[Kabar-indonesia] The Draft UN Resolution On Resolving the Lebanon Crisis [+Another 9/11]

[Joyo at aol.com]

3 reports:

- The draft UN resolution

- Robert Fisk: A terrible thought occurs to me - that
  there will be another 9/11

- NYT/Dexter Filkins: The Plot Against America

The Observer [UK]
Sunday August 6, 2006

The draft UN resolution

This is the draft concluded between the US, France and
Britain on resolving the Lebanon crisis which has yet
to be agreed by the Security Council

The Security Council,

PP1. Recalling all its previous resolutions on
Lebanon, in particular resolutions 425 (1978), 426
(1978), 520 (1982), 1559 (2004), 1655 (2006) and 1680
(2006), as well as the statements of its President on
the situation in Lebanon, in particular the statements
of 18 June 2000 (S/PRST/2000/21), of 19 October 2004
(S/PRST/2004/36), of 4 May 2005 (S/PRST/2005/17) of 23
January 2006 (S/PRST/2006/3) and of 30 July 2006
(S/PRST/2006/35),

PP2. Expressing its utmost concern at the continuing
escalation of hostilities in Lebanon and in Israel
since Hizbollah's attack on Israel on 12 July 2006,
which has already caused hundreds of deaths and
injuries on both sides, extensive damage to civilian
infrastructure and hundreds of thousands of internally
displaced persons,

PP3. Emphasizing the need for an end of violence, but
at the same time emphasizing the need to address
urgently the causes that have given rise to the
current crisis, including by the unconditional release
of the abducted Israeli soldiers,

PP4: Mindful of the sensitivity of the issue of
prisoners and encouraging the efforts aimed at
settling the issue of the Lebanese prisoners detained
in Israel,

OP1. Calls for a full cessation of hostilities based
upon, in particular, the immediate cessation by
Hizbollah of all attacks and the immediate cessation
by Israel of all offensive military operations;

OP2. Reiterates its strong support for full respect
for the Blue Line;

OP3. Also reiterates its strong support for the
territorial integrity, sovereignty and political
independence of Lebanon within its internationally
recognized borders, as contemplated by the
Israeli-Lebanese General Armistice Agreement of 23
March 1949;

OP4. Calls on the international community to take
immediate steps to extend its financial and
humanitarian assistance to the Lebanese people,
including through facilitating the safe return of
displaced persons and, under the authority of the
Government of Lebanon, reopening airports and harbours
for verifiably and purely civilian purposes, and calls
on it also to consider further assistance in the
future to contribute to the reconstruction and
development of Lebanon;

OP5. Emphasizes the importance of the extension of the
control of the Government of Lebanon over all Lebanese
territory in accordance with the provisions of
resolution 1559 (2004) and resolution 1680 (2006), and
of the relevant provisions of the Taif Accords, for it
to exercise its full sovereignty and authority;

OP6. Calls for Israel and Lebanon to support a
permanent ceasefire and a long-term solution based on
the following principles and elements:

· strict respect by all parties for the sovereignty
and territorial integrity of Israel and Lebanon;

· full respect for the Blue Line by both parties;

· delineation of the international borders of Lebanon,
especially in those areas where the border is disputed
or uncertain, including in the Shebaa farms area;

· security arrangements to prevent the resumption of
hostilities, including the establishment between the
Blue Line and the Litani river of an area free of any
armed personnel, assets and weapons other than those
of the Lebanese armed and security forces and of UN
mandated international forces deployed in this area;

· full implementation of the relevant provisions of
the Taif Accords and of resolutions 1559 (2004) and
1680 (2006) that require the disarmament of all armed
groups in Lebanon, so that, pursuant to the Lebanese
cabinet decision of July 27, 2006, there will be no
weapons or authority in Lebanon other than that of the
Lebanese state;

· deployment of an international force in Lebanon,
consistent with paragraph 10 below;

· establishment of an international embargo on the
sale or supply of arms and related material to Lebanon
except as authorized by its government;

· elimination of foreign forces in Lebanon without the
consent of its government;

· provision to the United Nations of remaining maps of
land mines in Lebanon in Israel's possession;

OP7. Invites the Secretary General to support efforts
to secure agreements in principle from the Government
of Lebanon and the Government of Israel to the
principles and elements for a long-term solution as
set forth in paragraph 6 above;

