I'd like to welcome you here today for Scott Atron's lecture, looking for Al-Qaeda. The... Does it say it up there? Oh, it doesn't have the subtitle here. The Evolution of Terror Networks. Scott's current academic home is in Paris, where he's the director of anthropological research at the Centre Nationale de la Réche Scientifique. But he's also a very well-known figure around the campus here at the University of Michigan. He's had appointments at ISR, at the Anthropology Department, the Psychology Department, as well as here at the Ford School. He's written many, many papers and five books covering topics in anthropology, psychology, sociology, and his work has been widely cited in major media outlets. His latest book will be published by MIT Press in March. It's titled The Native Mind and the Cultural Construction of Nature. In it, he and his co-author Douglas Medine draw on nearly two decades of cross-cultural and developmental research to examine the relationship between how people think about the natural world and how they act on it, and how these two phenomena are affected by cultural differences. He was here on campus this past academic year and taught a very well-received course here in the Ford School called Transnational Terrorism, Religion, and the Limits of Reason. We're really delighted to have him back here today to deliver this public lecture. We will try to leave some time at the end of the lecture for your questions, and we hope that you will then, after that, join us for a reception and more conversation after the lecture in the hall just outside there, outside the auditorium. So with all of that, I now welcome Scott Atron to the podium. Scott? Thanks. Glad to be back here. I'm going to walk a little so I can move this like this so I can see a little better. Some of these slides I'm going to go through fast because Bob wouldn't let me shorten my presentation because he said we had work to do. So it's a little bit long. And so don't read the slides unless I really stop on them. I'm going to use them sort of as props to keep me going. This is a scene from the Madrid trial which I attended. Very interesting trial.  Right?  Is Qaeda or its viral movement an existential threat to the United States or anybody else? My answer is not unless we make it so and we're doing a very good job of making it so. On October 25th, 1962, there was a vote in a nuclear submarine about whether to launch nuclear weapons against the United States. The United States didn't know at the time that Soviet Premier had given operational control of nuclear weapons to the submarine commanders. But release of those weapons depended upon a unanimous vote by the three commanders of the sub. Two voted to launch them. One named Vasily Arkhipov probably saved the world. He deserves five Nobel prizes. There was an existential threat at the time. There were tens of thousands of nuclear weapons. Each one on the average about ten times more powerful than the one that destroyed Hiroshima and could have destroyed hundreds of millions of people within 90 minutes. Nothing remotely like that exists today. Nothing in the wildest dreams of these guys could compare to that. However, the reaction of the United States, I consider to be a fairly hysterical one, has led to the growth of this movement around the world to where it has become now on the verge of becoming truly dangerous in places like Pakistan, which does have nuclear weapons. What we're witness to do, excuse me, what we're witness today is a sort of leaderless, decentralized Jihad. There are no leaders. There's no command and control. It has the properties of networks. And of course, networks are very different from hierarchies. Hierarchies have command and control. They have delegated responsibilities. Networks are flatter. They are looser. They are more flexible. They are also much more liable to be infiltrated and disrupted than our hierarchies. However, like criminal networks, terrorist networks overcome this problem by having very thick personal ties, especially ties based on kinship and friendship, which overcome that. In addition, terrorist networks differ from criminal networks, gangs, drug cartels, by the fact that the people who belong to them are revolutionaries, in the sense that they are committed to something that they're willing to sacrifice for that goes beyond their material interests. You have to ask yourself, why do revolutions win out against much more powerful resource rich adversaries? And the reason is basically because of the commitments they're willing to make, of the sacrifices they're willing to suffer in order to achieve their goals. And that's what makes revolutions very difficult to wipe out. And the Jihad is a revolutionary movement. It is part of a massive, transnational, media driven political awakening that has a fairly simple message, a message that Muslims everywhere are under attack and that justice in the world can only be brought about by the violent overthrow of the current world order. I'm not going to go into the formal properties of these networks.  People often conflate Wahhabi, Salafi, Jihadi, Arab Muslims. The Jihadis are not Wahhabis in general. The Wahhabi movement is a purest Salafi-like movement, fundamentalist movement, restricted pretty much to Saudi Arabia. That is devoted to the Saudi regime and has been for quite some time. Does not preach the violent overthrow of the government and does not preach attacks against fellow Muslims, except for Shia. The Salafi movement is a much more general, purest movement, similar to fundamentalism in the United States. But it would be wrong to equate the Jihadi movement with the Salafi movement in general, just like it would be wrong to equate the Christian identity movement with, say, Christian fundamentalism, or William Pierce and his brand of militant white supremacism with the Christian fundamentalist movement in general. This is a movement which can best be described as the Takfiri movement. The Takfiri movement grew up in Egypt in the 1970s, first in a fairly benign form under Sheikh Mustafa. And it preached Takfir wal Hijrah, which means excommunication and withdrawal. The idea was to emulate the flight of Muhammad from Mecca to Medina, where he withdrew with his friends. He regathered forces in order to go out again to spread the word of Islam and eventually conquer Mecca. The original Takfiri movement was a movement of withdrawal. It based much of its ideology on the writings of a marginal leader of the Muslim brotherhood named Sayyid Kutub, who had spent time in the United States. He was hanged by Gamal Abdel Asr in 1966. And his message of jahlia, of impurity, having swept into the Muslim world, was having an enormous echo among students in Egypt at the time, especially after the Six Day War and the defeat of the Egyptian armies and the humiliation that caused. When Mustafa died in 1978, the Takfir wal Hijrah movement turned violent. The students who were not originally part of the movement were imprisoned at the same time as Sheikh Mustafa and who were radicalizing then drew upon his teachings about withdrawal, but also argued that it was right and good to kill fellow Muslims who had become kafir, who had become infidel and could be excommunicated. In 1980, they formed their first movement. It was called the Tanzimal Jihad. One of the six emirs of the Cairo section of that movement's name was Aiman Zawahiri, who has since become the sort of number two of Al-Qaeda. And Al-Qaeda itself is a development of this branch of the Takfiri movement. Almost all of the leaders, the senior leaders of the Al-Qaeda movement that began coalescing around bin Laden in the summer of 1988 were Egyptian. And the Egyptian core of Al-Qaeda, this Takfiri core, is what made Al-Qaeda what it is. The only difference is that under bin Laden's tutelage in the mid-1990s, the focus of the Jihad went from attacking apostate governments within the Muslim world to attacking what they thought was the root cause of the continued existence of those governments, which was the far enemy, meaning the United States and its allies. Now, the first, I'm going to give you some stats of the first wave of this movement in Al-Qaeda. Our sample is 439 from Al-Qaeda, 164 from the Jama'i Islamiyah, which is an affiliated organization from Southeast Asia. And from a recent sample of Saudi jihadis who were not explicitly parts of Al-Qaeda, given to me by the minister of the interior of Saudi Arabia. And what we find is Al-Qaeda members are older on the average than other members of the Jihad. They are also likely to be better educated. They are, the leadership is mostly skilled. The members who actually do the attacks tend to be less skilled, but in any event they're more skilled than our other members of the Jihad. And the plurality among those who are skilled is that of engineer. Engineer is the largest category within the Al-Qaeda movement, an occupation followed by medical doctor. In terms of nationality, Al-Qaeda itself is an expatriate movement. That is, it's a diaspora movement, like many revolutionary movements, including the Palestinian movement, the IRA, formed initially in the diaspora, not in the countries of origin. The other movements, of course, tend to be much more localized and national. In terms of income, Al-Qaeda also has a higher average income than these other movements. And in terms of marital status, most are married. You can chuck the testosterone theory about the virgins, by the way. I mean, no one dies for virgins. That's a sexual fantasy that the West has, our politicians and pundits. But at least within that part of the world, I've never come up, and I interviewed these guys all the time, never come up with anybody who is remotely interested in dying for virgins. Probably interested in getting away from sex. The new wave of taqfiri terrorism is very different. The new wave tends to be much more marginalized in their societies, poorer, less educated, and much more likely to be involved with criminal networks. And that's a fairly recent phenomenon. As far as Al-Qaeda itself, there used to be about 1,000 members of Al-Qaeda, mostly built around this Egyptian core of taqfiri. There are maybe 100 left, that's a reduction by an order of magnitude. Most of them are in Waziristan. There are about a dozen small mobile camps with about six people in each one and a trainer, sometimes an assistant trainer. The largest one is a place called Mir Ali in northern Waziristan. It's commander is a guy named Abu Bayd al-Masri, who was the former Al-Qaeda representative for Noristan. And of course, there were openings in Al-Qaeda after the United States attack. And he filled up one of those openings. And he's a really dangerous guy. The only really significant Al-Qaeda plot since the bombings in Tunisia in 2002 has been the airplane plot, which is why you have to put your toilet kits in plastic containers. That was a very serious plot.  