JIHAD, INTELLIGENCE & 9-11

The “Big Wedding” and Its Sinister Offspring

Book Review:

The Big Wedding: 9-11, The Whistle Blowers and the Cover-Up
by Sander Hicks
VoxPop, New York, 2005

by A. Kronstadt, The Shadow

In the months after the horrific events of September 11, 2001, American society experienced an eclipse of reason, during which George W. Bush was given a blank check to transform government in his own image. Abominations like the USA PATRIOT Act went through Congress with no more than a whimper of meek opposition. It would have been considered positively unpatriotic to question whether putting the entire emergency management system under the hegemony of the Department of Homeland Security bureaucracy was really a good idea. It was not until the governmental fiasco in the wake of Hurricane Katrina that this question was finally answered. Only now are people beginning to realize that in the days, indeed in the hours after the World Trade Center was destroyed, certain completely unproven notions were imprinted upon our minds. (I use the word “imprinted” in the same sense that scientists use it in describing how experiences of baby animals determine their behavior for life.) For a little while there, the horror of September 11 and the deliberately manipulated imagery reduced the American populace to the status of infants—unable to comprehend, picking up the concepts, the language itself, from the grownups, those in power.

One hope for getting Americans out of their post 9-11 trance is that a large number of independently-produced and published documentaries and books are being generated by dedicated and patriotic researchers and investigators that reveal more truth behind the events of September 11, 2001. One such book is The Big Wedding: 9-11, The Whistle Blowers, and The Cover-Up, authored by Brooklyn-based investigative journalist Sander Hicks. The title of this engrossing work is based on a code-word alleged to have been used by some of the 9-11 terrorists referring to the attack, but which could also be interpreted as referring to the conjugal bliss that the U.S. government has enjoyed with Islamic fundamentalism.

In The Big Wedding, Hicks develops a thesis, based on interviews with ex-intelligence operatives, many of whom were involved in, or in close proximity to “black ops,” i.e., covert criminal operations carried out by government agents. Hicks’ informants in The Big Wedding are a rogue’s gallery that includes a diamond smuggler, pedophile, and Egyptian double agent. These unsavory characters provide Hicks with information that he weaves into a story where there are no boundaries between the Pakistani intelligence service (ISI), US intelligence, and Islamic fundamentalists, perhaps including those involved with the 9-11 attacks. Hicks bases many of his contentions on information that is common knowledge.

The marriage between these forces was brokered by members of the Reagan administration to counter the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan during the 1980s. Pakistan had always been a good Cold War ally of the US and our enemies, the Soviets, were close to Pakistan’s arch-enemy India. Pakistani intelligence helped create and later served as a partner to the ultra-orthodox Islamic fundamentalist Taliban militia, at the behest of the US. The Afghan Mujahideen rebels, precursors to the Taliban, fought against a succession of secular, pro-Soviet regimes in Afghanistan, and were joined by foreign forces, including Osama bin-Laden and other Saudis. [Years of infighting after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 led to the Taliban taking power in 1996—Ed.]

Financial backing for the Mujahideen was funneled in through front companies of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), a Pakistan-based institution originally touted as a source of capital for poorer nations, but which evolved into a kind of state-within-a-state in Pakistan, heavily overlapping with high-ranking personnel with the ISI. BCCI was mentioned as a link between the Bush and bin Laden families in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9-11, which showed that Bush crony James Bath acted as an intermediary for money transfers between Saudi moguls, including [Osama’s late half-brother] Salem bin-Laden, and some Bush enterprises, via BCCI majority shareholder Sheik Khalid bin Mafouz. But Hicks points out that BCCI was also an instrument used by US and Pakistani intelligence agents to hook up deals with arms merchants and supply the Afghan Mujahideen with weapons to fight the Soviets.

Although BCCI collapsed in the early 1990s, the basic infrastructure of money laundering and arms dealing created by the US and Pakistan to aid the Islamic fundamentalist cause in Afghanistan has continued to exist, and Hicks contends that it was this infrastructure that financed the 9-11 attacks. As evidence for this, Hicks points to a key event on Oct. 9, 2001, that the US media failed to mention, but reported by the Times of India and Agence Presse France, whereby a middleman, acting on behalf of Pakistani intelligence chief General Mahmood Ahmad, wired $100,000 to purported 9-11 terrorist ringleader Mohammed Atta the day before the September 11 attacks. Ahmad was dismissed from his post as the head of the ISI in October 2001, due to his alleged ties to the Taliban and Pakistani Islamist groups.

Ahmad’s dismissal came at a time when Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf had publicly renounced his government’s past links to the Taliban and pledged Pakistan’s support for Bush’s War on Terrorism. One could speculate whether or not the Times of India report on the ISI chief’s role in 9-11 was a piece of Indian propaganda, but the links between US intelligence, the ISI, and Islamists in Pakistan and Afghanistan are incontrovertible common knowledge.

The Big Wedding includes an interview with sleazy diamond merchant turned FBI informant Randy Glass, who says that, in June of 1999, he participated in a sting operation that involved meeting Pakistani arms dealer R.G. Abbas at the Tribeca Grill, a pricey New York restaurant owned by actor Robert De Niro, a few blocks from the World Trade Center. According to Glass, also at this meeting was Diaa Mohsen, an Egyptian arms dealer who had introduced Glass to a number of key terror figures who Mohsen knew on a business level. Subjects discussed at the Tribeca meeting included sales of anti-aircraft missiles and heavy water which Pakistani nuclear weapons researchers wanted in order to manufacture plutonium. However, at a certain point in the conversation, Glass says, Abbas pointed to the Twin Towers and told him: “Those towers are coming down.” Glass states that he tried desperately to inform his FBI handlers and later, Senator Bob Graham, about the plot he had gotten wind of, but the information was ignored, if not actively suppressed. The sting operation, called Operation Diamondback, concluded in June 2001, with Mohsen and a few others convicted on several counts of money laundering and violation of arms export laws. Mohsen was sentenced to only 30 months, though he violated Federal anti-terrorism laws and should have received a much stiffer penalty.

Another figure in The Big Wedding is Delmart Vreeland, who had worked as a spy for the Office of Naval Intelligence and, while in jail in Canada in the summer of 2001, prepared a series of notes describing potential terrorist targets of which he had knowledge, demanding to have them passed on to U.S. and Canadian authorities. Vreeland claims to have run across a document passing through Russian intelligence circles, stating that there would be an attack on the World Trade Center in September 2001. Hicks includes evidence to vouch for Vreeland’s intelligence credentials, but unfortunately, Vreeland comes across as being crazy. Hicks does not deny that many of his informants are so, and indeed out-and-out criminals—but these are the most suitable types for the “black ops,” in which they were able to pick up information on the most nefarious acts of the United States government. Hicks told The Shadow: “Intelligence agents can out-criminalize criminals. There are no archbishops in espionage. You don’t have to like these people, you just have to find corroboration.”

One of Hicks’ intellectual precursors in contending that double agents working for the both United States government and Islamic fundamentalist forces were at the bottom of the September 11 attacks is Daniel Hopsicker, author of Welcome to Terrorland: Mohammed Atta and the 9/11 Coverup in Florida. In The Big Wedding, Hicks focuses closely on Hopsicker’s research regarding Huffman Aviation and its training school in Venice, Florida. Three of the four supposed 9-11 pilots learned to fly at Venice Municipal Airport, where Huffman is based, and a fourth trained at the neighboring Florida Flight Training Center. In Welcome to Terrorland, Hopsicker outlined the role of Huffman’s owner Wally Hilliard in making the aviation company’s Venice airfields available as resources for government-sponsored drug dealing, which allowed the Mujahedeen to remain self-sufficient.

Hopsicker paints a picture of Mohammed Atta when he was at Huffman in Venice and in the nearby Florida Keys, that is a little different from the devoted true believer who appears in the 9-11 Commission report. Atta comes across as a cynical carouser who loved alcohol and parties, and seems to fit the profile shared by a number of Egyptian double agents that have simultaneously served the interests of Western intelligence and Islamic fundamentalism. Hicks compares Hopsicker’s Atta with Emad Salem, the Egyptian double agent who acted as a government informant and instigator in connection with the World Trade Center bombing in 1993.

