The Greatest Concern with the Protests in the Middle East

Anytime a population breaks free from the oppression of a corrupt government is good.  If you’re an Egyptian, the issue to be concerned with now, even when all of this is over, is how competent of a government the transitional government produces.  Moreover, it would be beneficial to find out which demographic the new government in power truly supports.  For example, if I were a politically active devout Christian, I would expect that the Republican Party would represent my views.  But when one actually looks at the empirical data, this is not the case.  So goes it for Egypt and the rest of the countries experiencing revolt.  Now, the question is not necessarily whether or not a new government will make the revolting population's country better off, but whether or not the new governments will make its citizens who are worse off, better.  Despite the leaps and bounds that have come out of the protests, there is still a growing concern shared by many who are wondering whether or not these protests pose a major threat to the U.S.  And although much of the public's anxiety is due to their concerns about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Iran, there is another, more influential player in the Middle East that poses the biggest threat.  But the public and the media seem to be ignoring it.

Egypt is the birthplace of the Islamic Brotherhood which justifies the speculation of the role the Brotherhood will play in the new government.  But the Brotherhood has spoken out, assuring that it will have nothing to do with the new government.[1]  But that does not mean that they have relinquished their power in Egypt.  They do not need a say in government processes.  Like their Near-East neighbor, Saudi Arabia, they only need a government willing to provide them with geographical petri dishes.  That is, a place where they can recruit and train volunteers without outside influences.  And there is somewhat of a reason to be concerned about the Brotherhood in Egypt.  Their move to passively defer any influence within the new government, is out of character for a group that successfully assassinated one president and conspired to do the same to Mubarak.

The impact of the uprisings in any of these countries is absolutely dependent upon whether or not extremist groups operate in those respective countries.  Although many in the extremist movement do not want to admit it, the U.S. government will know right away whether or not a newly established government is indifferent toward extremists operating in the country.  And if this is something that can be proven, those governments will eventually be sanctioned by the U.S.  This could possibly leave out the much needed assistance those countries need from the U.S.

The most significant revolution in recent years happened in Iran in 1979.  But the current protests differ from the Iranian revolt.  Whereas both are radical and Islamic, the Iranian movement sought to establish a Muslim theocracy within the country of Iran.  The rhetoric from the new movement, thus far, has yet to shift a focus to the religiosity of the uprisings.  That is, a shift to talk about tightening rules and regulations in order for the population to better adhere to Muslim Law, which is what happened in Iran.  In addition to enacting laws to better reflect the Muslim belief, Iranians were also concerned with the growing presence of Western Culture within their society.  Therefore, the Iranian revolution was guided by the push for the implementation of a theocracy as well as the goal of becoming a nation that is both more sovereign and more Muslim.

But this is not the case with the most recent protests.  Many within these new movements, including those in Iran, are seeking liberation from extreme Muslim rule.  Because of this, there is not much of a reason to expect a regime change as drastic as Iran experienced during its revolution.  This is true because part, if not all, of the causes for the 1979 Iranian revolution centered upon the fact that the West had such an influence over their government officials, economic means and natural resources.  Moreover, it was believed that the infiltration of the U.S.’s ideology of modernity was threatening Iran’s ideology of traditionalism, thus the reasoning behind the Ayatollah inheriting the duty of supreme ruler.

Despite this push against corruption and for liberalism (which may be used as “bait” for the more liberal Muslims), there is a way that it can be seen as a push for Islam.  This is the reasoning behind Iran supporting the protests.  But the Iranian view is not always made clear because many who try to keep up with Iran assume that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the ruler of Iran, but he is not.

He is a puppet.  He does what Ayatollah Seyed Ali Hoseyni Khāmene’I tells him to do.  To understand Iran, ignore Ahmadinejad, he is just a pawn.  It is best to listen to the Ayatollah.  Keeping that in mind, it is not surprising that the Ayatollah supports these protests.  This is true because a movement for Islam could very well unite the entire Middle East, establishing a powerful Muslim nation which could very well become a nation with the potential to hurt the U.S., primarily economically, but also militarily.  If this is the case, Iran would become more of a concern.  But it still would not be the primary concern.