And it came close to fruition. That's the only one. There are a couple of other smaller ones in places like Copenhagen that have existed. But for the most part, there are very few true Al-Qaeda plots, none have been successful since 2002. Most of the Al-Qaeda people don't know who the new terrorists are, couldn't communicate with them even if they did know. Let me just give you an idea of what terrorist networks are like in terms of trying to join up with Al-Qaeda. Most terrorists are caught trying to link up with Al-Qaeda. In fact, trying to link up with something that pretty much doesn't exist anymore. Young people from all over try to get to Afghanistan and Pakistan to find, make their way into Waziristan or other parts of the border, the frontier areas, to get training. And they find that most of the people who are waiting to accept them are intelligence agents from the Pakatanian authorities or even American agents. Some of them get there to a sort of silk road. That is, they know somebody who knows someone who may have had a relative who may have been in the training camp one day, and they pay their own way. The people who did the crevice plot, for example, the plot to blow up Heathrow Airlines, which was headlined in the Boston Globe in the New York Times, and Le Monde as Al-Qaeda plot foiled, were actually a bunch of friends who decided to go and do something. They paid 3,500 euros to get an apartment. They finally found a trader, a trainer who was a friend of a relative who trained them. They thought they were going to go to Kashmir where the action was.   You know, one would say, oh, how much of the ammonium nitrate was I supposed to mix? I forgot what they told us. And that's about the level at which these plots are carried out. The reason that these organizations are hitched up to criminal organizations now is because the United States has been largely successful at stopping large-scale money transfers between these groups. So you go where the money can be found, and where can money be found that isn't traceable in criminal networks? It's not that the jihadi search for the criminals. It's just that that's where the networks exist, where they can ride piggyback and get the sorts of ammunition and arms and funds they need to do the actions they want to do. They're mostly self-mobilized, self-generating guys who sit around, talk, schmooze, and decide they want to do something in life. There are no recruiters to al-Qaeda. There's never has been any recruiters to al-Qaeda. There's no recruiter who's gone to Europe. There are no recruiters who go to Saudi Arabia. Al-Qaeda used to be like a funding agency, like the NSF or the NIH. You'd put in an application. Al-Qaeda would accept maybe 15% to 20%. They thought it was good. They'd give you some money, give you some advice, maybe try to find a suicide bomber or two for you. But that was basically the extent of the involvement. A good case is the Hamburg plotters, Muhammad Atta and his friends. We spent a lot of time with their friends, their neighbors, their family. Now why did these guys self-radicalize? Well, in the 1990s, they were students at a technical university in the Hamburg suburb of Harburg. The interesting thing about them was they were all Middle Easterners. That means they were doubly alienated. All the others were either German Christians or Turkish and Moroccan Muslims. So these were the Middle Eastern Muslims who got together. They also broke the al-Qaeda pattern. They were bachelors. They started talking to one another, eating with one another, getting their haircuts with one another, praying with one another. And then they started to live together. The neighbors described 20 mattresses, a place stunk because, like many Takfiri people trying to emulate the prophet and his friends as they withdrew from Mecca to Medina, they would take in everybody from the neighborhood, anybody who was passing through. And they'd start self-radicalizing together. Then they wanted to do something. Islam was under attack everywhere. They wanted to go to Chechnya. Didn't work out. They tried to go to Kosovo. The Albanians said, get lost. And they were lost themselves about what they do. Someone came up with an idea. Why don't you go to Afghanistan? Find out what's going on. They eventually made their way to Afghanistan where Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who himself had just come into, basically al-Qaeda, because his proposal had been accepted by bin Laden and some of the others to blow up something in the United States, a sort of rehashed plot that he had tried out in the early 1990s. And basically he said, hey, boss, look what we got. We got Europeans who don't need visas to get into the United States, who can speak English, who can mix easily in European American society. Let's use them. So again, the idea is al-Qaeda didn't go looking for them. They went looking for al-Qaeda. Even the sort of ERP plot of al-Qaeda was not something that came from any kind of command and control network. It's now taking place over the internet. You've got three high school buddies in Canada, a few more in the United States, a couple of guys in Denmark and Sweden, a guy sitting in his basement calls himself your hobby 007, terrorist 007. None of these guys had met each other. I mean, the high school buddies knew one another, friends in America knew another. But over the internet, they developed a chat room.  They're gonna blow up the American Embassy in Bosnia of all places. And you know what? They actually get together for the first time at the airport in Bosnia where intelligence authorities had been following them. They were arrested with suicide belts, AK-47s, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. What that tells you is anybody can become a terrorist anytime, any place today. You don't need recruiters. You never did. The new wave of terrorism is about youth culture, okay? It's not about the Koran. Never was about the Koran. About 70% of the people who joined the Jihad are born again. They have no formal religious education. They don't even come from religious families. They come late in life and they have very little knowledge or even interest in the Koran itself. Again, the message from where I've been, jungles of remote islands in Sulawesi or Borneo to Morocco or London or the suburbs of Paris is, Islam's under attack. We've gotta do something. It's a flat message in a fairly flat world. Now, how do you change youth culture? That's our big problem. Not bombing these people and hammering it and spreading mercury all over the place. How do you deal with young people in search of something greater than themselves? And what I'm gonna show you now is that no one's really done any control studies. But when you look at controls, what you find is tens of millions of people are sympathetic to the Jihad and its notions of universal justice. Very few people, 2,400 people in all in Europe, 3,000 in Saudi Arabia, less in other places in the world, have actually committed themselves in some way to violence. It's a very small proportion. And you know what the greatest predictor is of who will commit violence versus who won't. Does anybody have any idea? What? The greatest predictor is whether they play soccer together. Whether they play soccer together, whether they're pinball buddies, whether they're bodybuilding buddies, whether they're friends. No one ever does it alone. And as far as violence is concerned, we did studies, so far as I know the only studies of humiliation, people who are humiliated don't commit violence. They're cowed. People believe they're responding because others they may love or be committed to, they feel are humiliated. But people who are humiliated don't commit violence. We regularly find a negative correlation between that. Ted Kazinsi is a loner. He has nothing. Yeah, that's what I mean, he's a crackpot loner. This is, these people have no criminal records to speak of, fairly well educated. Poverty isn't a big factor. They span the normal distribution. There's nothing in their individual psyches that's different from any of us, okay? It really has nothing to do with individual personality factors. It has to do with the small group dynamics, the patterns of friendship and of kinship and of neighborhood and of common activities which determine who will join the Jihad and whether or not they'll make a path. It's not about hierarchical organization, command and control, recruitment or brainwashing. There's none of that. There's no brainwashing in the Jihad. It's about fluid networks of friends, families, neighbors, schoolmates, workmates, soccer buddies, camp buddies, bodybuilding buddies and pinball buddies who self-radicalizing groups and go looking for al-Qaeda. And I'm gonna give you some case studies, some of the sort of famous case studies. This notion that there are cells, you hear guys like George Tenet or the president or anyone else talking about sleeper cells, does anybody have any idea how many sleeper cells there's been in the United States? There's been exactly one sleeper cell in the history of the United States. That was Colonel Rudolf Abel who was sent by the Russians in the 1950s in an exchange for Francis Gary Powers who was shot down in a U-2 flight over the Soviet Union. That's it. That's the only sleeper cell that's ever existed. Again, this is pretty much a fantasy. And this notion that there's cells, there's command and control, there's hierarchies, there's bureaus, there's offices, there's the chief of military planning, there's the chief of operations. This is simple bureaucratic mirroring by people who know nothing other than their own bureaucratic lives, who don't see things other than through the lenses of their own lives. I get it from everybody. This is what the Moroccan police give, I can give you what the Saudis give me, what the Indonesians give me. Basically, bureaucrats interpret the world in terms of bureaucracies, okay? With structures and hierarchies and all that. Has nothing to do with it, which makes it a hard problem to deal with it. These are the guys you entrust to deal with the problem. Same thing with al-Qaeda and the Maghreb. Basically, this new range of attacks in North Africa is guys who apply to Zawahiri and bin Laden to become al-Qaeda. Actually, they had problems with al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda, and the groups al-Afiz for the predication of Islam and the other North African groups were