30-12-2015, 06:36 PM
(This post was last modified: 04-01-2016, 01:29 AM by Tracy Riddle.)
I picked up a used copy of Lawrence Wright's book The Looming Tower for $1 recently. It's supposed to be one of the best (mainstream) accounts of the events leading up to 9/11.
The author knows how to write a good page-turning story. But he mostly succeeds in demonstrating how incapable "Al-Qaeda" was of actually carrying out the 9/11 attacks. The picture he paints is that of a disjointed group of self-promoting, incompetent, delusional people who can't agree on much of anything: religion, politics, tactics, strategies. Typical religious fanatics. Bin Laden is portrayed as suffering from a variety of health problems, some of them psychosomatic (he always seemed to get ill right before a battle during the Soviet-Afghan War). He had low blood pressure and may have had Addison's disease. The portrayal of the Arab volunteers in Afghanistan is almost comical. Most of them never left Peshawar, and those that went to the front were mostly incompetent. The Afghan rebels had little use for them, frequently telling them to get out of their way.
There is so much in-fighting among the various Jihadi groups, so many disagreements over points of religious doctrine, so much rivalry among the leaders, distrust between the Egyptian and Saudi factions...Not surprisingly, they were ineffective and mostly legends in their own minds. The Arab jihadis took credit for driving the Soviets out, though it was the Afghans who did nearly all of the fighting. Bin Laden comes across as a passive figurehead, mostly good at construction and agriculture, paying bills when he had access to money, and not much else. Zawahiri is clearly a deranged psychopath who even frightened other Islamic fundamentalists, possibly as the result of being tortured in Egyptian prisons.
In the early 90s, Bin Laden settled down in Sudan and became a farmer. His various businesses in Sudan were mostly a failure. He was not organized and disciplined in running them, preferring to tinker with his agricultural projects. Supposedly a lot of Al Qaeda fighters were sent to Somalia, but "according to Sudanese intelligence, the actual number of Al-Qaeda fighters was only a handful...Little the Al-Qaeda men did impressed their hosts; for instance, the Arabs built a car bomb to attack the UN, but the bomb failed."
The weak account of the WTC bombing in 1993 takes up one-and-a-half pages, and doesn't tell the whole story. Reading the brief account of Ali Mohamed, the man who allegedly infiltrated the US military, CIA and FBI on behalf of Al Qaeda, is like reading official biographies of Lee Harvey Oswald: it sounds totally unbelievable. His description of the TWA 800 incident doesn't mention the theory that it was an accidental shootdown by the US military, only the fear that it was an Islamic terrorist attack.
Once back in Afghanistan, Bin Laden was mostly broke, his men going hungry. He kept irritating the Taliban leaders by giving media interviews (once again, he was ill during his first TV interview in 1997). The embassy bombings in 1998 horrified the Muslim world "and even to some members of al-Qaeda, the attacks seemed pointless, a showy act of mass murder with no conceivable effect on American policy except to provoke a massive response." Wright says that Bin Laden's goal was to lure the US into a quagmire in Afghanistan like the Soviets and British before them. No mention of how Western oil companies also wanted to build an oil pipeline across the country.
On p317 Wright describes John O'Neill's mobster-like image:: "The founding director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, was sufficiently concerned about the young agent when he first entered the bureau that he drew O'Neill aside to ask about his connections.'" The source of this story is an old girlfriend of O'Neill's. However, Hoover died in 1972 when O'Neill was just twenty years old, and he didn't become an FBI agent until 1976. This example is typical of Wright's reliance on inside sources who may have fed him stories that weren't necessarily true. Overall, the book places a lot of the blame on the CIA for not sharing intelligence and information with the FBI and others.
His account of the buildup to 9/11 is also brief, unconvincing and omits many problems with the official story. Interestingly, on Page 406 he describes how the FBI's Barry Mawn and others duck into the already-shattered windows of WTC7 to escape the column of dust and debris coming at them as the South Tower collapses. The North Tower was still standing at this point; how are the ground-floor windows of WTC7 already shattered? Perhaps debris from the plane impact on the South Tower had flown across the WTC compound and struck Building 7.
