Monthly Archives: December 2014

Holy Land.

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First the people of the Middle East “Medized” (adapted to Persian rule); then they “Hellenized” (adapted to Greek rule); then they “Romanized” (adapted to Roman rule); then they “Christianized” (accepted Christianity as the sole true faith); and then they “Islamized” (accepted Islam as the sole true faith). Not a great example of sticking to your guns, but pretty normal human behavior.[1] Of course, there were always people who didn’t want to go along. As one leading expert has said, “the Jews are a stiff-necked people.” In similar fashion, some Christians clung to their faith under Islam. As late as 1900, fully a quarter of the population of the Ottoman Empire was Christian.

Then came the tumultuous 20th Century. First, nationalism spread among the Christian peoples of the lower Balkans. In 1908 Austria-Hungary seized Bosnia to keep Serb nationalists from getting their hands on it. In 1912, the Serbs, Greeks, and Bulgarians conquered most of what remained of Turkey-in-Europe. In the early 1920s, the Greeks tried to conquer a big chunk of Turkey that contained many Greek and Armenian Christians. They over-reached and many Christians died or were expelled in the blood-bath that followed. Second, the multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire broke up into nation-states that included adherence to Islam in their national identity. Arab birth rates rose (a sign of optimism), while Christians either had small families or emigrated (either one a sign of pessimism). By 2000 Christians made up only five percent of the population of the Middle East.

Since then, things have gotten dramatically worse. The secular dictatorships that ruled Iraq, Syria, and Egypt after they gained independence from the imperial powers had long repressed sectarian conflicts as well as human rights and liberty.[2] The American invasion of Iraq in 2003 toppled one of these regimes. The Syrian civil war weakened another one. The “Arab Spring” let loose sectarian hostilities long held in check by the Mubarak regime in Egypt. Fearful Christians often sided with the secular regimes, so they came to be seen as counter-revolutionary and anti-democratic by those who already had a grievance against them. Faith-based initiatives followed. Both sides in the Sunni-Shi’ite civil war in Iraq targeted Christians.   The bulk of the opponents of the Assad regime have always been conservative Sunni Muslims who leaned toward Islamism. Muhammad Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood dominated the writing of an Egyptian constitution that assigned a central place in society to Islam. The Morsi government did little to rein-in a wave of popular violence directed against Egyptian Christians.

As a result of this anti-Christian violence, 600,000 Iraqi Christians and 300,000 Syrian Christians had fled abroad by May 2013. Iraqi and Syrian Christians could flee to Turkey, still a peaceful and more-or-less secular state. Egyptian Christians didn’t have that option.[3]

Then there’s Pakistan, where a Christian couple were murdered by a mob on a false charge of blasphemy in Fall 2014. Not the first case of this. Can you say “Leo Frank”?

 

[1] Still, one can’t help but wonder if the Arabs aren’t the spineless descendants of spineless ancestors.

[2] I suppose one might think of lynching Christians as a “civil right” in a certain kind of society. Kind of like standing Tsarist Russia on its head.

[3] Maybe we could create Xr15t0 visas?

 

Climate of Fear XII.

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What is the “price” of one ton of carbon-dioxide pollution emitted into the atmosphere? According to Obama administration economists, it is $37.[1] If you add that cost into the price of carbon, then market forces will nudge people to burn less carbon and will create a market for alternative energy sources. A government can either tax carbon burning directly or it can dodge around the formal tax by establish a system in which companies have to buy what amount to licenses to pollute. (These are usually labeled “cap-and-trade: solutions.)

People who depend on carbon-burning for jobs, profits, and comfort see carbon-pricing as getting their ox gored for the sake of scientific predictions in which they cannot afford to believe. Australia is a good example. It produces 5.5% of the world’s coal, most of it for export. Prime Minister Julia Gillard, a climate change believer, pushed through a carbon tax. In 2013, she lost her office. Her successor immediately got the tax repealed.

