The 911 That Never Should Have Been

The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright
New York : Vintage Books, 2007.
540 p. : ill., maps ; 21 cm.

I've read a lot about the Middle East, and about 9/11, but The Looming Tower is one of the best books to pull all the narrative threads together into an informative, compelling and stunning read.

There were several things I learned that surprised me.  I didn't realize how central the Egyptian fundamentalist-jihad movement was to al-Qaeda.  I had no idea that Bin Laden's time in Sudan was marked by his arriving a multimillionaire and leaving virtually broke.  I didn't know that when he left Sudan for Afghanistan, he had no idea who the Taliban were and they were cautious about him, too.  Probably the most painful revelations of the book are the several times that the CIA refused to share information with the FBI which almost surely would have lead to the uncovering and thwarting of the 9/11 plot.  There is more to discover in Wright's definitive history.

I would definitely recommend this book to a student with a keen interest in the background of 9/11 or to a student working on a research project about 9/11.  It is a fine book, one which won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.      

Not a Good Spiral

Spiral: trapped in the forever war by Mark Danner
New York : Simon & Schuster, 2016.
267 p. ; 24 cm.

Spiral may make you angry.  Spiral may make you sad.  Whatever your reaction, Spiral is a timely and urgent book that you should read.  Danner, a veteran reporter makes a very damning case that in the reaction to the devastating 9/11 terrorist attacks, the US government has embarked on an unending security/military mission that has increased the spread of global terrorism, has fostered a dangerous and antidemocratic culture of fear, and has perhaps forever destroyed significant parts of the Constitutional framework of US law (and wrecked the already weak framework of international laws of war and human rights that emerged out of the ruins of WWII).

His book is not easy reading.  He presents the details of torture and lawlessness committed by US agents that were the hallmark of the Bush years - none of which were (as required by law) investigated, and some of which (e.g. mass surveillance and assassination) have been codified and expanded by the Obama administration.  He pointedly notes that Obama - by protecting the torturers of the Bush era from prosecution - has essentially made the strict US and international laws against torture all but meaningless, likely guaranteeing that torture will be committed by US operatives again in the future.  He also notes that the expansion of secretive war operations -whether by drones or special forces - has made US military actions free of any democratic oversight.

Danner also presents strong evidence to bear on the fact that not only has the mult-trillion dollar war on terror not ended global non-state terrorism, but has lead to a vast growth in the numbers and reach of global terrorism.

He ends his book with a few suggestions of how the "forever war" could be reigned in and perhaps ended.  They are steps that were unlikely when the book was published and that are clearly not going to happen for at least four more years based on the elections of November 2016.  It's  a heavy book, but well written and researched.  For anyone concerned about the future or interested in the recent past, it offers much to think about.