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What This Is
I’m a writer based in southern California. This site is mainly an archive of my work from newspapers, magazines and books over the years. It also contains news and notices of what I’m doing and a heavily-edited account of what others have to say about my work. That work has ranged around the globe and across the encyclopedia of subject matter. It’s been a great ride so far. The bar above contains links to more of my pieces than any sane person could possibly want to read. First person who claims to have read it all gets a beer. I like to drink beer with insane people so we’ll have fun. You can contact me through the form on the sidebar. I’m buying. |
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THE HUNT FOR KSM
Superlative story-telling – Kirkus The Atlantic and Huffington Post have both posted excerpts from the book. Read here and here. KIRKUS REVIEWS STARRED REVIEW!
Superlative storytelling and crackling reportage define a pulse-pounding narrative tracing the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. To this day, the bleary-eyed visage of the 9/11 mastermind being hauled off by authorities after a successful raid on his hideout in 2003 remains the most recognizable image of the hated international terrorist. McDermott (101 Theory Drive: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for Memory, 2010, etc.) and Los Angeles Times chief terrorism reporter Meyer explode that superficial frame with a taught, espionage-thriller–like narrative. The authors render characters on both sides of the law—the hunters and the hunted alike—in rich detail, ably evoking their clear motives and desires. While Osama bin Laden became the main symbol of America’s war on terror, it was actually KSM who tirelessly traveled the globe recruiting young Muslim men for his ongoing war on the West, directing their actions, outfitting their operations and setting them loose upon an unsuspecting populace. FBI Special Agent Frank Pellegrino was on his heels from the very beginning, when, in 1993, KSM tried to destroy the World Trade Center with a truck bomb left in a tower garage. During that time, write the authors, none of Pellegrino’s superiors seemed interested in his investigations, but ultimately, a decade-long game of cat-and-mouse ensued, marked largely by frustration, futility and missed opportunities. A surprising, sobering look at one of the deadliest terror networks in history, and the American spy agencies charged with bringing it down. Publishers Weekly Nonfiction review
The Hunt for KSM:
Terry McDermott and Josh Meyer. Little, Brown, $27.99 (352p) ISBN 978-0-316-18659-9 The cat-and-mouse game between American investigators and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, architect of the 9/11 attacks and other terrorist spectaculars, unfolds with suspenseful immediacy in this engrossing saga. Journalists McDermott (Perfect Soldiers) and Meyer (the L.A. Times’s chief terrorism reporter) present a police procedural starring an FBI agent, Frank Pellegrino, Port Authority detective Matt Besheer, and the inter-agency anti-terrorism experts who tracked KSM and his confederates for a decade before his 2003 capture. The pursuit of their elusive quarry required legwork in Manila strip clubs and Karachi slums, electronic eavesdropping, computer forensics, and cagey, empathetic questioning of suspects. Inevitably, turf battles arose with the CIA, whose impulsiveness, tunnel-vision, and brutal interrogation techniques the authors portray as the ineffective antithesis of the FBI’s meticulous sleuthing. The authors’ vivid profile of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed depicts a resourceful, charismatic man—he retained his self-possession under CIA interrogation, they contend, while spewing false information that sparked wild goose chases—and paints a detailed portrait of the workaday terrorist life of fund-raising, recruitment, bomb-rigging, and general plotting, all carried out while dodging a global manhunt. The book is disjointed and breathless at times, but it gives us one of the most revealing dispatches yet from the war on terror. Agent: Paul Bresnick Literary Agency. (Mar.) Reviewed on: 01/23/2012
BOOKLIST Terrorism reporters McDermott and Meyer write a fast-moving and deeply disturbing account of the CIA’s role before and after the 2003 capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, long considered the mastermind of 9/11. These journalists depict the U.S. intelligence apparatus as schizoid: sometimes freakishly good at predicting movements and placing gadgetry but often blind to what is actually going on. The book moves like a spy novel, cutting from KSM’s capture to the seven years before 9/11, when the authors convincingly show that the CIA, FBI, and Department of Justice ignored evidence regarding the danger posed by KSM, and then moving to an indictment of the torture-interrogation of KSM, which led to his withholding vital information. The journalistic foundation is rock solid. The authors, in their acknowledgments, note that their claims are built upon a decade’s worth of research, most of it abroad, including interviews with hundreds of sources and tens of thousands of pages of documents, obtained through Freedom of Information requests. Vitally important to the understanding of 9/11 and terrorism. — Connie Fletcher 3/1/12 A REPORTER AT LARGE THE MASTERMIND Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the making of 9/11. BY TERRY MCDERMOTT