There is no doubt that Iran is a threat.  But its threat can only be realized if they mobilize the protests in a way that maintains the protesters' sentiments while successfully shifting the cause of the movement from “a better life” to “Islam versus Modernity.”  But this can only happen with the cooperation of Saudi Arabia.  If the Saudi’s experience a successful revolution the U.S. is in trouble and there will be some kind of war. 
The Saudi kings make most of their money off of the U.S.  And they do like their money <cue party music>.  Therefore, the key is to keep the Saudi population from revolting - which is quite a moral dilemma, considering the oppressive nature of the Saudi Arabian government.  Saudi Arabia, though, has a very tight grip on their population.  Their intelligence agency virtually has complete control of the country's internet and communications capabilities.  If there were a chance of a revolt, the Saudi government has the capability of foreknowing any protests that could pack significance, ultimately stomping them out before they have any chance of catching on.  BUT!  The reasoning behind the financial dynamic between the U.S., Saudi Arabia and Muslim extremism is quite perplexing and might very well lead to the U.S.’s demise.

The U.S. buys the majority of its oil from the Saudis.  This has happened for a while.  It is not new news.  The Saudis take part of the money and allot it to the respective recipients including themselves.  The other part of the allotted money goes toward the evangelization of Wahhabism, a fundamentalist sect of Islam, by paying for the building of schools, mosques, etc….  So, the model, accounting for Saudi support for terrorism, looks like this:

            As the picture and its preceding explanation shows, the U.S. is not only dependent upon the Saudis for their oil, but they are also inadvertently manufacturing the terrorism they are combating.  Although this is a highly simplified model, it still represents the truth that the U.S. knowingly supports regimes that fund terrorism.  If these revolts continue to topple government after government, Iran is not the U.S.'s greatest concern because they face the task of switching the protesters' sentiments from 'liberation' to 'Islam versus modernity.'  The greatest threat is with Saudi Arabia because of its influence on those factors that play such a vital role on the everyday life of the average U.S. citizen.  If Saudi Arabia goes, American prices explode with the influence it once had over the Middle East.

---

[1] http://www.npr.org/2011/02/18/133870711/Muslim-Brotherhood-Speaks-Out-On-Egypt

USAF: Accessing WikiLeaks Leaks Violates Espionage Act

By Joshua Carpenter, Random Knuts
February 07, 2011  05:00 p.m. EST

You may want to cover your tracks if you have accessed the WikiLeaks website.  At least that is what a new report is claiming.  The material available to the general public is still classified.  And the simple fact that it is in the public domain does not change that fact.  Issued by the Air Force Materiel Command (AFMC) at Wright Patterson Air Force Base, the new guidelines state that "...the leaked documents are protected by the Espionage Act and that [any USAF employee, military or civilian] accessing them under any circumstances is [breaking] the law."  Moreover, the announcement highlights the fact that even if the relatives of USAF employees access the information on their private computer, they can be prosecuted as well.

The U.S. military has recently faced backlash for discouraging employee and servicemen and women's access to public resources covering leaked information such as newspapers, websites and most recently in the classrooms.

And the military has not been the only ones discouraged from viewing the cables.  In a knee-jerk reaction, Columbia's International and Public Affairs allotted the State Department enough time to make students fearful of talking about the leaks.  And although the State's announcement was withdrawn, it was in the students' minds long enough to feel immoral the next time they thought about accessing the still-classified files.

Wikileaks' Threat on the U.S. Citizens' Civil Liberties

There is a new terrorist on the block and he is causing quite a bit of a ruckus at the Pentagon.  Wielding a quarter million cables that hold potentially embarrassing accounts of foreign countries given by U.S. Ambassadors, Wikileaks has redefined “leaking” classified information by initiating a series of information “dumps” – or leaks in bulk.  This drive for transparency is not just focused on governments either.

In December of 2010, the figure most associated with the organization, Julian Assange, spoke about a Bank of America hard drive, ostensibly holding pre-meltdown data spurring the company to appoint a damage control council.  The organization does not just operate on a whim.  A copy of all of their files is kept by a company operating in an underground bunker that was made during World War II.  Additionally, the organization keeps a 1.4 gigabyte-sized file named “Insurance,” so if anything happens to Assange the contents would be made public.  Although the file is posted to be a dangling threat to many world governments, it could also serve as a temptation to those that think they can take on such a project.[1]  But the most important issue is that Wikileaks is, in fact, seen as a threat to national security.