OP8. Requests the Secretary General to develop, in
liaison with key international actors and the
concerned parties, proposals to implement the relevant
provisions of the Taif Accords, and of resolutions
1559 (2004) and 1680 (2006), including disarmament,
and for delineation of the international borders of
Lebanon, especially in those areas where the border is
disputed or uncertain, including by dealing with the
Shebaa farms, and to present those proposals to the
Security Council within thirty days;

OP9. Calls on all parties to cooperate during this
period with the Security Council and to refrain from
any action contrary to paragraph 1 above that might
adversely affect the search for a long-term solution,
humanitarian access to civilian populations, or the
safe return of displaced persons, and requests the
Secretary General to keep the Council informed in this
regard;

OP10. Expresses its intention, upon confirmation to
the Security Council that the Government of Lebanon
and the Government of Israel have agreed in principle
to the principles and elements for a long-term
solution as set forth in paragraph 6 above, and
subject to their approval, to authorize in a further
resolution under Chapter VII of the Charter the
deployment of a UN mandated international force to
support the Lebanese armed forces and government in
providing a secure environment and contribute to the
implementation of a permanent ceasefire and a
long-term solution;

OP11. Requests UNIFIL, upon cessation of hostilities,
to monitor its implementation and to extend its
assistance to help ensure humanitarian access to
civilian populations and the safe return of displaced
persons;

OP12. Calls upon the Government of Lebanon to ensure
arms or related materiel are not imported into Lebanon
without its consent and requests UNIFIL, conditions
permitting, to assist the Government of Lebanon at its
request;

OP13. Requests the Secretary-General to report to the
Council within one week on the implementation of this
resolution and to provide any relevant information in
light of the Council's intention to adopt, consistent
with paragraph 10 above, a further resolution;

OP14. Decides to remain actively seized of the matter.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

The Independent [UK]
05 August 2006

Robert Fisk: A terrible thought occurs to me - that
there will be another 9/11

The room shook. Not since the 1983 earthquake has my
apartment rocked from side to side. That was the force
of the Israeli explosions in the southern suburbs of
Beirut - three miles from my home - and the air
pressure changed in the house yesterday morning and
outside in the street the palm trees moved.

Is it to be like this every day? How many civilians
can you make homeless before you start a revolution?
And what is next? Are the Israelis to bomb the centre
of Beirut? The Corniche? Is this why all the foreign
warships came and took their citizens away, to make
Beirut safe to destroy?

Yesterday, needless to say, was another day of
massacres, great and small. The largest appeared to be
40 farm workers in northern Lebanon, some of them
Kurds - a people who do not even have a country. An
Israeli missile was reported to have exploded among
them as they loaded vegetables on to a refrigerated
truck near Al-Qaa, a small village east of Hermel in
the far north. The wounded were taken to hospital in
Syria because the roads of Lebanon have now all been
cratered by Israeli bomb-bursts. Later we learnt that
an air strike on a house in the village of Taibeh in
the south had killed seven civilians and wounded 10
seeking shelter from attack.

In Israel two civilians were killed by Hizbollah
missiles but, as usual, Lebanon bore the brunt of the
day's attacks which centred - incredibly - on the
Christian heartland that has traditionally shown great
sympathy towards Israel. It was the Christian Maronite
community whose Phalangist militiamen were Israel's
closest allies in its 1982 invasion of Lebanon yet
Israel's air force yesterday attacked three highway
bridges north of Beirut and - again as usual - it was
the little people who died.

One of them was Joseph Bassil, 65, a Christian man who
had gone out on his daily jogging exercise with four
friends north of Jounieh. "His friends packed up after
four rounds of the bridge because it was hot," a
member of his family told us later. "Joseph decided to
do one more jog on the bridge. That was what killed
him." The Israelis gave no reason for the attacks - no
Hizbollah fighters would ever enter this Christian
Maronite stronghold and the only hindrance was caused
to humanitarian convoys - and there were growing fears
in Lebanon that the latest air raids were a sign of
Israel's frustration rather any serious military
planning.

Indeed, as the Lebanon war continues to destroy
innocent lives - most of them Lebanese - the conflict
seems to be increasingly aimless. The Israeli air
force has succeeded in killing perhaps 50 Hizbollah
members and 600 civilians and has destroyed bridges,
milk factories, gas stations, fuel storage depots,
airport runways and thousands of homes. But to what
purpose?

Does the United States any longer believe Israel's
claims that it will destroy Hizbollah when its army
clearly cannot do anything of the kind? Does
Washington not realise that when Israel grows tired of
this war, it will plead for a ceasefire - which only
Washington can deliver by doing what it most loathes
to do: by taking the road to Damascus and asking for
help from President Bashar al-Assad of Syria?

