Fascinating personal history of the men who formed Al Qaeda (at least in the common, non-clocker-bob version of history), especially Bin Laden and Zawahiri. Chilling and more than a little depressing, but importantly insightful too. Ascribing recognizable human personalities, however pathological and flawed, to these men is an important and missing element of how we think about them.
This book will also make you wall-punching furious at the ineptitude of the U.S. intelligence community bureaucracy. So many missed opportunities and, according to this book, missed for no reasons other than internecine pissing matches and the stubborn refusal of the CIA, like many right-wingers, to view Islamist terrorism as crime rather than warfare. The book lays the blame for our failure to prevent 9/11 squarely on the CIA's obsessive secrecy and their refusal to disclose vital intelligence to the FBI out of fear that an official criminal investigation would endanger their assets and methods, which they hoped would ultimately bring Bin Laden down. The irony is as thick as it is tragic.
But that was the last of my latest stack from the book store. I'm without new reading material, though I have been wanting to tackle Alan Moore's From Hell again.
