9/11 so nearly didn’t happen

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

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?

Finally, someone else who recognizes that Bin Laden is so afraid of his own weapon that he closes his eyes when firing it, somebody else who recognizes that the "ultra-sophisticated" 9-11 plot was a poorly executed abortion that got lucky, someone else who recognizes that Ayman Al Zawahiri has taken advantage of an effeminate rich idiot in Osama Bin Laden and pulls the strings, perfectly content to let the 17th son of a rich guy's wife number four (the one that rish guys swap in and out for variety) who never got enough attention from his father because he was the son of a literal whore stand up front and take all the credit.

Now, if we could just deal with some of the other misinformation presented in this thread....high points:

1. Op-Plan Bojinka, the original roots of 9/11 as authored by Khalid Shiek Mohammed, planned to hijack numerous A/C and blow them up over the Pacific. A test run was executed, a small bomb left on-board one flight, a Japanese engineer was killed when it later detonated. KSM hinself was supposed to ride on hijacked a/c, rig it with explosives, land at a central US airport, make a speech to the press, then blow himself and the a/c up.

Osama Bin Laden (read Ayman al Zawahiri), revised the plan to use 4 or 5 a/c and drive them into buildings. A videotape of him discussing his pre-attack engineering calcualtions appeared well after the event.

I am aware of no pre-attack warnings or indicators with two exceptions, one fiction aiuthor Tom Clancy, and two, an abortive plot to fill a small private a/c with explosives and fly it into CIA HQ at Langley, circa 1993 if memory serves. This on the basis of extensive reserach into the subject, hazy memories may tie bits and pieces together when not warranted, but numerous texts do not support the conclusion that any plan of the attack was pre-published that I have seen to date. Citations to the contrary are welcomed, but highly unlikely.

2. There was good reason behind the "wall" between FBI and CIA, two of them in fact. One, the Fourth Amendment specifically provides for citizen's privacy, not to be infringed by government agencies. CIA was limited to overseas gathering, FBI, subject to much more stringent search and seizure regulation, was limited to domestic investigation.

Two, the FBI's mandate was to criminally charge and convict offenders, therefore evidence accumulated through CIA, not subject to strict evidenciary handling regulations would poison potential court cases.

That this "wall" created a loophole for terrorists to attack us is not in any doubt what-so-ever, but there was good reason for the wall to begin with, we all just made a mistake. Itr does little good for the 9/11 victims, but that loophole has been addressed, to some apparant success, now.

3. Bush didn't ignore Afghanistan and Al Qaeda for the first 8 months of his Administration, he took the wisest course of action possible.

Recognizig that Bill Clinton had no, zero, did not exist, policy for Afghanistan, the nation-state that supported Al Qaeda (or vice versa), he delegated his NSC to formulate one. The principle's seconds did so, and arrived at a policy to support the Northern Alliance in efforts to topple the Taliban and open the road to extraditing or assassinating Osama Bin Laden.

This policy was not thrown together in a few days, it was carefully researched and formulated and ready for presentation and signature on September 10th, 2001. Due to scheduling issues ot was postponed, and later formed the backbone of the plan which eventually reduced the Taliban militarily and freed Afghanistan.

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