WHY THEY HATE US: Apparently, they hate pretty much everybody:

“I want to eliminate these pigs, these swine,” Ben Soltane said. He told Es Sayed that he despised everything about Italy: “I hate the people, I hate the documents …. I want to go anywhere else.”

In countless hours of wiretaps over two years, members of the Milan cell schemed, threatened and told war stories, their voices full of hate and despair. Many were extremists from North African countries who fled to Italy to escape prosecution. But they were alienated in their adopted land as well; they sounded like men who felt permanently and dangerously adrift. . . .

The young men saw themselves as warrior-monks assailed by the temptations of a prosperous, fun-loving society.

The way other men might watch pornography, they sat in a seedy apartment chortling at videos of moujahedeen slaughtering Russian soldiers in the snows of Chechnya.

“Look, look how they cut his throat,” a suspect named Khaled exclaimed, according to the transcript of an intercept March 22, 2001, in an apartment in suburban Gallarate.

“Why’s the other one alive?” a man named Farid said as gunfire from the television echoed in the background. . . .

The anger trapped them in a doomed existence, although they had alternatives, judging from another exchange in the Citroen.

“You don’t like this nice life? You want to die?” Es Sayed asked Ben Soltane.

“Listen, sheik, if I liked this life, I would go to my cousin who is in Germany and wants to marry me,” Ben Soltane answered. “In five years, I would have a German passport and live in peace.”

Sorry, these guys are just scum. And ungrateful scum at that.