| Hear No Evil |   |
If we fail to take those who threaten us at their word, we become unwitting partners in their crimes
Four years after Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM), the operational commander for the al Qaeda terror network, was captured in March 2003 outside of Islamabad, Pakistan's capital, the world heard from him again. His taped confession, made during military hearings at Guantanamo Bay, was a grim reminder of the sort of enemy the West has been engaged with in the war against terror since September 2001.
The U.S. 9/11 Commission Report released in July 2004 stated, "No one exemplifies the model of the terrorist entrepreneur more clearly than Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks." The Commission never got to question KSM directly, and his portrait provided in the report, while extensive, remained incomplete until the public heard directly from him. His recent confession fills in the blanks, offering a glimpse into the mind of a calculating and cold-blooded killer, unrepentant, even boastful of his hideous crimes.
KSM claimed responsibility for the "9/11 operation from A to Z." He also claimed responsibility for some 28 other terrorist attacks, including the Bali bombing in October 2002 that killed 202 and injured another 200, the Kenya hotel bombings in November 2002 in which 13 Israelis and Kenyans perished, and the Istanbul bombings of British and Jewish targets in November 2003 that took 57 lives and wounded 700.
KSM boasted about his role in decapitating Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter kidnapped in Karachi, Pakistan, in January 2002. KSM's confession to being at the centre of extensive terror operations in the war against the United States in particular, and the West, including Israel, in general, reveals how costly has been the result of underestimating al Qaeda's threat and its avowed aim of driving Americans and their allies out of the Middle East.
Osama bin Laden's August 1996 epistle containing the declaration of war (jihad) against the United States went unheeded. More than a decade later, and with terrorism unabated, a likely majority in the West, including Canada, continue to disbelieve the gravity of that declaration and al Qaeda's intent to wage war by any means available.
The vote last February by Stéphane Dion's Liberals--joined by the Bloc and the NDP--against renewing two measures of the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2001 is indicative of this disbelief in a war, unlike any wars of the past, unleashed against the West by folks indistinguishable from the ethno-religious mix of the population in the greater Middle East and its diaspora in Europe and North America.
Were it not for KSM and his ilk--men of considerable intelligence, technical abilities, familiarity with the West and ferocity to do harm without any guilt--making common cause with Bin Laden, the al Qaeda leader would have remained a delusional warrior issuing worthless epistles. But men like KSM see themselves as alchemists of revolution, bringing down the world around them, heedless of the cost or the future. Such men can craft ideology from the disjointed scatterings of received wisdom, sacred or profane, as the Bolsheviks did, and hurl it against the civilized world.
In an open and free society, those who underestimate the evil of such men become unwitting partners in crimes imagined and then perpetrated against the unwary and innocent citizens of that society. There is always some grievance around in any society that can be exploited against the established order. But men such as KSM are crafty tacticians who avoid the hammer of the brutal regimes that flourish in the greater Middle East, while probing the soft underbelly of western democracies laden with feelings of guilt over past wrongs and present inequities.
The primary lesson of 9/11 is what happens when intelligence fails to connect the dots. Successful intelligence work means appreciating the intent of those who declared war on the West, as did Osama bin Laden, and apprehending the world's KSMs before they commit crimes.
Canada was among the countries Bin Laden warned for being allied with the U.S. against the Middle East envisioned by al Qaeda. Canadians must ask their political leaders, especially those of the liberal left, how their multicultural pieties will keep them secure from the evil of KSM and those who take the profanities of Bin Laden and associates as religious edicts to harm their fellow citizens, as did the homegrown jihadis in the London bombings of July 2005.
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