In 1990 the Country-Formerly-Known-As-East-Germany merged with West Germany.[2] East German had been an environmentalist’s nightmare, owing to its reliance on burning coal for energy. Many of the polluting electricity-generating plants were soon shut down. Nevertheless, Germany relied on coal for much of its fuel. In 1997 Germany adhered to the Kyoto Protocol. Angela Merkel was then serving as environment minister. Since then she has committed herself to cutting greenhouse gases. In 2007, as chancellor, she committed Germany to making substantial cuts in emissions. Cutting across this effort, however, was a desire to move away from nuclear energy. Germany had 17 nuclear plants, but started to shut them down as they aged, without building additional production capacity. The disaster at Fukushima in 2011 gave this slow movement a strong shove. As a result, Germany’s reliance on coal has returned to the 2007 levels. In 2013 Germany got 45 percent of its energy from burning coal and 25 percent from renewable energy. Moreover, coal miners and electrical plant workers are a big and well-connected constituency. It remains to be seen whether Merkel can push through real cuts.

The United States offers another good example. It produces 11.7% of the world’s coal.[3] In 2010, President Obama tried to get a cap-and-trade bill through the Senate, but was defeated by Republican opposition. The new Republican Congress isn’t likely to change course now.

If a carbon tax isn’t saleable in Western democracies with diverse economies, how will it fair in developing countries that rely heavily upon coal and oil to fuel their advance? India produces 7.7% of the world’s coal. China produces 46.4% of the world’s coal, all for domestic consumption. China signed a declaration sponsored by the World Bank that called for a price on carbon that reflected its real cost. China has begun cap-and-trade policies in some of its provinces. Loud snorts of derision followed the gestures: China continues to expand its burning of carbons and the declaration it signed was non-binding. Is it more than just window-dressing?

A German mining union official spoke for more than just German miners when he asked, “Is it worth it if we as a country succeed in reaching our targets in reducing carbon emissions, but sacrifice good jobs and our industrial base?”

 

[1] Coral Davenport, “President’s Drive For Carbon Pricing Fails to Win at Home,” NYT, 28 September 2014.

[2] Melissa Eddy, “Missing Its Own Goals, Germany Renews Effort to Cut Carbon Emissions,” NYT, 4 December 2014.

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_coal_production

The History of AIDS.

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For tens of thousands of years, some types of monkeys in West Africa have lived with a virus that attacks the immune system. Two different strains of it developed, one in Cameroon and one in the Senegal-Ivory Coast region. It wasn’t fatal because it was a “weak” virus. The immune system counter-attacked and fended off the virus. Over-simply put, it couldn’t evolve because the immune system jumped on it before the virus could make genetic changes. For the virus to evolve fast enough to become dangerous, it would have to be passed rapidly from one host to another—making changes along the way–before the immune-system hammered it flat.

So, no big deal even for diseased monkeys. However, American Indians hunted buffalo for food and Africans hunted “bushmeat” for food. Monkeys, tapirs, stuff like that. Then you had to skin them out to make steaks, chops, Kentucky Fried Tapir, etc. Butchers got nicked by knives and covered in (infected) blood along the way. So, the monkey immune-virus got into humans through open cuts. Still, this was not a big deal for most people because most Africans lived in isolated and not-very-large communities. That is, they lived in villages in the middle of forest clearings. The human version of the monkey immune deficiency, HIV, didn’t transmit very well because it needs to enter the bloodstream in some fashion. Even normal sex won’t do it most of the time. So, it settled into humans like it had settled into monkeys, and the human immune system fell on it.

So, no big deal even for diseased humans. However, European imperialists took over West and Central Africa in the late 19th Century. They tried to turn the place into a paying concern by starting plantations, building ports and railroads and warehouses, and corralling a lot of African labor. Port cities, railroad towns, and mining camps sprang up. All had large African working populations and small European ruling populations. People kept pouring in from the countryside. Most were men, but a minority were women.

