underpinning of fundamentalist Islamic terrorism is the religion itself.
http://tinyurl.com/3l5rfko The Atrocity of 9/11, 10 Years: That Terrible Day <http://www.rightsidenews.com/2011090414424/editorial/us-opinion-and-editori al/the-atrocity-of-911-10-years-that-terrible-day.html> Sunday, 04 September 2011 05:00 John Miller <http://www.rightsidenews.com/component/option,com_mailto/link,7556bf3cb4e75 8f632f8cdab2b4280894923e4db/tmpl,component/> E-mail <http://www.rightsidenews.com/2011090414424/editorial/us-opinion-and-editori al/the-atrocity-of-911-10-years-that-terrible-day/print.html> Print <http://www.rightsidenews.com/pdf/2011090414424/editorial/us-opinion-and-edi torial/the-atrocity-of-911-10-years-that-terrible-day.pdf> PDF a view from half a world away At my time of life, some historic events have been etched into my life but perhaps none more so than 9/11. I was working late in my little office conducting some basic research with my TV on in the background tuned to a black-and-white film, which is and was eminently forgettable. My wife had retired to bed and the house was quiet. The sound on the TV was low, until out of the corner of my eye, I saw the program had turned to color and swiveled in my chair. The feed was directly from America's ABC and the picture was just in time to see the second Boeing 757 slice into the World Trade Center. The commentary was American until a local night shift anchor with a couple of experts in tow attempted to make sense out of the proceedings. I sat glued to TV and then moved to where I could watch on a larger screen. I had one of those dreadful "WTF" moments as my overpowered senses watched the horror unfold and the towers collapse. I got no sleep that night and like many people around the world, in a single instant, I counted myself as an American, which was not particularly hard as I had many American friends and thoroughly enjoyed my visits to New York. Over the next 36 hours, I had every news outlet covered, while at the same time recording is much as I could for posterity. The orientation of my work shifted almost immediately to an examination of fundamentalist Islam and the notions of jihad. Regrettably I don't speak Arabic but in this case it was not necessary. As I disciplined myself to a regimen of less sleep and a massive collection of information from public sources, the names Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden were being heard increasingly frequently. I was shocked to the core but not paralysis and within a couple of days, my help was being solicited by someone attempting to write a book on the attack and the menace of fundamentalist Islam. These words are potentially politically incorrect but they describe accurately the nature of the beast. I watched hours of TV including the cleanup and the visceral reaction of President George W. Bush. I was struck by his fatigue but steely eyes and on his face I saw signs of shock determination. For many he was regarded as a national political joke but his speech following the attack was a masterpiece of brevity combined with emotion for the nation and perhaps the wider world. It occupies a place of honor in my video library. Apart from the horror and tragedy of the losses, the accounts of bravery on Flight 93 and the omnipresent TV footage every night my initial shock grew into great sympathy for the U.S. and its people but it also evoked a great sense of anger. Coming from a country which was no stranger to war and remembering the air raids only too well, I could only feel a new sense of purpose because unlike many, I had read with interest the works of Samuel P. Huntington on the "Clash of Civilizations" and as they say in this part of the world, it appeared that he was: "right on the money." I soon found my mailbox packed with publications and also requests for assistance in the preparation of a book. One particularly persistent writer, a long-standing acquaintance wanted my assistance in analyzing the role played by the ostensible leader of the attacks, Mohammed Atta. Before I could instil meaning into the whole affair, I had to know more about Osama bin Laden, his background and Al Qaeda. It is no exaggeration to say I burned the midnight oil in my attempts to cover territory and arguments, which in my world, and until that point, could best be described as of marginal interest. I had known that bin Laden had fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan and I knew quite a lot about the arming of the mujahedin and the role played by the CIA, the UKSIS and the Pakistani ISI. The Soviet incursion into Afghanistan was by that time known to have been highly contentious, opposed by Mikhail Gorbachev and Soviet military intelligence who were overridden by hard-line CPSU cadres and the top echelons of the KGB, most notably Yuri Andropov, known in some circles as the "Butcher of Budapest" for his role in the suppression of the 1956 