Profiles in Terror

[question everything]

Profiles in Terror

A Detailed Look at al Qaeda's Founders And the U.S. Agents Who Saw the Threat
By PETER BERGEN
August 11, 2006; Page W1

The announcement in London yesterday of the dismantling of a major terror plot against American passenger flights between Britain and the U.S. provided fresh evidence that the threat of terrorism -- whether inflicted by the militant jihadist movement al Qaeda or inspired by it -- is still very much with us. The arrival, then, of Lawrence Wright's "The Looming Tower," a deeply researched history of al Qaeda, is welcome and timely. This is a largely Egyptian and Saudi tale, one that Mr. Wright intercuts with the stories of the small group of U.S. officials who early on understood the threat posed by the group. Mr. Wright focuses on the decisions made by certain individuals rather than on the play of great impersonal forces. At one point he considers "whether 9/11 or some other similar tragedy might have happened without bin Laden to steer it." His answer: "Certainly not. The tectonic plates of history were certainly shifting, promoting a period of conflict between the West and the Arab Muslim world; however, the charisma and vision of a few individuals shaped the nature of the contest."

One of those individuals was Sayyid Qutb, a nebbishy Egyptian writer who arrived in Greeley, Colo., in 1946 to attend college. A priggish intellectual, Qutb found the U.S. to be racist and sexually promiscuous, an experience that left him with a lifelong contempt for the West. "Instead of becoming liberalized by his experience in America, he returned even more radicalized," Mr. Wright says. Once in Egypt again, Qutb joined the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood and was later jailed and tortured. In jail Qutb wrote his manifesto, "Milestones," which would become the primer for jihadist movements around the Muslim world. He insisted there that jihad be conducted offensively against the enemies of Islam. What was revolutionary was his insistence that Islam's enemies included Muslim governments that did not implement true sharia law. As Mr. Wright explains, Qutb wanted secular Middle Eastern governments excommunicated from the Muslim community. That process of declaring other Muslims to be apostates is known as takfir. It would become a key al Qaeda doctrine.

There would be no more eager student of Qutb's writings than a cerebral, prickly Egyptian doctor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who founded his first jihadist cell when he was 15 and who would go on to become the number two in al Qaeda. In 1981, Zawahiri was imprisoned and tortured by Egyptian authorities just as Qutb had been, an experience that further radicalized him. Mr. Wright notes that "one line of thinking proposes that America's tragedy on September 11 was born in the prisons of Egypt." As Zawahiri was serving out his prison sentence in the early 1980s, a small number of Arabs were volunteering for the war in Afghanistan against the Soviet occupation, among them a shy Saudi millionaire, Osama bin Laden.

(snip)

It was a marriage of convenience that would have hellish consequences. The doctrine of takfir would take organizational shape in al Qaeda, which bin Laden and a group of Egyptian militants founded in 1988 to install Taliban-style theocracies around the Muslim world. In the unipolar world of the 1990s, al Qaeda's leaders believed that they had only one force standing in their way -- "the far enemy," the U.S. While bin Laden was based in Sudan in the early and mid-1990s, al Qaeda slowly became operational -- sending men to Somalia, for instance, to fight U.S. forces stationed in the country. It was at the tail end of al Qaeda's sojourn in Sudan in 1996 that U.S. counter-terrorism officials got their first big break. Jamal al Fadl, an early member of the group, defected. His debriefer was Daniel Coleman, Mr. Wright says, a "scholarly and inquisitive" FBI agent who "concluded that al Qaeda was a world-wide terrorist organization dedicated to destroying America."

(snip)


Mr. Bergen, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, is the author of "The Osama bin Laden I Know" (Free Press).

URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115525828290232903.html(subscription)

[catmother]

1. so it all started with a nebbish who didn't like our country and

our ways. that's not a good enough reason to want to kill all of us.

i think many of these jihadists are sexually repressed men who channel that unused energy into violence. just one look at mohammad atta tells it all. the guy looked like a homosexual. probably harbored all that guilt about his real feelings.

maybe i'm not making sense. it's late and i'm tired, but it's just MHO.:eyes:

[question everything]

2. They are depressed, alright, and frustrated

which, I think, is true of all religious zealots - of all stripes. They have dreams and when they are not fulfilled, they search for someone to blame, and to take action. In the Middle East - and in other countries - they join terrorist organization; in this country they listen to Limbaugh who himself, obviously, has his own feelings of sexual inadequacy.

This is why the idea of conscription of young man was always so acceptable and successful: channel those surging hormones into basic training, at least.

And one mistake that the secular Arab countries have done was to neglect the medical attention, shelters and schools to the very poor - which provided fertile ground for terrorist organizations to thrive, and to recruit.

Instead, they were happy that someone is taking care of them.

[catmother]

3. you may want to start another thread with this topic. sometimes

things posted late at night get "lost". it's a very interesting subject.