9/11: A vital and highly readable explanation of what it all means

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	• The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 Lawrence Wright Knopf, 2006 - 480 pages average customer review:based on 285 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

THE book to read if you ever want to know why 9/11 happened

I like to read a lot. I owned the hard copy version of The Looming Tower and because I have well over 500 other books on my shelves, hadn't gotten around to reading it. Then I downloaded the iPod audiobook version which ended up grasping me totally. Finally I bought a Kindle and The Looming Tower now resides there as well.

The book is an incredible story of 9/11 and those who made, and let it happen as well as those who tried as hard as they could to prevent it. One of the latter was an FBI agent who is as complex a character as full of flaws as a human can be but if there is a hero in this book, it's him -warts and all. He was killed on 9/11 trying to save people in the WTC.

Why is this book so good? Because it really delves into the mind set of those who made it happen from bin Laden and his henchmen, to a certifiable "nut case", a Sayyid Qutb whose repressed sexuality and heavens knows what else drove him to father the current version of Islamic fundamentalism. It's easy to realize what sort of sociopaths are drawn to this belief system, but America has its own nut case fundamental religious zealots be they Jewish or Protestant. They range from harmless "speaking in tongues" types and rattle snake handlers to "W", who is as motivated by religious fundamentalism as is bin Laden.

"W" has at least permitted and encouraged wiretapping and torture to deal with the violent brand of Arab crazies who wish a lot worse than 9/11 on us. It may seem out of line to those shuddering in horror at our loss of liberty, but so far there are no more 9/11s in the USA.

I was born in 1938 and remember WW2 [barely] but know enough history to know that when you are at war, you should spare no effort in totally destroying the enemy as we did in WW2 with the Japanese and Germans.

After spending 20 years in the military, I only became more convinced that war should occur only if you mean business. Bringing "democracy" to Iraq is a sick joke. "W" should have watched Lawrence of Arabia and maybe he might have gotten a clue of the inevitable morass that awaited those stuck in the tar of Iraq. In WW2 we weren't worried about locking up presumably innocent Japanese, or censorship of all letters from our soldiers. All this under a president who many Americans considered the political equivalent of Stalin, or the equivalent of a socialist's greatest hope. Today the liberals are still worrying about the loss of freedoms, but freedoms can return AFTER the war. Whether they will is another story. The fault with our current miasma of political manure lies with us citizens. What we see in Congress, not to mention the executive and judicial branches merely reflect America's citizens own lack of care, education and hedonism.

But I digress. The Looming Tower is an incredible "morality tale" and Greek tragedy wrapped up in one. Hubris abounds, those idiots responsible for the debacle are named, although it is apparent that none suffered career reversals for their poor performance with the exception of the two people who saw it coming and couldn't stop it - FBI agent O'Neill and Richard Clarke. Clarke was smeared by Bush gunsels from Limbaugh to other White House staff thugs who fear the truth as a vampire fears sunlight. Condoleza Rice is shown as witless and also very much responsible for 9/11 because when presented with reality she couldn't think clearly or was driven by political expediency to the wrong decision - i.e. ignoring the threat.

The book is NOT a hatchet job on anybody. You get to see all the characters responsible on both sides and there is little to no judgmental criticism. As Det. Friday used to say on Dragnet, for those of you ancient enough to remember him, "Just the facts, M'am. Just the facts."

Much as I hate to swallow my atavistic tendencies to dismiss the likes of bin Laden and his cronies as crazy "rag heads", you will understand the character attributes that made his hellish plans come to fruition, and they certainly did not start with 9/11. I can only wish we had the likes of him to conduct our own war on the terrorists, although fortunately Cheney comes close.

Read this book. You can only grow wiser and sadder from the experience.

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9/11: A vital and highly readable explanation of what it all means

Trying to make sense of momentous events in our history, like those of September 11th 2001, can seem like standing too close to a very large painting. As the years pass we step away and some of the confusion of shapes and colours slowly starts to take focus. Lawrence Wright's Pulitzer Prize winning book is not the first but quite surely the finest attempt to try and provide some depth and understanding to that blur of incomprehensibility.
This is not a book that lingers on the detailed plans or plotting of the 9/11 hijackers or indeed the horrors of the actual day. Those events are covered elsewhere both in book and on celluloid. Instead The Looming Tower takes us on a 60 year journey and paints with a much wider brush the origins and motivations of Al- Qaeda. However this is more than a history book. Wright entwines together the contrasting and diverse lives of the ubiquitous Osama Bin Laden and the unheralded FBI agent John O'Neill as the narrative unfolds towards the inevitable conclusion. Instead it reads like a page turning thriller.
I learnt much and my mind was opened in unexpected ways. The deep roots of the Islamic fundamentalist tradition in Egypt, the antipathy of the movement to secular Islamists like Nasser and Sadat and the oil transformation of Saudi Arabia which helped create an alternative radical movement within the kingdom are all explored. The irrelevance of Iraq to the main game of the war on terror is made obvious; this is not a book you would find on George W's bedside table. But the best parts of the book are those which deal with Osama Bin Laden himself and his extended family. The familiarity of his name and the countless Bin Laden type jokes have numbed our ability to understand who he is and where he came from.
John O'Neill, the FBI agent, is the perfect foil for Bin Laden. This womanising charmer of Irish catholic traditions, so full of inconsistencies and flaws, at times almost single handedly represented the growing concerns about Al - Qaeda operations. How deeply ironic that he should die in the World Trade Center buildings just 1 month after taking up his new post as head of security. The breathtaking incompetency (as well as plain bad luck) of the US security organisations is revealed. Their failure to act together because of petty jealousies and human flaws is the subplot to the larger story.
The book is well illustrated with maps, photographs and a helpful glossary of characters (which I discovered all too late at the end). The latter is most helpful because the Islamic names can be confusing and difficult to remember. Possibly Wright's greatest achievement is to remain fair and unbiased. As an award winning journalist with the New Yorker he is interested in facts not in grinding an axe.
I strongly recommend this book to anybody who wants to begin to understand the world in which we find ourselves post 9/11.

