Кафедра английского языка гуманитарных специальностей ФМО
международный терроризм.
Terrorism
Пособие для студентов III-V курсов
факультета международных отношений
МИНСК
УДК 000.00(00.0)
ББК 00.0
М 11
Автор:
Г.Б.Филимонова, доцент;
Рекомендовано
Редакционно-издательским советом БГУ
Международный терроризм. Terrorism. Для студентов III-V курсов
М 11 факультета международных отношений. Метод. пособие / Сост.Г.Б.Филимонова. — Мн.: БГУ, 2002. — с. 33.
УДК 000.00(00.0)
ББК 00.0
© БГУ, 2002
PART I
TEXT 1.
Terrorism is the sustained, clandestine use of violence, including murder, kidnapping, hijacking, and bombings, to achieve a political purpose. Definition in the U.S. Intelligence and Surveillance Act of 1979 and the United Kingdom Prevention of Terrorism Act of 1976 stress the use of violence to coerce or intimidate the civilian population with a view to affecting government policy. In popular usage, however, as influenced by politicians and the media, “terrorism” is now increasingly used as a generic term for all kinds of political violence, especially as manifested in revolutionary and guerrilla warfare.
Nevertheless, not all political violence short of conventional war is terrorism. Political assassination may or may not be a terrorist act, depending on the degree of commitment to a sustained program of terror. Assassinations of Tsar Alexander 11 and other prominent figures in imperial Russia by nihilists and social revolutionaries were part of a sustained program of violence aimed at bringing down the Tsarist regime and as such were terrorist acts. On the other hand, the assassinations of Presidents Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, while undoubtedly political in motive, were not part of a sustained program and hence cannot properly be called terrorism. The term is inappropriate as applied to the suicide attacks of religious fanatics on military personnel in a war zone, as in the case of the bombings of U.S. Marine and French Foreign Legion in 1983, although not to the bombings of the U.S. Embassy (1983—1984).
The deliberate killing of civilians to intimidate the civilian population or government is one of the worst features of contemporary terrorism and can clearly be distinguished from the type of clandestine warfare waged by resistance groups or insurgency movements against official and military targets. By their actions, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Provisional Wing of the Irish Republican Army are terrorist organizations. But one would not use the term to describe the Polish and French underground resistance movements of World War 11. When governments engage in illegal and clandestine kidnapping and murder to intimidate their people – as in the case of the Nazis in Germany and the Argentine military junta in power from 1976 to 1983 – the term “state terrorism” is appropriate.
One important characteristic of modern terrorism is its quest for spectacular horror effects in order to attract media coverage. Terrorist atrocities like the PLO’s midair destruction of civilian airliners and murder of helpless athletes at the 1972 Olympics and schoolchildren were perpetrated to publicize a cause. Most of the victims of the Italian Red Brigades and the German Baader-Meinhof gang were selected for symbolic reasons. The choice New York City’s World Trade Center was presumed to have been made for similar reasons.
Another characteristic of modern terrorism is its international dimension – the ability of terrorists to slip across national frontiers, the support given to certain terrorist groups by a few countries dedicated to revolutionary change, and logistical ties that exist between terrorist groups of widely divergent ideologies and objectives. The 1985 hijacking by Palestinians of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro off Egypt, and the murder of a U.S. passenger, dramatized the international ramifications of terrorism.
Whereas prevention of domestic terrorism is in general the province of local law enforcement agencies or security forces, at the international level effective counter-terrorist actions run into obstacles raised by traditional concepts of national sovereignty. In theory, perpetrators of crimes in one country can, if apprehended in another country, be extradited for trial, and there is hardly a terrorist crime imaginable that is not well covered by criminal statutes. In practice, law enforcement officials tend to give foreign fugitives from justice a low priority. Moreover, a well-established exception for political offences may protect from extradition all but the perpetrators of the most egregious crimes. Hence, terrorist organizations consistently strive for political status, while governments seek to treat terrorists as common criminals.
In recent years international efforts to counter terrorism have led to the Tokyo and Montreal Conventions (1963 and 1971) on hijacking and sabotage of civilian aircraft; the Hague Convention of 1979 on hostage-taking; and the 1973 convention on crimes against diplomats. These conventions establish categories of international crimes that are punishable by any state regardless of the nationality of criminal or victim or locality of the offense. In addition, the United States and other nations have enacted laws to prohibit export of munitions without a license or participation of citizens in foreign conflicts.
In 1986, President Ronald Reagan accused Libya of carrying out terrorist attacks against U.S. citizens and property. Following one such attack, in which an American soldier was killed, Reagan ordered U.S. military forces to attack “terrorist-related” targets in Libya. U.S. Air Force and Navy planes bombed a number of sites in and around the Libyan cities of Tripoli and Benghazi. Soon afterward, seven Western industrial democracies pledged themselves to take joint action against terrorism. These nations are the United States, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Canada, France and Japan. They promised to deny terrorist suspects entry into their countries, to bring about close cooperation between the police and security forces in their countries, to place strict restrictions on diplomatic missions suspected of being involved in terrorism, and to cooperate in a number of other ways. These steps represented a concerted effort by the Western nations to combat terrorism “as an instrument of government policy”.
In democracies, the need to protect civil liberties, the difficulty of proving conspiracy, and the devastating nature of terrorist outrages have shifted the emphasis from deterrence to prevention. Today, by general consensus the most effective means of frustrating terrorist activity is through detailed intelligence obtained primarily by penetration of terrorist networks.
Exercise 1. Give the English equivalents of the following:
1) запугать гражданское население;
2) с целью повлиять на политику правительства;
3) преднамеренное убийство гражданских лиц;
4) правоохранительные органы;
5) лица, скрывающиеся от правосудия;
6) выдать преступника другому государству;
7) захват заложников;
8) лица, подозреваемые в терроризме;
9) отказать во въезде в страну;
10) внедрение в террористическую сеть.
Exercise 2. Give the Russian equivalents of the following:
1) sustained, clandestine use of violence;
2) suicide attack;
3) quest for spectacular horror effects;
4) to publicize a cause;
5) to slip across national frontiers;
6) a well-established exception;
7) to strive for political status;
8) to treat terrorists as common criminals;
9) the most egregious crimes;
10) to prove conspiracy.
