{"id":341,"date":"2009-05-05T14:11:19","date_gmt":"2009-05-05T20:11:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/?p=341"},"modified":"2009-05-05T14:11:19","modified_gmt":"2009-05-05T20:11:19","slug":"the-looming-tower","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/?p=341","title":{"rendered":"The Looming Tower"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I picked up a copy of Lawrence Wright&#8217;s Pulitzer Prize-winning <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/1400030846?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=relaxandhavef-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=1400030846\">The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9\/11 (Vintage)<\/a><img loading=\"lazy\" style=\"border:none !important; margin:0px !important;\" src=\"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=relaxandhavef-20&amp;l=as2&amp;o=1&amp;a=1400030846\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" \/> this weekend in Santa Fe.\u00a0  Started reading it just to fill in a few minutes, then couldn&#8217;t stop reading it.\u00a0  Apologies to all those who&#8217;s earlier recommendations of this book to me went unheeded until now.\u00a0 You were all correct.\u00a0  <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">The Looming Tower<\/span> is an amazing, revolting, fascinating and terrifying recounting of the life of Osama bin Laden, the history of al-Qaeda, the consequences of the broader Middle East Conflict and the tragically inefficient efforts of the U.S. intelligence community.<\/p>\n<p>For me, aside from the detailed explanations of exactly how the repeated lack of inter-agency cooperation made the U.S. blind to first bin Laden, then to al-Qaeda, then to their plans, the main benefit of the book was gained from understanding part of the life of bin Laden.\u00a0 To see how he started off in life, where he went, how he reacted to events in his life, who he listened to, how he changed and how he changed al-Qaeda was amazing.\u00a0 The book would have been great in that sense even if it had stopped prior to 9\/11.<\/p>\n<p>Other than some Truthers who claim the USG destroyed the World Trade Center, the book is very favorably <a title=\"multiple reviews\" href=\"http:\/\/www.metacritic.com\/books\/authors\/wrightlawrence\/loomingtower\" target=\"_blank\">reviewed<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0 I, too, highly recommend it for anyone looking for an accessible explanation of bin Laden and al-Qaeda.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I picked up a copy of Lawrence Wright&#8217;s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9\/11 (Vintage) this weekend in Santa Fe. Started reading it just to fill in a few minutes, then couldn&#8217;t stop reading it. Apologies to all those who&#8217;s earlier recommendations of this book to me went unheeded [&#8230;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[11,33,26,13,24,18],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=341"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":348,"href":"http:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341\/revisions\/348"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=341"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=341"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/relaxandhavefun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=341"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}