May 11, 2005
Book Review
The Men Who Hit The Towers
With all the books that came after 9/11 - about the Taliban, the little tiff between Islam and the West, and countless hagiographies of all things Giuliani - not a single one concerned the people who did the deed.
For all of bin Laden's financing and fatwas, for all the Taliban's passive (and active) support, it was 19 men - all but four Saudi citizens - that made Khalid Sheikh Muhammad's wicked plan a murderous reality.
Book: Perfect Soldiers
A few pages of Terry McDermott's scrupulously reported Perfect Soldiers (Harper Collins, New York, 2005) makes it clear why their story was not among the first (or 15th) to be told: tracking down a community of globally dispersed jihadists is really hard. At risk of stating the obvious, dead martyrs (or "combat teams" for all you Ward Churchill fans) don't give interviews.
Nevertheless, the questions raised by the hijackers' live are fascinating. How do so many young men go about abandoning life's prospects - and however humble, these guys had other options - to become human missiles? Where does the certainty come from to concede that it's not only okay to kill innocents, but it's actually God's will?
A reporter covering the hijackers for the Los Angeles Times, McDermott doesn't answer these questions directly, but he sheds more light on them than anyone to date. At worst, Perfect Soldiers offers tidbits for pondering: less "Why do they hate us" than "Is radical Islam a misogynist death cult?"
The story of Egyptian-born Muhammad Atta provides a case in point. Like most of his fellow conspirators, his family rejected political Islam for a more secular Arab nationalism. For Atta's father, manhood was linked with professional achievement, specifically earning a Ph.D. So it was no doubt humiliating for young Muhammad when his sisters earned doctorates from a graduate school his test scores kept him out of. Maybe this is only a minor footnote, but could such an early emasculation have helped him become the sort of pious bigot whose last will specifies that no woman should visit his grave?
To say Atta had problems with women is like saying Kim Jong Il has "some control issues." The portrait McDermott paints is of a man so profoundly humorless he makes James Dobson look like Krusty the Clown. As many of his former roommates noted, Atta never smiled or laughed. He would enter and leave rooms without acknowledging people in them. Women in sleeveless blouses made him uncomfortable. He even lamented the necessity of eating.
McDermott devotes considerable time in profiling Atta and others in "the Hamburg group," a gaggle of students from throughout the Arab world who became radicalized together in the mid 1990s. One of the book's main points is how this strain of Islam needed Western democracies to flourish. In many Arab nations, Islamists are suppressed by the government, but throughout western Europe, they're free to denounce the governments of their choice, while tempting young minds with the greater glories of jihad.
McDermott manages to stay above the fray by not judging his subjects or engaging in cheap shots of jingoism. His voice is dry, but he communicates a lot of information with clarity. As a died-in-the-wool reporter, he's less comfortable with ideas and their implications than facts. This works both to his advantage and not.
For instance, he details how the Hamburg crew was captivated by tapes of speeches from fiery imams and jihad videos featuring battle footage from Chechnya, Afghanistan and Bosnia, but he doesn't take it further. The role that home-brewed counter-media played in building a network of otherwise disparate radicals is never expanded upon. Without it, one has to wonder if bin Laden - an engineer with no clerical bona fides - could've built up his reputation as the Bill Gates of global jihad?
Another theme left unexplored is that nearly all the pilots became radicalized in the West. While there's nothing like living in another country to teach you about your own culture, what is it about being an Arab man that makes you more vulnerable to hate? Finally, McDermott notes, but doesn't highlight, the extent that misogyny played in alienating these men from Western culture and binding them to each other. The Hamburg crew was nothing if not a 24-hour sausage party. As one of McDermott's sources noted, of 9/11 pilot Marwan el-Shehhi, "He never spoke about women as anything other than potential marriage partners and never spoke to them at all unless compelled."
There's plenty of imperfection in Perfect Soldiers. At times facts are jammed on top of each other to make it feel less like a narrative than a case file. Nevertheless, this is a refreshing and often chilling account of the people who brought us 9/11 and the countless others who yearn to produce the sequel.
John Dicker
John Dicker is a freelance writer based in Denver.
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