Critical Book Review of Lawrence Wright's 'The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road To 9/11'



Critical Book Review of Lawrence Wright's 'The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road To 9/11'

I've been meaning to read this book, for which Wright won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction, since it came out but my schedule (which is very heavy on reading) only just lightened up enough for me to get through it. The Looming Tower is an extremely impressive book, one which probably deserved to win the Pulitzer and its required reading for anyone with an interest in 9/11, terrorism, Al-Qaeda or the modern history of the Middle East in general. What is particularly interesting about this book, at least from my perspective, is what it can tell us about the ubiquitous and very hard-to-eradicate conspiracy theories that continue to linger on about September 11, now nearly ten years after its occurrence (Wright, 2006).

The Looming Tower is not about 9/11 conspiracy theories. It's only tangentially about 9/11 itself; the event, while the narrative climax of the book, is only briefly described in the second-to-last chapter. Its focus is on the origins and rise of Al-Qaeda as well as a semi-biography of its (thankfully) deceased leader, Osama bin Laden. However, what The Looming Tower does without expressly setting out to is demonstrate just how far removed from reality “9/11 Truth” theories really are. The Looming Tower is an exhaustive study of the background of the 9/11 event and what led up to it. This background is totally missing from conspiracy theorists' shallow views of the 9/11 attacks, but it is key to any rational person who wishes to understand why Osama and his group attacked us, what they hoped to accomplish, and crucially why the United States was caught blindsided on that fateful day. Indeed, although it was not conceived as a piece to debunk the ridiculous conspiracy theories still pushed by 9/11 Twoofers (I call them that to emphasize that they believe in woo, or irrational and unsupportable things), The Looming Tower offers some excellent rejoinders to some of the Twoofers' most oft-repeated memes (Wright, 2006).

even among his closest followers, the fable that now attributed to him. The incompetence and failure were the only constant in his career mark as Bin Laden and the man is now determined to make his radical mass murder suicide, an Egyptian radical Ayman al-Zawahiri to take. Finally, Wright can offer no conclusive link between intermittent boorish Bin Laden and Zawahiri, and the success of the 9/11, nothing, the value of what was never seen in the distance calculation and means "Al Qaeda". Looming Tower is against the letter - that is, to explain the growth of the main terrorist organizations in the world - as a glance at the facts of life, men, allegedly responsible for the al-Qaida point in a very Another story to believe. Compared with many small finely reasoned and the facts scaremongering sites that have been issued, on the right, ...