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The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
A sweeping narrative history of the events leading to 9/11, a groundbreaking look at the people and ideas, the terrorist plans and the Western intelligence failures that culminated in the assault on America. Lawrence Wright's remarkable book is based on five years of research and hundreds of interviews that he conducted in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sudan, England, France, Germany, Spain, and the United States.
The Looming Tower achieves an unprecedented level of intimacy and insight by telling the story through the interweaving lives of four men: the two leaders of al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri; the FBI's counterterrorism chief, John O'Neill; and the former head of Saudi intelligence, Prince Turki al-Faisal.
As these lives unfold, we see revealed: the crosscurrents of modern Islam that helped to radicalize Zawahiri and bin Laden . . . the birth of al-Qaeda and its unsteady development into an organization capable of the American embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania and the attack on the USS Cole . . . O'Neill's heroic efforts to track al-Qaeda before 9/11, and his tragic death in the World Trade towers . . . Prince Turki's transformation from bin Laden's ally to his enemy . . . the failures of the FBI, CIA, and NSA to share intelligence that might have prevented the 9/11 attacks.
The Looming Tower broadens and deepens our knowledge of these signal events by taking us behind the scenes. Here is Sayyid Qutb, founder of the modern Islamist movement, lonely and despairing as he meets Western culture up close in 1940s America; the privileged childhoods of bin Laden and Zawahiri; family life in the al-Qaeda compounds of Sudan and Afghanistan; O'Neill's high-wire act in balancing his all-consuming career with his equally entangling personal life--he was living with three women, each of them unaware of the others' existence--and the nitty-gritty of turf battles among U.S. intelligence agencies.
Brilliantly conceived and written, The Looming Tower draws all elements of the story into a galvanizing narrative that adds immeasurably to our understanding of how we arrived at September 11, 2001. The richness of its new information, and the depth of its perceptions, can help us deal more wisely and effectively with the continuing terrorist threat.
The Looming Tower achieves an unprecedented level of intimacy and insight by telling the story through the interweaving lives of four men: the two leaders of al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri; the FBI's counterterrorism chief, John O'Neill; and the former head of Saudi intelligence, Prince Turki al-Faisal.
As these lives unfold, we see revealed: the crosscurrents of modern Islam that helped to radicalize Zawahiri and bin Laden . . . the birth of al-Qaeda and its unsteady development into an organization capable of the American embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania and the attack on the USS Cole . . . O'Neill's heroic efforts to track al-Qaeda before 9/11, and his tragic death in the World Trade towers . . . Prince Turki's transformation from bin Laden's ally to his enemy . . . the failures of the FBI, CIA, and NSA to share intelligence that might have prevented the 9/11 attacks.
The Looming Tower broadens and deepens our knowledge of these signal events by taking us behind the scenes. Here is Sayyid Qutb, founder of the modern Islamist movement, lonely and despairing as he meets Western culture up close in 1940s America; the privileged childhoods of bin Laden and Zawahiri; family life in the al-Qaeda compounds of Sudan and Afghanistan; O'Neill's high-wire act in balancing his all-consuming career with his equally entangling personal life--he was living with three women, each of them unaware of the others' existence--and the nitty-gritty of turf battles among U.S. intelligence agencies.
Brilliantly conceived and written, The Looming Tower draws all elements of the story into a galvanizing narrative that adds immeasurably to our understanding of how we arrived at September 11, 2001. The richness of its new information, and the depth of its perceptions, can help us deal more wisely and effectively with the continuing terrorist threat.
469 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2006
About the author
Lawrence Wright
58 books2,200 followersThere is more than one author with this name
Lawrence Wright is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American author, screenwriter, staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, and fellow at the Center for Law and Security at the New York University School of Law. He is a graduate of Tulane University, and for two years taught at the American University in Cairo in Egypt.
Wright graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School (Dallas, Texas) in 1965 and, in 2009, was inducted into Woodrow's Hall of Fame.
Wright is the author of six books, but is best known for his 2006 book, The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. A quick bestseller, The Looming Tower was awarded the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, and is frequently referenced by media pundits as an excellent source of background information on Al Qaeda and the September 11 attacks. The book's title is a phrase from the Quran: "Wherever you are, death will find you, even in the looming tower," which Osama bin Laden quoted three times in a videotaped speech seen as directed to the 9/11 hijackers.
Among Wright's other books is Remembering Satan: A Tragic Case of Recovered Memory (1994), about the Paul Ingram false memory case. On June 7, 1996, Wright testified at Ingram's pardon hearing.
Wright also co-wrote the screenplay for the film The Siege (1998), which told the story of a terrorist attack in New York City that led to curtailed civil liberties and rounding up of Arab-Americans.
A script that Wright originally wrote for Oliver Stone was turned instead into a well-regarded Showtime movie, Noriega: God's Favorite (2000).
A documentary featuring Wright, My Trip to Al-Qaeda, premiered on HBO in September 2010. Based on his journeys and experience in the Middle East during his research for The Looming Tower, My Trip to Al-Qaeda covers topics ranging from the current state of the regime in Saudi Arabia to the historic underpinnings of 9/11.
Lawrence Wright is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American author, screenwriter, staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, and fellow at the Center for Law and Security at the New York University School of Law. He is a graduate of Tulane University, and for two years taught at the American University in Cairo in Egypt.
Wright graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School (Dallas, Texas) in 1965 and, in 2009, was inducted into Woodrow's Hall of Fame.
Wright is the author of six books, but is best known for his 2006 book, The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. A quick bestseller, The Looming Tower was awarded the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, and is frequently referenced by media pundits as an excellent source of background information on Al Qaeda and the September 11 attacks. The book's title is a phrase from the Quran: "Wherever you are, death will find you, even in the looming tower," which Osama bin Laden quoted three times in a videotaped speech seen as directed to the 9/11 hijackers.
Among Wright's other books is Remembering Satan: A Tragic Case of Recovered Memory (1994), about the Paul Ingram false memory case. On June 7, 1996, Wright testified at Ingram's pardon hearing.
Wright also co-wrote the screenplay for the film The Siege (1998), which told the story of a terrorist attack in New York City that led to curtailed civil liberties and rounding up of Arab-Americans.
A script that Wright originally wrote for Oliver Stone was turned instead into a well-regarded Showtime movie, Noriega: God's Favorite (2000).
A documentary featuring Wright, My Trip to Al-Qaeda, premiered on HBO in September 2010. Based on his journeys and experience in the Middle East during his research for The Looming Tower, My Trip to Al-Qaeda covers topics ranging from the current state of the regime in Saudi Arabia to the historic underpinnings of 9/11.
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September 11, 2023
Lawrence Wright - from his site
Lawrence Wright looks at the players involved in the history and construction of Al-Qaeda, offering short bios of Sayyid Qtub, Ayyman Zawairi, bin Laden on the AQ side and John O’Neill of the FBI and others on the anti-terrorist teams. It is a thorough and interesting work. As someone who has read quite a bit about the players here, my expectations were modest. But I was impressed with the clarity of the story-telling. It was also impressive in the level of detail he presents. Some of that was amusing, as in his depiction of O’Neill’s girlfriend-juggling struggles. He comes down hard on the unwillingness of the CIA and FBI to share meaningful information in a timely manner. It is clear from his descriptions that turf wars played a larger role than did the institutional barriers to sharing information, although the latter were not trivial. This is highly recommended for anyone interested in the background to the terror events of the 21st century, clear, compelling and informative. The Pulitzer Committee thought so, awarding Wright their 2007 award for general non-fiction. The book earned a slew of other awards as well.
Published – August 8, 2006
Review first posted – October 2008
=============================EXTRA STUFF
Links to the author’s personal, Twitter and FB pages
Image from NewsMax.com
A nice article in Variety about the Hulu production
Jeff Daniels as John O'Neill in the Hulu production - image from IMDB.com
My personal experience of 9/11 seemed wrong to include in the review proper, so I am putting it here under a spoiler tag for any who have an interest. It is a slightly edited journal entry.
Many years before, in the late 80s and early 90s, I had worked at the World Financial Center, across the street from the WTC, passing through the WTC complex on my way to and from work every day. I would often stop into the WTC at lunchtime. There was a nice lunch place that had good, affordable chili and a video jukebox. In 1993, I was working across the river in Jersey City at one of the increasing number of skyscraping office towers that mirror Manhattan, reachable via PATH trains, the terminal being in the lower levels of the WTC. We felt the thud of the first attempt at the towers while at our desks.
My wife and I did not personally know any of the people who lost their lives on 9/11, but were only a couple of degrees removed from people who did. A friend lost a sister. A nephew knew one of the firemen who had died. We still grieved as New Yorkers, Americans and human beings.
Wright posted the ff in September 2014 in The New Yorker, about a significant omission in the 9/11 Commission Report, removed at the behest of Dubya - The Twenty-Eight Pages - worth a look
Wright interviewed by Tom Ashbrook for On Point
4/21/18 - My wife and I just finished watching the 10-part miniseries of The Looming Tower on Hulu. It is amazing, informative, gut-wrenching, and rage-inducing. So much could have been prevented but for egos, turf-wars, downright stupidity, and willful blindness.
February 6, 2012
Lawrence Wright is one of those guys who could easily put novelists out of business, and this book made me question why I read fiction at all. The locations, characters, and events in The Looming Tower are so much more fascinating than anything an author could invent, and the fact that they're real makes them seem important in a way fiction almost never does. I loved this book, and my picayune quibbles -- a few recurring awkward sentence constructions, inexplicably referring to domestic terrorists who bomb clinics and murder doctors as "protesters" -- just need to be dispatched with here so people know I actually read this book, and am not just brainlessly screaming about how good it is because someone's slipped me a Samsonite suitcase stuffed with cash.
I never would've read this, actually, if it hadn't been assigned for school, because I purposely avoid everything written about the terrorist attacks of 9/11/01. Having to read this book was good because it made me think a lot more about why I do that, plus most of it wasn't really about 9/11, but about the development during the last century of Islamist terrorism and formation of al-Qaeda, which is infinitely more interesting to read about anyway.
As a very provincial, ignorant person who hasn't traveled a lot, I don't know much about Islam or the Arab world and am thus highly susceptible to a romantic Orientalist-type fascination. And so the descriptions in this book of Egypt and Saudi Arabia (and Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan and a bunch of other places I can't even vaguely visualize without remedial assistance of the sort provided here) in the mid-to-late twentieth century were instantly riveting to me, as were Wright's patient and highly readable narratives of various key players' actions and lives. Partly because the people and places described were so exotic to me, the book had a quality of the mythic to it, and I'll admit that my ignorance and naivite about the rest of the world contributed to my enjoyment of this. For instance, his description of Saudi Arabia at mid-century, just as oil is being discovered, was at least as thrilling and evocative as some fantasy adventure story. The account of Mohammad bin Laden's construction in 1961 of a road uniting the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia had all the suspense and narrative power of incredible fiction... and the details of Mohammad's polygamous practices were too lurid and insane to have been made up.
No, Hollywood with all its big budgets and CGI effects can't compete with this book's images of antsy Arab jihadists holed up in Afghanistan, mid-eighties Peshawar filling with the chaos of the Afghan war's overflow, a jihadi/US Army sergeant/al-Qaeda member/would-be CIA agent's adventures stateside, a Sudanese general's selling bin Laden fake uranium that was really cinnabar, the shadowy worlds of international intrigues and terrorism and American intelligence's determined bureaucratic obstructionism of itself... and of course all the violence, which is so pervasive and twisted and sadistic beyond even the most famously filmed gore. YOU JUST CAN'T MAKE THIS SHIT UP! Would that we had to...
Okay, but Lawrence Wright didn't write his book just to entertain but also to inform. This stuff really did happen, and we're supposed to think something about it, I guess. Obviously part of what demands the comparison of this book to fiction is the over-the-top drama of its story: the "clash of civilizations" apparently driving these men to mass murder for reasons that seem so foreign and incomprehensible to me.
I guess the main reason I avoid reading about the 9/11 attacks is that I feel profoundly embarrassed by my nation's reaction to them. Not only by our political and military response, but by our cultural processing, and what we've made of these events. Reasons for my discomfort with the political and military stuff is pretty obvious; throughout The Looming Tower, Wright makes clear that a goal of the terrorists was to provoke a repressive response: to make the United States behave more like, say, Egypt, where dissenters and suspected terrorists were rounded up and tortured without any due process, a practice many point to as a factor in Ayman al-Zawahiri's increasingly bloodthirsty radicalization. Well uh, yeah -- as the old cliche points out, cliches become cliche for a reason, and "the terrorists have won" out in many ways, not least in our country's treatment of suspected terrorists. Score one for the away team!
I mean, I really don't want to get into some boring stupid political rant, but reading this did make my own thoughts and feelings about all this stuff clearer to me. In some ways the book had a sort of cartoonish simplicity in its presentation of the battle between good and evil, but the thing is that you can't argue that al-Qaeda and these other similar groups aren't purely evil. They are evil. Intentional mass slaughter of innocent civilians is objectively evil, and so painting these guys as two-dimensional Saturday-morning animated villains is not wrong. The only part of the equation that's not so simple is the goodness-of-adversary part, and so maybe the battle is more like evil v. at-least-somewhat-less-evil. But whatever your issues with the United States and our tendency to have robots drop bombs on wedding parties halfway around the world and to perform extraordinary renditions to Syria or whatever, there are some very nice things about living here, such as the Taliban not running our zoo.
One thing I remember really clearly about being a kid was watching movies or reading books and always thinking that the bad guys were trying to destroy the good guys based on some misunderstanding -- that if the good guys sat down with the bad guys and they drank some apple juice together, the bad guys would realize that their vendetta was all just a silly mistake. Then I grew up, and came to understand that this was rarely the case. Violent hatred isn't usually based just in miscommunication or a lack of understanding; that's just a comforting myth we tell children because the truth kind of sucks. It's not that al-Qaeda hates me because they don't understand me. If they really knew me and what I'm all about, they'd hate me even more than they already do.
Anyway, my book report is willfully trying to turn itself into a moronic political rant -- sorry. Where I think I was going was that Wright also emphasizes how badly bin Laden wanted to lure the U.S. into war in Afghanistan, which he envisioned -- after the Russians' misadventure there -- as a guaranteed destroyer of empires. Well, it is truly baffling to me why anyone would ever want to fight a war in AFGHANISTAN -- from what I can see this is a country of MUTILATED, DRUG-DEALING TRIBAL WARLORDS WHO ARE PERFECTLY COMFORTABLE BEING SURROUNDED BY LANDMINES, and it seems like you'd have to be crazy go fucking around with people like that -- but there we are. Or rather, there are our troops, dealing with God only knows what, while the rest of us sit around at home getting fatter and updating our Apple products and spouting off uninformed opinions in online book reviews and occasionally still making some kind of pious, wounded noise about the excruciatingly painful national tragedy that was 9/11.