In The Big Wedding, Hicks lambastes the 9-11 Commission, which he describes as a group of ten Washington insiders, and its report, which he accuses of ignoring anomalies, such as the fact that the 9-11 attacks took place on a day when there were three large-scale air-defense drills in progress, immobilizing any Air Force resources that might have responded effectively to the incidents. The indisputable fact that this “stand-down” was in progress on 9-11 has become a key piece of evidence for 9-11 skeptics, whether they be of the “they let it happen” or the “they made it happen” school of thought.

In addition to his journalism, Sander Hicks is among the pioneers of a nascent 9-11 Truth Movement. Although this effort unites independent thinkers of the left, right, and center, its members share a common distrust of the official conspiracy theory, whereby “the enemy” attacked America just because they hate our freedom. Another pioneer of this movement is Nicholas Levis, a coordinator of the 2006 Summer of Truth campaign in New York. Levis and Hicks, as well as the many thousands of Americans who have become inquisitive about the real sequence of events that led to the events of September 11, share a common distrust of the motives of the US government, not just about its competence.

Levis told The Shadow: “I have come to the conclusion that this was an orchestrated event, that there was facilitation within the US government; even though they may have used found elements, namely the Islamic fundamentalists, I don’t buy incompetence when it is this persistent. Bush, Rumsfeld, [Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] General [Richard] Myers and General [Montague] Winfield [of the National Military Command Center] all found reasons not to be active on this day. Then there was [Strategic Command chief] Admiral [Richard] Mies, who was running the overall set of air defense war games under the umbrella of Global Guardian. Some of these exercises, like Vigilant Guardian and Vigilant Warrior, appear to have used the scenario of multiple domestic hijackings and crash bombings, and this on the day when it actually happened. The evidence indicates that all of this was deliberately intended to confuse a response. The inaction by the head men in the military chain of command indicates intent.” Levis added: “When the old Iran Contra crew is back in power after a stolen election, what do you expect? They committed all of these kinds of crimes already in the ’80s, but they needed an enabling event before Americans would support multiple invasions and the transformations we’ve seen since September 11.”

On the subject of motive, Sander Hicks told The Shadow: “If you want to know why, look at the statements published by the Project for the New American Century in 2000.” PNAC is the neoconservative Washington think tank founded in 1997 by William Kristol, which includes as members Richard Armitage, Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, Lewis Libby, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz. In 2000, PNAC issued a position paper titled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century,” which includes the following ominous line, referring to the difficulty of implementing their right-wing agenda: “…the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor.” The 9-11 Truth Movement people are quick to interpret the PNAC document’s oddly tacked-on phrase “a new Pearl Harbor” as a prefiguration of 9-11.

Two things are certain. First, that the “new Pearl Harbor” did indeed happen on September 11, 2001. Second, that Bush used the horrific events of that day to justify and blunt the opposition to the subsequent US invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. More and more people in America are coming to the conclusion that this cannot be a coincidence. The 9-11 Truth Movement, whose foundations are being laid by people like Hicks, Levis, and others (including investigators at The Shadow), is united by incontrovertible evidence that some in government had the intention and ability to arrange an incident that would turn the public’s head just long enough to let them achieve their stated and published goals. Those of us who have seen the first threads of the “big lie” come loose have a responsibility to unravel the remainder of this fabric of deceit and to convince people to take political action.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Sander Hicks is now running for governor of New York: As he explained to the SHADOW: “I’m running for governor because most New York State folks are progressive, and neither party represents that. Most New Yorkers are pro-peace and anti-death penalty, but [NYS Attorney General and gubernatorial candidate Elliot] Spitzer was rabidly pro-Iraq invasion, and he’s pro-death penalty. He ignored a 2004 poll that showed 66% of the state wanted him to investigate all the anomalies around 9-11. Not listening to a majority is grounds for immediate termination of his public office. Spitzer has got to go.”

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This story originally appeared in the Summer 2006 edition of The Shadow
http://www.shadowpress.org

RESOURCES:

9-11 Truth
http://www.911Truth.org

Let’s Roll 9-11
http://www.letsroll911.org

Total 9-11 Info
http://www.total911.info

Summer of Truth
http://www.summeroftruth.org

Sander Hicks website
http://www.sanderhicks.com

“India Accuses Ex Pakistan Spy Chief Of Links to US Attacker: Report,”
AFP, Oct. 12, 2001, online at Bill St. Clair’s 9-11 Timeline
http://billstclair.com/911timeline/2001/afp101001.html

“Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century,”
Project for the New American Century, 2000
http://newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf

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Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Sept. 1, 2006
Reprinting permissible with attribution

THE DA VINCI CODE: DECODING THE PHENOMENON

The Paradoxes of Mainstreaming Esotericism

by Mark Sanborne

Dizzy from all the Decoding? Tired of endless yammering about Tom Hank’s hair? Ready to move on from the “Greatest Coverup in Human History”? Well, welcome to the cult, er, club. The perfect media-publicity storm and religio-cultural zeitgeist-tickler that is The Da Vinci Code, the second coming of Dan Brown’s controversial super-blockbuster 2003 novel, has at last arrived in theaters. So let the deconstruction begin…

Despite being roundly panned by most critics, the movie is, unsurprisingly, making tons of money—nearly $150 million in its first two weeks—attracting both the book’s legions of fans along with many others curious what all the fuss is about. For those of you who may have been hiding in a tomb the last few years, here’s the gist:

Both the novel and movie posit that Jesus married Mary Magdalene, who was not a prostitute (a folk tradition added later by Rome) but a lady of high standing who fled Palestine after the crucifixion with the couple’s child—a girl, Sarah—and settled among the Jewish community in southern France. After hundreds of years their descendants, carrying the royal blood of the house of the biblical King David, eventually got around to intermarrying with the Merovingians, the myth-shrouded first line of French kings who lived in the fifth through eighth centuries. Ever since, the Roman Catholic Church has been obsessed with extirpating this sacred lineage to prevent the explosive secret from getting out, beginning with the supposed assassination of Dagobert II in 679. (Much of Brown’s speculative information came from a 1982 British book, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, about which more below.)

In response, a secret society known as the Priory of Sion was formed during the First Crusade in 1099 to protect the putative royal bloodline. The Priory, in turn, was said to have formed the real-life Knights Templar, the order of warrior-monks who served as the Crusader armies’ shock troops and went on to establish the first international banking system before being accused of heresy and suppressed by the greedy King Philippe IV of France in 1307.

Meanwhile, the Priory had also been busy behind the scenes propagating the Grail romances that became all the rage in the 12th and 13th centuries, particularly those by Chretien de Troyes and Wolfram von Eschenbach, which included a Grail Family guarded by Templars. However, rather than being a sacred cup or chalice—the San Graal, or Holy Grail—it actually represented the Sang Raal, or Royal Blood, transformed from a pagan fertility symbol like the Horn of Plenty into a covert reference to the womb of the Magdalene, the Sacred Feminine suppressed by the church, and the secret lineage of the King of the Jews.

But wait, there’s more. The Priory of Sion supposedly has continued to exist down through the centuries, with grand masters of the order ranging from the first, Jean de Gisors, to such luminaries as Nicolas Flamel, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Robert Fludd, Robert Boyle, Issac Newton, Charles Nodier, Victor Hugo, Claude Debussy, and Jean Cocteau. However, the only “grand master” we can be sure of is one Pierre Plantard “de Saint-Clair,” an eccentric Frenchman who died in 2000 and who may have been the man behind the curtain who pulled the levers on the whole thing.

TELL & SHOW

Enough gist for now, let’s review the movie in question. In most key respects it is indeed faithful to the book—many might argue to a fault, though clearly director Ron Howard and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman felt they couldn’t afford to alienate the novel’s vast readership. (Similar logic lies behind the Star Trek movies: first satisfy the trekkie fan base, then everything else is gravy.)

That faithfulness means the movie consists largely of exposition, with patches of competently staged action serving as brief bridges to the next set of esoteric talking points. (Despite Brown’s hammy prose, reading the novel seemed faster than watching the film, though Hans Zimmer’s score is nicely evocative.) And a fair amount of the special-effects “action” consists of brief, sepia-tinted historical flashbacks to such events as the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D., the First Crusade, and the suppression of the Templars.

