“Hush money,” muttered Jonathan.
PD ignored the comment, “There’s several clauses in our offer that you need to study carefully; however I would advise against using any lawyer that we haven’t approved. I’ll be happy to give you a list.”
“This is a bad dream,” answered Jonathan feeling like a balloon that had just lost most of its air. “I was informed that I didn’t have a choice and that I couldn’t get a lawyer. Come on PD we’ve known each other forever and this is how it’s going end?”
PD scanned the room as if to make sure no one was listening. He leaned forward on his desk. “Okay, let me give it to you straight Jonathan and I’m only doing this because of our long history. The information on the bombing was traced to your home address and we have evidence that the emails were deleted using your computer id. Jonathan, we have enough evidence to hang you for treason, so you need to be thanking me for working this out for you. This is a clean break, you lost your son, and you resigned to take some time off. We can make this as easy or as difficult as you like. I have the separation agreement for you and if you sign this and cooperate with us through this investigation, you’ll be able to start over, although you’ll never again be able to work for the CIA or any other government agency. PD handed Jonathan the half-inch document.
Jonathan thumbed through the package until he came to the part about cause. He picked out a fragment that read, Mr. Anderson admits to violations of company procedures.
“You want me to admit that I did something wrong when I didn’t?”
“No one will ever see that, but the administration requires a body. You know how it goes.” answered PD. “It’s necessary for Human Resources and for us to cut our ties with you. I’ll need the keys to the building, the keys to your company car, and your CIA identification card. All your security clearances have been terminated, effective immediately.”
“They took all of that stuff a couple of weeks ago. Are you sure you don’t want my wife and family, too?”
“Jonathan, whether you like it or not, we have them and everything else in your life, so sign the agreement and don’t stray far from home, because it will get real ugly.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“No, I’m just telling you the truth, as a friend. Let it go!”
Book 2
The Voice of the Unknown
Chapter 1
I am one of the people responsible for the death of over 1000 Americans on July 15th 2012. Of course there were many others, some that I know, others that I will never know and an invisible group that leads and funds us that you don’t want to know. You probably think I’m a monster, and until that day I would have argued with you. Now, I would agree with you. I am a monster, every emotion in me has been affected by the deaths of so many innocent people, some that I knew and loved. I guess I was blinded by my cause and thought that somehow my strong conviction would be more powerful than my own conscience. But, was I ever wrong! Now, I’m more dead than alive and every human feeling in me has become one of misery and torment. It might have been different if it had gone the way it was planned, but circumstances couldn’t be predicted, and people were in there who should have been gone and I have been left with nightmares of the faces of those I loved reaching out to me and crying for help not knowing that it was me who was the cause of their pain when our group set the detonators for over a ton of C-4 explosives.
I don’t know why the others in my cell turned against America; we’re not big on testimonials, all I know is my story and I need to share it with you, just to release some of my pain and in the hope of finding a shred of understanding for my plight. Much of what I tell you may sound cliché, but listen to it all before you judge me. Put yourself in my shoes and if you would have taken a different path, you can call me a murderer and a terrorist, but maybe, just maybe you’ll identify with some of my thoughts and the actions of the American politicians that led me to where I am today.
Here is my story. You may be surprised to learn that I’m an American just like you. Early in my life some of my fundamental definitions collided head-on with another culture that was neither better nor worse than the one I knew. At first I just thought Americans needed to be educated that there were people with different beliefs who needed to be understood rather than persecuted, but the more I studied the situation the more I realized that Americans saw themselves as superior to this culture and completely disrespectful to most other ways of life. But after September 11, 2001, and the advent of the Hart-Langley Act in 2011 and then the Iraqi and Iranian war, the objective of the current Administration focused on a battle of good versus evil. This was not far from the notions of genocide that have plagued mankind throughout history, whenever one race saw themselves as superior to another. Somehow we have convinced ourselves that if another race is not capitalistic and living in a democracy, they need to be converted to the American ways of economics and government.
`I think it’s almost comical that many Americans believe that Muslims are uneducated demons, and that all Muslim countries are filled with these lawless heathens and savages. This is so untrue! Most Muslims are extremely well educated, many at top Western schools and believe in God. While Americans are praying for God to protect their families from Muslim terror, Muslims are praying that God will protect their culture from utter annihilation due to greed, bombs and imperialism. Already you are thinking, I don’t want to listen to someone who has conspired to destroy a building and kill innocent people and worst of all children, someone who has betrayed their country, their friends and their family. But there is another side, a perspective that you have probably not considered.
