The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11

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.

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.

"Wherever you are, death will find you, even if you are in high towers." - Quran 4:78

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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. Upon return to Cairo his ideas had crystallized into dialectical oppositions 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 threatened the Red Sea straight 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 threat of communism had now 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.

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.

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.

8:45a. Mary Ann was running late getting out to work. I was still in bed. She was just putting her shoes on when she heard on NPR that there had been an explosion at the World Trade Center. She dashed to the TV, and when she saw the carnage woke me immediately. We were watching varied television coverage when we saw the second explosion. In the shot, from the north of the towers, it was not at first obvious what had happened. The reporter on that station (I do not recall which) thought she had seen something and had it re-run. In the upper right hand corner a dot appeared and grew slightly. It was clear that it had been the cause of the explosion in the south tower. It was also clear that this was not just a tragic explosion but a coordinated attack. Eye-witnesses had various accounts. One said he saw a small plane go into the north tower. Another swore he had seen a prop plane. We were shaken. I remember saying to M, “This means war.” We applied our attention to CBS, NBC, ABC, FOX, CNN hungry for dreaded information. Later, I heard that one of the towers had collapsed and could not believe it, presuming that some portion of the building might have toppled. It was quite jarring to see footage of the entire building collapsing in upon itself. Mary Ann was in various states of weeping at many moments this day. I heaved with near sobs myself. It was too much to take in. I tried calling my brother to see if he was ok. (He worked at Federal Plaza, only a couple of blocks from the Towers.) There was no answer. I kept trying until we finally connected. By 2 PM, after having been glued to the set for over five hours, we went out to eat.

We went to a favorite diner in Park Slope, Katina’s. On the way we ran into a neighbor who had been working in the downtown area at the time of the attack. He had been able to get out unscathed. At Katina’s the tables were filled. Every eye was on the TV that rests atop a cabinet behind the register. Giuliani was holding a news conference. There was talk about Bin Laden as a prime suspect. What would happen next?

I was scheduled to pick up my daughters from their grandparents’ house in Sheepshead Bay that evening. We arrived ahead of schedule so drove around the neighborhood, and then experienced the strangest vision of the day. The cloud from the WTC fires was very much a presence several miles southeast of the disaster. But as we drove around it appeared that there was a flock of birds heading south. It was not birds. Pieces of paper, letter sized, or at least paper that had once been letter sized wafted to the ground, some charred, in vast numbers. People on the street stopped to pick them up. I saw a child snatch one. A middle-aged lady grabbed another. People gazed upward at this unexpected precipitation. I noticed that the windshield looked as if it had been had driven a bit too close to a volcanic explosion. There was a coating of streaked soot on the glass. We got the girls at 6. The grandparents had, thankfully, been watching coverage on TV, so the girls were not hearing it for the first time from us. We later asked the girls if their mother or their grandparents had talked with them about the events of the day. They had not. We did.

It was a quiet car on the drive north. The light gray cloud from Manhattan was clear, above and in front of us at 10 o’clock, spreading from a narrow plume in the distance to a wider coverage above. Back home, we watched coverage throughout the evening. I sat on the couch with them, holding Caitie’s hand. She clung tightly. Tash, only 8 at the time, did not seem to grasp the significance, although she accepted my hand on hers. The most telling detail of Caitie’s reaction was that as the evening progressed, she acquired two of her stuffed animals and clung to them. I managed to reach my brother. He works at least some of the time at 26 Federal Plaza. I had tried earlier in the day. There was no one at home. I had also called my New York sisters hoping one of them might have heard from him. I even tried my Pennsylvania sister. All to no avail. It was nerve-wracking. Thankfully, I finally reached him. He had gotten news of the event before leaving for work. He had been scheduled to head to Edison, NJ today, not Manhattan, so he would not have been at risk in any event.

