The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11

I took away from this book a new picture of terrorists, finding out terrorists are generally well educated and are not always deeply religious. This is surprising. They all seem, however, to be expatriots, living away from the countries of their ancestors. What else? Bin Laden's father was blinded by a teacher at school; after the incident, his father never returned to school and was illiterate for his entire life. O'Neill, one of the senior figures at the FBI who was in search for Bin Laden, left the agency on August 22 and reported to his new job, head of security for the Twin Towers. He was on the job on September 11 and was killed. I never quite figured out what motivated the terrorists. But most used the text of a book written many hundreds of years after the Koran as their basis for action. The Koran itself states explicitly that suicide will result in a trip to Hell. Murder in the Koran is prohibited. The terrorists, thus, are not following the Koran, but those who have interpreted and elaborated on it.