It’s become a truism that the world was able to take the full measure of Germany’s wartime crimes because the Nazis kept such meticulous records of whom they killed, and where.
It was the nature of that murderous bureaucratic state to punctiliously dot its umlauts and cross its T’s. Thus by the banality of its paperwork was the full monstrousness of its acts revealed.
Denying what the Nazis themselves documented marks one as either an intellectual outlier or a total nut bar (see: Iran, president of).
We can say the same of al Qaeda, which has been good enough to supplement its public atrocities with videotaped and written proof of both the group’s nature and its answerability.
And as with Holocaust deniers, those who reject al Qaeda’s authorship of its crimes — who claim 9/11 was an American or Zionist conspiracy, even as Osama bin Laden gleefully took responsibility — are unfortunates not to be taken seriously.
The latest horror from al Qaeda’s filing cabinet are five videotapes that American troops found when they raided a jihadi safe house northeast of Baghdad in December. The tapes, which appear to have been recorded last summer, show children being trained as kidnappers, assassins and suicide bombers.
In one sequence, a group of boys practices kidnapping techniques by forcing a man off his bicycle at gunpoint. In another, masked children are seen conducting an armed raid on a village house, putting guns to the heads of its sleeping occupants.
I wish this were all more surprising. But surely we know by now that there is no shame in the men of al Qaeda. They hide behind women’s veils to elude detection at checkpoints.
They dupe those weaker than themselves to strap on suicide belts: Last month, a 13-year-old boy blew up a meeting of tribal elders; last week it was two mentally handicapped young women who perished while unwittingly murdering scores around them at two Baghdad pet markets.
And now we see al Qaeda training prepubescent children as militants. This is not a mark of the terrorist group’s ingenuity, or the desperate authenticity of its cause, but of its ruthless depravity.
Men who would use girls with Down syndrome as human bombs would do anything.
Like the Nazi party, and indeed like the genocidal Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, which also kept close records, al Qaeda in Iraq reveals through its paperwork a nauseating juxtaposition of the homicidal and the mundane.
Piles of documents seized by American troops last fall in northern Iraq, for instance, show that the terrorist group has to manage the same sort of human resources issues as any American fast-food franchise: Salaries, employment contracts, vacation time and, in a family-friendly gesture, even bonuses when a jihadist has a new baby.
Even in the smoking wreckage of World War II, many people could not wrap their minds around the scale of Nazi evil. It took almost five years of Nuremburg trials to reveal the ghastliness in all its bland, bureaucratic detail.
With al Qaeda, there’s no need to wait for a trial. You can see all its hideous contours today, in the grainy videotaped images of armed children surging into a house and putting pistols to the heads of the family members asleep on the floor.
Examiner columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon is a former foreign correspondent and a regular contributor to the books pages of the Wall Street Journal. Her Examiner column appears on Thursdays.
