"There were no innocent people in those skyscrapers" - Chilling view from the other side

Douab, Afghanistan -- A cherub-faced foot soldier for Osama bin Laden and radical Islam, Obaidur Rahman paused to consider whether more than 6,000 people deserved to die when hijacked airliners crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the Pennsylvania countryside last month.

"There were no innocent people in those skyscrapers," said Rahman, with chilling earnestness.

The hijackers who carried out last month's catastrophic attacks are dead. Their accomplices are under arrest or on the run. Yet here, in a remote prison in rebel-controlled northern Afghanistan, Rahman and other inmates provided clues to their thinking.

For these Islamic militants, the guilt or innocence of Americans and hundreds of other foreigners killed in the attack is no issue.

In a world they view as a battleground between believers and infidels, there are no shades of complicity, only good versus evil. The Sept. 11 assault on the United States was a victory in a war, and an occasion only for rejoicing.

"When I heard the news, I was happy. I thought, Muslims are becoming strong," Rahman said, fingering a string of brown prayer beads, his legs shackled in thick iron manacles.

And if his fellow Muslim extremists are responsible for mailing anthrax-treated letters to U.S. journalists and lawmakers? "All the better," he said.

If Rahman, 22, shows little ability to parse guilt and innocence, it is because the world as he knows it has been sharply divided into believers and non-believers ever since he can remember.

Born in Yemen, on the Arabian peninsula, to parents who were farmers, Rahman attended an Islamic religious school. There, he was imbued with the fiery teachings of Abdul Majid Zandani, the head of Yemen's Iman University who advocates a return to an austere, early brand of Islam. Rahman and other students were urged to wage war against infidels for the survival of their faith.

Few exhortations were needed. While most non-Muslims know little, if anything, about Afghanistan, Rahman and many other Muslim youth viewed it as a shining symbol of empowerment.

In the 1980s, up to 25,000 Arab and Muslim young men had answered the call to converge on Afghanistan and help expel the occupying Soviet Red Army. With the aid of Pakistan, the United States and Saudi Arabia, they succeeded brilliantly.

Ten years later, Afghanistan beckoned another generation of Muslim youth -- this time not to fight Soviet soldiers but to help establish "pure" Islamic states worldwide.

"There was no question of becoming a farmer like my father. My decision was to fight pagans," Rahman said.

With the financial help of local businessmen, Rahman says, he traveled first to Karachi, Pakistan, then to a military training camp operated by bin Laden's al-Qaida network near the Afghan city of Khost. After he learned to shoot a Kalashnikov automatic rifle, he was deployed alongside his religious kinsmen, the ruling Taliban militia, to fight the opposition Northern Alliance.

Five years later, Rahman's contempt for the United States is unabated, his scorn rooted in what he says are America's evil policies toward the Islamic world -- its persecution of Iraq, its support of Israelis over Palestinians and the presence of 5,000 U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, the site of the Prophet Mohammed's birth and death.

The ambition that burns inside remains unquenched: to wage holy war against infidels, free Islamic countries from the grip of U.S. influence and help fundamentalist Muslims from the Philippines to Chechnya establish true Islamic governments. The source of his inspiration is simple, he said: "The Prophet Mohammed and the Koran tell us to wage jihad against pagan peoples."

Rahman believes ordinary Americans are guilty because they are accomplices of anti-Muslim policies carried out in their name. But not all of his fellow prisoners believe the calculus is quite that straightforward.

Mistakes have been made, said Salhuddin Khalid, a 27-year-old Pakistani who also fought on the side of the Taliban until he was taken captive by Northern Alliance forces five years ago.

The deaths of at least 229 Kenyans and Tanzanians in car-bomb attacks on the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998 were an "accident," the bespectacled Khalid said. Twelve Americans were killed in the blasts, which U.S. officials say were masterminded by bin Laden.

As for last month's attacks, Khalid said the complicity of the victims in anti-Islamic policies was insignificant compared to the responsibility of the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. military.

Still, he insisted, the deaths of Americans in the Twin Towers and on hijacked planes were merely the moral equivalent of a landmark event in another war. "Lots of innocent people were killed by the atomic bomb that America dropped on Hiroshima," he said.

In the deadly serious world of Rahman and Khalid, the end justifies the means. Both said they would once again join the holy war if they are ever released.

At that time, they said, no exceptions would be made for unsympathetic Muslims, let alone acquaintances who fall on the wrong side of their rigid view of life and pious mission.