always in conflict. But it's a big logo now. Zarkawi himself, he was a competitor of bin Laden. There was no love lost between them. But it's such a big brand name now. Everybody wants to belong to him. So they applied, took about six months for the word to actually get into the frontier regions. And then bin Laden Zawahiri said, okay, call yourselves al-Qaeda. And all of a sudden there's al-Qaeda and the Maghreb. They do a suicide attack for the first time and the headlines across the world is al-Qaeda in North Africa. But again, basically, they've got the consent of somebody to use a brand name. Same with Europe. Let me just go through a couple of examples. One is the Jamais Lamia. This is a very interesting organization. It's an outgrowth of a Islamic Revolutionary nationalist movement that first emerged in the 1930s in Indonesia, helped lead Indonesia to independence against the Dutch, fought the Japanese. The leader of it was executed by Sukarno. And a militant brand grew up during the 1970s founded by two clerics whose ancestors were from the Hadramat. That's the same area where bin Laden's father came from. The Hadramatis have been in that part of the world for four or 500 years. There's a huge network of kinship relations and commercial relations among Arab seafarers that have been in that part of the world for hundreds of years. And al-Qaeda and the al-Qaeda movement is parasitic on those pre-existing relationships. Well, within this movement, there was a split between the so-called Sufis. And this goes back to the Hadramat back four or 500 years. And those who wanted a Salafi version of the Dar al-Islam, that is no music, no mysticism, no metaphorical interpretations of God, very similar to the splits between the iconic clasts and the Catholics in the 9th and 10th century in Western Europe. And they originally modeled themselves on the gamat islamic, which was one of these taqfiri groups that emerged in Egypt in the 1980s under the spiritual guidance of the blind sheikh, Omar Abdel Rahman, who's now in prison in the United States for helping to plan blowing up New York City landmarks. Well, the Egyptian Islamic group hasn't done anything in years because after the Luxor massacres in the late 1990s, their relatives and friends in the upper Egypt where they were from basically said, hold off, this is enough, we don't want any more of this. Since then, there's not a peep out of these guys. But this had split off with the other group headed by Zawahiri, who was no longer embedded in his society, who was now in Afghanistan and who basically became more apocalyptic in his vision, saying, yeah, let's carry out any attack possible and who cares about retaliation. So at this time, the Jamas Lamia, who had been part of the jihad against the Soviets, decided to ally itself with bin Laden. This is about the time that the original Islamic group on which they had been modeled decided to basically call everything off. And they slowly developed an organization in 1988, 1989, when they were invited back, well, when they came back here to Suharto's fall, that became increasingly taqfiri. After Sunkar's death, the founder of the Jamas Lamia died in 1999, his side Kikabu Bakir Bashir took over. And Bashir was sort of an irracular leader. He wasn't an operational hands-on guy. And so he allowed, in a sense, the taqfiri within the group to emerge. Now, almost all descriptions of the Jamas Lamia are based on this sort of hierarchical descriptions that you get officially. Through the Jamas Lamia movement or through the intelligence analysts or through the paper. Now, we've worked a long time among our consultants as the head of Australian intelligence who tracked the Jamas Lamia. We work closely with the strike team leaders of the Indonesian government who tracked these guys. And we have sort of, I can't say in our University of Michigan payroll, but as consultants, guys who were former leaders of the Jamas Lamia. And I spent some time interviewing the Emir in prison in Jakarta in 19, in 2005. And this is what we find. The organization predicts nothing. There are four things that predict. Who will belong to an attack group and the likelihood that they'll continue to belong to a attack group. The first is what class during the Soviet Afghan war and in the immediate aftermath that they graduate from. They would go to the Abu Sayef training camp near Peshawar beginning in 1986 with Zulkarnayin who was the sort of military leader of the Jamas Lamia. And depending on the year and their cohort, they would form groups that kept together ever since. The second greatest predictor is marriages. And this we find again and again. There are 30 marriages, okay? Distributed over 10 attacks and think about it. You know, these films like The Godfather where you see all these plots being hatched in the marriage at the beginning of the film, that's exactly how it happens. Because marriage is a great place to hatch plots, much better than mosques, because you got everybody there. They're all relaxed. They can talk about whatever they want. No one's really listening. Great place to do jihad. The third greatest predictor is actual kinship relationships. Brothers, sisters, cousins. These are the clusters, family clusters of some of the principal actors in the attacks of the Jamas Lamia. These are the family ties over different attacks. A is the Australian Embassy bombing, Bali is the Bali attack of 2002, the second greatest terrorist attack after 9-11. TAR is the bombing of the Philippines Ambassador's residence in 2000. And you can see again, there are some thick family ties running through these things. This is just the family ties in one particular attack. The Bali bombing of 2002 is perhaps the most interesting because it's the most lethal and the most famous attack. It's what made people aware that Jamas Lamia existed.  Again, because in a little bit like drug cartels or even gangs, it's family groups, groups of friends, people who've gone to school to one another. This is the diagram of the Bali attack, the different operations groups, the suicide bombers and whatnot. The dark circles means that everybody within that dark circle has known everyone else and is thickly related to everyone else. Otherwise, you'd have many more ties. And what we find is the red guys, they all taught or studied at the Lukmanul School in Malaysia which was set up after they were kicked out of Indonesia. The gray group is the guys who had Afghan ties who weren't in any of the Madrasas. The yellow Bukmeen ties, the yellow guys is another Madrasa founded by the father of three of the Bali plotters. Sorry, the El Mukmeen ties, that's the original Madrasa founded by Abu Bakr Bashir. 17 of the 27 Bali bomb plotters went to the same schools. Now, you look at this and you say like our Secretary of State and our Secretary of Defense, former Secretary of Defense, that means Madrasas are dangerous. No, it does not mean Madrasas are dangerous. There are tens of thousands of Madrasas. We're talking about three that are responsible for all the attacks. It's a little bit like saying, you had Columbine, you had Virginia Tech, let's close down the American high schools and universities. Now, this is a very small group that are responsible for these kinds of actions. This is a study we did. So far as I know, the only study ever done of Madrasas themselves, we did a comparison study of Madrasas and we find that the ones associated with Chima Aslamiya really are different, okay? So here's a typical example we try to use. When we do surveys, we do them as experimental designs. We don't do attitude surveys. So we ask questions they've never heard of before and they have to form inferences and responses on the spot. So one of the questions we asked, for example, if a Jewish, a child who was born of Jewish Zionists is raised since birth by Chima Aslamiya, will it grow up to be Chima Aslamiya or Jewish Zionist? Now, when we ask this to people in the Christian identity movement, for example, we get terribly racist, essentialist responses. A Jew is a Jew, a Jew is Zionist, a Zionist, a Zionist, that's the way God made him. It doesn't matter who raises them. These guys are different. Most Muslim groups, including, for example, of the Hamas or the Hezbollah, or even most Al-Qaeda will say, no, it'll grow up to be a Muslim. In fact, an Al-Qaeda Muslim is raised by Al-Qaeda, which is the right way. This is one of the few groups that doesn't believe that. So there are some startling differences. These are just part of what the school connections are between the guys in the classes when they went to high school. Another set of connections, school connections between the major attack leaders. Again, they crisscross the organizational structure in every which way. Again, more school connections. And now I'd like to go over to the Madrid attack.  There was no ingenious cell structure, no hierarchy, no recruitment, no brainwashing, no coherent organization, no links to Al-Qaeda, yet this half-baked plot concocted in a few months with a target suggested over the internet was the proximate cause of regime change in a democratic society. So that's an interesting problem. How could so few cause such havoc? Not only so few, but basically a few nincompoops. These were mostly losers who got incredibly lucky. Most of these guys are caught. These guys made it. Some of them were fairly smart, but the plot itself when we go through it is so improbable, so unlikely. Where most of the people didn't have any idea what the other guys were doing, and it worked precisely because of that. The police were informed of what was going on with every part of the plot since its inception and before, yet they were never able to put it together. So what we have back in the early 1990s, we have up here a group of small-time Spanish criminal losers. They go to jail because they're selling dynamite to fishermen to blow up fish, which is illegal. They're stealing dynamite from the dynamite mine where they work Las Conchitas. This woman, Carmen Turo, she's the sister of this guy, Antonio Turo, who is the cellmate of this guy, Tras Horas, Emilio Tras Horas, and she will eventually marry Tras Horas. They also happen to be cousins to begin with. You got a bunch of Salafis who are actually frustrated Muslim brothers who fled Syria after Hafez al-Assad in the late 1980s, cracked down on the Muslim brotherhood in Syria, and they fled as refugees to Spain. They were indicted for involvement in the 9-11 plot by Balthazar Garçon, but they were, since their conviction was since overturned by the Spanish Supreme Court, basically had nothing to do with it. These guys, they're all became petty drug dealers from the same neighborhood in a small, tumble-down place called the Jamak Mesuak in Tetua, Northern Morocco, which is right near the Spanish enclave of Ciuta. Nothing changes here. Now, some Moroccan students, and one Tunisian, and economic students who got a scholarship to study for a PhD, an honor student, hook up after mosque with some of the Salafis that had come from Damascus. These guys are three brothers from Tetuan, all drug addicts. This guy, he's a sort of little Napoleon, more like James Cagney in Public Enemy. I mean, a tough little guy who you don't mess around with, but he's also a drug addict.    