Since 2006, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s family has received one letter a year from him, sent from his cell at the Guantánamo Bay detention center. According to rules established by the American military, the correspondence must fit on a six-inch-by-six-inch portion of a pre-printed form, and its content is restricted to the familial and personal; all else is stricken by censors. Mohammed, the self-proclaimed architect of the 9/11 attacks against America, mostly sends good wishes to his wife and children, who are now living in southeastern Iran, and to other relatives. He makes repeated references to his Islamic faith and the beneficence of Allah and his prophet. In photographs that accompanied one of the letters, Mohammed appeared shrunken from the man in the famous image taken the day of his capture: a thickset, wild-haired figure, half-dressed in his nightclothes. The image must have infuriated Mohammed, who is vain enough to have complained during a military-court hearing that a sketch artist had made his nose look too big. In the jailhouse photographs, he is almost forty pounds lighter. He stares directly at the camera, cloaked in long white robes, with a headdress framing a small, still face and a long black-and-white beard. A copy of the Koran lies open in his right hand. On June 25, 2009, Mohammed, writing in English, made what could be read as a surprising plea for absolution: “All praise is due to Allah. I praise Him and seek His aid and His forgiveness and I seek refuge in Allah from our evil in ourselves and from our bad deeds.” Even if this were only a ritual expression of obeisance, it would stand in contrast to his customarily belligerent behavior. In his few statements that have been made public – a 2002 interview with the Al Jazeera reporter Yosri Fouda, pieces of the United States government’s interrogations of him, Red Cross prison interviews, and his appearances before military tribunals Mohammed has been cold-bloodedly straightforward. He told Fouda that the Holy Tuesday planes operation, as Al Qaeda called the 9/11 assaults, was “designed to cause as many deaths as possible and havoc and to be a big slap for America on American soil.” Testifying before a military tribunal in 2007, he likened himself to George Washington and boasted that he planned “the 9/11 operation from A-to-Z.” Killing, he said, was simply part of his job: “War start from Adam when Cain he killed Abel until now. It’s never gonna stop killing of people.” In that appearance, he boasted of murdering the American reporter Daniel Pearl: “I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew, Daniel Pearl, in the city of Karachi, Pakistan. For those who would like to confirm, there are pictures of me on the Internet holding his head.” Since June, 2002, when the F.B.I. first identified Mohammed as the “mastermind” of 9/11, he has become one of history’s most famous criminals. Yet, unlike Osama bin Laden, he has remained essentially unknown. Efforts to uncover more than the outlines of his biography have produced sketchy and sometimes contradictory results. (These include my own, for my book “Perfect Soldiers,” published in 2005.) Even basic facts have been in doubt; there are, for example, at least three versions of his birth date. For almost the entire decade before he was captured, in early 2003, Mohammed was a fugitive, deliberately obscuring his tracks. Bin Laden, meanwhile, was hosting television interviewers, giving speeches, and distributing videos and text versions of his proclamations to whoever would have them. Insofar as we know Mohammed, we see him as a brilliant behind-the-scenes tactician and a resolute ideologue. As it turns out, he is earthy, slick in a way, but naïve, and seemingly motivated as much by pathology as by ideology. Fouda describes Mohammed’s Arabic as crude and colloquial and his knowledge of Islamic texts as almost nonexistent. A journalist who observed Mohammed’s appearance at one of the Guantánamo hearings likened his voluble performance to that of a Pakistani Jackie Mason. A college classmate said that he was an eager participant in impromptu skits and plays. A man who knew him from a mosque in Doha talked about his quick wit and chatty, glad-handing style. He was an operator. In at least