The author knows how to write a good page-turning story. But he mostly succeeds in demonstrating how incapable "Al-Qaeda" was of actually carrying out the 9/11 attacks. The picture he paints is that of a disjointed group of self-promoting, incompetent, delusional people who can't agree on much of anything: religion, politics, tactics, strategies. Typical religious fanatics. Bin Laden is portrayed as suffering from a variety of health problems, some of them psychosomatic (he always seemed to get ill right before a battle during the Soviet-Afghan War). He had low blood pressure and may have had Addison's disease. The portrayal of the Arab volunteers in Afghanistan is almost comical. Most of them never left Peshawar, and those that went to the front were mostly incompetent. The Afghan rebels had little use for them, frequently telling them to get out of their way.
There is so much in-fighting among the various Jihadi groups, so many disagreements over points of religious doctrine, so much rivalry among the leaders, distrust between the Egyptian and Saudi factions...Not surprisingly, they were ineffective and mostly legends in their own minds. The Arab jihadis took credit for driving the Soviets out, though it was the Afghans who did nearly all of the fighting. Bin Laden comes across as a passive figurehead, mostly good at construction and agriculture, paying bills when he had access to money, and not much else. Zawahiri is clearly a deranged psychopath who even frightened other Islamic fundamentalists, possibly as the result of being tortured in Egyptian prisons.
In the early 90s, Bin Laden settled down in Sudan and became a farmer. His various businesses in Sudan were mostly a failure. He was not organized and disciplined in running them, preferring to tinker with his agricultural projects. Supposedly a lot of Al Qaeda fighters were sent to Somalia, but "according to Sudanese intelligence, the actual number of Al-Qaeda fighters was only a handful...Little the Al-Qaeda men did impressed their hosts; for instance, the Arabs built a car bomb to attack the UN, but the bomb failed."
The weak account of the WTC bombing in 1993 takes up one-and-a-half pages, and doesn't tell the whole story. Reading the brief account of Ali Mohamed, the man who allegedly infiltrated the US military, CIA and FBI on behalf of Al Qaeda, is like reading official biographies of Lee Harvey Oswald: it sounds totally unbelievable. His description of the TWA 800 incident doesn't mention the theory that it was an accidental shootdown by the US military, only the fear that it was an Islamic terrorist attack.
Once back in Afghanistan, Bin Laden was mostly broke, his men going hungry. He kept irritating the Taliban leaders by giving media interviews (once again, he was ill during his first TV interview in 1997). The embassy bombings in 1998 horrified the Muslim world "and even to some members of al-Qaeda, the attacks seemed pointless, a showy act of mass murder with no conceivable effect on American policy except to provoke a massive response." Wright says that Bin Laden's goal was to lure the US into a quagmire in Afghanistan like the Soviets and British before them. No mention of how Western oil companies also wanted to build an oil pipeline across the country.
On p317 Wright describes John O'Neill's mobster-like image:: "The founding director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, was sufficiently concerned about the young agent when he first entered the bureau that he drew O'Neill aside to ask about his connections.'" The source of this story is an old girlfriend of O'Neill's. However, Hoover died in 1972 when O'Neill was just twenty years old, and he didn't become an FBI agent until 1976. This example is typical of Wright's reliance on inside sources who may have fed him stories that weren't necessarily true. Overall, the book places a lot of the blame on the CIA for not sharing intelligence and information with the FBI and others.
His account of the buildup to 9/11 is also brief, unconvincing and omits many problems with the official story. Interestingly, on Page 406 he describes how the FBI's Barry Mawn and others duck into the already-shattered windows of WTC7 to escape the column of dust and debris coming at them as the South Tower collapses. The North Tower was still standing at this point; how are the ground-floor windows of WTC7 already shattered? Perhaps debris from the plane impact on the South Tower had flown across the WTC compound and struck Building 7.