Book review: Al Qaeda and Bin Laden

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Book review: Al Qaeda and Bin Laden

Postby nomo » Wed Aug 02, 2006 2:48 pm

Looks like an interesting read. Unless of course, you believe Al Qaeda doesn't exist and there were no planes.<br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/01/books/01kaku.html?ref=books">www.nytimes.com/2006/08/0...?ref=books</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br>August 1, 2006<br>Books of The Times<br>The Evolution of Al Qaeda and the Intertwining Paths Leading to 9/11<br>Review by MICHIKO KAKUTANI<br><br>“The Looming Tower,” the title of Lawrence Wright’s remarkable new book about Al Qaeda and 9/11, refers not only to the doomed towers of the World Trade Center, but also to a passage in the Koran, which Osama bin Laden quoted several times in a speech exhorting the 19 hijackers to become martyrs to their cause: “Wherever you are, death will find you/even in the looming tower.”<br><br>Mr. Wright’s book, based on more than 500 interviews — ranging from Mr. bin Laden’s best friend in college, Jamal Khalifa, to Yosri Fouda, a reporter for Al Jazeera, to Richard A. Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism chief — gives the reader a searing view of the tragic events of Sept. 11, 2001, a view that is at once wrenchingly intimate and boldly sweeping in its historical perspective.<br><br>Though the broad outlines of his story have been recounted many, many times before, Mr. Wright fleshes out the narrative with myriad new details and a keen ability to situate the events he describes in a larger cultural and political context. And by focusing on the lives and careers of several key players on the “road to 9/11” — namely, Mr. bin Laden; his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri; the former head of Saudi intelligence, Prince Turki al-Faisal; and the F.B.I.’s former counterterrorism chief, John O’Neill — he has succeeded in writing a narrative history that possesses all the immediacy and emotional power of a novel, an account that indelibly illustrates how the political and the personal, the public and the private were often inextricably intertwined.<br><br>Mr. Wright’s book suggests that “the charisma and vision of a few individuals shaped the nature” of the contest between Islam and the West. While “the tectonic plates of history were certainly shifting,” promoting a period of conflict between those two cultures, he contends, the emergence of Al Qaeda “depended on a unique conjunction of personalities” — most notably, Mr. Zawahri, who promoted the apocalyptic notion that only violence could change history, and Mr. bin Laden, whose global vision and leadership “held together an organization that had been bankrupted and thrown into exile.”<br><br>The book also suggests that the events of Sept. 11 were not inevitable. Rather, bad luck, the confluence of particular decisions and chance encounters, dithering on the part of United States officials and a series of absurd turf wars between the C.I.A. and F.B.I. all contributed to Al Qaeda’s success in pulling off its nefarious plans that sunny September day.<br><br>Compared with the authors Peter L. Bergen (“Holy War: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden”) and Jonathan Randal (“Osama: the Making of a Terrorist”), Mr. Wright spends less time on the crucial role that the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan played in shaping the jihadist cause. Instead, he has drawn upon many documents in Arabic and a host of interviews with jihadis to provide an arresting chronicle of the many formative events that shaped Al Qaeda over the years and Mr. bin Laden’s long, winding road to war against America. His book provides an amazingly detailed look at daily life inside Al Qaeda, and the motivations, misgivings and political goals of individual members.<br><br>Mr. Wright begins his story with an account of the life of Sayyid Qutb, the intellectual father of the Islamist movement: he recounts how a sojourn in America in the late 1940’s radicalized the Egyptian educator, how he was later thrown in prison by the regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser, and how his writings and eventual execution in 1966 made him a martyr and hero to a fledgling revolutionary movement. Mr. Wright then goes on to describe the radicalization of Mr. bin Laden, the heir to one of Saudi Arabia’s great fortunes, who grows from a shy boy who loved the American television series “Bonanza” into a solemn, religious adolescent influenced, some say, by a charismatic Syrian gym teacher who was a member of the Muslim Brothers organization.<br><br>Mr. Zawahri, an Egyptian doctor whom Mr. bin Laden got to know in Peshawar in the 1980’s, would have an even more formative impact. Indeed Mr. Zawahri emerges from this volume as an evil mentor, drawing ever “tighter the noose of influence he was casting around” the young Saudi by surrounding him with handpicked bodyguards and presiding over his medical treatment (possibly for Addison’s disease). Mr. Wright argues that before meeting Mr. Zawahri, Mr. bin Laden was “not much of a political thinker,” and he quotes the Saudi’s first biographer, Essam Deraz, saying he thought Mr. bin Laden had the potential to become “another Eisenhower,” turning the celebrity status he had achieved fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan into a peaceful political life. But that wasn’t Mr. Zawahri’s plan.