My Interview on Al-Jazeera English TV, Sunday, Sept. 4, 2011

I was interviewed by Al-Jazeera English TV this past Sunday, September 4, 2011, about 9/11 and the U.S. intelligence community. The call came late on Sunday afternoon on the Labor Day three-day weekend so I'm sure I wasn't the first person they called. Be that as it may, I discussed the reasons why the 9/11 attack took the intelligence community by surprise, some of the reforms that have been implemented in the past 10 years, and whether the United States is consequently "safer" than it was 10 years ago.

Bearing in mind that the entire interview lasted 3 minutes, I emphasized that even if the intelligence agencies had been sharing information with each other and even if they had been connecting the dots ― they still would not have anticipated the 9/11 attacks. This was due to ― first of all ― a failure of imagination, as pointed out in the 9/11 Commission report. It was also because of preconceptions and perceptions, and because of bureaucratic and cultural inertia.

The interviewer threw me a curveball at the end of the interview when he asked me if the U.S. was less free as a result of the increased surveillance of Americans because of the intelligence “reforms.” He did have a point but I ended the interview by pointing out that part of the problem was bureaucratic ― and anyone who has worked in a large bureaucracy should know that the U.S. intelligence “community” is far from being a monolithic, agile, omnipotent entity (despite the fevered imaginings and conspiracy theories of both the left and the right on the political spectrum). Another part of the problem is that Congress has not done anything about one of the most important reforms called for by the 9/11 Commission ― to reform itself.

Ten years ago there were approximately 85 Congressional committees and subcommittees that had some oversight function for homeland security. The Commission report emphasized that this state of affairs actually undermined the security of the United States and it decreased ― not increased ― oversight. It recommended that this be reduced to something like a dozen committees and subcommittees at the most. Instead, in one of its few bipartisan efforts in the past 10 years, Congress, in its infinite wisdom, has increased the number of committees to around 92 at last count.

I feel so much safer. NOT!

My interview is introduced by a report by an Al-Jazeera reporter on 9/11 and the U.S. intelligence community, with an emphasis on questioning whether the creation of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has really helped to reform the intelligence community. I referred to that report several times during my interview.

 

They Feed Our Illusions (and my comments)

By Mshari Al-Zaydi

Asharq Alawsat (London)
September 9, 2009

Those who carried out the 11 September 2001 attacks, were they extremist Serbian nationalists, no it was the Israeli Mossad, no, pardon me, it was a US group of Seventh Day Adventists! Not at all, the one who carried out the terrible attacks was the US Central Intelligence Agency [CIA]!

The suggestions and imaginary illusions continue to pour in the direction of evading the real consequences of the reality, which is that those who carried out the 11 September attacks were Muslim youths who believe in a hard-line interpretation of Islam, who are led by Osama Bin Laden, and who are encouraged and were then encouraged by millions of Muslims.

The idea that the Serbs were the ones who carried out the 11 September attacks to take revenge for US interference in the Serbs' war against Bosnia and the Croats was pronounced by Hasanayn Haykal, symbol of Arab political journalists who follow the pan-Arab direction. He said it days after the explosions took place (Lebanese Al-Safir newspaper 1 October 2001).

The idea that the attacks were carried out by the Israeli Mossad (the source of all evils and mysterious events that some people do not have the stamina to investigate and scrutinize) was suggested by the Islamist writer Fahmi Huwaydi, who believed that Al-Qaeda could not carry out such an operation, but the Mossad could (Kuwaiti Al-Watan newspaper 25 September 2001).

As for the idea that the explosions were carried out by a US group called the Seventh Day Adventists, it was pronounced by the presenter of the Science and Belief program, Mustafa Mahmud (Al-Ahram 22 September 2001).

All these suggestions and scenarios indicate the extent of the control of wishful thinking over us. This is because the common factor among all these ideas is to put the responsibility on the shoulders of a party other than the Arab and Muslim party, i.e., a party that is not us. I remember that there were some who spoke of the involvement of the Colombian drug cartels in these attacks. What is important is that the involved side is someone other than us, even if this one is a blue jinn. The owners of these suggestions do not burden themselves with thinking of the events and analyzing them in order to reach the closest possible point to the truth, as the researcher Saqr Abu-Fakhr says in his book, "Religion and the Mob."

From this we can understand the enthusiastic celebrations with which our Arab media, and our semi- and even quarter-intellectuals met the delusions of the French journalist Thierry Missan that what took place on 11 September was merely a "terrifying deception" carried out by the United States itself, and hence it killed 5,000 people, and bombed the Defense Department building and the World Trade Center twin towers!