When Tash was in bed reading, Cait continued watching with us. She fell asleep on the couch. We woke her and she walked to bed. I tried to sing to Tash, “Always” from Tarzan. It seemed appropriate. I found that I was unable to sing at all. Tears seeped into my eyes and my voice caught. I told her that I was sorry, but I could not sing because the attempt made me cry. I explained to her that the attack on the World Trade Center was an attack on us all. I told her that there were people in the world who wanted to kill us just because we were Americans. [I believed that at the time, but have arrived at a more informed opinion in the years since.] Maybe we had not suffered any losses in our family, but we probably knew people who had. My brother had told me of a friend of his oldest son, a young man of 26 who had been in the Fire Department for only a year or so. He had almost certainly perished in the carnage. I told Caitie that we needed to feel for and support each other as Americans as we would as family members. On this day, we were all a family, an American family. She seemed to get at least some of this, and accepted sleep calmly.

Mary Ann had tried many times during the day to reach her brother, a teacher in Harrisburg. Finally, she got through to his school. In a major surprise, when she reached a school secretary, the secretary had her hold on while she went to fetch him. He had been, obviously, very concerned about her. Our attempts through the rest of the day to reach my sister and other relations in Pennsylvania were unavailing. We were faced with telephone company messages saying that all lines were busy.

One aspect of the day was sound. There is a normal din from the many flights that constantly overpass the city. Today there was almost none of that. Traffic noise is usually oppressive here, with trucks entering the Prospect Expressway on their way toward Manhattan. It was much less today. There were the occasional sirens of emergency vehicles, whether rushing to provide direct service themselves or accompanying convoys of volunteers. Even in this crisis Brooklyn is not a quiet place. Yet the distinct change in background din, almost a hush, was very noticeable

Remembering that day, particularly seeing images of the destruction, still makes my eyes leak. And I never look up at an airplane without having at least a passing concern about whether it is aloft with dark purpose. .

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.

Nice thriller. The sad part was it was all real.

The common theme I found in most books on international terrorist networks based in Muslim-dominated conflict zones (I could have said words like 'jihadists' or worse 'Islamists,' but that's plain stupid, and I'm not gonna explain that. Figure it out.) is that the leaders of terrorist outlets like al-Qaeda and EIJ actually believed in what they were doing. You know. Bombing and killing foreign, not-so-foreign, and Muslim kuffar. But the main guy all these Osamas and Zawahiris and alikes took inspiration from was a practically non-violent but intellectually wild Egyptian 'Islamic' scholar Sayyid Qutb.

I don't know, man. I tried to read the intellectual ramblings of this Qutb guy, but he sounded so confused and boring. Yet these morons found a genius in his ideas. Well, he was a genius in the sense that he hit these practical terrorists where it hurt them.

That's why today I see all the academics writing long-ass essays explaining one simple idea so that another stupid man out there doesn't take them too seriously. Words have unintended but definite consequences.

It sounds more like a rant than a review. Sure. But trust me, I enjoyed feeling uncomfortable and annoyed and frustrated throughout the read. You might as well.

Anyway, there's a bunch of stuff on the beef between the CIA and the FBI in the book. Their usual crap. Who's a better patriot. Whatever that means. But for that, I liked the mini-series based on the book better. If I remember it correctly, it's on Prime.

-De voluntades, sustratos, oportunidades y fracasos.-

Género. Ensayo.

Lo que nos cuenta. Tras un breve prólogo que explica muchas de las situaciones a mediados de los años noventa, relato de las vidas de varias personas, arrancando en el año 1949, cuyas reflexiones y/o acciones significaron la creación de Al-Qaeda, para continuar narrando cómo funcionaba la organización y quiénes trataron de investigarla y oponerse a ella hasta los conocidos sucesos del 11 de septiembre de 2001, con un pequeño viaje final que nos llevará hasta Afganistán en 2002.

¿Quiere saber más de este libro, sin spoilers? Visite:

http://librosdeolethros.blogspot.com/...

sent me down previously unimaginable numbers of wikipedia rabbit-holes