I mean, that's really why I avoid all the 9/11 stuff, and what I find so uncomfortably embarrassing about it. For me, in many ways what this book was about ultimately was violence, and about cultural understandings of violence and how it can be used. A lot of the things in here shocked me because of the nature of the violence described -- far before we actually got to jihad, the accepted levels of violence in a lot of these cultures was astounding. For instance, okay, yes, we still have the death penalty here, which also shocks me, but in Saudi Arabia -- who are our friends over there (well, more or less, as far as these things go) -- capital punishment is effected through beheading. BEHEADING! HOLY SHIT! Maybe you think it's culturally insensitive or something that I consider that more gruesome than lethal injection, but man, I sure do. That's just one example though: the wider culture that suicide bombers grow out of is one that seems to have a great deal more familiarity -- and thus perhaps, to some extent, comfort -- with actual violence than our own.
I say "actual" violence because there is a pretty great scene in here towards the end when -- I hope I'm not getting the details wrong, I can't find it, sorry if this is wrong -- the al-Qaeda guys are sitting around in some caves in Afghanistan watching Arnold Schwarzenegger movies to get ideas for their hijackings. One unexpected impact this book, though its good v. evil presentation, had was in making me question my own culture in a different way than I usually do. I was raised to be critical of American values, even while being so obliviously embedded within and formed by them that I couldn't even fully identify what they were. By explicating the terrorists' beef with the U.S. in such detail, Wright helped me see better why it is exactly that they "hate our freedoms," and what these freedoms are, and of which ingredients is brewed the American Kool Aid is that I was raised on... and remain ideologically committed to drinking.
Maybe the amount of sentimentalism and exceptionalism that goes along with American discourse about 9/11 bothers me so much because I secretly feel some of it too. There are embarrassing things about being an American in this era, and the 9/11 stuff makes me feel a lot of them strongly. As I said at the outset, I am provincial and sheltered, and in this I am fairly representative of my countrymen. I haven't traveled much, but I lived in New York for several years, and descriptions of mass death there do affect me more than those of even more horrific violence in far-off Afghanistan, Egypt, Algeria, or Kenya.
Lately -- before reading this book -- I've been troubled a lot by the thought that I'm not at all brave. One thing that got me started thinking about that was talking to men who'd served recently in Iraq and Afghanistan. These guys are very different from most of us Americans in that they have traveled to these places, and have witnessed and participated in violence there. They aren't motivated by religious fundamentalism; they go into dangerous situations hoping very much they won't get hurt or die, and I consider that very brave. But -- and I know this is no news flash, every idiot knows this -- while they were over there shooting people and having their convoys blown up we were all just back here buying shoes on the Internet and complaining about gas being expensive and acting like the events of September 11, 2001 were this completely isolated and exceptionally violent event that was so traumatic for all of us that our country just might never recover its emotional bearings. I mean, we're so removed from violence that the false memory of its rarity frightens us so badly that we can't even bring our shampoo on the plane. This bums me out so much because I don't want these jihadist assholes to be right about anything. I don't want them to be right thinking that we're not brave and that we're not a moral nation, but we haven't done that great a job proving them wrong in the years since this happened.
Okay, this review got away from me and I'm just babbling and it's really really stupid, and I'm sorry, but anyway, bottom line: this is a fantastic book and I couldn't put it down the whole time that I was reading it. Highly recommended, though maybe not for the plane.
* * * *
Okay, I had to chop off this already overly-long non-review, because I heard the screams of my neighbors and realized the Superbowl had started, so not wanting to be "against us" I had to run off to that. But now, having patriotically reaffirmed my faith in the greatness of my powerful nation by watching Cee Lo Green and Madonna lip sync "Like a Prayer," I thought I'd try to wrap up some of my irrelevant and incoherent non-thoughts.
I'm actually not sure what it is that I was trying to say here about violence. Maybe I'm saying that I think we need to be more consistent in our cultural understanding and application of it, but this book could be a warning about the dangers of consistency, which is perhaps not just the hobgoblin of little minds but also the lifeblood of fundamentalism. One thing I think Wright did a really good job of explaining was the lure that these ideas have for men who then blow up themselves and a whole bunch of innocent people. What's the trade-off, what do they get from it, aside from that rumored afterlife stacked with nubile virgins? Yeah I know these people are real different from the people I know, but they are still people, and I just don't think humans are wired for purely delayed gratification.
What they get from fundamentalism -- taken to murderous extremes, sure, but fundamentalism in general -- is the happy comfort of moral clarity, of a simplified world. Me, I just don't know what to make of all this. All the violence, all the pain, all the baffling overwhelming complexity of an insane world. It's hard enough figuring out what to think of any of it, let alone to know how to live every day in a way that doesn't feel like a series of idiotic and self-contradicting mistakes. But if you become one of these jihad guys, such confusion is no longer a problem you face. There's good, and there's bad, and you know what you must do. And what you must do does seem super batshit crazy and horrible to me, but to you it makes so much sense that you'd never even dream of questioning it, and that's gotta feel pretty great... maybe so much that it's a feeling worth killing and dying for.
But I am still disturbed by our culture's relationship to violence, which seems very hypocritical and problematic to me. Obviously there's something distasteful about letting our enemies define us, but if we are going to play that game and say we stand for the opposite of what they do, then what we stand for, what we do and believe should make sense. If they are for repression and we are for freedom, then we need to be free. If we are against violence, let us be against violence; if we are not against violence, then let's be honest about that, and not cry and whine so much when that violence touches our lives.
I don't know, it was easy for the terrorists to be consistent in their actions, because they were fundamentalists: they were willing to die in order to kill (though tellingly, bin Laden expressed in his will that he didn't want his sons to join al-Qaeda: it's understandably a lot easier to send someone else's kids off to die, as we see here at home when powerful people happily start wars that their sons won't have to fight). It is a lot harder for a diverse nation of people with wildly different ideas about morality and violence to agree about how we're going to see things and respond to something like terrorist acts. But it should start at least with our owning the consequences of our actions -- it should have started with much more responsible media coverage of this last decade's wars, for example. I mean that's just an example. I don't really know what else to say about it, except that I thought of some article a few months ago in one of those mainstream weekly news magazines -- Time or Newsweek -- about the United States military and how sealed off in many ways from the rest of the population they've become. I think that's a really important problem that points to a lot more than just itself. In my experience, it seems to me that a lot of us either tend to be lefty doves, who tend to be naive about certain global realities, or righty hawks, who can be cavalier about the effects of violence. It seems to me that Americans who have fought in the military and people who have grown up in really violent neighborhoods not surprisingly tend to be more realistic and less sentimental about violence, but is that what we want? As this book shows, once you get comfortable with violence things can quickly get horrific and disgusting.
Blah blah blah blah. I don't know who I'm talking to or what I'm saying or why, I'm really just babbling -- procrastinating on homework. Sorry.
The final thing that I wanted to say about The Looming Tower was that I learned how all the terrorists would blend in and get legal status -- whether in California or Somalia or wherever -- by simply marrying a native woman. THIS SERIOUSLY FREAKED ME THE HELL OUT! Those who know me are aware that I have a reputation for poor judgment when it comes to affairs of the heart, and a weakness for swarthy men with an air of mystery about them... and so what am I supposed to do now with this piece of information!?? If I turn down dates with foreign guys named Muhammad does that mean the terrorists have won?
Ah, questions, troubling questions of "the post-9/11 world."
In any case: a truly great book.
I never would've read this, actually, if it hadn't been assigned for school, because I purposely avoid everything written about the terrorist attacks of 9/11/01. Having to read this book was good because it made me think a lot more about why I do that, plus most of it wasn't really about 9/11, but about the development during the last century of Islamist terrorism and formation of al-Qaeda, which is infinitely more interesting to read about anyway.
As a very provincial, ignorant person who hasn't traveled a lot, I don't know much about Islam or the Arab world and am thus highly susceptible to a romantic Orientalist-type fascination. And so the descriptions in this book of Egypt and Saudi Arabia (and Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan and a bunch of other places I can't even vaguely visualize without remedial assistance of the sort provided here) in the mid-to-late twentieth century were instantly riveting to me, as were Wright's patient and highly readable narratives of various key players' actions and lives. Partly because the people and places described were so exotic to me, the book had a quality of the mythic to it, and I'll admit that my ignorance and naivite about the rest of the world contributed to my enjoyment of this. For instance, his description of Saudi Arabia at mid-century, just as oil is being discovered, was at least as thrilling and evocative as some fantasy adventure story. The account of Mohammad bin Laden's construction in 1961 of a road uniting the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia had all the suspense and narrative power of incredible fiction... and the details of Mohammad's polygamous practices were too lurid and insane to have been made up.
No, Hollywood with all its big budgets and CGI effects can't compete with this book's images of antsy Arab jihadists holed up in Afghanistan, mid-eighties Peshawar filling with the chaos of the Afghan war's overflow, a jihadi/US Army sergeant/al-Qaeda member/would-be CIA agent's adventures stateside, a Sudanese general's selling bin Laden fake uranium that was really cinnabar, the shadowy worlds of international intrigues and terrorism and American intelligence's determined bureaucratic obstructionism of itself... and of course all the violence, which is so pervasive and twisted and sadistic beyond even the most famously filmed gore. YOU JUST CAN'T MAKE THIS SHIT UP! Would that we had to...
Okay, but Lawrence Wright didn't write his book just to entertain but also to inform. This stuff really did happen, and we're supposed to think something about it, I guess. Obviously part of what demands the comparison of this book to fiction is the over-the-top drama of its story: the "clash of civilizations" apparently driving these men to mass murder for reasons that seem so foreign and incomprehensible to me.
I guess the main reason I avoid reading about the 9/11 attacks is that I feel profoundly embarrassed by my nation's reaction to them. Not only by our political and military response, but by our cultural processing, and what we've made of these events. Reasons for my discomfort with the political and military stuff is pretty obvious; throughout The Looming Tower, Wright makes clear that a goal of the terrorists was to provoke a repressive response: to make the United States behave more like, say, Egypt, where dissenters and suspected terrorists were rounded up and tortured without any due process, a practice many point to as a factor in Ayman al-Zawahiri's increasingly bloodthirsty radicalization. Well uh, yeah -- as the old cliche points out, cliches become cliche for a reason, and "the terrorists have won" out in many ways, not least in our country's treatment of suspected terrorists. Score one for the away team!
I mean, I really don't want to get into some boring stupid political rant, but reading this did make my own thoughts and feelings about all this stuff clearer to me. In some ways the book had a sort of cartoonish simplicity in its presentation of the battle between good and evil, but the thing is that you can't argue that al-Qaeda and these other similar groups aren't purely evil. They are evil. Intentional mass slaughter of innocent civilians is objectively evil, and so painting these guys as two-dimensional Saturday-morning animated villains is not wrong. The only part of the equation that's not so simple is the goodness-of-adversary part, and so maybe the battle is more like evil v. at-least-somewhat-less-evil. But whatever your issues with the United States and our tendency to have robots drop bombs on wedding parties halfway around the world and to perform extraordinary renditions to Syria or whatever, there are some very nice things about living here, such as the Taliban not running our zoo.
One thing I remember really clearly about being a kid was watching movies or reading books and always thinking that the bad guys were trying to destroy the good guys based on some misunderstanding -- that if the good guys sat down with the bad guys and they drank some apple juice together, the bad guys would realize that their vendetta was all just a silly mistake. Then I grew up, and came to understand that this was rarely the case. Violent hatred isn't usually based just in miscommunication or a lack of understanding; that's just a comforting myth we tell children because the truth kind of sucks. It's not that al-Qaeda hates me because they don't understand me. If they really knew me and what I'm all about, they'd hate me even more than they already do.
Anyway, my book report is willfully trying to turn itself into a moronic political rant -- sorry. Where I think I was going was that Wright also emphasizes how badly bin Laden wanted to lure the U.S. into war in Afghanistan, which he envisioned -- after the Russians' misadventure there -- as a guaranteed destroyer of empires. Well, it is truly baffling to me why anyone would ever want to fight a war in AFGHANISTAN -- from what I can see this is a country of MUTILATED, DRUG-DEALING TRIBAL WARLORDS WHO ARE PERFECTLY COMFORTABLE BEING SURROUNDED BY LANDMINES, and it seems like you'd have to be crazy go fucking around with people like that -- but there we are. Or rather, there are our troops, dealing with God only knows what, while the rest of us sit around at home getting fatter and updating our Apple products and spouting off uninformed opinions in online book reviews and occasionally still making some kind of pious, wounded noise about the excruciatingly painful national tragedy that was 9/11.
I mean, that's really why I avoid all the 9/11 stuff, and what I find so uncomfortably embarrassing about it. For me, in many ways what this book was about ultimately was violence, and about cultural understandings of violence and how it can be used. A lot of the things in here shocked me because of the nature of the violence described -- far before we actually got to jihad, the accepted levels of violence in a lot of these cultures was astounding. For instance, okay, yes, we still have the death penalty here, which also shocks me, but in Saudi Arabia -- who are our friends over there (well, more or less, as far as these things go) -- capital punishment is effected through beheading. BEHEADING! HOLY SHIT! Maybe you think it's culturally insensitive or something that I consider that more gruesome than lethal injection, but man, I sure do. That's just one example though: the wider culture that suicide bombers grow out of is one that seems to have a great deal more familiarity -- and thus perhaps, to some extent, comfort -- with actual violence than our own.
I say "actual" violence because there is a pretty great scene in here towards the end when -- I hope I'm not getting the details wrong, I can't find it, sorry if this is wrong -- the al-Qaeda guys are sitting around in some caves in Afghanistan watching Arnold Schwarzenegger movies to get ideas for their hijackings. One unexpected impact this book, though its good v. evil presentation, had was in making me question my own culture in a different way than I usually do. I was raised to be critical of American values, even while being so obliviously embedded within and formed by them that I couldn't even fully identify what they were. By explicating the terrorists' beef with the U.S. in such detail, Wright helped me see better why it is exactly that they "hate our freedoms," and what these freedoms are, and of which ingredients is brewed the American Kool Aid is that I was raised on... and remain ideologically committed to drinking.
Maybe the amount of sentimentalism and exceptionalism that goes along with American discourse about 9/11 bothers me so much because I secretly feel some of it too. There are embarrassing things about being an American in this era, and the 9/11 stuff makes me feel a lot of them strongly. As I said at the outset, I am provincial and sheltered, and in this I am fairly representative of my countrymen. I haven't traveled much, but I lived in New York for several years, and descriptions of mass death there do affect me more than those of even more horrific violence in far-off Afghanistan, Egypt, Algeria, or Kenya.
Lately -- before reading this book -- I've been troubled a lot by the thought that I'm not at all brave. One thing that got me started thinking about that was talking to men who'd served recently in Iraq and Afghanistan. These guys are very different from most of us Americans in that they have traveled to these places, and have witnessed and participated in violence there. They aren't motivated by religious fundamentalism; they go into dangerous situations hoping very much they won't get hurt or die, and I consider that very brave. But -- and I know this is no news flash, every idiot knows this -- while they were over there shooting people and having their convoys blown up we were all just back here buying shoes on the Internet and complaining about gas being expensive and acting like the events of September 11, 2001 were this completely isolated and exceptionally violent event that was so traumatic for all of us that our country just might never recover its emotional bearings. I mean, we're so removed from violence that the false memory of its rarity frightens us so badly that we can't even bring our shampoo on the plane. This bums me out so much because I don't want these jihadist assholes to be right about anything. I don't want them to be right thinking that we're not brave and that we're not a moral nation, but we haven't done that great a job proving them wrong in the years since this happened.
