The president and his aides have not upheld their oaths to "preserve and protect" our country against "all enemies, foreign and domestic." I can only hope the next president, whether Al Gore or George W. Bush, sets a higher standard.

"I believe there is a kernel of truth in the original account - i.e., that there was some penetration or compromise of top echelon C4I. However, CIA or NSA may have done it, come to think of it. CIA, NSA, and a few other government entities seem to have known a major attack would happen on or about Sept. 11. E.g. State grounded Salmon Rushdie a week ahead of time. CIA or NSA may have desired to protect POTUS, but sought to avoid having to explain how it knew what it knew. CIA is more prone to such goofiness, but NSA is far better positioned to know how to send the signals, and maybe even to be aware of a threat (since CIA's field agent and informant complement has become skeletal, PhD's and lily white know-nothings). The story is now being denied because none of the possible explanations are politically tenable. If al-Qaeda obtained those secrets, then we have good reason to fear they might obtain the football codes (the nuclear launch codes), for example, and certainly we have good reason to reject out of hand any proposal that the government be keymaster for personal and business high security communications. On the other hand, if the intelligence community is sneaking around like that, it's also a potentially explosive situation, which might lead reputable journalists to sniff out the CIA/GHW Bush/BCCI/bin Laden/Robert Mueller/etc octopus, causing the eventual dissolution of the CIA (the threat of which, apparently, already led to one presidential assassination)."

GMK has no teeth unless every computer in the world is doctored so that it refuses to run software not approved by the government. This is quite impossible as a practical matter, but for the sake of argument, let's assume it's possible. If it were achieved, then it would become impossible for people to update and repair their computers quickly in the event that criminals or terrorists gain access to the master key, or the event that a design flaw were identified in the system. It would also become impossible for people to quickly respond to viruses, worms, and other such real world hazards. Indeed, the absolute uniformity of a network in which software is only by government approval vastly enlarges vulnerability to viruses and worms, tending to render networks unusable. People would be helpless to protect themselves, and their computers would become useless. The economy would collapse.

If cryptographic protections on financial transaction networks and financial transactions on the Internet are subjected to GMK, then these systems are made vulnerable to the criminal and terroristic attacks described above. If they are exempted, then GMK is meaningless, because all cryptographically protected transmissions look the same, whether they contain financial information or personal messages.

GMK is impractical, un-American, and counter-productive plan. The terrorists already use uncrackable cryptography, and steganography - a technology that disguises encrypted messages so that they appear to be unencrypted, benign messages. A law forbidding or restricting encryption will not even inconvenience them in their use of these technologies, much less actually stop them. However, any such law would expose the United States to cyberterrorist attack, in the scenarios described above, and because profit-oriented companies that sell the software and hardware will simply skip the security part if Congress makes it inconvenient and expensive to do it.

A prominent proponent of GMK is Judd Gregg, a senator from New Hampshire. Gregg is also the only member of New Hampshire's four man congressional delegation to reject a proposal to arm commercial airline pilots.


Director Mueller, BCCI, and the CIA

opening passage of the Kerry Report chapter ``BCCI, THE CIA AND FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE'', December 1992:

Introduction

The relationships involving BCCI, the CIA, and members of the United States and foreign intelligence communities have been among the most perplexing aspects of understanding the rise and fall of BCCI. The CIA's and BCCI's mutual environments of secrecy have been one obvious obstacle. For many months, the CIA resisted providing information to the Subcommittee about its involvement with and knowledge of BCCI. Moreover, key players who might explain these relationships are unavailable. Some, including former CIA director William Casey, and BCCI customers and Iranian arms dealers Ben Banerjee and Cyrus Hashemi, are dead. Others, including most of BCCI's key insiders, remain held incommunicado in Abu Dhabi. While promising in public hearings to provide full cooperation to the Subcommittee, to date the Abu Dhabi government has refused to make any BCCI officers available for interview by the Subcommittee. Former BCCI chairman Agha Hasan Abedi remains severely incapacitated due to a heart attack. Finally, some persons in a position to know portions of the truth have denied having any memory of events in which they participated and of documents which they reviewed.