He does it by turning to religion. And if you follow people who've actually kicked their heroin addicts, the only ones who can do it really cold turkey are usually those guys who find religion, otherwise they really need medical help. Anyway, he's successful, he goes to his friends, fellow drug pushers, the three, two of the three decide to kick the habit with him, and they become his lifelong friends and his bodyguards. This is his cousin who also doesn't kick the habit. Okay, the original group of Salafis from Syria, together with the students from Morocco and the one Tunisian, start meeting at this river and having picnics on the Naval Canira River in the late 1990s. They start singing jihadi songs, they start chanting, playing soccer together, deciding that they have to do something. I have no idea what to do. And so they start forming new connections. Whoops, let me go back. They start forming a thick set of connections, of friends, of family, of guys they meet at the cultural association and the mosque, at the barbershop, at the butcher shop. It's really hard to get through the thick set of relationships that are involved, but they start forming a thick community. By the way, this guy, Kartakena, he's a police informant who's part of the group who's reporting as this is going on the whole time. They start calling themselves El-Haraqat al-Salafiyah, which means the Salafi movement. They also start calling themselves Takfir wal-Hijrah, after the old Takfiri movement. But again, mostly they just talk and scream and yell and run around and play soccer and have picnics together, and they're gonna do this until right before the plot is hatched because they really have no idea what to do.  He gets thrown in the same cell. He's got a friend, Aglif, who's called the Rabbit. The Rabbit has to be, happens to be one of the messengers for the drug guys who have since moved to Madrid from Tetuan. The police release Zuhir, who's playing all sides of the gang, and his police handler named Victor, says, look, you go back to Astorius, that's the northern Spanish town, where you were in prison with Tras Horas and Toro, the two Spanish losers who were selling dynamite, and you try to find out who's their new market. So Zuhir goes back up in Astorius. There's no one really who's a market. He starts talking to his friend, Aglif. They used to go to these sort of these whorehouses on the outskirts of Madrid. And Aglif says, well, my friend who just got out of prison, he had jamalaf me down this little sort of public enemy James Cagney type. He had been put in prison for murder. He had knifed some guy, killed him, but then he paid off the family and was eventually released. Besides, he was so tough, no one wanted to testify against them. He comes back in late July 2003 to Spain. He starts smoothing around with Aglif, who says, hey, by the way, there's a guy I know, Zuhir, who's trying to get rid of some dynamite.   Then they try to get him to be involved in the Sufi movement, yeah. They try to get him to be involved in the Sufi movement. He says, that ain't violent enough for me. And he wants to become a Salafi, Takfiri. He's moping around for a month or two and eventually he meets up with the Tunisian, Serhan, where are you Serhan? You're up here somewhere. There you are. Who becomes a sort of substitute radical preacher in the mosque? He's left his economics scholarship.  He's expelled from the mosque. He has nothing to do, by the way. These groups of students have nothing to do with the drug pushes. This is where they push the drugs in the same neighborhood of Lavapies. But the interesting thing is, it's all the same neighborhood. Whoops. So this is where they push drugs. This is the restaurant all these guys would eat at, called the Alhambra restaurant, where they eat sandwiches. I like that.  Those were the two guys who kicked the habit with the little Napoleon guy. But here's the most amazing thing. Five of the seven guys, so they do this plot. The plot is hatched from October to December. You still don't know what they're doing, right? But Jamal, this sort of hands-on guy, this drug dealer who's actually killed people and who actually goes up in the middle of the plot to blow away two guys in Bilbao for not giving them the drug money because he needed the drug money in order to buy the explosives for the jihad. Five of those seven guys who blew themselves up were the drug guys who had found religion and who only got into the plot a few months before it was hatched. The plot itself, by the way, they concocted it finally when they downloaded something on the internet from the Zarkawi website which said, why don't you blow up something in Spain before the elections? And finally, they found something to do. The students who had been yelling for three years, four years about something to do finally found a little guy who was willing to get the dynamite to them and actually do something. And the interesting thing is five of the seven guys who blew themselves up all came from one neighborhood, two were brothers, all linked to that friend, Jamala Khmedan, that little Napoleon guy, a guy named Kunja who was known as the first Afghan in the neighborhood because he put on this Afghan smock, this hat and start preaching takfiri and the candy salesman, a gay candy salesman named Refat. These were the guys who blew themselves up and the police captured them, cornered them in Madrid. Now, Kunja's cousin was married to a guy named Hanza and these guys all in 2006 and 2007 went to Iraq to blow themselves up. They all came from this neighborhood within 400 square meters, grew up as kids together, went to this elementary school called the Abdel Karim Khattabi Elementary School and we're all in the same class since first grade. This is the kids coming out of the school, this is the kids going to the school. Now, Kunja preached in this mosque, but again, it's not in the mosque, we thought it was in the mosque. There was an article in the Washington Post when we first gave this information which said their al-Qaeda recruiters, al-Qaeda, I'm looking for the al-Qaeda recruiter, all I see is the donkey. And we find out most of the stuff is going on in the Chicago cafe. That's because that's where things happen. People watch Al Jazeera and they get super psyched. I mean, I don't know if you've ever watched Al Jazeera News, you get 15 minutes of Iraq. It's not like watching CNN or Fox. You see fathers running through the streets of Baghdad with the brains of their children falling out. You get five minutes of Palestine, pretty gruesome images as well and one minute for the rest of the world. It's a little bit like Fox in reverse, right? This is the scene right below the mosque where they play soccer and jihad. They were all soccer buddies and they all went as soccer buddies to Iraq. Then I went to Ceuta, which is a nearby Spanish enclave and I was asking the kids, you know, trying to figure out why do these guys do it? How do they get involved?  So they say to me, okay, first hero, this is about 50, a sample of about 50. First hero is Ronaldinho. Okay, he's the Brazilian soccer star from the Barça team. Everybody's either a Barça soccer fan or a Madrid soccer fan. In fact, there are two cafes in this plaza. One right there, which is the Madrid cafe for the Madrid guys and the other for the Barça guys, but they're both showing El Jazeera all the time. The Terminator is number two, but they have no idea that he's related to the present governor of California. And number three is Asma bin Laden. So why do they do it? And people in our society not? Well, Muslims in our society buy into the American dream. Okay, the demographics on Muslims in the United States society exactly mirror the average of the United States society. Muslims in Europe, in Spain, for example, are 19 times more likely to be poor, marginal, and it goes more or less in the same fashion for the rest of Western Europe. We find, for example, there is no radicalization. Despite the hype you get in Congress, and I've testified in front of God knows how many organizations and committees and whatnot, there have only been really two cases of radicalization in the prison population of 2.3 million. I mean, that's not a lot, okay? But 60 to 70% of the Muslims of European prison populations are Muslim, very much like African Americans in the United States, and for very much the same reasons. So there are no reasons, in a sense, social reasons for Muslims to become radicalized in the United States. The problem of radicalization in prisons in the United States is basically among Afro-Americans, not Muslims who originated from foreign sources. And what makes someone become radicalized to take the path of violence is, first of all, not humiliation again, okay? It's moral outrage, and that moral outrage is often lived vicariously looking at the internet or on television, where people feel that their people are being violated, murdered, or whatever. Now that is a virtual imagined community. Why should someone who lives in the jungles of Sulawesi, this remote island where anthropologists like myself would dream about going a generation ago because they were cannibals three generations ago? And people in Morocco or Spain dream about the same thing when they've never been out of their villages. That's only possible, again, because of this sort of massive, media-driven transnational making, and it's creating a virtual community. That virtual community, that media-driven virtual community, is being created to a large extent, as well, by the actions of the United States. I'm not gonna go into that, everybody knows the story. All I can report to you is that the greatest heroic thing anybody, any of these young people can do is say, go to Iraq and fight American soldiers. They dream of it. They've never been out of Borneo or Sumatra. They dream of fighting Americans in Iraq. I'm not gonna go through any of this. I will go towards the end about what not to do. I have many prescriptions about what not to do, like spend millions of dollars to study the Quran or make predictive models and widgets. I mean, look at these guys.  