<br><br>It was Mr. Zawahri, whose adamantine resolve was hardened by the torture he endured in Egyptian prisons as a young man, Mr. Wright notes, who introduced the use of suicide bombers. And it was Mr. Zawahri who was keen from the start on using biological and chemical weapons. As for Mr. bin Laden, it apparently took a long time, after his stint in Afghanistan, for him to settle on a subsequent plan of action.<br><br>During his exile from Saudi Arabia in the Sudan, Mr. Wright says, Mr. bin Laden “was wavering — the lure of peace being as strong as the battle cry of jihad.” Agriculture “captivated his imagination,” and he reportedly told various friends that he was thinking of quitting Al Qaeda and becoming a farmer.<br><br>Yet as Mr. Wright tells it, the continuing presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia (after the first gulf war) continued to gnaw at Mr. bin Laden, and the movement of American troops into Somalia in 1992 (on a humanitarian relief mission) made Al Qaeda feel increasingly encircled. In meetings held at the end of 1992, the group “turned from being the anti-communist Islamic army that bin Laden originally envisioned into a terrorist organization bent on attacking the United States.”<br><br>Mr. Wright not only traces how Al Qaeda evolved — from an opponent of two of America’s enemies (the Soviet Union and Saddam Hussein) to America’s sworn foe — but he also gives the reader a visceral sense of day-to-day life at its training camps. His descriptions echo the observation made by other experts like the former C.I.A. officer Michael Scheuer that Mr. bin Laden is not opposed to the United States because of its culture or ideas but because of its political and military actions in the Islamic world. Mr. Wright observes that Mr. bin Laden allowed his younger sons to play Nintendo and that Al Qaeda’s trainees often watched Hollywood thrillers at night (Arnold Schwarzenegger movies were particular favorites) in an effort to gather tips. One of Mr. bin Laden’s wives favored “brand-name cosmetics and lingerie, preferring American products”; another held a doctorate in child psychology.<br><br>Intercut with the portraits of Mr. bin Laden and Mr. Zawahri are equally compelling ones of the flamboyant F.B.I. counterterrorism chief John O’Neill (who died on 9/11, having left the bureau to become chief of security for the World Trade Center) and a small band of C.I.A. and F.B.I. operatives, who for years had worried about Al Qaeda and who, in the months before Sept. 11, worked furiously, in the face of bureaucratic complacency and in-fighting, to head off a probable attack.<br><br>The failures of the C.I.A., F.B.I. and N.S.A. to share information — and their failure to stop the 9/11 hijackers — have been voluminously documented before, but Mr. Wright’s narrative is so lucid and unnerving that it drives home the stupidity, hubris and dereliction of duty that occurred within the United States government with unusual power and resonance.<br><br>Mr. Wright is equally scathing about the Bush and Clinton administrations. He notes that terrorism was a low priority for the Bush White House when it took over in January 2001. And like Mr. Bergen and Mr. Randal, he argues that the Clinton administration’s reaction to the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa — launching cruise missiles at an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan in a failed effort to kill Mr. bin Laden — helped turn the terrorist into a global celebrity and enabled him to mythologize himself further.<br><br>Mr. bin Laden’s goal in striking the American embassies and bombing the American destroyer Cole in 2000, says Mr. Wright, was to “lure America into the same trap the Soviets had fallen into: Afghanistan”: “His strategy was to continually attack until the U.S. forces invaded; then the mujahideen would swarm upon them and bleed them until the entire American empire fell from its wounds. It had happened to Great Britain and to the Soviet Union. He was certain it would happen to America.” When neither the embassy bombings nor the Cole bombing was enough to “provoke a massive retaliation,” Mr. Wright suggests, Mr. bin Laden decided “he would have to create an irresistible outrage.”<br><br>That outrage, of course, was 9/11. Though American forces would not become bogged down in Afghanistan — at least not immediately in the fall of 2001 — another, longer war was on the horizon. On March 19, 2003, President George W. Bush ordered the start of the war against Iraq; more than three years and more than 2,500 American deaths later, the United States is still there, fighting just the sort of asymmetrical war Mr. bin Laden so fervently desired.<br><hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--> <p></p><i>Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=nomo@rigorousintuition>nomo</A> at: 8/2/06 12:49 pm<br></i>
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"A riveting tale'

