You're welcome.
Ayman al-Zawahiri is not just some POS mujahadin. He's the #2 man(well maybe not man, let's say male) in al qaeda, and you could say the driving force behind it.
For more I highly recomend "The Looming Tower" by Lawrence Wright (I don't use the term MUST READ very often, but this book is. I read almost everything i see on the war, and this is one of the best books I've read in the last year.
Hugh Hewitt interviews "The Looming Tower" author Lawrence Wright
Hugh Hewitt Show ^ | 9/22/06
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1706824/posts
Posted on 09/23/2006 4:46:35 AM CDT by Valin
The Looming Tower author, Lawrence Wright The Hugh Hewitt Show 9-22-06 at 6:02 PM
HH: If you’re driving, you’ll want to pull over. If you’re in your house, you’ll want to sit down. For the next two hours, I’m going to talk with Lawrence Wright, author of The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda And The Road To 9/11, about the nature of al Qaeda, where it came from, where it is going, what it did on 9/11, and what it did before and since. It’s a conversation you really don’t want to miss. The Looming Tower is now on best seller lists across the United States, widely hailed as the most comprehensive history of al Qaeda ever put forward. Lawrence Wright is a staff writer at the New Yorker, a fellow at the Center On Law and Security at New York University. He’s the author of five previous books. He’s a graduate of Tulane, and I’m pleased to welcome him. Lawrence Wright, welcome to the Hugh Hewitt Show.
(snip)
HH: There’s one anecdote in here, one bit of history of al Qaeda, which I want to get in before our first break, so that people understand. It’s the boy spies…
LW: Oh, yes.
HH: …about which I’d heard nothing. But it tells us about Egyptian secret police, it tells us about Zawahiri. If you could, in a minute and a half, tell people what that episode was.
LW: In 1995, Zawahiri, the number two guy in al Qaeda, and other Egyptian groups, attempted an assassination on Hosni Mubarek, the Egyptian president. It was part of their long term campaign against the Egyptian state. But that went too far. The Egyptians, the intelligence agencies, went to Sudan, where Zawahiri and his organization, al Jahad, were located. And they enticed a young boy, a 12 year old boy, into coming to watch some videos and have some sodas. And they drugged him and sodomized him and photographed the entire thing. Then, they told him that they were going to turn these photographs over to his father if he didn’t cooperate. That could have been a death sentence for that boy. So he cooperated. He put microphones and listening devices in his parents’ apartment. He brought home papers…he brought papers to the Egyptian spies. And he also recruited another boy, who was subjected to the same degrading treatment. And the Egyptians decided to use these boys to try to assassinate Zawahiri. They actually got them to try to plant a bomb outside an apartment building where Zawahiri and some of his leaders were going to meet. The Sudanese intelligence intercepted this…
- - -
HH: Lawrence Wright, before we went to break, we were telling…you were recounting the story of the boy spies kidnapped in Sudan in 1995 by Egyptian intelligence, sodomized, brutalized, turned against Zawahiri. And what happened to them?
LW: Well, the Sudanese intelligence intercepted this young boy as he was planting a bomb on behalf of the Egyptian intelligence officers. And Zawahiri found out about it, and he demanded to talk to the boys. And the Sudanese willingly handed him over, thinking they were going to get him back. Zawahiri put these two boys on trial. First of all, there was some objection about putting children on trial, but he had them stripped naked to see if they had pubic hair, which was an indication that they were mature enough to stand trial. And then, he convicted them and executed them, and videotaped the entire procedure to distribute among other followers who might be tempted to betray him.
HH: And how old were they?
LW: 12.
HH: To me, both the brutality of the Egyptian secret police, and the brutality of Zawahiri, come through in that in ways that lots of books fail to communicate, and we’ll come back to that.
(snip)