A baseline for assessing the BCCI-CIA story is the CIA's official record of its use of BCCI and its targeting of the bank, as set forth in several hundred CIA records created from 1982 through 1992. That record was, by and large, accurately represented by CIA acting director Richard Kerr in public testimony on October 25, 1991, supplemented by more detailed, classified testimony on October 31, 1991. Unfortunately, that record also contains ostensible gaps in knowledge on the part of the CIA about the activities of key contacts in the Middle East for U.S. intelligence -- including BCCI shareholders Kamal Adham and Abdul Raouf Khalil, and BCCI customer and Iran/Contra arms merchant Adnan Khashoggi -- which strain belief.

[...]

The Subcommittee Investigation and the CIA

The Subcommittee's contact with the CIA regarding BCCI began in March, 1991, when staff learned from a Subcommittee source that the CIA had prepared a report concerning BCCI's criminality which was made available to Customs in late 1988. Cleared staff contacted the CIA's congressional liaison office to request a copy of the document. The staff was told that no such document had ever existed. Perplexed, staff contacted its source to determine whether he was certain that the material had been provided. The source referred staff to former Customs Commissioner William Von Raab, who confirmed the existence of the document. Staff contacted the CIA a second time, and informed the agency that a senior Reagan administration official had viewed the document. Again, the Subcommittee was told that no documents concerning BCCI had ever been created by the CIA.(1)

Staff then met with Von Raab, who revealed that not only had the CIA provided him with a briefing paper regarding BCCI, but that he obtained it through the offices of then-CIA assistant director Robert Gates, who referred to BCCI as "the Bank of Crooks and Criminals." Von Raab also advised the Subcommittee that Customs agents handling the C-Chase investigation of BCCI had discovered in the course of their work several BCCI accounts that were actually accounts held by the CIA. Von Raab told Subcommittee staff that his agents were told to cease their investigation of those particular accounts.(2) However, in an interview with Subcommittee staff, AUSA Mark Jackowski denied that he had ever uncovered any CIA involvement with the bank and Assistant Attorney General Robert Mueller testified that "at no time ...has anyone from the CIA ... attempted to obstruct or interfere with the Department of Justice's investigation and prosecution of BCCI."(3)

[...]

Note that the above-referenced ``Assistant Attorney General Robert Mueller'' assumed his position as Director of the FBI five days before the Sept. 11 attack.

Continuing with telling excerpts of the Kerry Report:

The Official Record

The CIA's first user request in connection with BCCI was from the Federal Reserve in 1981, which asked the CIA whether the CIA had any derogatory information concerning the Middle Eastern shareholders who were about to buy Financial General Bankshares (FGB), which later became First American Bankshares, through the holding company CCAH. The CIA, after reviewing its records, told the Federal Reserve that it had no derogatory information on the shareholders, who included Kamal Adham and Abdul Raouf Khalil, the past and then-current Saudi intelligence liaisons to the United States.(10)

The CIA did not tell the Federal Reserve that Adham and Khalil were foreign intelligence liaisons of the United States, nor did it advise the Federal Reserve that both Adham and a third FGB shareholder, Faisal al-Fulaij, had been the subject of a Securities and Exchange Commission probe in connection with violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act by Boeing and Lockheed for arms sales to Saudi Arabia.(11)

[...]

According to the contemporaneous CIA records retrieved during the search of Agency files during the summer of 1991, the CIA first developed information concerning BCCI, which it provided users in the U.S. government, in 1979. After learning in the early 1980's that BCCI was, as an institution, involved in money laundering activities, the CIA began by the mid-1980's to target BCCI as an institution for foreign intelligence collection. Initially, this collection operation was small. The CIA began a larger and more comprehensive operation as of 1986, which continued through 1990. This operation focused on the "people, the mechanisms, and the way that BCCI laundered narcotics money."(14)

In the course of targeting BCCI for laundering drug money, the CIA learned of BCCI's involvement in manipulating certain financial markets, in arms trafficking, and in supporting international terrorism, including handling the finances of Sabri Al-Bannah or Abu Nidal, and his terrorist organization.(15)

[...]

The 1985 Report

There are a number of oddities pertaining to the early 1985 report by the CIA on BCCI.

The first oddity is the fact that original report is missing and has not been located by the CIA, which has instead, at the request of the Subcommittee, reconstructed the contents of the report by looking to the source information it was based upon, and relying on its normal procedures for analyzing and disseminating similar material.

The second unusual aspect of the report is that the CIA has records showing it to have been commissioned by the then-head of the International Division of the OCC, Robert Bench, who has denied under oath having ever sought the information.