Postby nomo » Sat Aug 05, 2006 11:02 pm

And yet another review. The NY Times <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>loves</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> this book.<br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/06/books/review/06filkins.html">www.nytimes.com/2006/08/0...lkins.html</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br>The Plot Against America<br>Review by DEXTER FILKINS<br><br>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.<br><br>But the events of Sept. 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.<br><br>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.<br><br>What a story it is. And what a riveting tale Lawrence Wright fashions in this marvelous book. “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. 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 portrait of John O’Neill, the driven, demon-ridden F.B.I. 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 Looming Tower” is a thriller. And it’s a tragedy, too.<br><br>In the nearly five years since the attacks, we’ve heard oceans of commentary on the whys and how-comes and what-it-means and what’s nexts. Wright, a staff writer for The New Yorker — where portions of this book have appeared — has put his boots on the ground in the hard places, conducted the interviews and done the sleuthing. Others talked, he listened. And so he has unearthed an astonishing amount of detail about Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Mullah Muhammad Omar and all the rest of them. They come alive.<br><br>Who knew, for instance, that bin Laden, far from being a warrior-stoic fighting against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, was actually a pathetic stick-in-the-mud who would fall ill before battle? That the combat-hardened Afghans, so tired of bin Laden’s behavior, declared him and his Arab associates “useless”? Or that he was a permissive father and indulgent husband? Or that he is only six feet tall?<br><br>More important, who knew — I sure didn’t — that bin Laden had left behind such a long trail of words? Wright has found them in books, on film, in audio recordings, in people’s notebooks and memories. This has allowed him to draw an in-depth portrait of bin Laden, and to chart his evolution from a self-conscious step-child growing up in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, to the visionary cave-dwelling madman who mimics the Holy Prophet in his most humdrum daily habits.<br><br>Wright takes the title of his book from the fourth sura of the Koran, which bin Laden repeated three times in a speech videotaped just as the hijackers were preparing to fly. The video was found later, on a computer in Hamburg.<br><br>“Wherever you are, death will find you, Even in the looming tower.”<br><br>There is poetry, too. 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. 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. At least with regard to his abilities as an author, bin Laden was unusually modest: he let someone else write the words. “I am not, as most of our brothers know, a warrior of the word,” he said.<br><br><!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>A destroyer, even the brave might fear, <br>She inspires horror in the harbor and the open sea, <br>She goes into the waves flanked by arrogance, haughtiness and fake might, <br>To her doom she progresses slowly, clothed in a huge illusion, <br>Awaiting her is a dinghy, bobbing in the waves.</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--><br><br>“The Looming Tower” is full of such surprising detail. 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. At just the right moment Atta appeared in Afghanistan, along with Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Ziad al-Jarrah and Marwan al-Shehhi, all Western-educated transplants, offering themselves up for slaughter. The game was on.<br><br>Just as dramatic as the portraits of bin Laden and Zawahiri is Wright’s account of the roots of Islamic militancy — the intellectual, spiritual and material world from which the plotters came. Wright draws a fascinating picture of Sayyid Qutb, the font of modern Islamic fundamentalism, a frail, middle-aged writer who found himself, as a visitor to the United States and a student at Colorado State College of Education in Greeley in the 1940’s, overwhelmed by the unbridled splendor and godlessness of modern America. And by the sex: like so many others who followed him, Qutb seemed simultaneously drawn to and repelled by American women, so free and unselfconscious in their sexuality. The result is a kind of delirium:<br><br>“A girl looks at you, appearing as if she were an enchanting nymph or an escaped mermaid,” Qutb wrote, “but as she approaches, you sense only the screaming instinct inside her, and you can smell her burning body, not the scent of perfume, but flesh, only flesh. Tasty flesh, truly, but flesh nonetheless.”<br><br>It wasn’t much later that Qutb began writing elaborate rationalizations for killing non-Muslims and waging war against the West. Years later, Atta expressed a similar mix of obsession and disgust for women. Indeed, anyone who has spent time in the Middle East will recognize such tortured emotions.