one important way, though, his boasts are accurate. Mohammed, not Osama bin Laden, was the essential figure in the 9/11 plot. The attacks were his idea, carried out under his direct command. Mohammed has said that he went so far as to resist swearing allegiance to bin Laden and Al Qaeda until after the attacks, so that he could carry them out if Al Qaeda lost courage. The United States intends to try Mohammed this year or next, in a venue and a jurisdiction yet to be determined. The specifics of the trial where it should be held, and whether it ought to be a military or a civil hearing have been the subject of intense debate. In the absence of bin Laden, it is hard to imagine a more spectacular legal proceeding; even without a location or a prosecutor, it has been called the trial of the century. Wherever Mohammed may be tried, he seems to have done much of the prosecution’s work for it, describing himself as a righteous, relentless executioner whose version of making war knows no bounds. But the process will be aimed at assessing guilt, not causes. It will not tell us much about who Mohammed is, or about the forces that shaped him, which are, to an alarming extent, still at work in the places where he came of age. Badawiya, the neighborhood where Khalid Sheikh Mohammed grew up, sits between the sand and the sea on the southernmost edge of Fahaheel, a suburb of Kuwait City. The neighborhood mosque overlooks a mile-wide field of rubble and weeds, a buffer against the Shuaiba petrochemical complex, whose flare stacks sputter and glow around the clock. Just a few miles to the west are Ahmadi, the administrative center of the Kuwait Oil Company, and the bountiful Burgan oil field, where the stores of oil that essentially created modern Kuwait were discovered, in 1938. Mohammed’s parents moved to Kuwait from Pakistan in the nineteen-fifties, at the beginning of the country’s oil boom. His father, his father’s brother, and their young families came together; the brothers, both religious men, had been recruited to head mosques. Mohammed’s father became the imam in Ahmadi. The mosque, like most buildings from that era, was built of drab brown brick and today looks as if it could stand some freshening up. Its twin minarets rise above the Kuwait Oil Company corporate reservation (built by the British before the Kuwaitis nationalized the oil industry), a tidy plot of tree-lined streets and white-fenced worker cottages that seems to have been shipped in whole from a greener world. Sheikh Mohammed and his wife, Halima, had four children when they arrived in Kuwait. Five more were born after their arrival; Khalid was the second-to-last child and the youngest of four boys. The family travelled on Pakistani passports, but both Sheikh Mohammed and Halima were ethnic Baluchis, from a swath of hard, dry land across the Gulf of Oman from the Arabian Peninsula. Baluchistan, as it has been called for centuries, includes parts of contemporary Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, but existed as an entity long before the boundaries of any of these modern states were drawn. The oil money that drew Mohammed’s family transformed Kuwait. At its first formal census, in 1957, the country had a population of three hundred and six thousand. By 1985, it was nearly six times as large. The boom gave native Kuwaitis a lifelong assurance of comfort: guaranteed jobs, housing, medical care, education, and pensions. The foreign guest workers, known as bidoon mostly Palestinians, Egyptians, and South Asians were not eligible for the benefits, though they made up the majority of Kuwaiti residents. The Baluchis were bidoon. For Mohammed’s family, this was a fundamental fact of life. |
101 THEORY DRIVE
McDermott is a total bad ass, and his writing is a high-wire balancing act of providing the perfect mix of candy and vegetables – Corduroy Books
Here’s the always excellent Larry Mantle at KPCC: http://www.scpr.org/programs/airtalk/2010/04/28/what-is-memory-made-of/ And here is Steve Scher’s interview on Seattle’s KUOW: https://www.kuow.org/program.php?id=20018 Amazon, Powell’s, Pantheon, Barnes and Noble, Indiebound PRAISE FOR
101 THEORY DRIVE
Oregonian April 10, 2010
In late 2004, writer Terry McDermott asked neuroscientist Gary Lynch if he could spend a few weeks, maybe a few months, in Lynch’s lab at the University of California at Irvine. McDermott planned to write about memory and its biological workings.
Seattle Times April 16, 2010 ‘101 Theory Drive’: a scientist’s search to understand memory
Gary Lynch is a brainiac. That one-word description is a sort-of pun, but also accurate. Lynch, a laboratory neuroscientist at the University of California, Irvine, uses his amazing brain as a tool to understand brains in general. More specifically, Lynch is hoping to prove how the brain takes in and then stores information so that it becomes part of what humans call “memory.”
