Engineers Most Likely to Become Islamic Radicals

Engineers of Jihad

Why Are There So Many Engineers Among Islamic Radicals?

What sort of people are more likely to become religious fundamentalists?

Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog recently released two reports demonstrating that individuals with degrees in subjects such as science, engineering, and medicine are most likely to become Islamic extremists. The two most well-known cases are Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, who studied engineering in university, and Al-Qaeda second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri who received a degree in medicine.

US silent on Taliban’s al-Qaeda offer

WASHINGTON – The Barack Obama administration is refusing to acknowledge an offer by the leadership of the Taliban in early December to give “legal guarantees” that they will not allow Afghanistan to be used for attacks on other countries.

The administration’s silence on the offer, despite a public statement by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressing skepticism about any Taliban offer to separate itself from al-Qaeda, effectively leaves the door open to negotiating a deal with the Taliban based on such a proposal.

The Taliban, however, have chosen to interpret the Obama administration’s position as one of rejection of their offer.

The Taliban offer, included in a statement dated December 4 and e-mailed to news organizations the following day, said the organization had “no agenda of meddling in the internal affairs of other countries and is ready to give legal guarantees if foreign forces withdraw from Afghanistan”.

The statement did not mention al-Qaeda by name or elaborate on what was meant by “legal guarantees” against such “meddling”, but it was an obvious response to past US insistence that the US war in Afghanistan is necessary to prevent al-Qaeda from having a safe haven in Afghanistan once again.

Capturing Osama Bin Laden Is the Last Thing That Americans Want

Where is bad guy Osama bin Laden? This question still takes the minds of US political and military elite. US National Security Advisor James L. Jones believes that the prime suspect of 9/11 attacks is hiding in Pakistan. Defense Secretary Robert Michael Gates later said that the Pentagon did not have the information to confirm the statement, for terrorist No. 1 would have been caught otherwise.

A special report from the US Senate said that the US military had a chance to capture Bin Laden alive, but they missed him during the first months of the Afghan campaign in 2001. Former Defense Secretary Donald Henry Rumsfeld and General Tommy Ray Franks are said to be accountable for that mistake.

According to US intelligence, Bin Laden was hiding in Tora Bora caves in the east of Afghanistan. US troops were prepared to storm the caves in December of 2001, but suddenly canceled the operation following the orders from Rumsfeld and Franks, who later said that they should concentrate their efforts in other directions.

The authors of the report believe that Bin Laden and his associates used the opportunity to escape to Pakistan, where he can probably be staying still. The officials, who prepared the report, referred to the information announced by Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani.

Transcript shows man claiming to be spy helped FBI

WEST COVINA, Calif. — A Southern California man who claimed to spy on mosques for the Federal Bureau of Investigation provided the agency with valuable information for a federal prosecution, a court transcript showed on Friday.

The transcript from an August 2007 hearing states that Craig Monteilh (MON’-tay) provided “very, very valuable” information to the FBI, which prompted a deputy district attorney to ask a Superior Court judge to have his probation terminated in an unrelated theft case.

The transcript released on Friday does not state the nature of the information nor the relationship the FBI had with Monteilh, who has accused the agency of failing to properly pay him for his work as an informant.

The 47-year old fitness consultant from Irvine claims he infiltrated Orange County mosques in 2006 and 2007 for an anti-terrorism task force — an activity that caused an uproar in Muslim communities.

US let bin Laden escape after 9/11: Senate report

US military leaders allowed al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden (Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden) to ‘walk unmolested out of Tora Bora‘ when he was within the reach of US troops, a Senate report reveals.

Staff members for the Democratic majority of the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations prepared the report at the request of the chairman, Sen. John Forbes Kerry.

The Saturday report said that the failure to kill or capture bin Laden in December 2001 has had lasting consequences, according to the Associated Press.

Kerry has argued the Bush administration missed a chance to get the al-Qaeda leader and top deputies when they were holed up in the mountainous area of eastern Afghanistan three months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The report also sharply criticized mishandling of US military for capturing Osama bin Laden.

The Day the Death Star Went Down

The US military and its cult of cruelty

In the week that George Bush took to fantasizing that his blood-soaked “war on terror” would lead the 21st century into a “shining age of human liberty” I went through my mail bag to find a frightening letter addressed to me by an American veteran whose son is serving as a lieutenant colonel and medical doctor with US forces in Baghdad. Put simply, my American friend believes the change of military creed under the Bush administration – from that of “soldier” to that of “warrior” – is encouraging American troops to commit atrocities.

From Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo to Bagram, to the battlefields of Iraq and to the “black” prisons of the CIA, humiliation and beatings, rape, anal rape and murder have now become so commonplace that each new outrage is creeping into the inside pages of our newspapers. My reporting notebooks are full of Afghan and Iraqi complaints of torture and beatings from August 2002, and then from 2003 to the present point. How, I keep asking myself, did this happen? Obviously, the trail leads to the top. But where did this cult of cruelty begin?

See also: Iraq to re-open Abu Ghraib prison