Because of the threat that they now pose, the U.S. government has been driven into action.  Most notably, the CIA developed a task force to assess the impact of Wikileaks’ file dumps.  Interestingly enough, very few CIA documents have been in Wikileaks’ hands. That fact necessarily brings about the question of whether or not the task force’s acronym, “W.T.F.,” was deliberate and intent on sending a distinct message to the other agencies that contributed to the compromise of the government’s classification of sensitive information.[2]  But the fact is that Wikileaks busted on the scene quite quickly.  And considering what they have accomplished already, it is only logical to follow up with the question “who is Wikileaks?”

An organization that preaches transparency by leaking secret information should prompt the country’s citizens to demand answers for many important questions before showing any type of support for the organization.  And as a matter of principle, the organization preaching the message ought to live by the motto and values for which it advocates.  But it seems that this is not the case.  For someone who is taking such a solid stand for transparency, they seem to be peculiarly unconcerned with the transparency of their own organization.  It does not stop there.  Front man Julian Assange has been adamant with communicating to volunteers that any type of information they have on him is to be kept secret, prohibiting them from talking to anyone associated with the media.  He has had three prominent volunteers resign because he suspended them from volunteering after they gave out already-known information to the press.[3]  

The most publically criticized hypocrisy the organization has faced is the veil it has placed over its finances.  Because of this lack of transparency, many feel that Wikileaks could be financed by a number of “shady” adversaries, or even the U.S. government itself.

Another ambiguous trait of the organization is the shortage of sources that confirms its board members.  While a record of its consultative board members had been posted on the Wikileaks website at one time, many of those listed have yet to confirm anything close to a consultative relationship with Wikileaks.  But this is the most intriguing part of the organization.

A large portion of those board members listed as “advisers” had no idea they were on the board.[4]  And as far as the other board members are concerned, there are little to no sources that confirm their advising role.  These seemingly loose connections between those on the advisory board and Wikileaks necessarily shifts the focus of the original question.  And with the identity of the advisers and a financial record masked by what is often described as a dictatorship, defining the identity of Wikileaks by looking at the organization, seems to be a lost cause.  Therefore, by defining the dictator, the authoritarian shroud is gradually lifted and the face of a pure, simple quest for truth inadvertently becomes a depraved, complex attack on individual freedom.

With board members unknowingly a part of Wikileaks and key volunteers quitting because of Julian Assange’s dictatorial management approach, the task of painting a picture of the organization proves difficult.  But removing the noise and shifting the focus on Assange yields a much clearer portrait, allowing the intent of the organization to be critically examined as opposed to getting trapped in focusing on its public identity. 

The information available on Assange is limited, but it is known that he is an experienced cryptographer and hacker.  He was taken to court for hacking into “thousands of systems” including a few belonging to the Department of Defense.[5]  An email exchange posted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shows Assange collaborating with NASA scientist Fred Blonder and Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist Michael C. Neuman on a project nearly two-years before his prosecution.[6]  These scientists were in top positions at prominent national security research institutions.  This puts Assange connected to a seemingly tight-knit community of national security scientists.  And it’s not the only ambiguous trait of his past.

Assange has reportedly attended thirty-seven separate schools and six universities, many of which have yet to be mentioned by name.  Nor is there information or proof of his actual credentials or the work that he had performed prior to the Wikileaks project.  The best information available is in a biography which states that he is a “…prolific programmer and consultant for many open-source projects and his software is used by most large organizations and is inside every Apple computer.”  But yet he has not appeared in any sources open to the public as being a freelance contributor to Apple.[7]

The fact that an advocate for transparency has such a blurry past does very little to support the thought that they are conspiring with others.  It does, though, point out major discrepancies in Assange’s credibility by revealing the possibility of manipulating the public by manufacturing a past that can answer any questions that arise.  And even though there is a need for the anonymity of Assange and Wikileaks’ board members, there is also a need to portray the group as being open and trusted.  But that’s not the case.  Wikileaks has as sketchy and unknown of a past as the governments they seek to change.  Pot, meet kettle.  Of course, there is always the idea that Assange and Wikileaks are funded and controlled by the U.S. government to provide reasoning for internet regulation.  Although it is an interesting claim, it is difficult to prove.

Okay, it may not be a conspiracy, but there are still many questions that need to be answered before I relinquish my foil hat.  The simple fact is that Americans are now in a compromising position because of what Wikileaks has brought to the table.  The possibility of regulating the internet may be laughable, but the reality is that there were reports that both military and university leaders spoke out against reading the cables on line.  It is far from absolute regulation, but it is as close to a knee-jerk reaction that I need to register in my mind that it could very well be a route considered by the government at a later time.