A third oddity is that CIA records also show Douglas P. Mulholland, then the intelligence chief of the Treasury Department, as having also solicited the information. Yet like Bench, Mulholland denies having any recollection of having done so.

Fourth, the information contained in the report -- that BCCI owned First American -- was important and startling, and would have been so recognized by anyone in the position of Mulholland or Bench -- yet neither of them recollect that the report discussed this issue. First American was by then the largest bank holding company in the metropolitan Washington area, and BCCI's prohibition from ownership had received widespread attention in the Washington Post and the financial press.

Firth [fifth], no action was taken by Mulholland or Bench in response to this critical information to alert federal law enforcement or the Federal Reserve, the primary regulator. The CIA, having provided the information to Treasury and the OCC, believed it had no further obligation to disseminate the information, either.

[...]

From the chapter ``BCCI AND LAW ENFORCEMENT'', here are some snippets from a chronicle of the Justice Department's campaign of obstruction, apparently spearhearded by Mueller (again, now FBI Director):

We are responsible, ethical prosecutors. We will not indict simply to get favorable press coverage or to quiet our critics. We require evidence sufficient to prove a crime beyond a reasonable doubt, and we will not indict if that evidence does not exist . . . It is premature to assess our performance. We cannot even respond fully to criticism, because we cannot reveal grand jury proceedings or the details of our investigations. Our record when the investigations and prosecutions have concluded will speak for itself. . . a fair review of the available facts will show that the Department of Justice has done an excellent job on the BCCI investigations, and that the criticisms of the Department are fundamentally unfair.(2)

[...]

Various officials at the Justice Department provided different explanations as to why the information was not followed-up on. Assistant Attorney General Mueller "passed the buck" to the Federal Reserve, noting that "the essence of the information. . . regarding the allegations of secret ownership was passed on to the Federal Reserve after the October 1988 takedown of the undercover case." Quoting from the Federal Reserve General Counsel Virgil Mattingly's testimony before the Subcommittee, Mueller claimed the Federal Reserve disregarded the information as "the kind of allegation [that] they had heard before."(50)

[...]

Only after regulatory agencies around the world seized the bank on July 5, 1991, did the Justice Department begin to give the BCCI investigation an unprecedented urgency and importance. Under Assistant Attorney General Mueller, the Department assigned nearly three dozen attorneys to the case. During 1992, the Department brought several indictments, which remained narrower, less detailed and, at times, seemingly in response to the efforts of District Attorney Robert Morgenthau of New York, the Federal Reserve, or both.

[...]

Lehtinen and his assistants continued to urge the Department of Justice to assist in the enforcement of the other subpoenas. By August, 1991, following the Morgenthau indictment, the Justice Department began a series of meetings in an effort to move more swiftly against BCCI. In one such meeting at Justice in Washington, Lehtinen again raised the issue of the failure to enforce his subpoenas in response to Assistant Attorney General Mueller's offer to provide assistance to any US Attorney office pursuing a case against BCCI. Despite Mueller's offer, no assistance was forthcoming and the subpoenas continued to languish, leaving Lehtinen perplexed:

[E]xactly why the Department of Justice handles matters as they do is -- whatever factors they take into account are not particularly known to us in Miami in all circumstances. We in Miami wanted all of those steps taken that we proposed. They were not taken and we are just not able to say why.(87)

[...]

While it is difficult to sort out precisely what went wrong between the U.S. Attorney for Miami and main Justice in Washington, it is obvious from the above account that two important cases involving BCCI in Miami were frustrated, if not paralyzed, by inaction at main Justice in Washington during much of 1991. In part, that outcome may have been the result of continuing attempts by the Justice Department to defend the plea agreement in Tampa, and to steer any further activities pertaining to BCCI to the Tampa office. Additionally, the Justice Department may have been uncomfortable dealing with the possible preclusion of investigation or prosecution in Miami arising out of the double-jeopardy problems created by BCCI's plea in Tampa, problems that had to date not surfaced even in interviews with Congressional investigators.

[...]