<br><br>WRIGHT shows, correctly, that at the root of Islamic militancy — its anger, its antimodernity, its justifications for murder — lies a feeling of intense humiliation. Islam plays a role in this, with its straitjacketed and all-encompassing worldview. But whether the militant hails from a middle-class family or an impoverished one, is intensely religious or a “theological amateur,” as Wright calls bin Laden and his cohort, he springs almost invariably from an ossified society with an autocratic government that is unable to provide any reason to believe in the future. Islam offers dignity, even in — especially in — death. Living in the West, Atta and the others felt these things more acutely, not less. As Wright notes:<br><br>“Their motivations varied, but they had in common a belief that Islam — pure and primitive, unmitigated by modernity and uncompromised by politics — would cure the wounds that socialism or Arab nationalism had failed to heal. They were angry but powerless in their own countries. They did not see themselves as terrorists but as revolutionaries who, like all such men throughout history, had been pushed into action by the simple human need for justice. Some had experienced brutal repression; some were simply drawn to bloody chaos. From the beginning of Al Qaeda, there were reformers and there were nihilists. The dynamic between them was irreconcilable and self-destructive, but events were moving so quickly that it was almost impossible to tell the philosophers from the sociopaths. They were glued together by the charismatic personality of Osama bin Laden, which contained both strands, idealism and nihilism, in a potent mix.”<br><br>In John O’Neill, bin Laden almost met his match. The supervisor of the F.B.I.’s New York office and of the team assigned to track Al Qaeda in the United States, O’Neill felt, as strongly as anyone in the government, that Al Qaeda was coming to America. He was a relentless investigator, a volcanic personality and sometimes his own worst enemy. In the end he broke himself on a government bureaucracy that could not — and would not — move as quickly as he did. O’Neill and others like him were in a race with Al Qaeda, and although we know how the race ended, it’s astonishing — and heartbreaking — to learn how close it was.<br><br>Some of the F.B.I.’s field agents, as we now know, had premonitions of what was coming. When the supervisor of the Minneapolis field office was admonished, in August 2001, for expressing fears that an Islamic radical attending flight school might be planning a suicide attack, he shot back defiantly that he was “trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing into the World Trade Center.” Amazing.<br><br>The most gut-wrenching scenes are the ones that show F.B.I. agents trying, as 9/11 approached, to pry information from their rivals inside the United States government. The C.I.A., Wright says, knew that high-level Qaeda operatives had held a meeting in Malaysia in January 2000, and, later, that two of them had entered the United States. Both men turned out to be part of the team that hijacked the planes on Sept. 11. The C.I.A. failed to inform agencies like the F.B.I. — which might have been able to locate the men and break up the plot — until late in the summer of 2001.<br><br>The fateful struggle between the C.I.A. and F.B.I. in the months leading up to the attacks has been outlined before, but never in such detail. At meetings, C.I.A. analysts dangled photos of two of the eventual hijackers in front of F.B.I. agents, but wouldn’t tell them who they were. The F.B.I. agents could sense that the C.I.A. possessed crucial pieces of evidence about Islamic radicals they were investigating, but couldn’t tell what they were. The tension came to a head at a meeting in New York on June 11, exactly three months before the catastrophe, which ended with F.B.I. and C.I.A. agents shouting at each other across the room.<br><br>In one of the most remarkable scenes in the book, Ali Soufan, an F.B.I. agent assigned to Al Qaeda, was taken aside on Sept. 12 and finally shown the names and photos of the men the C.I.A. had known for more than a year and a half were in America. The planes had already struck. Soufan ran to the bathroom and retched.<br><br>Great stuff. I just wish Wright had given us something, even a chapter, on the hijackings themselves; as it is, he takes us right up to the moment, and then straight to the burning towers. Perhaps he felt that ground was too well-trodden. My other complaint is more substantive. Through the enormous amount of legwork he has done, tracking down people who worked with bin Laden and Zawahiri over the years, Wright has drawn up verbatim reconstructions of entire conversations, some of which took place more than a decade ago. Many of these conversations are riveting. Still, in some cases, it’s hard to believe that memories are that good.<br><br>“The Looming Tower” ends near the Pakistani border, where Zawahiri, or someone who looked like him, rode through a village on horseback and then disappeared into the mountains. It’s not a definitive ending; there is no closure. And that’s the point. For as amazing as the story of Al Qaeda and the road to 9/11 is, it’s not over yet.<br><br>Dexter Filkins is a Baghdad correspondent for The Times.<br><hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--> <p></p><i>Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=nomo@rigorousintuition>nomo</A> at: 8/5/06 9:03 pm<br></i>
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Re: "A riveting tale'

