The Looming Tower, Al-Qaeda and the road to 9/11

Introduction

American policies and decisions on the international level have always come under the scanner more times for controversies than appreciation, the reason being the relentless use of devastating technology and force that has caused “approximate” disaster to their intended targets. Approximate in terms of the leveling down of cities at a stretch and killings of innocent victims of the wars. Therefore, in this work, we will focus ourselves to especially what has been the biggest (on the scale of aftereffects) assertion of terrorist activity of the 21^st century- Attack on World Trade Centre, U.S.A. on September 9, 2001 (more commonly called as 9/11 attack). Through the analysis of book: The Looming Towers, Al Qaeda and the road to 9/11.

These attacks (others were on the pentagon building and try fully on The White House) are the effects of causes that can de dug out from as before as the peak of cold war between the soviets and the Americans.

Concise History Related to the 9/11 Attack[1]

     As a part of the cold war going on, the soviets feared that Afghanistan was being eyed by the U.S. as a stand point from where it can threaten Soviet Union’s mainland. Hence, reacting to this fear, the soviet army in 1979 moved with all the arms and ammunition into afghan land. The soviets were trying to force communism on the people of Afghanistan (in their bid to clear the region from any chance of it becoming U.S. military base that can pose threat to them. But the Afghans with America’s support of heavy artillery and millions of dollar funding fought back. The financial help from America was to ensure that without its direct intervention, the afghan mujahideen (who have a historic track record of fighting continuously and fiercely till death for their homeland are well equipped against the technologically advanced soviet tanks and fighter planes. American troops were not involved in this war (Meher, page 122) The American support came in disguise through other Islamic countries like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan (Meher, page 199) etc because the direct intervention of America could trigger the next world war. The afghan jihads resisted the soviets well above the expectation of U.S. which was matching their performance with ever increasing million dollars each year. Now with the initial strong opening to the war from the Afghans, the next step was to make the war sustainable from Afghanistan side.

For that to happen, more and more Muslim volunteer jihadis were required to pick up arms and fight. The funding helped to create madrassas (Muslim schools of Islam thought) which noticed Muslims turning up in large numbers and soon they were prepared with enough expertise to wage war. It was in these madrassas that Osama Bin Laden came to work as a volunteer in the war. Osama was Saudi national and with him brought big money as well and started helping the cause by working in construction purposes and in medical aid. The madrassas were established in the border regions between Pakistan and Afghanistan which in the future will give birth to “Taliban”. Taliban and Al Qaeda were involved as one during post soviet war.

And both became anti America after America withdrew funding and humanitarian aid. The soviets after suffering devastation and persistent resistance from the afghan fighters went into huge military losses of men and arms. At the end of war (May`88), the soviets were defeated and they started their return (Wright, page 129) which was complete in `89. Afghanistan won with a major help from U.S. and the cold war ended with the fall of communism. Afghanistan victory brought happiness to common people who were the innocent victims in the war. However, immediately after the war the United States lost its interest in the region and avoided even any humanitarian policy toward the victims of soviet-afghan war and those of the civil war that followed because of lack of any established government rule. In result, lawlessness prevailed and whole of the Afghanistan went into another fight, this time intra-nation.

Seeing such an acrimonious act of denial, the people of Afghanistan and the Taliban (which was flourishing initially with the help of U.S.) were annoyed with America’s change of attitude and selfishness for own motives. In the mean time, the volunteers returned to their countries and so did Osama now as a war hero there. Osama bin laden also saw the U.S. act of disappointment. Osama formed the Al Qaeda terrorist groups backed with strong military training and heavy artillery and arms. Osama took cue of the feeling of hatred against U.S. among people of Muslim community and appealed to them to declare jihad against American people and government and he staged his rally at a still higher level, calling upon all the Muslims around the world to join the fight against U.S., this led to the formation of a school of thought that believed that it is the religious duty of every Muslim to oppose the American way.

Al Qaeda was also formed in between these days and slowly developed into future of the suicide bombings, terrorist attacks in every region. Osama’s reach was also felt in disputed Balkans regions (Kosovo etc) where the Islamic fundamentalists feasted upon the lack of proper governance and unaccountable resources. The terrorist framework working in the Balkan area was trained for deployment all over the world. The once harmless bin laden (seen as a war volunteer engaged in medical camps during war with the soviets) who has returned to his home country was now slowly progressing toward an establishment of terrorist acts that would shake the foundations of America.

