Roots of a would-be bomber
JAMES BARRON AND MICHAELS. SCHMIDT
They took their places in the wood-panelled courtroom, 58 people from 32 countries. They listened as a federal magistrate banged the gavel and said it was “a wonderful day for the United States”— the day they would become Americans.
The magistrate talked about Thomas Jefferson and told the group that they could run for office — only the presidency and the vice-presidency were off limits, according to a tape recording of the proceedings in a Bridgeport, Connecticut, courtroom last year, on April 17. On her instructions, they raised their right hands and repeated the oath of citizenship.
One man in the group was the Pakistani-born Faisal Shahzad, whose father is a retired vice-air marshal, affording him a special status in Pakistan, where the military is the most powerful and influential institution.
On Saturday, authorities said, Shahzad drove a Nissan Pathfinder packed with explosives and detonators, leaving it in Times Square.
Shahzad was born in Pakistan in 1979, though there is some confusion over where.
Officials in Pakistan said it was in Nowshera, an area in northern Pakistan known for its Afghan refugee camps. But on a university application Shahzad had filled out and that was found in the maggotcovered garbage outside his former house in Connecticut on Tuesday, he listed Karachi.
Shahzad apparently went back and forth to Pakistan often, returning most recently
in February after what he said was five months visiting his family, prosecutors said. A Pakistani intelligence official said Shahzad had travelled with three passports, two from Pakistan and one from the US; he last secured a Pakistani passport in 2000, describing his nationality as “Kashmiri”.
A Pakistani official said Shahzad might have had affiliations with Ilyas Kashmiri, a militant linked to al Qaida who was formerly associated with Lashkar-e-Toiba, an antiIndia militant group once nurtured by the Pakistani state.
But friends said the family was well respected.
“Neither Faisal nor his family has ever had any links with any jihadist or religious organisation,” one friend said.
Another, a lawyer, said that “the family is in a state of shock,” adding that “they be
lieve that their son has been implicated in a fake case".
Shahzad's generation grew up in a Pakistan where alcohol had been banned and Islam had been forced into schools and communities as a doctrine and a national glue.
"It's not that they don't speak English or aren't skilled," a Pakistani official explained. "But in their hearts and in their minds they reject the West. They can't see a world where they live together; there's only one way, one right way ."
At 29, Faisal had spent a decade in the US, collecting a bachelor's degree and a master's degree and landing a job with a Connecticut financial marketing company .
He had obtained citizenship through marriage to a woman who was born in Colorado -the authorities say she and their two young children are still in Pakistan, where they believe he was trained in making bombs last year in Waziristan.
Shahzad fits the profile of many Pakistanis in the US: educated and with a higher income than the population as a whole, and often in professional or management jobs. His brother is a mechanical engineer in Canada.
Shahzad’s father, Bahar-ulHaq, hurriedly vacated the family home in Peshawar late on Tuesday to avoid attention, according to Pakistan’s The News newspaper. Witnesses said he packed some belongings in a vehicle and left with family members, it said.
Shahzad’s family is from the northwestern farming village of Mohib Banda, home to 5,000 people, in the Pabbi district. A tiny, dusty road from a
nearby highway named after a soldier who was killed in fighting against the Taliban in 2007 snakes through fields of wheat, maize and rice crops to the village.Residents expressed disbelief on learning of Shahzad’s involvement in the bombing attempt. “This is our son,” retired school teacher Nazirullah Khan told Reuters by telephone. “I recognised him. Last time when I met him, he didn’t have a beard. I attended his wedding.” In nearly a dozen years in America, Shahzad had gone to school, held steady jobs, bought and sold real estate, and kept his immigration status in good order, giving no sign to those he interacted with that he would try to wreak havoc in one of the world’s most crowded places, Times Square.
His neighbours in Connecticut said the things neighbours always say about someone who suddenly turns up in the headlines — he was quiet, he was polite, he went jogging late at night.
Like so many others, he lost a house to foreclosure — a real estate broker who helped him buy the house, in Shelton, Connecticut, in 2004 remembered that Shahzad did not like President George W. Bush or the Iraq war.
“I didn’t take it for much,” said the broker, Igor Djuric, “because around that time not many people did.”
(abridged)
how to tell home address
today' s evening was booked for a promise, to attend the birthday of my youngest sister whose house is not very far away, although the traffic jam in the city road connecting made me wonder if i would ever reach her house.
there i was also expecting to meet my younger, actually youngest of brothers who gels well with the sister in limelight.
it was a yellow light of a candle with which we were greeted. but i chuckled it was better than darkness. we had no choice, the state electricity board has failed miserably. it has failed to provide darkness to every household in the city. some coal still finds way to power plants.. to keep some lanterns glowing.