In brief, for the lucky few who have not read or seen The Da Vinci Code, the movie follows the adventures of Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon (Hanks), who while visiting Paris is called to the Louvre to view a dead and self-mutilated curator laid out on the floor like da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Langdon quickly hooks up with Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou), a police cryptographer who turns out to be the estranged grand-daughter of the dead man—who in fact is the latest grand master of the Priory of Sion.

The two are quickly on the run from Bezu Fache (Jean Reno), a French cop, and Silas (Paul Bettany), a cowl-wearing albino assassin, both of whom are acting under orders from a bishop of Opus Dei, the ultraconservative Catholic society. The bishop (Alfred Molina) is seen conspiring with several shadowy Vatican figures, discussing the need for “sacrifices” to cover up the church’s dirty laundry. Meanwhile, Ian McKellen steals the show in the role of Grail expert Sir Leigh Teabing, who employs hi-tech computer wizardry to demonstrate to Sophie that the person to the left of Jesus in da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” is actually Mary Magdalene. He seems to be the only one in the movie having fun, and offers viewers a knowing smirk like he did when playing Gandalf smoking a bowl of Hobbit-weed back in the first installment of The Lord of the Rings.

Needless to say, I was not disturbed by the book or film’s cavalier treatment of orthodox Christian tradition. (For the record, I was confirmed as an Episcopalian, but my instinctive adolescent doubts were even more confirmed when I learned that “my” Anglican religion had been created so that Henry VIII could get laid. That early cynicism, combined with my early interest in anthropology, eventually helped make me the scientific Taoist-Gnostic I sort of am today.) In fact, by far the most disturbing thing in the movie came early on, in a scene showing Silas demonstrating an X-treme form of the “corporal mortification” practiced by some Opus Dei adherents, pulling the sharp barbs of a “cilice” from the bloody and suppurating flesh of his thighs as he lashes his back with a cat-o-nine-tails and the camera lingers far too long on his naked white butt crack.

The action, such as it is, moves from France to London, but once McKellen leaves the scene the movie slows to a crawl, and the last 15 minutes seemed painfully endless. In their search for the Grail—which apparently consists of the bones of the Magdalene and some bloodline documents—Langdon and Sophie finally get to Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland, a hotbed of esoteric speculation built in the 1400s that includes Templar and pagan influences. Our loveless couple encounters a crowd of locals looking like they’d stepped out of an English country catalog who turn out to be members of the Priory “family,” and Sophie finds out (SPOILER ALERT!) that she, too, is carrying the royal blood. Langdon ends up back in Paris at the Louvre, but I’ll save the final plot “twist” for those still don’t know and insist on going to the movie.

FAITH, HOLLYWOOD, AND THE GLOBAL MARKET

Since Martin Scorsese’s 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ caused a vicious religious backlash around the world—and it only showed Jesus fantasizing about having sex with Mary Magdalene—Sony Pictures Entertainment knew it had a big problem on its hand when it acquired the rights to The Da Vinci Code in 2003. A fascinating story in the May 22, 2006 New Yorker detailed how, in the wake of the unexpectedly huge box office success of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, Hollywood was learning not to totally ignore the concerns of religious-minded moviegoers.

Sony hired a faith-oriented consultant and by last year was already funding websites like www.thedavincidialogue.com, where mainstream religious experts debunk Brown’s work. The effort to proactively reach out paid off, and most clergy around the country talked more about engaging the issues than protests and boycotts, which were seen as counterproductive. Even Opus Dei spoke of the upcoming movie—which of course no one could stop from being a blockbuster, anyway—as a “teaching moment.” But this new spirit of toleration did not sit well with everyone: Barbara Nicolosi, a screenwriter and Christian blogger, called those working with Sony “useful Christian idiots” who were debating the issue “on Hell’s terms.”

Hollywood movies are one of the most reliable exports from the West to the rest of humanity, but in this most unflat world of globalization, pleasing everyone is not always easy. Ironically, while Sony was able to help temper the tone of the domestic debate about the movie, it appears to have had more problems with its customers in much of the rest of the world.

In advance of The Da Vinci Code‘s mid-May debut at the Cannes Film Festival, a variety of protests were staged in India, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand, South Korea, and Zambia, among other places. India even put a temporary hold on the movie’s release because of complaints. Apparently, Christians outside the US, particularly those who are a minority in their own country, are more militant in defense of their faith than many god-fearing Americans. (Though thankfully the protests haven’t risen to the level caused earlier this year by Danish cartoons lampooning the prophet Muhammad.)

Meanwhile, the Da Vinci Moment was the sort of thing American cable TV was made for: wall-to-wall coverage with what seemed like dozens of news reports, documentaries, profiles, and puff pieces all tied to the movie. The History and Discovery channels were particularly gung-ho in the week leading up to the premier, and my eyes glazed over as I took in as much as I could.

Several interesting examples from the History Channel stand out. One was on the network’s new hit, “Digging for the Truth” with host Josh Bernstein, a hunky Jewish Indiana Jones who travels the world taking a hands-on approach to archaeology. In this one, he actually got a French museum to donate a sample from the bones of a supposed Merovingian princess and compared its DNA to that of an ancient community of Jewish descent in Israel. Result: Supposedly the princess didn’t carry a Middle East “marker,” providing extremely-sketchy-to-the-point-of-nonsense evidence that the genes of the Semitic Jesus and Mary Magdalene did not mix with early French kings. (Whew!)

Another eye-opener: a documentary that suggested the Knights Templar, both before and after the suppression of their order, were instrumental in the formation of the five cantons of the modern Swiss state. It noted the rapidity with which Switzerland went from being a collection of isolated settlements to an organized confederation with famously well-drilled defense forces during the late Middle Ages and Renaissance periods, and developed into a center of international banking. There’s also Switzerland’s traditional neutrality in international affairs and spirit of religious tolerance, both Templar traits. And oh yeah, the Templar emblem appears on the Swiss national flag and on the flags and emblems of many of the cantons—not to mention on the Swiss Army knife! Good stuff.

Finally, while watching yet another program, I was suddenly struck by the image of a painted statue at a church in southern France dedicated, like many in the region, to the Magdalene. The statue is of both Mary and her child, Sarah, and while Mary appears European, Sarah’s skin is a chocolate brown, and her features appear to be Egyptian. A Black Madonna in waiting, perhaps?

THE PRIORY OF PIERRE PLANTARD

There were also numerous programs, on both cable and broadcast TV (including 60 Minutes) dissecting the “facts” that Brown claimed lay behind his fictional story. The prologue of his novel is preceded by this statement: “FACT: The Priory of Sion—a European secret society founded in 1099—is a real organization. In 1975 Paris’s Bibliotheque Nationale discovered parchments known as Les Dossiers Secrets, identifying numerous members of the Priory, including Sir Issac Newton, Botticelli, Victor Hugo, and Leonardo da Vinci.”

So much for the “facts”—it’s hard to know where to begin. The so-called Secret Dossiers were not “discovered” by France’s national library, but were deposited there in the 1960s by the aforementioned Pierre Plantard and his cohorts—and are generally assumed to be fraudulent. They were not “parchments” but consisted mostly of copies of modern typewritten documents, including numerous genealogies and the infamous list of Priory “grand masters.” The dossiers were uncovered in the 1970s by three British writers—Henry Lincoln, Michael Baigent, and Richard Leigh—in the course of research that led to their controversial 1982 book, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, which first formulated and laid out the whole Priory-Merovingian-Jesus-bloodline scenario, and which Dan Brown (and his wife and principal researcher Blythe Brown) later appropriated for The Da Vinci Code.

In the novel, the name of the Ian McKellen character, Leigh Teabing, is an anagramatic tribute to the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and Teabing actually points out the book on his shelf and cites its importance. But those indirect acknowledgements were not enough to prevent Baigent and Leigh from suing Random House, publisher of The Da Vinci Code, in London’s high court for copyright infringement, charging that Brown had in effect stolen the “architecture” of their nonfiction book for his novel.

This past April, Judge Peter Smith ruled against the plaintiffs while also strongly criticizing the methods and testimony of Dan Brown and the fact that his wife declined to appear before the court. In keeping with the circus-like spirit of the occasion, the judge also embedded his own gimmicky coded message in his 70-page decision (italicized letters spelled out “Smithy Code Jackie Fisher who are you Dreadnought,” an obscure reference to British Naval history), while the highly publicized trial helped pump up the sales of both Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Da Vinci Code in the run-up to the movie’s premier.