Exercise 3. Study the meanings of the following words. Which of them are actualized in the text?
| Coerce | · to make (an unwilling person or group) do sth, by force, threats, etc.; · to keep (a person, a group or activity) under control by using force, threats, etc. |
| cause | · something which produces an effect; · something that provides a satisfactory reason for an action; · a principle, aim, or movement that is strongly defended or supported. |
| Justice | · the quality of being just, fairness; · the action or power of the law; · a judge in a law court. |
Exercise 4. Use the information of the text and your background knowledge to answer the following questions:
1. What is the definition of terrorism?
2. What are the characteristic features of modern terrorism?
3. What are the most notorious terrorist organizations?
4. What measures are being taken against terrorism by the international community?
Exercise 5. Translate at sight the following short stories from the “Wall Street Journal”:
1. A suicide bomb attack in Algeria killed seven people and injured 100. A bomb-laden car with an unknown number of passengers blew up in front of Algeria’s main police headquarters. There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but suspicion centered on Islamic extremists trying to topple the military-backed government.
2. A bomb in the capital of India’s Punjub state killed 12 people, including Chief Minister Beant Singh, and wounded 10. Singh had crushed an uprising by Sikh separatists. No one immediately claimed responsibility for the blast, but authorities said Sikh militants were suspected.
3. An aide to a Georgian paramilitary leader was arrested in connection with a bombing that slightly injured the country’s leader, Eduard Shevardnadze, on Monday. The aide, Alexander Ochoshvili, and the leader of Mkhedrioni paramilitary group, Dzaba Ioseliani, denied involvement. Weapons were found in Ochoshvili’s office, near the site of the blast.
4. A Corsica nationalist was killed and his wife wounded in an apparent vendetta shooting. Two men opened fire in Corte on Noel Sargentini and his wife, Dominique, members of the Cuncolta movement, which is one of several factions advocating autonomy for the French Mediterranean island. The death brought to 10 the number of nationalist militants killed this year.
5. French police arrested 20 suspected Islamic militants in dawn raids in Paris and Lyon, seizing weapons and documents. The sweep was ordered by Paris anti-terrorist Judge Laurence Le Vert following two deadly bomb attacks in Paris this summer and a failed bomb attack on the Lyon-Paris high-speed train line last weekend. Nearly 200 suspected of ties with Algerian fundamentalists have been arrested in the past two years and 20 expelled.
Exercise 6. Fill in the blanks with prepositions, if necessary:
1. to bring _____ the political regime
2. to extradite a criminal _____ another state _____ trial
3. to arrest sb _____ suspicion _____ ties _____ terrorists
4. to accuse sb _____ murder
5. to claim responsibility _____ the blast
6. to arrest sb _____ connection _____ a bombing
7. a suicide attack _____ military personnel
8. to apply the term _____ suicide attacks _____ religious fanatics
9. the 1973 convention _____ crimes _____ diplomats
10. to shift the emphasis _____ deterrence _____ prevention
TEXT 2
terrorism, the systematic use of terror or unpredictable violence against governments, publics, or individuals to attain a political objective. Terrorism has been used by political organizations with both rightist and leftist objectives, by nationalistic and ethnic groups, by revolutionaries, and by the armies and secret police of governments themselves.
Terrorism has been practiced throughout history and throughout the world. The ancient Greek historian Xenophon (431. 350 BC) wrote of the effectiveness of psychological warfare against enemy populations. Roman emperors such as Tiberius (reigned AD 14—37) and Caligula (reigned AD 37—41) used banishment, expropriation of property, and execution as means to discourage opposition to their rule. The Spanish Inquisition used arbitrary arrest, torture, and execution to punish what it viewed as religious heresy. The use of terror was openly advocated by Robespierre as a means of encouraging revolutionary virtue during the French Revolution, leading to the period of his political dominance called the Reign of Terror (1793—1994). After the American Civil War (1861—1865) defiant Southerners formed a terrorist organization called the Ku Klux Klan to intimidate supporters of Reconstruction. In the latter half of the 19th century, terrorism was adopted by adherents of anarchism in Western Europe, Russia, and the United States. They believed that the best way to effect revolutionary political and social change was to assassinate persons in positions of power. From 1865 to 1905 a number of kings, presidents, prime ministers, and other government officials were killed by anarchists' guns or bombs.
The 20th century witnessed great changes in the use and practice of terrorism. Terrorism became the hallmark of a number of political movements stretching from the extreme right to the extreme left of the political spectrum. Technological advances such as automatic weapons and compact, electrically detonated explosives gave terrorists a new mobility and lethality. Terrorism was adopted as virtually a state policy, though an unacknowledged one, by such totalitarian regimes as those of Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler and the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin. In these states arrest, imprisonment, torture, and execution were applied without legal guidance or restraints to create a climate of fear and to encourage adherence to the national ideology and the declared economic, social, and political goals of the state.
Terrorism has most commonly become identified, however, with individuals or groups attempting to destabilize or overthrow existing political institutions. Terrorism has been used by one or both sides in anticolonial conflicts (Ireland and the United Kingdom, Algeria and France, Vietnam and France/United States), in disputes between different national groups over possession of a contested homeland (Palestinians and Israel), in conflicts between different religious denominations (Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland), and in internal conflicts between revolutionary forces and established governments (Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Iran, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Argentina).
Terrorism 's public impact has been greatly magnified by the use of modern communications media. Any act of violence is certain to attract television coverage, which brings the event directly into millions of homes and exposes viewers to the terrorists' demands, grievances, or political goals. Modern terrorism differs from that of the past because its victims are frequently innocent civilians who are picked at random or who merely happen into terrorist situations. Many groups of terrorists in Europe hark back to the anarchists of the 19th century in their isolation from the political mainstream and the unrealistic nature of their goals. Lacking a base of popular support, extremists substitute violent acts for legitimate political activities. Such acts include kidnappings, assassinations, skyjackings, bombings, and hijackings.
The Baader-Meinhof gang of West Germany, the Japanese Red Army, Italy's Red Brigades, the Puerto Rican FALN, al-Fatah and other Palestinian organizations, the Shining Path of Peru, and France's Direct Action were among the most prominent terrorist groups of the later 20th century.
