Books : The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Vintage)

Rating: - Get inside Osama's head
While this work is a bit didactic, Wright lays out the logic and planning of the September 11 attacks as a part of a greater plan to purify Islam. He explains the origins of this movement from the Islamic Brotherhood in Egypt, and differentiates the international role of al Qaeda (if only President Bush had asked Karen Hughes to read this book and give him an executive summary). The Looming Tower is a must read for every Westerner who plans to go out in public, and for every Muslim who is not ultra devout and loyal to OBL. Once you read it you'll understand the thinking of another religious zealot, Jeremiah Wright (no relation to the author). And you'll understand why the war on terrorism will be waged indefinitely.

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Rating: - Unlocking al-Qaeda's Conspiracy Of Hate
One of many disturbing, ironic tales Lawrence Wright shares about the evolution of Islamic terrorism in his 2006 book "The Looming Tower" is about the day Ramzi Yousef, the man who tried to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993, was finally brought to trial. Arriving by helicopter, he was nudged by a guard who pointed out the Twin Towers against the Manhattan skyline.

"You see, it's still standing," the guard said with a nudge.

"It wouldn't be if we had had more money," Yousef replied.

Osama bin Laden, as it turned out, had that money, Saudi petrodollars funneled through his father's vast contracting empire. He also had zealotry, vision, and charisma to unite a disparate group of fundamentalists and nihilists and set them on a course that would knock down the towers and usher in an Age of Terror like no other in history.

Wright's book, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, is a suspenseful and riveting read despite the handicap of subject matter that makes for thoroughly depressing reading toward a conclusion everyone on the planet knows going in. He puts 9/11 in perspective, not an easy thing to do, by showing bin Laden's antecedents in the last century and revealing the organization's weaknesses as well as strengths.

Cut off from his wealthy family, bin Laden struggled to pay for basic necessities during the mid-1990s, hardly the Bondian supervillain once imagined. His followers were confused, often disenchanted by his killjoy attitudes toward everything from music ("The flute of the devil") to air-conditioning. He even struggled with the moral question of terrorism, though his monochromatic worldview didn't leave him wrestling for long.

"The confrontation that we are calling for with the apostate regimes does not know Socratic debates...Platonic ideals...nor Aristotelian diplomacy," read the al-Queda manual "Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants". "But it does know the dialogue of bullets, the ideals of assassination, bombing, and destruction, and the diplomacy of the cannon and machine gun."

To make 9/11 happen, bin Laden needed help, not only from fellow zealots like Egyptian radical Ayman al-Zawahiri and Afghan Taliban leader Mohummad Omar, who paved the way for his own regime's downfall by hosting and insanely abetting al-Queda until the bitter end. He also got sizable support from intelligence agents like those at the CIA, who had 9/11 in their sights but refused to share their information with the FBI's counterterrorist boss John O'Neill, who knew what was afoot and only needed the CIA's help to take the necessary action.

In writing about O'Neill, who exhausted by in-fighting, went to work at the World Trade Center and died in the ensuing carnage, Wright's book answers the challenge posed by some who would award al-Queda the monopoly on bravery in this savage fight. Yet even O'Neill helped al-Queda in a way, by being such a polarizing figure in the Bureau that others found him all-too-easy to discount.

Not everything about this book sits right with me. He's too easy on Richard Clarke, the White House counterterrorism czar who passed up many chances to kill bin Laden, and offers some tortured Freudian analysis suggesting that the root of Islamic terrorism is tied to female sexuality (bin Laden may be repressive, but he's also been married five times).

There are no easy answers in the end, just piercing questions, which Wright lays out in a compelling, crystalline fashion. You may not want to pick up "The Looming Tower", but if you do, you'll have as hard a time putting it down.

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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?