Terry McDermott, a former Seattle Times and Los Angeles Times reporter, spent years inside Lynch’s campus laboratory observing Lynch and his crew try to solve one of the great mysteries of humanity. The access Lynch, a high-level researcher, granted McDermott, a journalist, is highly unusual, and maybe unprecedented in the scientific realm. McDermott has used that access wisely by writing a sometimes technical but always fascinating book. Before proceeding with the Lynch saga as told by McDermott, two points seem especially relevant.
First, an explanation of the title, which is not self-explanatory. “101 Theory Drive: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for Memory” (Pantheon, 288 pp., $25.95) is the postal address of the building that houses Lynch’s laboratory. (Noting the subtle but significant difference between a theory and a hypothesis, Lynch told McDermott, “I would have named it Hypothesis Drive.”)
Second, although the book falls outside what McDermott has written about during his career, it seems in an offhand way a natural progression from his other book, “Perfect Soldiers: The 9/11 Hijackers — Who They Were, Why They Did It.” I read that book in the aftermath of 9/11 and found McDermott’s research breathtaking. After the hijackers died while attacking the New York City skyscrapers and the Pentagon near Washington, D.C., McDermott worked backward from those deaths to piece together their lives against gigantic odds. He figured out, to the extent possible, the workings of their brains that led them to consider the United States an evil empire.
Back to Lynch, to whom the cliché “larger than life” completely applies. He is driven, day after day, year after year, decade after decade, to devote his life to laboratory research because of his fanatical quest for an understanding of memory. Lynch drives his lab employees mercilessly. He picks fights with competing researchers across the United States and around the globe. He rarely if ever tries to disguise his gigantic ego. He could have come across as a hateful man. But McDermott understands the dangers of reductionism when portraying another human being. As a result, Lynch at times seems endearing, perhaps because he seems incapable of guile or artifice.
Lynch’s patience with a nonspecialist journalist is endearing, for sure. Writers like McDermott possess the communication skills to carry difficult-to-grasp scientific research to generalist readers who would never be allowed inside a laboratory like Lynch’s. But scientists tend to shut out journalists, concerned — often with good reason — that journalists will oversimplify the research results and maybe even portray the results inaccurately. Lynch deserves the gratitude of generalist readers for his willingness to make his memory research accessible.
In addition to interpreting Lynch’s research protocols, McDermott explains the big picture. Here is one of those passages: “The myth of modern science — that it proceeds carefully, scrutably, incrementally, building bit by bit from rock-solid foundations to impregnable fortresses of fact — comes unraveled in contemporary neuroscience. Fortresses, entire kingdoms, of neuroscience have been built of frail premises that were swept away entirely when the next new thing came along.” The drama of McDermott’s book rests largely on whether premises guiding Lynch’s research over four decades will crumble. Memory, however it is constructed, suggests it is too soon to tell.
Providence Journal
A memorable portrait of a ‘hippie/outlaw’ scientist Apr 12, 2010 Review by Tony Lewis 101 THEORY DRIVE: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for Memory “101 Theory Drive,” the title of Terry McDermott’s profile of Gary Lynch, a neuroscientist on the faculty of the University of California at Irvine, denotes the address of the trailer that he and his posse of scientific roughriders use as a lab. The trailer is parked somewhere on the border between academia and the rest of La-la Land, a perfect setting for this hippie/outlaw lab rat. McDermott showed up at the trailer in 2004 hoping to capture the spirit of the place and to describe Lynch’s search to find memory — to find, that is, where exactly memory resides in the human brain, how it gets there, stays there, and changes, how its 100 billion neurons and more than 100 trillion synapses work to form the memories that allow us to know and to pass on what we know. McDermott, a former national reporter for the Los Angeles Times, “arrived at the lab largely ignorant of the field,” and over the next four years ascended a steep learning curve. Equally adept at describing what occurs inside a brain cell and what happens in the bars and apartments where the motley crew of researchers goes to unwind, McDermott makes Lynch’s lifework a real adventure. Readers face a learning curve, too, to understand just how daring Lynch’s quest is, how competitive and nerve-wracking. The neurobiological jargon flows hot and heavy at times, but in the end what we learn seems well worth the effort. You may not fully understand what “theta rhythm” is or how “LTP” works, but the current of McDermott’s crisp prose will take you past the tough spots before you can say “neurotransmitter.” “LTP”– Long-Term Potentiation — as it turns out, is crucial to getting a grip on the significance of Lynch’s work. McDermott gives us a primer on brain function early on, and then explains how LTP allows for the sort of communication between brain cells that is crucial to the formation of memory. Sensory organs “translate” the signals they receive into electrical impulses that head for the brain. There, where the axons from one bunch of neurons meet the dendrites of others across the tiny gap we call the synapse, the electrical impulse becomes chemical and the neurons on both sides form a closer connection, which constitutes “the biological underpinning of memory.” “101 Theory Drive” is about the science, of course, but what makes this study enjoyable is McDermott’s profile of Gary Lynch. There’s the beer swilling and the carousing, the swearing, the all-night jags in the lab, the interpersonal rivalries, the firings and hirings, the grandiose aspirations and the monumental achievements. In the end, you just might feel as though you’ve spent the weekend with a cross between Hunter S. Thompson and E.O. Wilson or Stephen Jay Gould — just as informed and just as giddy.