Osama Bin Laden

The 9/11 report paints a picture of bin Laden as being blindly obsessed with attacking the United States, possessing a vendetta and an irrational, intrinsic loathing of America and Americans (Fawaz, 2005, page 1). Mohammed bin Laden and Alia’s only child was born in Riyadh in January 1958, named Osama, “the Lion,” after one of the companions of the Prophet (Wright, Page 72). For most of Osama’s young life, however, he lived in Jeddah. Though his father was by now prosperous and esteemed, the family occupied a large, ramshackle house in Al-Amariyya, a modest neighborhood with small shops and lines of laundry hanging off the balconies. Osama spent his early years among a horde of children in his father’s house. Mohammed ran the family like a corporation, with each wife reporting on her division. The children rarely saw the great man, who was often away on business.

Whenever he returned, he would call them into his office and gaze upon his vast brood. During the Islamic feasting days, he would kiss them and give each child a gold coin; otherwise, he rarely spoke to them. “I remember reciting a poem to him, and he gave me a hundred riyals, which was a huge amount of money in those days/’ Osama remembered (Wright, Page 73). Osama`s character was very much influenced by his father, who was a very hard working, persistent and fundamentalist person. His father had a sort of “rags to riches” story of how he made his fortune. Osama got the civil engineering work experience in heritage from his father who was the king in construction in his peak years. Osama enjoyed television, especially westerns. Bonanza was his favorite show, and he adored Fury, a series about a boy and his silky black stallion. On summer mornings, after the dawn prayer, the boys would play soccer. Osama was an average player who could have been better if he had concentrated on the sport. But his mind was always somewhere else (Wright page 75). “He was a normal, not excellent, student,” said Ahmed Badeeb, who taught Osama science courses for three years.

The lives of these two men, bin Laden and Badeeb, would intertwine in unexpected ways in the future, as bin Laden was drawn to jihad and Badeeb became a member of Saudi intelligence. In Osama’s fourteenth year he experienced a religious and political awakening. Some ascribe the change to a charismatic Syrian gym teacher at the school who was a member of the Muslim Brothers. Osama stopped watching cowboy shows. Outside of school, he refused to wear Western dress. Sometimes he would sit in front of the television and weep over the news from Palestine.

“In his teenage years, he was the same nice kid,” his mother later related. “But he was more concerned, sad, and frustrated about the situation in Palestine in particular, and the Arab and Muslim world in general.” He tried to explain his feelings to his friends and family, but his passion left them nonplussed. “He thought Muslims are not close enough to Allah, and Muslim youth are too busy playing and having fun,” his mother concluded. He began fasting twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays, in emulation of the Prophet. He went to bed right after isha, the evening prayer. In addition to the five prayers a day, he set his alarm for one in the morning and prayed alone every night. Osama became quite stern with his younger half siblings, especially about rising early to go to the mosque for the dawn prayer (Wright page 82).

During his “war on terror” in Afghanistan and the search for “weapons of mass destruction”, Osama came across the following recording:

“Tonight in Iraq, Saddam walks amidst ruin,” President George H.W. Bush was able to boast on March 6. “His war machine is crushed. His ability to threaten mass destruction is itself destroyed.” Although Saddam remained in power, that seemed to be a footnote to the awesome display of American military force and the international coalition that rallied behind U.S. leadership. The president was exultant. With the fall of the Soviet Union followed by this lightning victory, American hegemony was undisputed. “We can see a new world coming into view,” Bush told Congress, “in which there is the very real prospect of a new world order…. A world where the United Nations, freed from cold war stalemate, is poised to fulfill the historic vision of its founders. A world in which freedom and respect for human rights find a home among all nations.” These words, uttered so hopefully, found a bitter audience in Osama bin Laden. He also wanted to create a new world order, one that was ruled by Muslims, not dictated by America and enforced by the UN.

