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

Rating: - Lacking Key Information
I flipped through this book a while back, and simply went to the index to find some key figures in the 911 attacks... like General Mahmoud Ahmad or Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, the funders of the 911 attacks. Without information like who paid, this book is rendered as useless as the 911 Commision Report.

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Rating: - Awesome
I wanted to respond to the reviewer who said the Bin Laden of the book wouldn't have denied the 9/11 bombings right after they happened. Remember, he does say in the book that Bin Laden denied the bombings of the East African embassies right after they happened. So I don't think the argument that Wright carefully omitted facts to make Bin Laden into a stock movie villain holds much water. In fact, Hollywood would never dare offer the portrait Wright offers. Bin Laden is far from a cartoonish villian in this book. In fact, the most startling parts are the descriptions of him with his family, friends, etc. Or the episode where he changed his mind about going to Yemen as a teenager when his mother cried about him leaving Saudi Arabia. Also, a cartoonish villain would not have been portrayed as mostly a joke in the Afghan war against the Soviets. Or, far from the stock evil genius of Hollywood, Wright includes this depiction by his young friend from Sudan: "I loved that man by that time because of so many ideas I see in him. There was no hypocrisy in his character. No divergence between what he says and what he does. Unfortunately, his IQ was not that great". This Osama is as much a Don Quixote as a Genghis Khan--a (perhaps) well meaning guy not smart enough to see through his own corruption of the true and pure Islam he thought he was protecting.

This is the most 3 dimensional view of Bin Laden that I'm aware of--and that's what made this book so spellbinding. The bad guys aren't all good and the good guys aren't all good--i.e.: John O'Neill is shown as a tad shady.

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Rating: - An Eye Opening Account of the Events That Led to the 9/11 Attacks
Lawrence Wright's "The Looming Tower" is a richly detailed account of the people and events that led to the World Trade Center attacks on September 11 2001. Wright provides insight into the philosophy that drove the al-Qaeda and towards its extremist charter.
The book also starkly lays bare the inept handling of intelligence by the CIA, poor decisions that let the al-Qaeda get away with missteps in its planning and execution.

I do feel the book could have benefited from a study of the 9/11 hijackers themselves - it focuses mostly on the al-Qaeda's founders and management and not sufficiently on the men who actually carried out the attacks. Perhaps in a later book?

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Rating: - MUST READ BOOK!
If you ever wanted to better understand where and how modern terrorism all started and how it links to the two embassy bombings in Africa, the USS COLE bombing in Yemen, the 1st WTC bombing and finally to 9/11/01, this book very clearly explains the linkages, the people, organizations and the histories & ideologies of all the players. It also follows the people were working to prevent 9/11 and the obstacles and frustrations they encountered each step of the way. This book was impossible to put down from the very first page to the final chapter. A great read.

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Rating: - An Informative, Devastating, Essential Book
It's encouraging that this is the #1 book on the topic of 9/11 in Amazon. It deserves to be. Not content with depicting the terrible events of 9/11, Wright brilliantly and logically draws out the origins of the nihilist religious movement that formed the ideological motor of 9/11. The roots of 9/11 are twofold: in the writings of Egyptian expatriate Sayyid Qutb, who ironically wrote his most inflammatory works while an academic guest in Colorado (some of Qutb's works form the Mein Kampf of Islamic extremism); and the toxic Wahhabi Muslim sect in Saudi Arabia. When you finish the chapters on these topics, you will thoroughly understand the repellent underpinnings of Saudi-specific culture, which in fact have very little to do with the humane face of Islam.

Obviously, the central figure in this book is Osama Bin Laden, and you will also find yourself knowing more than perhaps you really wanted to know about this unusually prolific mass-murderer. In Qutb's and Bin Laden's world, the deaths of innocent Muslims are of no more value than blowing your nose in a Kleenex.

The ultimate issue exposed beyond debate in this book is the calamitous incompetence of the CIA, coupled with the hidebound bureaucratic stupidity pervading all levels of the FBI, with its institutional rigidity and lack of acceptance of technology. The lion's share of the blame for the failure of the United States to forestall the attacks really has to be laid at the doors of President Bill Clinton and his CIA directors, who were responsible for the policies disallowing the CIA from sharing any intelligence information whatever with law enforcement authorities inside the US. Secondary blame has to be laid at the door of the Bush Administration, who had ample warning of impending attacks and had absolutely no interest in proceeding even with the lamentably weak anti-terrorism policies of the Clinton administration.

But, ultimately, as I've noted, the CIA is really to blame as an institution for allowing the 9/11 attacks to succeed. It leaves an indelible impression of decadence and decline in America, and that particular institution should be disbanded and those CIA functionaries who did not share vital information with the FBI really should be thrown in prison for the rest of their lives, starting with ex-Director Tenet. There is no excuse for such meretricious incompetence. Absolutely none. My fondest hope is that one or two of the people mentioned in the book as having committed these acts of arrogant stupidity will read these words or those of others on this page. These CIA people have as much blood on their hands as Bin Laden, as far as I'm concerned.

Can you tell I'm really, really angry with these people? You will be too, by the time you finish reading this book. The final chapter, "The Big Wedding," painstakingly describes the attack on the USS Cole and its aftermath, and clearly draws a direct line between that attack and the one that single-handedly (and ironically) ensured George Bush a second term. The book climaxes with a strikingly brief but utterly visual and devastating real-time narrative of the attacks as the ex-FBI man John O'Neill (another central figure in the book, who reminds me strongly of Tony Soprano if Soprano was a big-time FBI man) experienced them. This book will be read and discussed a century and more from now. It is an essential work of our time.