Justice and the CIA

From early 1985 on, the CIA possessed and disseminate to other governmental agencies detailed and important information about BCCI's plans in the United States, and its secret ownership of First American. That information was made available initially to the Treasury and to the Comptroller of the Currency, neither of which passed the information on to anyone else. In 1986, a broader group of agencies received the same information. In neither case did the CIA's memoranda trickle down to the agents or prosecutors responsible for investigating and prosecuting BCCI, until after the takedown of Operation C-Chase, when information in a third memorandum from the CIA did reach Tampa Customs agents.

Undercover Customs agent Mazur testified that during Operation C-Chase he never received any information from his superiors "about information the CIA might have."(127) According to Mazur, information from the CIA was brought to his attention "after the conclusion of the undercover operation."

Assistant Attorney General Mueller told the Subcommittee that while the CIA may have known about BCCI's criminality and illegal ownership of First American dating as far back as 1985, "regrettably, the Justice Department was not on the CIA's dissemination list until 1990 and therefore the Department never received this 1986 report at the time it was disseminated." Mueller is correct that no component of DOJ ever received the 1986 report, but the May 1989 report, which contained many of the same facts, including BCCI's ownership of First American -- in some cases with more detail provided -- was provided to both the DEA and the FBI.

As Assistant Attorney General Mueller testified:

At no time, to my knowledge, has anyone from the CIA, or any agency, attempted to obstruct or interfere with the Department of Justice's investigation and prosecution of BCCI.(128)

For the record, assistant US Attorney Mark Jackowski, who oversaw the undercover operation and prosecuted the case, has provided a variety of answers on this subject. When asked by a journalist whether he had uncovered any CIA involvement in BCCI or whether the agency had ever interfered with Operation C-Chase or the ensuing prosecution, Jackowski responded "no comment." When asked the same question by Subcommittee staff, Jackowski replied that "I read a lot of spy novels. Let's leave it at that." When asked by Senator Kerry in a public hearing, Jackowski, under oath, stated that he did not come into contact with the CIA.

The Justice Department and the Senate Investigation

Through much of the Subcommittee's four year investigation into BCCI, the Justice Department treated the Subcommittee's investigation with visible disdain, at times bordering on contempt. As Jackowski testified, the Tampa prosecutors viewed the principal Subcommittee investigator of BCCI in 1988 and 1989, Jack Blum, to be unreliable at best, someone who wished to trade his information for money, and who had produced little of real value for them. In interviews with Senate staff in the fall of 1991, Jackowski characterized Blum as a "wacko," who had done little more than provide him with "bullshit."(129) Accordingly, after initial interviews of his witnesses, Jackowski and his colleagues did nothing further with the information and leads he had provided.

Following Blum's departure, other Senate staff efforts were treated equally cavalierly.

In the fall of 1989, the Subcommittee sought to depose a Colombian money-launderer who was also cooperating with the Tampa prosecutors, and who had used BCCI in Panama. The Tampa prosector's office and the Justice Department, without prior notification to Subcommittee staff, began making telephone calls to other Senate offices, not involved in the investigation, in an effort to prevent the deposition. [...]

from Executive Intelligence Review, 1996-Nov-1, by William Engdahl:

The Secret Financial Network Behind "Wizard" George Soros

[...]

N.M. Rothschild and Sons is also implicated in some of the filthiest drugs-for-weapons secret intelligence operations. Because it is connected to the highest levels of the British intelligence establishment, Rothschilds managed to evade any prominent mention of its complicity in one of the more sordid black covert intelligence networks, that of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). Rothschilds was at the center of the international web of money-laundering banks used during the 1970s and 1980s by Britain's MI-6 and the networks of Col. Oliver North and George Bush, to finance such projects as the Nicaraguan Contras.

On June 8, 1993 the chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Banking, Rep. Henry Gonzalez (D-Tex.), made a speech charging that the U.S. government, under the previous Bush and Reagan administrations, had systematically refused to prosecute the BCCI, and that the Department of Justice had repeatedly refused to cooperate with Congressional investigations of both the BCCI scandal and what Gonzalez claims is the closely related scandal of the Atlanta, Georgia Banca Nationale del Lavoro, which was alleged to have secured billions in loans from the Bush administration to Saddam Hussein, just prior to the Gulf War of 1990-91.

Gonzalez charged that the Bush administration had "a Justice Department that I say, and I repeat, has been the most corrupt, most unbelievably corrupt justice system that I have seen in the 32 years I have been in the Congress."