And what about elusive Mr. Plantard? It turns out to be a story that neither begins nor ends well During the war, he formed a quasi-occult, pro-Vichy association that was both anti-masonic and anti-semitic. In 1956, he registered the Priory of Sion as an association with the French government, indicating in its statutes a desire to form a monastic order. In the 1960s he teamed up with author Gerard de Sede to begin spreading the idea the Priory was descended from the Abbey of Sion, a monastic order that records indicate indeed was formed in Jerusalem during the First Crusade but later was dissolved.

Though French researchers were already casting doubts on Plantard’s credibilty as early as the 1970s, the manufactured Secret Dossiers became a centerpiece of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, ultimately providing much of the intellectual basis for The Da Vinci Code. Finally, however, Plantard’s confabulations caught up with him, and what remained of his reputation was ruined. In 1993, an investigative judge ordered a search of his home, which turned up numerous forged documents, including some proclaiming him as the true king of France through a nonexistent Merovingian linkage. Plantard admitted to his fabrications under oath and afterwards lived quietly until his death in 2000.

BLASPHEMERS AND FUNDAMENTALISTS: PARADOXICAL UNITY

In the end, it’s hard to see clearly through all the murk. But maybe that’s sort of the point. The Da Vinci Code is successful because it taps into the deep inner stuff that makes us tick, drilled into our collective unconscious by 2,000 years of mass indoctrination.

Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln also worked the notorious anti-semitic forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, into their story, maintaining that it actually referred to the Priory of Sion, with the Jews as stand-ins for the real secret order. Meanwhile, fringe Christian end-timers view the pseudo-unveiling of the Priory as a fulfillment of prophecies in the Book of Revelations and proof of a vast anti-Christian conspiracy.

Hollywood merely appropriates the outrage of the fundamentalists as an implicit tool of the publicity machine, while the fundamentalists likewise use outrage at this evidence of society’s domination by amoral apostasy as a recruiting tool. These seeming opposites feed off each other—the same dynamic which is at work in the global showdown between Western imperialism and Islamic fundamentalism.

RESOURCES:

Sony’s “The Da Vinci Dialogue”
http://www.thedavincidialogue.com

Wikipedia page on the Priory of Sion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priory_of_Sion

See also:

“Bible scholars to crack Mafia code?,” April 23
/node/1877

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Special to WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, June 1, 2006
Reprinting permissible with attribution

BUSH’S “OVERSTRETCH” PROBLEM—AND OURS

BOOK REVIEW

Imperial Overstretch:
George W Bush and the Hubris of Empire
By Roger Burbach and Jim Tarbell
Zed Books, London, 2004

by Daniel Leal Diaz

In the optimistically-entitled Imperial Overstretch, Burbach and Tarbell credit the contemporary United States, “an imperial nation, flagrantly imposing its will on others,” with doing so more successfully and universally than any previous empire the world has seen. With the fall of the Communist bloc, the United States appropriated for itself the right to decide which governments are acceptable. For those governments deemed “unfit” to rule their own countries, the United States created the special doctrine of “preventive war,” holding that the US can attack any country that it perceives as a potential challenge to its hegemony.

This American righteousness is ostensibly based on the conviction that the virtues of the liberal democratic model need to be promoted and spread across the planet. For Burbach and Tarbell the real intention behind this democratic rhetoric is to “ensure that the US penetrates other countries’ economies”—the same motive which was behind the imposition of dictatorships in Latin America and elsewhere. The elite catchphrase of “free market democracies” is deconstructed as “controlled democracies that would recognize the prerogatives of international capital.”

The authors trace the rise of this “imperial nation” from its roots, predicated on westward territorial expansion, through the era of gunboat diplomacy in Latin America and classical “Yanqui imperialism” aimed at financial and market penetration, to the global anti-communist crusade of the Cold War. But it was only after the events of September 11, 2001 that the US has emerged as something unprecedented in all human history: a single unchallenged world empire, bent on controlling global oil supplies to assure continued global dominance. Under the guise of the “war on terrorism,” George W Bush—referred to throughout the book as a “dry drunk”—seized the opportunity to implement a project of “universal domination.”

Of the 189 member nations of the UN, the United States already had a military presence in 153. This was insufficient for Bush, whose government since 9-11 “has established fourteen new military bases extending from Eastern Europe through Iraq, the Persian Gulf, Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Central Asian republics of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.” As the invasion of Iraq loomed in 2002, former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia James Akin predicted: “The American oil companies are going to be the main beneficiaries of this war. We take over Iraq, install our regime, produce oil at the maximum rate and tell Saudi Arabia to go to hell.”

A central aspect of the book is the attempt to figure out the configuration of Bush’s “dry-drunk twisted view of the world.” More interesting than the question of how being a recovered alcoholic has infected Bush with a personal delusional hubris is that of the political alliance which has come together around his hubristic global program. A significant element of both configurations lies in the relation between politics and religion. The authors identify three principal pillars of this alliance.

The first is the corporate right or “neo-liberals,” who support a global expansion of “free trade” and a return to the values of the 19th century, “when ‘liberalism’ meant the right of wealthy international entrepreneurs to have rights of access to markets and resources anywhere on the planet.” The second are the “neo-conservatives,” the leading policy analysts of the big conservative foundations (funded by the corporate right) which “emulated the CIA’s post-war funding of former communists and leftists to counter the western European communist parties”—but this time to push through a domestic agenda of “American exceptionalism.” The authors dissect the web of these foundations (the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Project for the New American Century) and how their analysts and supporters found their way into the Bush administration (Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Elliot Abrams). The third pillar is the Christian right which “has inculcated the values of the corporate right into its theological fold.” This is the link to a grassroots voting bloc, and Bush’s personal conversion provides this bloc with a personal credibility.

To push beyond this bloc, Bush has played to the politics of fear. At the start of the Cold War, Senator Arthur Vandenberg said that the government had to “scare hell out of the American people” to make them accept the responsibilities of empire. Bush holds the same belief, unveiling the “Axis of Evil” concept to represent the new threat in his 2002 State of the Union address. This strategy of fear was also clearly visible in his State of the Union address in 2003, when he informed the world that “the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” Bush added that “evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications and statements by people now in custody reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al-Qaeda.” These claims have been largely disproven—but they served their propagandistic purpose, and helped facilitate the current US occupation of Iraq.

But this new imperialism—a “petro-military complex” that rules the world by force, ignoring international law—consumes enormous economic resources. The United States ran a budget deficit of $375 billion in 2003, and has not had a positive trade balance since 1975. “Militarily the US is so strong that nobody can meet it head on,” the authors quote one analyst. “Economically, however, it is vulnerable.” Hence overstretch.

The authors quote Yale historian Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, whose 1987 work they are clearly building on. Kennedy wrote that the United States “runs the risk, so familiar to historians of the rise and fall of previous Great Powers, of what might roughly be called ‘imperial overstretch.'” The United States is seriously overextended, they argue, and what appear to be manifestations of strength might in fact signal strategic weakness.

Other dangers of empire we are clearly already witnessing. Burbach and Tarbell warn: “The American empire, as in the time of Caesar’s Rome, could easily turn against the republic, creating a twisted, conflict-ridden society at war with itself.”

The architects of the new imperialism openly warn against the re-emergence of a second superpower. Burbach and Tarbell quote neo-conservative authors Lawrence F. Kaplan and William Kristol that the US must act to “prevent potential adversaries” from rising to rival or surpass the United States. But Burbach and Tarbell see a new kind of “second superpower” arising from an unexpected place—from below. They write:

“This power is rooted in the mobilization of popular forces on a global scale. It includes the anti-war and anti-globalization movements, the gatherings of the Porto Alegre Forum and a multitude of human rights and global justice organizations…”

The authors may commit the same error here as the neo-liberal and neo-conservative theorists they deride: that of reducing all world conflict to a single dimension. They write:

“There is indeed a global clash occurring. However, it is not between the Islamic and Western worlds, but between international corporate capital and the innumerable cultures, societies and civilizations that are undermined, uprooted and shattered as corporate capital expands its hold on the globe’s peoples and resources… The younger Bush and his ideologues refuse to acknowledge that ‘they hate us’ because of recurring US interventions around the globe, including the overthrow of democratic governments and US support of international terrorism well before the rise of al-Qaeda.”