The main purpose of all these contorted ideas is to kill the questions, and to exonerate the cultural self from responsibility. If the ones who carried out these explosions were Serbs, Mossad, Seventh Day Adventists, Colombian gangs, or the CIA, it would be meaningless to question us about extremism, the culture of fanaticism and religious excess, the need to revise the concepts that establish religious violence, and all this continuous headache of questions that keep hammering on the mind of the society. The matter is easy with these conspiratorial illusions, and presenting critical questions becomes meaningless "intellectual luxury" and verbosity.

With these images, the entire issue is reduced to saying that there are conspiracies that no one knows about except those in the know, but we are a perfect nation with a healthy society, culture, and civilization (where are all these now?!). However, we are targeted and warred upon. We are the main preoccupation of the world. The world wants to oppress us, prevent us from rising, and rob our wealth.

Conspiracy is neither an illusion nor an abstract idea; it is part of the world of politics, and it has happened, and still is happening. The aim is not to deny its existence or to ridicule that it has taken place at certain periods and in specific cases, and that it will take place again, because conspiracy is a part of the practice of political wars. Many people in the world are obsessed by the conspiracy theories, and there are films and novels about this group of people, who do not see anything in front of them other than a conspiracy or a potential conspiracy.

However, in the societies that are free from injured pride, historic-role complex, and regrets of being backward in civilization, they do not allow such group of people to undertake the decision making in important and sensitive issues; in these societies such issues are studied with complete, or as close as possible to complete, objectivity in order to protect the state and the decision making from the impact of fleeting emotional feelings. Even if some hysterical people, such as the journalist Thierry Missan, were to emerge at certain times, as a fleeting fit of hysteria, they soon would fade away in the sea of the ruling rationalism.

However, our situation is the opposite of their situation. We continuously enable these people, listen to them, and rely on anything that anyone says that would tickle our sentiments, and inflame our imagination with sensational conspiracies. The defeat of 1967 was a foreign conspiracy, so were the 1956 aggression and the 1948 catastrophe. The appointment of Anwar al-Sadat as president of Egypt was a conspiracy. Saddam's invasion of Kuwait was a conspiracy, and the West deliberately enticed Saddam into it. Osama Bin Laden is a conspiracy. All the religious fanaticism, and the dozens, even hundreds of suicide bombers, who flood our land with blood and torn bodies, are nothing but tools of a conspiracy that is managed from abroad (the nature and type of this abroad vary according to the prevailing circumstances and enemies).

This type of thinking reflects a deep-rooted perplexity, and a continuous fear of facing up to the naked truth. It is true that facing up to the truth is bitter and painful, but this is temporary bitterness and pain that soon will go away, and putting up with this is better and more beneficial than resorting to intellectual drugs and evasion tricks.

Does this mean self-hatred and shedding one's identity and culture? This question is meaningless, because man cannot shed his skin; if he did he would turn into an appalling freak, or perhaps he would die completely, because the skin is what protects the body, and hence the soul that uses the parts of the body.

Therefore, this question, which is presented always whenever the idea of self-criticism is put forward, is meaningless. If our problem with our prevailing way of thinking were restricted to the 11 September explosions, the situation would be easy, and we would believe the conspiracy theories, be they the Serbian scenario, the Mossad scenario, the Colombian scenario, or even the blue jinn scenario. However, our problem has not been restricted to the story of 11 September. Before and after the 11 September events we have gone through dozens of crises that have led us to this reality, which I do not think pleases any rational Muslim or Arab.

In a nutshell: The solution before we go through any talk or sidelines is that if we do not change our way of thinking we will continue to repeat these saddening distractions in an absurd and tragic way. We repeat the same words at every problem. It is said that you will not get a different result if you are using the same method!

I say these words as in a few days we will commemorate the eighth anniversary of 11 September 2001. We will remember that many of us celebrated it and its deeds, while at the same time the ideas of the conspiracy and the foreign side became widespread. I do not know how we can take pride in a deed, and at the same time we are pleased that someone tells us that there are foreign sides that did that deed, and it was not us!

Abu-al-Ala al-Maarri [famous Arab poet 973-1057 AD] was right when he said: In every generation there are falsehoods to condemn it, has any generation ever been uniquely well-guided?