Okay, this review got away from me and I'm just babbling and it's really really stupid, and I'm sorry, but anyway, bottom line: this is a fantastic book and I couldn't put it down the whole time that I was reading it. Highly recommended, though maybe not for the plane.
* * * *
Okay, I had to chop off this already overly-long non-review, because I heard the screams of my neighbors and realized the Superbowl had started, so not wanting to be "against us" I had to run off to that. But now, having patriotically reaffirmed my faith in the greatness of my powerful nation by watching Cee Lo Green and Madonna lip sync "Like a Prayer," I thought I'd try to wrap up some of my irrelevant and incoherent non-thoughts.
I'm actually not sure what it is that I was trying to say here about violence. Maybe I'm saying that I think we need to be more consistent in our cultural understanding and application of it, but this book could be a warning about the dangers of consistency, which is perhaps not just the hobgoblin of little minds but also the lifeblood of fundamentalism. One thing I think Wright did a really good job of explaining was the lure that these ideas have for men who then blow up themselves and a whole bunch of innocent people. What's the trade-off, what do they get from it, aside from that rumored afterlife stacked with nubile virgins? Yeah I know these people are real different from the people I know, but they are still people, and I just don't think humans are wired for purely delayed gratification.
What they get from fundamentalism -- taken to murderous extremes, sure, but fundamentalism in general -- is the happy comfort of moral clarity, of a simplified world. Me, I just don't know what to make of all this. All the violence, all the pain, all the baffling overwhelming complexity of an insane world. It's hard enough figuring out what to think of any of it, let alone to know how to live every day in a way that doesn't feel like a series of idiotic and self-contradicting mistakes. But if you become one of these jihad guys, such confusion is no longer a problem you face. There's good, and there's bad, and you know what you must do. And what you must do does seem super batshit crazy and horrible to me, but to you it makes so much sense that you'd never even dream of questioning it, and that's gotta feel pretty great... maybe so much that it's a feeling worth killing and dying for.
But I am still disturbed by our culture's relationship to violence, which seems very hypocritical and problematic to me. Obviously there's something distasteful about letting our enemies define us, but if we are going to play that game and say we stand for the opposite of what they do, then what we stand for, what we do and believe should make sense. If they are for repression and we are for freedom, then we need to be free. If we are against violence, let us be against violence; if we are not against violence, then let's be honest about that, and not cry and whine so much when that violence touches our lives.
I don't know, it was easy for the terrorists to be consistent in their actions, because they were fundamentalists: they were willing to die in order to kill (though tellingly, bin Laden expressed in his will that he didn't want his sons to join al-Qaeda: it's understandably a lot easier to send someone else's kids off to die, as we see here at home when powerful people happily start wars that their sons won't have to fight). It is a lot harder for a diverse nation of people with wildly different ideas about morality and violence to agree about how we're going to see things and respond to something like terrorist acts. But it should start at least with our owning the consequences of our actions -- it should have started with much more responsible media coverage of this last decade's wars, for example. I mean that's just an example. I don't really know what else to say about it, except that I thought of some article a few months ago in one of those mainstream weekly news magazines -- Time or Newsweek -- about the United States military and how sealed off in many ways from the rest of the population they've become. I think that's a really important problem that points to a lot more than just itself. In my experience, it seems to me that a lot of us either tend to be lefty doves, who tend to be naive about certain global realities, or righty hawks, who can be cavalier about the effects of violence. It seems to me that Americans who have fought in the military and people who have grown up in really violent neighborhoods not surprisingly tend to be more realistic and less sentimental about violence, but is that what we want? As this book shows, once you get comfortable with violence things can quickly get horrific and disgusting.
Blah blah blah blah. I don't know who I'm talking to or what I'm saying or why, I'm really just babbling -- procrastinating on homework. Sorry.
The final thing that I wanted to say about The Looming Tower was that I learned how all the terrorists would blend in and get legal status -- whether in California or Somalia or wherever -- by simply marrying a native woman. THIS SERIOUSLY FREAKED ME THE HELL OUT! Those who know me are aware that I have a reputation for poor judgment when it comes to affairs of the heart, and a weakness for swarthy men with an air of mystery about them... and so what am I supposed to do now with this piece of information!?? If I turn down dates with foreign guys named Muhammad does that mean the terrorists have won?
Ah, questions, troubling questions of "the post-9/11 world."
In any case: a truly great book.
November 6, 2007
What a great surprise this book was. I first read about The Looming Tower (the title comes from the Koranic verse Osama bin Laden used as a coded message to the 9/11 hijackers) in a number of political op/ed columns. Finally, though, it was conservative writer Jonah Goldberg's heavy reliance on The Looming Tower for an L.A. Times column that sent me looking for the book.
Lawrence Wright's treatment of the jihadist movement is thorough to the point of being almost sympathetic. It goes deeply into what Egyptian interrogation methods created so many Ayman al-Zawahiris. It explores the history of oil wealth in Saudi Arabia and an immigrant construction entrepreneur named Mohammed bin Laden whose seventeenth child, of fifty-four, would grow up to become the world's most ambitious terrorist.
It also walks readers through the tangled relationship between the United States and Afghanistan and the Taliban and al Qaeda and, yes, Saddam Hussein, and the Northern Alliance and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak.
It is fairly merciless in its treatment of the American bureaucracy that created figurative walls between the CIA and the FBI. It makes a somewhat cartoonish hero of an FBI agent named John O'Neill and a level-headed assessment of Richard Clarke.
This was the book that led to the interesting and needlessly controversial two-day miniseries called "The Road to 9/11". That series, like this book, points an accusatory finger at no one American, not Bill Clinton and not George W. Bush.
Why not? Well, because the book is too sophisticated for the mindless, thirty-second shout-a-thons that have passed for political discourse on both the political left and right since 9/11.
Anyone who is interested in an intermediate-level analysis of what made Osama bin Laden so notorious (and his rise has many parallels to that of Ernesto Guevara de la Serna) is well advised to read this book. At 475 pages, it is exhaustive but not exhausting.
Anyone who has "strong" feelings about what caused the rise of al Qaeda (and be warned, the network is a lot smaller than one might think) on the world stage should read this book before the next time he raises his voice for/against a US politician.
The Looming Tower is not "complicated" (the cop-out word self-proclaimed intellectuals use at every turn) but detailed. It is not inciting but insightful. It is also highly recommended to any curious American.
Lawrence Wright's treatment of the jihadist movement is thorough to the point of being almost sympathetic. It goes deeply into what Egyptian interrogation methods created so many Ayman al-Zawahiris. It explores the history of oil wealth in Saudi Arabia and an immigrant construction entrepreneur named Mohammed bin Laden whose seventeenth child, of fifty-four, would grow up to become the world's most ambitious terrorist.
It also walks readers through the tangled relationship between the United States and Afghanistan and the Taliban and al Qaeda and, yes, Saddam Hussein, and the Northern Alliance and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak.
It is fairly merciless in its treatment of the American bureaucracy that created figurative walls between the CIA and the FBI. It makes a somewhat cartoonish hero of an FBI agent named John O'Neill and a level-headed assessment of Richard Clarke.
This was the book that led to the interesting and needlessly controversial two-day miniseries called "The Road to 9/11". That series, like this book, points an accusatory finger at no one American, not Bill Clinton and not George W. Bush.
Why not? Well, because the book is too sophisticated for the mindless, thirty-second shout-a-thons that have passed for political discourse on both the political left and right since 9/11.
Anyone who is interested in an intermediate-level analysis of what made Osama bin Laden so notorious (and his rise has many parallels to that of Ernesto Guevara de la Serna) is well advised to read this book. At 475 pages, it is exhaustive but not exhausting.
Anyone who has "strong" feelings about what caused the rise of al Qaeda (and be warned, the network is a lot smaller than one might think) on the world stage should read this book before the next time he raises his voice for/against a US politician.
The Looming Tower is not "complicated" (the cop-out word self-proclaimed intellectuals use at every turn) but detailed. It is not inciting but insightful. It is also highly recommended to any curious American.
August 14, 2016
there are the books that make our heads explode, that make every minute of the day a chinese water torture of waiting for the chance to get the hell home and read some more, the books that live inside us all through the day, the books that make us excited to take a crap just so we can shut the door behind us (or not) and sneak in a few pages, the books which cause horn-honking at red lights from drivers irritated we're reading at the fucking wheel... the looming tower is one of 'em. as riveting and compelling as any novel i've read. only on page 230 and stamping with a fiver. fucking fantastic.
February 18, 2024
"Wherever you are, death will find you, even if you are in high towers." - Quran 4:78
************
Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian Islamic theorist, begins this saga with a voyage to the US in 1948. After a brief stay in the post war sin city of New York, Qutb attended college in small town Colorado as a well known Arabic author. On return to Cairo his ideas crystallized into a dialectical opposition between east-west, traditional-modern and religious-secular. Israel had defeated the Arab alliance and the British were occupying the Suez Canal. Joining with the Muslim Brotherhood, Qutb assisted Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1952 to depose King Farouk, but Pan-Arabic socialism thwarted his desires for a sharia state. After a 1954 assassination attempt on Nasser, Qutb was jailed and executed in 1966.
Ayman al-Zawahiri was born in 1951 to a famous family of doctors and clerics, friends of Qutb. He lived in a rich Cairo suburb, home to Edward Said, Omar Sharif and future King Hussein. In 1967 Egypt blocked the straight to the Red Sea from Palestine. Israel destroyed Egypt's air force, overran Sinai and reached the Suez canal in less than a week. The same six days saw the capture of Jerusalem, the West Bank, Golan Heights, and a rout of Jordanian and Syrian forces. The war marked the birth of a new fundamentalism. Only a return to the faith could hope to regain the lost favor of God. Zawahiri believed that restoration of a caliphate would lead to a holy war with the US and it's Jewish conspirators.
Nasser died in 1970 and Sadat emptied jails of Muslim Brothers in a bid to legitimize his presidency. The decade saw a surge in radical groups fostered by official tolerance. Khomeini established Islamic rule in 1979 Iran raising hopes for theocracy. Egypt was not ready for revolution however and in 1980 Zawahiri visited Pakistan to provide medical support in the Soviet-Afghan conflict. Sadat had signed a treaty with Israel in 1978, and was assassinated in 1981. Zawahiri was implicated and tortured in the Citadel of Cairo. Mubarak arrested hundreds of Islamists for the trial. Omar Abdel Rahman, the leader of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, would share prison time with Zawahiri.
Osama bin Laden was born in 1957 to a successful family of developers in Saudi Arabia. King Saud had ended a rebellion of religious fanatics in 1931, and established Salafism as the fundamentalist creed of the land. Oil boomed in 1950 and the bin Laden's became rich through construction for the king. The seventeenth son Osama was a devout youth, and fervent for sharia law. Influenced by Qutb he joined the Muslim Brothers. Rapid social change and resentment of royalty spurred dreams of revolution. King Faisal was killed in 1975 while making secular reforms. Mecca's mosque was seized in 1979 by rebels seeking theocratic rule. If an Islamic state could be formed the world would soon follow.
Abdullah Azzam, al-Azhar scholar and jihadi, left Jordan for Jeddah in 1980 where he met bin Laden. He joined Afghan forces against the Soviets, issued fatwas to fight and spun tales of battlefield miracles. Bin Laden had raised funds and recruited volunteers, when he met Zawahiri. Saudi royals sacrificed riches to defend the faith and block the USSR from the gulf. The US funneled fortunes into the region to protect oil interests. Bin Laden built training camps for foreign fighters using Pakistan as a local base. A network of Arab princes, holy warriors, secret agents, Muslim mystics and puppet dictators was born. Azzam became a founding father of al-Qaida, Hamas and Lashkar-e-Taiba.
Azzam vied with Zawahiri and bin Laden for control of al-Qaida when the USSR fell in 1989. The Saudis intervened and bin Laden won the day. When Azzam fell from favor he was killed. Hailed as hero in the Afghanistan-Soviet war, bin Laden led a ragtag band who amused the Afghan army. The last half of the book covers the decade leading to the 2001 attacks. Royal corruption and an economic slide bred unrest in the Kingdom. Bin Laden blamed the US, a tricky position towards an ally against the USSR, but the princes feared domestic threats as much as foreign ones. Allowing infidel troops on Saudi soil in 1990 to attack Saddam Hussein was an affront to bin Laden, even in defense of Saudi oil.
Hasan al-Turabi, a Sudanese scholar armed with degrees from London and Paris, staged a coup that created a Sunni Islamist state in 1989. He had been a Muslim Brotherhood leader since 1964. Sudan opened it's doors to stateless jihadi, with a special invitation extended to bin Laden. Relocating to Khartoum in 1992 he reunited with Zawahiri. As the communist threat subsided a Christian one took hold. The presence of Americans in the KSA and Yemen violated a Quranic verse about one religion in Arabia. This coalesced into a crusades redux, where ancient battles began anew. If a western new world order was the future, then al-Qaida would reignite a fight for past traditions of law and faith.
Omar Abdel Rahman led the 1993 WTC bombing, funded by bin Laden. Al-Qaida trained fighters killed 19 US soldiers in Mogadishu that year. Mubarak survived a 1995 assassination attempt by Zawahiri. Bin Laden returned to Afghanistan in 1996, under the baleful eye of Taliban leader Mullah Omar, who was bankrolled by Pakistan and the KSA. Khaled Sheikh Mohammed visited bin Laden. His nephew, WTC bomber Ramzi Yousef blew up a passenger jet and plotted to kill Bill Clinton. Their new plan was to crash airliners into US buildings. Khobar Towers exploded killing 19 US Air Force personnel. In 1997 62 tourists were gunned down in Egypt. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania followed in 1998.
The last quarter of the book details the dysfunctional ties between the FBI and the CIA. An agent of Zawahiri told the FBI about al-Qaida in 1993, but the CIA wasn't informed. As bin Laden declared war on the US in 1996 we wondered what it would mean. Al-Qaida began suicide missions, evolving from freedom fighters to global terrorists. In 1999 a missile strike aimed at bin Laden was canceled by the CIA. As al-Qaida pilots entered the US in 2000 the CIA didn't tell the FBI. The USS Cole exploded in Yemen killing 17 sailors. By the summer of 2001 there were reports a vast attack was imminent. The FBI agent who lead the al-Qaida team retired. Within two weeks at his new job in the WTC the planes hit.
I lived next to the WTC then as I do now. Assuming I had heard it all in the news I delayed reading this book. Instead of a narrow focus on the 911 plot, the book gives a wide historical context. It is not a painstaking recount of the attack. Lawrence Wright won a 2007 Pulitzer Prize for his work. More than 350 people worldwide were interviewed by the author. He takes a balanced view and no one is blameless in this account. From blinkered politicians and warlike empires, corrupt royalty and cynical clergy, Machiavellian intellects and credulous minds came a scourge of violence. Bin Laden may not have succeeded in a showdown for a single world faith, but the seeds of destruction were sown.