Postby Joe Hillshoist » Sun Aug 06, 2006 1:12 am

<!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>“The Looming Tower” is full of such surprising detail. 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. At just the right moment Atta appeared in Afghanistan, along with Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Ziad al-Jarrah and Marwan al-Shehhi, all Western-educated transplants, offering themselves up for slaughter. The game was on.<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br>Just the right moment. <p></p><i></i>
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Re: "A riveting tale'

Postby orz » Sun Aug 06, 2006 6:52 am

I find the "tape" meme in mainstream reporting of Al Qaeda interesting... it's always "taped" messages... audio tapes, video tapes... what, they don't have CDrs in Bin Laden's james bond villain style underground superbase!? <!--EZCODE EMOTICON START :lol --><img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/laugh.gif ALT=":lol"><!--EZCODE EMOTICON END--> <br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>videotaped just as the hijackers were preparing to fly. The video was found later, on a computer in Hamburg.<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>...found on another videotape,<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br>if it was found on a computer, it wasn't a video<!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>tape</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--> surely... unless it was literally like a VHS cassette left lying on top of someone's PC tower i guess. <!--EZCODE EMOTICON START :) --><img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/smile.gif ALT=":)"><!--EZCODE EMOTICON END--> <br><br>ANyway i'm getting pedantic but it is weird... just subconcious bit of reassurance along with the fear, implication that these people are 'primative' i guess? <p></p><i></i>
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Re: "A riveting tale'