The truth of the matter is that guys will pay for sex. Prostitution thrived in the towns of Central Africa. So did venereal diseases like syphilis. These diseases cause genital ulcers.[1] Such ulcers greatly facilitated the rapid spread of HIV into the human bloodstream. Rapid transmission allowed rapid genetic evolution into the fearsome plague we know today. Widespread vaccination of workers against smallpox compounded the problem because the colonial medical authorities did not sterilize needles between injections in order to save money.[2]

So, a big deal for African workers, but no big deal for anyone else. However, in the mid-1960s, HIV reached the Western Hemisphere and Europe. In all likelihood, a merchant seaman carried it from one port to another. In the early 1960s a young Norwegian merchant sailor spent time in West Africa. He came down with gonorrhea and was infected with HIV. By 1968 he had abandoned the sea to work as a long-haul truck-driver in Europe. He often had sex with prostitutes while on trips. He died in 1976. In 1966 a boy in St. Louis contracted HIV by some unknown means and died of it in 1969. Was a closeted gay man working in tropical medicine at one of the St. Louis universities? HIV/AIDS was still unknown outside Africa at the time and American and European doctors were stumped. About the same time some still-unidentified person traveled from the newly-independent Democratic Republic of the Congo to Haiti. S/he carried HIV. An epidemic soon began in Haiti. From here it was communicated in much greater numbers to the United States. By 1981 doctors had begun to identify an HIV/AIDS epidemic.

 

[1] See: US Army training films during the Second World War.

[2] I’m not making this up. Alas.

Climate of Fear XI.

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The International Energy Agency (IEA) issues reports on critical energy issues. It’s “Energy Technology Perspectives” reports offer an insight into climate change issues. So, is the glass half-full or is it empty?

The power industry produces almost 40 percent of America’s carbon dioxide emissions. There have been big technological gains in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. These improvements are what allowed President Obama to order a 30 percent reduction in emissions from a 2005 baseline by coal-burning power plants by 2030. (His recent agreement with the Chinese apparently merely ratified changes already underway.)

People have stopped believing in some of the alternative energy sources touted by environmentalists. All these technologies hold promise, but they are not yet anywhere near price competitive with carbon energy generation. Funding for things like bio-energy, offshore wind,[1] and geo-thermal dropped more than twenty percent between 2011 and 2013. It can be dangerous to extrapolate from brief periods of change. The price of photovoltaic solar cells dropped sharply from 2008 to 2012 because a land-rush of producers into the market led to savage price competition. The subsequent shake-out has led to a stabilization of prices. The “levelized” costs of solar energy generation have fallen by 40 percent from their 2010 estimate. Thus, as part of the stimulus, the Obama administration heavily subsidized alternative energy generation sources. As a result, in 2010, the US added 5 gigawatts of energy generation from wind-power; in 2011 it added 7 gigawatts; and in 2012 it added a whopping 13 gigawatts. The end of the stimulus left wind-power generation becalmed: in 2013, the US added only 1 gigawatt from wind-power, and 2014 isn’t shaping up to be much of an improvement. Lesson: in the current state of technology, alternative fuels are only competitive with carbon-fueled energy generation when the government “levels the playing field” by tilting it in one direction.

What are the real possibilities?

By 2019, onshore wind generation could cost $71/megawatt, “even without subsidies.” By 2040, in exceptionally windy places (Washington, DC?) the cost might be as low as $63.40/megawatt. By 2040 nuclear-generated power might cost $80.00/megawatt. By 2040 solar might generate power at $86.50/megawatt. None of this is going to amount to much.

The IEA predicts that by 2040 only 16.5 percent of energy will be produced from renewable resources. More than 65 percent will come from the burning of coal and gas. This means that “carbon capture” technology must develop rapidly. However, “carbon capture” technologies are failing to develop at an adequate pace. Costs are high relative to the return, so no one is interested in investing. Similarly, we need a 24 percent increase in nuclear power generation by 2025 to fend off drastic climate change.[2] Instead, nuclear generating capacity is falling.