Is the key link between the losers in the Spanish prison and these drug guys and these students who couldn't get it together? Come on. You're never gonna get that with scale-free modeling or scale-more modeling or God knows what. But how do you deal with it? Well, this moral outrage becomes effective only if it personally resonates with you, okay? It doesn't personally resonate with Muslims in the United States. There's just nothing to resonate with. It does resonate with people in Europe, in North Africa and in the Middle East. If police, for example, are particularly hostile, then although you don't experience the violence of occupation or invasion or anything else, you start empathizing with it. And that's what we find again and again. We find the most successful people at stopping the Jihad are people who treat it as a public health problem and it's not a criminal problem. The way the Saudis, the way the Turks, the way the Indonesians have virtually stopped Salafi attacks is basically go to the families, the friends, the relatives, the neighborhood and say, look, we don't want a problem. What can we do so that people don't take the path of violence? They give gifts in Ramadan, they find jobs. They talk to the families now, oh, this is being filmed. One senior law enforcement agent who was a witness to testimony by these various heads of intelligence said, can you see me with Timothée McVeigh? I mean, one of these guys, the head of one of these intelligence was actually hugging a mass suicide bomber who had been released because he was much more effective at getting others to turn than if he had stayed in prison and been hung or shot.  So it is very hard for law enforcement in the United States to go into this mindset because of our laws. But I want to tell you, it is very successful. There hasn't been a single Salafi incident in Turkey, for example, since the Istanbul bombings and in Indonesia since 2005. So how did we deal with it in this sort of thing? Well, of course, we have to deal with problems associated alienation in these societies, but more important, think of things like the Boy Scouts. High school football, where did that come from? Why did it work? It worked because we were an immigrant society and we had to integrate people in our social structure, in our social network and it was largely successful. You know, I had, as I said to Bobby, I had also been one of the first ones back in the late 1960s. First one to vote against ROTC, fraternities, high school, college football, kicking around with pig skin and making a big deal of it, but now I really see what that does. It binds people in a sort of communitas, like no other thing and that's what happens with these friends and that's the only way to get them, I think, away from the kinds of, given that their structure is basically one of family and friends, 70% of the people who join the Jihad do it through their friends, 20% through their family. Their friends become their families because the sisters start cooking for them and they start marrying the sisters of one another. Less than 10% come from any schools and that's only in two countries, Pakistan and Indonesia. Provide for alternative dreams and heroes because that's what youth can connect into. Look at the new comic book series called The Muslim 99 Superheroes. This is going great guns in Indonesia and Qatar and Kuwait, even in Iraq. Kids are buying this up, eating this up like kids in our society used to eat up Marvel Comics, Superman and Batman and truth justice in the American way and it's making headway. That's gonna have a lot more effect than getting the Imams to preach moderation. Dreams and heroes mobilized in the fight for faith and friends, causes and camaraderie, perhaps more than industry and power give impetus to lives and civilizations. Faith and friendship, this is my punch line. Faith and friendship provide humans with a sense of being that is larger, deeper and more enduring than a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.  And just another quote from Shakespeare which really captures the people who joined Jihad. Never alone, always his friends, always for a cause that gives their friendship solidarity and eternity and a sense of being and meaning greater than themselves. This story shall the good man teach his son from this day to the ending of the world but we in it shall be remembered. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers. For he today that chases blood with me shall be my brother but he may or so vile this day shall gentle his condition. And ask yourselves, and this is the final slide, ask yourselves why all political systems, all imagined communities of non-kin describe themselves in terms of fictive kinship of brothers and sisters and homelands and fatherlands and motherlands. Aristotle I think got it right in the ethics where he said friendship, filia, is the basis of all political union, all political union that defines who human beings are that is communities of non-kin. And as a final reflect for those interested in evolutionary theory, it's a fact worthy of deep meditations at Katala Lorenz that for all we know the bond of personal friendship was evolved by the necessity for certain individuals to cease from fighting each other in order to more effectively combat other fellow members of our species. Since the Pleistocene, humans have been their own worst predators. When humans first formed groups of non-kin, they were able to dominate all threats that came from the animal world. They soon became their own worst enemies and they began forming larger and larger groups. And if we look at the way they formed larger groups, from the Pleistocene until today, through all of recorded history and through every society, the anthropologists, every study, it's always in terms of bonds of friendship and fictive kinship. And that's what you've got to deal with really. That's what this movement is about. It's not about generals and command and control. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. We've got time for questions. So I'll let you identify them, unless you. Yeah. Yeah. No questions? Yeah. The perspective on the terrorists and what motivates the terrorists, it's very different from what we were typically here from US policy and the way it's framed in the media. And so if this is the basis, it would suggest that the US government's approach is very off base. And if that is the case, then what do you think is motivating the US government to take this approach that's not as reminded about the actual problem? OK, the question is, this is a very different approach from the approach we usually hear from policymakers in the United States. And this is truly the case. Why is it that the United States government leaders pursue the policies they do, which don't seem to have much relevance to this particular set of phenomena? Now that's complex. The answer is fairly complex. For one thing, on a very superficial level, I've talked about bureaucratic mirroring. It's stunning that no one actually does fieldwork with these guys. No one talks to them. If you look at the books written, any of them dying to win are the latest books by Alan Kruger at Princeton University on the economic causes of terrorism. They're very smart people.  And they really have no idea who these people are, and they're normal people who do the things they do. That's one problem. Second problem is this idea of bureaucratic mirroring. The guys who do the analysis of intelligence aren't the case officers. They're just out of school like you. There are reasons, structural reasons, why the field officers never do analysis. But they just mirror their bureaucracies, and they can't interpret the world in any other way. They have no references to do it. But third and most important, it is politically convenient to believe there's a bogeyman out there.  And Al Qaeda is about the best bogeyman you can possibly come up with, fits it all together. And there's a sort of perfect storm of psychological biases that can be plugged into this. The need to tell a story, sort of fundamental, all sorts of cognitive biases.   And these guys are determining the course of the debate on presidential politics. Thankfully or unthankfully is moving to economics because we're driving into a recession right now. But it still dominates to a large extent. And literally, at least in the beginning of the campaign, not only here, but in the countries of Western Europe, it's run on the basis of how you're going to respond to this particular threat without any knowledge of what the threat is or care. Let me tell you, we've talked to some of the candidates and their staffs and things like that, suggesting that things like, no, war on terror, this is ridiculous. Said, no, we can't put that phrase aside. The public understands that. And there was a debate, actually, in the administration in the first couple of days about whether this was supposed to be a war on terror or a crime against humanity. Think of how it would have played out it was declared a crime against humanity. And the support in the world, whether it could have actually been sustained politically in the United States is another matter. But if it had been sustained as a crime against humanity, the present status of the world would be much different than it is today. So it is a political issue and the careers of our major politicians and political parties and affiliations depend upon how it's treated. And how are you going to describe it?  No, you've got to make it something profound and strong and deep. And by so doing, by the way, and this is a peculiarity of human categorization versus categorization of natural kinds. When people categorize human kinds, whether they be people or political processes, there's a looping effect. No matter how arbitrary and false it is to begin with, once you make that category, the frame, you force, in a sense, history and behavior into that frame. Okay, I'll give you just another example. African-American, okay? Or there was once called Negro, that there was supposed to be some race. I remember a friend of mine who was supposed to pick up some guy from New Guinea because his skin was dark and he was dark.  