It is clear that Wikileaks is a threat to government transparency.  And much of what is happening parallels a perfect storm that could both obligate and justify the government to go to extremes in combating the organization.  Therefore, even though Wikileaks may be expressing and testing our freedom of speech and press, those rights are contingent upon the extremity the government wishes to go in the name of national security.  When looking back at the PATRIOT act or Ollie North’s Rex 84, it is not so far fetched to see that because of the threat that Wikileaks poses on our government, it, inadvertently, poses a similar threat to our civil freedom.

---

[1] http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/12/05/wikileaks-ready-release-massive-insurance-file-shut/

[2] http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2010/12/cia-wikileaks-wtf.html

[3] ABC | Brian Ross Investigates: Fri, Dec 17, 2010 Season 1 : Ep. 36 (20:08) Air date: 12/17/2010

[4] http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?aid=22437&context=va

[5] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/12/wikirebels-documentary/

[6] http://diswww.mit.edu/menelaus/bt/204

[7] http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?aid=22437&context=va

LA Times Book Review: Family of Secrets by Russ Baker

Family of Secrets is the journey of investigative journalist Russ Baker into the lives a part of the Bush Family Dynasty.  Baker spends a good amount of time establishing continuity of relationships that have had, or often perceived to have had, a large impact upon American history.  This book is essential to understanding what American politics are.  Moreover, the end product is a gleaming example of how extraordinary Baker is as an investigative journalist.  Although there were a few chapters which slowed the progression of the book to a crawl, many other chapters did a fairly good job at making up for what the slow ones lacked.  All in all a good read.  It is essential for anyone interested in the politics of American government.  Moreover, it provides well documented support for alternative theories to the JFK assassination and many, many other important happenings in recent American history.  Baker does a fine job at documenting his progress.  One of the most prominent issues that Baker avoids all-together was attempting to investigate or elucidate an explicit connection between the Bushes finances and the terror groups funding the attacks on 9/11.

Essential, 2 out of 3 Knuts!

The original of the full review can be found on the Los Angeles Times' website here.

Works Cited

Ruttin, Tim. Book Review: Family of Secrets. January 7, 2009. http://articles.latimes.com/print/2009/jan/07/entertainment/et-rutten7 (accessed December 24, 2010).



Family of Secrets

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BOOK REVIEW

The charges of corruption the author levels at the Bush family are extraordinary and sensational--why, our reviewer wonders, would anyone legitimize them by publishing this book?

January 07, 2009 | Tim Rutten

The tendency Richard Hofstadter so aptly labeled "the paranoid style" in American politics operates independent of ideology. 

"American politics has often been an arena for angry minds," the great historian wrote in a 1964 issue of Harper's magazine. He called the expression of that anger "the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind."

Russ Baker is an independent investigative journalist who has published widely in national magazines and, nowadays, is active mainly on the Internet. If the paranoid style can be said to have a canon, his preposterous new book -- "Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces That Put It in the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America" -- surely deserves a place among its classics.

Baker begins this dispiriting tome with a couple of reasonable questions that probably are on a great many minds as George W. Bush's disastrous presidency sputters to a close: "What did the ascendancy of this frighteningly inadequate man signify? Could anything be learned from the George W. Bush phenomenon that would help us understand how we Americans choose our leaders and chart our collective course?"
It's all downhill from there -- though hardly in a straight line, since clarity and direct exposition are anathema to the wheels-within-wheels school of thought, in which Baker really should be given an endowed chair.
"One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows" is a characterization of Hofstadter's that might have been tailored to fit Baker's book. "It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed. Of course, there are highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow paranoids, as there are likely to be in any political tendency . . . [that] all but obsessively accumulate 'evidence.' . . . The higher paranoid scholarship is nothing if not coherent -- in fact, the paranoid mind is far more coherent than the real world."

Baker's coherent explanation of the world purports to be "a secret history" of a vast conspiracy stretching back more than a century in which a cabal of rich, interconnected men -- mainly involved in oil and gold extraction -- have used, first, private intelligence agents and then, later, the government spy agencies they helped found to manipulate . . . well, just about everything. Along the way, readers with enough stamina to wade through the mind-numbing accretion of names, dates and places will discover heretofore "hidden" explanations for the American entry into World War I, the formation of the CIA, the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the Watergate scandal (which, by the way, turns out to have been a secret coup engineered by the petro-intelligence access).