The best solution to this problem is a severe carbon tax. Today the US emits about 5.4 billion tons of carbon dioxide. If carbon emissions were taxed at $25/ton beginning in 2015, with a 5 percent/year increase (i.e. rising to about $60/ton by 2040), lots of alternative energy sources would start to look more attractive—if not attractive.

Eduardo Porter, “A Carbon Tax Could Bolster Green Energy,” NYT, 19 November 2014.

[1] Migrating birds and drunken pleasure-boaters alike are happy about this.

[2] Build a lot of nukes in Maine. No one lives there and the winds aloft will carry the fall-out from the inevitable accident across the Atlantic to Portugal and Spain. Bad for the cork oaks and cod donuts I’ll grant you.

The 317th Platoon and The Anderson Platoon.

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Not that you would know it from Anglophone publishers, but sometimes Frenchmen get bitten by the adventure bug. The results can be fascinating.

Henri de Monfried (1879-1974) was the son of a French painter. One of his father’s friends was Paul Gauguin, which explains a lot. When he hit thirty, de Monfried junked conventional life. He went to Djibouti, built a dhow, and went into the smuggling business around the Red Sea. He smuggled guns and opium, and fished for pearls, but insisted that he had never been a slaver. He became a well-known, respected, and prosperous figure. Which ought to tell you something about the neighborhood. In 1930, he encountered Joseph Kessel, who was passing through looking for adventure. Kessel (1898–1979) was a Lithuanian Jew born in Argentina, then raised in Russia and France. He served in the French air force in the First World War. Between the wars he wrote ten books. One of Kessel’s interwar books was Fortune carree (1932), based on some of Monfried’s experiences (or, at least, on his stories).[1]

Pierre Schoendoerffer (1928-2012) lost his grandfather (1917) and father (1940) fighting the Germans. When he was fifteen he read Kessel’s Fortune carree and decided that was the life for him. He spent the summer of 1946 on a fishing boat in the Bay of Biscay, then traded on that experience to get hired on a merchant ship in 1947. He did this for a couple of years, then spent a couple of years doing his military service in the “Chasseurs alpins” (mountain troops). Peacetime soldiering had been dull, but a rebellion had broken out in Indochina. In 1951 he re-enlisted and volunteered for a documentary film unit that was going east. He spent three years in Indochina, including serving with the “paras” and the Foreign Legionnaires at Dien Bien Phu (1954) and in the brutal Vietminh prison camp afterward. Back in civvy-street, he went into making documentaries and films based on his experience. Several are about the Vietnam wars.

“The 317th Platoon” (1965) takes place in French Indochina in 1954.[2] Dien Bien Phu has just fallen and the Vietminh are on the offensive. The garrison of a tiny post of Foreign Legionnaires out in the boonies is ordered to retreat to the main lines. The dominant figures are the commander—a high-minded, but wet-behind-the-ears lieutenant—and his top-kick—a German veteran of the Eastern Front. Most of the troops are Vietnamese now caught on the losing side of a civil war. The retreat begins in a light-hearted fashion (they lug their refrigerator along), but soon turns grim. A spectacularly filmed ambush of some Vietminh brings the hunters down on the little group. They are gnawed away to nothing. You can watch the trailer at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiHhA8p8Ous

“The Anderson Platoon” (1967) takes place in South Vietnam in 1966. It is a documentary record of Schoendoerffer’s six weeks with a platoon of the 1st Cavalry Division commanded by Lieutenant Joseph Anderson. Hence, the film has less of an overt structure and message than does “The 317th Platoon.” The platoon marches through the countryside seeking the enemy, fording streams, pushing through tall grass and trees. Occasionally they make contact in little fire fights that seem to accomplish nothing. Occasionally they go on morose leave in Saigon. You can watch the movie at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iw_7AJjd6Yo

[1] Later on, Kessel answered Charles de Gaulle’s “appeal” for support in June 1940 and flew in the Free French Air Force. One of his fellow flyers was Romain Gary, another Lithuanian Jew turned French author. Later on, Gary wrote the adventure novel The Roots of Heaven (1956), then co-wrote the screen-play with Patrick Leigh Fermor. Later on, de Monfried retired to a little French village. He raised opium poppies in his garden.