************
Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian Islamic theorist, begins this saga with a voyage to the US in 1948. After a brief stay in the post war sin city of New York, Qutb attended college in small town Colorado as a well known Arabic author. On return to Cairo his ideas crystallized into a dialectical opposition between east-west, traditional-modern and religious-secular. Israel had defeated the Arab alliance and the British were occupying the Suez Canal. Joining with the Muslim Brotherhood, Qutb assisted Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1952 to depose King Farouk, but Pan-Arabic socialism thwarted his desires for a sharia state. After a 1954 assassination attempt on Nasser, Qutb was jailed and executed in 1966.
Ayman al-Zawahiri was born in 1951 to a famous family of doctors and clerics, friends of Qutb. He lived in a rich Cairo suburb, home to Edward Said, Omar Sharif and future King Hussein. In 1967 Egypt blocked the straight to the Red Sea from Palestine. Israel destroyed Egypt's air force, overran Sinai and reached the Suez canal in less than a week. The same six days saw the capture of Jerusalem, the West Bank, Golan Heights, and a rout of Jordanian and Syrian forces. The war marked the birth of a new fundamentalism. Only a return to the faith could hope to regain the lost favor of God. Zawahiri believed that restoration of a caliphate would lead to a holy war with the US and it's Jewish conspirators.
Nasser died in 1970 and Sadat emptied jails of Muslim Brothers in a bid to legitimize his presidency. The decade saw a surge in radical groups fostered by official tolerance. Khomeini established Islamic rule in 1979 Iran raising hopes for theocracy. Egypt was not ready for revolution however and in 1980 Zawahiri visited Pakistan to provide medical support in the Soviet-Afghan conflict. Sadat had signed a treaty with Israel in 1978, and was assassinated in 1981. Zawahiri was implicated and tortured in the Citadel of Cairo. Mubarak arrested hundreds of Islamists for the trial. Omar Abdel Rahman, the leader of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, would share prison time with Zawahiri.
Osama bin Laden was born in 1957 to a successful family of developers in Saudi Arabia. King Saud had ended a rebellion of religious fanatics in 1931, and established Salafism as the fundamentalist creed of the land. Oil boomed in 1950 and the bin Laden's became rich through construction for the king. The seventeenth son Osama was a devout youth, and fervent for sharia law. Influenced by Qutb he joined the Muslim Brothers. Rapid social change and resentment of royalty spurred dreams of revolution. King Faisal was killed in 1975 while making secular reforms. Mecca's mosque was seized in 1979 by rebels seeking theocratic rule. If an Islamic state could be formed the world would soon follow.
Abdullah Azzam, al-Azhar scholar and jihadi, left Jordan for Jeddah in 1980 where he met bin Laden. He joined Afghan forces against the Soviets, issued fatwas to fight and spun tales of battlefield miracles. Bin Laden had raised funds and recruited volunteers, when he met Zawahiri. Saudi royals sacrificed riches to defend the faith and block the USSR from the gulf. The US funneled fortunes into the region to protect oil interests. Bin Laden built training camps for foreign fighters using Pakistan as a local base. A network of Arab princes, holy warriors, secret agents, Muslim mystics and puppet dictators was born. Azzam became a founding father of al-Qaida, Hamas and Lashkar-e-Taiba.
Azzam vied with Zawahiri and bin Laden for control of al-Qaida when the USSR fell in 1989. The Saudis intervened and bin Laden won the day. When Azzam fell from favor he was killed. Hailed as hero in the Afghanistan-Soviet war, bin Laden led a ragtag band who amused the Afghan army. The last half of the book covers the decade leading to the 2001 attacks. Royal corruption and an economic slide bred unrest in the Kingdom. Bin Laden blamed the US, a tricky position towards an ally against the USSR, but the princes feared domestic threats as much as foreign ones. Allowing infidel troops on Saudi soil in 1990 to attack Saddam Hussein was an affront to bin Laden, even in defense of Saudi oil.
Hasan al-Turabi, a Sudanese scholar armed with degrees from London and Paris, staged a coup that created a Sunni Islamist state in 1989. He had been a Muslim Brotherhood leader since 1964. Sudan opened it's doors to stateless jihadi, with a special invitation extended to bin Laden. Relocating to Khartoum in 1992 he reunited with Zawahiri. As the communist threat subsided a Christian one took hold. The presence of Americans in the KSA and Yemen violated a Quranic verse about one religion in Arabia. This coalesced into a crusades redux, where ancient battles began anew. If a western new world order was the future, then al-Qaida would reignite a fight for past traditions of law and faith.
Omar Abdel Rahman led the 1993 WTC bombing, funded by bin Laden. Al-Qaida trained fighters killed 19 US soldiers in Mogadishu that year. Mubarak survived a 1995 assassination attempt by Zawahiri. Bin Laden returned to Afghanistan in 1996, under the baleful eye of Taliban leader Mullah Omar, who was bankrolled by Pakistan and the KSA. Khaled Sheikh Mohammed visited bin Laden. His nephew, WTC bomber Ramzi Yousef blew up a passenger jet and plotted to kill Bill Clinton. Their new plan was to crash airliners into US buildings. Khobar Towers exploded killing 19 US Air Force personnel. In 1997 62 tourists were gunned down in Egypt. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania followed in 1998.
The last quarter of the book details the dysfunctional ties between the FBI and the CIA. An agent of Zawahiri told the FBI about al-Qaida in 1993, but the CIA wasn't informed. As bin Laden declared war on the US in 1996 we wondered what it would mean. Al-Qaida began suicide missions, evolving from freedom fighters to global terrorists. In 1999 a missile strike aimed at bin Laden was canceled by the CIA. As al-Qaida pilots entered the US in 2000 the CIA didn't tell the FBI. The USS Cole exploded in Yemen killing 17 sailors. By the summer of 2001 there were reports a vast attack was imminent. The FBI agent who lead the al-Qaida team retired. Within two weeks at his new job in the WTC the planes hit.
I lived next to the WTC then as I do now. Assuming I had heard it all in the news I delayed reading this book. Instead of a narrow focus on the 911 plot, the book gives a wide historical context. It is not a painstaking recount of the attack. Lawrence Wright won a 2007 Pulitzer Prize for his work. More than 350 people worldwide were interviewed by the author. He takes a balanced view and no one is blameless in this account. From blinkered politicians and warlike empires, corrupt royalty and cynical clergy, Machiavellian intellects and credulous minds came a scourge of violence. Bin Laden may not have succeeded in a showdown for a single world faith, but the seeds of destruction were sown.
March 22, 2016
"Wherever you are, death will find you, even if you are in looming towers" ("أينما تكونوا يدرككم الموت ولو كنتم في بروج مشيدة")
- Qur'an 4:78
A great narrative history of the rise of al-Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden. Wright's journalism takes the reader from Sayyid Qutb's youth to the destruction of the twin towers and includes most of the major characters both in al-Qaeda, and Zawahiri's al-Jihad to Saudi Arabia to the FBI, CIA, and NSA. The focus of the book, however, is obviously Bin Laden and O'Neill who both seem iconic symbols of radicalized Islam and the US. The research and narrative of the book is impressive and even though many of these stories and ideas have been floating for years; some of what I seem to have known is probably due to Wright's groundbreaking reporting in this book (It was originally published in 2006). The narrative is complex and jumps back and forth across countries and cultures and institutions, but never loses the central theme and historical elements. It is a masterpiece of narrative history in both focus and scale.
- Qur'an 4:78
A great narrative history of the rise of al-Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden. Wright's journalism takes the reader from Sayyid Qutb's youth to the destruction of the twin towers and includes most of the major characters both in al-Qaeda, and Zawahiri's al-Jihad to Saudi Arabia to the FBI, CIA, and NSA. The focus of the book, however, is obviously Bin Laden and O'Neill who both seem iconic symbols of radicalized Islam and the US. The research and narrative of the book is impressive and even though many of these stories and ideas have been floating for years; some of what I seem to have known is probably due to Wright's groundbreaking reporting in this book (It was originally published in 2006). The narrative is complex and jumps back and forth across countries and cultures and institutions, but never loses the central theme and historical elements. It is a masterpiece of narrative history in both focus and scale.
July 4, 2012
Well, I finally found my notes and got this review finished - long overdue.
For all the energy, lives and treasure we have devoted to Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s important to remember that they had nothing to do with 9/11 which became the excuse for our actions rather than the proximate rationale. We are now in a war that would appear to have literally no end, this “war of terror,” one that any sane person who recently traveled on an airplane can see the terrorists have won as we meekly surrender our civil rights to government agencies who now can tap phones, examine library records, collect data, cavity search, etc., in the name of some illusionary sense of safety, a theater of the absurd. In addition they convinced us , this tiny group of delusionary men (no women), to send thousands of troops to a hostile land and environment where they could be more easily picked off.
Wright traces the rise of anti-semitism in the MIddle East to the influence of Naziism during WW II and especially afterwards when many Nazis fled to Egypt for sanctuary from the victorious allies. For centuries Jews had lived quite peacefully with their Muslim neighbors, but several events fueled a return to a fundamentalist, Islamicist view. The Six-Day war was used by these in a rather tortured logic to validate their position, i.e. that God had favored the Jews because Muslims had wandered away from the true Islam and the Caliphate. (This kind of perverted thinking is not unique to Islamists. It’s rampant among fundamentalist Christian groups such as the Westboro Baptists who insist that US military deaths are caused by God’s displeasure with current U.S. policies with regard to homosexuality. Other examples abound.) The war, which an overwhelming victory for Israel, humiliated Egypt, where, following Nassar’s death, Sadat needed to appeal to the fundamentalists to strengthen his government; so he released many who had been jailed from prison. Not a smart move.
The actions of the Egyptians, following the assassination of Sadat, solidified a diverse, incoherent movement. He flatly states that 9/11 was born in the torture chambers of the Egyptian government which created an appetite for revenge and turned moderates into extremists, not to mention destroyed any notion that western society actually practiced the ideals of freedom and human rights they espoused. Communism, Zionism, and Imperialism were all lumped together as the great western enemy of Islam and the only solution was to use violence to try to create an Islamic theocracy. By throwing all of the anti-government groups together in prison, many individuals and groups which had been unaware of the other’s existence were now thrown together and molded into a more coherent movement. Torture was an instrument of humiliation, revenge and punishment as well as information gathering and Ayman Zawahiri emerged as the new leader of the group.
I was astonished how intertwined the Bin Laden family, wealthy beyond measure from lucrative construction contracts, was with Saudi government and culture. That said, Osama comes across as a pathetic little man whom, for some bizarre reason, we have inflated to mythic proportions. He left a long trail of words that Wright has used effectively to build a comprehensive picture of the man that Afghans, in the fight against the Russians, thought was rather pathetic, but who was adopted by the United States and supported. Another example of how certain actions taken for a variety of reasons can have long-range negative effects. How one might ever develop the perspicuity to avoid making such mistakes remains a mystery to me.
If there are any heroes in this book, it’s the field officers of the FBI and one John O’Neill (who tragically died in the World Trade Center.) They had been concerned that the Islamic fundamentalists would try something spectacular but got little support from Washington. One Minneapolis supervisor, admonished for his reports and concerns, simply said back to the bosses in DC that he was simply “ “trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing into the World Trade Center.” This in August of 2001
Wright has done a magnificent job of melding detail and the broader picture to present a better understanding of why we are where we are today.The title, drawn from the Koran is ironic in light of Osama’s killing by American troops: ““Wherever you are, death will find you, Even in the looming tower,” a quote from one of Osama’s many videos.
After-note: Read a couple of the one-star reviews on Amazon to get a feel for psychotic thinking.
Previously written: "Therefore when you induce others to construct a formation while you yourself are formless, then you are concentrated while the opponent is divided... Therefore the consummation of forming an army is to arrive at formlessness. When you have no form, undercover espionage cannot find out anything, intelligence cannot form a strategy." Sun Tzu, 500 B.C.
For some reason, I failed to get very far into this book and was reminded of it when I read an excellent column recently at Salon (http://www.salon.com/news/feature/201...) regarding the costs of our obsessiveness with regard to airline security. I was reminded that Wright discussed Al Qaeda strategy at some length. It was quite simple. Bin Laden knew he couldn't maintain an attack on U.S. soil so he needed to get us to come to him. And he has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. We send troops and treasure over to him to be whittled away at. His first attempt to draw us in was the U.S.S. Cole; Clinton failed to fall into the trap as did Reagan after the 200 Marines were killed in Lebanon. Bush swallowed the bait hook, line and sinker. Iraq and Afghanistan have cost more than a trillion dollars of borroweded money in the first unfunded war in our history. And we spend more hundreds of billions searching for the latest object in someone's crotch for the illusion of security. Wait till someone detonates a small bomb in a TSA security line or at a McDonald's. We will then lose all our freedoms in the name of maintaining an empire we cannot afford.
For all the energy, lives and treasure we have devoted to Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s important to remember that they had nothing to do with 9/11 which became the excuse for our actions rather than the proximate rationale. We are now in a war that would appear to have literally no end, this “war of terror,” one that any sane person who recently traveled on an airplane can see the terrorists have won as we meekly surrender our civil rights to government agencies who now can tap phones, examine library records, collect data, cavity search, etc., in the name of some illusionary sense of safety, a theater of the absurd. In addition they convinced us , this tiny group of delusionary men (no women), to send thousands of troops to a hostile land and environment where they could be more easily picked off.
Wright traces the rise of anti-semitism in the MIddle East to the influence of Naziism during WW II and especially afterwards when many Nazis fled to Egypt for sanctuary from the victorious allies. For centuries Jews had lived quite peacefully with their Muslim neighbors, but several events fueled a return to a fundamentalist, Islamicist view. The Six-Day war was used by these in a rather tortured logic to validate their position, i.e. that God had favored the Jews because Muslims had wandered away from the true Islam and the Caliphate. (This kind of perverted thinking is not unique to Islamists. It’s rampant among fundamentalist Christian groups such as the Westboro Baptists who insist that US military deaths are caused by God’s displeasure with current U.S. policies with regard to homosexuality. Other examples abound.) The war, which an overwhelming victory for Israel, humiliated Egypt, where, following Nassar’s death, Sadat needed to appeal to the fundamentalists to strengthen his government; so he released many who had been jailed from prison. Not a smart move.
The actions of the Egyptians, following the assassination of Sadat, solidified a diverse, incoherent movement. He flatly states that 9/11 was born in the torture chambers of the Egyptian government which created an appetite for revenge and turned moderates into extremists, not to mention destroyed any notion that western society actually practiced the ideals of freedom and human rights they espoused. Communism, Zionism, and Imperialism were all lumped together as the great western enemy of Islam and the only solution was to use violence to try to create an Islamic theocracy. By throwing all of the anti-government groups together in prison, many individuals and groups which had been unaware of the other’s existence were now thrown together and molded into a more coherent movement. Torture was an instrument of humiliation, revenge and punishment as well as information gathering and Ayman Zawahiri emerged as the new leader of the group.
I was astonished how intertwined the Bin Laden family, wealthy beyond measure from lucrative construction contracts, was with Saudi government and culture. That said, Osama comes across as a pathetic little man whom, for some bizarre reason, we have inflated to mythic proportions. He left a long trail of words that Wright has used effectively to build a comprehensive picture of the man that Afghans, in the fight against the Russians, thought was rather pathetic, but who was adopted by the United States and supported. Another example of how certain actions taken for a variety of reasons can have long-range negative effects. How one might ever develop the perspicuity to avoid making such mistakes remains a mystery to me.