This analysis is posed against the simplistic “clash of civilizations” theory of the conservative Samuel P. Huntington, which they call a “pseudo-intellectual” thesis that “feeds into xenophobic tendencies among Americans.” But clearly many on the “Islamic” side of Huntington’s equation also view the global conflict as one between the “Islamic and Western worlds,” and cast their own struggle in xenophobic terms.

The authors conclude that it is crucial to reject, demystify and ultimately replace the capitalist system that dominates the world. While acknowledging that this task will likely take centuries, they point to peasant land struggles in Brazil, the Bolivian movement against water privatization, and the emergence of local “alternative currencies” in the barrios of Argentina and the upstate New York town of Ithaca as examples of “de-comodification”—which could finally bring about “an end to the buying and selling of commodities for profit.” They call this struggle for de-comodification “the only way to change the global system of capitalism that burst out of Western Europe half a millennium ago, mediated by conquest and empire.”

Sadly, they don’t go into the specifics of the examples they cite, or elaborate how this process of de-comodification could be implemented. Nor do they sufficiently acknowledge that much of the actually-existing opposition to Bush’s new imperialism on the global stage comes from forces not thinking in terms of de-commodification so much as extreme religious fundamentalism—paradoxically mirroring that which they oppose.

The authors strike a dubious chord when they state “today, in the aftermath of the Iraqi war, it is eminently clear that the United States is in a state of imperial decline.” They argue that we are in an “interregnum” such as that between the first two world wars, that the fundamental contradictions of the global system are yet to play themselves out. But the multi-polar world of the inter-war era was very different from that of the current unipolar reality. George W Bush may have “launched the United States on a path of imperial overstretch,” but the empire is not seriously threatened by any other power. And the grassroots democratic forces which the authors pose in that role, at least potentially, are now subject to their own dangerous overstretch: having to oppose not only corporate globalization but the seemingly unending military crusade.

Burbach and Tarbell look hopefully to a post-imperial planet at the other end of the “interregnum,” writing that “the very concept of empire in any form is proving antiquated and incompatible with the winds of popular change, resistance and upheaval that have been unleashed in the epoch of globalization.” Whether those winds will finally prevail may be determined generations from now.

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Special to WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Nov. 1, 2005
Reprinting permissible with attribution

GLOBALIZING LIBERATION—AFTER 9-11

BOOK REVIEW

Globalize Liberation:
How to Uproot the System and Build a Better World
Edited by David Solnit
City Lights, San Francisco, 2004

by Gavin Sewell and Vilosh Vinograd

The stated goal is very ambitious: “Globalize Liberation was created as a resource of hands-on tools, ideas and examples to aid in our efforts to gain control of our lives and our communities, and ultimately to change the world we live in. It is intended to help individuals, groups, and movements to deepen their understanding of what’s wrong and why, to create a vision of alternatives, and to develop strategies for creating change.”

Globalize Liberation indeed paints a useful picture of the anti-capitalist movement since the Zapatista uprising and Seattle, and several of the essays in the anthology are excellent. But it’s hard to tell for whom this book was intended. It’s not systematic or didactic enough to be effective as an introduction for people with no experience in activism; the essays do a good job of describing our situation but generally don’t argue as if expecting either disagreement or complete ignorance. On the other hand, few of the essays go into enough depth or detail to be revelatory to any veteran activist. Most of the book ambles along in a frustrating gray area.

More importantly, a conceptual flaw is revealed by how much larger Seattle and Chiapas loom in the book than 9-11. Editor David Solnit—leading light of the Bay Area-based group Art and Revolution, which creates many of the giant puppets and props seen at anti-globalization protests in recent years—has assembled contributors similarly seasoned by years of experience in this movement. But, like the movement as a whole, they generally do not address what has changed since September 2001: how the war for resources and labor represented by “globalization” has become an actual shooting war, while US unilateralism has punctured the facade of a seamlessly “globalized capitalism.” Solnit’s 14-page introduction doesn’t even mention 9-11, and only briefly touches on the Iraq war.

The anthology is divided into three sections, “What’s the Problem?,” “How to Change Things,” and, “Ideas in Action.” Not surprisingly, “What’s the Problem?” is by far the strongest section overall. Cindy Milstein of Vermont’s Institute for Social Ecology contributes a clear, concise overview of basic anarchist theory and spirit that could serve as a good introduction to the subject. Citing the classical Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, she expounds on the nation-state and capital as twin pillars of an inherently centralizing and anti-democratic system. Invoking New England town meetings as a “fragment” survival of more human, decentralized models, she poses the movement toward direct democracy as part of a broader historical tendency.

George Caffentzis of the indispensable Midnight Notes Collective offers an original, astute analysis of the World Trade Center attacks. He notes how an economic “liberalization” scheme within Saudi Arabia instituted in 2000 allowed foreigners to buy parts of Islam’s holy land, making a strong case that the attacks were carried out the next year as a direct reaction to this policy. The “liberalization” only expanded after 9-11—prompting further attacks within Saudi Arabia, in a vicious cycle. Caffentzis says the “war on terrorism” is really the “struggle over control of the earth’s oil and gas.”

But even this section insufficiently grapples with how 9-11 has entrenched the imperial system—and diverted the momentum that had been building since the November 1999 Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization. Walden Bello of Focus on the Global South optimistically writes: “Since September 11, global capitalism has continued to lose legitimacy…” Perhaps, but the protest mobilizations against the WTO and World Bank have been smaller since then, and activist energies have been deflected into protesting the Iraq occupation.

Even Chris Hables Gray in his chapter on war and globalization (the last in the “What’s the Problem?” section) barely mentions 9-11. He also writes with optimism that “our current international system is based on nation-states and their decline opens up a real opportunity, actually a necessity, to demilitarize politics.” Again, could be—but the collapse of nation-states in (for instance) the Balkans and Somalia has only meant an increase in militarism and an occasion for US interventionism. The emergence of “non-state actors” on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq has provided a pretext for Washington to suspend the Geneva Conventions, the only minimal legal restraints on state militarism.

In what’s probably the most important chapter of this book for activists, Van Jones goes behind enemy lines and describes what he saw from the inside of the February 2002 World Economic Forum in New York City. (A veteran of the Seattle protests, he was mysteriously invited to the WEF summit as a “Global Leader for Tomorrow.”) One of his observations is worth quoting. Jones found that the ruling elite in the Waldorf-Astoria “loved the protesters. In fact, most attendees took the demonstration—and the huge police response—as an affirmation of their own self-impotence. It was almost as if a bunch of really nerdy kids were chanting and marching around the coolest frat-house on campus.” Jones provides serious food for thought for anyone doing conventional street protest.

The “How to Change Things” section of course provides a greater challenge than delineating what’s wrong—and runs into bigger problems. A good example is longtime nonviolence theorist George Lakey’s essay “Strategizing for a Living Revolution.” In a 25-page essay he gives only one page to consciousness-raising and the creation of a new non-capitalist culture. The rest of his essay explains what you do to build and be effective as a revolutionary organization once you’ve done this. This is an instructive discussion, with case studies including Argentina’s piqueteros and Serbia’s Otpor, providing some very useful material for any existing mass movement. For example, to combat police brutality the kids in Otpor would go to the homes of violent cops and show pictures of their beaten comrades to the neighbors, family, and children. After a few months of doing this they had (peacefully) intimidated most of the Serbian police force into retreating from violent repression. Otpor’s slogan was “It only hurts when you’re scared.” The stories of middle class people joining piqueteros to beat the walls of banks are also inspiring. But these were situations where extreme repression (Serbia) or extreme economic devastation (Argentina) had already galvanized a large people’s movement. Here in the US, we face the bizarre challenge of a downtrodden population which by and large doesn’t feel oppressed. Glossing over the stage of consciousness and culture-building seems like writing a how-to book on horse racing with 24 chapters on how to spend the money you’ll win at the Triple Crown and only one on how to train a horse.