The BCCI violated countless laws, including laundering drug money, financing illegal arms traffic, and falsifying bank records. In July 1991, New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau announced a grand jury indictment against BCCI, charging it with having committed "the largest bank fraud in world financial history. BCCI operated as a corrupt criminal organization throughout its entire 19-year history."

The BCCI had links directly into the Bush White House. Saudi Sheik Kamal Adham, a BCCI director and former head of Saudi Arabian intelligence when George Bush was head of the CIA, was one of the BCCI shareholders indicted in the United States. Days after his indictment, former top Bush White House aide Edward Rogers went to Saudi Arabia as a private citizen to sign a contract to represent Sheikh Adham in the United States.

But, what has never been identified in a single major Western press investigation, was that the Rothschild-group was at the heart of the vast illegal web of BCCI. The key figure was Dr. Alfred Hartmann, the managing director of the BCCI Swiss subsidiary, Banque de Commerce et de Placement SA; at the same time, he ran the Zurich Rothschild Bank AG, and sat in London as a member of the board of N.M. Rothschild and Sons, Hartmann was also a business partner of Helmut Raiser, friend of de Picciotto, and linked to Nordex.

[...]

James Bamford in Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency from the Cold War Through the Dawn of a New Century Amazon.com About the Author: James Bamford is the author of The Puzzle Palace, a national bestseller when it was first published and now regarded as a classic. He was until recently Washington Investigative Producer for ABC's World News Tonight with Peter Jennings and has written investigative cover stories for the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post Magazine, and the Los Angeles Times Magazine. [...] The Joint Chiefs of Staff drew up and approved plans for what may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government. In the name of anticommunism, they proposed launching a secret and bloody war of terrorism against their own country in order to trick the American public into supporting an ill-conceived war they intended to launch against Cuba. Codenamed Operation Northwoods, the plan [...] called for innocent people to be shot on American streets; for boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba to be sunk on the high seas; for a wave of violent terrorism to be launched in Washington, D.C., Miami, and elsewhere. People would be framed for bombings they did not commit; planes would be hijacked. Using phony evidence, all of it would be blamed on Castro, thus giving Lemnitzer [Chairman JCS] and his cabal the excuse, as well as the public and international backing, they needed to launch their war. this is a distant-connection thing: CIA creates these things that evolve into Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, and Osama and the Taliban's jihad. I think it's a given that at least some of the people who decided to underwrite these loonies did so because the fact that they might turn around and bite us was in fact favorable to their purposes. Was it conscious or unconscious? Does it matter?

Bill O'Reilly's Religion

What follows is a transcript of the Gaylor segment of the O'Reilly Factor 2001-Sep-24, with my square-bracketed comments interstitiated. I did not bother to transcribe O'Reilly's snide gesticulations and facial expressions, but it's pretty obvious from the transcript anyway. `O' means O'Reilly, `G' means Gaylor.

O: ... there are those who think religion is actually to blame for the atrocity. Joining us now from Madison, Wisconsin is Annie Laurie Gaylor, and she is the founder of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. Alright Miss Gaylor, now I know you don't like religion, everybody knows. umm- But if you were President Bush right now, what would you be doing?

G: I wouldn't be praying...

O: Right, obviously.

G: ...I wouldn't be urging citizens to go to church and to pray and to worship and to unite behind the very force that caused the problem in the first place, which is religion.

O: Which religion caused the problem?

G: Well, in this case, it was the Moslem religion, umm-

O: But they don't- but the Moslem religion doesn't say any of that [In fact, it does.]. It looks to me to be rogue people who are hiding behind that religion, not the theology itself. Am I wrong about that or is there something that you..

G: The Koran does say that you should kill infidels and unbelievers and blasphemers [true - see below, ``The Horrors of Islam''], and so does the Hebrew Bible, and Jesus said ``He came not to bring peace but a sword''; they all have the same root warrior deity that believes in scorched earth policies, and we're very concerned..

O: Wait a min, hold it hold it, Je- You mentioned Jesus believes in a scorched earth policy?

G: ``I came not to bring peace but a sword'' is in the New Testament, attributed to Jesus. ``If you're not with me you're against me''..

O: What - What is it - What was that passage again - Now wait a minute, Miss Gaylor, hold it. I need to get this clear, now maybe I'm not hearing you correctly. Now Jesus had a scorched earth policy in what way?

