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Does anyone know sources of info about al Qaeda?

Here's one opinion from Johnson's Russia List today:

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Date: Sat, 13 Oct 2001 23:39:15 -0400 From: Dmitri Gusev Subject: Article for the JRL: Author of bin Laden's "Mein Kampf" Russian-born?

A couple of weeks ago I asked a friend of mine, Russian writer and Afghan war veteran Vladimir Grigoriev to find out if "The Foundation", a 1951 sci-fi bestseller by Isaac Asimov, a well-known American author and scientist, was translated and published in Arabic, and if so, under what title? Yesterday, I learned that my friend contacted his former professor Olga Frolova, currently the Chair of the Arab Philology Department, School of Oriental Languages, St. Petersburg State University, and she confirmed that the book was published in Arabic as "Al Qaeda", the title matching the name of the international terrorist network founded and headed by Osama bin Laden. (The Western media usually translates "Al Qaeda" back as "The Base", as if a base of terrorists were been referred to.

This peculiar coincidence would be of little interest if not for abundant parallels between the plot of Asimov's book and the events unfolding now. The central character of "The Foundation" named Seldon, the pioneer of a new scientific discipline called "psychohistory", predicts that the Galactic Empire is about to fall. While the process of disintegration cannot not be stopped, Seldon decides to send an expedition to a remote place on the outskirts of the Galaxy and establish The Foundation, which is to become the nucleus of the next Empire. Even though the Old Empire tries to destroy The Foundation with its superior military might, Seldon's plan eventually works despite many predicted difficulties and occasional random hiccups. Seldon does not live long enough to see the triumph of his cause, but he leaves videotaped messages at a machine timed to broadcast them to his followers and instruct them at the turning points of The Foundation's history, as his forecasts are coming true.

I think the public would be relieved to realize that the internationally feared Terrorist No. 1 is trying to mimic a scenario from his favorite science fiction novel. I also believe that the study of "The Foundation" (along with its sequels and prequels) can help the decision makers around the globe to better understand what they're up against and what the ultimate objectives of Osama bin Laden are, much in the same way a study of "Mein Kampf" would have benefited Adolf Hitler's counterparts a great deal if they bothered to read the book and paid attention to what it said.

Isaac Asimov, a famous Jewish-American author and researcher, was born January 2, 1920, in Petrovichi, Russia, on the territory of the present day Belarus. He died April 6, 1992, in New York, New York, several months before the first attack struck the World Trade Center on February 26, 1993.

For a good response to the silly "root causes" argument, I excerpt the Mark Steyn article below. It's a masterpiece.:

Mark Steyn
National Post

What have we learned since September 11th? We've learned that poverty breeds despair, despair breeds instability, instability breeds resentment and resentment breeds extremism.

Yes, folks, these are what we in the trade call "root causes." Which cause do you root for? "Poverty breeds instability" (The Detroit News)? Or "poverty breeds fanaticism" (Carolyn Lochhead in The San Francisco Chronicle)? Bear in mind that "instability breeds zealots" (John Ibbitson in The Globe And Mail), but that "fanaticism breeds hatred" (Mauve MacCormack of New South Wales) and "hatred breeds extremism" (Mircea Geoana, Romanian Foreign Minister).

Above all, let's not forget that "desperation breeds resentment" (Howard Zinn in The Los Angeles Times) and "resentment breeds terrorism" (Eugene G. Wollaston of Naperville, Illinois) but sometimes "desperation breeds terrorism" (a poster in Lower Manhattan) as surely as "despair breeds terrorism" (Ian Lawson in the San Diego Union-Tribune), though occasionally "despair breeds pestilence" (James Robertson of Ashland, Oregon).

Moreover, "injustice breeds hopelessness" (Stephen Bachhuber of Portland, Oregon) and "hopelessness breeds fanaticism" (Mark McCulloch of Forest Hills, Pennsylvania) and "injustice breeds rage" (the National Council of Churches).

Also, "ignorance breeds hate" (Wasima Alikhan of the Islamic Academy of Las Vegas), just as "hostility breeds violence" (Alexa McDonough), and "suffering breeds violence" (David Pricco of San Francisco) and "war breeds hate and hate breeds terrorism" (Julia Watts of Berkeley, California) and "intolerance breeds hate, hate breeds violence and violence breeds death, destruction and heartache" (David Coleman of the University of Oklahoma).

"Injustice breeds injustice" (Dr. L. B. Quesnel of Manchester, England) and "suffering breeds suffering" (Gabor Mate of Vancouver, author of Scattered Minds: A New Look At The Origins And Healing Of Attention Deficit Disorder) and "instability breeds instability" (Congressman Alcee Hastings) and "hate breeds hate" (a sign at the University of Maryland) and "hatred breeds hatred" (the Reverend Charles A. Summers of the First Presbyterian Church of Richmond, Virginia) and "anger breeds anger. Hostility breeds hostility. And attacks are going to breed other attacks" (Dania Dandashly of the Governor Bent Elementary School in Albuquerque, New Mexico), all of which only further confirms that -- all together now -- "violence breeds violence." So say Bishop Thomas Gumbleton of Detroit, and Kathleen McQuillen of the American Friends Service Committee, and Chris Struble, President of Humanists of Idaho, and Riane Eisler, international activist for peace, human rights and the environment, macro-historian, systems and cultural-transformation theorist and President of the Center for Partnership Studies.