Mshari Al-Zaydi is a Saudi journalist and expert on Islamic movements and Islamic fundamentalism as well as Saudi affairs. Mshari is Asharq Al-Awsat’s opinion page editor, where he also contributes a weekly column.

Mark says:

One of the strangest (or saddest) justifications by a number of Arab "intellectuals" for believing that the 9/11 attacks had to have been an Israeli Mossad or Mossad-CIA conspiracy was "the fact" that they were obviously the result of excellent discipline and coordination and especially long-term planning. These so-called intellectuals claimed that such features were the obvious hallmarks of the Mossad and/or CIA and could not possibly have been carried out by Arabs who, these "intellectuals" asserted, are incapable of long-term planning, discipline, and coordination.

Upon reading these particular conspiracy mongers, I thought at the time — and until now — that if I or any other Western writer had published such drivel we would have been denounced as racists and worse — perhaps even as Orientalists. But these Arab "intellectuals" — who had spent most of their careers denouncing the sins and crimes of Western colonialism and imperialism and Western neo-colonialism and neo-imperialism and, of course, Zionism — obviously could not perceive the ludicrous ironies that their fevered imaginations had produced.

I must point out that other Arab intellectuals did ridicule and rebuke these particular conspiracy mongers (although some of them still believed that the Mossad and/or CIA was responsible, although not because Arabs were "incapable" of doing such a thing — but that's another story). However, as Mshari Al-Zaydi makes plain in his article above, the spirit is still very much alive and flourishing — including the belief in some quarters that Arabs couldn't have pulled off 9/11 because Arabs are not capable of long-term planning, discipline, and coordination.

What Can We Learn About Mohamed Atta From His Work as a Student of Urban Planning?: Part I (and my comments)

Mark says:

This is the first in a series of articles by Daniel Brook on the connections between urban planning and architecture and the leader of the 9/11 attacks, Muhammad Atta, who did his master's thesis in urban planning at the Hamburg University of Technology in Germany. There are several themes that should hopefully catch your notice in these articles (I will post the succeeding articles in the following days). For example, a number of terms (e.g., Oriental) are used but not always in the "expected" ways. The present is not always just a continuation of the past and many things that we assume always were may actually be relatively recent developments. And what we sometimes assume to be "Islamic" or "Arab" (a reflection of the view that the present is just a continuation of the past) is not necessarily "Islamic" or "Arab" but had their origins elsewhere.

Finally, you will no longer see this kind of reporting when the "mainstream media" goes belly up.


The Architect of 9/11
In Aleppo, Syria, Mohamed Atta thought he could build the ideal Islamic city.

By Daniel Brook

Slate.com
September 8, 2009

A month after 9/11, Fouad Ajami wrote in the New York Times Magazine, "I almost know Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian [at] the controls of the jet that crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center." While the Middle East scholar had never met the lead hijacker, Ajami knew his type: the young Arab male living abroad, tantalized by yet alienated from Western modernity, who retreats into fundamentalist piety.

Eight years after 9/11, we still almost know Mohamed Atta. We can almost see him, a gaunt and spectral figure making his way through Hamburg's red-light district en route to his radical storefront Al-Quds Mosque. We still vividly recall his ominous visa photograph. But the man in that photograph remains a cipher, his eyes vacant. How did those eyes see the world?

We'll never know for sure, but part of the answer may lie in a document he left behind, one that has strangely gone largely unexamined: his master's thesis in urban planning. While the bulk of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi Arabian street toughs tapped for their brawn, Atta was chosen for his brains. Trained as an architect in his native Egypt, he went on to pursue a master's degree in city planning at the Hamburg University of Technology, in Germany.

In the climate after 9/11, when attempts to understand the terrorists were often seen as apologies for them, the thesis Atta wrote was not given close scrutiny. Newsweek, among other outlets, reported that the thesis lashed out at the imposition of modernist high-rise buildings on Arab cities, but only its chilling dedication — "My prayer and my sacrifice and my life and my death belong to Allah, Lord of the worlds" — got wide coverage. When the British Prospect magazine sent a reporter to Hamburg a few months after Sept. 11, she dismissed out of hand the idea that Atta's academic work was worth considering. After securing an interview with Atta's thesis adviser, professor Dittmar Machule, the reporter concluded it was "ludicrous that Atta's ideas on how to preserve an old quarter of Aleppo are regarded as a window into his terrorist's mind." Machule bolstered this impression, telling the Associated Press that the thesis had "no anti-Americanism, no anti-Zionism, no anti-Christianity, just good thinking."