The scale of his ambition was beginning to reveal itself. In his fantasy he would enter history as the savior of Islam. He argued that he needed to return to Pakistan in order to help mediate the civil war among the mujahideen, which the Saudi government was keenly interested in resolving. Many prominent princes and sheikhs interceded on his behalf. Eventually, Prince Naif backed down and returned bin Laden’s travel documents, but only after making the nettlesome warrior sign a pledge that he would not interfere with the politics of Saudi Arabia or any Arab country (Wright page 160-161). In March 1992, bin Laden arrived in Peshawar. In the three years since his departure, the communist government in Afghanistan had managed to hang on to power, but it was on the verge of being overrun. Before he left Afghanistan, bin Laden put on a disguise and checked into a clinic in Karachi for some unknown ailment. (Wright page 161).

AY M AN-AL-ZAWAHIRI

AY M AN AL-ZAWAHIRI, the man who would lead Qutb’s vanguard, grew up in a quiet middle-class suburb called Maadi, five miles south of the noisy chaos of Cairo. It was an unlikely breeding ground for revolution. A consortium of Egyptian Jewish financiers, intending to create a kind of English village amid the mango and guava plantations and the Bedouin settlements on the eastern bank of the Nile, began selling lots in the first decade of the twentieth century.

In 1960 Dr. Mohammed Rabie al-Zawahiri and his wife, Umayma, moved from Heliopolis to Maadi. Rabie and Umayma belonged to two of the most prominent families in Egypt. The Zawahiri (pronounced za-wah-iri) clan was already on its way to becoming a medical dynasty. Rabie was a professor of pharmacology at Ain Shams University. Obese, bald, and slightly cross-eyed, Ayman’s father had the reputation of being eccentric and absentminded, and yet he was beloved by his students and neighborhood children. He spent most of his time in the laboratory or in his private medical clinic. Professor Zawahiri’s research occasionally took him to Czechoslovakia, at a time when few Egyptians traveled because of currency restrictions. He always returned loaded with toys. Young Ayman loved the cartoons and Disney films, which played three nights a week on the outdoor screen. Life on a professor’s salary was often tight, however, especially with five ambitious children to educate. The family never owned a car until Ayman was grown. Like many Egyptian academics, Professor Zawahiri eventually spent several years teaching outside of Egypt—he went to Algeria—to earn a higher income.

To economize, the Zawahiris kept hens and ducks behind the house, and the professor bought oranges and mangoes by the crate, which he pressed on the children as a natural source of vitamin C (Wright page 34). Ayman al-Zawahiri, however, attended the state secondary school, a modest, low-slung building behind a green gate on the opposite side of the suburb. As a child, Ayman had a round face, wary eyes, and a mouth that was flat and unsmiling. He was a bookworm who excelled in his studies and hated violent sports—he thought they were “inhumane.” From an early age he was known for being devout, and he would often attend prayers at the Hussein Sidki Mosque; an unimposing annex of a large apartment building, it was named after a famous actor who had renounced his profession because it was ungodly. No doubt Ayman’s interest in religion seemed natural in a family with so many distinguished religious scholars, but it added to his image of being soft and otherworldly.

Zawahiri also sought to restore the caliphate, the rule of Islamic clerics, which had formally ended in 1924 following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire but which had not exercised real power since the thirteenth century. Once the caliphate was established, Zawahiri believed, Egypt would become a rallying point for the rest of the Islamic world, leading it in a jihad against the West. “Then history would make a new turn, God willing,” Zawahiri later wrote, “in the opposite direction against the empire of the United States and the world’s Jewish government.” (Wright page 39). While he was covering for another doctor at a Muslim Brothers clinic, the director of the clinic asked if Zawahiri would like to accompany him to Pakistan to tend to the Afghan refugees. Hundreds of thousands were fleeing across the border after the recent Soviet invasion. Zawahiri immediately agreed. He had been secretly preoccupied with the problem of finding a secure base for jihad, which seemed practically impossible in Egypt.

“The River Nile runs in its narrow valley between two deserts that have no vegetation or water,” he observed in his memoir. “Such a terrain made guerrilla warfare in Egypt impossible and, as a result, forced the inhabitants of this valley to submit to the central government, to be exploited as workers, and compelled them to be recruited into its army.” Perhaps Pakistan or Afghanistan would prove a more suitable location for raising an army of radical Islamists who could eventually return to take over Egypt. Zawahiri traveled to Peshawar with an anesthesiologist and a plastic surgeon. “We were the first three Arabs to arrive there to participate in relief work,” Zawahiri claims. He spent four months in Pakistan, working for the Red Crescent Society, the Islamic arm of the International Red Cross. Through his connection with local tribal chiefs, Zawahiri made several furtive trips across the border into Afghanistan. He became one of the first outsiders to witness the courage of the Afghan freedom fighters,