uprising. Our TV sets had been flooded with glowing accounts of the increasing successes of the Afghan mujahedin and attempts were made to popularize some leaders including the bloodthirsty and despicable Gulbuddin Hekmatayar, little more than a cut-throat bandit, interviewed by an Australian film crew, toying lovingly with Stinger surface to air, antiaircraft missiles. US President Jimmy Carter had some few years before told the US people and by extension allies that we should not be afraid of communism. As I had dealings with defectors, survivors of the gulags and reports from diplomats and fellow intelligence officers, I had no illusions about communism and the Soviet battle plan was to slice through Afghanistan, create an "independent" Baluchistan with a home base and warm water port. There was nothing particularly new about this objective which dated from the days of the Tsars and while President Carter was reeling over the shock of the Soviet incursion and later the bloody coups in Kabul, I wondered quite frequently whether the modern Soviet war machine could succeed where other imperial powers had failed so abysmally. It was a case of feudal tribes people against a mechanized and mobile force supported from the air by bombers and gunships. The Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan and turmoil within the Soviet bloc as we knew it, little thought appeared to have been given to the reconstruction of Afghanistan beyond clearing mines and offering medical assistance. As every Monday morning quarterback in the intelligence world now knows, the arming of the mujahedin had been brilliantly successful and so what if they settled a few scores between themselves along the way. Also etched into my memory was the picture of the so-called popular hero of Afghanistan, General Boris Vsevolovoldich Gromov, being symbolically the last Soviet soldier to leave the soil of that unhappy nation. I'm not going to pretend to be a wiseacre as Americans would have it and say that I expected 9/11. I didn't because it stretched the bounds of credulity that intelligent religious fanatics could use airliners as guided missiles and hit the heart of America, surely a country with a most potent defense. As the death toll mounted and human interest stories came to the fore, the situation became even more heartbreaking. I remembered with great pleasure dining on a waterside barge restaurant looking at the mighty towers in their glory, arguably one of the most pleasant views in New York. I thought of FBI agents and CIA officers with whom I had a working relationship and wondered about the effects on them but I was not in contact with the intelligence world, having retired. I grieved for the lives lost and prayed for the survivors and the relatives of the lost and not for the first time wondered how high the death toll would finally be and how many people would simply be missing presumed killed and those that continue to grieve not knowing. The U.S and allied reaction. I don't want to dwell on what George W. Bush referred to as the global war on terror and the axis of evil except to offer the observation that perhaps strategically Iran might have been a better target than Iraq. The world's mightiest superpower had to take action, swiftly and decisively. Naturally enough, to hunt down and eliminate the almost ephemeral forces of Al Qaeda and related organizations requires boots on the ground and qualities that are almost impossible to quantify especially when it comes to distinguishing between friend and foe in foreign lands. Taking down Saddam Hussein and going after the Taliban committed America and allies to long-term military action and unfortunately there was no substitute for such a course of action. The hearts and minds of people are never purchased with selective terminations and predator drones. Quite recently, the buoyant Leon Panetta, newly installed in Defense suggested that Al Qaeda could be defeated militarily within 6 months. He has been regarded as an optimist by some and a fool by others. Certain aspects of US military action against terrorists have been spectacularly successful, especially with the killing of Osama bin Laden and other leading terrorists. However, this does not in any way guarantee victory in either the short or long term. As I found out working on that book that was never published, the roots of terrorism run deep and are so intertwined with religious beliefs that they have an almost organic property. You can kill off one patch and another springs to life somewhere else. Even the death of the nominal chief of operations of Al Qaeda, Atiyah Abd al-Rahman at the hands of a drone in Pakistan, widely regarded as weakening Al Qaeda further and now denied in some quarters to have actually occurred - i.e. did they get the right man - is almost irrelevant. The nature of the beast. During many years in intelligence, I learned that apart from optimists