Lunch at the Labs

In response to Thomas L. Friedman's Op-Ed column in the January 22, 2003 New York Times I sent him the following email:

Dear Mr. Friedman,

Your January 22 Op-Ed column "Thinking About Iraq (I)" described a desirable goal, but your suggestion for how to achieve it was off the mark. Don't you think it's just a little bit silly (and stupid) to go to war to oust the tyrants we have supported and aided in the past (Saddam) and continue to aid now (in Saudia Arabia, Egypt and probably every other Arab country in the mid-east). How about this for a more sensible solution: stop supporting the tyrants now. Of course this will not happen because we need mid-east oil.

Furthermore it's clear to me from our past history that given the choice between a dictator that does our bidding versus a democracy that does not, we prefer the former. Do you remember Allende in Chile?

Since 9/11 many people have noted that 14 of the 19 hijackers had visas from Saudia Arabia. Some have even gone so far as to accuse Saudia Arabia of supporting the terrorists. But in a column by Joel Mowbray that appeared in the December 23 issue of the National Review, there is finally a rational explanation.

Before he was arrested in Pakistan, one of the masterminds of the 9/11 attack on the WTC, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, was interviewed by the Arab language network al-Jazeera. According to the interview, bin al-Shieb made two attempts from Germany and two attempts from Yemen to get a visa to the United States and after these were unsuccessful, al-Qaeda decided to recruit terrorists from Saudi Arabia, a country from which it was easy to get a visa to the U.S. So the reason so many of the terrorist were from Saudi Arabia was just that our State Department provided an open door from that country.

Another interesting tidbit is how the terrorist Atta in the U.S. communicated to bin al-Shieb the date for the hijackings:

Atta called him with a "puzzle" to solve. "Two sticks and between them a dash, a cake from which a stick is dangling. Bin al-Shieb explains, "The puzzle meant the date, in other words the time of the operation; the two sticks represent the number 11 then the dash and then the cake from which a stick dangles represents the number 9; thus the picture becomes complete: 11-9."

The United States is passing all sorts of laws that invade our privacy in order to be able to intercept messages and thus prevent future terrorist attacks. I dare to say that not in my lifetime will a computer program be able to flag such a message as having anything to do with a terrorist attack, much less be able to decipher it. I propose that before we give the U.S. government any more powers that invade our privacy, it first be made to prove that it can intelligently use the information it already has the power to collect.