Something of the same lack of pragmatism weakens the essays on the Argentine uprising, the Zapatistas, the U’wa indigenous resistance to Occidental Petroleum in Colombia, and most of the “Ideas in Action” section of the book. None of the essays explore the question of how we translate the concepts of these actions into the realities of the “first word.” Globalize Liberation was published in North America, and was presumably written mostly for North Americans. Could the propagation techniques of the Zapatistas work here? How about the tactics of the Argentine direct-democracy assemblies? How would they need to be modified? Where are these pragmatic questions addressed?

Manuel Callahan’s chapter “Zapatismo Beyond Chiapas” takes an admirable stab at it, but would need another hundred pages to make a serious dent in the problem. Marina Sitrin describes the Argentine struggle in enough detail to be useful and also writes some of the best prose in the book. What Sitrin and Callahan both see as critical are the imagination and flexibility of these movements, their spontaneity and non-traditional, non-hierarchical approaches to organizing. What neither of them have space to get into here are the psychological and social differences between Latin Americans and citizens of the US; what can we wards of a cold, technocratic society do to reverse the erosion of traditions of social solidarity still vibrant south of the border?

Keir Milburn’s essay on creative protest tactics in Italy could answer some of the problems raised by Van Jones. Milburn tells how Italian activists use foam padding and home-made body armor, blurring the lines between violent and non-violent protest. These padded anti-globalization protestors, or “turtles,” could stand their ground against club-wielding riot-cops without having to physically fight them. By blockading without hurting the police they managed to score both tactical and PR victories. This ties in with the kind of creative flexibility Sitrin and Callahan describe in their essays, and it makes for interesting reading on its own. In fact, most of the essays in the last section of the book are interesting; what’s doubtful is how many of them are useful at this stage or our struggle.

Finally, there’s the back cover. In the lower right is a pretend bar-code with stick people escaping from it, as if from behind prison bars, to mock the idea of bar-codes. Bar-codes certainly should be ridiculed, but over on the lower left-hand corner of the book is…a real bar-code. A bar code may be a necessity of getting the book out to a wide readership. But the self-parody may also betray the obvious contradictions that make it easy for most Americans to ignore us and our ideas.

In summary, Globalize Liberation is an imperfectly conceived anthology with some really great essays in it. It is also an attempt to write a kind of book that really needs to be written. It’s much easier to criticize than to create, and editor Solnit and his contributors deserve credit for stepping up to fill a void. We need to forge intellectual weapons against the capitalist establishment, and despite its problems, Globalize Liberation is a sign that we’re trying.

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See also WW4 REPORT’s coverage of the February 2002 WEF protests in NYC
/static/20.html#nyc1

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Special to WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Oct. 1, 2005
Reprinting permissible with attribution

AN ACCIDENTAL DISSIDENT FROM THE BIN LADEN DYNASTY

BOOK REVIEW

INSIDE THE KINGDOM
My Life in Saudi Arabia
by Carmen Bin Ladin
Warner Books, 2004

by Chesley Hicks

“Socially, Saudi Arabia is medieval, dark with sin and interdiction,” opens chapter seven of Carmen Bin Ladin’s chronicle of the years she spent married to Yeslam Bin Ladin, one of the infamous Osama’s 22 brothers.

In her 2004 memoir, recently out in paperback, the Western-raised, half-Swiss, half-Persian Bin Ladin (the book refers to Carmen and Yeslam as Bin Ladin, and the rest of the clan, including the notorious brother, as Bin Laden) outlines how she came to meet and marry a young Saudi Arabian jetsetter, leave her Geneva home, and endure life for nine years as a near-captive on his family compound in the Arabian desert.

Bin Ladin describes how the path to this fate really began with her mother. Far from fundamentalist, but nonetheless socially conventional, Carmen’s mother was eager for her eldest daughter to find a husband after her own husband—Carmen’s father, a Swiss man—abruptly left her. Carmen says that when she first met her future husband in Geneva, both were young, idealistic, and living Western lives. At the time, his family—who were taking a long vacation in Geneva—also struck the author as open-minded and even hip. However, as she gradually became acquainted with Yeslam’s family on their own turf, Carmen recognized that her husband was different from the rest—more progressive and appreciative of her Western values and autonomy—just as she was radically different from the Bin Laden clan’s subjugated wives and sisters. Even so, when the oil boom hit Saudi Arabia in the ’70s and it became apparent that colossal cash piles could be collected doing business there, Carmen and Yeslam decided to make a go of it in the desert kingdom.

Before moving there for good after the birth of their first daughter, the couple made several trips to Saudi Arabia, the earliest in order to procure the Saudi King’s mandatory permission to marry. From beneath an abaya—the compulsory head-to-toe covering for Saudi women—Carmen made her prescient first encounter with Saudi Arabia: “I watched the desert approach as we landed. The light through the black gauze cloth was so dim, I didn’t know if this new country was simply the darkest, dimmest place I had ever seen, or if the cloth across my eyes was preventing me from seeing anything that was there.”

Her ensuing Saudi wedding was likewise foreboding. “I waited, in my abaya, in the car,” she writes. “Yeslam and Ibrahim [his brother] brought me out a book that I had to sign. That was the marriage register… Then someone took the book back and we were married.” On this first visit to Saudi Arabia and with each subsequent one, Carmen portrays her increasing awareness of Saudi culture’s deeply entrenched misogyny, utter disregard for women’s welfare, and penchant for violent oppression. Yet she says that when the young couple arrived there to live, she was optimistic. “I thought [wearing the abaya] was temporary,” she writes. “Jeddah was booming, and foreigners had come flocking to the country… I assumed that Saudi culture would move into the modern world, just as other cultures had.” Writing in hindsight, Carmen seems alternately appreciative of and dismayed by her naive temerity, which she says was born both of her youth and having been a teenager in the revolutionary-feeling sixties. Coming from what appears to have been a sheltered, wealthy environment, it’s fair to say she found her Altamont in Saudi Arabia, 1979.

From 1976 to 1979, Carmen witnessed massive, breakneck modern development in Saudi Arabia. Though the culture followed at a glacial pace—she spent those years adjusting to harsh Saudi protocols, learning to circumscribe her public behavior while creating a liberal safe haven within her own home—she describes a relative loosening of fundamentalist strictures. Women began to appear in public without the full abaya, some of the Bin Laden wives brought their children to the birthday parties Carmen threw for her daughters (observation of birthdays is considered sacrilege by some strict Saudi Muslims). But it all came to a grinding halt in 1979 with the overthrow of the Shah of Iran. The Iranian revolution caused panic in the royal family, which was already straining between the pull of the austere Wahabist Islam it purported to uphold and many of the royal family members’ libertine inclinations. “The more debauched princes,” Carmen writes, “continued indulging in their privately lavish lifestyles, while at the same time the royal family enforced increasing restrictions on the ordinary people they ruled.” Nearly overnight, the kingdom’s streets reverted to its brutish, tribal past, the culture of which Carmen spends a good portion of her book dissecting—revealing the parts to be even less appealing than the desiccated whole.

Throughout book—sometimes with a redundancy perhaps resounding with the years spent silent on the matter, and with how intensely she believes it a threat to the world—Carmen depicts a Saudi culture as crude as the oil that sustains it. She contrasts the culture of Saudi Islam with the Persian Islamic culture of her grandmother: “The Saudi version of Islam—Wahabism—is ferocious in its enforcement of a stark and ancient social code. This is not a complex intellectual culture like that of Iran or Egypt.” In her view, contemporary Saudi Arabia amounts to little more than a primitive tribal society that stumbled upon a whole lotta money, which has brought the country gross material wealth and power but not a whit of sophistication or enlightenment. She offers vivid, succinct depictions of the ways in which the Saudis have adopted garish and gaudy simulations of Western opulence without any sense of form or function She describes her first impression of her mother-in-law’s home: “It was a relief to take off my abaya. Suddenly the light inside the house seemed blinding. There were so many chandeliers blazing, it was like stepping into a lamp shop… The lack of sophistication surprised me. I had imagined an exotic Oriental abode, like in the movies, or like my grandmother’s home in Iran. After all, Yeslam’s father had been one of the richest men in Saudi Arabia. But this was just a basic house furnished in poor taste.” She also presents numerous examples of comically absurd but painfully oppressive Saudi moral bureaucracy, generally employed to keep women lowly.

