![]() ![]() Al Qaeda’s leaders had all but shelved the 9/11 plot when they realized they lacked foot soldiers who could pass convincingly as westernized Muslims in the United States. THE TWO TOWERS BOOK COVER FULL“The Looming Tower” is full of such surprising detail. “I am not, as most of our brothers know, a warrior of the word,” he said.Ī destroyer, even the brave might fear, She inspires horror in the harbor and the open sea, She goes into the waves flanked by arrogance, haughtiness and fake might, To her doom she progresses slowly, clothed in a huge illusion, Awaiting her is a dinghy, bobbing in the waves. At least with regard to his abilities as an author, bin Laden was unusually modest: he let someone else write the words. The celebration took place not long after a pair of Qaeda suicide bombers, riding in a tiny boat filled with explosives, nearly sank the billion-dollar guided missile destroyer Cole. ![]() Here is a particularly chilling bit, found on another videotape, which bin Laden had read aloud at the wedding of his 17-year-old son, Mohammed. “Wherever you are, death will find you, Even in the looming tower.” agent who worked so frantically to stop Osama bin Laden, only to perish in the attack on the World Trade Center, is worth the price of the book alone. The portrait of John O’Neill, the driven, demon-ridden F.B.I. It’s an education, too - though you’d never know it - a thoughtful examination of the world that produced the men who brought us 9/11, and of their progeny who bedevil us today. “The Looming Tower” is not just a detailed, heart-stopping account of the events leading up to 9/11, written with style and verve, and carried along by villains and heroes that only a crime novelist could dream up. And what a riveting tale Lawrence Wright fashions in this marvelous book. In its simplest terms, this is the story of how a small group of men, with a frightening mix of delusion and calculation, rose from a tormented civilization to mount a catastrophic assault on the world’s mightiest power, and how another group of men and women, convinced that such an attack was on the way, tried desperately to stop it. 11, 2001, were in many ways less the start of a tale than the end of one, or at least the climax of one, begun many years before in many different precincts: in the middle-class suburbs of Cairo, in the mosques of Hamburg, in Jidda, in Islamabad, in the quiet university town of Greeley, Colo. When Mohamed Atta and his four Saudi confederates commandeered a Boeing 767 and steered it into the north tower of the World Trade Center, they began a story that still consumes us nearly five years on, and one that seems, on bad days, to promise war without end.īut the events of Sept. ![]()
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