What in the meanwhile is happening to Lebanon? Bridges
and buildings can be reconstructed - with European
Union loans, no doubt - but many Lebanese are now
questioning the institutions of the democracy for
which the US was itself so full of praise last year.
What is the point of a democratically elected Lebanese
government which cannot protect its people? What is
the point of a 75,000-member Lebanese army which
cannot protect its nation, which cannot be sent to the
border, which does not fire on Lebanon's enemies and
which cannot disarm Hizbollah? Indeed, for many
Lebanese Shias, Hizbollah is now the Lebanese army.

So fierce has been Hizbollah's resistance - and so
determined its attacks on Israeli ground troops in
Lebanon - that many people here no longer recall that
it was Hizbollah which provoked this latest war by
crossing the border on 12 July, killing three Israeli
soldiers and capturing two others. Israel's threats of
enlarging the conflict even further are now met with
amusement rather than horror by a Lebanese population
which has been listening to Israel's warnings for 30
years with ever greater weariness. And yet they fear
for their lives. If Tel Aviv is hit, will Beirut be
spared. Or if central Beirut is hit, will Tel Aviv be
spared? Hizbollah now uses Israel's language of an eye
for an eye. Every Israeli taunt is met by a Hizbollah
taunt.

And do the Israelis realise that they are legitimising
Hizbollah, that a rag-tag army of guerrillas is
winning its spurs against an Israeli army and air
force whose targets - if intended - prove them to be
war criminals and if unintended suggest that they are
a rif-raff little better than the Arab armies they
have been fighting, on and off, for more than half a
century? Extraordinary precedents are being set in
this Lebanon war.

In fact, one of the most profound changes in the
region these past three decades has been the growing
unwillingness of Arabs to be afraid. Their leaders -
our "moderate" pro-Western Arab leaders such as King
Abdullah of Jordan and President Mubarak of Egypt -
may be afraid. But their peoples are not. And once a
people have lost their terror, they cannot be
re-injected with fear. Thus Israel's consistent policy
of smashing Arabs into submission no longer works. It
is a policy whose bankruptcy the Americans are now
discovering in Iraq.

And all across the Muslim world, "we" - the West,
America, Israel - are fighting not nationalists but
Islamists. And watching the martyrdom of Lebanon this
week - its slaughtered children in Qana packed into
plastic bags until the bags ran out and their corpses
had to be wrapped in carpets - a terrible and daunting
thought occurs to me, day by day. That there will be
another 9/11.

The room shook. Not since the 1983 earthquake has my
apartment rocked from side to side. That was the force
of the Israeli explosions in the southern suburbs of
Beirut - three miles from my home - and the air
pressure changed in the house yesterday morning and
outside in the street the palm trees moved.

Is it to be like this every day? How many civilians
can you make homeless before you start a revolution?
And what is next? Are the Israelis to bomb the centre
of Beirut? The Corniche? Is this why all the foreign
warships came and took their citizens away, to make
Beirut safe to destroy?

Yesterday, needless to say, was another day of
massacres, great and small. The largest appeared to be
40 farm workers in northern Lebanon, some of them
Kurds - a people who do not even have a country. An
Israeli missile was reported to have exploded among
them as they loaded vegetables on to a refrigerated
truck near Al-Qaa, a small village east of Hermel in
the far north. The wounded were taken to hospital in
Syria because the roads of Lebanon have now all been
cratered by Israeli bomb-bursts. Later we learnt that
an air strike on a house in the village of Taibeh in
the south had killed seven civilians and wounded 10
seeking shelter from attack.

In Israel two civilians were killed by Hizbollah
missiles but, as usual, Lebanon bore the brunt of the
day's attacks which centred - incredibly - on the
Christian heartland that has traditionally shown great
sympathy towards Israel. It was the Christian Maronite
community whose Phalangist militiamen were Israel's
closest allies in its 1982 invasion of Lebanon yet
Israel's air force yesterday attacked three highway
bridges north of Beirut and - again as usual - it was
the little people who died.

One of them was Joseph Bassil, 65, a Christian man who
had gone out on his daily jogging exercise with four
friends north of Jounieh. "His friends packed up after
four rounds of the bridge because it was hot," a
member of his family told us later. "Joseph decided to
do one more jog on the bridge. That was what killed
him." The Israelis gave no reason for the attacks - no
Hizbollah fighters would ever enter this Christian
Maronite stronghold and the only hindrance was caused
to humanitarian convoys - and there were growing fears
in Lebanon that the latest air raids were a sign of
Israel's frustration rather any serious military
planning.