and pessimists, there was quite a number of contrarians and realists. If the optimist says the glass of wine is half full and the pessimists half empty, the realist knows he will be doing the washing up and the contrarian will wonder why they just didn't drink from the bottle. Thus, we contrarians always believed that Al Qaeda was like the mythical Medusa or hydra -headed monster. Cut off its head and will grow along with tentacles. One of the most intriguing descriptions of Al Qaeda appeared in our own press this week and has much to commend it: the writer describes Al Qaeda like the Medusa but also: "a cancer, a breach in the hull of the ship, a piece of knitting (complex, interwoven at times impenetrable) and a computer virus. It is a burst thermometer, a box of tissues and a balloon (squeeze it in one place and it bulges elsewhere). It resembles a fungus, a sand dune, a cresting wave and a virus (when it appears en masse it indicates something is wrong with a country's immune system). It is a hive of bees that has declared war on a herd of elephants, a media brand, a tool, a plague and a shark that must continually move or perish. And if that's not abstract enough, Al Qaeda is a precept, a way of working, a false multiplier and a modernist or post-modernist phenomenon. I do not know the writer of the piece but in many respects, Joanne Lock, (The Australian August 30, 2011) has managed to define the problem by thinking outside the square. She is absolutely correct in talking about Al Qaeda as an abstraction and abstractions are by their nature speculative and only rarely accompanied by empirical evidence, good intelligence or meaningful data. I regard myself as chastened in some respects when I read Ms Lock's insight that regardless of the expertise of the writer, comparisons are opinion not analysis and academic eminence is no reliable indicator of veracity on matters concerning Al Qaeda. Too right I thought over my third reading. Leaving aside the creative abstractions, do we really know anything about Al Qaeda's organizational model, its size and reach? Definitions abound and I have fought my own lonely battle to prevent the presentation of Al Qaeda as a corporation with the late bin Laden as CEO, a kind of terrorist Ford foundation, a franchised social movement, a federation of Islamist groups and the global tribe waging segmental warfare. I take the view, rather like Ms Lock, that it is a decentralized network of regional affiliates but I take my leave of her argument because the underpinning of fundamentalist Islamic terrorism is the religion itself. For the proclamations of Islam as a religion of peace, try telling that to the survivors of 9/11 and those who have lost sons and daughters serving overseas. However, I commend her argument which deserves to be widely read as a very necessary bucket of cold water on hot heads. Most acutely, she has observed and Al Qaeda and by extension all other fundamentalist Islamic terrorist groups are a product of today's interconnected world. They are not going away. (I'd also add that it's high time we sorted out a uniform and useful transliteration of Arabic - it's long overdue!) Facing the future. A decade on, the security landscape and our concepts of democracy have been changed by laws and intrusive measures; by the exposing and elimination of plots and threats and the number of successful terrorist operations. It is pointless to ask fruitless questions such as: "What would Ronald Reagan do?" Or any other US president for that matter. We have to face the unpalatable fact that our world has changed and not necessarily for the better. We are under siege from without and threat from within and emboldened Islam is on the march under many flags. Western society has become soft, lost its identity, undermined its own freedoms, deserted its faith and roots and encouraged aberrant and deviant behavior claiming them to be normal and there is nothing we can do about it. We have also lost a sense of perspective as evidenced by the host of conspiracy theories that abound on the Internet which "prove" quite conclusively that 9/11 was produced by Steven Spielberg and George Lucas; organized by Mossad and the CIA and that the buildings were constructed to fall apart in the finest traditions of demolition experts. Worst of all in my view is the fact that at the official commemorative service on 9/11, 2011, mainstream religious leaders have been excluded from the ceremony. America is a proud Christian country which reveres its honored dead. The antics of Mayor Bloomberg should be overridden and the underlying principle should be exactly the same as employed in the war against terror - whatever it takes. How dare a petty official deny your rights further? God bless the United States of America and its people. Ref "Al-Qa'ida is still a mystery" The Australian August 30, 2011. 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