The War Room

1. Sun at 11 Sagittarius is in the warring Aries decanate and conjoins the USA's Ascendant. It is just past the U.S. Constitution's Moon at 9 Sagittarius.

2. Chiron at 10 Aries retrograde bespeaks a warring Centaur's wound: Crusading Knights rode and fought on horseback. Mars at 23 Leo, in the Aries decanate, disposits both Chiron and Pluto, and is in mutual reception by sign with the Sun. Hence, Western Europe's Christian Kings under pressure of a "holy" authoritarian papal order (Jupiter in Capricorn) saddled up to avenge the "true God." Jupiter in the 1095 chart is in the Virgo Decanate and resonates with the chart's Saturn at, you guessed it, 11 degrees of Virgo in the Capricorn Decanate. And yes, 11 x 2 = 22.

3. The Scorpio Moon (14 degrees at noon, Pisces Decanate), disposited by retrograde Pluto in Aries, is the harbinger of The Black Plague, first introduced to Europe during the Crusades. Retrograde Pluto may indicate that the Plague, which wiped out 1/4 or more of Europe's population, surfaced over three times. In 1544, for example, the outbreak of Plague in Marseille and again in 1546 in Aisen-Provence, roused a young physician by the name of Nostradamus.

4. Uranus at 21 Aries (Sagittarius decanate) is in trine to 9/11/01's retrograde Aquarian Uranus (Libra decanate). This trine has a Jupiter-Venus flavor by decanate rulership. Transiting Mars will conjoin 1095's Jupiter on October 16, 2001. October 13, 2001, with Moon in square to transiting Pluto and Saturn may be an explosive day as this lunar T-square repeats its aspects noted at the 9/2/01 Full Moon -- the initiating Lunar sequence for Disaster 9/11/01. The FBI has the USA and her allies on high alert commencing Friday, October 11. This "window" is fraught with treachery. Keep in mind that 1095's Jupiter at 22 Capricorn is the degree of December 14, 2001's Solar Eclipse (22 Sagittarius).

5. Neptune retrograde at 29 Cancer sextiles Venus at 29 Taurus (Alcyone, the fixed star of great grief) in the USA's Solar Return chart. It also quincunxes 11/27/1095's North Node in Pisces. That, and the location of Ceres at 16 Pisces, reflects that the Plague and the Crusades were a scourge upon the land. Famine and the Dark Ages followed. Oddly enough, it was in large part due to the devotion of Islamic scholars that a vast amount of the world's knowledge was preserved. In later years, while Aquinas, et al., were debating how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, Arabs had already invented algebra and geometry.

Footnotes

" Jupiter is aligned with values, beliefs, religion, philosophy, law, courts and churches. Jupiter is charity and welfare recipient payouts. It is social security payments, meals-on-wheels, the Jerry Lewis “Telethon,” and other manifestations of philanthropy. It is higher education and is associated with colleges and universities. The first universities were comprised of jesuits and priests who preserved the accumulated knowledge of the ages as a result of black plague outbreaks during the middle ages. [As did the Islamic Scholars. See article above] From this legacy, Jupiter is also associated with the Pope and the Vatican, with university professors, preachers, ministers, rabbis and Islamic Imans. Law, which was once closely bonded to the church (until the U.S. Constitution separated church and state), has at its base the components that embody society’s mores. (Saturn is judgment and the carrying out of the penal code in criminal law). Book publishing, most particularly books that serve a “higher purpose,” are also associated with Jupiter."

"Understanding Bin Laden's Hot Buttons"

Aside from his specific gripes against current U.S. policy, there's a historical component to Osama bin Laden's complaints against the Western world. TIME's Scott MacLeod discusses:

TIME.com: It's plain to see why Bin Laden would try and champion the plight of the Palestinians and Iraqis, but what is his propaganda purpose in calling the U.S. "Crusaders"?

Scott MacLeod: For Muslims, the mediaeval crusades marked a very bloody and disastrous period in their history, when Western European armies motivated by religion rampaged through Muslim lands, conquering and subjugating them and occupying their holy sites in Jerusalem. The defeat of the Crusaders by Saladdin and his reconquering of Jerusalem has always been upheld as an important milestone for Muslims in their history.

Bin Laden, in his speeches, tries to present the activities of the West in today's Arab world as a return of the Crusades, which has been drummed into Muslims and Arabs in their history books as a dark era, and one that was heroically resisted by Muslim warriors. He tries to present himself as personifying the spirit of Saladdin and others who are embraced as heroes in the Arab world for fighting the infidel.

In his most recent speech, Bin Laden twice mentioned "80 years" of humiliation at the hands of the West. To what was he referring?

There's a strong feeling in the Arab world that the West bitterly betrayed the Arabs after World War I, when it broke up the Ottoman Empire. And it was this betrayal that marked the first chapter of modern Western involvement in the Arab world.

When World War I broke out, the Middle East had been ruled for hundreds of years by the Ottoman Turks, who were allied with Germany. Around 1914, the British encouraged the Emir of Mecca, Sheikh Hussein (great grandfather of Jordan's late King Hussein), to lead a revolt against the Turks in Saudi Arabia, promising independence if he could drive them out. As Arabs see this history, they rose against the Turks and drove them out, but instead of being granted independence, the Arab world was betrayed.

First, the British had secretly accepted a proposal by the Zionist movement to create a homeland for the Jewish people in post-Ottoman Palestine, which would give a good part of the territory to a people who at that time were a minority of the population.

The second thing that happened was that in the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement, the British and French agreed to divide up the Middle East between them and were mandated by the League of Nations to rule these areas, postponing independence. Needless to say, Arab nationalists have always viewed these events 80 years ago as a betrayal of promises to the Arabs, and as laying the foundations for a Jewish state by force of Western arms. And Bin Laden is trying to fashion his image as the savior who will right these perceived wrongs.