Maryland jihad. "Md. Man Accused in Terrorist Support Plan," from AP, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:
NEW YORK - A Maryland man was charged with conspiring to help a terrorist organization after describing the time he spent at a terrorist training camp in Pakistan as "one of the better decisions in my life," prosecutors said Thursday.Mahmud Faruq Brent, of Gwynn Oak, Md., allegedly boasted that he had agreed to provide whatever assistance was necessary.
Authorities began investigating Brent after they found an address book with telephone numbers for him when they arrested Tarik Shah, 42, of New York. Shah pleaded not guilty to terrorism charges earlier this summer.
Brent was charged in a criminal complaint filed in federal court in Manhattan with conspiracy to provide material support to the Lashkar-e-Taiba organization, which the U.S. designated a terrorist organization in 2001.
Brent was charged after Shah agreed to meet with him and let the FBI record the encounter, according to a news release by federal prosecutors, the FBI and New York police.
During the taped conversation at a hotel in Columbia, Md., Brent indicated he had traveled to Pakistan and into the mountains for training "and stuff" with "the mujahideen, the fighters," the release said.
In longer accounts of the arrest of the reverted Brent, one learns that a name in the address book of some other suspect Muslim contained a telephone number which turned out to be listed in the name of a certain "Almutazzim" which, in turn, turned out to be the wife of the crude Brent in question.
By way of tribute to Borges, we have set the stage for describing this as the FBI's new, and improved means for
"The Approach to Al-Mutasim."
Hugh,
I rather think we are trapped in another Borges story, "La muerte y la brújula," in which the crack detective Erik Lönnrot allows himself to get entangled in all sorts of outlandish theories, ultimately preventing him from solving the case and allowing him to be trapped and murdered by the villains -- all because he dismisses the simple explanation that is right in front of his eyes.
When the New York Times ran that egregious article not too long ago scratching its gray head and wondering why on earth the London bombers would have done such a thing, and breezing by the jihad ideology as if it didn't exist, and searching for clues in economics and sociology, I think it should be rechristened not the "New Duranty Times," but the New Lönnrot Times.
Yours
Robert
The most famous story, Robert, tu t'en souviens, is "Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote." It is about someone who, round about 1935, produces word for word, not a copy, but an exact replica, because he, Pierre Menard, had somehow managed to inhale the intellectual atmosphere and emotional air of Spain, circa 1600, by having read the same old romances, from Tirant lo Blanch forward, and in all other ways managed somehow to experience what Cervantes had experienced in order to "become" him for the purposes of writing that exemplary novel "Don Quixote."
This leads one to wonder what the response would be to the result produced by someone who, in the year 2005, were to attempt to produce another celebrated text word-for-word, a text de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, performing the same kind of imitative magic as Pierre Menard did with Cervantes, but with a text almost a millennium older than that which Menard, in Borges's fiction, undertook to write, and came up with something that did not vary from the original.