That was evident as Rahman's visitor prepared to leave the prison and asked him a final question, this one hypothetical.

If he were piloting a hijacked civilian airliner bound for an attack on the World Trade Center and were told that his visitor, an American, were working on the 82nd floor of the skyscraper, would he still crash the airplane into the building?

Armor is an inefficient solution exposing large numbers of our troops to unnecessary risk. I would prefer more efficient (i.e. more dead Terrorists for the cost) lower risk solutions, such as those used to abruptly change Japanese attitudes towards continuing the Pacific War.

Someone in another post pointed out that the first terrorism against the United States was perpetrated by the Indians (excuse me, native Americans), first encouraged by the French, then by the British. Someone should point out to the Arab world just how we solved that terrorist problem over a couple of centuries, especially when it was difficult to tell "good Indians" from "bad Indians" [q.v. Gen. Sheridan's famous statement at Ft. Union in 1869: The only 'good Indians' I ever saw were dead.]

As the words to the patriotic song at the beginning of WWII went, in part: We've done it before, and we can do it again!

Which once again leads us to an inescapable conclusion: the only way we will ever destroy terrorism (sometimes called "asymmetric" warfare) is to actively replace these cultures that espouse violent opposition to us. This means "change of government ceremonies" imposed at the muzzles of an M1A1 tanks and seeking out and finding these "teachers" among them that get young people filled with this kind of aberrant value system and eliminating them. Then we have to get democracy and prosperity for them, just like we did for Germany and Japan after we readjusted their attitudes.

I agree with your assessment, but I see it as an impossible task. Once you remove one leader another will take his place...just like they would here at home.

This is a war between Christianity and Islam for the struggle to exist, and it will be waged until the world in thrown so far back into the Dark Ages that neither side is able to wage it anymore.

IMHO, the Crusades never ended and they will shake the world next...

If you want to see some chilling daily "news" each day, check out the online version of the Tehran Times from Iran, www.tehrantimes.com, as it seems to me their propoganda machine is revving up those fanatic Muslims. Here's today's front page "story":

Use of Biological Weapons Against Afghans Possible

TEHRAN TIMES INTL. DESK

TEHRAN Sources in Germany say that the United States is purchasing the components to develop biological and chemical weapons, raising fears of the usage of bio-chemical weapons against Afghans in the current supposed U.S. war against terrorism.

On Tuesday, German Interior Minister Otto Schilly was quoted as saying that Germany exported the weapons' raw materials to the United States. The estimated value of the components was 77 million marks.

In related news, German Defense Minister Rudolf Scharping has stated that Germany's biological and chemical weapon production potential is rapidly increasing.

Fear of attacks in Germany has sparked off a run on gas masks in some areas, a military supply shop manager said Tuesday.

Marianne Ohrem of the NATO shop for German Army supplies in the western city of Duesseldorf said that wholesalers have sold out their gas mask inventories due to dramatically increased demand.

"Since the attacks, we have sold nearly 200 gas masks in Duesseldorf alone," she said, adding that sales had previously averaged two per year.

Duesseldorf has a population of 580,000.

Ohrem said that customers cited fear of chemical or biological attacks when buying the protective gear.

But she acknowledged that she could not guarantee that the masks would offer protection from all dangerous substances.

Meanwhile, Australia's leading authority on terrorism said Tuesday that the anthrax attacks now spreading terror through the United States are unlikely to have had anything to do with Osama bin Laden.

Clive Williams, a specialist in terrorism at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, said the evidence points to right-wing U.S. militia.

"I think the first instances of it, the ones involving media, were more likely to have been caused by extremist militia in the U.S. who have shown an interest in anthrax in the past and tried to acquire it," he told AFP.

"The subsequent instances were basically copy-cat episodes by mentally unbalanced people, I believe."

Williams, widely acknowledged as Australia's leading authority on the subject, is preparing a graduate course in terrorism for the ABU's Strategic and Defense Studies Center.

Speaking 24 hours after Australia was plunged into chaos and panic because of a series of hoaxes involving "suspicious" packages of white powder, he said Australia, in reality, is in little danger from bio-terrorist attack.

However, up to 16 buildings were evacuated on Monday because of hoax packages and authorities reported dozens more were received on Tuesday.

He said that the U.S. attacks have involved the use of a form of anthrax readily available to scientists and researchers.

A photo editor died on October 5 from respiratory anthrax at American Media Inc. in Boca Raton, Florida.