And where she thought she might find sorority among the repressed women with whom she lived in the Bin Laden compound, she instead found relationships among wives and sisters to be superficial and catty—a consequence in part of their being relentlessly segregated, herded, and quartered like breeding heifers. Carmen depicts many Saudi women as spiritually and intellectually lobotomized, forced to get by on the favors they are able to curry from the men who control them, usually by dint of deceit and manipulation. Their dynamic reflects a concentration camp mentality—the sense that there are never enough resources to go around and what is given to another extracts from one’s own welfare. This might seem strange in as wealthy a nation as Saudi Arabia, but polygamy is the norm there—so it seems each wife knows she is only as good as her last performance. Even the wives’ forays into lesbianism come off as desperate attempts to compensate for what they don’t get from men and aren’t allowed to do for themselves. Carmen addresses these behaviors with varying degrees of compassion and resentment, and of course takes care to detail the exceptions—a handful of women with whom she could relate, including some who remained close following her estrangement from the kingdom.

And the men in Carmen’s kingdom are generally craven-hearted brutes wearing complacent veneers. By adolescence, Carmen says, boys have learned to control their own mothers with an arrogance and sense of entitlement bred deeply into them. Within the family, they are subject mainly to birth order. The formerly nomadic tribes relied heavily on patrilineal clan organization: still in full effect today according to Carmen. “Families are headed by patriarchs and obedience to the patriarch is absolute,” she writes. “The only values that count in Saudi Arabia are loyalty and submission—first to Islam then to the clan.”

Carmen says she got by not just pursuing illusory Saudi liberalism, but by going on a mission to educate herself on the country’s history and the inextricably entangled intrigues of the Saudi royal and Bin Laden families. She achieved her goal by listening to the conversations around her and reading books and newspapers smuggled in from elsewhere. Apparently the governmental watchdogs dared not investigate luggage or packages bearing the Bin Laden name, so she even was able to access information that was critical of the royal family.

The result of that inquiry helps make Inside the Kingdom the compelling read it is. Carmen connects what’s going on in her personal life to what’s happening globally and in Saudi Arabia in particular. It’s a view into Saudi culture and a political history lesson, shown in the unfolding of the author’s personal saga.

Carmen’s rendition of modern Saudi affairs resides largely in an examination of legacy, which is a recurring theme in the book. She frames the current state of the Bin Laden family as reflective of each brother’s relationship to the pious, self-made, and shrewd patriarch, Sheik Mohammed Bin Laden, who had 22 wives and 54 children before he died at age 59 in a plane crash—rumored to have occurred en route to his taking a 23rd wife. “Sadly,” Carmen writes, “none of his children has ever really measured up to Sheikh Mohamed,” her misgivings about the family he spawned oddly notwithstanding her admiration for the legend of the man she never met. One doesn’t have to read too far between Inside the Kingdom‘s lines to see that Carmen craves a father figure.

Similarly, Carmen identifies her haste to marry as, in part, answering her mother’s insecurity and concern for appearances—something that she says was not of her mother’s true character but a carry-over from her Iranian upbringing that only expressed itself after she was humiliated by her husband’s departure. (Carmen’s mother never admitted her divorce to her own family). “That is what it meant to me to be from the Middle East,” Carmen writes. “You lived behind secrets. You hid things that were disagreeable.” It is not clear when in Carmen’s life she fully figured this out, though she describes an epiphany—one of a few in the book—she had upon returning to Iran as an adult. Though she maintains her respect for the rich and ancient Iranian culture, she describes having been devastated to find that life on Iran’s streets did not resemble the aristocratic gardens within the walls of her grandmother’s estate she visited as a child. Carmen says she told Yeslam when she first met him that she would never marry, as she didn’t want to see her children abandoned by a father as she and her three sisters were. Yet about 15 years later, that is precisely the predicament in which Carmen finds herself.

And in that vein, the dissolution of the Saudi royal family itself can be seen as a microcosm of modern Saudi Arabia. Carmen says there are rumored to be some 25,000 in the Saudi clan now, and she portrays the generation coming to dominate the country as remarkably shiftless. They all receive some stipend or another from the country’s oil wealth and believe themselves above work (Carmen depicts Saudis relying heavily upon yet abusing their foreign hired help, treating them as slaves). Add to that the Saudi belief that, as the caretakers of Mecca, they are a chosen people, and you have delusional, dysfunctional elite—yet depicted as possessing little substance with which to fill their lives. One can only wonder how that legacy will unfold when the oil wells begin to run dry.

Returning to the Bin Laden legacy: there is the book’s tacitly central character of Osama, and there is Yeslam. Among Carmen’s chief reasons for writing her memoir, she says, was the opportunity to exonerate her daughters and herself from the scourge wrought on their surname, and to warn the world of the roiling Saudi threat. Osama, she says, was neither a black sheep nor an exalted member of the Bin Laden family while she lived in the compound. She met him only briefly on a few occasions and comes to no definitive conclusion about him other than that his pious commitment to strict fundamentalism and its causes celebres seemed to earn him increasing respect in polarized, backward-sliding Saudi society. Near the book’s conclusion she writes: “I cannot believe that the Bin Ladens have cut Osama off completely. I simply can’t see them depriving a brother of his annual dividend from their father’s company, and sharing it among themselves. This would be unthinkable—among the Bin Ladens, no matter what a brother does, he remains a brother.” She also says: “It’s certainly possible that Osama retains ties to the royal family, too. The Bin Ladens and the princes work together, very closely. They are secretive and they are united.” On 9-ll she asserts: “Though they have made a few public statements condemning the tragedy, neither clan has gone to any length to prove that they have not given Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaida moral and financial support in the past, and that they are currently not doing so.”

Yeslam, as it turns out, succumbs to neuroses and, ultimately, to the pull of the clan’s gravity. According to Carmen, Saudi Arabia is a nation of wealthy hypochondriacs who fly across the globe to visit their various favorite doctors and collect prescriptions. Her husband, whose level-headed, intelligent composure had always impressed her, eventually joins and then even surpasses their obsessive ranks. She watches as he slips deeper into anxiety disorder, becoming phobic, distant, and, finally, estranged. It’s hard not to feel the parallels between his trajectory and that of his country. He ascends his family’s stature-ladder, defying birth order, establishing contacts within the royal family, and making a name for himself as a highly successful businessman. He marries a Western woman to whom he intimately and intellectually relates, while always managing to maintain face in traditional Saudi culture as it catapults into Western capitalism. But eventually his sanity splinters, his own psychiatric decline and the subsequent deterioration of his marriage mirroring the kingdom’s decent into fractured consciousness.

It seems that as Carmen was finishing her book, she was still involved in a protracted, painful divorce from Yeslam. She says that as she watched Yeslam lose his sanguine self-possession, she also saw him drawn further into the recesses of Saudi moral despotism. When she recognizes that she’s losing him as an ally, she realizes that she and her daughters are close to becoming true captives in Saudi Arabia. Her daughters are coming of age–and becoming subject to the Saudi interpretation of womanhood. Finally, with of one of their annual visits to Switzerland, they simply don’t return to the desert. Then the marriage disintegrates. Carmen says that though he was living in Geneva, Yeslam became ever more Saudi, and even started cheating on her. They divorce. The odd thing is that Yelsam stays in Switzerland, too, but lives an entirely separate life and eventually denies the existence of his daughters. According to Carmen, he used his might and money to try to extradite all of their daughters to Saudi Arabia—even though he’d asked her to abort her pregnancy with the third daughter—where she would lose access to them. Apparently parts of their battle became public news in Switzerland—something one imagines might also have compelled Carmen to set the record straight with a book.

Though there are some holes in the telling, one tends to believe Carmen’s story comes from the heart, and that her insights are solid. Her tale is a memoir, yet it’s not as forthcoming as it could be. For instance, she never reveals the source of her birth family’s wealth, though it’s apparent and certainly shapes her experiences and perspective on the world. (Hell, I doubt you meet and marry a Bin Laden if you’re not rich to begin with.) Sometimes you get the feeling that as far out on limb as she’s gone to tell her story, she’s still holding back at times—maybe a remnant of her mother’s secretive conventionalism.

