Ghost Wars by Steve Coll

Aku habis membaca buku ini, ketika aku kepala aku sudah mampat dengan kes-kes jenayah yang membebankan otak. Bukan mudah memahami kes-kes yang menyesakkan pemikiran dek kesalahan si pelaku dan juga bagaimana sang hakim mencapai keputusan atau lebih kami kenali sebagai ‘ratio decidendi’ atau reasons for the decision dalam bahasa inggerisnya.
Monolog dalaman:
“ceh, konon-konon je. Padahal itu semua mesti dibaca untuk peperiksaan undang-undang jenayahku yang macam @#$%”

Ah, lupakan dulu perihal itu. Kemudian baru ku ceritakan yah :)

Akibat tekanan menjawab peperiksaan tersebut, aku yang masih belum ada semangat untuk menelaah subjek lain lantas menarik buku ini dari almari buku lalu tekun menguliti karya Steve Coll ini yang memang sedang dalam pembacaanku. Kelihatan ia juga meminta aku supaya cepat-cepat mengkhatamkannya.

Buku ini secara umumnya mengisahkan tentang peristiwa-peristiwa berkaitan yang berlaku sebelum kejadian yang pernah dan masih menggegarkan dunia iaitu peristiwa 9/11. Penulis berjaya memperincikan kisah mengenai bin Laden sejak dari awal hinggalah kepada kebangkitan beliau, dari perspektif beliau yang bagi saya amat menarik perhatian kerana ianya ditulis oleh seseorang yang boleh dikatakan ‘orang luar’.

Jika dilihat dari luaran sahaja, umum sudah mengetahui bahawa bahan tulisan Steve Coll ini amat berat untuk diproses minda. Namun begitu, bahan bacaan sebeginilah yang perlu diuliti selalu untuk mempertingkatkan lagi tahap pengetahuan kita mengenai sesuatu isu penting. Menyedari akan hakikat inilah yang telah membuatku mempelbagaikan bahan bacaanku dan bukan lagi terhad hanya kepada novel2 yang menjadi kegemaranku.

Aku kini tidak lagi hanya membaca novel2 fiksyen sahaja. Ku selang-selikan pembacaan ku dari satu buku ke satu jenis buku yang lain. Dari novel2 ke bahan bacaan ilmiah mahupun bacaan yang penuh dengan ilmu pengetahuan.

Daripada pemerhatian saya, kesedaran seperti ini amat kurang dimiliki oleh remaja kini. Mereka lebih menggermari karya santai yang sekadar hanya untuk suka-suka sahaja. Memang pada pandangan orang lain, apa salahnya kan…lebih baik begini daripada tiada budaya membaca langsung. Apa yang saya perkatakan ini hanyalah pendapat peribadi saya sendiri. Bukan apa, saya tidak gemar akan karya-karya cinta yang memualkan. Berdasarkan perbualan yang saya dengar daripada rakan-rakan saya yang membaca novel sebegitu, apa yang dapat saya simpulkan ialah, jalan cerita dalam novel2 tersebut adalah lebih kurang sama,

-watak utama lelaki adalah daripada golongan berada, manakala watak utama perempuan daripada golongan sederhana ataupun miskin dan begitulah sebaliknya

-selalunya akan ada kisah mengenai kahwin paksa, perkahwinan yang diatur oleh ibu bapa. Dipermulaan kisah tidak suka, lama-lama…

-dalam masa ke arah penerimaan pasangan yang terpaksa itu, mesti ada adegan2 suspen (saspen ke? Hoho)

Selepas itu, macam2lah…dipusing2 cerita, balik2 begitu sahaja. bacalah sendiri baru tahu…saya belum mempunyai keinginan untuk membaca novel sedemikian…nanti2lah…seingat saya, novel cinta yang saya pernah baca ialah Ayat-Ayat Cinta yang popular itu…aku tidak tahu sama ada karya tersebut adakah termasuk dalam golongan yang telah kukritik. Yang aku tahu, aku sudah jatuh cinta padanya ^_^