Well, biologically, that's crazy notion. But the fact that the world treated, the Western world treated those people as the same, even though they were as distant as you could possibly be in human evolution since 50,000 years, made that category real however false it was. And that's a property of human kinds and we do it all the time. And I'm afraid El Qaeda has become one of those things. It has created its own reality, its own reactions in the world. It's now become a logo that carries essential properties. It's being transformed all the time because it never fits reality quite nicely. And we're witness to the spread of this viral ideology because of this category creation. Yes? So some independent networks that for sort of around the radicalization of terror, or even some like quite a, I don't know, maybe it wasn't radicalism in the network, but sometimes there's some small chance can't communicate with this group. I'm not sure if I understand your question right here. So Charles Tilley came here and said, terrorism is a strategy, so it's a strategy not a network. And are you asking me if I consider these networks to generate terrorism? All right, terrorism is even worse than El Qaeda or democracy as concepts. I mean, it's so fuzzy and vague. I use it because it gets me in the front door of policy groups. Terrorism, of course, is a method. It's essentially being applied these days to the use by transnational actors for attacks against non-combatant civilians. That's the way most people sort of feel about it. It's actually a method like guns. I mean, there's nothing to it. There's no kind that's called terrorism. Anybody can be called a terrorist or freedom fighter or whatever. I'm talking specifically about a specific group, the Takfiri groups. Although there are very, very great similarities between how these groups form in human groups in general, be they spontaneous groups over the internet or gangs or drug cartels or our own political leadership.  What I'm saying is that terrorism, the phenomena of Takfiri terrorism, the one that everybody's scared about but won't call that Muslim terrorism or whatever reasons, that phenomena is based on two things. The kinds of ordinary networks that drive most of human behavior and the most important predictive factors are just knowing the ordinary networks. Secondly, the friendship and bit.  And that's a result of historical process of fairly recent origin that I've mentioned, the collapse of the Soviet Union being won. A very similar phenomena occurred between 1878 and 1914 and that was the anarchist movement. People thought that the anarchists, there was some central movement and these were terrorists in the same way. They would blow up people.  A lot of them were students, very well educated middle class. They were quite successful in the havoc they brought, much more than Al Qaeda. I mean, they managed to kill the president of the United States, the Archduke of Austria to start World War I, Prime Minister of France, was it the Queen of Italy or Queen of Italy? Half, about a half a dozen top Russian ministers caused havoc all over the world. Scotland Yard was set up, the Russian Ochrana, which became the predecessor of the NKVD and the KGB. The Secret Service sort of split and became the FBI at the same time. All those result the anarchist threat. Teddy Roosevelt, when he took over from McKinley, who was assassinated by an anarchist, gave his first speech to Congress and said, look, this is very similar to George W. Bush's speech on September 19th. There is evil in the world, okay? This is a battle against good and evil. You're for us or against us. And also gave himself the right for the United States for the first time in history to interfere in other places in the world in order to stop this evil act, which was the greatest threat against humanity at the time. It was only until the Warren Commission redid a study of the assassination of presidents they decided, well, there really was no anarchist central after all, okay? And it's very similar. Why did the anarchist movement disappear?  They blew up things in New York. There was a Spanish Civil War. But it basically died out after World War I because the Bolshevists co-opted their support and their audience. Well, I don't think we should wait for someone like the Bolshevists to co-opt this. Marvel Comics is even better. But we should think about what kinds, and we can't predict this stuff, but we should start forming strategies about what can attract young people besides rave, okay? What can really move young people to find meaning in their lives? And Davos won't do it, right? Globalization isn't gonna do it.  For most of the world, globalization does not mean everybody's happier, healthier, and hippier. It means they're unmoored from their societies and the traditions and they don't know where they are and they're looking for where they are. And what are, is our society gonna do to get these people sympathetic to us rather than that? And I don't see anything. Do you know the National Security Council, for example? Which is the primary mechanism in the United States for forming foreign policy. Congress has no effect, none, okay? The pundits have very little effect. It's the president and his National Security Council which decides foreign policy in the United States. There is not a single permanent representative from health or education or welfare or anything to do with actual human beings and their interactions on the National Security Council with permanent representation, okay? It's mostly military, intelligence, and close association with economics. And so we're not getting the kinds of strategies we need to actually deal with the world as it is now. This is not a Soviet threat. This is not a battle against power blocks looking to position themselves for control of the world. This is an ideological battle, but one which is thoroughly integrated into notions of community and neighborhood and friendship, of people trying to find again a meaning in life in a world where traditional relationships are being unmoored in an incredibly rapid pace. Take one more question. Yeah. What frame do you mean? Well, the question is this 9-1-1 in Al Qaeda, part of a frame. It's part of lots of competing frames. I mean, we can describe all of human discourse, political discourse in terms of frames, as Bob would say. The particular frame of Al Qaeda, the historical frame of Al Qaeda is, you know, I've talked about anarchism as sort of the model for understanding the social dynamics of it. The Nazi movement, and I'm not saying that these people are Nazis, I'm just talking about the movement. The Nazi movement is a good example of what Al Qaeda's like in the sense that it is a thoroughly modern movement, thoroughly modern, but it has out of this the cultural elements of a very Peku, your kind. It is almost tribal in the sense that it wants to create a sense of deep community, of communitas, almost of collective apprehensions. There are many sort of, if you look at the poetry of it, of the ritual of it, you find the idea of trying to create a virtual community of people who can personally relate to one another at a very emotional level, not an intellectual level at all. And in that sense, it's a derivative of that movement. And let me, I don't know if I talked about it here, I don't think I did. So my last comment. Monotheism created the notion of humanity. Humanity didn't exist before monotheism. If you go to the jungles of New Guinea or even Egypt, which had a classification of different human kinds, there was no notion of humanity between monotheism. The secular monotheisms since the Enlightenment are monotheisms nonetheless, all the isms, the anarchisms, colonialism, fascism, communism, even democratism. And they try to save humanity. You see, that's their object. You can even find in Matthew in the book of Matthew, Christ saying, you're either for us or against us. And so there was a division into humanity between those who should or could be saved and those who couldn't. And most of the clashes that have led to the greatest mass murders in human history are a result of the fact that one group wants to save humanity and there's another group that doesn't really want to be saved.  And I think Al Qaeda fits very well into this millennial tradition of monotheisms that are out to save humanity.  Okay, thank you very much. That was wonderful. And now we've got food and drink out from the hallway and we can continue the conversation up there. Thank you very much.


The Cavalcade of America sponsored by Dupont, maker of better things for better living through chemistry, presents Randolph Scott in The Vengeance of Torpedo 8. This evening with Randolph Scott as our star, Dupont presents The Vengeance of Torpedo 8, based on the book Torpedo 8 by Ira Wolfert. The Vengeance of Torpedo 8 written by Milton Wayne and Robert L. Richards is a story of courage out of the annals of our war in the Pacific. Randolph Scott appears on The Cavalcade tonight by the courtesy of Universal Pictures, which is now filming the Walter Wenger production, Gung Ho starring Randolph Scott as Lieutenant Harold Larson on The Cavalcade of America. This is the story of vengeance and the story of a man. It is the story of a grim item of particulars presented to the enemy and collected in fullest measure by the men of the United States Navy Torpedo Squadron and by their skipper. The name of the squadron is Torpedo 8. The name of the man is Swede Larson and The Vengeance was on behalf of 42 of its men, men who were still alive only 18 months ago. It is a day in March 1942 at the Norfolk Naval Base. And Torpedo 8 is in the process of commissioning new TBF planes for the big job that still lies ahead. And carefully supervising every move is Torpedo 8 Skipper, Lieutenant Swede Larson. Larson Darnis. Yes, Skipper. Hold it. I'll call you back. Here comes the captain. Well, Swede, how are they coming? Couldn't ask for butter, sir. Look, Swede, I don't want to rush you, but well, it would help to have a rough idea. How soon do you think your boys can get these planes into commission for combat? Well, I've been doing considerable thinking about that. Of course, you know, there's a lot of work involved in a job like this. Sure, I know, but there's a war on, too. Yes, sir. That's why I was thinking. I figured we could do the job by May. May? Are you kidding? No, sir. But that's about the best we can do. Do you realize that May is only two months from now? Yes, sir. And that the Navy has never commissioned a new type of combat plane in two months in its life, nor the Army, nor any other service in any other country in the world? Well, no, sir. I didn't. Well, it's a fact. Do you still think you'll have these ships by May? Yes, sir. Because these new ships are good. And the boys out there will need them, and the boys here know it. They'll have them ready. Okay. I'll put in my report. But there can't be much fooling around if you're going to have those planes out that fast. Don't worry, sir. We'll deliver them. Jack! Yeah, Frenchie, what do you want? Hey, I want to go to that ball game. This guy's sweet is killing us. Well, why don't you put it up to him? Why not? All he can do is say no. Yeah, and he will. But tell him we'll all be dead before we ever fight at this rate. You're not kidding. I'm going to talk to him. The last I saw of me was down there in the grease pit. Good luck, Frenchie. Hey, Swede. Hey, Swede! Yeah? How are you, Frenchie? Come on up for a minute. Let's have a cigarette. Be right with you. Stick it down there. Yeah. Thanks. Well, what's on your mind, kid? You see, the fellas were kind of thinking... Is something wrong? No, no, no. But you see, they've been working pretty hard lately. Nights and all. Don't I know it.  