If there are any heroes in this book, it’s the field officers of the FBI and one John O’Neill (who tragically died in the World Trade Center.) They had been concerned that the Islamic fundamentalists would try something spectacular but got little support from Washington. One Minneapolis supervisor, admonished for his reports and concerns, simply said back to the bosses in DC that he was simply “ “trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing into the World Trade Center.” This in August of 2001
Wright has done a magnificent job of melding detail and the broader picture to present a better understanding of why we are where we are today.The title, drawn from the Koran is ironic in light of Osama’s killing by American troops: ““Wherever you are, death will find you, Even in the looming tower,” a quote from one of Osama’s many videos.
After-note: Read a couple of the one-star reviews on Amazon to get a feel for psychotic thinking.
Previously written: "Therefore when you induce others to construct a formation while you yourself are formless, then you are concentrated while the opponent is divided... Therefore the consummation of forming an army is to arrive at formlessness. When you have no form, undercover espionage cannot find out anything, intelligence cannot form a strategy." Sun Tzu, 500 B.C.
For some reason, I failed to get very far into this book and was reminded of it when I read an excellent column recently at Salon (http://www.salon.com/news/feature/201...) regarding the costs of our obsessiveness with regard to airline security. I was reminded that Wright discussed Al Qaeda strategy at some length. It was quite simple. Bin Laden knew he couldn't maintain an attack on U.S. soil so he needed to get us to come to him. And he has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. We send troops and treasure over to him to be whittled away at. His first attempt to draw us in was the U.S.S. Cole; Clinton failed to fall into the trap as did Reagan after the 200 Marines were killed in Lebanon. Bush swallowed the bait hook, line and sinker. Iraq and Afghanistan have cost more than a trillion dollars of borroweded money in the first unfunded war in our history. And we spend more hundreds of billions searching for the latest object in someone's crotch for the illusion of security. Wait till someone detonates a small bomb in a TSA security line or at a McDonald's. We will then lose all our freedoms in the name of maintaining an empire we cannot afford.
January 18, 2013
You can be nerdy and geeky and boring about all manner of things, railway timetables, cricket, fine wine, Marvel comics, Beatles flipsides, the confectionary you used to scoff when you were little (ah the nostalgic sweetmeats of childhood, how much of a lump in your throat were they then and still are now), campy 70s sitcoms, Jean-Marie Straub movies, the best places to go backpacking in Andalucia, bootlegs of the Velvet Underground, and so on boringly and tediously.
Turns out you can be geeky and tedious about 9/11 too. But perhaps not too surprising, as 90% of this book is about that shadowy alphabet world of espionage, counter-espionage, counter-counter-espionage and lots of sweaty men trying to pluck the one shiny needle of truth from the haystack of rancid "intelligence" that the world of spy vs spy vs spy showers like golden rain bountifully, munificently, all over the place in this information-soaked fun-packed palace of stupefied over-eaters we call the western world. Three blind counter-terrorist agencies - see how they run - they all ran after the farmer's wife - which was a grave error as she knew very little about al-Qaeda, as it turned out, after some strenuous waterboarding.
Anyway, I couldn't hack it, it made me feel slightly ill. Too much stuff about two giant boys towns, one better dressed than the other one, but only slightly.
Dispiriting is not the word.
Disgusting may be.
This has been another bad-tempered rant from your friend Paul Bryant of Nottingham. He ought to know better, but he doesn't.
Thank you for your patience.
Turns out you can be geeky and tedious about 9/11 too. But perhaps not too surprising, as 90% of this book is about that shadowy alphabet world of espionage, counter-espionage, counter-counter-espionage and lots of sweaty men trying to pluck the one shiny needle of truth from the haystack of rancid "intelligence" that the world of spy vs spy vs spy showers like golden rain bountifully, munificently, all over the place in this information-soaked fun-packed palace of stupefied over-eaters we call the western world. Three blind counter-terrorist agencies - see how they run - they all ran after the farmer's wife - which was a grave error as she knew very little about al-Qaeda, as it turned out, after some strenuous waterboarding.
Anyway, I couldn't hack it, it made me feel slightly ill. Too much stuff about two giant boys towns, one better dressed than the other one, but only slightly.
Dispiriting is not the word.
Disgusting may be.
This has been another bad-tempered rant from your friend Paul Bryant of Nottingham. He ought to know better, but he doesn't.
Thank you for your patience.
August 14, 2013
البروج المشيدة
حصل هذا الكتاب على جائزة البوليتزر للعام 2007 م، وقد استقى مؤلفه الأمريكي (لورانس رايت) العنوان من الآية القرآنية (أَيْنَمَا تَكُونُوا يُدْرِكْكُمُ الْمَوْتُ وَلَوْ كُنْتُمْ فِي بُرُوجٍ مُشَيَّدَةٍ)، وفي إشارة كذلك للبروج المشيدة التي ضربتها القاعدة في 11 سبتمبر، الكتاب رحلة تفصيلية مكتوبة برشاقة، لتنقلك من بدايات بروز الفكر الذي استند عليه تنظيم القاعدة، من سيد قطب، إلى أيمن الظواهري ومن ثم أسامة بن لادن، ليصل إلى الجهاد الأفغاني، وما تلاه بعد ذلك من القصة المعروفة، يتميز الكتاب بنفسه الروائي، فهو يتناول شخصية محددة ويخصص لها فصل أو أكثر، بحيث يجعلك تتعرف على الأحداث والشخصيات بشكل مترابط، وهو جهد استغرق من المؤلف خمس سنوات، ومقابلات مع 600 شخص ممن عاصروا الأحداث أو عايشوها.
تبهرك قدرة المؤلف على تتبع التفاصيل، وتشعر بأنك لأول مرة تمتلك الصورة الكاملة لما حدث، ولكن رغم إعجابي بالكتاب إلا أنني أدرك موطن ضعفه، فالكتاب في سبيل عرض قصة تنظيم القاعدة بصورة روائية، يتجاهل الامتدادات التشعبية التي ستفسد عليه الرواية، وهو المأزق الذي يقع فيه كثير من المؤلفين ويجعل كتبهم تبدو كبحر جارف من الشخصيات والأحداث التي تختلط تماماً بعد عدة فصول، ولا تخرج منها إلا بالقليل، خيار المؤلف منح الكتاب الجماهيرية التي يحتاجها، ولكنك تدرك وأنت تنتهي منه، أنه لم يتحدث تفصيلياً إلا عن ابن لادن والظواهري فقط، وأنه لم يتناول تنظيم القاعدة، ولا عملياته الرئيسية وكيف تمت، حتى 11 سبتمبر لم يتطرق لها بالتفصيل، إنه فقط يريد أن يخبرك بالرحلة التي انتهت بانهيار مركز التجارة العالمي، من دون أن يفصل حول شخصيات قيادية ومهمة في التنظيم مثل خالد شيخ محمد، إن الكتاب يبدو وكأنه أخذ معلوماتك الأساسية المشتتة والتي استقيتها ��ن عدة كتب، وأعاد ترتيبها وتنظيمها، وزودها بتفاصيل أوسع، وأعادها إليك، وظلت الفجوات الضخمة التي كنت تتوقع أن يسدها لك الكتاب قائمة، كما لاحظت في الكتاب أيضاً تبنيه للقصة السعودية حول شخصية ابن لادن، وهي أنه مغرر به من قبل المصريين، وهو ليس إلا شاب ثري متحمس، انتهت به حماسته إلى ما نعرف.
الكتاب رغم انتقاداتي له لا يفوت.
حصل هذا الكتاب على جائزة البوليتزر للعام 2007 م، وقد استقى مؤلفه الأمريكي (لورانس رايت) العنوان من الآية القرآنية (أَيْنَمَا تَكُونُوا يُدْرِكْكُمُ الْمَوْتُ وَلَوْ كُنْتُمْ فِي بُرُوجٍ مُشَيَّدَةٍ)، وفي إشارة كذلك للبروج المشيدة التي ضربتها القاعدة في 11 سبتمبر، الكتاب رحلة تفصيلية مكتوبة برشاقة، لتنقلك من بدايات بروز الفكر الذي استند عليه تنظيم القاعدة، من سيد قطب، إلى أيمن الظواهري ومن ثم أسامة بن لادن، ليصل إلى الجهاد الأفغاني، وما تلاه بعد ذلك من القصة المعروفة، يتميز الكتاب بنفسه الروائي، فهو يتناول شخصية محددة ويخصص لها فصل أو أكثر، بحيث يجعلك تتعرف على الأحداث والشخصيات بشكل مترابط، وهو جهد استغرق من المؤلف خمس سنوات، ومقابلات مع 600 شخص ممن عاصروا الأحداث أو عايشوها.
تبهرك قدرة المؤلف على تتبع التفاصيل، وتشعر بأنك لأول مرة تمتلك الصورة الكاملة لما حدث، ولكن رغم إعجابي بالكتاب إلا أنني أدرك موطن ضعفه، فالكتاب في سبيل عرض قصة تنظيم القاعدة بصورة روائية، يتجاهل الامتدادات التشعبية التي ستفسد عليه الرواية، وهو المأزق الذي يقع فيه كثير من المؤلفين ويجعل كتبهم تبدو كبحر جارف من الشخصيات والأحداث التي تختلط تماماً بعد عدة فصول، ولا تخرج منها إلا بالقليل، خيار المؤلف منح الكتاب الجماهيرية التي يحتاجها، ولكنك تدرك وأنت تنتهي منه، أنه لم يتحدث تفصيلياً إلا عن ابن لادن والظواهري فقط، وأنه لم يتناول تنظيم القاعدة، ولا عملياته الرئيسية وكيف تمت، حتى 11 سبتمبر لم يتطرق لها بالتفصيل، إنه فقط يريد أن يخبرك بالرحلة التي انتهت بانهيار مركز التجارة العالمي، من دون أن يفصل حول شخصيات قيادية ومهمة في التنظيم مثل خالد شيخ محمد، إن الكتاب يبدو وكأنه أخذ معلوماتك الأساسية المشتتة والتي استقيتها ��ن عدة كتب، وأعاد ترتيبها وتنظيمها، وزودها بتفاصيل أوسع، وأعادها إليك، وظلت الفجوات الضخمة التي كنت تتوقع أن يسدها لك الكتاب قائمة، كما لاحظت في الكتاب أيضاً تبنيه للقصة السعودية حول شخصية ابن لادن، وهي أنه مغرر به من قبل المصريين، وهو ليس إلا شاب ثري متحمس، انتهت به حماسته إلى ما نعرف.
الكتاب رغم انتقاداتي له لا يفوت.
July 29, 2015
Two themes run through the book. First is the development of radical Islamist movements particularly in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan culminating in the formation of al-Queda. Included in the story are detailed accounts of the lives of Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and their ideological predecessor Sayyid Qutb. Second is the disjointed response of the CIA, FBI and national security apparatus in Washington to counter al-Queda and similar groups. American efforts are rendered ineffective by personality feuds, political infighting and protection of jurisdictional turf. As a case in point we get the personal story of John O’Neill, his love lives, and his abrupt off-putting and endearing behaviors that won allies and created enemies. O’Neill is a polarizing figure who the author feels had the right stuff to uncover the plot if left to his own devices. My take is he was the wrong man for the job, incapable of inducing cooperation and lacking the deftness to break through bureaucratic tangles.
The book is a compelling read. Wright sprinkles in personal details about the protagonists to keep the narrative eminently human. Between the machinations of the various terrorist groups and Washington agencies we are always finding out something about the private lives of O’Neill, bin Laden and his widely extended family, as well as the character shaping events in the lives of al-Zawahiri and Qutb. This personal touch and straight forward journalistic style make Wright’s history very accessible. But more important is the message, the shifting nature of terrorism, always morphing, always challenging established thought and practices and the total inadequacy of America’s institutions to keep pace short of a massive military response. Based on this account, America’s intelligence agencies were in need of deep reform and restructuring. Hopefully action has been taken to make America’s counter terrorism agencies work together effectively because, as we look around us fourteen years after 9-11, the need has never been greater.
The book is a compelling read. Wright sprinkles in personal details about the protagonists to keep the narrative eminently human. Between the machinations of the various terrorist groups and Washington agencies we are always finding out something about the private lives of O’Neill, bin Laden and his widely extended family, as well as the character shaping events in the lives of al-Zawahiri and Qutb. This personal touch and straight forward journalistic style make Wright’s history very accessible. But more important is the message, the shifting nature of terrorism, always morphing, always challenging established thought and practices and the total inadequacy of America’s institutions to keep pace short of a massive military response. Based on this account, America’s intelligence agencies were in need of deep reform and restructuring. Hopefully action has been taken to make America’s counter terrorism agencies work together effectively because, as we look around us fourteen years after 9-11, the need has never been greater.
September 18, 2021
I am just being honest now. I don’t have the energy to write the review that this book deserves. I an giving myself a break that I need. Here follow just a few short words.
What the title promises is fulfilled. You get, in fact, a comprehensive review of how terrorism has developed since the Second World War. The book has in-depth biographical portraits. The history leading to 9/11 is clearly and thoroughly covered. The coverage of 9/11 is well written too. There is not an excess of detail.
Terror is not glorified—events are not drawn in a manner to raise excitement. Facts are presented to enhance an understanding of events. The style is journalistic, factual and clear. The Arabic names are not always simple to keep straight for a Westerner. Nevertheless, in my view, the author provides adequate information making each individual unique—both private and public attributes are mentioned.
I am glad to have read this book. A book such as this could have been extremely distressing. I find it balanced in its presentation. Its purpose is to educate, and it does this well.
The author reads the audiobook. He reads slowly and clearly. In my view, the narration is excellent. I gave the narration four stars, but maybe it deserves five.
Seriously, this book is very well written. Maybe it is worthy of a whopping five stars, despite that its topic is so grim. I highly recommend it. You will not regret having read it.
What the title promises is fulfilled. You get, in fact, a comprehensive review of how terrorism has developed since the Second World War. The book has in-depth biographical portraits. The history leading to 9/11 is clearly and thoroughly covered. The coverage of 9/11 is well written too. There is not an excess of detail.
Terror is not glorified—events are not drawn in a manner to raise excitement. Facts are presented to enhance an understanding of events. The style is journalistic, factual and clear. The Arabic names are not always simple to keep straight for a Westerner. Nevertheless, in my view, the author provides adequate information making each individual unique—both private and public attributes are mentioned.
I am glad to have read this book. A book such as this could have been extremely distressing. I find it balanced in its presentation. Its purpose is to educate, and it does this well.
The author reads the audiobook. He reads slowly and clearly. In my view, the narration is excellent. I gave the narration four stars, but maybe it deserves five.
Seriously, this book is very well written. Maybe it is worthy of a whopping five stars, despite that its topic is so grim. I highly recommend it. You will not regret having read it.
June 9, 2018
I have a morbid fascination with terrorism and the reasons people behind it do what they do, but I have always wanted to learn more about their motivations and the ties to religion. It's crucial in today's world that more of us have an understanding of why this is happening, especially with events such as 9/11. Religion, politics and foreign policy are all of interest to me, all three feature in "The Looming Tower" in a large way.
