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

Rating: - Real information about Al Qaeda
Too much of what we have heard about Al Qaeda has been little more than pep-talk and wishful thinking: I still remember how our president called the 9-11 hijackers "cowards"--evil, certainly, but cowards, no. It has been hard to find real information about these people, until Lawrence Wright's book. Like an ethnographer, he has been able to suspend judgment sufficiently to get inside the heads of Salafist, takfirist terrorists. I found myself learning something on every page: everything from the importance of kin relations in Saudi Arabia, to the nature of Osama bin Laden's business interests, to the role of the Arab Mujahideen in the Soviet-Afghan war, and much, much more. There is a great deal here, too, on the U.S.'s inadequate response to Al Qaeda, with quite a bit of detail on the dysfunctional CIA-FBI rivalry. He points no fingers at elected officials, but rather at institutional arrangements, a choice that, I think, makes the book more valuable.

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Rating: - The Looming Tower
This is an excellent account of the rise of al-Qaeda, based on very extensive interviews in both the Arab and Western worlds. But the book is also curiously one-sided when it comes to U.S. involvement. It supplies a detailed account of the Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union in which Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki al-Faisal is mentioned about two dozen times, but William Casey of the CIA, the principal architect, is not mentioned even once. Nor does he mention Prince Turki's frank public account of how his jihad activities were guided by his own and other intelligence agencies grouped in something called the Safari Club, which took this initiative in response to the establishment of congressional oversight over the CIA. (As Prince Turki revealed, the group "included France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Iran.") With Casey's personal connivance and oversight, the Safari Club financed and administered the Afghan resistance through the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), also not mentioned by Wright. To get a more balanced view of America's role in the background of al Qaeda, I suggest that readers supplement The Looming Tower with Peter Dale Scott's The Road to 9/11, just out from the University of California Press.

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Rating: - What comes next?
While I was eager to read this book, I am finding it rough going. Mr. Wright has included way too much in my opinion. A lot of what he has included at length, could have been said in a fewer words and with more punch. Such as Qutb's visit to the USA or Ayman al-Zawahiri's childhood and background. While Qutb's visit is much more pertinent to the story line, al-Zawahiri's isn't all that much help in understanding what happened and continues to this day.

The info is good, one just has to plow through too many weeds to get to it.

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Rating: - THE LOOMING TOWER
Anyone who wishes to KNOW the BEGINNING and CONTINUING truth under-pinning our vicious, seemingly endless battle with ORGANIZED TERRORISTS, not just in IRAQ and AFGHANISTAN, but literally across the civilized world MUST READ THIS BOOK! It reveals clearly and unmistakably, the common threads which bind the very fabric of the terrifying spread of terrorism and literally, a continuing WAR between Western Civilization and the TYRANNICAL terrorists who will stop at nothing. One should read this after the "LONE SURVIVOR" best-seller. It brings together what appear as countless loose ends of this monumental struggle which promises to be a veritable 'FIGHT TO THE VERY LAST SURVIVOR' of what is, unmistakably. a WAR like NO OTHER WE HAVE EVER FACED. This conflict will test every conceivable sinew of the 'muscle of resolve and potency' of not only the United States but of the Free World as we now know it!
You owe nothing less to yourself than the knowledge you will gain from this truly thorough, remarkable book on the subject, which astoundingly, yet, has commanded the attention of all too few Countries and plain citizens!

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Rating: - Fascinating and absorbing read with a very important message for political leaders today.
This book intimately traces the movements of Osama Bin Laden, the FBI, and CIA in the events leading up to 9/11. It is very convincingly written in a voice that is unobtrusive and observant, leaving the reader to form his or her own opinion of what Osama bin Laden's involvement really was in the 9/11 attacks (including if he was really behind it) and what motivated him to take the militant-political position he has taken in our world today.

What I found most interesting was the compassionate portrayal of Osama bin Laden himself and how that was made even more sharply clear by the words that came out of his very mouth (Wright handles "the telling detail" well). I also appreciated the author's thorough account of bin Laden's predecessors (his colleagues and mentors) and the rise of militant islamism in Egypt and throughout the Middle East, particularly the role Afghanistan played as a breeding ground for this extremist faction.

This book is an extremely engaging and absorbing read that grabbed me from beginning to end, even while combing the finer details of Bin Laden's character. While it does not offer a penetrating analysis of militant islamism as a whole, nor clearly point a finger at who exactly was behind 9/11 (not physically, but mentally), it does not claim to, but instead lays out many pieces of evidence, allowing the reader to draw conclusions for himself or herself.

If there is one sobering and important lesson that can be taken from this book, it is this: War and torture cannot be used to punish opponents in a political conflict, because in the end, by marginalizing individuals and their followers, these methods will only breed deeper and more troubling pathologies.