Yeah. Well, you see, there's a... There's a ball game this afternoon. Yeah? And it would only be a couple of hours, and so they got the sort of thinking of... Boy, would I like to go and take the wife along, too? Hey, that's swell. Yeah, but you know we can as well as I do. Ah, Swede. The war will keep her... Okay, okay. You're the boss. I know how you guys feel. My wife came all the way from Birmingham with the kids, and now I hardly ever see her. And you know how I feel about Missy. Well, maybe you ought to see more of her, Swede. Maybe you ought to make the time. Maybe. Sit down, Frenchie. I want to tell you something. Yeah. What's on your mind? Look, Frenchie, I'm not a very smart guy. Well, I got the kind of brains that works long. I found that out a long time ago. I found out that everything I did, I had to work awful hard. It's kind of the same way with this war. I'm never going to do anything smart. Ah, Swede, never going to dope out any fancy strategy. The only thing I know how to do is work and keep on working. And as long and as hard as I can on the job I got. You see what I mean? I'm sure, Skipper. Tell the guys I'm sorry about the ball game. Ah, Skipper. They were only kidding. Who wants to see a lousy ball game? We all do, kid. But the captain's got to have these planes, and I promised him we'd have them ready. There they are, sir. Ready to go. Well, you made it, didn't you? It's a swell job, Swede. Thank you, sir. Your boy's ready to take him out to the coast? Yes, sir. Turn your hands, then.  Yes, sir. Weed. Hello, Missy. I was down at the shops. They said you were up here. Just looking at you crates over.  I sure am. Well, come on, then. Oh, darling, think. Tomorrow's Sunday. We'll have it all to ourselves. Missy. And I got the most lovely turkey from the commissary. Missy, I... We won't have so many more Sundays, and I thought we could sort of celebrate. Missy. What, Swede? Look, honey, I won't be here tomorrow. Swede. That's right, honey. I've got to leave tonight. Oh, Swede, why didn't you tell me? I thought it was better this way. But we've had so little time, and now it's gone. Why didn't you tell me sooner? Well, I told you as soon as I let the others tell their wives. But why, darling? Why? It's easier without long goodbyes. Oh, is it? Well, maybe they don't think so. But I... Maybe their wives and their children and their sweethearts don't think so. Well, I... Maybe they feel the way I do. That they want to know in time so they can get ready for it a little. I want to tell you that... So they can take it and not... Oh, Swede. I know, Missy. Oh, darling. Listen, honey, do you remember when you were a kid, they used to tie a string around your tooth, tie the other end to the door knob and slam the door shut real quick so it wouldn't hurt so much? Mm-hmm. Maybe I'm wrong, but this is the way I see it, Missy. If a man went off to fight always wondering when he'd have to leave the people he loved, and then wondering when he got there, how soon he'd have to come back to them, he would hurt so much that he couldn't do the job at all, and then he never would come back. Don't you see, Missy, I'm thinking about their wives and their sweethearts too, just the same as you are. I know. I'm sorry, darling. I know you've got the toughest job. Just waiting. I don't mind waiting, Swede. I can wait a long, long time. Take care of yourself. Sure, I will. Missy. Yes, Swede. I love you, darling. I love you too. Right to me often. Sure, but don't worry when you don't hear from me. I'll try to call you before I go. You'll be sure to, now. I'll be waiting. Well, goodbye. Tell me when you get there. All right. Goodbye now. Goodbye. Goodbye, Swede. Goodbye. Goodbye. I'm trying to get your party now, sir. Okay, but hurry, please. Hello, Birmingham. This is the Birmingham operator. Try my party again, please. Mrs. Larson. One moment, please. Please, hurry. I'm meeting your party now, operator. I'm sorry, sir. Sailing time.  It's my wife. I just want to say hello. Hello. Hello. Ship to shore operator. Hello. Hello. Mrs. Larson. Yes? Your husband was calling Mrs. Larson. My husband? Swede. Swede is at you. I'm sorry, Mrs. Larson, but he was disconnected. Well, how soon can you get the connection through again? I'm afraid we can't, Mrs. Larson. The connection has been broken. Oh, I see. I'm awful sorry, Mrs. Larson. I know how you feel. I got a guy out there, too. The last slender thread is cut. And Swede Larson and the men of Torpedo 8 are out in the broad waters of the Pacific. Then Honolulu, Pearl Harbor. There's food enough for vengeance there, but they don't know what the word means yet. They can't know until they and their turn, like others who've gone before, have known the bitterness of sacrifice and death. That lies ahead, but now there's only waiting. Wait, wait, wait. Well, what do we do now, Swede? Park it, sit on it, and wait some more. Any idea for how long? Take it easy, guys. Waiting's part of the war out here. You just have to get used to it. Lieutenant Larson, the admiral would like to see you, sir. Right. Hey, maybe we're going to work. I'll try to get some action. I'll get on him, Swede. I'll do everything but hit him. Admiral Norris, Lieutenant Larson. Come in, Larson. Come in. Sit down. Thank you, sir. Larson, I know it's been difficult for you, for all of you, waiting this way. But until we get more stuff out here, we've got to see what we've got and make it count. I know, sir. I think we've got a chance to make it count now. The Jap is getting set to take a crack at Midway. We're going to make him pay. That's where Torpedo 8 comes in. That's what we've been waiting for, sir. I want six crews to take off for Midway right away. We'll be ready at once, sir. It's not going to be any picnic, Larson. You better tell your men that. It'll be a one-way trip for them. Well, more of them than I care the rest of me. Yes, sir. Can I pick any other five crews I want to go with me? I'm afraid you'll have to pick six, Larson. You're staying here. Staying? Where? Here. I need you. But Admiral Norris, Torpedo 8 is my job. These are my boys. I can't send them off to something I won't want myself. I'm afraid you have no alternative, Lieutenant. Wait a minute, sir. I've had more training than anyone in the whole squadron. I put those ships into commission myself, and I know every turn and twist of every one of them. If anybody goes to Midway... Larson, you may select your crews in any way you like. You will remain here at your post. That's an order. Yes, sir. Is that all, sir? That's all. Hey, sweet. What's the pitch? Did we get the job? Get the men together. Hey, guys. Come on in. Big news. Papa's going to put us on the first team. Hey, what's up? What is it? Come on. Okay, pipe down. I got some news. There's a job to do. Six crews are going to Midway. It's going to be tough all the way. A lot of the men who go won't come back. All I can promise is that you'll be in a position to dish out more than you take. I'll call for volunteers. All right, quiet. I'll pick the crews myself. I'm staying here. You? You're staying? Orders. I'll pick six flight officers, and they can choose their own crews. Joe Gerson. Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. Don't thank me. Osadi. Yes, sir. McMahon. Yes, sir. Levine. Yes, sir. Johnson. Yes, sir. Ernest. Yes, sir. That's all dismissed. Any news yet, Sparks? Nothing new, Lieutenant Larson. There's been a fight at Midway all right, and torpedo 8 was in it. There's nothing more. Let me know as soon as anything breaks, will you? Yes, sir. Oh, uh, wait a minute. Wait a minute, sir. What? Getting it, sir, right now. What is it? Oh, it's not so good, sir. What is it? Well, only one got back, sir. Only one? Yes, sir. Who was it? Lieutenant Ernest. You are listening to Randolph Scott as Lieutenant Swede Larson in the vengeance of torpedo 8 on the cavalcade of America presented by Dupont. Lieutenant Larson has just learned that five of the six of his torpedo squadron that he sent to Midway are lost. He is waiting now for the return of the sixth, Lieutenant Ernest. Well, Swede, I made it. Yeah, I heard about it, Ernie. Oh, look, Ernie. Don't talk about it if you don't want to. I don't mind. I wish I could have been there. So do I, Swede. If we all did, it was tougher. It was plenty. Did you do any good before? The best we could. How did it happen? We didn't have enough to put up, that's all. We didn't have any fire protection. We didn't have any dive bombers to break up their ground fire. They just sat upstairs and waited for us. Swede, we were like a raw egg thrown into an electric fan. That bad? Yeah. Better get some sleep, kid. We'll make it up, Swede. Yeah, we'll make it, kid. That's a promise. I can't tell you men much about what's happened. You know what, by now? We sent 44 men to Midway, and only two came back. That's in the past. That's a job that's been done, and we don't have time to talk about that. The men have torpedoed away to standing at attention. The men who are left. About 150 of them. Boys from Kentucky and Oregon and Jersey, California. From rich homes and poor homes. From big towns and little ones. From factories. From the CIO and the AFL and Wall Street and store counters and the docks. Boys from all over America. But they're not boys anymore. They've been through it now. They never will be young again, these boys. And they're waiting for their skipper. For Swede Larson to tell them about what's past and the ones who are no longer there. And about the future. That's our job we've got to get ready for. That's what I have in mind now, and I think you have too. We're going to work at our job the way none of us have ever worked at anything before. And we're going to like it. Because we're going to hit the jab wherever we can and as hard as we can and as often as we can. We're going to make him pay for Midway over and over and over again until he lies down and quits coal rather than pay anymore. The motto of torpedo rate has always been attacked. But from the day, it's going to be something more. It's going to be attack and vengeance. We're going to make the jab remember the day that motto was born. And we're going to make him remember those men and whose names it was taken. The name of Oscar Jorgerson. Of Franco Sari. Of Patrick McMahon. Harry Levine. From the day that Swede Larson spoke to them, from that day on, the men of torpedo weight committed themselves to vengeance. They brought their minds out of their old familiar world into a world in which their dead could live with them more fiercely. Vengeance was their job. When they got to Guadalcanal, they worked at it relentlessly. They're aboard the carrier Hornet now and the first flight of Avengers of Torpedo weight take to the air over Guadalcanal. Larson to Squadron. Larson to Squadron. Okay, Skipper. Go ahead, Skipper. Here's the setup. We flat-headed. Come in as low as we can. Drop one bomb to pass. We'll take the radio silence until we hit the jab. Then we tear in and musse him up. Got it? Got you, Skipper. Let's go. They hit the jab at Point Purvis. The jab headquarters goes up and smoke and flame. Call number two on the list for the day is Lange Lange Harbor. They do a job on the docks, the floats and the storing boats.  