Exercise 1. Do you remember in what context the following words and word combinations were used in text 2?
1) to attain a political goal;
2) expropriation of property;
3) arbitrary arrest;
4) to assassinate persons in positions of power;
5) the hallmark of a number of political movements;
6) to encourage adherence to the national ideology;
7) to pick (victims) at random;
8) to be magnified by the use of modern communications media;
9) isolation from the political mainstream;
10) contested homeland.
Exercise 2. Arrange the following into synonymous pairs:
| Concerted (effort) | Joint |
| Banishment To extradite To overthrow (the government) Explosion To release (hostages) Contested (land) To combat (terrorism) | To free To topple Blast disputed Exile To hand over To fight |
Exercise 3. Guess the words by their definitions (all the words were used in text 2!):
· putting to death by a legal sentence;
· a religious belief opposed to the orthodox doctrines of a church;
· the inflicting of severe pain, as to force information or confession;
· a particular religious body;
· absolute, despotic; decided by or based on chance or personal opinion rather than reason;
· the power to move feelings, influence thinking, etc.
Exercise 4. Think of a heading for each paragraph of text 2.
Exercise 5. Discuss with your partner what new things you have learned from text 2.
TEXT 3
Exercise 1. Find the answers for the following questions:
1. How do the effects of terrorism vary?
2. How does FBI categorize terrorism in the USA?
3. What are biological agents?
4. What are the effects of chemical agents on people and livestock?
5. What is the primary aim of using biological and chemical weapons?
6. What were the consequences of the February 29, 1993 bombing in the parking garage of the World Trade Center?
7. How many nations may possess chemical agents and/or weapons?
8. How many countries are believed to be conducting research on biological agents for weaponization?
9. What do forms of a terrorist attack depend on?
BACKGROUNDER: TERRORISM
EMERGENCY INFORMATION
1. Most terrorist incidents in the United States have been bombing attacks, involving detonated and undetonated explosive devices, tear gas and pipe and fire bombs.
2. The effects of terrorism can vary significantly from loss of life and injuries to property damage and disruptions in services such as electricity, water supply, public transportation and communications.
3. One way governments attempt to reduce our vulnerability to terrorist incidents is by increasing security at airports and other public facilities. The U.S. government also works with other countries to limit the sources of support for terrorism.
WHAT IS TERRORISM?
Terrorism is the use of force or violence against persons or property in violation of the criminal laws of the United States for purposes of intimidation, coercion or ransom. Terrorists often use threats to create fear among the public, to try to convince citizens that their government is powerless to prevent terrorism, and to get immediate publicity for their causes.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) categorizes terrorism in the United States as one of two types—domestic terrorism or international terrorism.
Domestic terrorism involves groups or individuals whose terrorist activities are directed at elements of our government or population without foreign direction.
International terrorism involves groups or individuals whose terrorist activities are foreign-based and/or directed by countries or groups outside the United States or whose activities transcend national boundaries.
BIOLOGICAL AND CHEMICAL WEAPONS
Biological agents are infectious microbes or toxins used to produce illness or death in people, animals or plants. Biological agents can be dispersed as aerosols or airborne particles. Terrorists may use biological agents to contaminate food or water because they are extremely difficult to detect. Chemical agents kill or incapacitate people, destroy livestock or ravage crops. Some chemical agents are odorless and tasteless and are difficult to detect. They can have an immediate effect (a few seconds to a few minutes) or a delayed effect (several hours to several days).
Biological and chemical weapons have been used primarily to terrorize an unprotected civilian population and not as a weapon of war. This is because of fear of retaliation and the likelihood that the agent would contaminate the battlefield for a long period of time. The Persian Gulf War in 1991 and other confrontations in the Middle East were causes for concern in the United States regarding the possibility of chemical or biological warfare. While no incidents occurred, there remains a concern that such weapons could be involved in an accident or be used by terrorists.
FACTS ABOUT TERRORISM
· On February 29, 1993, a bombing in the parking garage of the World Trade Center in New York City resulted in the deaths of five people and thousands of injuries. The bomb left a crater 200 by 100 feet wide and five stories deep. The World Trade Center is the second largest building in the world and houses 100,000 workers and visitors each day.
· The Department of Defense estimates that as many as 26 nations may possess chemical agents and/or weapons and an additional 12 may be seeking to develop them.
· In recent years the largest number of terrorist strikes have occurred in the Western States and Puerto Rico. Attacks in Puerto Rico accounted for about 60 percent of all terrorist incidents between 1983 and 1991 that occurred on United States territory.
· The Central Intelligence Agency reports that at least ten countries are believed to possess or be conducting research on biological agents for weaponization.
TERRORISM IN THE UNITED STATES
· In the United States, most terrorist incidents have involved small extremist groups who use terrorism to achieve a designated objective. Local, State and Federal law enforcement officials monitor suspected terrorist groups and try to prevent or protect against a suspected attack. Additionally, the U.S. government works with other countries to limit the sources of support for terrorism.
· A terrorist attack can take several forms, depending on the technological means available to the terrorist, the nature of the political issue motivating the attack, and the points of weakness of the terrorist's target. Bombings are the most frequently used terrorist method in the United States. Other possibilities include an attack at transportation facilities, an attack against utilities or other public services or an incident involving chemical or biological agents.
· Terrorist incidents in this country have included bombings of the World Trade Center in New York City, the United States Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. and Mobil Oil corporate headquarters in New York City.
Exercise 2. The text refers to 1995. Can you add anything to the list of terrorist incidents in the USA?
TEXT 4
Exercise 1. Before reading the text, discuss with your partner what you know about the September 11, 2001 events. Do you remember the number of hijacked planes? Do you remember the number of hijackers? Do you remember the number of victims, etc.?
The New Breed of Terrorist
An exclusive look at the lives of the men behind the strike. Now dozens of their associates may be at large in the U.S. What will come next?