Here it's necessary to declare a personal bias. I regard the belief that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone as an important indicium of mental health. In fact, I think there are three things that every serious American needs to believe about our recent history: Kennedy was killed by a lone lunatic, Americans really did land on the moon and the Twin Towers were destroyed when they were struck by two fully fueled airliners that had been hijacked by Islamic extremists organized by Al Qaeda. People who do not believe in these things are, within reasonable limits, entitled to sympathy. They are not entitled to a seat at the table where serious discussions occur.

Lack of seriousness is not this book's real failing, however. What makes Baker's book singularly offensive is the way he recklessly impugns, in the most disgusting possible way, the reputations not simply of men and women now dead, but of the living. The great Satan in this fevered schema is not the current President Bush but his father, President George H.W. Bush, whom Baker alleges has been a covert intelligence agent since his teens. According to Baker, he also was at the very center of a successful plot to murder John Kennedy that included, among dozens of others, former CIA Director Allen Dulles, then-Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, the usual Cuban emigre suspects, a clutch of White Russian exiles living in Dallas, Sen. Prescott Bush and assorted Texas oil and money men.

By Baker's reckoning, there seem to have been about as many people involved in the plot as there were on Omaha Beach. With that many people involved in the conspiracy, it's a miracle it remained a secret long enough for Baker to "uncover" it. The elder President Bush is a public figure and, therefore, practically libel-proof. But using the tissue of innuendo, illogical inference, circumstance and guilt by tenuous association -- as Baker does in this book -- to indict rhetorically anyone, let alone a former chief executive, of an infamous murder is a reprehensible calumny.

The nadir of this particular chapter in the author's "secret history" may be the paragraph in which he rounds up all his key suspects and then darkly muses that each had an alibi that put him at a distance from Dallas on the day of JFK's assassination. What does Baker deduce from the consistency of his perpetrators' absence? Why, conspiracy to create cover stories, what else? One can't help but be reminded of the Crown prosecutor who argued that failure to produce a shred of evidence linking the Jesuits to the Gunpowder Plot simply was proof of how diabolically clever they were.

Watergate flood

Baker does something similar to the Washington Post's Bob Woodward, whom he accuses of being an intelligence agent who, with master co-conspirator John W. Dean, were the prime movers in a coup to remove Nixon for opposing the oil depletion allowance. Woodward's legendary work habits are cited as evidence of how engrossed in the plot he was.

We could go on, but why? Life is short and real problems are pressing.

In the meantime, we can avoid Baker's "Family of Secrets" and console ourselves with another of Hofstadter's wise observations: "We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well."
--
timothy.rutten@latimes.com

NY Times Book Review: The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright

Joshua Carpenter:
Random-Knuts
Main Contributor

The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright has seriously altered my expectations for the quality of writing found in any genre of literature.  The care taken by Wright to describe each and every detail sets this book apart from most other non-fiction book.  Moreover, the exceptional writing drives home the point of the entire book: to show the connections and continuity between key individuals, groups and governments which make up the axis of terror that the War on Terrorism is currently fighting.  Unlike any other, this book caught my interest from the preface and kept me coming back for more, sans the typical dry-spells of interest.  No one can talk about terrorist groups or Islamic fundamentalism unless they know the message the information in this book brings.

Perfect Score, 3 out of 3 Knuts!

The original of the full review can be found on the New York Times' website here.

Works Cited

Filkins, Dexter. The Plot Against America. August 6, 2006. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/06/books/review/06filkins.html (accessed December 24, 2010).



The Plot Against America

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Review by DEXTER FILKINS

Published: August 6, 2006

THE LOOMING TOWER

Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.

By Lawrence Wright.

Illustrated. 469 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $27.95. 

Click to buy from Amazon!

When Mohamed Atta and his four Saudi confederates commandeered a Boeing 767 and steered it into the north tower of the World Trade Center, they began a story that still consumes us nearly five years on, and one that seems, on bad days, to promise war without end.

But the events of Sept. 11, 2001, were in many ways less the start of a tale than the end of one, or at least the climax of one, begun many years before in many different precincts: in the middle-class suburbs of Cairo, in the mosques of Hamburg, in Jidda, in Islamabad, in the quiet university town of Greeley, Colo.



Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Osama bin Laden



In its simplest terms, this is the story of how a small group of men, with a frightening mix of delusion and calculation, rose from a tormented civilization to mount a catastrophic assault on the world’s mightiest power, and how another group of men and women, convinced that such an attack was on the way, tried desperately to stop it.