who called themselves the “mujahideen”—the holy warriors. That fall, Zawahiri returned to Cairo full of stories about the “miracles” that were taking place in the jihad against the Soviets. It was a war few knew much about, even in the Arab world, although it was by far the bloodiest conflict of the 1980s. Zawahiri began going around to universities, recruiting for jihad. He had grown a beard and was affecting a Pakistani outfit—a long tunic over loose trousers (Wright page 45). Zawahiri returned for another tour of duty with the Red Crescent Society in Peshawar in March of 1981. This time he cut short his stay and returned to Cairo after only two months. Later he would write that he saw the Afghan jihad as “a training course of the utmost importance to prepare the Muslim mujahideen to wage their awaited battle against the superpower that now has sole dominance over the globe, namely, the United States.” When ZAWAHIRI returned to his medical practice in Maadi, the Islamic world was still trembling from the political earthquakes of 1979, which included not only the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan but also the return of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to Iran and the toppling of the Peacock Throne—the first successful Islamist takeover of a major country (Wright page 47).

Sayyid Qutb

Sayyid Qutb, founder of the modern Islamist movement, lonely and despairing he meets Western culture up close in 1940s America. He was a writer, and in effect of his writings, he was (although he did not get famous for his works as he expected to be, hence not satisfied with his writer`s status) on the nerves of King Farouk. Qutb was divided between two schools of thought: One consisted of Islam and the east, and the other was Christianity in the west. Qutb was shocked and betrayed by support of US government to Zionist cause (Wright page 8), “I hate those Westerners and despise them!” Qutb wrote after President Harry Truman endorsed the transfer of a hundred thousand Jewish refugees into Palestine. “All of them, without any exception: the English, the French, the Dutch, and finally the Americans, who have been trusted by many.” (Wright page 9). STORIES ABOUT SAYYID QUTB’S SUFFERING in prison have formed a kind of Passion play for Islamic fundamentalists. It is said that Qutb had a high fever when he was arrested; nonetheless, the state-security officers handcuffed him and forced him to walk to prison. He fainted several times along the way.

For hours he was held in a cell with vicious dogs, and then, during long periods of interrogation, he was beaten. “The principles of the revolution have indeed been applied to us,” he said, as he raised his shirt to show the court the marks of torture (Wright page 28). Qutb saw sex as main enemy of salvation, turned celibate after failed relationship and further prohibited himself from sexual relations. His mother was of conservative belief system and insulated herself and family from foreign influence. The trial of Sayyid Qutb and forty-two of his followers opened on April 19,1966, and lasted nearly three months. “The time has come for a Muslim to give his head in order to proclaim the birth of the Islamic movement,” Qutb defiantly declared when the trial began. He bitterly acknowledged that the anticolonialist new Egypt was more oppressive than the regime it had replaced (Wright page 30).

Sayyid Qutb was hanged after dawn prayers on August 29, 1966. The government refused to surrender his corpse to his family, fearing that his grave would become a shrine to his followers. The radical Islamist threat seemed to have come to an end. But Qutb’s vanguard was already hearing the music. One line of thinking proposes that America’s tragedy on September 11 was born in the prisons of Egypt. Human-rights advocates in Cairo argue that torture created an appetite for revenge, first in Sayyid Qutb and later in his acolytes, including Ayman al-Zawahiri. The main target of the prisoners’ wrath was the secular Egyptian government, but a powerful current of anger was also directed toward the West, which they saw as an enabling force behind the repressive regime. They held the West responsible for corrupting and humiliating Islamic society (Wright page 52).

Efforts by FBI and CIA

CIA was in some terms seen as birth cause of Osama`s Al Qaeda assertions.

The Central Intelligence Agency of the United States was involved in many covert missions in the Middle East. The notion that Bin Laden is a CIA creation, and that the attacks on the Trade Centre and Pentagon were “blowback,” is a standard analysis among leftists around the world. Indian novelist Arundhati Roy has written that Bin Laden was “among the jihadis who moved to Afghanistan in 1979 when the CIA commenced its operations there. Bin Laden has the distinction of being created by the CIA.” This theory is advanced as axiomatic but it has no supporting evidence. The real scandal here is not that the CIA helped to create Bin Laden during the 1980s, but that the agency had no idea of his significance until sometime in 1996, when it set up a special unit to track the Saudi exile.