Make no mistake, this is a challenging read! It could be categorised as a "non-fiction thriller" as it is a compelling and information rich book. I also found it highly thought-provoking and an eye- opener, Lawrence Wright certainly knows his stuff. The writing is exquisite and immensely detailed from the word go. Wright has clearly done a lot of research on this topic
I had no idea that the book had been made into a TV series but I plan on watching it and seeing how it compares to this. It is a topic that more people should be interested in learning, as it does impact us all and will for the foreseeable future.
Many thanks to Penguin Books (UK) for an ARC. I was not required to post a review and all thoughts and opinions expressed are my own.
Make no mistake, this is a challenging read! It could be categorised as a "non-fiction thriller" as it is a compelling and information rich book. I also found it highly thought-provoking and an eye- opener, Lawrence Wright certainly knows his stuff. The writing is exquisite and immensely detailed from the word go. Wright has clearly done a lot of research on this topic
I had no idea that the book had been made into a TV series but I plan on watching it and seeing how it compares to this. It is a topic that more people should be interested in learning, as it does impact us all and will for the foreseeable future.
Many thanks to Penguin Books (UK) for an ARC. I was not required to post a review and all thoughts and opinions expressed are my own.
September 30, 2021
This is a tremendously impressive book. Lawrence Wright shows us what a determined, intelligent, and careful journalist can do. Just five years after that fateful day in 2001, he wrote a narrative about the events leading up to, and people responsible for, the attack that is as gripping as any crime drama (which, as it happens, this book was eventually transformed into). If news is the first draft of history, this account is well on its way to becoming the fair copy.
Very often—particularly in the many sections on Bin Laden—I found myself wondering how Wright, a mere civilian journalist, was able to collect so much information. In the midst of a massive military invasion, and one of the biggest manhunts in history, Wright somehow interviewed several members of Bin Laden’s inner circle. He also does a fine job in taking us inside the American Intelligence services, particularly the FBI. As far as lessons go, he concurs with the 9/11 Commission in concluding that a lack of cooperation between the FBI and CIA opened the door to the attack.
All this being said, this is very much a micro view of the attack, focusing on a handful of people and their personal decisions. Though the wider historical context is roughly painted in, by the end the book largely boils down to a good guy vs bad guy story—which is very fun to read, of course, but not necessarily the best way to approach this historical turning-point. But it would be unfair to ask Wright to do everything at once. What he has set out to do—write the story of the people directly responsible for 9/11—he has done, with considerably aplomb. I certainly learned a great deal.
Now, twenty years later, it is disturbing to consider how incredibly successful the attack turned out to be. It was Bin Laden’s express goal to prompt a U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, which he thought would be just as costly and unsuccessful as the U.S.S.R. invasion. It is clear that he was correct. We even threw in another military debacle (Iraq), free of charge. Hopefully, this does not mean that America will meet the same fate as the Soviet Union. Time will tell.
Very often—particularly in the many sections on Bin Laden—I found myself wondering how Wright, a mere civilian journalist, was able to collect so much information. In the midst of a massive military invasion, and one of the biggest manhunts in history, Wright somehow interviewed several members of Bin Laden’s inner circle. He also does a fine job in taking us inside the American Intelligence services, particularly the FBI. As far as lessons go, he concurs with the 9/11 Commission in concluding that a lack of cooperation between the FBI and CIA opened the door to the attack.
All this being said, this is very much a micro view of the attack, focusing on a handful of people and their personal decisions. Though the wider historical context is roughly painted in, by the end the book largely boils down to a good guy vs bad guy story—which is very fun to read, of course, but not necessarily the best way to approach this historical turning-point. But it would be unfair to ask Wright to do everything at once. What he has set out to do—write the story of the people directly responsible for 9/11—he has done, with considerably aplomb. I certainly learned a great deal.
Now, twenty years later, it is disturbing to consider how incredibly successful the attack turned out to be. It was Bin Laden’s express goal to prompt a U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, which he thought would be just as costly and unsuccessful as the U.S.S.R. invasion. It is clear that he was correct. We even threw in another military debacle (Iraq), free of charge. Hopefully, this does not mean that America will meet the same fate as the Soviet Union. Time will tell.
January 12, 2022
This is a very readable account of the growth of Islamic militancy. This is given from the perspective of life in the Arab states and the different personalities involved. It starts with Sayyid Qutb’s visit to the United States in the late 1940’s and the subsequent publication of his books espousing fundamentalist Islam. This version of Islam hardly recognizes any of the social transformations that have taken place in the world in the last 1200 years (since the death of Mohammed). The author then describes the life of Ayman al-Zawahiri (like Qutb an Egyptian) who also became an Islamist favouring a Sharia state. Lawrence Wright then moves on to Bin laden’s early life in Saudi Arabia and events there. Ayman al-Zawahiri came to influence Osama Bin Laden.
The level of violence in Egypt and Saudi Arabia between the government and religious groups is astounding. Both groups vie for power and control by any means necessary. Fundamentalist Islamists assassinated Anwar Sadat in broad daylight. After, predictably, thousands of Islamists were incarcerated. Violence spread and was justified by various interpretations of the Quran – for the killing of innocent people – children, women, apostates. These justifications later evolved to the glorification of suicide in killing people.
There is an attempt to blame the FBI and the CIA for being negligent in putting together the pieces of the puzzle that led to September 11/2001. Only a small minority within these two organizations were convinced of the dangers of Islamic militancy to the U.S. This aspect on the failures of U.S. intelligence seemed to be an afterthought when writing the book. Was it necessary to describe the girlfriends of John O’Neill?
But on all other fronts this is an excellent account of the growing turbulence in the Middle East and how it became global.
The level of violence in Egypt and Saudi Arabia between the government and religious groups is astounding. Both groups vie for power and control by any means necessary. Fundamentalist Islamists assassinated Anwar Sadat in broad daylight. After, predictably, thousands of Islamists were incarcerated. Violence spread and was justified by various interpretations of the Quran – for the killing of innocent people – children, women, apostates. These justifications later evolved to the glorification of suicide in killing people.
There is an attempt to blame the FBI and the CIA for being negligent in putting together the pieces of the puzzle that led to September 11/2001. Only a small minority within these two organizations were convinced of the dangers of Islamic militancy to the U.S. This aspect on the failures of U.S. intelligence seemed to be an afterthought when writing the book. Was it necessary to describe the girlfriends of John O’Neill?
But on all other fronts this is an excellent account of the growing turbulence in the Middle East and how it became global.
September 21, 2018
This book was very good and very interesting, but I want to do something different and do a double review. I like to read several books at a time and it just so happened that I read this book at the same time as I read the book "Bring the War Home" by Kathleen Belew and I was struck by how similar Al Qaeda was to the white power paramilitary in the US. There are obvious differences, but there are more similarities than you would expect. So here's what I observed of both movements:
1. Both are run by men who feel disaffected and feel like their society has lost its way. Al Qaeda resists the push of modernity on Islam and the white power groups resist the Civil Rights movements changes and feminism in the 60s.
2. Both movements believe in strict gender roles and view men as hyper masculine warriors whose sole job is to protect their women from being soiled. Both view women as pure virgins to be protected. BOTH movements take on polygamy and retreat from the world into their own highly armed home spaces. The women of both movements seem to be brainwashed into the rightness and holiness of the movement the men are running.
3. Both are ostensibly rooted in religion (Al Qaeda more so), but both are perversions of the mainstream religious movement. However, the Saudi Wahabbi's are much more fundamentalists than the right wing Christian movement. Both movements glamorize a past of violence sanctioned by God. The white power movement talks about the crusades and Al Qaeda about the Islamic Caliphate.
4. Both movements are ignored by the FBI until a major act of terrorism. Timothy McVeigh's bombing of the Oklahoma city building was not as devastating as 9/11, but it was not linked to the broader white power movement. The FBI did not take the Al Qaeda threat very seriously until it was too late. After 9/11, they shifted gears quickly and snuffed it out.
5. THE MAIN SIMILARITY, which was striking to me: BOTH of these groups were used, armed, and trained by the US Defense department or CIA during the 80s to fight communists. Not Al Qaeda because they weren't formed yet, but the Taliban and the Afghani Mujahedeen that Bin Laden uses were all formerly relied on by the US to beat back the communists in Afghanistan.
In the case of the white paramilitary, the movement started in Vietnam and when these vets came back, they formed civilian contra paramilitaries and the US either used their services or turned a blind eye as these men went into Nicaragua and other central American countries and used their military training to informally wage war on commies. They also tried to kill "commies" (aka Asian immigrants trying to fish in America).
6. Both movements started with a bunch of enemies and then both honed in on one: The US federal government.
7. Obviously, both groups blame everyone else for their own problems and filled with rage.
Al Qaeda is dead, but then there was ISIS and there will be more and more of these hate-filled extremists. We have to take the threat of these men and their ideas seriously and not rely just on the FBI to take them down, but also on the political systems in which both groups embedded themselves. Obviously, the US does a much better job at rooting out the violent psychos on our own soil and failed states in the middle east do not, but it's important for Americans to distinguish between the likes of Al Qaeda and the Taliban and other Middle Eastern regimes that they don't like instead of lumping them all together. That's what gives rise to white hate groups here who think all people of color are commies.
1. Both are run by men who feel disaffected and feel like their society has lost its way. Al Qaeda resists the push of modernity on Islam and the white power groups resist the Civil Rights movements changes and feminism in the 60s.
2. Both movements believe in strict gender roles and view men as hyper masculine warriors whose sole job is to protect their women from being soiled. Both view women as pure virgins to be protected. BOTH movements take on polygamy and retreat from the world into their own highly armed home spaces. The women of both movements seem to be brainwashed into the rightness and holiness of the movement the men are running.
3. Both are ostensibly rooted in religion (Al Qaeda more so), but both are perversions of the mainstream religious movement. However, the Saudi Wahabbi's are much more fundamentalists than the right wing Christian movement. Both movements glamorize a past of violence sanctioned by God. The white power movement talks about the crusades and Al Qaeda about the Islamic Caliphate.
4. Both movements are ignored by the FBI until a major act of terrorism. Timothy McVeigh's bombing of the Oklahoma city building was not as devastating as 9/11, but it was not linked to the broader white power movement. The FBI did not take the Al Qaeda threat very seriously until it was too late. After 9/11, they shifted gears quickly and snuffed it out.
5. THE MAIN SIMILARITY, which was striking to me: BOTH of these groups were used, armed, and trained by the US Defense department or CIA during the 80s to fight communists. Not Al Qaeda because they weren't formed yet, but the Taliban and the Afghani Mujahedeen that Bin Laden uses were all formerly relied on by the US to beat back the communists in Afghanistan.
In the case of the white paramilitary, the movement started in Vietnam and when these vets came back, they formed civilian contra paramilitaries and the US either used their services or turned a blind eye as these men went into Nicaragua and other central American countries and used their military training to informally wage war on commies. They also tried to kill "commies" (aka Asian immigrants trying to fish in America).
6. Both movements started with a bunch of enemies and then both honed in on one: The US federal government.
7. Obviously, both groups blame everyone else for their own problems and filled with rage.
Al Qaeda is dead, but then there was ISIS and there will be more and more of these hate-filled extremists. We have to take the threat of these men and their ideas seriously and not rely just on the FBI to take them down, but also on the political systems in which both groups embedded themselves. Obviously, the US does a much better job at rooting out the violent psychos on our own soil and failed states in the middle east do not, but it's important for Americans to distinguish between the likes of Al Qaeda and the Taliban and other Middle Eastern regimes that they don't like instead of lumping them all together. That's what gives rise to white hate groups here who think all people of color are commies.
December 26, 2021
“Radicalism usually prospers in the gap between rising expectations and declining opportunities. This is especially true where the population is young, idle, and bored; where the art is impoverished; where entertainment—movies, theater, music—is policed or absent altogether; and where young men are set apart from the consoling and socializing presence of women.”
This Pulitzer-Prize winner encompasses a massive scope by tracing the roots of Islamic fundamentalism all the way back to the 1950s (with a few brief nods to the Crusades) and the writings of Egyptian author Sayyid Qutb as it picks up steam during the Palestinian conflict, gains traction in financing and personnel during the Russian war in Afghanistan, and rises to a fever pitch in the years leading up to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, which are not the focus of the book but rather are portrayed as a horrifying inevitability. The information within has been meticulously researched, as evidenced by the massive section of notes and sources at the back of the book, including an astonishing number of firsthand interviews with many of the players involved in the events related. The most frustrating part for readers will be the damning amount of proof that massive amounts of information about al-Qaeda acting in the United States was available to U.S. law enforcement agencies prior to the attacks but was never shared or acted upon for reasons ranging from bureaucratic indifference to political stubbornness to myopic overconfidence, as evidence by the fact that those who sounded the alarms were quickly and quietly marginalized.
"Whatever has happened to this - someday somebody will die - and wall or not - the public will not understand why we are not more effective and throwing every resource we had at certain 'problems.'"
- email from FBI Agent Steve Bongardt to FBI intelligence Analyst Dina Corsi complaining about lack of freedom to investigate Al Qaeda activity within the United States, dated August 24, 2001 - 18 days prior to the terrorist attacks of 9/11/2001
This Pulitzer-Prize winner encompasses a massive scope by tracing the roots of Islamic fundamentalism all the way back to the 1950s (with a few brief nods to the Crusades) and the writings of Egyptian author Sayyid Qutb as it picks up steam during the Palestinian conflict, gains traction in financing and personnel during the Russian war in Afghanistan, and rises to a fever pitch in the years leading up to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, which are not the focus of the book but rather are portrayed as a horrifying inevitability. The information within has been meticulously researched, as evidenced by the massive section of notes and sources at the back of the book, including an astonishing number of firsthand interviews with many of the players involved in the events related. The most frustrating part for readers will be the damning amount of proof that massive amounts of information about al-Qaeda acting in the United States was available to U.S. law enforcement agencies prior to the attacks but was never shared or acted upon for reasons ranging from bureaucratic indifference to political stubbornness to myopic overconfidence, as evidence by the fact that those who sounded the alarms were quickly and quietly marginalized.
"Whatever has happened to this - someday somebody will die - and wall or not - the public will not understand why we are not more effective and throwing every resource we had at certain 'problems.'"
- email from FBI Agent Steve Bongardt to FBI intelligence Analyst Dina Corsi complaining about lack of freedom to investigate Al Qaeda activity within the United States, dated August 24, 2001 - 18 days prior to the terrorist attacks of 9/11/2001
August 14, 2009
Thoroughly, painstakingly researched, extremely readable, well-written, riveting account of the genesis of al-Qaeda and some of the reasons why we failed to prevent 9/11 and their earlier attacks, by New Yorker contributor Wright. Long on narrative and short on analysis, although what analysis there is, is good and insightful. Wright used primary and secondary sources as well as personal interviews with hundreds of people. Where accounts differ, he explains in the endnotes that he chose one source's version over another source, though he doesn't always explain why.
The interesting tidbits are too many to note - Osama starting an a capella singing group as a youth; Osama's young sons, even in the decrepit conditions in Afghanistan, playing Nintendo; Osama's prettiest wife determined to stay in shape by jogging around the courtyard of their ramshackle abode. (In spite of these details, no, they really aren't a lot like us.)