Indeed, as the Lebanon war continues to destroy
innocent lives - most of them Lebanese - the conflict
seems to be increasingly aimless. The Israeli air
force has succeeded in killing perhaps 50 Hizbollah
members and 600 civilians and has destroyed bridges,
milk factories, gas stations, fuel storage depots,
airport runways and thousands of homes. But to what
purpose?

Does the United States any longer believe Israel's
claims that it will destroy Hizbollah when its army
clearly cannot do anything of the kind? Does
Washington not realise that when Israel grows tired of
this war, it will plead for a ceasefire - which only
Washington can deliver by doing what it most loathes
to do: by taking the road to Damascus and asking for
help from President Bashar al-Assad of Syria?

What in the meanwhile is happening to Lebanon? Bridges
and buildings can be reconstructed - with European
Union loans, no doubt - but many Lebanese are now
questioning the institutions of the democracy for
which the US was itself so full of praise last year.
What is the point of a democratically elected Lebanese
government which cannot protect its people? What is
the point of a 75,000-member Lebanese army which
cannot protect its nation, which cannot be sent to the
border, which does not fire on Lebanon's enemies and
which cannot disarm Hizbollah? Indeed, for many
Lebanese Shias, Hizbollah is now the Lebanese army.

So fierce has been Hizbollah's resistance - and so
determined its attacks on Israeli ground troops in
Lebanon - that many people here no longer recall that
it was Hizbollah which provoked this latest war by
crossing the border on 12 July, killing three Israeli
soldiers and capturing two others. Israel's threats of
enlarging the conflict even further are now met with
amusement rather than horror by a Lebanese population
which has been listening to Israel's warnings for 30
years with ever greater weariness. And yet they fear
for their lives. If Tel Aviv is hit, will Beirut be
spared. Or if central Beirut is hit, will Tel Aviv be
spared? Hizbollah now uses Israel's language of an eye
for an eye. Every Israeli taunt is met by a Hizbollah
taunt.

And do the Israelis realise that they are legitimising
Hizbollah, that a rag-tag army of guerrillas is
winning its spurs against an Israeli army and air
force whose targets - if intended - prove them to be
war criminals and if unintended suggest that they are
a rif-raff little better than the Arab armies they
have been fighting, on and off, for more than half a
century? Extraordinary precedents are being set in
this Lebanon war.

In fact, one of the most profound changes in the
region these past three decades has been the growing
unwillingness of Arabs to be afraid. Their leaders -
our "moderate" pro-Western Arab leaders such as King
Abdullah of Jordan and President Mubarak of Egypt -
may be afraid. But their peoples are not. And once a
people have lost their terror, they cannot be
re-injected with fear. Thus Israel's consistent policy
of smashing Arabs into submission no longer works. It
is a policy whose bankruptcy the Americans are now
discovering in Iraq.

And all across the Muslim world, "we" - the West,
America, Israel - are fighting not nationalists but
Islamists. And watching the martyrdom of Lebanon this
week - its slaughtered children in Qana packed into
plastic bags until the bags ran out and their corpses
had to be wrapped in carpets - a terrible and daunting
thought occurs to me, day by day. That there will be
another 9/11.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

The New York Times
Sunday, August 6, 2006

The Plot Against America

Review by DEXTER FILKINS

When Mohamed Atta and his four Saudi confederates
commandeered a Boeing 767 and steered it into the
north tower of the World Trade Center, they began a
story that still consumes us nearly five years on, and
one that seems, on bad days, to promise war without
end.

But the events of Sept. 11, 2001, were in many ways
less the start of a tale than the end of one, or at
least the climax of one, begun many years before in
many different precincts: in the middle-class suburbs
of Cairo, in the mosques of Hamburg, in Jidda, in
Islamabad, in the quiet university town of Greeley,
Colo.

In its simplest terms, this is the story of how a
small group of men, with a frightening mix of delusion
and calculation, rose from a tormented civilization to
mount a catastrophic assault on the world’s mightiest
power, and how another group of men and women,
convinced that such an attack was on the way, tried
desperately to stop it.