According to a Reuters report (quoting Richard Labevière’s book Corridors of Terror), “negotiations” between Osama bin Laden and the CIA, took place two months prior to the September 11, 2001 attacks at the American Hospital in Dubai,United Arab Emirates, while bin Laden was recovering from a kidney dialysis treatment. As to “negotiations” between the CIA and Osama (a CIA “intelligence asset”), this statement seems to be contradictory. Even though the CIA has refuted the claim, the report serves to highlight Osama as a bona fide “Enemy of America,” rather than a creation of the CIA. In the words of former CIA agent Milt Bearden in an interview with Dan Rather on September 12, 2001, “If they didn’t have an Osama bin Laden, they would invent one.” (Chossudovsky, 2005, page 17). The attacks of 9/11 were result of undermining the potential threat to the United States of the total happenings in the region (Middle East).

Alec was the first “virtual” station, situated only a few miles from the headquarters building in Langley. On an organizational chart it was labeled “Terrorist Financial Links/7 a subsection of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center, but in practice it was devoted to tracking the activities of a single man, Osama bin Laden, whose name had arisen as the master financier of terror. Coleman first heard of him in 1993, when a foreign source spoke about a “Saudi prince” who was supporting a cell of radical Islamists who were plotting to blow up New York landmarks, including the United Nations, the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, and even 26 Federal Plaza, the building where Coleman worked (Wright page 3).  Alec Station already had thirty-five volumes of material on bin Laden, consisting mostly of transcripts of telephone conversations that had been sucked up by the electronic ears of the National Security Agency. Like many agents, Dan Coleman had been trained to fight the Cold War. He joined the FBI as a hie clerk in 1973.

Scholarly and inquisitive, Coleman was naturally drawn to counterintelligence. In the 1980s, he concentrated on recruiting communist spies in the populous diplomatic community surrounding the United Nations; an East German attaché was a particular treasure. In 1990, however, when the Cold War had just ended, he found himself on a squad devoted to Middle Eastern terrorism. in August 1996, bin Laden declared war on America from a cave in Afghanistan. The stated cause was the continued presence of U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia five years after the first Gulf War. “Terrorizing you, while you are carrying arms in our land, is a legitimate right and a moral obligation,,, he stated. He presumed to speak on behalf of all Muslims, and even directed some of his lengthy fatwa to U.S. Secretary of Defense William Perry personally. “I say to you, William, that: These youths love death as you love life…. These youths will not ask you for explanations. They will sing out that there is nothing between us that needs to be explained, there is only killing and neck-smiting.” In May 1993, an FBI agent in San Jose named John Zent approached Mohammed, inquiring about the trade in fake driver’s licenses.

Still hoping to get recruited by American intelligence, Mohammed steered the conversation toward radical activities in a local mosque, and he told some eye-opening tales about fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. Because of the military nature of these revelations, Zent contacted the Department of Defense, and a team of counterintelligence specialists from Fort Meade, Maryland, came to San Jose to talk to Mohammed. They spread out maps of Afghanistan on the floor of Zent’s office, and Mohammed indicated the mujahideen training camps. He mentioned the name of Osama bin Laden, who Mohammed said was preparing an army to knock off the Saudi regime. Mohammed also spoke about an organization, al-Qaeda, which was operating training camps in Sudan. He even admitted that he was providing the members instruction in hijacking and espionage. The interrogators apparently made nothing of these revelations. It would be three critical years before anyone else in American intelligence would hear of al-Qaeda (Wright page 182). Few Americans, even in the intelligence community, had any idea of the network of radical Islamists that had grown up inside the country.

The blind sheikh may as well have been speaking in Martian as Arabic, since there were so few Middle East language specialists available to the FBI, much less to the local police. Even if his threats had been heard and understood, the perception of most Americans was dimmed by their general insulation from the world’s problems and clouded by the comfortable feeling that no one who lived in America would turn against it. Then, on February 26, 1993, a rented Ford Econoline van entered the World Trade Center’s massive basement parking garage. Inside the truck was Ramzi Yousef. It is unclear if bin Laden sent him, but he was a product of an al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan, where he had learned his bomb-craft. He had come to America to oversee the construction of what the FBI later determined was the largest improvised explosive device the bureau had ever encountered. Yousef lit four twenty-footlong fuses and fled to a vantage point just north of Canal Street, from which he expected to see the buildings fall (Wright page 177).

