Posted on 09/18/2005 2:20:51 PM PDT by FairOpinion
The article is a book review, of the book The Martyr's Oath: The Apprenticeship of a Homegrown Terrorist, By Stewart Bell
A decade ago, when I was investigating counter-terrorism cases for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), our targets were just as murderous as today, but they were decidedly less suicidal. However twisted, their operations were designed with at least enough pragmatic restraint that the terrorist could hope to emerge unscathed. The current generation of terrorist embraces martyrdom, that oddly archaic end that suggests dying for a cause is equivalent to achieving it.
Who chooses terrorism and the hope for death over anything this life has to offer?
In pursuing the answer to this question, National Post reporter Stewart Bell tells the story of Mohammed Mansour Jabarah, a Kuwaiti-Canadian who decided at the age of 14 to become an Islamic holy warrior. The portrait that emerges in The Martyr's Oath is frequently obscure, but nonetheless captivating.
Jabarah was not the product of some squalid refugee camp or an oppressive regime. He grew up in middle-class St. Catharines, Ont., his father a service station owner, his mother a lawyer. He hadn't suffered any traumatic discrimination. He spoke English and was at home in the West. He held the promise to be anything he wished. Bell proposes, "He would have made an excellent addition to the Canadian military, intelligence service or police." Fluent Arabic-speakers who understand Muslim culture are prized recruits.
But Jabarah would choose a path to the extreme opposite pole, falling under the influence of a radical cleric during his summer visits to family in Kuwait. In 2000, he made his way to Pakistan and on to the al-Qaeda training camps across the border in Afghanistan. There, he was so successful that he was given advanced training offered only to the very best students. He met with, and reportedly impressed, Osama bin Laden. After brief exposure to the fight against the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, Jabarah moved on to Karachi, where he was given a mission by Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the infamous mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.
Jabarah's assignment was to conduct surveillance of the U.S. and Israeli embassies in Manila in preparation for a bomb assault. But the targets were deemed too difficult, and the scheme abandoned. Following 9/11, he landed in Singapore, where he became the key logistician for a plot to detonate six suicide bombs at six different locations associated with Western embassies, businesses and military facilities. However, he and his co-conspirators caught the attention of Singapore's ubiquitous Internal Security Department. Though he got away, the authorities were on to him and he was eventually arrested in Oman.
Because of his citizenship, he was deported back to Canada, where CSIS was anxious to speak with him. He was courted by an officer to whom his father bitterly refers as "the cunning Mike." In truth, as Bell relates it, Mike performed masterfully, building rapport, winning Jabarah's trust and extracting reams of intelligence about al-Qaeda before convincing him to turn himself over to U.S. authorities. For Jabarah had committed no indictable offence against Canada. However, by conspiring to kill Americans, he was prosecutable in the United States. Today he sits in a Manhattan detention centre, facing an indeterminate sentence.
Bell has done an admirable investigative job in amassing so much detail about Jabarah's terrorist recruitment and activities. He accessed classified material and spoke at length to Jabarah's father, who sways pathetically between lamenting the decisions made by his son and blaming intelligence officials for his fate. It's unfortunate that Bell was denied the opportunity to speak with Jabarah, but given the letters he quotes at some length, I suspect such conversations would have yielded only self-righteous soliloquies about perceived injustices in place of genuine insight.
Jabarah did not turn to jihad out of desperation, but as a deliberate expression of his ideals and dreams. He was raised in Canada, but pledged allegiance to bin Laden. We don't really know that he was prepared to die, but we are certain he was ready to kill. I came away from the book feeling that there is still a deep void at Jabarah's core, which is not a negative reflection on the book so much as reinforcement of the sense that hardcore terrorists are so alien to the values most Westerners are raised to cherish as to be incomprehensible. Resourceful reporters like Bell can meticulously reconstruct a chain of events, but the essence of the character, the configuration of the synapses that compels the behaviour, remain inexplicable.
Tod Hoffman is a former Canadian Security Intelligence Service officer. The author of three volumes, he is at work on a book about Chinese espionage.
Religion of peace....
They can bite my incredibly large backside
The crimes of islam:
http://flanstein.blogspot.com
He probably grew up reading the Globe and Mail and watching the CBC.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.