She offers lucid views into many of the kingdom’s angles and shadows, but Carmen says little about the intimate intertwining of US and Saudi legacies. Her approach is uncritical of Western values, coming rather from a vantage of unmitigated gratitude for the freedoms the West offers in relief to Mideastern oppressions. Indeed she even sees in the rigors of her own divorce from Yeslam an epochal struggle against Saudi tyranny. In the conclusion, she says that she fears for her and her three daughters’ safety in the wake of the book’s release. But a year later, it doesn’t seem to have roused dire controversy. Maybe it’s because she never injured Allah in her writing, or perhaps it is because her words are too close to the truth.

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For more on the Bin Laden dynasty see:

WW4 REPORT #43
/43.html#shadows7

WW4 REPORT #28
/28.html#shadows1

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Special to WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Sept. 1, 2005

Reprinting permissible with attribution

PARANOIA ON ROUTE 66

An Algerian Immigrant’s Kafkaesque Journey in Post-9-11 America

by Bill Weinberg

Still Moments
A Story About Faded Dreams & Forbidden Pictures
Zighen Aym
ZAWP, POB 411, Mossville, IL 61552-411

Of all the nightmares which have befallen immigrants from the Islamic world since the September 11 attacks, those related in this short self-published memoir, Still Moments, are far from the most egregious. But the nearly surreal ironies of this story, and the straightforward, almost innocent way it is told, make it a powerful testament to how freedom is contracting as our leaders wage wars in the name of expanding freedom. As if synchronicity had conspired to drive home this point, the critical incident on which the tale turns takes place on Route 66, fabled in song (Chuck Berry) and story (Jack Kerouac) as a symbol of the uniquely American freedom of the Open Road.

The (probably pseudonymous) protagonist, Zighen Aym, who tells his tale in the first person, is a middle-class professional working as a mechanical engineer for an unnamed company in central Illinois. He is a husband and father, a naturalized US citizen, and had been in the country seven years at the time of the 9-11 disaster. He was the archetype of the “good” immigrant who really believed that the USA represents freedom. He had left his native Algeria to escape violence and repression, which was endemic there in the 1990s, and doubly targeted at members of his own people, the Berber ethnic minority.

News from home never failed to confirm the wisdom of his decision to leave. In May 1997, his young sister-in-law was killed when a bomb exploded at her high school in Algiers. But some of the salient incidents which prompted Aym to leave his homeland would take on an ironic significance as he was “profiled” as a potential terrorist by the FBI for the most unassuming acts after 9-11.

The first came in 1986, when he was vacationing with a friend at the Mediterranean port of Bejaia. An avid photographer, he began taking pictures of the port below from a scenic vista point. This activity came to the attention of a police officer. Aym was detained at the local police station, interrogated about his purposes in photographing the harbor, and given a verbal drumming about the threat of espionage and subversion from the imperialist powers. This degree of paranoia over something as innocent as photography helped inform his decision to leave the country years later.

Another concerned the food shortages which were chronic, despite the oil boom of the 1980s. After waiting in a long line for hours to triumphantly return home with ten pounds of garbanzo beans and four pounds of butter, he began to realize how his standards for material security had eroded.

Early one morning in October 2002, Aym, now living happily in Illinois, was driving along Route 66 with his camera, his eye drawn by images that could make for interesting shots, unaware of how his comfortable world was about to change. First he stops to shoot dew-glistening spider webs interlacing between corn stalks in a farmer’s field. Then—fatefully—he notices a pair of railroad tracks, “their flat surfaces reflecting sunlight and shining like two silver lines drawn into the horizon.” His interest is purely aesthetic, not at all technical: “The scene of converging rail tracks and obsolete telephone poles was a harmonious display of increasing distance and decreasing height and span; a natural 3-D visual agreement.” He again stops the car and starts clicking.

As at the port at Bejaia 15 years earlier, this activity draws the attention of the local constabulary. A state trooper pulls up, questions him about what he is doing and where he is from, asks for ID, runs a check. Aym is finally allowed to go. Weeks later, the FBI issues an alert warning of terrorist attacks on Amtrak.

In January 2003, Aym receives a call at his home from the FBI. They request an interview to discuss his “love of trains.” (The assumption seems to be he is either a terrorist or a train-spotting geek.) “I don’t love trains,” he answers. He is aware he can refuse the interview, but also aware that this would only invite an FBI visit at his workplace, which would be a public embarrassment and could even jeopardize his job. He realizes his official rights are somewhat irrelevant. He agrees to the interview.

“Even if the FBI suspects me of being a terrorist, it is better to be in America than Algeria,” he jokes to his worried wife. “Here, at least I can buy garbanzo beans at any time of the day and night.”

In the following days, as he frets over his impending interview, contacts the ACLU and is referred to a lawyer, he contemplates how freedom is diminishing in both his native and adoptive countries—and for related reasons. In the ’90s, as the Algerian regime turned post-socialist and came to be dominated by a “mafia” of corrupt generals, the new populist mantle was assumed by the Islamic fundamentalists. Their electoral victory in 1992 only prompted the regime to annul the elections and declare military rule—which in turn prompted the Islamists to take up arms, precipitating nearly ten years of civil war in which 200,000 Algerians lost their lives. And neither side—the military mafia or the Islamist guerillas—saw the Berbers as anything other than a dangerous threat to national unity.

The resurgence of a Berber movement for human and cultural rights came, unfortunately, just as 9-11 was about to transform the political landscape for the worse. On June 14, 2001, over 1 million Berbers marched in Algiers to protest the killing of an unarmed youth by the police in Kabylia, the Berber region. Ten were killed as police attacked the protesters. The White House said nothing. On July 12, 2001, Algeria’s President Abdelaziz Bouteflika was at the White House for an official visit; a small group of Berber protesters stood outside with a banner reading “ALGERIAN PRESIDENT AND GENERALS TO THE HAGUE.” A few weeks later, Algeria awarded a $700 million contract to Halliburton subsidiary KBR to help modernize the country’s oil industry. After 9-11, the US would step up arms sales and military-intelligence cooperation with the Algerian regime, and human and minority rights in Algeria would become more of an inconvenience than ever for Algiers and Washington alike.

So Aym’s people face persecution in his homeland precisely because they are not Arab, Algeria’s dominant ethnicity. And the Islamists and government are seen as equal threats to Berber freedom and identity. Yet in Illinois, he is profiled as an Arab/Islamic terrorist.

Aym’s interview with the FBI takes place at a federal building in a Bloomington suburb named (more irony) Normal. Once ensconced in the office of the interrogating agent, he offers to do a Google search of his own name, which would turn up freelance work confirming that he is, in fact, a photographer. The agent declines, instead asking a barrage of banal questions: “Do you know anyone, associates or friends, who may be working for any terrorist government or terrorist organization?” “Are you a terrorist or linked to a terrorist organization?”

Writes Aym: “I had a feeling of deja vu: I saw the Algerian policeman at the police station in 1986. The agent’s blank face and small but muscular body made him an extension of the repressive system. How interesting to see that repression and love of power easily cross cultural, national, and religious boundaries!”

After answering a requisite “no” to the agent’s questions, he is free to leave—until, in one final flourish of paranoid sleuthwork, the agent notices the decal on Aym’s notepad and demands he explain it. It reads “UBL,” for Ultimate Band List, a music e-store. The agent accepts this explanation. Aym is confused until his lawyer, who was allowed to be present for the interview, says to the agent, “I see that you have the picture of UBL here.” He indicates a WANTED poster for Usama bin Laden—using the FBI’s unorthodox spelling of the first name.

“I was stunned when I realized how naive I was,” Aym writes. “Both my lawyer and the agent had made the link between my UBL decal and Usama Bin Laden. My lawyer used the initials UBL as if he purposely wanted to expose my naivete to me.”

The interview had lasted an hour, but of course felt like an eternity. Upon leaving, Aym considers “heading north to get my kicks on Route 66 one more time. Instead, I drove home.”

The story is told in a brief 65 pages, and does often come across as slightly naive. But a lot of meaning is packed into this slim volume—about lost innocence, about the paradoxes of identity, and about the diminishing prospects for human freedom in both the United States of America and on planet Earth generally in the long aftermath of September 11.

RESOURCES

Zighen Aym’s homepage
http://www.geocities.com/zighenaym

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Special to WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, July 10, 2005
Reprinting permissible with attribution

http://WW4Report.com