Corduroy Books 01/07/2010
So, it’s a fascinating subject, therefore riveting reading, right? Wrong. Of course not: most baseball books suck, and yet there are few subjects I care much more about. No, the truth is Terry McDermott is a total bad ass, and his writing is a high-wire balancing act of providing the perfect mix of candy and vegetables: since most readers of this book won’t have the hard science background to referencelessly follow every Lynchian development, McDermott’s got to teach us, and, by and large, most of us look for more than didactic drudgery in our books. I don’t mean to make this sound like anything less than an astonishing feat: making hard science not just intelligible but intuitive—and not just intuitive but fucking riveting—that’s some magic. Somewhere there’s a top hat, and there are carrots, and there are rabbits, and McDermott’s got access to a whole range of tricks most writers don’t even know about.
PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY 2/8 101 Theory Drive: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for Memory Terry McDermott. Pantheon, $24.95 ( Memory takes on a physical presence in this raucous scientific saga. Former L.A. Times reporter McDermott (Perfect Soldiers: The 9/11 Hijackers) profiles UC-Irvine “psychobiologist” Gary Lynch and his decades-long effort to understand the biochemical processes and structural changes in neurons that underlie memory. (His research has identified drugs that could stem memory loss and treat Alzheimer’s and ADHD.) In McDermott’s portrayal, Lynch comes off as a hippie-ish, hard-drinking, foul-mouthed visionary at odds with the neuroscientific establishment, who both inspires and exploits the students and post-docs under his sway. McDermott is a bit too taken with his charismatic protagonist,and loves to quote Lynch’s profane, inarticulate ramblings for pages on end (“Memory’s continuous. You walk through the day. Da duh da duh da dah”). Fortunately, his own exposition of the science is lucid, and his first-hand account of Lynch’s seething laboratory is riveting, full of prickly egos, desperate battles for grants, and epic experiments—Lynch’s students spent years slicing up and photographing thousands of rat brains—that become daily roller-coasters of triumph and despair as results trickle in.This is an engrossing story of science and the brilliant, flawed people who make it.
KIRKUS REVIEWS 1/1 issue Former Los Angeles Times national reporter McDermott (Perfect Soldiers: The 9/11 Hijackers: Who They Were, Why They Did It, 2006) tells the story of the driven neuroscientist Gary Lynch and his ongoing quest to discover the biochemical workings of memory.
April 15 McDermott steps inside Lynch’s laboratory at “101 Theory Drive” in Irvine, California, for a peek at Lynch’s groundbreaking ideas and eccentric, often sharp-tongued personality. McDermott balances a layfriendly discussion about exotic brain chemicals and Lynch’s long-term potentiation theory (LTP) of memory, and a riveting portrait of Lynch as hard-driving taskmaster to his lab technicians and iconoclast
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On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was driving my middle daughter to her Southern California high school car pool when I heard on the radio that a jetliner had flown into the north tower of the World Trade Center. I’m a reporter at the Los Angeles Times and although I surely didn’t know its full portent that morning, I knew we were at the edge of something new and frightening. I dropped off my daughter, returned home, and packed a bag. Within a week I was assigned to write a profile of Mohamed Atta, then thought to be one of the masterminds of the attacks. My editor’s instructions were to go wherever I needed to go and stay as long as I needed to stay. Neither of us imagined the reporting would take three years and require travel to twenty countries on four continents. Perfect Soldiers is the report of what I found. It’s important to note what it was I was after. A simple search on Powells.com finds around 500 books about some aspect of September 11. The overwhelming majority of them are, in a fundamental sense, polemics — arguments about who to blame for what had happened. We live in an argument-obsessed age. Opinions are shouted from mountain top, valley, and every destination in between. I wanted, instead of shouting what I believed, to find what was findable, to lay down a baseline of factual information before it disappeared forever, which it might well have.