You may not admit or understand but the American politicians have done exactly the same. The war against Iraq was a conspiracy based upon falsified claims and manufactured evidence. Iraq had nothing to do with the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center neither did it have any affiliation with Osama Bin Laden. America was the aggressor, the instigator and brought terror to their land and forced them into alliances with the very terrorists that they were falsely accused of being associated with! Let me ask you this question. Is an American or British bomb dropped into an Iraqi hospital any different from what I’ve done? For every child that died on July 15th, 10,000 Middle Eastern children have been killed and another 50,000 were maimed through the senseless series of wars that followed. Which of you, if you saw your city and home destroyed and your family members blown to pieces by weaponry from an invisible enemy would not want to fight back, whether with a stick or a gun or whatever you could find to defend yourself. Muslims have to fight back, if for nothing else but to defend their rights as human beings. The only difference between the kind of terror that America brings and the type that we bring is the method by which it is delivered. You may argue that you had nothing to do with the attacks on Iraq, and that you were not in favor of any of the wars against Muslims, to which I would argue that the general population had everything to do with it, through their support of the current administration, their penchant for consuming fuel and their conservative Christian religion that labels half of the world as unbelievers sentenced to hell. If you didn’t vote for the present administration and you drive a hybrid automobile and you are liberal in your beliefs toward other cultures, I apologize, because our argument is not with you.
I would liken Iraq’s plight to the American Indian. I remember being so embarrassed when I learned in history that America seized land belonging to someone else through a planned and systematic genocide of its native people and once they were hopelessly defeated, caused their survivors to be dependent by stealing their land, annihilating their primary food source and introducing our diseases to which they had no immunity.
The Muslims didn’t start a war with America, money and greed did. We have used America’s definition of terror as our only way of fighting back, because we don’t have sophisticated jets that carry 800 lb. laser guided bombs, or destroyers that fire laser guided cruise missiles or
a trained, well equipped army that can empty a land of life with turbine powered tanks, night vision technology and helicopters that carry enough fire power to destroy a small army. Iraq has always been a tribal people, with a rich heritage that can be traced back to the beginning of time.
Chapter 2
I was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1963. My father Harry was a Harvard educated American doctor and my mother Islee received her PhD from John Hopkins and worked as a scientist for a major pharmaceutical company. I was baptized when I was 2 months old at the First United Methodist Church in downtown New Haven and was raised in a conservative family in an upper-class environment, deprived of nothing. My parents, both having degrees from prestigious universities, were very strict with my education and sent me to the best private schools in the Northeast. Then upon my insistence, because I wanted to explore the international world, to Queen Ethelburga’s boarding school in York, England, when I was 13 years old. I inherited the fair skin and name of my father, and growing up in the Northeast gave me a genuine “Yankee” accent. I had an American name, an American look and an American tongue, I did not have a hint of my mother’s dark complexion or Middle Eastern features. I have always been a right-brained person and my education concentrated on mathematics and the sciences. My father wanted me to follow in his footsteps in medicine, and my mother acquiesced, but there were several awakenings that led me down a different path. When I think about it, what’s most interesting is that my father and my mother know so little about me, and I’m sure would testify under oath that I would never do anything as radical as what I’ve done because I was moderate in both my religious and political views.
I was always amazed at my mother’s complete lack of interest in her lineage, even though she was born and spent the first 18 years of her life in Iraq. I would almost have to force her to talk about her heritage, as if she was ashamed and was trying to erase her upbringing completely from her memory. This only made me more curious and made me believe there was a good deal for me to explore in Iraq. So in spite of my mother’s objections, when I was sixteen years old, during my summer break, I contacted my Uncle Tariq, who was more than happy to host my visit and introduce me to my lost family of aunts and uncles and cousins. I flew on a British Airways jet from London Gatwick to Baghdad and got reconnected with 5000 years of my heritage.
My Uncle Tariq and his family lived in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains about 100 miles north of Baghdad, just south of the city of Kirkuk. He was a highly educated man who lived a very simple and religious life. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Baghdad in chemical engineering and to my surprise went to the University of Wisconsin to receive his PhD. My uncle was a bald, pudgy man in his early forties, with gray streaks on his remaining hair and bushy white eyebrows. He wore large silver rim glasses and worked for a national oil production center in Kirkuk. He wore the traditional dress called an Abaya, with a long white outer garment, a red and white head piece (that looked like something we would put over a picnic basket) fastened to his head with a braided black rope. He looked quite comfortable and thought it funny when I told him that it must be nice to go through the day in his pajamas. I asked him if he also slept in his Abaya. Uncle Tariq giggled again, seeming to enjoy the naivete of an American teenager and then explained to me that everything in Iraq had a tradition and the practicality of this type of dress came from the Bedouins who found it the most suitable dress for the Iraqi desert.