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A must read to better understand our times.

An excellent book regarding Al-Qaeda and its leaders. Here you will find what the goals are and what the funding ideas behind this organization, what the cultural background and what the deep, profund origins of this terrorist nihilist organization are. Many interesting and dramatic pages regard the unacceptable and irresponsible ideological and burocratic barriers that kept CIA and FBI from identifying and isolating the terrorists while they were in the US territory before 9/11. The personal stories of strong characters with steel personalities such as John o'neill and Mike Schauer are also told. Above all the most striking and appalling feature that comes out is how, once again in history, some influencial individuals distorted the original religious message and warped to a point that it became a message of death, suicide, suffering in name of a delirious and insane goal. A must read to understand our present.

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A Monumental, but Flawed Work

First of all, this book makes it clear that 9/11 had many roots that stem from many factors, all of which combined to create the perfect storm that we know as 9/11. However, most of the activities that directly led up to the even occurred during the Clinton Administration. I think Wright tried to protect the reputations of such key people as Sandy Berger, George Tenet, Madeline Albright, Louis Freeh and others -- mainly by omitting or scarcely mentioning them -- leaders who must bear responsibility for success or failure. Instead, Wright goes after the lesser officials -- the guys on the ground, the expendable professionals. And it's clear that he's a big fan of Richard Clarke, who probably provided him with a great deal of the inside baseball in which Clarke is hardly a disinterested party. Therefore Clarke comes out good in this book, despite his attempts to shift blame from his shoulders on others. Wright also seems to favor the FBI, probably because one of the main characters of this book is uber-FBI agent and philanderer John O'Neil. I imagine the CIA didn't help its own cause due to its institutionalized and deep-seated secrecy that probably thwarted its ability to effectively tell its side of the story.

All that said, however, there is no taking away from the fact that this book is a monumental chronology of the rise of jihadist terrorism and and almost Keystone Kops bureaucracy battles between the FBI and the CIA that unwillingly abetted 9/11. If Wright is to be believed -- and I think he should be -- 9/11 could have easily been prevented had the CIA and FBI coordinated better. There were enough warnings but those warnings weren't often shared because each group had a separate agenda --the CIA wanting to recruit spies; the FBI seeking to put them in jail. Also, the book paints a picture of Osama Bin Laden that is revealing. We see that he is not invincible. Instead, he is largely flawed and vulnerable. To my mind, he's a dangerous but unstable mental case who just got lucky. He's still dangerous, but not invincible. Another message is that the U.S. is quite capable of protecting itself against the terrorists if it can correct the infighting among the intelligence/law enforcement instituions. All in all, this is a book for our times and screams to be on bookshelves all over America. The murders and psycopaths are coming back. Will we be ready for them? This book may help you answer that question.

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An Excellent Primer on Al-Qaeda's Birth and Growth

The Looming Tower does a superb examination of the 9/11 attacks and their attackers. The author did extensive research for this history of terrorism, describing its morph from anti-Communist/Left-wing agenda (as atheists, the Communists and the Left-Wing were a huge abomination to the militant Muslims) in Afghanistan to the present day. He details how the group led by Osama bin Laden, called Al-Qaeda, was formed in that country along with their ideology blaming America. As a modestly wealthy member of a prominent Saudi construction family, bin Laden lived a Spartan life and created a responsive and insular organization with a strong sense of publicity. The list of terrorist attacks include East Africa embassy attacks, the USS Cole and more. Like war, counterterrorism is not a scientific activity with 100% assurance of results. It's inexact at best and we see that the FBI, CIA and other agencies are pursuing an uneven and cloudy trail. One of the most dangerous aspects of bin Laden's efforts are the seeds that he tossed into the wind to create a considerable, unconnected (and therefore untraceable) waves of terrorist imitators.

Michael Mandaville, Author: "Citizen Soldier Handbook: 101 Ways for Every American to Fight Terrorism"

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reviews: 1, page 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

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