Opinions are easy, broad, and often trivial. Facts are hard, granular, and sometimes revelatory. Would it inform us more to be told that one author thinks, without much basis, that 9/11 was the fault of a conspiracy involving the Saudi royal family and Texas oilmen or to learn that the first thing Mohamed el-Amir Atta usually did when he came home to his student apartment in Hamburg was to exchange his street shoes for a pair of blue flip-flops? I don’t know about you, but complicated conspiracy theories that tie far-fetched ideas together in an unending string that circles the globe don’t help me much.
I don’t think the world works that way. I look for more organic, natural processes. As a friend put it to me once, if you hear hoof beats in the distance, they’re probably coming from horses, not zebras. The flip-flops could be a powerful instrument to help explain the men who attacked us. They’re horses. Conspiracy theories are zebras.
Here are a few more hoof beats: September 11 pilot Marwan al-Shehhi habitually carried a bag of candy with him wherever he went and shared it with whomever he met. Hijack pilot Ziad Jarrah frequently signed his e-mails with long strings of exclamation points; he was the favorite uncle of his nieces and nephews, the one who would take them to the beach or out for ice cream. When the hijack pilots moved to the United States to train, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a would-be pilot who could never get a U.S. visa, stayed behind in Germany and had an affair with a ballet dancer in Berlin.
These mundane facts of daily existence are the raw materials of lives that, if accumulated in sufficient quantity, can begin to give some insight on the forces behind large events. They help to inform us once again of a fundamental aspect of men who commit horrific acts of inhumanity. It is in a way the oldest story — that of the banality of evil, the nearly organic way in which these men came to be who they became.
I, like almost every writer, have literary ambitions. My intentions in this book, however, were almost anti-literary. The events of September 11 didn’t need to be remade and rethought in heightened dramatic fashion. They needed to be understood. The way I conceived of doing this was no great revelation. It was the only way I knew to be available to me: to go where the 9/11 hijackers had lived and learned and even loved and tell the stories of their lives, to attempt to fit those mundane details into the larger courses of history through which they floated. If there was to be any literary ambition in this, it would be to construct a poetry of fact.
This very modest goal proved to be immensely difficult.
Recently, there were three books on the national bestsellers lists about Scott Peterson, a man who murdered his pregnant wife. That was doubtless an horrendous act, but do we really need three books about him. Meanwhile, there were — other than this one — no books devoted primarily to the 9/11 hijackers.
The reason, pretty simply, is that information about them is scarce and very hard to find. This was without question the most difficult reporting I’ve ever endured. And endurance is what was required. During many weeks in the reporting, I went backwards — that is, I lost rather than gained information. But I am above all else stubborn and I committed to the long haul. If it was there, I was going to get it, or exhaust all means in the attempt. Whatever success this book represents is the result of that stubbornness.
One of the consistent oddities of being a reporter has to do with the most fundamental aspect of it — you ask people questions and they answer you. Why? It always astonishes me that no matter what the event or circumstance, you can find people with relevant knowledge who will talk. In the instance of most disasters or other horrific events, people often talk to reporters out of a sense of remorse or some slight responsibility. It’s that “if only” feeling: If only I had done this, or: If only I had seen that. Because they feel this way, they are often persuaded to talk. In fact, they are often eager to talk, have been waiting to be asked. That had been my experience prior to this project. I interviewed more than 500 people for this book. Not five of them were eager to talk. In large part, this was because they didn’t believe the men had anything to do with it, or, if they believed it, felt no remorse about it.
One of the consequences of the paucity of information was the proliferation of rumor and gossip and their solidification into fact. If you go back and review what else has been written about the nineteen hijackers, you’ll find a huge quantity of words based on a miniscule amount of information. You’ll also find conclusions based on the thinnest of threads.