BY JOHANNA MCGEARY AND DAVID VAN BIEMA
It was so ordinary at the time, so ominous in hindsight. An American Airlines agent at Dulles Airport in Virginia looked up as two polite young men of Arab origin handed over their tickets. Odd: they were waiting in the coach-class line, dressed in inexpensive clothes, but their tickets were first class, one way. Prepaid at $2,400 each. "Oil money", thought the agent. Such passengers are common at Dulles, but these two looked a bit young: one, around 20, spoke a little English; his brother, even younger, spoke none. And they seemed awfully thin, almost underfed. The agent saw they had ordered special Muslim meals, but so had some others on the flight. The brothers gave the right answers to standard security questions and had valid IDs, one of them a proper-looking Commonwealth of Massachusetts driver's license. The agent wasn't in a rush and laughed to himself that the two brothers were such infrequent flyers they didn't know they could check in at the empty first-class counter. But the two were patient, pleasant, low key. There was really nothing to trigger alarms as the brothers and three other passengers of Arab ethnicity boarded American Airlines Flight 77 for Los Angeles.
The two brothers were Nawaq Alhamzi and Salem Alhamzi, who knew they were going to die that morning. They were two of the 19 men who hijacked four planes and turned them into deadly missiles last Tuesday, shocking the world with their new technique for terror. But they were only the visible agents of the conspiracy. As investigators and intelligence services worldwide raced to trace their movements and feverishly searched for other plots, it became increasingly apparent that the 19 were merely soldiers, part of a terrible new army that owes its allegiance to a cause, not a country. There were other hands on the control sticks of those planes: the masterminds who dreamed up the plot and who saw it through to catastrophic conclusion. The goal of the new war on terrorism is not only to arrest perps and break up plots but also to trace those lines of responsibility as far as they go, to prove moral responsibility for terrorist acts on the part of any world leaders who encourage them.
President Bush sounded the battle call last week for a war to be waged on a thousand fronts. The sprawling investigation now under way will help the White House shape a response: not only an attack of retribution against those who plotted this massacre but also a long line of moves designed to forestall future attacks. "This is a conflict without battlefields or beachheads, a conflict with opponents who believe they are invisible. Yet they are mistaken. They will be exposed", the President said last Satur day. "We will smoke them out of their holes". Secretary of State Colin Powell spread the word worldwide: You are with us or you are against us.
At the FBI, they're calling the investigation Penttbom, for Pentagon Twin Towers Bombing, and running the probe from inside the agency's high-tech Special Information and Operations Center, a 40,000-sq.-ft. command post in Washington where FBI Deputy Director Tom Pickard supervises the 4,000 agents and 3,000 analysts and support people working the case. Pickard's team had received 46,125 tips by last Saturday, which they were farming out to field offices and 31 other agencies working with them on the case. Pickard, 51, a native of Queens, faces the colossal task of shaping the information into a portrait of a criminal organization ingeniously designed to avoid detection. FBI agents are delving into the training logs and financial records of four Florida flight schools and others around the U.S., compiling a list of other pilots who could form the nucleus of fresh hijack teams that might be scrambling for jet seats even now. A U.S. intelligence official told Time he believes some 30 terror operatives were deployed on the Sept. 11 mission. "There's more", says the official. "More than we have accounted for". And the hit squads were backed, officials now believe, by a network of financial, informational and logistical support. "There's a concern that there's a substantial infrastructure scattered around the country, in Detroit, Florida and Boston, for example", the intelligence official told Time.
U.S. security agencies must unravel a conspiracy that stretches back years and across continents. Israel's Mossad, experts in this sort of thing, estimate that it took at least two years and 100 people to pull it off. Someone thought long and hard how to do it, then found willing fanatics to carry it out. They carried different passports—Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Lebanon — and perhaps pledged fealty to different radical factions. What brought them together was first a hatred of America for causing their resentments and frustrations, and then someone who knew how to transform their rage into bloody results. Osama bin Laden may be the top general in charge, but who are the field lieutenants? Even usually placid FBI officers called their search squads "frenzied" as they hunted last week for shadow figures who might be involved. To underscore the broad reach, at New York's Kennedy Airport Thursday, 10 people were questioned, and one was eventually held as a material witness.
The West had developed a fairly well-defined profile of the typical suicidal terrorist. That man would be young, 18 to 24, born in poverty, a victim of some personal tragedy, a despairing zealot with nothing to lose. He would be fanatic in behavior and belief: stern, moralistic, teetotaling. The status of shahid, or holy martyr, would solve his earthly issues in paradise, and someone would give money to his family on earth. If he hailed from the rebel training camps of Afghanistan, where the cult of jihad gets its earthly gunmen, he would be fundamentalist in his faith, ignorant of the outside world, immersed in a life of religious devotion and guerrilla instruction. He would speak not in casual conversation but in scripture. An intense, carefully nurtured fanaticism would replace any natural instinct for self-preservation.
But the 19 men who carried out last Tuesday's attacks were different. They did their most important training right here, among us. They were "sleepers", unusually purposeful men, living ordinary lives as they prepared for extraordinary deeds; they had plenty of time to change their minds if they had wanted to. They lived by the terrorist handbook cited in the East Africa embassy-bombings trial: "When you're in the outer world, you have to act like them, dress like them, behave like them". They were older: one age 33, several in their late 20s—educated, technically skilled people who could have enjoyed solid middle-class lives. Some left wives and children behind. Yet even more ardently than their young predecessors, these men made common cause with each other out of some profound hatred for America. Investigators don't know yet if they were recruited or they volunteered, but their need to do violence to the enemy and their unflinching will to carry the plan through over months, even years, brings a terrible new dimension to the dynamics of terrorism.
It is one of the truisms of the modern airline industry that the U.S. trains many of the world's pilots. The backs of international pilot magazines are crammed with ads for flight schools in Florida, California and Arizona. "Three hundred sunny days a year", some of them proclaim, an enticement to students in a hurry to build up the hundreds of hours of basic prop-plane time needed before moving on to jet training and potentially lucrative careers. If Harvard, Yale and M.I.T. draw the world's future biochemists, these small four- and five-plane aviation schools attract the globe's future pilots. Huffman Aviation, tucked on Florida's Gulf Coast between Tampa and Fort Myers, is just such a place. The weather is good. Gas and airplane rentals are cheap—you can fly a Cessna 150 single-engine plane for $55 an hour, 40 % less than what you might pay in a big city. The airport cafe is open, serving hot, cheap food with aviation nicknames like "Emergency Descent", a bacon cheeseburger.
