AL QAEDA'S COMPUTERS

It all started when Alan Cullison, covering the war in Afghanistan for the Wall Street Journal, needed to replace his damaged laptop computer. He made contact with one of the country's few computer dealers, who in turn led Cullison to a jeweler who had stolen two computers from al Qaeda's former headquarters in Kabul. Cullison bought the computers and had the files on them decoded and translated. The files, which he presents in the cover story of the current Atlantic Monthly (preview/excerpts), give an eerie look at the day-to-day doings of al Qaeda.

One memo complains about how hard it is to work in Afghanistan; a Yemeni visitor to al Qaeda headquarters writes of "the difficulty of calling from this country" and adds that "the road is very bad" between cities." One memo to Osama bin Laden urges him to ease up his public relations campaign, lest he annoy the Taliban and get kicked out of Afghanistan. "I think our brother has caught the disease of screens, flashes, fans, and applause," the memo says.

Among the most intriguing of the more than 1,000 files recovered from one of the computers is an apparent appeal to an Islamic scholar for justification of killing innocent civilians. Sent in 1998 to an unknown recipient, it asks, "What is your lawful stand on the killing of civilians, specifically when women and children are included? And please explain the legitimate law concerning those who are deliberately killed." Any qualms about killing innocent victims seems to have disappeared after September 11, when an al Qaeda operative writes that attacks on innocents "are legally legitimate, because they are committed against a country at war with us, and the people in that country are combatants. … The sanctity of women, children, and the elderly is not absolute." Bin Laden even wrote a memo addressed to the American people, saying, "What takes place in America today was caused by the flagrant interference on the part of successive American governments into others' business."

The most mundane memos are among the most revealing, including squabbling over accounting. "Why did you give out loans?" says one memo about an expense sheet. "Didn't I give clear orders to … refer any loan requests to me?" The communication is commonplace, but chilling when you consider the acts that arose from it. Writes Cullison, "At the most basic—that is to say, human—level the work relationships of al-Qaeda's key players were characterized by the same sort of bickering and gossiping and griping about money that one finds in offices everywhere."

Earlier:
Analyzing bin Laden's "Letter to America" (second item here)

PLACES & CULTURE

From the New Republic:

In the last day of the Baghdad College High School reunion, at a makeshift altar set up in the ballroom of a Sheraton in Framingham, Massachusetts,* Father Thomas Regan, a Jesuit priest, said Mass. The 100 or so Iraqis in attendance were all graduates of B.C. High—an elite, Jesuit-run prep school that turned out grads from 1932 until 1969, when the Jesuits were kicked out by the newly ensconced Baath Party. After Communion, a silver-haired gentleman stood … proceeded to lead the room in an a cappella version of the Baghdad College fight song … No one had forgotten the words.

From the Chicago Tribune:

CHICAGO* - The crazy racket of the "L" trains originates from above. It cascades; it plummets. … The sound tumbles down in meaty sweep, a downward arc of pure pulverizing noise. … At its monstrous zenith the "L" train produces an astonishing sound: part shriek, part roar, part clang, part clatter. It's a headache on wheels. It's not a pretty sound, not by any means. It halts conversations; startles children; causes even those who tread the Loop daily to feel a sharp fingernail of panic scrape the base of the brain. Yet if the trains suddenly were able to run silently—if some technology muffled the mechanical caterwauling—the Loop would be nothing but traffic noise and the occasional accordion solo. It would be just a place name on a map. … It's a nuisance—but it's part of the family.

WEEKLY DIGEST

1. "The economy" is an election buzzword, but what does it mean? "The Economy is not easily pinned down. It's not a single thing," says the Washington Post. So it was a good idea to take two economic experts from Washington think tanks—one conservative, one liberal—and take a walk with them around the city. Away from their charts and graphs, economic questions come alive. The economists witness a fender bender and talk about its effect on the economy. They walk through a run-down area and talk about skill and opportunity. They stroll through a multilingual food market near Union Station and talk about globalization. In short, they show the necessity of the Post's concluding question: "In any conversation about the economy one must stipulate whose economy you're talking about. The longshoreman's? The trial lawyer's? The recent college graduate's? The chief executive officer's?" Article
   Related:
   Why business books are so bad, from the Economist
   The economics of hosting conventions, from the New Yorker
   Earlier:
   What is a 'weak economy'?
   Literature and economics, from B&C
2. For some who work with statistics, a walk in the real world makes an abstract discipline more vivid. For others, their grip on statistics makes the real world more dull. In a Scientific American column on the probability of miracles, Michael Shermer scoffs at people's claims of supernatural premonitions of friends' deaths. "Events with million-to-one odds happen 295 times a day in America," Shermer writes. "The total number of events that happen to us is about thirty thousand per day, or about a million per month. … The chance of a miracle is about one per million events. Therefore we should expect about one miracle to happen, on the average, every month." But behind Shermer's criticism of supernaturalism is his own belief system: a fervent faith in numbers and "controlled tests" to convey the reality of the world. Column
   Also:
   Shermer on the probability of God
3. It's bad enough that drivers chat on their cell phones instead of watching the road. Pedestrians are part of the problem too. "Pedestrians talking on cellphones have become a major cause of 'pedlock' and subsequent 'ped-rage,'" says the New York Times . Pedestrians on the phone "step into traffic without looking, cut off and bump into other pedestrians and even confuse passers-by with their very public conversations—all of which can hinder the natural flow of human traffic along sidewalks," the Times says. Worse, it reduces the ranks of Good Samaritans and increases "the privatization of public space … cellphone walkers are less likely to help a stranger in need, for instance, or to exchange pleasantries with passers-by." Article*
   Related:
   Cell phone boycott fails in Beirut, from the Times
4. Who says contemporary art is morose? The lead essay in the Humor Issue of Art News says that in art today, "laughter is nervous but never cheap, and comic turns are but the gateway to a world of doubt." One curator calls laughter a "good, solid connection from an artwork to a viewer. It is art that is functioning well." Article But the article doesn't really distinguish between humor and irony in art; it mentions the absurdity of Amy Cutler's Tiger Mending, in which prim Indian women sew the hides of sleeping tigers, but the portrayal is more ironic than humorous. Nor is absurdity in the arts discussed in the context of 20th century surrealism. Beware the jargon, too; says one artist: "The humor came about through a search for a conceptual format of picture and word."
5. There's Ruth Jordan, the demonstrative Juror No. 4 in the Tyco mistrial. There's Steve Bartman and that fateful foul ball at Wrigley Field. Farther back, there's Baby Jessica, rescued from a well in Texas (now a recent high school graduate). Our culture is full of "unwitting citizen[s] … suddenly caught in the pitiless glare of the media, and either can't or won't get out," writes the Atlantic's Cullen Murphy. What should we do with these "quasi-public figures" in their "sixteenth minute," when their fifteen minutes of fame are up? Murphy suggests something like the Witness Protection Program that would exile these people to oblivion and forbid public mention of their names. For those who refuse to leave the spotlight, Murphy suggests stronger measures, in the form of a "Witless Protection Program." Preview
6. Miscellaneous:  With new editor, Paris Review publishes first post-Plimpton issue, from the Christian Science Monitor - Advances in acoustical design, from the New York Times - Using contraception to control wildlife populations, from the Times—Don't run, for your knees' sake, from the Times - Eating disorders among athletes, from the Monitor - Mom was right: stay off the phone during thunderstorms, says the Chicago Reader
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Nathan Bierma is editorial assistant atBooks & Culture. He writes the weekly "On Language" column for the Chicago Tribune.