New England Patriots Forums - PatsFans.com Patriots Fan Messageboard - “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11”

Great book coming out in August...Here is a Q&A with the author Lawrence Wright.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/cont...n_onlineonly01

SOME OF THE MATERIAL:

Quote:

AMY DAVIDSON: The question your article asks is whether the C.I.A. stopped an F.B.I. agent from preventing 9/11. Letâ€™s start with the F.B.I. agent. Who was he, and why was he remarkable?

LAWRENCE WRIGHT: On 9/11, Ali Soufan, an Arab-American F.B.I. agent, was one of only eight agents in the F.B.I. who spoke Arabic, and the only one in New York City. He was absolutely invaluable to the bureau because of his skills, his innate talent, and his relentless nature. At the age of twenty-nine, he was appointed the chief agent in charge of investigating the attack on the U.S.S. Cole, in the harbor of Aden, Yemen, which killed seventeen American soldiers in October of 2000.

That was an Al Qaeda attack as well?

As it turned outâ€”Soufanâ€™s investigation proved that it was.

Quote:

What could he have done to stop Osama bin Laden from attacking the World Trade Center?

People who were involved in the planning of the Cole bombing were connected to the people who planned 9/11. There was a meeting in Malaysia in January, 2000, where at least two of the 9/11 hijackers and the mastermind behind the Cole bombing, a man named Khallad, met with other Al Qaeda operatives. After that meeting, two of the hijackers flew to the United States and settled in San Diego. The C.I.A. knew about the meeting; the agency had had it monitored by Malaysiaâ€™s secret service, Special Branch, which took surveillance photos and sent them to the C.I.A. So the agency had in its file pictures of Khallad and of people who turned out to be among the hijackers. Had the C.I.A. told Soufan what it knew about the meeting, he might have uncovered the plot.

Quote:

This weekâ€™s story is taken from your forthcoming book, â€œThe Looming Tower.â€ Thereâ€™s a lot in your book, of course, thatâ€™s not in your article.

Thatâ€™s true. This is just a portion of a vast saga, beginning in 1948, with the arrival of Sayyid Qutb in America, and ending shortly after 9/11. Itâ€™s a story of the terrorists and the counter-terrorists, of two cultures in collision. Itâ€™s told equally from each side. Much of it has to do with the rise of radical Islam and our failed efforts to counter it. Itâ€™s told through the lives of four individuals: Osama bin Laden; Ayman al-Zawahiri, his deputy; Prince Turki al-Faisal, the former head of Saudi intelligence; and John Oâ€™Neill.

THE LIBERALS HERE WOULD BE WISE TO RESEARCH SAYYID QUTB...actually everyone should research Sayyid...his teachings are the bible for modern radical Muslims.