Day after day, week after week, they have a bill of vengeance to present and collect. Ernest, Frenchie, where are you guys? Right up above you, sweet. I'm down below, sweet. Looking things over. You see those trucks coming out of the woods down there? I see them. Go get them, Frenchie. On my way, sweet. How many did you get? How many burning? Can't see. The wind has busted. Did you make them pay for it? I don't know yet. Wait a minute. Yeah. I see three, four, seven trucks burning. All burning. Hey, sweet. This is Ernest. Ships about 11 o'clock. See him? I got you. Let's go. Torpedo 8 had a bill of vengeance to present and to collect. And they were collecting with interest. The Hornet had put out to sea, and they were working out of Henderson Field when the big day came that they'd all been expecting and hoping for. Sweet got his squadron together in the briefing room. Everybody here? Yes, sir. The dope has just come in. It's what we've all been waiting for, and it's our meat. The Jap is getting ready to throw his Sunday punch. He's heading for Guadalcanal. And not with just little stuff. He's got a whole fleet. Oh, Ernest. We'll take off right away. Just one thing. This is it. This is our chance to collect in a big way for Midway. And a lot of other things. Torpedo 8 has got just one job to do. For every man in the squadron, get a torpedo into one of those ships and get it in right. Not yet, Sweet. Any new orders? No, same course. Keep a close watch. Hey, Sweet. Sweet. I got you, Ernest. What is it? Down there about two o'clock. That's it, guys. Squadron attention. Target sighted. Target sighted two o'clock. Steaming southwest. What a sight. What a sight. Nothing cruises battleships' transports. Here they go, the guns. They've spotted us. Okay, guys, let's go. Follow me. Crazy. Sweet. Sweet. Look out. Look out. Out of it. Get out of there. Sweet, she's listing and burning. Sweet, you're losing oil. Pull out. Sweet, you're hit bad. It's crazy. Strafing your woman. Sink it. I'm going in. You'll never get through that fire, Sweet. Don't do it.  Collect him. An itemized account. One Japanese battleship. Two Japanese cruises. Five heavy cruises. Four light cruises. One destroyer. One transport. Millions of dollars in Japanese equipment and materiel. And forty-eight hundred Japanese dead. For Lieutenant Oscar Jorgerson. For Lieutenant Frank Orsatti. For Lieutenant Patrick McMahon. For Lieutenant Harry Levine. For Lieutenant George. For Lieutenant Harry Levine. For Lieutenant George Johnson. To all men. Living and dead. Who once made up torpedo 8. Salute. Thank you, Randolph Scott. Ladies and gentlemen, in just a few moments, Mr. Scott will return to the microphone. Meanwhile, here is Gaine Whitman with a message from Dupont. Rainbow colored signal smokes. Red, orange, yellow, green and violet hues. Red, orange, yellow, green and violet hues. Red, orange, yellow, green and violet hues. The Navy is a group of Chinese canisters enabling American tanks and vehicles to operate in areas of intense air activity without danger from attack by their own planes. The Panzer type of warfare in which swift moving tanks are supported by squadrons of planes made some sort of precaution imperative.  Various schemes for identification were proposed. Painted emblems. Signal flags. Flares. But none proved successful. It was then suggested that colored smokes might solve the problem. At the time, no practical colored smokes were available. But the knowledge gained in peacetime by Dupont along with other dive stuffs manufacturers was made available to the chemical warfare service and contributed to the solution of the problem. The specifications were rigid. There had to be several colors to permit code variations. The colors had to be brilliant, dense and absolutely uniform. Finally and most difficult they had to withstand high temperatures since the heat from the burning charge destroyed the color of ordinary dives. After literally hundreds of tests suitable colors and techniques were worked out. Before leaving for Africa Lieutenant General George Patton sought to it that his force embarked for Africa with a plentiful supply of this new life-saving munition. All possible uses for colored smokes have not yet been worked out in detail and some cannot be disclosed at present. It may be said however that various smoke colors can be used to identify command posts to friendly aircraft. That one airplane may signal another by use of a distinctive color. While canisters attached to a small parachute may be dropped from observation planes to point out enemy targets to artillery by means of colored smoke. Further research has developed special canisters that can also be used on water while still another kind of canister produces a brilliant white light which like the colored smokes used in daylight can be seen at night from altitudes of 10,000 feet. From the thousands of different dyes developed for use on textiles and other materials has come this interesting wartime use for one of Dupont's peacetime better things for better living through chemistry. You have just heard of the use of Dupont colors in military operations. Another Dupont product which involves color and which does not contain vital materials needed in the war effort is speed easy. One of the things Dupont makes for better living today. Speed easy is a wall paint that covers dingy wall paper and other interior walls in one quick coat. Although speed easy thins with water it is a resin oil paint not a calcimine. Speed easy dries in an hour comes in eight cheerful pastel colors. You can make your home more livable during these war days by redecorating with speed easy made by Dupont. And here is the star of tonight's cavalcade Randolph Scott. Thank you ladies and gentlemen. This account of top Peter 8 brings us all face to face with the great sacrifices our men made against desperate odds in the early days of the war and gives us a clearer understanding of what we are up against today. For most of us the war is a distant terror until it's brought forcefully home by those very close to our own lives. Let's match their efforts at the front with ours at home. Back the attack with war bonds. Next week cavalcade brings you another popular star of the stage screen and radio Basil Rathbone. Our play The Hated Hero of 76 is the story of the brilliant figure of the days of the American Revolution Tom Paine who instilled men with the ideal of liberty remains our heritage today. Dupont invites you to be its guest again next week when we bring you The Hated Hero of 76 a story of courage and confidence in the destiny of the United States starring Basil Rathbone as Tom Paine. Tonight's musical score was composed and conducted by Robert Armister. Cavalcade is pleased to advise its listeners that Randolph Scott can soon be seen in the Howard Hawks Universal production Corvette K-225 based on facts. With the exception of Lieutenant Larson and Lieutenant Ernst all of their names were fictitious. This is James Bannon sending best wishes from Cavalcade sponsor the Dupont Company of Wilmington, Delaware. The Cavalcade of America came to you from Hollywood. This is the National Broadcasting Company.


at the police. Being Canadian, if it bothers me that a small country such as Ukraine is left alone to defend itself from a giant like Putin, are you saying countries should not support and then allow Putin to do what he likes? See here's a kicker. All of Russia, the biggest country in the world, is not just Putin, right? That's a talking point, right? So there's a hundred and 30 million people living in Russia. So you can't say Russia is Putin. It's like calling the United States Biden. Is the United States Biden? You've never called the United States Biden. You can't allow Biden to build 800 military bases around the world. That doesn't make sense, right? You can't allow Biden to control NATO, right? If you believe Biden can even wipe his ass, right? So saying Putin for Russia is disingenuous, right? It's not, it isn't. Like really, it's crazy. Ukraine is not small. Ukraine is pretty damn big, right? Ukraine is huge. Oh, the gods in the house and he posted the thing. Yeah, nice. Elder God, you weren't here, so we made a hoogie-loogie little thing of a jiggy. Oh, Elder God, you rock. Pin the thing. Nice. Nice. So Ukraine is pretty huge. It had a population of 40 million people before this whole thing happened, right? Before the 2014 coup, right?  Ukraine had the best army in all of Europe. Really, best trained, best equipped, best army in all of Europe, right? So Ukraine was a little kid and Putin, a giant, come and step in on him, right? Ukraine was threatening Russia, right?  Personally, for me as a Canadian, I don't want to participate in a fight. If I see fights on the street, depending on what's going on, if there's knives involved, I'm stepping back, right? Because if there's knives involved, bats involved, weapons involved, you step in, you're part of the conflict. You might get hit accidentally. But in my time, I've stopped a lot of fights in the public, multiple times. There's a couple of times I got hurt, right? There's a couple of times that I got hit, right? I can take a punch, right? I wouldn't do it now, right? Well, no, I would do it now. But there's certain fights that I stopped that I wouldn't do now because they were too dangerous and at the time it was a little tougher, right? So no, neutrality is the way to go. You should be a peacemaker, not participating in war. That's my opinion, right?