Not unusually for a large news event, a public narrative of the 9/11 attacks and attackers was constructed with astonishing speed: by the end of the first week after the attacks, the central story had been set and the characters cast. Unfortunately, as is also usual in big news events, much of the initial information was either factually wrong or, more commonly, irrelevant and misconstrued. The hijackers were caricatured as evil geniuses or as wild-eyed fanatics. While there might well be trace elements of both of these extremes in some of the men, they were largely neither of these things.
I think portraying them as motivated by this one thing or the other is understandable, but misleading. The forces that drove the men in the 9/11 plot are many and complicated; they include broad historical trends, specific political objections, devout if wholly misguided religious belief, psychological alienation, and self aggrandizement.
For a long time in my reporting, I struggled to find who had recruited these men to this cause. In the end, I was forced to admit they weren’t recruited. They were volunteers. They delivered themselves.
What can we do to stop them?
This question, without close competition, is the one I’m most often asked about the post 9/11 world. It’s the central question going forward, one we’re going struggle to answer for decades.
When it is posed in public forums, there is invariably at least one person in the room who knows exactly what to do: Kill them. Kill them all. Hunt them down, dig them out, and rid the world of their wretched existence. This solution has a lot to recommend it. It’s decisive, no dilly-dallying around there. It’s pure hearted, good versus evil. It’s satisfying in a cinematic, righteous-justice-delivered-at-the-
Unfortunately, even if this were your desired policy, it seems upon even casual inspection impossible to execute. It’s surpassingly difficult to even begin to find them all, much less finish the job. It’s revenge fantasy, not reason.
Start at the most basic level: Who are they? Where are they? How will we know them much less find them? Where do we start? Where do we end? When does one become a they? Is there a line between sympathizer and soldier? Wouldn’t we be likely to kill a bunch of people who only looked, or perhaps talked, or thought, like bad guys?
I have been distressed to discover the degree to which casually malevolent ideas are ambient in much of the contemporary Arab world, at how much the view from there has been shaped by mythic beliefs. I say mythic in the same sense that Karen Armstrong uses it to describe the nature of belief among fundamentalists in all religions, that the nature of their beliefs are pre-rational and unshakable by the existence of contrary fact. I must have been told a hundred times during my research that 9/11 could not have happened without the connivance, indeed, the active execution, of either or both the American CIA and Israeli Mossad. Those who espouse these theories hold a view that the United States is omnipotent and, therefore, nothing of this scale could happen unbeknownst to us. All evidence to the contrary — which is depressing in its own way — matters not a bit. I was repeatedly told no Jews died in the World Trade Center. One of my own interpreters, an upper middle class Cairene whose career goal was to come to the United States and open a chain of LASIK eye surgery clinics, in other words, a Westernized Arab, a scientist, would ask me every two or three days why the Jews stayed home that day.
That is the situation at the heart of contemporary, moderate Islam. It goes downhill, quickly, from there to the fringes where there exists a cult, a large cult with millions of members, who choose to find within their religion’s historical texts a rationale to attack, and kill, any who oppose them. They think they are at war. No, they are at war. The men within radical Islam see themselves as soldiers in that war. They see what they were doing as having the obligations of soldiers, serving the righteous cause of an army with the winds of redemption at its back.
The cult, not accidentally, is centered in Saudi Arabia and in the explicitly political and allegedly literal interpretation of Salafist Wahabism embraced there. Whatever else is done to combat terrorism, this interpretation of Islam has to be confronted.
That at least is a place to start. You can’t have spent as much time as I have studying these people without wondering what to do and, yet, I haven’t found a solution that satisfies. Perhaps that’s because there is no single answer. Just as there are many causes that brought these men together, so are there many reasons that drive them apart from us.
Like, I imagine, most people, I had in the beginning assumed the hijackers — and those who would follow them — were in some ways extraordinary individuals, that they otherwise couldn’t have accomplished something so huge. The biggest surprise to me was they were nearly the opposite — all too common among young men in similar circumstances across the Muslim world. The obvious implication of them being ordinary is that there must be many more men just like them. I think there are. I think they’re waiting. I think this is the world we will live in for a long time to come.
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