[2] One of the production assistants was Brigitte Friang (1924-2011). A remarkable person.

The Affordable Courts Act (ACA).

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The Affordable Care Act offered the states the opportunity to create health insurance exchanges, but then set up barriers to states actually creating such exchanges insurance. To create its’ own exchange, a state had to create a new state-paid staff to set up and operate the exchange: run a call center to explain the plans, regulate the plans offered by the private insurance companies, and set up the web-site through which people select their insurance. All this would cost money[1] and require some horse-trading in the legislature that could mess up other deals. Recognizing this, the federal government created a pool of money to subsidize the creation of state exchanges. The continuing costs would fall on the states. Moreover, many state legislatures were in the hands of Republicans who were opposed to the whole thing to begin with. It should surprise no one that thirty-four–about two thirds–of state legislatures opted to let the federal government carry the weight. Thus, most people buy their insurance through federal exchanges, rather than through state exchanges.[2]

Recently, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear a challenge to one provision of the ACA. The case of King v. Burwell turns on the meaning of the language in the ACA regarding subsidies for people who purchase insurance through the exchanges. Do subsidies go only to people who purchase insurance on state-created exchanges or do they go to all exchanges, state and federal alike?[3] The Supreme Court will issue an opinion on the case in June 2015.

In a subtle bit of propagandizing the court, Margot Sanger-Katz recently penned a story in the New York Times that explains the likely consequences of a Court decision restricting the subsidies to state-created exchanges.[4] First, subsidies would end in the thirty-four federal government-created exchanges. This would drive up the cost for many insurance consumers beyond what they could afford. The individual mandate to purchase health insurance, a corner-stone of the ACA, could not be maintained if insurance costs rose dramatically. Second, any effort to replace the federal exchanges with state exchanges would involve an immense amount of work in a restricted period of time.

The Court will probably issue its opinion in June 2015. October is the enrollment month, so states would have from June to October (about four months) to create exchanges. Only eight states will have legislatures in session in June. This may cut down the time for legislative action to the extent that is necessary. It took three years to create the original exchanges. They turned out to be plagued with what the Obama Administration is pleased to call “glitches.” Doubtless people have learned a lot from the first round of experiences. The trouble is that one of those lessons is that it isn’t possible to create an exchange over-night. States will have to hire teams of people to create and manage the exchanges. They will have to find the additional money (see fn. 1 below) somewhere in the middle of a fiscal year. They will have to find the people somewhere. (I foresee a big money harvest for Massachusetts health insurance professionals.) Then computer programs will have to be purchased and adapted to suit the needs of each new state exchange. There is a good chance that chaos will reign for a time if the Court overturns subsidies for federal exchanges.

This leads me to believe that Chief Justice John Roberts will side with the Democratic appointees on the Court and against the four Justices who have always opposed the ACA.

Or, already existing state exchanges could start enrolling residents of other states as well. You can go to another state’s public colleges and universities if you pay out-of-state tuition. Why can’t insurance customers pay out-of-state premiums? Not a lot higher. Just enough to create a positive revenue stream.

[1] One current estimate of the cost to establish a single state exchange is about $40 to $60 million. Then the annual operating cost would be added on that. Obviously not the end of the world, but a hard sell to state legislatures in the middle of a recession.

[2] President Obama’s unilateral abandonment of the “public option” looks worse and worse all the time—in retrospect. Lots of human decisions look worse in retrospect.

[3] To an ignorant—Republican—layman like myself, the answer is clear. Congress did not pass an enormous and complicated piece of legislation with the intent that it should fail. Congress did not intend that subsidies be restricted to the state-created exchanges when it was creating the federal exchanges as a back-up system. Congress intended both forms of exchanges to receive subsidies. End of story.

[4] Margot Sanger-Katz, “Many States Unprepared to Set Up Health Exchanges,” NYT, 11 December 2014.

 

“The Battle of Algiers” (1966).