G: Well, in that he said he was with there with a sword, not to bring peace but a sword, and to divide people from each other.

O: He - he - he was there with a sword? What passage is that? I'm not gettin' that passage [It's Matthew 10:34]. I believe he said to turn the other cheek, and when the guy cut off the swo- uh- one of his followers cut off the ear of a person who was trying to arrest him, he healed the ear and said ``those who live by the sword die by the sword'' Miss Gaylor. I believe that's what Jesus said. Am I wrong?

G: And Jesus was part of the warrior god mentality that you find in all the three monotheistic religions.

O: He was - Jesus was a warrior guy, huh? Miss Gaylor, ya know, I - with all due respect, I mean, you don't know anything about religion. How can you be against something that you know absolutely nothing about?

G: How could you deny that religion isn't the problem? If it weren't for religion...

O: I can deny it because there's nothing in any religion that says you're supposed to crash planes into buildings [Non-starter: the religions were invented before planes were invented.] and kill innocent people [In a way - religions redefine ``innocent'' to suit their purposes.]. And those who think there are distort that religion, and people like you who buy into that distortion are- and I'm not even gonna use a word that's pejorative, because that wouldn't be charitable; in my religion I'm supposed to be charitable.

G: <small laugh> If it weren't for religion, what happened on September- we would have had 6000 people alive today. We wouldn't have had the bombing of the World Trade Center. We woudln't have had 19 young men willing to sacrifice themselves...

O: And you know that how? You know that how?

G: Because what else motivated them, but their religious belief in an afterlife...

O: No, they were motivated by political things. [Religion is part of politics - it's really silly to maintain there's a separation.]

G: ...and that they would be rewarded in paradise, that they would have their 72 virgins, because they were dying as martyrs. This is a religion-fueled terrorism, no question about it.

O: Alright, but they were motivated- that's true, your last part is true, about the Moslem promise...

G: Well I'm glad you agreed to something.

O: ...that if you kill people you're gonna go to heaven. Ya know what, Miss Gaylor? Right now, there aren't any virgins for those people, if you know what I mean. But lemme tell you this, they were motivated by political things, not religious things. Muhammad never came down and said ``kill all the people who don't believe in Islam''. He never did it. [Not exactly, but in part, he did - see below, ``The Horrors of Islam''.] They were motivated by the fact that the United States is a wealthy nation, and they perceive the United States as anti-Arab because we won't allow them to slaughter the Israelis. I mean, that- that- that's- that's politics [And it's religion.]. That doesn't have anything to do with religion.

G: That is part of it, and we are also perceived- we are perceived as a secularist nation, and they have the same problem with our country that another fundamenatliast has, and that's Jerry Falwell, who is the flip side of the coin of bin Laden. All the fundamentalists are the same.

O: Alright, well I'm not gonna defend Jerry Falwell. But you believe if we were a godless nation as you would have us, atheistic, that we wouldn't have any problem with anybody? [This is not at all what Gaylor said - she said if they were atheists, we would not have been bombed.]

G: Ya know, Pascal said ``men never do evil so cheerfully and completely as when they do it from religious conviction'', and Voltaire said ``people who believe in atrocities...'' [Voltaire said ``If we believe absurdities, we will commit atrocities.'']

O: Alright, so if we didn't have any- wait a minute, Miss Gaylor, let's get very precise. No speeches, no speeches. Let's get very precise. If we were all atheists, as you are, we wouldn't have any enemies, we wouldn't have any problems? [This isn't true either - religion is only one of many sources of social conflict.]

G: We would not have had this history of warfare and bloodshed. More people have been killed in the name of a god than for any other reason. Yes, I think it would be a paradise on earth, if everyone were atheists. [This is plainly Utopian and foolish.]

O: OK, so the, so the- wait a minute - so, the- the- the atheistic communists, they would've been our pals [no, communism is a religion of paradise on earth, in which man is elevated to godhood.], and the atheistic Nazis [The Nazis were not atheists, they were Christians and New Agers.], they woulda said ``hey, ya know I like that America, they're-'' - they wouldn't a given us a hard time either, right?

G: Hitler was Catholic. Hitler belonged to the same religion as I think you do, he was Catholic.

O: Who?

G: Hitler.

O: Hitler was an atheist! He persecuted every...

G: He was never excommunicated.