The interesting tidbits are too many to note - Osama starting an a capella singing group as a youth; Osama's young sons, even in the decrepit conditions in Afghanistan, playing Nintendo; Osama's prettiest wife determined to stay in shape by jogging around the courtyard of their ramshackle abode. (In spite of these details, no, they really aren't a lot like us.)
March 12, 2021
لا أظن أن هناك عملاً تاريخياً يتحدث عن القاعدة من الممكن أن يضاهي ذلك العمل، يجمع بين البورتريهات الشخصية لأبطال الأحداث، وحذاقة المحقق الصحفي الذي لا يترك كبيرة أو صغيرة، ويبدو أن كتابه حقاً قد بذل جهداً واضحاً فيه للتقرب من وجهة النظر الآخرى وليس الاكتفاء بمصادر غربية، عمل ضخم ورهيب وفارق وهام بشدة
September 19, 2007
This book is really worth reading, even if you think you've had your fill of Al Queda, 9-11 et al. The histories of Bin Laden and Zawahiri are interesting and surprising, and this book really lays out how the CIA and FBI blew their chances to stop 9/11. If you're not already disgusted by them, this will get you there. Despite its depressing subject matter, the book is actually a pleasure to read, because the writing and story-telling are so good. This dude has knowledge!
April 10, 2024
3.5 ⭐️
June 22, 2020
I think it is a must read. For me, it showed once again the dangers of religion, especially when it is taken to the extreme. Same goes for all ideologies. If there is one hero in the book, it is John O'Neill, the one man who could have stopped Bin Laden. There were failures of governments, religions, human beings. All of it added up to a disaster still destroying the world.
There are discussions on Goodreads where members call it all a conspiracy of false stories. Shame on those people.
For most of the chapters we focus on one person carrying the narrative along, starting with Mohammed and Sayyid Qutb. At the time of publication, Mohammed Qutb was still living in Mecca. That tells you something.
Al-Qaeda was made up of angry but powerless young men. They felt a need for justice. They were taught to hate heretics, Shiites, America, and Israel. Other than that, they thought everyone else was wonderful.
Marginalised people found identities in mosques. I know the feeling. When I studied philosophy, I spent constant time with every religious group and center I could find. I covered them all. I always felt welcome. They draw you in and ask you to believe their version of supernaturalism.
Mohammed Atta's will gives you an idea of the hatred of women: "No pregnant woman or disbelievers should walk in my funeral or ever visit my grave. No woman should ask forgiveness of me. Those who will wash my body should wear gloves so that they do not touch my genitals."
There were a few people along the way who were concerned about events they were tracking. The failures of leaders and jealousy between departments hurt.
John O'Neill had a story about a great-grandfather who was racing another clan to touch a stone first. He was losing, so he cut off his hand and threw it at the stone to win the race.
The author feels without Bin Laden none of this would have happened. He convinced people to join him in an international goal.
Condoleeza Rice failed to give terrorism a high enough priority. I worry with all of the government haters being spread around by the crazy libertarian movement, we are destroying almost permanently our important government agencies. We will not be able to handle future crises like climate change.
The first man needing to be killed by Bin Laden was Ahmed Shah Massoud, the charismatic leader of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. If he could have lived, what might have been possible we will never know. He was the best hope for a moderate Islamist alternative to the Taliban.
The CIA blocked the FBI's investigation into the Cole attack and allowed the 9/11 plot to continue.
The dead represented 62 countries and nearly every ethnic group and religion in the entire world.
Fits in with the Quranic injunction that whoever takes a single life destroys a universe.
There are discussions on Goodreads where members call it all a conspiracy of false stories. Shame on those people.
For most of the chapters we focus on one person carrying the narrative along, starting with Mohammed and Sayyid Qutb. At the time of publication, Mohammed Qutb was still living in Mecca. That tells you something.
Al-Qaeda was made up of angry but powerless young men. They felt a need for justice. They were taught to hate heretics, Shiites, America, and Israel. Other than that, they thought everyone else was wonderful.
Marginalised people found identities in mosques. I know the feeling. When I studied philosophy, I spent constant time with every religious group and center I could find. I covered them all. I always felt welcome. They draw you in and ask you to believe their version of supernaturalism.
Mohammed Atta's will gives you an idea of the hatred of women: "No pregnant woman or disbelievers should walk in my funeral or ever visit my grave. No woman should ask forgiveness of me. Those who will wash my body should wear gloves so that they do not touch my genitals."
There were a few people along the way who were concerned about events they were tracking. The failures of leaders and jealousy between departments hurt.
John O'Neill had a story about a great-grandfather who was racing another clan to touch a stone first. He was losing, so he cut off his hand and threw it at the stone to win the race.
The author feels without Bin Laden none of this would have happened. He convinced people to join him in an international goal.
Condoleeza Rice failed to give terrorism a high enough priority. I worry with all of the government haters being spread around by the crazy libertarian movement, we are destroying almost permanently our important government agencies. We will not be able to handle future crises like climate change.
The first man needing to be killed by Bin Laden was Ahmed Shah Massoud, the charismatic leader of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. If he could have lived, what might have been possible we will never know. He was the best hope for a moderate Islamist alternative to the Taliban.
The CIA blocked the FBI's investigation into the Cole attack and allowed the 9/11 plot to continue.
The dead represented 62 countries and nearly every ethnic group and religion in the entire world.
Fits in with the Quranic injunction that whoever takes a single life destroys a universe.
September 18, 2022
Ciężko było przebrnąć. Momentami aż za bardzo szczegółowa.
February 2, 2020
This review is for the audio version.
Ugh. This was an incredibly difficult book to listen to.
When the reader got to September 11th, I had to pause several times to get my emotions under control. I remember that day. I remember being at school and watching the news and being excited. Man. Highschoolers. We were so dumb. We didn't know anything. Then my parents came to get us and we saw the actual images of people throwing themselves from the buildings and people running through the streets covered in white ash. It was awful.
I don't remember when, but I read another book about a forensic anthropologist who volunteered at the site and she talked about trying to identify the people from the leftover pieces. It was awful.
So, yeah. Reading this book was not fun at those parts.
But, actually the worst part about this book was the sheer incompetence of the American intelligence services. Seriously! They need to talk to each other! The US government had enough information to piece together that there were terrorists inside the country taking flight lessons, but the information was spread out among the FBI, CIA and NSA and they were all too busy fighting turf wars to actually talk to each other. I hope that the policies mentioned in the book are gone now, because they were seriously idiotic.
I also didn't know that the FBI agent who had been predicting Al Qaeda was going to attack retired and worked in the World Trade Center and lost his life there. That was...coincidental, to say the least.
I am glad that I read this book though. I learned a lot from it. I learned about a lot of important political figures and was able to connect the information to other things that I had read like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and American Sniper, and even some novels like Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns. I randomly clicked on an article called 'What happened to us?' about the changes in the Muslim world since 1979 and I understood exactly what it was talking about because I had enough background information to finally connect all the dots.
That's why I can't stop reading. I feel like I understand the world a little bit better with each book that I read. Even the parts that I wish I didn't know, they help me to grasp the world that I live in.
Ugh. This was an incredibly difficult book to listen to.
When the reader got to September 11th, I had to pause several times to get my emotions under control. I remember that day. I remember being at school and watching the news and being excited. Man. Highschoolers. We were so dumb. We didn't know anything. Then my parents came to get us and we saw the actual images of people throwing themselves from the buildings and people running through the streets covered in white ash. It was awful.
I don't remember when, but I read another book about a forensic anthropologist who volunteered at the site and she talked about trying to identify the people from the leftover pieces. It was awful.
So, yeah. Reading this book was not fun at those parts.
But, actually the worst part about this book was the sheer incompetence of the American intelligence services. Seriously! They need to talk to each other! The US government had enough information to piece together that there were terrorists inside the country taking flight lessons, but the information was spread out among the FBI, CIA and NSA and they were all too busy fighting turf wars to actually talk to each other. I hope that the policies mentioned in the book are gone now, because they were seriously idiotic.
I also didn't know that the FBI agent who had been predicting Al Qaeda was going to attack retired and worked in the World Trade Center and lost his life there. That was...coincidental, to say the least.
I am glad that I read this book though. I learned a lot from it. I learned about a lot of important political figures and was able to connect the information to other things that I had read like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and American Sniper, and even some novels like Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns. I randomly clicked on an article called 'What happened to us?' about the changes in the Muslim world since 1979 and I understood exactly what it was talking about because I had enough background information to finally connect all the dots.
That's why I can't stop reading. I feel like I understand the world a little bit better with each book that I read. Even the parts that I wish I didn't know, they help me to grasp the world that I live in.
March 18, 2018
This is my second or third Wright book and I’m convinced he might be one of our best historians currently working. Another phenomenal read. Truly sad stuff. Not just the topic. But to get a glimpse of how it all came about. From the horror and absurdity of religion and the extremists it breeds to the failure of bureaucracy to communicate and share data which ultimately led to the deaths of thousands of people. If you’ve ever wondered how something so twisted was allowed to happen or how someone’s mind becomes so warped they would carry out such a murder; it’s all laid out here. Recommended!
March 6, 2014
لم أقرأ كتابا تحدث عن أحداث ١١ سبتمبر بهذه الحرفية ...الكتاب قبل أن أطري على القيمة المعلوماتية التي احتوته أحببت أن أشيد على الأسلوب السردي الشيق وبراعة الترجمة به... دائما ما كنت أسأل نفسي عن مصدر الأموال التي بدأت بها بذرة القاعدة ومن هو أساس صنيعة بن لادن وأتباعه ومناصروه .....كانت الكثير من الأسئلة التي تجول في خاطري عن الأسرار الكامنة وراء هذا التنظيم التي وجدت أجوبتها المنطقية في هذا الكتاب القيم ...رائع
September 11, 2022
The Looming Tower takes its title from a verse of the Koran – one that was recited by Osama bin Laden during the weeks before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In a videotaped speech that was found on an al-Qaeda member’s computer in Hamburg, bin Laden repeatedly quoted the following verse: “Wherever you are, death will find you, even if you are in looming towers” (p. 395). It is tragically clear, in retrospect, which looming towers bin Laden had in mind.
Author Lawrence Wright won a Pulitzer Prize for this compelling and meticulously researched story of Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (the book’s subtitle). Wright’s diligent work in conducting hundreds of interviews draws a clear picture of the social, political, and historical factors that led from decades-old conflicts in obscure corners of the Middle East to the death and destruction of 9/11 at the World Trade Center, at the Pentagon, and in that field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
Western readers unfamiliar with the fine points of Islamic history will learn much from Wright’s recounting of the profound changes that wracked Saudi Arabia when the oil boom and the wealth it brought transformed life in a region where much had remained the same since the Muslims’ “Golden Age” of the 7th century A.D. For centuries, Wright suggests, “The essential experience of life on the Arabian Peninsula was that nothing changed. The eternal and the present were one and the same” (p. 99). But when change came, it was disorienting, and a number of Saudis sought refuge from that change in the fundamentalism of the Wahhabi school of Islam.
Islamist ideology, as first articulated by an eccentric and troubled Egyptian named Sayyid Qutb during the years after the Second World War, gradually gained adherents across the Muslim world; and as some Islamists began to target the United States of America, Wright argues, American law enforcement was not prepared to confront this new threat. When considering, for example, the 1993 World Trade Center attack carried out by followers of the blind Islamist cleric Omar Abdul Rahman, Wright assesses the American mindset on the eve of that attack as follows:
“Few Americans, even in the intelligence community, had any idea of the network of radical Islamists that had grown up inside the country. The blind sheikh may as well have been speaking in Martian as Arabic, since there were so few Middle East language specialists available to the FBI, much less to the local police. Even if his threats had been heard and understood, the perception of most Americans was dimmed by their general insulation from the world’s problems and clouded by the comfortable feeling that no one who lived in America would turn against it.” (p. 201)
Part of the drama of The Looming Tower inheres in the story of John O’Neill, an FBI counterterrorism chief who “was fascinated by [bin Laden] at a time when it was rare to meet anyone, even in the bureau, who knew who Osama bin Laden was” (p. 275). Wright captures well the frustration that O’Neill felt as he tried to warn anyone who might listen of the increasingly likely prospects of an al-Qaeda terrorist attack on the American homeland. O’Neill, knowing of bin Laden’s penchant for spectacular attacks with heavy symbolic significance, told friends that “We’re due” for an attack as early as the second half of 1999; and as celebrations of the new year and new millennium of 2000 unfolded in midtown Manhattan, O’Neill went to Times Square, telling White House national counterrorism coordinator Richard A. Clarke that “If they’re gonna do anything in New York, they’re gonna do it here….So I’m here” (pp. 336, 338).
O’Neill was unsuccessful in his years-long attempts to persuade his superiors to share his anxieties about Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda; he eventually retired from the FBI and took a security post at the World Trade Center. On September 10, 2001, socializing with some colleagues at the China Club in Manhattan, O’Neill “told his friends that something big was going to happen. ‘We’re overdue,’ he said again” (p. 401). The next day, he was at the Twin Towers when the planes struck.
The 2011 Vintage Books edition of The Looming Tower is particularly helpful, as Wright has a chance to reflect on new developments since the book’s original publication in 2006 – including the killing of Osama bin Laden by members of Seal Team 6 in Pakistan in 2011 – and to reflect on the changes that he has seen in the Muslim world since he taught English in his youth at the American University in Cairo.
He reflects that bin Laden failed to achieve “his central goal…to take over a Muslim country and establish a caliphate” (p. 429). Yet as of 2011, “America was sinking ever more deeply into unpromising, fantastically expensive wars in the Muslim world – following the script that had been written by bin Laden. Repeatedly, he had outlined his goal of drawing America into such conflicts with the goal of bleeding the U.S. economically and turning the War on Terror into a genuine clash of civilizations” (p. 428). How do we act against groups like al-Qaeda without taking on the role that Osama bin Laden sought to assign us?
Writing on this anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I reflect that much of what Wright wrote back in 2006 about a 2001 terrorist attack seems strongly applicable to the world of the 2020’s. Today, of course, the Islamist group about which one hears the most is ISIS, a group that claims to have established in Iraq and Syria the caliphate of which bin Laden dreamed. The question of how to deal with this ideological conflict still looms over us; and in an election season when the two major-party candidates have put forth profoundly different policy proposals for how to deal with ISIS, Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower reminds us that the question of how to ensure that democratic values prevail in a conflict with a decidedly anti-democratic adversary is a question with no easy answers.
Author Lawrence Wright won a Pulitzer Prize for this compelling and meticulously researched story of Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (the book’s subtitle). Wright’s diligent work in conducting hundreds of interviews draws a clear picture of the social, political, and historical factors that led from decades-old conflicts in obscure corners of the Middle East to the death and destruction of 9/11 at the World Trade Center, at the Pentagon, and in that field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
Western readers unfamiliar with the fine points of Islamic history will learn much from Wright’s recounting of the profound changes that wracked Saudi Arabia when the oil boom and the wealth it brought transformed life in a region where much had remained the same since the Muslims’ “Golden Age” of the 7th century A.D. For centuries, Wright suggests, “The essential experience of life on the Arabian Peninsula was that nothing changed. The eternal and the present were one and the same” (p. 99). But when change came, it was disorienting, and a number of Saudis sought refuge from that change in the fundamentalism of the Wahhabi school of Islam.