What a story it is. And what a riveting tale Lawrence Wright fashions in this marvelous book. “The Looming Tower” is not just a detailed, heart-stopping account of the events leading up to 9/11, written with style and verve, and carried along by villains and heroes that only a crime novelist could dream up. It’s an education, too — though you’d never know it — a thoughtful examination of the world that produced the men who brought us 9/11, and of their progeny who bedevil us today. The portrait of John O’Neill, the driven, demon-ridden F.B.I. agent who worked so frantically to stop Osama bin Laden, only to perish in the attack on the World Trade Center, is worth the price of the book alone. “The Looming Tower” is a thriller. And it’s a tragedy, too.

In the nearly five years since the attacks, we’ve heard oceans of commentary on the whys and how-comes and what-it-means and what’s nexts. Wright, a staff writer for The New Yorker — where portions of this book have appeared — has put his boots on the ground in the hard places, conducted the interviews and done the sleuthing. Others talked, he listened. And so he has unearthed an astonishing amount of detail about Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Mullah Muhammad Omar and all the rest of them. They come alive.

Who knew, for instance, that bin Laden, far from being a warrior-stoic fighting against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, was actually a pathetic stick-in-the-mud who would fall ill before battle? That the combat-hardened Afghans, so tired of bin Laden’s behavior, declared him and his Arab associates “useless”? Or that he was a permissive father and indulgent husband? Or that he is only six feet tall?
More important, who knew — I sure didn’t — that bin Laden had left behind such a long trail of words? Wright has found them in books, on film, in audio recordings, in people’s notebooks and memories. This has allowed him to draw an in-depth portrait of bin Laden, and to chart his evolution from a self-conscious step-child growing up in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, to the visionary cave-dwelling madman who mimics the Holy Prophet in his most humdrum daily habits.

Wright takes the title of his book from the fourth sura of the Koran, which bin Laden repeated three times in a speech videotaped just as the hijackers were preparing to fly. The video was found later, on a computer in Hamburg.

“Wherever you are, death will find you, Even in the looming tower.”
There is poetry, too. Here is a particularly chilling bit, found on another videotape, which bin Laden had read aloud at the wedding of his 17-year-old son, Mohammed. The celebration took place not long after a pair of Qaeda suicide bombers, riding in a tiny boat filled with explosives, nearly sank the billion-dollar guided missile destroyer Cole. At least with regard to his abilities as an author, bin Laden was unusually modest: he let someone else write the words. “I am not, as most of our brothers know, a warrior of the word,” he said.

A destroyer, even the brave might fear,

She inspires horror in the harbor and the open sea,

She goes into the waves flanked by arrogance, haughtiness and fake might,

To her doom she progresses slowly, clothed in a huge illusion,

Awaiting her is a dinghy, bobbing in the waves.

“The Looming Tower” is full of such surprising detail. Al Qaeda’s leaders had all but shelved the 9/11 plot when they realized they lacked foot soldiers who could pass convincingly as westernized Muslims in the United States. At just the right moment Atta appeared in Afghanistan, along with Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Ziad al-Jarrah and Marwan al-Shehhi, all Western-educated transplants, offering themselves up for slaughter. The game was on.

Just as dramatic as the portraits of bin Laden and Zawahiri is Wright’s account of the roots of Islamic militancy — the intellectual, spiritual and material world from which the plotters came. Wright draws a fascinating picture of Sayyid Qutb, the font of modern Islamic fundamentalism, a frail, middle-aged writer who found himself, as a visitor to the United States and a student at Colorado State College of Education in Greeley in the 1940’s, overwhelmed by the unbridled splendor and godlessness of modern America. And by the sex: like so many others who followed him, Qutb seemed simultaneously drawn to and repelled by American women, so free and unselfconscious in their sexuality. The result is a kind of delirium:

“A girl looks at you, appearing as if she were an enchanting nymph or an escaped mermaid,” Qutb wrote, “but as she approaches, you sense only the screaming instinct inside her, and you can smell her burning body, not the scent of perfume, but flesh, only flesh. Tasty flesh, truly, but flesh nonetheless.”
It wasn’t much later that Qutb began writing elaborate rationalizations for killing non-Muslims and waging war against the West. Years later, Atta expressed a similar mix of obsession and disgust for women. Indeed, anyone who has spent time in the Middle East will recognize such tortured emotions.
WRIGHT shows, correctly, that at the root of Islamic militancy — its anger, its antimodernity, its justifications for murder — lies a feeling of intense humiliation. Islam plays a role in this, with its straitjacketed and all-encompassing worldview. But whether the militant hails from a middle-class family or an impoverished one, is intensely religious or a “theological amateur,” as Wright calls bin Laden and his cohort, he springs almost invariably from an ossified society with an autocratic government that is unable to provide any reason to believe in the future. Islam offers dignity, even in — especially in — death. Living in the West, Atta and the others felt these things more acutely, not less. As Wright notes:

“Their motivations varied, but they had in common a belief that Islam — pure and primitive, unmitigated by modernity and uncompromised by politics — would cure the wounds that socialism or Arab nationalism had failed to heal. They were angry but powerless in their own countries. They did not see themselves as terrorists but as revolutionaries who, like all such men throughout history, had been pushed into action by the simple human need for justice. Some had experienced brutal repression; some were simply drawn to bloody chaos. From the beginning of Al Qaeda, there were reformers and there were nihilists. The dynamic between them was irreconcilable and self-destructive, but events were moving so quickly that it was almost impossible to tell the philosophers from the sociopaths. They were glued together by the charismatic personality of Osama bin Laden, which contained both strands, idealism and nihilism, in a potent mix.”

Frances M. Roberts/The New York Times

F.B.I. counterterrorism expert John O’Neill

who died in the Sept. 11 attacks.



In John O’Neill, bin Laden almost met his match. The supervisor of the F.B.I.’s New York office and of the team assigned to track Al Qaeda in the United States, O’Neill felt, as strongly as anyone in the government, that Al Qaeda was coming to America. He was a relentless investigator, a volcanic personality and sometimes his own worst enemy. In the end he broke himself on a government bureaucracy that could not — and would not — move as quickly as he did. O’Neill and others like him were in a race with Al Qaeda, and although we know how the race ended, it’s astonishing — and heartbreaking — to learn how close it was.

Some of the F.B.I.’s field agents, as we now know, had premonitions of what was coming. When the supervisor of the Minneapolis field office was admonished, in August 2001, for expressing fears that an Islamic radical attending flight school might be planning a suicide attack, he shot back defiantly that he was “trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing into the World Trade Center.” Amazing.

The most gut-wrenching scenes are the ones that show F.B.I. agents trying, as 9/11 approached, to pry information from their rivals inside the United States government. The C.I.A., Wright says, knew that high-level Qaeda operatives had held a meeting in Malaysia in January 2000, and, later, that two of them had entered the United States. Both men turned out to be part of the team that hijacked the planes on Sept. 11. The C.I.A. failed to inform agencies like the F.B.I. — which might have been able to locate the men and break up the plot — until late in the summer of 2001.

The fateful struggle between the C.I.A. and F.B.I. in the months leading up to the attacks has been outlined before, but never in such detail. At meetings, C.I.A. analysts dangled photos of two of the eventual hijackers in front of F.B.I. agents, but wouldn’t tell them who they were. The F.B.I. agents could sense that the C.I.A. possessed crucial pieces of evidence about Islamic radicals they were investigating, but couldn’t tell what they were. The tension came to a head at a meeting in New York on June 11, exactly three months before the catastrophe, which ended with F.B.I. and C.I.A. agents shouting at each other across the room.

In one of the most remarkable scenes in the book, Ali Soufan, an F.B.I. agent assigned to Al Qaeda, was taken aside on Sept. 12 and finally shown the names and photos of the men the C.I.A. had known for more than a year and a half were in America. The planes had already struck. Soufan ran to the bathroom and retched.

Great stuff. I just wish Wright had given us something, even a chapter, on the hijackings themselves; as

it is, he takes us right up to the moment, and then straight to the burning towers. Perhaps he felt that ground was too well-trodden. My other complaint is more substantive. Through the enormous amount of legwork he has done, tracking down people who worked with bin Laden and Zawahiri over the years, Wright has drawn up verbatim reconstructions of entire conversations, some of which took place more than a decade ago. Many of these conversations are riveting. Still, in some cases, it’s hard to believe that memories are that good.

“The Looming Tower” ends near the Pakistani border, where Zawahiri, or someone who looked like him, rode through a village on horseback and then disappeared into the mountains. It’s not a definitive ending; there is no closure. And that’s the point. For as amazing as the story of Al Qaeda and the road to 9/11 is, it’s not over yet.