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Saadi Yacef was born in Algiers, the capital city of Algeria, in 1928. He learned the trade of baker, but didn’t learn to read or write. Yacef became involved in nationalist politics from 1945 on. From 1947 to 1949 he was a member of a secret nationalist para-military organization. The French stomped on this organization. Escaping the round-up, Yacef went to France for three years. While working as a baker, he thought a lot about what he had learned about conspiracy. He returned to Algiers in 1952. When the Algerian war for independence broke out in 1954, Yacef joined up. From May 1956 to September 1957 he commanded the Algerian nationalist forces inside the city of Algiers. The French captured him in September 1957, then kept him in prison until the end of the war in 1962. In prison he purportedly wrote a memoir of the Battle of Algiers. That memoir became the basis for the screen-play of the movie “The Battle of Algiers.”

Enter Gillo Pontecorvo, who was born in Pisa, Italy, in 1919. Well-off, Jewish, and trained in science, Pontecorvo fled Mussolini’s Italy for France in 1938. While scratching out a living as a journalist, he met a lot of interesting people in Paris and got started in the movie business. After the Second World War broke out, Pontecorvo returned to Italy to join the Communist Party and the Resistance movement. He led the Communist Party’s resistance organization in Milan from 1943 to 1945, so he knew a good deal about living on the run and blowing up things. After the war, Pontecorvo taught himself to make movies. He remained a Communist until 1956, and never stopped being a “man on the Left.” His movies had a strong anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist strain in them. So he was a natural for the Algerians who were seeking a director to tell the story of their war against the French.

Pontecorvo had his own style. He shot the movie in black-and-white. He shot it on location, with the eager assistance of the post-colonial Algerian government. The combined effect is to make it look like a documentary. He liked using amateurs, whose faces looked right for the scene, rather than professional actors. (His one exception in this movie was Jean Martin, a former member of the French Resistance and a paratrooper in the Indo-China War, who plays the commander of the French paratroopers.) You can see he had watched a lot of Eisenstein.

Colonel Mathieu, the para commander is a composite of several real French officers (Jacques Massu, Marcel Bigeard, Yves Godard). Many of the other leading characters are based on real people: Andre Achiary (the mustached police officer), Ali “la Pointe” Ammar, “le petit Omar,” Hassiba Ben Bouali, Djamila Bouhired (who later married Klaus Barbie’s defense attorney), and Zohra Drif (actually Yacef’s girlfriend at the time). Some of them are still living.

The movie came out in 1966. The French government banned it for five years; Fidel Castro’s Cuba awarded it a big prize. So that’s a wash. The movie deserves to be evaluated in its own right as a work of art. More to our purposes is the reception it has received from professionals in the insurgency line of work. Andreas Baader, one leader of a 1970s German terrorist group, claimed it was his favorite movie. Israeli audiences flocked to see the movie in 1988 when it was shown at the same time as the Palestinian “First Intifada” broke out. In Summer 2003, shortly after completion of the major military operations phase of the Iraq War, the US DoD’s Directorate for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict sponsored several showings of the movie in the Pentagon. So, a lot of people at the sharp end of the business thought that it had some lessons to teach. What are they?

What we learned from the Report of the 911 Commission XIX.

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The “planes operation” called for a large group of “muscle hijackers” to seize the cockpits of airliners in flight, then bar to door to any rebellious passengers while the smaller number of pilots flew the planes into buildings.

The “muscle hijackers” all obtained new passports in their home countries, then during September, October, and November 2000, obtained visas to enter the United States. (p. 340.) The muscle hijackers were back in Afghanistan from late 2000/early 2001 until Spring 2001. In Afghanistan they were given advanced training on terrorism, much—but not all–of which dealt with seizing control of an airplane in flight. (pp. 341-342.)