For the better part of the past year, as the U.S. elected a new President and pondered the Internet bust, Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi spent their days buzzing up and down the Florida coast in small Cessnas, building time. Their training began in ear nest in July. They were quiet and private. For a week or two they leased a room—$17 a night—from Charlie Voss, a bookkeeper at Huffman. But Voss's wife did not like their slovenly habits. In the morning they would pad from the shower with wet hair and snap their heads around. "You've been here long enough, and you need to find a place", Charlie told the two. "Go to it".
They seemed to be in a rush to fly the big planes. Long before they were really ready, before they had the 1,000 or so hours any airline would demand of a future jet pilot, they invested in expensive time in a training device. The 727 full-motion simulator is a multimillion-dollar contraption that twists and bucks and turns on hydraulic pistons like a Disney ride. But the technology is good enough that airline pilots use simulators regularly to train for emergencies that are too dangerous to practice in a real plane: a double-engine failure or a fire on takeoff. For $1,500, Atta and Al-Shehhi bought six hours of simulator time from Henry George, who owns the Sim Center School in Opa-Locka. He led them through a few basic maneuvers: climbs, descents, turns. It wasn't much, but it was enough to give a beginner pilot a realistic sensation of how to handle a three-engine jet airliner. And enough, later, to break George's heart. "To think that I helped in any way their terrible cause, that my skills were used for such a terrible deed", he says. Al-Shehhi was on board United Flight 175 and was probably the pilot of the airliner as it smashed into the side of the World Trade Center's south tower. Atta was on American Flight 11, which had hit the north tower 21 minutes earlier.
They were not, it seems, alone in their training. Waleed Alshehri, in his mid-20s, had graduated in 1997 with a degree in aeronautical science and a commercial pilot's license from the prestigious Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Fla., where nearly a quarter of all commercial pilots train. He surely knew how to fly the large aircraft the terrorists planned to ram into their targets. He was on American Flight 11 with Atta. Abdulaziz Alomari told his Vero Beach landlord in July 2000 that he was a Saudi commercial pilot when he moved in with a wife and three kids. He was then taking classes at Flight Safety Academy, often patronized by employees from Saudi Arabian Airlines. He too would have had the rudimentary skills needed to steer an airliner. Says a neighbor: "My kids played with his kids. I'm stunned". He was aboard Flight 11 as well. Of the five hijackers on board, four were U.S.-trained pilots.
As far back as 1996, at least two other men were following a similar course. Hani Hanjour, another of the eventual hijackers, was working with a CRM Airline Training Center in Scottsdale, Ariz. By 1999 Hanjour had accumulated enough hours — 250 — to fly with an FAA examiner for his commercial pilot's license. It was awarded and issued that same year. His address: a post-office box in Saudi Arabia, though for much of the past year he had lived with two other men, Nawaq Alhamzi and Khalid Al-Midhar in a San Diego apartment complex.
They were a quiet lot. "I saw them watching and playing flight-simulator games when I was walking my dog at 10 or 11 at night. They would leave the front door open", recalls Ed Murray, who lived across from them. It was the closest contact anyone at the complex had with the three. "Anytime you saw them, they were on their cell phones. What I found strange was that they always kept to themselves. Even if someone got in the pool, they got out". Another neighbor, Nancy Coker, 36, saw them getting into limos late at night, even though the car that neighbors said they drove was a gray Toyota Camry, early '90s vintage. "A week ago, I was coming home between 12 and 1 a.m. from a club. I saw a limo pick them up. It wasn't the first time. In this neighborhood you notice stuff like that. In the past couple of months, I have seen this happen at least two or three times". Last week Hanjour was the probable pilot when American Airlines Flight 77 flew into the Pentagon with Alhamzi and Al-Midhar aboard.
Hollywood, Fla., is an overlooked burg outshone by Miami on one side and Fort Lauderdale on the other, trying to grab some limelight with a string of sushi and blues restaurants. One such establishment is Shuckums Oyster Pub and Seafood Grill, a music showcase with the requisite life-size shark mounted on an ocean-colored wall. It was at Shuckums, on Sept. 8, that Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi did some premass murder tippling. Atta drank vodka and orange juice, while Al-Shehhi preferred rum and cokes, five drinks apiece. "They were wasted", the bartender recalled, and Atta objected to the $48 bill. Tony Amos, the manager, asked if they were short the cash. "No", said Atta. "I have plenty of money. I'm a pilot". And he hauled a wad of $50 and $100 bills from his pocket, eventually leaving a $3 tip.
Atta and Al-Shehhi, his close companion, are the two hijackers the investigation has been most successful in profiling. Before journeying to Florida, Atta studied for several years at Germany's Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg and shared an apartment with Al-Shehhi. According to German chief prosecutor Kay Nehm, they were linked with a group formed with the "aim of carrying out serious crimes, together with other Islamic extremist groups abroad, to attack the U.S. in a spectacular way through the destruction of symbolic buildings".
There, in a 780-sq.-ft. apartment in a working-class district, they appear to have lived a life involving deepening Islamic practice and community. They had frequent visitors, sometimes as many as 20 at a time, witnesses told the New York Times. The group left their shoes at the door and could frequently be heard reciting from the Koran. They wore traditional Islamic garb, at least some of the time. The men often sat in circles on the floor praying, a neighbor reported. When they caught her watching, they installed blinds. They spoke good German. One neighbor complained about loud Arabic music. Despite Nehm's claims, the German sojourn has the feel of a somewhat more relaxed period, of working toward a goal that was not yet imminent.
Some of the future hijackers developed a connection with Portland, Maine, that investigators are still puzzling over. Getting to and from that city has become easier in the past few years as the big airlines have laid on small-jet routes to link it to Boston and other Northeastern hubs. The Portland airport still has just one security checkpoint, which has a surveillance camera pointed at it. On Tuesday, shortly before 6 a.m., the camera captured an image of Mohamed Atta and Abdulaziz Alomari clearing security in the quiet airport for a US Airways flight to Boston. "In the photo, Atta has a ticket in his hand and a small shoulder bag", says Michael Chitwood, who runs Portland's 155-man police department. Both men were dressed in Western garb.
