The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright

From The Week of November 08, 2009

The Looming Tower is the best book I've read to date on
Al Qaeda, its origins, its structure, and the execution of its purpose.
Mr. Wright traces radicalized Islam back to the 1940s when a
young Egyptian scholar visited the United States, staying long enough to take education in some of its schools before returning, disgusted by American sinfulness, to Egypt where he became active in the Muslim Brotherhood before being executed for attempting to overthrow the
Nasser Regime. His martyrdom and his writings went on to inspire the future leaders of terrorist organizations, Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, both familiar names to those who've followed the pushback against Islamic terror. Though the book spends most of its time on painting fulsome portraits of these men, it also covers the American officials who have, over the years, attempted to track and thwart Al Qaeda and groups like it, laying out in all the gritty detail the numerous occasions where American intelligence failed to put two and two together and get four.

There are those who always question the authenticity of the mainstream portrayal of great events. The bigger the event, the bigger the fringe agitating for their own conspiratorial truths in an attempt to explain what they cannot grasp. And though I am not one of these who believes in any 9/11 conspiracies, that the Pennsylvania plane was shot down, or that the towers were felled by controlled demolitions, The Looming Tower inadvertently offers the most realistic case for a conspiracy. Mr. Wright points out that American intelligence knew, for months, that members of Al Qaeda were operating inside the United States. Agents knew that they were training in airplanes. They knew that there had been meetings, plans. And yet still the attacks on 9/11 went ahead with no one the wiser. Surely that is sufficient grist for the conspiracy mill. How does intelligence fail that badly? And if intelligence can fail that badly, is it right to even call it intelligence?

This is a sobering read, one many people will find emotionally challenging, but its importance surpasses its challenge. This is the world we live in. To refuse to understand it, to refuse to understand the people who hate this much in the name of religion... The world is a difficult place; and we will get nowhere in it unless we understand its workings. (5/5 Stars)