Postby Byrne » Sun Aug 06, 2006 8:19 pm

From <!--EZCODE LINK START--><a href="http://kurtnimmo.com/?p=502" target="top">kurtnimmo.com/?p=502</a><!--EZCODE LINK END-->, an article illustrating, yet again, the involvement of western intelligence agencies with <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>the behind the scenes effort to manufacture and unleash contrived terrorist organizations in an effort to gain support for the ongoing “clash of civilizations” war against Islam.</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--> <br><br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong><br>British Sheltered Terror Org Joins al-Qaeda</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> <br><!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>Sunday August 06th 2006, 8:25 am</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--> <br><br>Leave it up to the corporate media stenographers not to tell the whole story. “Al Qaeda’s No. 2 leader announced in a new videotape aired Saturday that an Egyptian militant group has joined the terrorist network,” reports the Associated Press. “It is the first time that Al Qaeda has announced a branch in Egypt, the Arab world’s most populous nation. The Egyptian group, Gamaa al Islamiya, is apparently a revived version of a militant group of the same name that waged a campaign of violence in Egypt during the 1990s but was crushed in a government crackdown.” <br><br>No word here of the fact al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya (Islamic Group) was provided with “political asylum” in Britain, thus leading us to one of two obvious conclusions—either the British government is clueless, or the group is a British intelligence operation. “Gamaa al-Islamiya (Islamic Group), the terrorist organization responsible for killing 62 tourists in Luxor, Egypt, was provided political asylum in Britain and numerous efforts by the Egyptian government to have members extradited were denied. The Algerian Armed Islamic Group, responsible for the assassination of Algerian President Mohamed Boudiaf on June 29, 1992, has its international headquarters in London,” I wrote last August. <br><br>It should be noted that Gamaa al-Islamiya was created by Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind cleric currently serving a life sentence for “seditious conspiracy,” that is to say he wasn’t actually convicted of a terrorist crime, although it is assumed he was involved in Oplan Bojinka, or Operation Bojinka, a terror op described as a CIA and FBI “intelligence failure,” in other words, they more than likely had a hand in the scheme. Emad Salem, an ex-Egyptian army officer turned FBI informant, “received money from Kahane Chai, Rabbi Meir Kahane’s group,” according to the late William Kunstler, the famous attorney retained by Siddig Ibrahim Siddig Ali and Ibrahim El-Gabrowny, two defendants in the case. Kunstler also alludes to Mossad involvement in the plot, according to a 1993 interview with Kunstler by Paul DeRienzo. According to Emad Salem, the FBI was behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, as it refused to swap harmless powder for explosives in the bomb that killed 6 people and injured over a 1,000 (see Ralph Blumenthal, Tapes Depict Proposal to Thwart Bomb Used in Trade Center Blast, the New York Times, October 28, 1993). <br><br>Considering the far less than coincidental involvement of the CIA, FBI, Mossad, and other intelligence and law enforcement agencies in a number of so-called Muslim terrorist events, usually dismissed as “intelligence failures,” and the terrorists involved are usually clueless patsies incapable of such acts without close supervision, one has to take this latest declaration concerning al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya with a grain of salt, to say the least. In fact, when the wealth of data documenting the link between “al-Qaeda” and American, British, and Israeli intelligence is examined, there is a strong case indicating the al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya and “al-Qaeda” merger is but another phase of the “war on terrorism,” or rather the behind the scenes effort to manufacture and unleash contrived terrorist organizations in an effort to gain support for the ongoing “clash of civilizations” war against Islam. <br><br><br><br><br> <p></p><i></i>
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Re: Book review: Al Qaeda and Bin Laden

Postby elfismiles » Thu Dec 21, 2017 4:51 pm

TV adaptation coming soon...

https://www.hulu.com/the-looming-tower

The Looming Tower: Based on the Pulitzer-Prize winning book, The Looming Tower traces the rising threat of Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda in the late 1990s and how the rivalry between the FBI and CIA during that time may have inadvertently set the path for the tragedy of 9/11. The series follows members of the I-49 Squad in New York and Alec Station in Washington, D.C., the counter-terrorism divisions of the FBI and CIA, respectively, as they travel the world fighting for ownership of information while seemingly working toward the same goal - trying to prevent an imminent attack on U.S. soil.
Hulu Original Series


Image


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPakFrbTmck


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIlEtd3Hu3Q
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