Three other people who have since developed the disease were employees of media companies, triggering suspicions of a bio-terrorist campaign.

"There were no innocent people in those skyscrapers" - Chilling view from the other side

In the West, we have the underlying, unspoken, and often unconscious concept that all men everywhere equally stand in relationship to some kind of moral law. Now, we take into consideration the fact that a person's background or education or mental capability or age may make judgment necessary in certain cases to determine just how severely those individuals are to be judged, something akin to a handicap, but nevertheless, we have an idea that there is some general, basic, set of moral expectations that can be lived up to by any human being anywhere. That is, all humans are members of a single group and capable, at least, of bringing themselves into conformity to that basic moral law. Any particular nation's laws overlap this set of expectations to varying extents and are often taken by individuals living in these societies of being equivalent to them. Individuals who are unable in and of themselves of bringing themselves into conformity with these expectations (moral or legal) may be classed as mentally unfit. Those who are developmentally not yet likely to be able to do this are classed as children. Those who just plain refuse to do this are moral reprobates, sinners, or criminals (depending on which set of expectations are focused on). Those who are new to a particular region and are just plain unaware of them and make an infraction but otherwise would not have had they known are often classified as foreigners or barbarians or worldly (again depending on the focus).

Those of us who belong to this Western tradition believe to some degree that merely being born into a group--a family, a language group, a nation, even a religion--does not automatically make one guilty of things done by other members of that group.

This, however, is not how some groups throughout the world think and many more have thought throughout most of history. In their way of thinking, they are the human beings, they are "the people" (as their own language's name for themselves often indicates), they are the true people of Allah, and everyone else, just because they weren't born into their group, is not. Because of this, none of these other people are to be treated in any way other than what will facilitate the goals of one's own group, the truly human group. This type of thinking appears to be the default setting of the human heart. It is the core of tribalism. It is not restricted to the technologically unsophisticated because the same type of thinking was the foundation of Communism (forging the new soviet man) and Naziism (the true Aryan was only worthy of life and full membership in society). The two major religions that are absent this type of thinking are Judaism and Christianity (though you could make an argument that classical Buddhism is similar). Judaism still maintains that they are the chosen people of G-d (and I think that is true for specific historical and religious reasons), but they have not, for thousands of years, assumed this to mean that they have carte blanche to take out other groups with impunity (regardless of the propaganda of the Palestinians which is just plain factually, historically inaccurate). Even in the earliest documents of Judaism the people are told by G-d himself to treat strangers in their society well because they were once strangers in a strange land. And if those people desired to live among them, they were allowed to with no more restrictions than those laid on the people themselves. And if those people desired to convert, they could do so. Christianity made the distinction that morally everyone stood before G-d in exactly the same position, Jew and Gentile alike, Greek, barbarian, male, female. In fact, it is this tradition that underlies our "modern" concept of the family of man.

Islam, however, does not embody this concept. Radical Islamic groups certainly do not. There is just The Group. All outside the group is against the group. All outside the group is in and of itself an enemy of the group. Innocent is defined as being part of The Group. Simply to NOT be a member of The Group is to be guilty of everything that the enemy of The Group is trying to do against it. Simply being outside The Group is to be its enemy and worthy of whatever The Group deems necessary to advance its own goals. Combine this thinking with the conviction that everything they are doing they are doing for and with the approval of the supreme moral power and you've got something that represents extreme danger for everyone else in the world.

All outside the group is against the group. All outside the group is in and of itself an enemy of the group. Innocent is defined as being part of The Group. Simply to NOT be a member of The Group is to be guilty of everything that the enemy of The Group is trying to do against it. Simply being outside The Group is to be its enemy and worthy of whatever The Group deems necessary to advance its own goals. Combine this thinking with the conviction that everything they are doing they are doing for and with the approval of the supreme moral power and you've got something that represents extreme danger for everyone else in the world.

This is probably partly why a psychologist I knew about 20 years ago said that most Middle Eastern Muslim males could be classified as clinically insane (or course, getting circumcized as an older child (it varies with the Muslim group) and the culture and mentality built up around that probably has a lot to do with that, too). Funny that you don't hear circumcision foes hitting the Muslims for ritual mutilation but only the Jews. Consider, what would the difference be in psychological impact of circumcision on the 8th day (Jews) versus circumcision in childhood (Muslims), the premium being put on submitting to it (Islam=surrender, submission) without showing a sign of pain or suffering, being a celebration that children can hear stories about and grow up anticipating?

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