Posted on 08/28/2006 9:13:16 AM PDT by 1066AD
A new book reveals how much was known about al-Qaeda before the attack, says charles laurence
September 11 in New York still comes as a bitter end to all the hopes and pleasures of summer, and this year marks the fifth anniversary of the day al-Qaeda destroyed the twin towers of the World Trade Centre.
Those five years have done remarkably little to heal wounds, both national and personal. But the sense of dread seems more acute than ever because I have been reading The Looming Tower by journalist and academic Lawrence Wright, which is in its second week on the New York Times bestseller list.
Written with a thriller's pace and detail, it is the first popular attempt to take the story beyond the clear-sky morning of 9/11, and to most Americans - notoriously badly schooled in world history - it comes as an eye-opener.
The fifth anniversary also sees Oliver Stone’s movie World Trade Center playing in the multiplexes, starring Nicholas Cage as the fireman hero trapped in the rubble. It is the second Hollywood film on 9/11, and like Paul Greengrass’s United 93, released in early summer, has been hailed by the critics.
Neither movie, however, has taken off at the box office. It is The Looming Tower that brings both the villains and the heroes to life.
Once a teacher at the American University in Cairo, Wright starts in post-war decolonisation, the seed-bed of Jihad, with Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian intellectual who is deemed the founder of radical Islam and who was eventually hanged for sedition in his own country. Qutb wrote the justifications for the slaughter of "infidels": but Wright also discovers how the same man wrote of his disgust at Western sexuality while a lonely, frustrated student in Washington, articulating the same tormented sexuality that consumed the World Trade Centre bombers.
Such threads weave their way through a narrative built around the lives of Qutb, his protege Ayman al-Zawahiri who founded al-Jihad, Osama bin-Laden, his rival and
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eventual partner and, on the other side, those of FBI counter-terrorism chief John O'Neill, who died in the 9/11 attack, and Prince Turki al-Faisal, head of Saudi intelligence and old friend of bin-Laden.
Behind their lives Wright reveals a curious mix of ambition and frustration. Years of digging in the Middle East and Afghanistan gave him the material for a new picture of bin-Laden: his indolent childhood, his naive financing of a sort of Koranic-terrorist utopia in the Sudan, until that regime effectively stole his fortune, and his feebleness in battle, which prompted his Afghan hosts to send him to the rear as "useless".
9/11 so nearly didn't happen. Grand fantasies of mass murder in America had all but foundered for the lack of Jihadists who could pass as westernised, until Mohammed Atta and his Hamburg crew turned up uninvited at an al-Qaeda training camp.
And O'Neill and his FBI colleagues were onto them, only to be frustrated by the secrecy and competitiveness of the CIA. Rival agents ended up shouting at each other at a meeting on June 11, exactly three months before the devastation. Incredibly, as the ruins smoked on September 12, an FBI agent was finally shown photographs of the plotters the CIA had known were in America for a year and a half.
O'Neill was also deeply flawed. He abandoned his wife while maintaining simultaneous affairs with three mistresses, all of whom he promised to marry. They met for this first time at his funeral. If he had been less abrasive at work, where he was loathed, the various agencies just might have connected the dots in time.
The Looming Tower is the first mass-market book to go some way to answering the question that haunts us all: how could they do it?
FIRST POSTED AUGUST 28, 2006
Is this not the famous "wall" in action ? CIA & FBI forbidden to collaborate ?
Exactly. Thank you Democrats AND Republicans.
And 8 months of a new administration more interested in making nice and "reaching out" with breads and circuses rather than the basic responsibilities of government-- protecting its borders and its citizens.
And too many holdovers from the previous administration who were incompetent or even fifth-columnists because the new administration was unwilling to clean house too much after a close election.
And airport security who thought Atta and his companion were suspicious but was afraid to stop and profile them due to the threat of ACLU lawsuits and ACLU appointees on the Supreme Court who would back them up.
National Geographic has a program on tonight called Triple Cross: Bin Laden's Spy in America (9:00 p.m EDT).
[I don't get NG Channel. It does sound interesting. It is about the spy who infiltrated the US Army, FBI and CIA and provided information to bin laden.]
Exactly. Thank you Democrats AND Republicans.
The wall was erected by Jamie Gorelick, clinton department of justice staffer and (inexplicably) key member of the so-called 9-11 Commission. The Republicans had nothing to do with putting that wall in place, and until after 9-11 happened any attempt to tear down that idiotic wall would have been met with derision from "privacy advocates".
It is relatively easy to connect the historical dots knowing what actually happened on 9-11, but at the time no one could have put together what was going to happen. It is no different than the endless speculation about Pearl Harbor and whether Roosevelt, Churchill, military intelligence the code breakers etc. could have forewarned the Navy about December 7th.
BZZZZT. Wrong. That would be Mohammed.
Actually, the details as to what was planned were laid out on the Internet long before September 11, 2001. I read about it and talked to others about it. I was at work and was talking to a supplier on the telephone when my employer walked in to my tiny office and told me that something had struck one of the towers. I told him that suicide pilots were involved and that there would be more.
What I cannot understand is that I can find nothing in the internet archives on this now and while there was some discussion of it before the event and immediately afterward, nobody seems to remember anything about it now. I did not imagine all this, I read warnings before the event.
No, you're not imagining it.
Yep. Hindsight is always 20/20.
Is this true? Should it be told? Why is there such a demand to destroy heros and people of action? This was reading pretty good until that last sentence. It is as there is some need to bring everyone down to the level of the Clintons and people like them. And if they cannot find some nugget of dirt on someone or some great individual, then they just make it up - like with Jesus and the whole Da Vinci code thing. I just cannot understand it.
Protecting that lying ba$tard of a president at the time.
This scurrilous attack on the President and his administration is so beyond outrageous as to be sickening.
Thanks, but what I refer to is something different than a prediction of the towers being hit from the sky. This was a detailed explanation of the plan from someone who claimed to have inside information. It was reported in advance that there were plans to hijack multiple airliners and fly them into the towers, the Pentagon, the White House and Camp David. It was also reported that engineering calculations indicated that a freshly fueled airliner would create enough heat to cause a tower to collapse. All these plans were said to have been developed by and for Osama Bin Laden who was said to be the force behind the plan. I don't remember a specific date being laid out but I think there was a general time frame mentioned.
http://www.allanfavish.com/the_9_11_commission_report.htm
Read the books "1,000 Years for Revenge" and "Cover-up" at http://www.peterlance.com
He also complained that he couldn't get a good haircut in America.
AKA 09-11 Commissioner Jamie Gorlick's Wall.
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