Posted on 10/14/2001 8:57:59 AM PDT by Brian Mosely
Sunday October 14, 11:50 am Eastern Time
NEW YORK, Oct. 14 /PRNewswire/ -- The FBI has evidence from ``technical sources'' that Al Qaeda terrorist leaders in Afghanistan have placed at least four calls to telephone numbers in the United States since the September 11 devastation of New York's World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, Newsweek has learned. The prevailing theory agents are following up is that Osama bin Laden was trying to activate more terror cells hiding in the U.S., but the phone calls haven't yet produced new leads, writes Senior Writer Jeffrey Bartholet in the October 22 issue of Newsweek (on newsstands Monday, October 15). One target number that was tracked down turned out to be The New York Times.
Bin Laden's aim is not simply to terrorize America, writes Bartholet. The attacks on civilians are a means to an end, which is to overthrow or ``reform'' regimes across the Muslim world. According to a 1999 FBI memo obtained by Newsweek, bin Laden's desire to ``cleanse'' the Persian Gulf region is just a start. ``He envisions installing a worldwide Islamic government with himself as the caliph.'' The memo also noted that investigators had ``revealed a limited network of bin Laden associates in the United States,'' but warned darkly that ``a larger U.S. presence is anticipated.'' The CIA estimates that up to 20,000 volunteers have passed through bin Laden's training camps in Afghanistan since 1995, reports Bartholet, and even if only a quarter of those people are active now, that's a lot of true believers indoctrinated in bin Laden's extremist interpretations of Islam.
The FBI and the CIA have full-time teams probing bin Laden's mystique and his methods. The most urgent question concerns his Al Qaeda network, and its ability to find and recruit 19 men to join a mass suicide plot to kill thousands of civilians. ``If we had to sit down and do the psychological vetting to find people like that, we'd never get 19 out of 19,'' says a former senior intelligence officer for the CIA, who specialized in Afghan operations. ``But I don't think they vetted 5,000 people to find the 19. I think there are hundreds of potential fanatics within bin Laden's grasp, willing to give up their lives at his command.''
Most volunteers appear to be Arab or Pakistani, but they've also included Europeans, Chinese, Chechens, and Muslims from Southeast Asia. Some are peasants, others have advanced degrees. Al Qaeda vets volunteers and assigns them to different camps, and eventually gives them marching orders. Some of the volunteers are placed in bin Laden's 055 brigade in Afghanistan, where they fight alongside the fundamentalist Taliban militia. Others have been sent to hotspots like Chechnya and Bosnia. Still others are trained in terror skills, including bomb making, assassination and sabotage, and are encouraged to settle in the West, Asia or Africa. They might set up an Islamic relief organization, an import-export company or a computer business. Sometimes they get help from Al Qaeda operatives to acquire documents like asylum papers or visas, or even false passports.
Sometimes the vetting involves psychological screening. One Tajik who signed up to fight communists described, for a friend, how he failed one such test. His handlers put him in a room and told him to wait there until someone came for him. He waited two days and part of a third, at which time the handlers came and told him he had failed. When the surprised Tajik asked what he had done wrong, he was told that he pulled back a window curtain several times to look outside -- a sign of psychological weakness. Al Qaeda wanted someone who would sit without stirring, at peace with himself, until he was called to the task at hand.
Often, Al Qaeda recruits locals who are given specific duties, but little other information about the operation they're involved in. One of the participants in the 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Dar es Salaam was a Tanzanian grocery clerk named Khalfan Muhamed. He became involved with terrorism at his local mosque, where he was introduced to the idea that he was part of the worldwide Islamic community and had obligations to fellow Muslims who were suffering in warzones like Bosnia. Muhamed later went into training camps in Afghanistan and hoped to become a warrior for God in the Balkans or in Chechnya. But he never joined Al Qaeda and was disappointed when he was told his training was over and that he should go back home. But more than a year later an Al Qaeda operative approached him on a ferry and asked if he wanted to help with ``a jihad job.'' He handled local logistics including a safe house and rental car for the Tanzanian bombers and was not told of the target until a few days before the bombings. And while Al Qaeda operatives left the country when the mission was done, Muhamed was left behind to clean up.
1. the UN
2. the Media
3. the DNC
4. the ACLU
message: keep up the good work!
Hmmmmm....and people wonder why Muslims might be "profiled."
What?
Who are the four people who got the calls? Those are leads. Those are people that are tailed 24 hours a day from now on until it becomes necessary to incarcerate them.
Same goes for everyone they come in contact with.
And isn't it nice for Newsweak to let the 4 people who got the calls know that the US Law Enorcement also knows?
How 'bout the one to Jessie Jackson, to invite him to come over and talk?
I hope so free but sometimes I think I'm just talkin to myself!
Number 5!
thanks in advance
Those being terrorised or the terrorists? - in the 911 case I would say the terrorists were not ignorant - but those they terrorised were and perhaps still are. (no offence intended so don't flame me)
for example bin Laden is a pediatrician ( paediatrician) and went to Oxford
Who else went to Oxford and was it at the same time ??
"its the media DNC Hollywood ACLU UN etc - stupid!" - (this is a quote so don't take it personal)
Wake up America the enemy is within!
Right its time for tea I'm off my soapbox now!
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.
Right! LOL! And didn't Jesse "Reparations" Jackson just say that we weren't doing enough to help "the childruuuunnnn"? Which children?
I have an idea! Let's make Jesse the "Minister of Reparations"!!! He has the most shake-down experience out there today. We can put him in charge of getting reparations from the terrorists for the children of the parents who died in the WTC attack!!
After that, he can go after them for reparations for American businesses and citizens who have suffered economic loss since 9-11.
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