Unconventional Warfare: The U.S. Military's 500 Pound Gorrilla

The United States has successfully led the nation through the post-war era.  While being the economic powerhouse from post-1945 up to today, it instigated a military-industrial-academic complex which led to a culture of consumerism and a boom in technological capabilities.  The post-war era became the Cold-War era and now, after the cusp of the millennium had been broken, we have ushered in the information age.  Although the information age may evoke thoughts of super-smart defense technology, infinite-distant remotes or a pulling together of the world's population, there is still one fatal flaw in the policy and operation of the United States' military - the soldiers lack of a basic training in unconventional warfare tactics supported by the U.S. military's failure to fight and win unconventional wars against, at the most, semi-stable adversaries.

After World War II the military began to focus their tactical methods more on a "shock and awe" approach of invasion.  This is the United States military's modus operandi and it is why the United States is such a force with which is not to be reckoned.  These large scale, shock and awe-type strategies were used during both Iraq wars and during both World Wars.  They were also used in Afghanistan, Vietnam and Post-Saddam Iraq.  But the differences in modern warfare and the conventional warfare of the two world wars is simply in the fact that power is limited, but dispersed in a way that is difficult to be detected even through the best of methods.  This shift in focus from an organized modern-warfare state to a dispersed, covert state has led to a unique demand.  Prior to the World War I, the military operated predominately unconventionally.  But after the Second World War the world was introduced to a stronger political state because of a push for the protection of individual rights and a focus on nuclear physics which fueled big science. The Cold War did not help much either, as a fearful nation's over-speculation about the enemy's power over the U.S. led to a drastic increase in weapon production and technological change focused on the ideological and military power of an established nation-state.  The fact that many of the authors who write about world history define it through the Cold War only supports the fact that this focus on being more powerful than the enemy ruled the policy of the United States.  More significantly, it was the focus of preparing for an attack by established nation-states with stable political systems and economies that, ironically enough, led to the most significant weakness of the U.S. military.

Because the United States saw the most powerful threat of the enemy as being an operation from afar, it established political, military and diplomatic strategies, still in place today, which were built on the enemy being a geographically-identified force.  Politically it led to a greater focus on the rights of the individual.  This idea that an individual had basic rights that could be protected, whether they are a dissenter or patriot, necessarily led to opening up the option to dissent without public backlash – whereas in the past there would be public and governmental backlash.  And although not the proverbial glue that holds the ideology of nationalism together, there is an important role that barring one from the expression of their individual rights - whether or not freely chosen - plays in actively supporting their community, state and nation.  The current lack of political unity only supports this.

The fact that the enemy has become a part of many states instead of one has demanded a set of resources which are more spread out.  The Unites State's Ambassador is no exception.  Now, instead of conversing with a representative of the body with which the US desires to relieve conflict, there is no open method of communication because there is no formal state or place to do so.  Moreover, the fact that it is the policy to "not negotiate with terrorists" only exacerbates this problem.  The foreign relations with the enemy is important, but none so important than our defense and the simple fact is that since the change in training after the first and second world war, we have become incapable of successfully waging an unconventional war where, in the end, we are declared the winners.  This is supported many times over by failures in Vietnam and the dire troubles in achieving success in Afghanistan and Iraq.

So what's next?  How does a military, seemingly untrained in unconventional warfare (except for a few special groups), go about making up for 65-years of vital training.  There is no easy answer.  But shifting the public's focus on the individual as a part of a team is a good start and is already in progress.  There could be an increase in funding to Boy Scouts to increase interest in nature, although, this is questionable, given that current funding is in jeopardy due to their stance on homosexuality.  There could be a propaganda effort geared toward the elementary and middle school-aged children to evoke a passion for the outdoors - although controversial, it is not unheard of, just think of how the lesson that "George Washington never told a lie" affected views on honesty, or how textbooks of elementary children are so patriotic, instilling a sense of nationalism.  Whatever it is to be done, it needs to be done fast.  And the issue should be addressed because it is apolitical.  There is no need for major changes in defense spending because it is not the money that brings the problem into existence.  It is simply the method that is used to train our military.  But the only way that there can be a successful change is if those in charge admit that there is a gaping whole in the future defense system and there needs to be some sort of reform to combat such a terrible threat.  Otherwise, this will become a war on our own soil which will obligate the citizenry to become involved and only lead to critical complications of domestic freedoms which play a crucial part in the solidarity of the United States.