In April, May, and June 2001 the muscle hijackers began being moved toward the United States. (pp. 341-342.) In early July 2001 Midhar, the original hijacker who had bailed out for a time, returned to the United States. (p. 344.) Upon arrival in the United States, most of the muscle hijackers were brought to Florida. They seem to have spent their time going to gyms to work out. Thus, the muscle hijackers were in the United States from April through August 2001 at the longest. Three to five months for something to go wrong for al Qaeda; three to five months for the US government to notice something odd about twenty foreigners.

During Spring and Summer 2001 the pilots made several reconnaissance flights. Some of these were across the United States in the same type of planes they would command during the final attack; others were in small aircraft along the “Hudson Corridor” air route that passes Manhattan. (pp. 352-353.) They also did a lot of practice flying in small planes.

In June 2001 UBL pressed KSM to attack in June or July 2001, possibly to coincide with a visit to Washington by Ariel Sharon, but KSM resisted this pressure. (p. 360.) Instead, in July 2001 the “planes operation” had to be postponed until September 2001 because of another glitch (probably the uncertainty over one of the pilits, Zaid Jarrah). (p. 360.) Jarrah differed from the other hijackers in a number of ways and he also resented the domineering Atta; by July 2001 the conflict between the two men aroused concern that Jarrah might back out of the operation. (pp. 352-353.) In late July 2001 Jarrah returned to Germany with a one-way ticket purchased by his girl-friend in Germany.

In early July 2001 Mohammad Atta and Ramzi Binalshibh met in Spain to confer on last details. Atta was trying to co-ordinate four transcontinental air flights that would be departing almost simultaneously from East Coast cities. Moreover, Atta was aware that national leaders were usually on vacation in August and therefore out of Washington, DC. He wanted to delay the attack until early September. (p. 356.) NB: Atta wanted to kill a lot of members of Congress.

On 10 July 2001 Zacarias Moussaoui arranged to take renewed flight training in Egan, Minnesota, with the course scheduled to run from 13 to 20 August 2001. In late July 2001 Binalshibh wire transferred $15,000 to Moussaoui. (p. 354.) On 10 August 2001 Moussaoui left Oklahoma for Minnesota; on 13 August 2001 he began his simulator training, but aroused the suspicion of his instructors; several days later he was arrested by the INS. (pp. 354-355.)

Then things began to move forward for the operation. In the first half of August 2001 Jarrah returned to the United States to assume his place as one of the pilots. Moussaoui was now irrelevant. Between 29 June and 17 September 2000 Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, another nephew of KSM wire-transferred $114,500 in five tranches. (p. 324.) Between 25 August and 5 September 2001 all the plane tickets were purchased. (p. 357.) The attack would come on 11 September 2001.

 

What we learned from the Report of the 911 Commission XVIII.

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The 9/11 Commission believes that UBL had arranged for someone in the United States to receive Hazmi and Midhar, the first two al Qaeda agents to arrive in the United States. Who were the contacts?

One likely candidate was Fahad al Thumairy, a Saudi consul in Los Angeles and an imam at the King Fahd mosque there who is believed to have been an extremist. However, there is no concrete proof. (pp. 313-314.)

The most likely candidate was Mohdar Abdullah, a Yemeni whom jailhouse snitches subsequently claimed had boasted about having foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks. (p. 316.) Abdullah drove the two men from Los Angeles to San Diego, served as a translator, helped them get California driver’s licenses, helped them sign up for languages classes and flying lessons, and introduced them to his circle of friends. (pp. 318-319.) Abdullah seems to have helped Hazmi get a job at a gas station where Abdullah worked. (p. 322.)

A third possibility is Yazeed al Salmi, who only came to the United States in July or August 2000. On 5 September 2000 Hazmi deposited $1,900 of al Salmi’s travelers cheques in his own bank account and withdrew the same amount of cash; al Salmi then lived in the same apartment with Hazmi until about October, when he moved in with Abdullah. (p. 322.)

Hazmi and Midhar arrived in Los Angeles on 15 January 2000; by the end of May 2000 they had abandoned the effort to learn to fly. They could not learn English, so they could not take flying lessons. Indeed, Midhar had become homesick and flew back to Yemen to visit his family in early June 2000. Hamzi hung around the mosque, then got a part-time job in a gas station.