Breeders, breeders everywhere, and, although most of the above rhetorical stud farmers are "pro-choice," the chances of this formulation getting terminated before the second trimester are slim indeed. A large swathe of the Western elites has settled into an endless dopey roundelay, a vast Schnitzlerian carousel where every abstract noun is carrying on like Anthony Quinn on Viagra. Instability breeds resentment, resentment breeds inertia, inertia breeds generalities, generalities breed clichés, clichés breed lame metaphors, until we reach the pitiful state of the peacenik opinion columns where, to modify the old Eyewitness News formula, if it breeds it leads.

If I were to say "Mr. Scroggins breeds racing pigeons," it would be reasonable to assume that I'd been round to the Scroggins house or at least made a phone call. But the "injustice breeds anger" routine requires no such mooring to humdrum reality, though it's generally offered as a uniquely shrewd insight, reflecting a vastly superior understanding of the complexities of the situation than we nuke-crazy warmongers have. "What you have to look at is the underlying reasons," an Ivy League student said to me the other day. "Poverty breeds resentment and resentment breeds anger."

"Really?" I said. "And what's the capital of Saudi Arabia?"

It's certainly possible to mount a trenchant demolition of U.S. policy toward Israel, Palestine, Kuwait, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, but that would require specifics, facts, a curiosity about the subject, and this breed of rhetoric is designed to save you the trouble. It's certainly not worth rebutting: If poverty and despair breed terrorism, then how come AIDS-infested sub-Saharan Africa isn't a hotbed of terrorism? Needless to say, it's also racist, or more accurately culturalist: the non-Western world is apparently just one big petri dish full of mutating cells, eternally passive, acted upon but never acting. As Salman Rushdie wrote of September 11th, "To excuse such an atrocity by blaming U.S. government policies is to deny the basic idea of all morality: that individuals are responsible for their actions." And the fact that only one side is denied this essential dignity of humanity tells you a lot about what the peace crowd really thinks of them.

But the breed screed is revealing of the broader disposition of its speakers. The right tend to be federalists, the left centralists. The right are happy to leave education to local school boards, the left want big Federal government programs. The right say hire a new local police chief and let him fix the crime problem, the left demand Federal hate-crimes legislation. The right favour individual liberties, the left are more concerned with group rights. In a nutshell, the right are particular, the left love generalities (if you'll forgive a generalization).

And so faced with the enormity of September 11th the pacifist left has done what it always does -- smother the issues in generalities and abstractions -- though never on such an epic scale. On that sunny Tuesday morning, at least 7,000 people died -- real, living men and women and children with families and street addresses and telephone numbers.

But the language of the pacifists -- for all its ostensible compassion -- dehumanizes these individuals. They're no longer flight attendants and firemen and waitresses and bond dealers, but only an abstract blur in some theoretical equation -- if not mere "collateral damage," certainly collateral. Of course, real live folks die in the Middle East, too, and their stories are worth telling. But in between the bonehead refrains of this breeding that and that breeding the other you'll search in vain for a name or a face, a street or a city or sometimes even a country. Just the confident assertion that one abstract noun breeds another.

Why do some people look at a smoking ruin and see lives lost -- the secretary standing by the photocopier -- and others see only confirmation of their thesis on Kyoto? Any real insight into the "root causes" has to begin with an acknowledgement of the human toll, if only because that speaks more eloquently than anything else to the vast cultural gulf between the victims and perpetrators. To deny them their humanity, to reduce them to an impersonal abstraction is Stalinist.

Bill Clinton at least claimed to "feel your pain." The creepy, totalitarian boilerplate slogans of the peace movement can't even go through the motions.

Few of us would have bet on the professors, preachers and the rest of the educated, articulate left performing in quite such a desultory, slapdash fashion. But in bringing war to the East Coast for the first time in two centuries the terrorists have also brought the fellow travellers home. It was easy to slough off the dead in the gulags, far away and out of sight. But could they do the same if the corpses were right here on this continent, and not in some obscure cornpone hicksville but in the heart of our biggest cities?

Yes, they could, and so easily. At one level, it's simply bad taste -- a lack of breeding, so to speak. But the interesting thing, to those of us used to being reviled as right-wing haters, is how sterile the vocabulary of those who profess to "love" and "care" is. In some weird Orwellian boomerang, the degradation of language required to advance the left's agenda has rendered its proponents utterly desiccated.

The President gets teary in the Oval Office, the Queen chokes up at St. Paul's, David Letterman and Dan Rather sob on CBS, New Yorkers weep openly for their slain fireman, but the dead-eyed zombies of the peace movement who claim to love everyone parade through the streets unmoved, a breed apart.