Islamist ideology, as first articulated by an eccentric and troubled Egyptian named Sayyid Qutb during the years after the Second World War, gradually gained adherents across the Muslim world; and as some Islamists began to target the United States of America, Wright argues, American law enforcement was not prepared to confront this new threat. When considering, for example, the 1993 World Trade Center attack carried out by followers of the blind Islamist cleric Omar Abdul Rahman, Wright assesses the American mindset on the eve of that attack as follows:
“Few Americans, even in the intelligence community, had any idea of the network of radical Islamists that had grown up inside the country. The blind sheikh may as well have been speaking in Martian as Arabic, since there were so few Middle East language specialists available to the FBI, much less to the local police. Even if his threats had been heard and understood, the perception of most Americans was dimmed by their general insulation from the world’s problems and clouded by the comfortable feeling that no one who lived in America would turn against it.” (p. 201)
Part of the drama of The Looming Tower inheres in the story of John O’Neill, an FBI counterterrorism chief who “was fascinated by [bin Laden] at a time when it was rare to meet anyone, even in the bureau, who knew who Osama bin Laden was” (p. 275). Wright captures well the frustration that O’Neill felt as he tried to warn anyone who might listen of the increasingly likely prospects of an al-Qaeda terrorist attack on the American homeland. O’Neill, knowing of bin Laden’s penchant for spectacular attacks with heavy symbolic significance, told friends that “We’re due” for an attack as early as the second half of 1999; and as celebrations of the new year and new millennium of 2000 unfolded in midtown Manhattan, O’Neill went to Times Square, telling White House national counterrorism coordinator Richard A. Clarke that “If they’re gonna do anything in New York, they’re gonna do it here….So I’m here” (pp. 336, 338).
O’Neill was unsuccessful in his years-long attempts to persuade his superiors to share his anxieties about Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda; he eventually retired from the FBI and took a security post at the World Trade Center. On September 10, 2001, socializing with some colleagues at the China Club in Manhattan, O’Neill “told his friends that something big was going to happen. ‘We’re overdue,’ he said again” (p. 401). The next day, he was at the Twin Towers when the planes struck.
The 2011 Vintage Books edition of The Looming Tower is particularly helpful, as Wright has a chance to reflect on new developments since the book’s original publication in 2006 – including the killing of Osama bin Laden by members of Seal Team 6 in Pakistan in 2011 – and to reflect on the changes that he has seen in the Muslim world since he taught English in his youth at the American University in Cairo.
He reflects that bin Laden failed to achieve “his central goal…to take over a Muslim country and establish a caliphate” (p. 429). Yet as of 2011, “America was sinking ever more deeply into unpromising, fantastically expensive wars in the Muslim world – following the script that had been written by bin Laden. Repeatedly, he had outlined his goal of drawing America into such conflicts with the goal of bleeding the U.S. economically and turning the War on Terror into a genuine clash of civilizations” (p. 428). How do we act against groups like al-Qaeda without taking on the role that Osama bin Laden sought to assign us?
Writing on this anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I reflect that much of what Wright wrote back in 2006 about a 2001 terrorist attack seems strongly applicable to the world of the 2020’s. Today, of course, the Islamist group about which one hears the most is ISIS, a group that claims to have established in Iraq and Syria the caliphate of which bin Laden dreamed. The question of how to deal with this ideological conflict still looms over us; and in an election season when the two major-party candidates have put forth profoundly different policy proposals for how to deal with ISIS, Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower reminds us that the question of how to ensure that democratic values prevail in a conflict with a decidedly anti-democratic adversary is a question with no easy answers.
September 11, 2019
Informative. Exciting. Revelatory. Thought-provoking. Powerful. I could use a slew of words and phrases to describe The Looming Tower, but to no avail could I ever begin to satisfactorily convey to the proper extent exactly how magnificent this book was from start to finish.
The Looming Tower is unlike any other non-fiction book I have read thus far, for it read as though it were the work of one of literature's most prominent and accomplished storytellers of the same vein as F. Scott Fitzgerald or Edith Wharton – not necessarily in terms of writing style, but rather in sheer narrative scope and power. I was wholly captivated in a story unlike any other thanks to Wright's stellar writing and storytelling abilities. The people in the book were fleshed out so well that, at times, I nearly forgot I was reading non-fiction. From bin Laden and the al-Qaeda operatives directly involved in the terror attacks, to John O'Neill and his fellow FBI agents dedicated to the prevention of such diabolical plots, every single person was written in a humanizing fashion to such a degree that I was able to fully understand how and why the attacks on September 11 took place, and furthermore why it was not prevented. Were it not for the refined writing that made these people seemingly jump right out of the page with every sentence, the effect of the book would have been entirely lost on me, and it would have read no differently than a textbook. Truly, Wright's engrossing narrative makes such a complex historical matter exhilarating even to those who are the most averse to American history as a subject.
Not only was this book written exceptionally well, but it was also expertly researched. The investigative effort on Wright's part deserves the highest praises, for it seems as though not a single minute detail had been omitted in the telling of this harrowing American tragedy. Anything remotely related to the September 11 attacks is covered in stunning detail, but not in an overwhelming fashion that tends to bore readers. Every substantive link to the attacks was discussed from the unassuming origin of the radical Islamic movement against the United States up until the days following the collapse of the Twin Towers and destruction of the Pentagon. Not a single major moment was overlooked, much to the benefit of this book's value. What I found to be truly commendable was how objectively the author was able to present these details to the reader, seeing as how 9/11 was both heartbreaking and infuriating for any American to have to recount without constantly recalling strong emotions of anger, hatred, scorn, or bitterness at each utterance of "al-Qaeda" or "bin Laden" (I know I would not have been able to hold my tongue so well). That is not to say that Wright in any way, shape, or form sympathized with the terrorists at any point in his book due to his lack of personal input. Rather, he presented the facts from both perspectives in an unbiased and professional manner, thus making his work much more credible in the process. Anybody could write a hate-piece directed against al-Qaeda and bin Laden for the evils they have committed, but it takes an especially skilled and disciplined writer to get people to see the bigger picture of this tragedy – unabated by our personal sentiments regarding that fateful day.
At no point in the book was I emotionally detached from what was going on. I experienced a litany of emotions in response to what I was reading. I felt rage. I felt heartbreak. I felt worry, anxiety, inspiration, and wonderment. Never did I feel indifferent or apathetic to the story being told. That once again speaks to how phenomenally written The Looming Tower is.
The attacks on 9/11 have always personally affected me, despite my being only five years old at the time it took place. The fact that one of my earliest memories is coming home from school to see my mom crying while watching the news is a testament to how impactful this tragedy has been to me. That is why I am so pleased that The Looming Tower was written with such dignity and respect. This fine book opted to be an honest and informative history lesson with heart rather than be a cold attempt at prying money out of the hands of patriotic Americans yearning for that ever-so elusive answer to the question of how and why we left ourselves vulnerable to such unspeakable atrocities. Lawrence Wright accomplishes something spectacular by delivering a definitive answer to that question without pandering to the lowest common denominator. This could easily have been a manipulative cash-grab that preyed on the patriotic Americans whom 9/11 personally affected, but thankfully The Looming Tower carried itself with dignity and poise the whole way through and did each American an invaluable service in the process.
With my highest approval, I recommend this book to everyone regardless of their reading preferences. In the age of widespread terrorism, The Looming Tower educates its readers on the origins of this global affront against the civilized world and also to the general theme of how deep seated hatred can breed catastrophe if left to fester for so long. The book's teachings feel just as relevant today, if not more so, than back in 2001. The Looming Tower should be required reading for every American so that the horrors of that fateful September morning will never be forgotten.
The Looming Tower is unlike any other non-fiction book I have read thus far, for it read as though it were the work of one of literature's most prominent and accomplished storytellers of the same vein as F. Scott Fitzgerald or Edith Wharton – not necessarily in terms of writing style, but rather in sheer narrative scope and power. I was wholly captivated in a story unlike any other thanks to Wright's stellar writing and storytelling abilities. The people in the book were fleshed out so well that, at times, I nearly forgot I was reading non-fiction. From bin Laden and the al-Qaeda operatives directly involved in the terror attacks, to John O'Neill and his fellow FBI agents dedicated to the prevention of such diabolical plots, every single person was written in a humanizing fashion to such a degree that I was able to fully understand how and why the attacks on September 11 took place, and furthermore why it was not prevented. Were it not for the refined writing that made these people seemingly jump right out of the page with every sentence, the effect of the book would have been entirely lost on me, and it would have read no differently than a textbook. Truly, Wright's engrossing narrative makes such a complex historical matter exhilarating even to those who are the most averse to American history as a subject.
Not only was this book written exceptionally well, but it was also expertly researched. The investigative effort on Wright's part deserves the highest praises, for it seems as though not a single minute detail had been omitted in the telling of this harrowing American tragedy. Anything remotely related to the September 11 attacks is covered in stunning detail, but not in an overwhelming fashion that tends to bore readers. Every substantive link to the attacks was discussed from the unassuming origin of the radical Islamic movement against the United States up until the days following the collapse of the Twin Towers and destruction of the Pentagon. Not a single major moment was overlooked, much to the benefit of this book's value. What I found to be truly commendable was how objectively the author was able to present these details to the reader, seeing as how 9/11 was both heartbreaking and infuriating for any American to have to recount without constantly recalling strong emotions of anger, hatred, scorn, or bitterness at each utterance of "al-Qaeda" or "bin Laden" (I know I would not have been able to hold my tongue so well). That is not to say that Wright in any way, shape, or form sympathized with the terrorists at any point in his book due to his lack of personal input. Rather, he presented the facts from both perspectives in an unbiased and professional manner, thus making his work much more credible in the process. Anybody could write a hate-piece directed against al-Qaeda and bin Laden for the evils they have committed, but it takes an especially skilled and disciplined writer to get people to see the bigger picture of this tragedy – unabated by our personal sentiments regarding that fateful day.
At no point in the book was I emotionally detached from what was going on. I experienced a litany of emotions in response to what I was reading. I felt rage. I felt heartbreak. I felt worry, anxiety, inspiration, and wonderment. Never did I feel indifferent or apathetic to the story being told. That once again speaks to how phenomenally written The Looming Tower is.
The attacks on 9/11 have always personally affected me, despite my being only five years old at the time it took place. The fact that one of my earliest memories is coming home from school to see my mom crying while watching the news is a testament to how impactful this tragedy has been to me. That is why I am so pleased that The Looming Tower was written with such dignity and respect. This fine book opted to be an honest and informative history lesson with heart rather than be a cold attempt at prying money out of the hands of patriotic Americans yearning for that ever-so elusive answer to the question of how and why we left ourselves vulnerable to such unspeakable atrocities. Lawrence Wright accomplishes something spectacular by delivering a definitive answer to that question without pandering to the lowest common denominator. This could easily have been a manipulative cash-grab that preyed on the patriotic Americans whom 9/11 personally affected, but thankfully The Looming Tower carried itself with dignity and poise the whole way through and did each American an invaluable service in the process.
With my highest approval, I recommend this book to everyone regardless of their reading preferences. In the age of widespread terrorism, The Looming Tower educates its readers on the origins of this global affront against the civilized world and also to the general theme of how deep seated hatred can breed catastrophe if left to fester for so long. The book's teachings feel just as relevant today, if not more so, than back in 2001. The Looming Tower should be required reading for every American so that the horrors of that fateful September morning will never be forgotten.
October 4, 2023
يقتبس هذا الكتاب عنوانه من الآية الكريمة "أينما تكونوا يدرككم الموت ولو كنتم في بروج مشيدة"، يقدم فيه تفاصيل أحداث سبتمبر التي هزت العالم بمفاجأة غيرت مسار التاريخ. وقد فاز مؤلفه الصحافي لورانس رايت بجائزة بوليتزر العالمية. كناب لا غنى عنه لكل مهتم بمجال التاريخ والسياسة.
March 23, 2022
I picked up this book shortly after it was released in '06 and it quickly became the cornerstone of my top five books* you must read to understand America's enemy in the world today. A wonderful and engaging book that I can't recommend highly enough.
*the other four book are:
America Alone - Mark Steyn
While Europe Slept - Bruce Bawer
The Pentagon's New Map - Thomas P.M. Barnett
Guests Of The Ayatollah - Mark Bowden
*the other four book are:
America Alone - Mark Steyn
While Europe Slept - Bruce Bawer
The Pentagon's New Map - Thomas P.M. Barnett
Guests Of The Ayatollah - Mark Bowden
July 25, 2009
يتتبع الكتاب (البرج المشيّد) قصة القاعدة منذ بدايات التنظيمات الجهادية في مصر، رابطاً بين نشأتها وفكر سيد قطب مروراً بتنظيمات الجهاد والتكفير والهجرة والجماعة الإسلامية. طبعاً كان هناك تركيز على قصة حياة أسامة بن لادن. وما يميز السرد أنه مقسم لأكثر من بيوغرافي أو قصة منفصلة ومتداخلة معاً. قصة أسرة ابن لادن. قصة الصحوة بالمملكة، قصة الجماعات الإسلامية في مصر، قصة (جون أونيل) محقق الإف بي آي المسؤول عن ملاحقة ابن لادن، قصة أفغانستان، وعلاقة أميركا بذلك كله. ما يميز الكتاب هو ربطه المتقن والسلس بين القصص التي نعرفها كلنا. بما فيها العمليات الشهيرة ضد الأهداف الأميركية ودور أميركا في السعودية و��فغانستان والسودان والبلقان وإيران.. إلخ. مع حقائق مدهشة بخصوص الأفغان العرب والجهاديين. ستخرج من الكتاب بانطباعين: أولاً أن أسامة بن لادن قد تم استغلاله من قبل الجماعات المصرية (بالذات ا��ظواهري) . أنه قد تم التعامل معه كمجرد مصدر تمويل لمشروعهم هم ثم ولما فشل هذاالمشروع قاموا بتبني فكرته المجنونة (القاعدة) وتجييرها لصالح رؤاهم هم. هذا لا يبرئه لكنه ينزع عنه معظم هالة العظمة التي تحوطه. ثانياً: يحمل الكتاب على أجهزة الأمن الأميركية ويكشف مقدار البيروقراطية والعلاقة التنافسية الصبيانية بين رؤوسه والتي سيطرت عليها والتي قادتها في النهاية للفشل الذريع في تفادي أحداث ١١ سبتمبر برغم كل المؤشرات الواضحة وبالرغم من تحذيرات الاستخبارات السعودية بالذات.. اليمين الأميركي المتطرف والمحافظون الجدد ليسوا سوى حلقة صغيرة وأخيرة في سلسلة طويلة من الأحداث والشخوص. الكتاب حافل أيضاً بتفاصيل علاقات الأشخاص بالأحداث.. جمال خاشقجي وجمال خليفة وتركي الفيصل وحسن الترابي وغيرهم كثير. هذا كتاب لا يكشف أسراراً لكنه يقدم رؤية شاملة للصورة.
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