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When the ABC movie Path To 9/11 was shown, I recorded it for later viewing. Finally saw it this week and it was a extremely good presentation. My thoughts - The actors and actresses they got to play different people for the most part was right on. The only real exception was the actor for Dick Cheney. Dick Cheney in this movie looked elderly and befuddled. He never comes across that way in interviews. The movie portrayed the Clinton administration as aware of what was happening but playing the political expediant card - very cynical. The Bush administration is shown...

I started reading The Looming Tower two days ago and so far, I have read fifty-one pages. My impressions so far - So far, an excellent narrative. These people are insane! And what is worse is we - the United States, the West, et al - attempt to deal with these people from a rational, Western, Christian point of view. It isn't working and it will never work. They have to be cut down like mad dogs. The people who start or lead these destructive idealogies, all seem to be cut from the same cloth. Social misfits who find it...

The question on every American's lips on Sept. 11, 2001 was "why?" Lawrence Wright's new book, "The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11" answers it better than just about anything written so far. In what's destined to be one of the definitive early histories of the events leading up to the 9/11 attacks, Wright starts at what he says is the beginning of modern Islamic fundamentalism: the curious case of an Egyptian named Sayyid Qutb. Living in the U.S. in the late 1940s and '50s (including a stint in Greeley, of all places), the middle-aged Qutb formed an...

In the chapter "The Miracles",Lawrence Wright is discussing the roots of al Qaeda; specifically Ayaman al Zawahiri's ties to the assassination of Anwar Sadat, and detailing how Osama bin Laden's father was deeply involved in so many construction projects that he was revered throughout the Middle East, which led to Osama's personal wealth and ability to underwrite jihad. In writing of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and how Arabs were being attracted to jihad against the Communists Wright says... "Sheikh Abdullah (Azzam) called the small band of Arabs who gathered in Peshawar the "Brigade of The Strangers". The Arabs kept...

A masterful new work on al-Qaeda and 9/11 explains how a loser cult has metastasized On the fifth anniversary of 9/11, U.S. and Afghan troops in "eastern Afghanistan" -- a vague delineated land that doesn't necessarily stop at the Pakistani border -- captured a man called Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Who? Well, he was the head of Hezb-i-Islami -- or, latterly, one faction of it. And for a while he was prime minister of Afghanistan, and an opponent of the Taliban, and then an ally of the Taliban. And in recent years he's been Iran's Mister Big in the Hindu Kush. He's...