What a story it is. And what a riveting tale Lawrence
Wright fashions in this marvelous book. “The Looming
Tower” is not just a detailed, heart-stopping account
of the events leading up to 9/11, written with style
and verve, and carried along by villains and heroes
that only a crime novelist could dream up. It’s an
education, too — though you’d never know it — a
thoughtful examination of the world that produced the
men who brought us 9/11, and of their progeny who
bedevil us today. The portrait of John O’Neill, the
driven, demon-ridden F.B.I. agent who worked so
frantically to stop Osama bin Laden, only to perish in
the attack on the World Trade Center, is worth the
price of the book alone. “The Looming Tower” is a
thriller. And it’s a tragedy, too.

In the nearly five years since the attacks, we’ve
heard oceans of commentary on the whys and how-comes
and what-it-means and what’s nexts. Wright, a staff
writer for The New Yorker — where portions of this
book have appeared — has put his boots on the ground
in the hard places, conducted the interviews and done
the sleuthing. Others talked, he listened. And so he
has unearthed an astonishing amount of detail about
Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Mullah Muhammad
Omar and all the rest of them. They come alive.

Who knew, for instance, that bin Laden, far from being
a warrior-stoic fighting against the Soviet Union in
Afghanistan, was actually a pathetic stick-in-the-mud
who would fall ill before battle? That the
combat-hardened Afghans, so tired of bin Laden’s
behavior, declared him and his Arab associates
“useless”? Or that he was a permissive father and
indulgent husband? Or that he is only six feet tall?

More important, who knew — I sure didn’t — that bin
Laden had left behind such a long trail of words?
Wright has found them in books, on film, in audio
recordings, in people’s notebooks and memories. This
has allowed him to draw an in-depth portrait of bin
Laden, and to chart his evolution from a
self-conscious step-child growing up in Jidda, Saudi
Arabia, to the visionary cave-dwelling madman who
mimics the Holy Prophet in his most humdrum daily
habits.

Wright takes the title of his book from the fourth
sura of the Koran, which bin Laden repeated three
times in a speech videotaped just as the hijackers
were preparing to fly. The video was found later, on a
computer in Hamburg.

“Wherever you are, death will find you, Even in the
looming tower.”

There is poetry, too. Here is a particularly chilling
bit, found on another videotape, which bin Laden had
read aloud at the wedding of his 17-year-old son,
Mohammed. The celebration took place not long after a
pair of Qaeda suicide bombers, riding in a tiny boat
filled with explosives, nearly sank the billion-dollar
guided missile destroyer Cole. At least with regard to
his abilities as an author, bin Laden was unusually
modest: he let someone else write the words. “I am
not, as most of our brothers know, a warrior of the
word,” he said.

    A destroyer, even the brave might fear,
    She inspires horror in the harbor and the open
sea,
    She goes into the waves flanked by arrogance,
haughtiness and fake might,
    To her doom she progresses slowly, clothed in a
huge illusion,
    Awaiting her is a dinghy, bobbing in the waves.

“The Looming Tower” is full of such surprising detail.
Al Qaeda’s leaders had all but shelved the 9/11 plot
when they realized they lacked foot soldiers who could
pass convincingly as westernized Muslims in the United
States. At just the right moment Atta appeared in
Afghanistan, along with Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Ziad
al-Jarrah and Marwan al-Shehhi, all Western-educated
transplants, offering themselves up for slaughter. The
game was on.

Just as dramatic as the portraits of bin Laden and
Zawahiri is Wright’s account of the roots of Islamic
militancy — the intellectual, spiritual and material
world from which the plotters came. Wright draws a
fascinating picture of Sayyid Qutb, the font of modern
Islamic fundamentalism, a frail, middle-aged writer
who found himself, as a visitor to the United States
and a student at Colorado State College of Education
in Greeley in the 1940’s, overwhelmed by the unbridled
splendor and godlessness of modern America. And by the
sex: like so many others who followed him, Qutb seemed
simultaneously drawn to and repelled by American
women, so free and unselfconscious in their sexuality.
The result is a kind of delirium:

“A girl looks at you, appearing as if she were an
enchanting nymph or an escaped mermaid,” Qutb wrote,
“but as she approaches, you sense only the screaming
instinct inside her, and you can smell her burning
body, not the scent of perfume, but flesh, only flesh.
Tasty flesh, truly, but flesh nonetheless.”

It wasn’t much later that Qutb began writing elaborate
rationalizations for killing non-Muslims and waging
war against the West. Years later, Atta expressed a
similar mix of obsession and disgust for women.
Indeed, anyone who has spent time in the Middle East
will recognize such tortured emotions.

