The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright, an excellent book by the way, has a touching scene when Ali Soufan, the Lebanese American FBI agent who interrogated Abu Jandal, the Yemeni source for much of what we know about the 9/11 hijackers, where Ali finally breaks him.
Ali got Abu to identify the hijackers in a brilliant ploy.
But Wright builds up to the identification of the hijackers by beginning his story six decades ago with the first Middle Eastener to attack the West.
Sayyid Qutb was an Egyptian who was offended by the decadent Americans while attending college in Colorado. Qutb's jail time manifesto justified takfir which held that Islam was the only true religion and that true believers had the religious obligation to kill everyone—including women and children—who disagreed with the true faith (29).
Wright describes Bin Laden's youth and evolution as a thinker when in 1980 Osama adopted the doctrine of takfir as al-Qa’ida’s operating principle.
The Americans are slow to understand Bin Laden but when they do FBI terrorist experts Dan Coleman, John O’Neill, and to a lesser extent Michael Scheuer and Richard Clarke are quick to identify him as a significant threat. They first learned of al-Qa’ida from a Sudanese defector, Jamal al-Fadl, shortly after bin Laden declared war on the United States in 1996. While al-Qa’ida evolved and planned its terrorist operations—the first World Trade Center bombing, the attacks in Lebanon, Africa, and on the USS Cole—leading up to 9/11, the FBI and CIA came to realize that al-Qa’ida planned terrorist attacks against America itself.
Wright documents that on 11 September 2001, the Bureau had only one analyst working full time on the al-Qa’ida account.
Wright demonstrates that the failure of the FBI and the CIA to cooperate at key junctures and the failure of Clinton to aggressively identify and attack Bin Laden provided him a loophole to escape.
In the words of Scheuer in his own work Imperial Hubris, American policy makers failed to smoke Bin Laden in the dust of history. Americans were failed by the tepid investigation and muted response by American policy makers. The tragedy of 9/11 is the result.
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