An excellent read

Posted by Mission Man at 5:03 PM

For those of you who haven't read it yet, do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.

The book is an exhaustive history of the terrorist organization, with over 500 sources utilized to detail how a small group of Islamofascists brought America to its knees five and a half years ago.

Wright doesn't take a political stance in the book -- there's no bashing of either the Bush or Clinton administrations (or even Israel for that matter). Instead, he paints a steady portrait of an organization that remained all but unknown throughout most of its history, even going bankrupt at one point. The account is riveting, reading more like a suspense novel than a history tome.

The book traces the history of al-Qaeda far beyond bin Laden and al-Zawahiri to the man who formed the radical theocratic notions that resulted in al-Qaeda, Sayyid Qutb, who became al-Zawahiri's mentor. It is impossible to understand Islamic terrorism without understanding Qutb.

One thing the reader will come away with is a knowledge of how the U.S. intelligence services charged with protecting the nation failed utterly -- not through laws preventing the sharing of information, but rather through bureaucratic boondoggles that prevented anyone from ever gaining enough pieces of the puzzle to accurately see what was happening. The author makes it abundantly clear that this was due to misplaced pride and jealousy, especially between the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. This is also the result of an American mindset that is simply incapable of understanding the forces that lead to such hatred.

I believe this is an absolute must-read for anyone interested in ascertaining the truth about terror.