Kepada yang belum mengenaliku, aku adalah penggemar karya-karya sastera. Dan penulis novel sastera yang amat aku kagumi adalah Faisal Tehrani. Aku suka hasil tangannya. Setiap karya beliau amat mengujakan dan sangat memberi maklumat dan informasi baru kepada ku. Mengambil satu contoh novelnya iaitu Tunggu Teduh Dulu. Saya definisikan buku itu sebagai buku yang sangat betik! :) Kenapa? Bacalah…

Berbalik kepada karya Steve Coll tadi. Apa yang sangat menarik bagi saya untuk dikongsi adalah ini…

Salem (Osama’s half brother) and other bin Ladens paid their way into elite British boarding schools and American Universities. On their wings of their wealth many of them moved comfortably and even adventurously between the kingdom and the West. Salem married and English aristocrat, played the guitar, piloted airplanes, and vacationed in Orlando. A photograph of the bin Laden children snapped on a cobbled Swedish street during the early 1970s shows a shaggy, mod clan in bell-bottoms. Perhaps because his mother was not one of Mohammed’s (Osama’s father) favored wives, or because of choices she made about schooling, or because of her boy’s own preferences, Osama never slipped into the jetstream that carried his half-brothers and half-sisters to Geneva and London and Aspen. Instead he enrolled in Jedda’s King Abdul Aziz University, a prestigious school by Saudi standards but one isolated from world affairs and populated by Islamist professors from Egypt and Jordan - some of them members of the Muslim Brotherhood or connected to its underground proselytizing networks.

Osama bin Laden was an impressionable college sophomore on a $1 million annual allowance during the first shocking upheavals of 1979. His teacher in Jedda included Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian who would become a spiritual finder of Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist rival to the secular-leftist Palestine Liberation Organization. Another of bin Laden’s teachers was Mohammed Qutb, the brother of Sayyed Qutb, an Egyptian Islamic radical executed in 1966 for advocating his secular government’s violent overthrow. In these classrooms bin Laden studied the imperative and nuances of contemporary Islamic jihad.
“ I loved Osama and considered him a good citizen of Saudi Arabia,” Badeeb said.

The Badeeb family and the bin Ladens hailed from the same regions of Saudi Arabia and Yemen, Badeeb said. When Ahmed Badeeb first met Osamaat school in Jedda, before Badeeb become Turki’s chief of staff, bin Laden had “joined the religious committee at the school, as opposed to any of the other many other committees,” Badeeb recalled. “He was not en extremist at all, and I liked him because he was a decent and polite person. In school and academically he was in the middle.”
As the Afghan jihad roused Saudis to action, bin Laden met regularly in the kingdom with senior princes, including Prince Turki and Prince Naif, the Saudi minister of the interior, “who liked and appreciated him,” as Badeeb recalled it. And as he shuttled back and forth to Afghanistan, bin Laden developed “strong relations with the Saudi intelligence and with our embassy in Pakistan.” The Saudi embassy in Islamabad had “a very powerful and active role” in the Afghan jihad. The ambassador often hosted dinner and would invite bin Laden to attend. He “had a very good rapport with the ambassador and with all the Saudi ambassadors that served there.”

Prince Turki has acknowledged meeting bin Laden “several times” at these embassy receptions in Islamabad. “ he seemed to be a relatively pleasant man,” Turki recalled, “very shy, soft spoken, and as a matter of fact, he didn’t speak much at all.”

The Afghans regarded bin Laden as “a nice and generous person who has money and goof contacts with Saudi government officials.”

The chief of staff to the director of Saudi intelligence put it simply: “We were happy with him. He was our man. He was doing all what we ask him.”

For now.

Since the Gulf War in 1991, bin Laden now declared, the United States “has been occupying the most sacred lands of Islam: the Arabian Peninsula. It has been stealing its resources, dictating to its leaders, humiliating its people, and frightening its neighbors. It is using its rule in the Peninsula as a weapon to fight the neighboring peoples of Islam”. The Americans had declared war “on Allah, His Prophet, and Muslims”. In reply, the signatories of the manifesto “hereby give all Muslims the following judgment: The judgment to kill and fight Americans and their allies, whether civilians or military, is an obligation for every Muslim who is able to do so in any country.”

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