They evidently arrived in Boston the previous Sunday, drove back to Portland and then flew again to Boston. But this would have increased their exposure to airline security, which they had to clear once in Portland and again in Boston, since US Airways and American Airlines operate from opposite ends of the terminal. Yet, says Chitwood, "if these guys carried out this attack the way they did, they had a reason to be up here, but who the hell knows what it is?" The movements, however, suggest a group of hijackers quite familiar with airport and immigration security, men who had figured out how to move in and around the U.S. without attracting notice. This is especially remarkable since several of them, sources t ell Time, were already on FBI watch lists. Toward the end of 1999, the CIA received sketchy information connecting two of the dead hijackers — Khalid Al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhamzi — to bin Laden's organization.
Officials tell Time the CIA information was considered too vague to pass along, but by this summer those suspicions had firmed up. There was no indication of the plot they had in mind, but there were strong hints of links to bin Laden associates, including a connection to a suspect in the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, enough to raise a flag in the CIA database. A U.S. official deep in the investigation says it has now been determined from Immigration and Naturalization Service records that Al-Midhar and Alhamzi visited the U.S. briefly in 2000. They returned in July 2001, giving "Marriott in New York City" as their destination. On Aug. 23, the CIA passed their names to the FBI and the ins for inclusion on the U.S. watch list, and FBI agents searched the country for the two. But they had left addresses that turned out to be useless, and the FBI never found them until they crashed into the Pentagon. Only afterward did the FBI turn up the address for Al-Midhar in the Claremont area of San Diego.
The suicide squads seem to have regularly used their own names, or at least consistent noms de guerre, when they enrolled in flight school, rented apartments, bought cars. Police have impounded cars they used and searched apartments up and down the American East Coast and in Germany, hauling off bags of potential evidence. In Florida, the FBI picked up a discarded tote bag at the Panther Motel, where Al-Shehhi stayed during the past two weeks. Its contents: maps, flight manuals and martial-arts books.
Some of the men seemed to use the same Visa card, on which they rang up substantial charges, and gave the same Mail Boxes Etc. addresses, especially toward the last days of their lives. On attack day, four to seven cross-country tickets were billed to the same card. The same card number showed up on the rental contract for a car the hijackers left at Logan Airport and for a Boston hotel room some slept in. The pile of credit-card receipts, rental-car contracts, hotel bills and airline tickets tracks their movements as they eventually made their way from Florida to three chosen airports. By then, the ones determined to die didn't seem to care whether they left a trail, but investigators say the paperwork also opens useful leads in new directions.
Investigators don't know how much the suicide pilots knew about their confederates before they gathered Tuesday morning at their assigned planes—or if they knew others would undertake similar missions. But preliminary information suggests that the cells followed classic bin Laden practice: over time, cell members built up a small local support network to collect information, rent houses, buy equipment for the "sleeper" operatives while they waited to be activated. As happened with the East Africa embassy bombings, agents think only a few superior handlers—a Commander X or two—sent perhaps by HQ at the penultimate moment, knew how the final pieces were meant to fit together. They're the ones Washington desperately wants to find, because they might provide the definitive link to bin Laden and interdict more terrorist acts.
But there are plenty of clues to retrace the steps of the hijackers in their final days and hours. Boston seems to have served as a forward staging area, a big city where the terrorists could vanish in the large Arab population. Three times last month Atta rented cars from Warrick's Rent-a-Car in Pompano Beach and checked one back in with 2,000 miles on the odometer. He brought the last one back Sept. 9. Parking-lot cameras picked up a white Mitsubishi sedan leased from an Alamo franchise that had gone in and out of Boston's Logan Airport five times between Sept. 5 and Sept. 11.
Someone, maybe Atta, was meticulously casing the airport, checking plane schedules, looking for half-empty flights, testing security measures. He and his accomplices obviously learned a great deal about airline schedules, aircraft capabilities and fuel loads, perhaps even seat configurations. The car was found there again Tuesday night, containing a "ramp pass" to enter restricted areas of Logan Airport. Maybe that someone was reconnoitering with accomplices who worked on the planes, who could plant weapons onboard. Monday night, some of the Boston suicide squads collected at the Park Inn in suburban Chestnut Hill. By Wednesday dozens of police in bulletproof vests descended on Room 432 to collect and remove evidence.
When the four cells arrived at their takeoff airports on Tuesday morning, they no longer needed the karate and flight manuals investigators would later discover. Two teams of five rendezvoused at Boston's Logan, a third group of four at Newark and the last five men at Dulles, with their knives and their box cutters either stashed in their shoulder bags or perhaps already concealed onboard. Wail Alshehri, Waleed Alshehri, Mohamed Atta, Abdulaziz Alomari and Satam Al Suqami boarded American Airlines 11 and drove it square into the World Trade north tower at 8:45 a.m. A few minutes later, Marwan Al-Shehhi, Fayez Ahmed, Mohald Alshehri, Hamza Alghamdi and Ahmed Alghamdi departed on United Airlines 175 and rammed it through the corner of World Trade south tower 21 minutes later. Khalid Al-Midhar, Majed Moqed, Nawaq Alhamzi, Hani Hanjour and Salem Alhamzi embarked on American Flight 77 out of Dulles and swung it around to smash into the Pentagon at 9:40 a.m. The cockpit voice recorder that might have clarified whether this plane intended to take out the White House or the Capitol was found too badly damaged to provide any information. Only the kamikazes who got on United 93 in Newark were thwarted, after determined passengers decided to die "doing something about it" rather than let the terrorists crash the plane into their apparent Washington target.
What we know now is only the surface. The unidentified support structure worries intelligence officials just as much. Officials want to know too the whereabouts of others from the Muslim world who enrolled at the same flight schools, trained with the kamikazes and perhaps connected to field supporters of the operation. More than 100 names of acquaintances of the hijackers have been forwarded to 18,000 law-enforcement agencies in the U.S. and 20 overseas FBI offices in hopes that a few will help identify terrorists still living. Some raw intelligence led to speculations there might be a phase-two operation, maybe involving car bombs. Some leads suggest a fifth suicide effort was aborted when its target air flight to L.A. was canceled in the wake of the other terrorists' successes.