The plot did not seem to be going forward. Nevertheless, KSM and OBL were not easily deterred.

A group of Muslim students living in Hamburg, Germany, had become radicalized by some means that still is not clear. In late 1999, fired by a desire to join in “jihad,” four of the group had left Germany for Afghanistan. Here they were recruited by al Qaeda. The intent was to use them for the “planes operation,” but they were not told exactly what their mission would be at this time. By late January 2000 they were back in Hamburg trying to get visas for the United States; in March 2000 Mohammed Atta, the alpha dog in the group, began contacting US flight schools. (pp. 231-245.) The first three of these pilot-candidates arrived in Newark between 29 May and 27 June 2000. They soon settled in Florida, where they signed up for flying lessons. By December 2000 all three had obtained pilot’s licenses and had begun simulator training for flying very large jets. (p. 328.)

Ramzi Binalshibh, the fourth pilot, could not obtain a visa for the US in May and June 2000, so al Qaeda hunted around for a replacement.

One obvious candidate turned out to be Hani Hanjour, a Saudi with an FAA pilot’s license who was discovered to be training in one of the al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan in Spring 2000. Between June and 8 December 2000 Hanjour was prepped for his mission, then sent to the United States by way of San Diego. (pp. 326-327.)

For a time, they thought that Zacarias Moussaoui also might serve. He was sent to the United States by KSM in October 2000. (pp. 325-326.) From February to late May 2001 Moussaoui took flying lessons in Norman, Oklahoma, then stopped. (p. 355.)

Between January and October 2000, al Qaeda sent seven candidate-pilots for the “planes operation” to the United States. All entered the country without hindrance.

What we learned from the Report of the 9/11 Commission XVII.

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At the end of June the CIA ordered its station chiefs to contact their liaison with host-nation services and to get disruption operations going. (pp. 370-371.) During July and August 2001 disruption operations were carried out in about twenty countries.

On 5 July 2001Clarke called in the security representatives from a bunch of domestic agencies for a security briefing from the CIA. The briefing was not particularly helpful. (pp. 371-372.) On 6 July 2001 the CIA informed Clarke that al Qaeda sources said that the next attack would be “spectacular” and unlike either the embassy bombings or the attack on the USS Cole. (p. 372.)

Then nothing happened. In mid-July 2001 CIA received reports that Bin Laden had been forced to postpone execution of, but had not abandoned, his operation. (pp. 372-373.) On 27 July 2001 Clarke told Rice that reports had stopped coming in, but that he believed that the attack would still come in the near future. (p. 373.)

On 1 August 2001 the Deputies Committee decided that it was legal for the CIA to kill Bin Laden or his henchmen. (p. 306.) On 4 August 2001 Bush wrote to Musharraf again to ask for his assistance against al Qaeda. (p. 299.) On 6 August 2001 President Bush received a Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) from the CIA which reviewed al Qaeda’s commitment to launch attacks against America and which stated that the FBI was investigating al Qaeda operations in the United States. (pp. 374-376.) Then everyone went on vacation for August.

On 4 September 2001 the Principals Committee met on al Qaeda for the first time. They approved the draft presidential directive on dealing with al Qaeda. (p. 308.) This directive established a new policy of giving the Taliban yet another “last chance,” then coercing them with covert aid to all sorts of anti-Taliban elements within Afghanistan, then working to overthrow them if they still would not play ball. (p. 299.) At the Principals Committee, “Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill was skittish, cautioning about the implications of trying to kill an individual.” (p. 309.)

On 9 September 2001 two al Qaeda suicide bombers killed Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance.

On 10 September 2001 the Deputies Committee met to work out the last details of the policy approved by the Principals Committee a week before. (p. 299.) Hadley told Tenet to draft the documents authorizing these actions and also authorizing the use of lethal force against al Qaeda leaders. (p. 310.) The Americans had arrived at the decision for decisive action against al Qaeda: the gloves had come off.