Conclusion

American government took some strong steps forward toward combating terrorists who might have infiltrated the country. Hence, increasing the security loop of the airports, important buildings, the immigration service was dealt with utmost scrutiny. With what followed the attacks, large population of immigrants from Asia experienced tough experiences with the officials in Intelligence agencies fishing out suspects of the attack.

Suspension of habeas corpus

Habeas corpus is a writ petition of a law through which a person can seek relief from unlawful detention of themselves or another person. The writ of habeas corpus has historically been an important instrument for the safeguarding of individual freedom against arbitrary state action. However, in most countries, the procedure of habeas corpus can be suspended in time of national emergency. And that is exactly what was implemented post 9/11 to take control of the situation.

United States Constitution specifically included the English common law procedure in the Suspension Clause, located in Article One, Section 9. It states:

“The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion, the public safety may require it.”

Exponentially increased surveillance by CCTV cameras and satellite imaging

Save for a few battle-weary civil libertarians, not many people have been fretting about how cameras now monitor all downtown areas in Washington, or the unchecked spread of face-recognition cameras that spy on travelers in airports and sports fans in arenas. Every inch of major cities is being recorded for any suspicious activity. Optimistically, this act would be efficient in decreasing the local criminal activity too.

USA Patriot Act of 2001.

Full title: Uniting and Strengthening America by:

Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001.

It was signed into law on October 26, 2001. The Act expanded the authority of U.S. law enforcement agencies for the stated purpose of fighting terrorism in the United States and abroad. Among its provisions, the Act increased the ability of law enforcement agencies to search telephone and e-mail communications and medical, financial and other records; eased restrictions on foreign intelligence gathering within the United States; expanded the Secretary of the Treasury’s authority to regulate financial transactions, particularly those involving foreign individuals and entities; and enhanced the discretion of law enforcement and immigration authorities in detaining and deporting immigrants suspected of terrorism-related acts.

Sudden Changes In Immigration Acts for immigrants

There was now flexibility with the authorities to extend the detention period to 48 hours or more depending upon their need. (Bakalian & Bozorgmehr).

Creation Of Department Of Homeland Security

Department of Homeland Security (DHS), an executive department of the United States federal government, created by law in November 2002 and officially established in January 2003. The department’s mission is to help prevent terrorist attacks in the United States, reduce the country’s vulnerability to terrorism, and assist in recovery after an attack. The department was created in response to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon (see September 11 Attacks) as a way to oversee and coordinate security functions previously performed by dozens of different government agencies.

Other amendments and acts passed in order to make the working of terrorist prevention acts more easy and efficient:

Aviation and Transportation Security Act(November 19, 2001), which established the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). The law empowered the new agency to use informationfrom government agencies to identify individuals on passenger lists who may be a

threat to civil or national security, and to prevent them from flying.

Updates on the list of probable suspects and terrorists

Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act (May 14, 2002). Like most of the government initiatives, this law was most consequential to individuals of Middle Eastern and South Asian birth, even if they were naturalized Canadian citizens.

Like above there were lots of new acts which were introduced for students, middle east countries and other immigrants from Asia which made the traveling experience for tourists quite difficult.

With the greatest attack on U.S., the fact which America was ignoring (or at least under evaluating) the needful before 9/11 became a sore reality of the time.

References

Bakalian Anny and Bozorgmehr Mehdi, Publications from NSF Study on Post-9/11 Backlash,

Government Initiatives after the September 11^th Attack on America, Encyclopedia of Racism in the United States

Chossudovsky Michel, America’s “War on Terrorism”, Second Edition, 2005.

Meher Jagmohan, America’s Afghanistan War: The success that failed, Kalpaz publications,

     published in 2004

Wright Lawrence, The looming tower: Al Qaeda and the road to 9/11, Alfred A. Knopf: Publisher, New York, 2006

Fawaz A. Gerges, The Far Enemy: WHY JIHAD WENT GLOBAL, Cambridge University Press 2005

[1] National Geographic Documentary: Inside the Taliban.