What we still need to know is the deeper connections: the radical affiliations of the hijackers and the links that connect those 19 dedicated death seekers to the men who ordered them to do it, and the men who would like to emulate them. Their personal agendas are less important than who recruited them, financed them, oversaw their mission. As Secretary of State Colin Powell said Wednesday, "When you are attacked by a terrorist and you know who the terrorist is and you can fingerprint it back to the cause of the terror, you should respond". Now the public tips and paper trails, worldwide investigation and local canvassing need to hunt down that fingerprint.
Nearly everyone in Washington has all but concluded the whorls and ridges belong to bin Laden. President Bush named him the "prime suspect" on Saturday. When you look at the point of this attack, who better does it serve? The faceless enemy needs no claim of responsibility to get his message across; he has no agenda that can be met. What he wants is to make a statement: to carry out attacks to prove that he can. What better recruiting poster than that searing image of a plane shearing through the south tower: it tells the faithful, Look at me, look what we can do, join me.
The U.S. will have to keep cool in the coming days as it proceeds to give life to Bush's vow of war on terrorism. It may lift our hearts now to pledge an end to it, but heartache and heartbreak lie ahead in what promises to be a long, painful struggle to prevail. "You will be asked for your strength, because the course to victory may be long," said Bush last week. Even if bin Laden worked "alone" this time, he is not alone in his enmity. His ideas and thousands of men like him are still out there.
Reported by Carole Buia/New York, Teresa Brumback and Elaine Shannon/ Washington, Jeanne DeQuine/Miami, Yvette C. Hammett/Vero Beach, Broward Liston/ Daytona Beach, Rochelle Renford/Venice, Jill Underwood/San Diego, Eric Francis/Boston and Kathie Klarreich/Coral Springs
Exercise 2. Write a one-sentence summary of each paragraph of the text.
Exercise 3. Look at how the following words are used in text 4 and then match them to the definitions:
a) Hindsight, origin, low key, allegiance, retribution, detection, unravel, teetotaling, recruit, enticement, rudimentary, garb, squad, confederate, thwart, affiliation
b) — loyalty;
— wisdom after the event;
— involving basic principles, fundamental;
— attachment or connection (of a person or society) with a larger
organization;
— to enlist a person as a serviceman or a member of an organization;
— a person’s ancestry;
— the act or an instance of discovering;
— advocating or characterized by total abstinence from alcoholic drink;
— (an act of) persuading by the offer of pleasure or reward;
— requital usu. For evil done;
— an ally, (esp. in a bad sense), accomplice;
— a small group of people sharing a task, etc.
— frustrate or foil a person or purpose etc.;
— clothing, esp. of a distinctive kind;
— lacking intensity or prominence; restrained;
— probe and solve (a mystery, etc.)
Exercise 4. Translate at sight the following text.
Ceremonies mark 3 months since September 11
December 12, 2001 Posted: 10:25 AM EST (1525 GMT)
NEW YORK (CNN) — three months after the September 11 terrorist attacks, people around the world took part in ceremonies Tuesday morning to honor the victims.
At the White House, President Bush led a memorial that began at 8:46 a.m. EST, the moment the first hijacked plane hit the World Trade Center three months ago.
"Everyone of the innocents who died on September 11 was the most important person on Earth to somebody", Bush said. "Every death extinguished a world".
Bush said September 11 is a day that will be forever etched in people's minds.
"We'll remember where we were and how we felt", he said. "We'll remember the dead and what we owe them. We'll remember what we lost and what we found".
At the World Trade Center disaster site, hundreds of New York police and firefighters joined Mayor Rudy Giuliani and New York Gov. George Pataki for a memorial service that included Broadway star William Michals singing "Let There Be Peace on Earth".
In a poignant remembrance at the Justice Department, U.S. Solicitor General Theodore Olson referred to "the sufferings we have all experienced". He made no direct reference to the death of his wife, Barbara Olson, who was a passenger aboard the American Airlines flight that crashed into the Pentagon.
"We will never forget our loved ones who died or who were wounded on September 11", Olson told a gathering in the Great Hall of the Main Justice Building.
"We will fight this evil as long and as patiently as it takes", Olson vowed.
With U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft attending the White House ceremony, Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson introduced Olson and paid tribute to Barbara Olson's phone call to the Justice Department command center as hijackers controlled the plane.
"Ted's beloved Barbara helped to sound a clarion call that awakened our nation's leaders to the true nature of the events that were unfolding", he recalled.
At the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld held a ceremony at the site where American Airlines Flight 77 slammed into the building's outer ring, which housed U.S. Army military and civilian staff.
"Three months ago today, at this hour, in this place, some 184 people died", Rumsfeld said. "They died because they were Americans — sons and daughters of the land of liberty".
"They died because they were here, in this place that symbolizes the power of freedom and the strength of American purpose and principles.... We will remember their lives and the reasons for their deaths until freedom triumphs over oppression, over fear and long beyond", he said.
Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the people killed at the Pentagon "were among the first to give their lives in this war on terrorism — but certainly not the last".
American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts on the international space station joined together and shared their thoughts about the attacks. The astronauts on the shuttle Endeavour carried more than 6,000 U.S. flags into space for the ceremony. The flags will be presented to victims' families when the shuttle returns to Earth.
Events were held in more than 110 countries.
Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat offered his condolences during a speech on Palestinian television.
"In these tragic and sad moments, I would like to extend to the friendly American people and to the president, George Bush, my deepest condolences and solidarity", Arafat said. "That was a horrendous attack and a form of devastating terror".
Exercise 5. Comment upon the following:
1. One person’s freedom fighter is another’s terrorist.
2. Terrorism gains attention because of the randomness of its choice of victims. Although only a few dozen people may be injured by a bomb left in a market, millions of people realize that “it could have been me”, because they too, shop in markets. In attack on airplanes their fear is heightened by many people’s fears of flying. Terrorism thus amplifies a small amount of power through its psychological effect on large populations; this is why it is usually a tool of the powerless.