O: every- uh- every religion- organized religion. See, look, Miss Gaylor, number one you need to do, is go back and read the Bible, I know you don't like it, and number two, get a history book.

G: I have read the Bible.

O: Alright, well if you read it..

G: and Hitler, and I have read history, and Hitler was a Catholic...

O: Ya gotta read it, but you gotta, you gotta-

G: ...and this is a fact that has been censored but it is true.

O: Alright, censored. Alright, Miss Gaylor, thanks for putting forth your point of view. Appreciate it.

Excerpt from the King James V Bible, Book of Matthew, to which Gaylor refered:

10:5 These twelve Jesus sent forth, and commanded them, saying, Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not:

[...]

10:32 Whosoever therefore shall confess me before men, him will I confess also before my Father which is in heaven.

10:33 But whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven.

10:34 Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.

10:35 For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.

10:36 And a man's foes shall be they of his own household.

10:37 He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.

10:38 And he that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy of me.

10:39 He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.

"… Really, all I can think about right now is, well, Godspell, of all things. Stephen Schwartz's 1971 musical retelling of the Gospel according to St. Matthew was made into a film in 1973. Victor Garber starred as a hippie Christ being followed around Manhattan by 13 flower children/disciples. According to the video box, Jesus & Company "form a roving acting troupe that enacts the Parables through the streets and landmarks of New York," where they perform "show-stopping dance numbers." One of these show-stopping dance numbers is performed on top of the World Trade Center. Jesus does a little soft-shoe on the roof and sings "All for the Best," a song about suffering: "When you feel sad, or under a curse / Your life is bad, your prospects are worse / Your wife is sighing, crying / and your olive tree is dying… / Your mood and your robe / are both a deep blue / You'd bet that Job / had nothin' on you / Don't forget that when you get to / heaven you'll be blessed / Yes, it's all for the best." For some reason, I haven't been able to get that goddamn song out of my head since I turned on the Today show just in time to see the World Trade Center collapse. … The song that's stuck in my head is no comfort to me. In fact, it makes me furious. The idea of Jesus Christ dancing on top of the World Trade Center and telling us that no matter how bad our lives are (however much our wives cry, however Job-like our suffering), really, it's all for the best … Well, it makes me wanna go kick in a stained-glass window. What happened last Tuesday was not "all for the best," and the people I saw falling from the upper floors of the World Trade Center are not now in heaven being blessed. They're just fucking dead. "There's a real need to turn to prayer," said one of Jesus' employees on Wednesday night. Msgr. Thomas Hartman told Tom Brokaw that "there's a real need to turn to God." Who could be against prayer at a time like this? Or God? Well, I am. Does anyone doubt for a moment that the people on those four doomed planes were praying? Or that the people hanging out the windows at the World Trade Center were praying? After the first tower collapsed, how many people watching events unfold on their television sets started praying for the second tower not to fall? Jesus, I even slipped up and said a prayer. And what good did all that prayer do? "If we believe absurdities," Voltaire said, "we will commit atrocities." On Sept. 11, suicidal Islamic radicals, their heads stuffed with absurdities, committed the most appalling atrocities. And what do we do in response? We trot out some absurdities of our own: Pray to God. God listens. God cares. Does He really? If so, I'd really like to see Him get off His ass and prove it every once in a while. … Listening to Msgr. Hartman promote his own brand of absurdities, "All for the Best" playing on tape loop in my head, I remembered something from Mark Twain's unfinished essay, Letters from the Earth. After spending some time walking up and down on the Earth, Lucifer writes home to the other archangels. "[Man] prays to God and thinks He listens. Isn't it a quaint idea? Fills his prayers with crude and bald and florid flatteries of Him, and thinks He sits and purrs over these extravagancies and enjoys them. He prays for helps, he prays for favor, and protection every day; and does it with a hopefulness and confidence, too, although no prayer of his has ever been answered." Twain was on to something, I think. Even if God exists - and all evidence would seem to indicate otherwise - our crude and florid flatteries don't seem to have much of an impact on Him. They never do. So to hell with prayer. Let's get revenge. Let's catch every last bastard who had anything to do with the attacks on Sept. 11, throw 'em in prison, and get busy rebuilding the World Trade Center. Once the towers are up, let's drag the bastards to the top by their balls, set their asses on fire, and toss them over the side. That would be all for the best, don't you think?" copyright Dan Savage