I finished listening to The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright Sunday morning. Actually, I sat 10 minutes in my car in the Panera parking lot listening to the end, because I had to hear the last little bits, even though by that part in the book, I was on familiar ground because I’d lived it, we’d all lived it. Any cognizant person over the age of twelve most likely vividly remembers that day and the days that followed.
The reason I picked up The Looming Tower in the first place though had to do with a realization that I don’t really understand how or why we got here. I prefer to be well-informed on the subjects that matter, especially the subjects that affect my political views and voting. I decided that I’d put it off long enough, that I couldn’t avoid facing 9/11 anymore.
As I mentioned previously, the book starts after WWII with Qutb and traces the influences of radical Islam and the British’s broken promise to give certain lands to the Arabs who aided them in WWI, a broken promise that led to the creation of Israel. The book discusses Osama bin Laden’s father’s rise from poverty and anonymity to such wealth that he was able to loan money to the King of Saudi Arabia in the 60’s. The book traces the connections of Osama to the Saudi royal family, Sudan, and Al Jihad.
I was surprised to realize that Osama bin Laden was not the big military success in Afghanistan in the 80’s when they were fighting the Soviet Union that he purports to be. In fact, the book suggests that the Arabs that bin Laden financed and led into Afghanistan to aid the Afghanis mainly trained and were a source of amusement to the Afghani soldiers. The few battles they participated in were failures. Interestingly, Al Qaeda was born at the end of this war, but they didn’t do anything until the embassy bombings in Africa a decade later.
Osama spent most of his time financing terrorist actions and groups as well as writing letters and declarations that the King of Saudi Arabia was not a true Muslim. Mostly he was crazed because the U.S. had promised to leave Saudia Arabia immediately after the Gulf War and instead they were digging in. In Osama’s mind, the U.S. was trying to enslave and destroy the Arab world. His talking out against the Saudi King, despite being a family friend, eventually caused him to be exiled to Sudan and eventually cut off from his money. Then the U.S., unable to prove he was involved in financing terrorist actions, pressured Sudan to kick him out of the country.
Osama returned to Afghanistan just as the Taliban were taking over. Now, I don’t know where I got this idea, but all of this time, I thought Osama was a leader in the Taliban, but in fact he was never part of the Taliban. He doesn’t even subscribe to their strain of Muslim faith. However, when he first arrived, the Saudi’s who were supporting the Taliban financially asked the Taliban to keep him there and keep him quiet. He didn’t keep quiet, as we know. He started holding press conferences and having interviews with the likes of 60 Minutes. However, when the Saudi’s came to get him and take him back to Saudi Arabia to be “handled”, the Taliban wouldn’t give him up.
I was completely fascinated by the number of mistakes that Al Qaeda made over the years — terrorist actions that went awry and therefore never occurred, terrorist members who told the CIA everything and were allowed to go on about their lives. In fact, the Embassy bombings didn’t go quite right. The trucks weren’t in the right locations and one of the suicide drivers wasn’t even in his truck — much to his surprise, he survived and later had the privilege of being tried for terrorism after the F.B.I. caught him. There was a man who was supposed to video tape the bombing of the USS Cole for later propaganda and training films, but he was late because he overslept; he was also caught by the F.B.I.
As much fumbling as Al Qaeda did, it was very frustrating to read about the information that the CIA had and the information that the FBI kept asking the CIA for. The CIA repeatedly stonewalled the FBI’s terrorist taskforce even when the CIA knew there were Al Qaeda members inside the country, even after a warning came out of the FBI’s Phoenix office that some Arab students at a flight school had been asking some peculiar questions. I just felt nauseous thinking that 9/11 might have been prevented if not for the CIA’s refusal to share with the other kiddies.
I admit, the part that made me cry is the strangest coincidence of all the events involved with 9/11. John O’Neil was the FBI agent in charge of the terrorist task force and he had been chasing Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda for years; he’d been warning the powers that be that bin Laden was more dangerous than they perceived. A month before 9/11, he retired from the FBI and took a job as head of security at the World Trade Center. After the first plane crashed into the building, he made it downstairs and to the street. He met up with his former FBI team who worked just down the street. He called the women in his life and told them he was safe. Then he went back inside to help people.
John O’Neil was one of the heroes who died in the World Trade Center collapse that day.
I must say that I thought this book was well-researched and well-written. The author clearly has a way with the descriptive word and doesn’t just fling facts at you. I feel as though I have come away from the book with a better understand of the motivations of Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden. I certainly feel that I have a better grasp of the notion that there are many different sects or flavors of the Islamic religion just as their are many different denominations of the Christian religion. I am even more convinced that it’s wrong to bunch them all together and blame them all for each other’s sins.
(This book has inspired me to acquire another book that compares Christianity, Judaism, and Islam and traces them back to a common origin in Abraham, which I’ll be listening to after Wicked. )
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