WRIGHT shows, correctly, that at the root of Islamic
militancy — its anger, its antimodernity, its
justifications for murder — lies a feeling of intense
humiliation. Islam plays a role in this, with its
straitjacketed and all-encompassing worldview. But
whether the militant hails from a middle-class family
or an impoverished one, is intensely religious or a
“theological amateur,” as Wright calls bin Laden and
his cohort, he springs almost invariably from an
ossified society with an autocratic government that is
unable to provide any reason to believe in the future.
Islam offers dignity, even in — especially in — death.
Living in the West, Atta and the others felt these
things more acutely, not less. As Wright notes:

“Their motivations varied, but they had in common a
belief that Islam — pure and primitive, unmitigated by
modernity and uncompromised by politics — would cure
the wounds that socialism or Arab nationalism had
failed to heal. They were angry but powerless in their
own countries. They did not see themselves as
terrorists but as revolutionaries who, like all such
men throughout history, had been pushed into action by
the simple human need for justice. Some had
experienced brutal repression; some were simply drawn
to bloody chaos. From the beginning of Al Qaeda, there
were reformers and there were nihilists. The dynamic
between them was irreconcilable and self-destructive,
but events were moving so quickly that it was almost
impossible to tell the philosophers from the
sociopaths. They were glued together by the
charismatic personality of Osama bin Laden, which
contained both strands, idealism and nihilism, in a
potent mix.”

In John O’Neill, bin Laden almost met his match. The
supervisor of the F.B.I.’s New York office and of the
team assigned to track Al Qaeda in the United States,
O’Neill felt, as strongly as anyone in the government,
that Al Qaeda was coming to America. He was a
relentless investigator, a volcanic personality and
sometimes his own worst enemy. In the end he broke
himself on a government bureaucracy that could not —
and would not — move as quickly as he did. O’Neill and
others like him were in a race with Al Qaeda, and
although we know how the race ended, it’s astonishing
— and heartbreaking — to learn how close it was.

Some of the F.B.I.’s field agents, as we now know, had
premonitions of what was coming. When the supervisor
of the Minneapolis field office was admonished, in
August 2001, for expressing fears that an Islamic
radical attending flight school might be planning a
suicide attack, he shot back defiantly that he was
“trying to keep someone from taking a plane and
crashing into the World Trade Center.” Amazing.

The most gut-wrenching scenes are the ones that show
F.B.I. agents trying, as 9/11 approached, to pry
information from their rivals inside the United States
government. The C.I.A., Wright says, knew that
high-level Qaeda operatives had held a meeting in
Malaysia in January 2000, and, later, that two of them
had entered the United States. Both men turned out to
be part of the team that hijacked the planes on Sept.
11. The C.I.A. failed to inform agencies like the
F.B.I. — which might have been able to locate the men
and break up the plot — until late in the summer of
2001.

The fateful struggle between the C.I.A. and F.B.I. in
the months leading up to the attacks has been outlined
before, but never in such detail. At meetings, C.I.A.
analysts dangled photos of two of the eventual
hijackers in front of F.B.I. agents, but wouldn’t tell
them who they were. The F.B.I. agents could sense that
the C.I.A. possessed crucial pieces of evidence about
Islamic radicals they were investigating, but couldn’t
tell what they were. The tension came to a head at a
meeting in New York on June 11, exactly three months
before the catastrophe, which ended with F.B.I. and
C.I.A. agents shouting at each other across the room.

In one of the most remarkable scenes in the book, Ali
Soufan, an F.B.I. agent assigned to Al Qaeda, was
taken aside on Sept. 12 and finally shown the names
and photos of the men the C.I.A. had known for more
than a year and a half were in America. The planes had
already struck. Soufan ran to the bathroom and
retched.

Great stuff. I just wish Wright had given us
something, even a chapter, on the hijackings
themselves; as it is, he takes us right up to the
moment, and then straight to the burning towers.
Perhaps he felt that ground was too well-trodden. My
other complaint is more substantive. Through the
enormous amount of legwork he has done, tracking down
people who worked with bin Laden and Zawahiri over the
years, Wright has drawn up verbatim reconstructions of
entire conversations, some of which took place more
than a decade ago. Many of these conversations are
riveting. Still, in some cases, it’s hard to believe
that memories are that good.

“The Looming Tower” ends near the Pakistani border,
where Zawahiri, or someone who looked like him, rode
through a village on horseback and then disappeared
into the mountains. It’s not a definitive ending;
there is no closure. And that’s the point. For as
amazing as the story of Al Qaeda and the road to 9/11
is, it’s not over yet.

Dexter Filkins is a Baghdad correspondent for The
Times.

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Joyo Indonesia News Service
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