Uncle Tariq and I immediately found a lot in common, because we both loved to learn, each being equally interested in the other’s lifestyle. I was interested in learning as much as I could about his culture and tradition and he, already understanding America, was curious about how the next generation of young Americans perceived his world. Being completely outside of my comfort zone made everything seem new and adventurous and I often felt that I was being obnoxious with all of my questions, but he was never impatient and didn’t seem to mind taking the time to help me understand. Uncle Tariq certainly had his eccentricities. The first evening I was there I saw him listening and talking back to an old cassette recorder. I snuck up behind him and listened as he worked with a teaching aid learning Chinese. It sounded and looked pretty funny, a middle aged Iraqi in an Abaya parroting broken Chinese back to a machine. I started to laugh, almost uncontrollably. I guess I startled him and he fumbled trying to turn off the machine, nearly knocking it onto the floor. He acted as if he was embarrassed, as if I had caught him doing something he shouldn’t have been doing. When he collected himself, he explained that he was trying to learn Chinese from these tapes he had purchased through a magazine and it wasn’t going very well. “Tough language,” he said. “Much tougher than some of the others.” I asked him how many languages he knew and he told me that he was fluent in several of the local dialects, many that I had never heard of, and he was also competent in 6 international languages, including English. I then asked him if he had learned all the languages from tapes, to which he laughed and replied, “Chinese is the first and probably the last. It is much easier at the university, with real people who talk back to you and correct you.”
“Why do you need to know so many languages?” I asked. “And who are you ever going to talk to from China? I haven’t seen many Chinese restaurants around and I’m guessing if there were they would have to speak Arabic. How would you say Moo Shu Pork in Arabic?”
He smiled, as if remembering America and all the different cultures and cuisines, perhaps wishing that there was a Chinese restaurant in Kirkuk, so he could practice his new skill. He then got quite serious and explained to me as a father, “The world is getting smaller and more international every day and people had better start paying attention to China. Maybe not in my lifetime, but they will be the next world superpower and it just might be important to know their language. But apart from all that, you know what I like most of all?”
“To learn?” I guessed.
He put his arm around me and said, “You and I are two peas in a pod. That is an American expression, I believe.”
I nodded and smiled.
My Uncle Tariq was full of surprises. I was absolutely amazed that he knew more about American history and politics than I and he constantly reminded me that I needed to be more vigilant with issues that affected my life. He would embarrass me by asking the names of legislators and prospective international legislation that would affect not only Iraq but any nation in the Middle East and even the world. I only knew a few of the answers, but he knew them all.
He put his hands on my shoulders and pulled me towards him, looking directly into my eyes.
I instinctively pulled back.
“This is how an Iraqi talks to someone when it is important,” he explained. “It is important that we touch and look into each other’s eyes to know that we are telling the truth.”
I surrendered to the custom, even though it seemed uncomfortable. He continued with his lesson on democracy.
“If you don’t understand the law,” he explained, “then what good is democracy? You don’t even know what you’re voting about.”
All in all he was quite pleased with Iraq’s relationship with the United States and thought Ronald Reagan to be a solid ally and a pretty good President.
During that first visit I learned that virtually every one of my preconceived ideas about Muslims was wrong. Somehow I thought that the people in Iraq would be aloof and mean to Westerners. However, the people I met in Kirkuk were very kind to me and respectful of my ways, even though my customs were very different. I was impressed at the deep respect they showed for each other and the absence of the Western pushiness that always annoyed me whenever I saw an American bullying their way through another country. The Americans always stuck out to me like a sore thumb, because invariably they would be the ones hollering or pushing, or complaining. There was only courtesy and respect shown for each other in Kirkuk and I tried my best not to let any of my capitalistic tendencies surface a
nd disrupt the serene Eastern harmony of this peaceful society.
My biggest disappointment was how far behind Muslims were when it came to women’s rights. Women were definitely subordinate to men, could show only the amount of skin specified by their spouse, and they were usually less educated. Although it was not often practiced, women could be subjected to polygamy. My uncle explained that in the Muslim religion a Muslim man can take up to 4 wives as long as he has the financial means to treat them all equal. Equal means 4 equal homes, 4 equal automobiles, 4 equal allowances, etc. Uncle Tariq made very light of it all, saying that nearly all the men treated the women as equals anyway and that only the very rich could afford more than one wife, but even then most wouldn’t because as he put it, “it’s difficult enough to handle one woman.”
Uncle Tariq was the most intriguing, most spiritual and most intelligent man I had ever met. Part of this was due to the fact that I was a wild-eyed sixteen year old that had never met anyone like him, but it was mostly because he was truly a unique human being. I struggled to find elements of my mother in his mannerisms but there were none and if I hadn’t known different, I would never have believed that they were brother and sister. Everything about them was different. My mother was a staunch Republican about as far to the right as the right will go. Uncle Tariq was an apolitical Sunni Muslim who was sympathetic to the Iraqi Kurds, believing that they deserved their own homeland. He was extremely aggravated with the conservative Baath party and Saddam Hussein, who was a Sunni. He believed Hussein to be an animal who was a Muslim in “word only” and worse than the worst politician of the Western world. You might wonder as I did how a religious person affiliated with a conservative sect such as Sunni Muslim could possibly be a liberal, but I soon learned that Muslims had fundamentalists (right wing) and moderate (left wing) groups just like Christians, only instead of separating themselves by denominations, they held their beliefs individually and shared them only with their inner circle of friends. Of course there are extremists in every culture and the extremists were different, but during my entire time in Iraq I never met a radical or revolutionary person. That would come later.
Perspectives, An Intriguing Tale of an American Born Terrorist Page 11