Exercise 6. Consider the following topics for discussion:
1. Some people maintain that we are entering into the age of terrorism where nations like America are extremely vulnerable to terrorist attacks. Do you agree with that?
2. As long as many terrorist acts are perpetrated by Islamist fundamentalists, there is a very strong anti-Muslim sentiment in the West. Is it justifiable?
3. By definition, terrorist wants publicity. The mass media provide extensive coverage of every major or minor terrorist attack. Do they play into the hands of the terrorists by doing so?
4. Is it possible to stop terrorism, and if yes, which of the ways is more preferable: prevention or retaliation?
PART II
Supplementary reading.
Portraits of Osama bin Laden
Osama bin Laden could be reading this right now, along with you: Legend has it that he's the most wired terrorist ever, running a holy war via satellite phones and modems from a Batcave deep in the mountains of Afghanistan. "Inside the cave, in rooms hollowed into the rock face, computer screens glow, fax machines whirr, messages are sent via satellite telephone", wrote the Newark Star Ledger on August 21, in a vivid account of the superterrorist's lair. "Western intelligence believes that he e-mailed instructions from here to his supporters on the timing of a 1995 car bombing in Riyadh that killed five Americans". Curiously enough, this man who controls $300 million and kills with the Send button of his e-mail is described as living on "gritty bread", cheese and tea. "A recent visitor found Bin Laden and his entourage sharing a meal of four fried eggs between 12 people", the Ledger reports.
Just one more bizarre portrait feature in the burgeoning, Bond-movie-baddie legend of the superterrorist blamed for the East Africa embassy bombings. The little that we know about the man whose face has in two short weeks become the scariest icon in the American media since Ayatollah Khomeini suggests that Osama bin Laden is a fact-checker's migraine. He was born either in 1956 or 1958 as the 17th of the 52 (or 53) children of Saudi construction magnate Muhammad Awad bin Ladin. His mother (variously reported as either Palestinian or from the conservative Saudi hinterland), is unanimously derided as the billionaire's 10th and least-favored wife (a claim bolstered by the fact that Osama is their only child).
By all accounts a quiet and unremarkable boy, Osama learned the family business in his school holidays and graduated college (either in Riyadh, Jeddah or London) with a degree in business management (or engineering). Most accounts have the teenage Bin Laden becoming fired up with religious fervor while working on restoring the Islamic holy sites at Mecca and Medina. The Washington Post, however, offers an alternative account, in which he leaves high school in 1973 to carouse in the bars and nightclubs of swinging Beirut, happy to trade insults and punches over the attentions of a pretty barmaid or belly dancer until the Lebanese civil war ended the party in 1975.
It is generally agreed, however, that Bin Laden's life-changing experience was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In 1980 the young Saudi went there to fight the infidel invaders, and organized thousands of volunteers to join him from Arab countries — the core of his latter-day international Islamic revolutionary army. Reported to have been in the thick of fierce battlefield action in the mid-'80s, he became a legend in Afghanistan and in the Arab world.
It is also widely speculated that Bin Laden was a major beneficiary of CIA assistance, although these days both parties have good reason to deny any past connection — even in the face of video evidence that Bin Laden's fighters in the '80s were using Stinger missiles supplied to the Afghan resistance by Washington. (Today, those missiles are supposedly carried by the 12 to 100 masked personal bodyguards who accompany Bin Laden on every stroll.)
The defeat of the Soviets left Bin Laden burning to spread Islamic revolution, setting him at odds with the conservative Saudi monarchy. When Saudi Arabia became a staging point for the Gulf War, Bin Laden declared a war to "liberate" Islam's holy lands (Saudi Arabia and Israel) from "Jews and Crusaders" and targeted the Saudi monarchy as allies of the West. That got him ejected from Saudi Arabia, and later Sudan caved in to U.S. demands to do the same, sending Bin Laden back to his camps in Afghanistan and the protection of the Taliban militia.
Bin Laden had been training Islamic fighters from all over the world both for local conflicts — Egypt, Algeria, Chechnya, Tajikistan, Kashmir, Somalia, the Philippines, Bosnia and others — as well as to target the Saudis and the U.S. He was linked with attacks on Saudi-based U.S.
Intelligence analysts suggest his role is more complex than simply that of the guy at the center of an international web giving orders by e-mail. His entrepreneurial skills are held to have created a unique base for funding terrorism without state backing, and he is alleged to have been trying to establish a consensus on strategic direction among disparate but similar Islamic groups, each with its own leadership. To this end he has released fatwas, or decrees, declaring war on the U.S. and Israel and urging Muslims around the world to attack American targets, military and civilian.
The exact nature of his involvement in the East Africa embassy bombings remains to be specified by U.S. authorities. For now, however, we'll have to make do with the image of a mysterious high-tech superterrorist who flies his own private jet to Iran, Switzerland, the Philippines and beyond, controls millions in bank accounts all over the world and yet also supposedly lives in a cave, has three wives (or four, depending on which reports you believe), eats "gritty bread" and splits a fried egg three ways. He's always reported to be modest, shy and reclusive, and yet has in the past two years given exclusive interviews to TIME, CNN, ABC and Britain's Independent newspaper. International man of mystery, consummate Tom Clancy-meets-Harold Robbins-and-gets-Hollywood-salivating bad guy? Perhaps. But one skill that Osama bin Laden appears to have mastered better than most is the ability to persuade major U.S. media outlets that he's giving them an exclusive priority. He is believed to be behind the attack on U.S. personnel at Riyadh (1995) and Dhahran (1996), an assassination attempt on Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak and a string of worldwide terrorist actions that keeps growing along with his fable.
PART III
Texts for rendering from Russian into English.
Терроризм угрожает человечеству
Из выступления председателя Совета руководителей органов безопасности и специальных служб стран СНГ Н.П. Патрушева
Терроризм давно сопровождает развитие человеческой цивилизации. Однако именно в прошедшем XX веке в мире было совершено наибольшее количество преступлений террористического характера, что заставило многие государства мира всерьез задуматься над выработкой адекватных мер реагирования на это зло.
Последние события, связанные с захватом российского самолета в Медине, активизация албанских экстремистов в бывшей Югославии и, наконец, взрывы в Ростове и Минеральных Водах, унесшие десятки жизней, — все