And so the proceedings went the usual way, the way which would make children happier. I played chinese whispers , the robot i had brought was walking, the cake was cut, gobbled, metabolized, with help of one glass of rasna and while i might sound nonchalant, it was lovely to be in a birthday party after a long time! i asked my brother who's in class 4 that how can one reach his home. he told that for this i would have to stop after haldiram's outlet, enter phase 1, and there would be a long road ahead, as i would walk along, i would encounter a cut on left, a narrow lane, but this wasn't where i was supposed to go, so i should continue walking , take a right( he actually turned positions to make his description in sync and aligned with his body, soul and spirit) and reach a field. i interrupted to help him ( actually help myself, given his discourse) and asked him his house number. he replied it was 20D/8. but added, that there were two 20D's once i would reach the field, there would be a flag-pole no farther than our refrigerator is to the sofa on which we were sitting. from that point i was supposed to turn left, and there would be a building path to my left, and on the first floor, counted from the ground floor there would be flat number 8 . and then he yells,' so simple n easy'
but he continued that if i wanted a shortcut ( as if i was interested in knowing only the longest route) , i would have to stop before phase I, enter haldiram's , and get out of its back door and not make a silly mistake of entering the main door of food outlet. at the back door, we would be facing a pillar reading' Anupama apartments'. i should walk in, and take a left, then right and then again take a second left to reach the field.
then came a philosophical statement ... see there are two ways to reach the same place !
then he told there was another way to reach his home, the one thru gorabazaar, but that road had 50 lanes left and right, and so was complex..
( as if this wasnt enough :))
then i realized that he would grow up to be a true represntative and champion of all his senior brothers..
NOTEBOOK: by IAN JACK
Thanks to my children I’vebeen watching the latest British sensation on YouTube,which is a three minuteclip called “GapYah”. An upper middle-class student,Orlando, is talking on his mobile to his friend, Tarquin, in west London.Orlando is apparently in Burma, travellingthe world in his “gap yah” —gap year — which is what studentswith rich enough families tend to dobetween school and university. Youmight call it “poverty tourism”. Hetells his friend that in “Tanzanah”,meaning Tanzania, he met a woman who had “like, flies around her eyes”and who looked at him “with this vacantstare but with this sense of enduringhope, yah?” For a second herecognized her as a fellow humanbeing. And then, he tells Tarquin, he vomited all over her. That’s what Orlandodoes: he skips through poorcountries, has adolescent insightsinto their condition, drinks too much,throws up, and then chortles cheerfully at the mess. A hundred years ago asimilar young man might have had “Isay you fellows, what a lark!” as his verbal tick. Orlando’s equivalent is alazy way with vowels and consonants,so that ‘yah’ can mean ‘year’ or ‘yes’.Orlando is, of course, a parody. Ayoung actor and writer, Matt Lacey,created him to satirize, in Lacey’s words, “the great number of peoplewho seem to be leaving these shores tovomit all over the developing world”.In Britain, they’re known as ‘Rahs’and what they have in common is a private education and a place on offer at one of the older universities:Durham, St Andrews and Bristol are among the favourites, though Oxbridgecan never be ruled out. Their sense of entitlement often outweighstheir intelligence.None of this is new. You can catch glimpses of Orlando’s riotous ancestors in the memoirs of William Hickeywhich record with a fascinating detailand candour Hickey’s adventures in Calcutta in the late 18th century.Like many of his compatriots in Bengalat that time, Hickey drank astonishing quantities of claret and brandy (a detail I remember is his spewing from a carriage window, perhaps in Chowringhee) and persisted with a heavy English diet of roast beef and dumplings however hot and unhealthy the season. Diet alone should have secured him an early resting place in the Park Street cemetery,but he survived to live a long and happy retirement in London.The moralism of the Victorian empire put an end to this kind of public excess — the whoring and gamblingas well as the eating and drinking— though the English upper-class buffoon survived as a comic element in literature. In this way, you can see Orlando as a character updated from the novels of P.G.Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh, as the latest twist in a long tradition.The surprising thing is that despite all that has happened to British behaviour in the years since— the changes, for example, produced by pop culture — the stereotype still endures. How many people are like Orlando? Quite a few, because my children recognized him as a type immediately and it’s the parody’s accuracy that has made it such a hit.And now a paradox:Orlando and his kind are the butt of popular comedy,and yet within a few weeks it seems likely that Britain will elect a new government that has at its heart a group of men who in their youth were just like Orlando. If all goes well for the Tories, the new primeminister will be David Cameron and his chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne.They and quite a few of their expensively educated colleagues share a common background:prosperous families, the very best schools and Oxford University. At Oxford,Cameron, Osborne and BorisJohnson (now the Tory mayor of London)were all members of the celebrated Bullingdon Club, a socially exclusive dining society the purpose of which, so far as any outsider can tell,is to trash restaurants in drunken sprees and then pay handsomely for the damage. Members dress up smartly in dinner jackets and waistcoats.History records quite a bit of throwing-up. The dry-cleaning bills must have been expensive.Today, nobody in the Tory party is keen to remember the BullingdonClub. Copies of official club photographsfrom the 1980s showing Cameron, Osborne and Johnson can still be found on the web, though theTory party is reported to have tried hard to have them withdrawn. Their membership is excused in terms of “ayouthful indiscretion”. Being an Orlando doesn’t win votes.How then not to be like Orlando?The answer is to sound more ordinary— no more yah-ing, chuckling and braying, no mention of previous pastimes such as hunting and shooting, a new emphasis on pop music and other demotic pleasures. Cameron now likes to be known as “Dave”, just as his political model, Blair, was known by all as “Tony”. Osborne is rumoured to have taken lessons todown-class his voice. The most notable example, however,comes with Cameron’s wife Samantha — “Sam-Cam” in the tabloids — who has an impeccable social lineage. Her father is a baronet and her mother by as econd marriage is Viscountess Astor.The family has large estates in atleast two English counties, and Samantha was educated at one of the best girls’ boardingschools. And how does Samantha sound now? He rvowels are those of a woman who grew up in a London suburb and attended her local stateschool. Orlando, we laugh at; Samantha,we like. If her husband wins, as he looks very likely to, he’ll know that he owes his victory at least partly to social disguise.
kumaon-2
we clicked our camera a few times in the temple area, and came back by SUV
to the main market. next we spent the noon and evening by walking 5 km to the golf course ( returned by a jeep), we were tired and then we wanted a lodge, a good one at reasonable price.so we heard we could get hotels at mall road, ranikhet. but whats this, when we reached mall road, we realised it was the worst mall road i have visited.one restaurant, two good lodges, and 3-4 other hotels. no shops, no people or hustle or bustle. infact it was so quiet that there could be a hissle or even bad, a rustle, given that there was no lighting in road.
so this small inn was where we took paranthas, and tea and rushed back to our den to end the day.
Ranikhet is a highly controlled area by army.army jeeps, vans carrying equipments, ammos, sign boards showing 'restricted entry' are a common sight. another thing common to this hill station is,
that army and other vehicle owners and other people know each other, and these people help each other and greet them on their way.
next morning afer our visit to apple garden, we ran into one such vehicle which dropped us to the bus stand.
a visit to kumaon- I
( by the way i am talking of India)
a month ago i paid a visit to ranikhet and almora amidst a hectic schedule , which i suddenly renounced for greater and higher reasons. i managed to complete an assignment of treasury management and gave it for submission and left all other work to catch a train at midnight from ghaziabad station. thus its a personal account of how i felt and may not interest you at all.a more specific blog regarding the trip can be http://exploreindiaa.blogspot.com/2010/02/kumaon-explored.html. but i thought this was my blog so..
the month of February
February is a small month, it is also perceived shorter than the actual 28/29 days it has. and no great birthday or anything good happens in this month. not surprisingly , people show least liking to it and they are right.
except the fact that some people try to be crazy as the 14 th day of this month nears.. they call it rose day or valentine's day. its another matter that no love sick soul tries to browse and find out who valentine was.if they were so curious about that they wouldn't be celebrating valentine's day at all ( there are many possibilities..read the Wikipedia please ). i got a message today , i.e on 9th feb from a friend wishing me happy chocolate day !?..another futile effort to cheer up the damned month.the weather in India is undecided and deceptive. the winter returns after everybody is misled that summer has arrived..the author is one of the countless victims who got a sore throat, headache and fever and paid the price for being not clever and cautious. to add to the disgust is the downpour yesterday, the sort that could beat the best rainy day of the rainy season here in delhi ( the annual rainfall here is anyway a joke, 56cm just).No company is interested in preparing its final accounts , no individual wants to prepare his tax returns.march 31 is too far for this kind of job.the sales people are gasping for breath to complete their year end targets and curse the short duration of this month. the stock markets also do not find direction as does the wind in the doldrums.
Maha shivratri is the saving grace during this time, that too for hindus..
i am yet to find someone telling good things about this time of the year..
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