Perhaps the subject — the architecture of a little-known Syrian city — sounded too esoteric to be relevant. But it always struck me as a missed opportunity to understand Atta — and, perhaps, to understand what led him to commit his hideous crime. So I went to Hamburg to see what I could learn about the thesis. I then retraced Atta's academic research across three continents, interviewing those who knew him as an urban-planning student and trying to see the places I visited through Atta's eyes — those of a keen architectural observer wearing ideological blinders.

I met with professor Machule at his office in Hamburg, where he keeps the only known copy of Atta's thesis under lock and key. While Machule acknowledges that publishing the document would be in the public interest, he worries Atta's father, a retired EgyptAir attorney who maintains his son's innocence, would sue if the document were published without family consent. But Machule was willing to walk through the thesis with me. I sat in the spot where Atta gave his thesis defense in 1999, and together we made our way through the German document section by section. Machule translated portions of it and responded to my questions. The thesis was also heavy on visuals — photographs, maps, and sketches of proposed redevelopments.

The subject of the thesis is a section of Aleppo, Syria's second city. Atta describes decades of meddling by Western urban planners, who rammed highways through the neighborhood's historic urban fabric and replaced many of its once ubiquitous courtyard houses with modernist high-rises. Atta calls for rebuilding the area along traditional lines, all tiny shops and odd-angled cul-de-sacs. The highways and high-rises are to be removed — in the meticulous color-coded maps, they are all slated for demolition. Traditional courtyard homes and market stalls are to be rebuilt.

For Atta, the rebuilding of Aleppo's traditional cityscape was part of a larger project to restore the Islamic culture of the neighborhood, a culture he sees as threatened by the West. "The traditional structures of the society in all areas should be re-erected," Atta writes in the thesis, using architectural metaphors to describe his reactionary cultural project. In Atta's Aleppo, women wouldn't leave the house, and policies would be carefully crafted so as not to "engender emancipatory thoughts of any kind," which he sees as "out of place in Islamic society."

The subtitle of the thesis is Neighborhood Development in an Islamic-Oriental City, and the use of that anachronistic term — Islamic-Oriental city — is telling. The term denotes a concept rooted in 19th-century European Orientalism, according to which Islamic civilization and Western civilization are entirely distinct and opposite: The dynamic, rational West gallops toward the future while the backward East remains cut off from foreign influence, exclusively defined by Islam, and frozen in time. In his academic work, Atta takes the Orientalist conceit of two distinct civilizations, one superior, the other inferior, and simply flips the chauvinism from pro-Western to pro-Muslim.

Today, the "Islamic-Oriental city" is a teetering intellectual edifice that survives only on the right-wing fringes of academic Middle East studies, in the imagination of tourists seeking to experience the "authentic" Thousand and One Nights Arabia, and, as Atta's work makes clear, in the minds of Islamist radicals. Ironically, there could hardly be better evidence for the fallaciousness of the "Islamic-Oriental city" concept than the urban history of Aleppo and specifically of its Bab al-Nasr neighborhood, the old city quarter that Atta describes — and egregiously misinterprets — in his thesis.

Professor Machule told me he found Atta's reactionary plans for the neighborhood impractical but not objectionable. "He made a proposal for a design which seems to be from the 17th century," Machule said. "I would say this is not realistic, these are dreams. But why should young people not have dreams?" Atta's ideas about the role of women conflicted with Machule's sensibilities, but the professor said he saw the benefit of training a talented Egyptian who could bring Western urban planning techniques — if not Western architectural styles — back to the Arab world. When Atta refused to shake the hand of the lone woman on his thesis defense committee, Machule explained to her that he meant no offense by it, that this was simply his strict Muslim practice. Atta received high marks.

Degree in hand, Atta left Germany. A few months later, over a Ramadan feast in Afghanistan, Osama Bin Laden informed him that he would be a martyr. Atta did not choose the World Trade Center as a target; Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mechanical engineer now commonly called "the architect of 9/11," did that, likely because his nephew Ramsi Youssef had tried and failed to level the buildings in 1993. But when Atta was told he would lead a mission to destroy America's tallest and most famous modernist high-rise complex — the apotheosis of the building type he dreamed of razing in Aleppo — he may have felt the hand of divine providence at work.

Daniel Brook is the author of The Trap: Selling Out To Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America and has written on architecture for Harper's and Metropolis, among other publications. He is at work on a book about the architecture of Westernization. Travel for this series was funded by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.