There is scarcely a small child in the English speaking western world, particularly the United States of America, who does not recognize the name of Mohamed Atta. He made a name for himself that was horrifyingly notorious, as the ringleader of a 20 man terrorist group, the pilot who flew a hijacked plane laden with terrified passengers, into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Conversely, there would be many fundamentalist Islamics who revere the name of Mohamed Atta. To them, he goes down in history as a martyr, someone heroic not only to be admired but emulated. This book will show that, at least on the part of Atta and some others involved, this was not only politically/religiously motivated, but was an aircraft assisted suicide. A numerological criminal analysis and profile of all 20 suicide terrorists who carried out the 9/11 attacks, including the lone terrorist who helped coordinate the attacks from overseas, having failed to obtain a visa. He now is a prisoner of the United States government.

Presents a discussion of ties between the terrorists of the 9/11 attacks and the United States government.

This in-depth investigation into the associations of Mohamed Atta and other terrorist pilots in Venice, Florida, as they prepared for the 9/11 attacks discloses that the FBI led a massive postattack cover-up designed to conceal their knowledge of the terrorists' activities. Unreported stories including the assassination attempt on the life of President George W. Bush on the morning of September 11, 2001, and the rampant drug-trafficking of the financier behind the flight school the terrorist pilots attended are fully discussed, with attention to the stunning evidence that the CIA was aware that hundreds of Arab flight students were pouring into southwest Florida. This examination of the conspiracy behind the 9/11 investigation and the CIA complicity in the illegal activities that allowed the known terrorists' activities to continue offers truth behind the "official" story of the attacks.

“The definitive book on the nineteen men who brought such devastation and terror to this country . . . a well-told, meticulously researched cautionary tale.” —Washington Post Book World The attacks of September 11, 2001, were a calamity on a scale few had imagined possible. In their aftermath, we exaggerated the men who perpetrated the attacks, shaping hasty and often mistaken reporting into caricatures we could comprehend—monsters and master criminals equal to the enormity of their crime. In reality, the 9/11 hijackers were unexceptional men, not much different from countless others. It is this ordinary enemy, not the caricature, that we must understand if we are to have a legitimate hope of defeating terrorism. Using research undertaken in twenty countries on four continents, Los Angeles Times correspondent Terry McDermott provides gripping, authoritative portraits of the main players in the 9/11 plot. With brilliant reporting and thoughtful analysis, McDermott brings us a clearer, more nuanced, and in some ways more frightening, understanding of the landmark event of our time. “The very best [book] available . . . on the subject.” —Los Angeles Times “Absorbing. . . . [A] richly textured narrative full of the sort of small, telling details that turn these men from faceless figures of evil into individuals.” —New York Times “Bound to become one of the most insightful books ever published about September 11.” —Houston Chronicle “Offers riveting accounts of the final weeks and days as the plotters prepared to carry out their horrific mission.” —Booklist “Chilling.” —KirkusReviews “This is journalism at its best.” —Seymour M. Hersh, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist “Engrossing and deeply disturbing.” —Publishers Weekly

Everyone knows what happened on September 11, 2001. But do we really know what was behind this act of war? What was the lure? What was it about the Hamburg cell that appealed to him? What lured this educated son of a successful Lebanese family to the jihadist message of destruction and annihiliation that would result in the death of 3170 Americans? These questions torment Sami Haddad as he pondered his choice, in August of 2001, whether or not to join the 9-ll hijackers. Through a series of tape recordings which Sami had made in the months before the operation, he tells his beautiful and feisty Turkish-German lover, Karima Ilgun, of his first meeting with Muhammad Atta in Hamburg, of his training in Afghanistan under the watchful eye of Al Qaeda's military chief, of his meeting with Osama bin Ladin where he swears his oath of allegiance, and of his final months of preparation in Florida where he comes to loath Muhammad Atta but cannot find the courage to flee. A sense of doubt and skepticism suffuses his musings to her, but also of weakness. After the attack on 9/11, Kommissar Recht, a rumpled German government investigator), is tasked to ferret out Karima's role, if any, as an Al Qaeda operative. He comes to suspect that she is withholding valuable evidence, but under German privacy law he is barred from employing strong-arm tactics that would force her to talk. Surviving members of the Al Qaeda cell in Hamburg also suspect Karima is hiding Sami's tapes. To them Sami's recollections are sacred artifacts of what they deemed to be their successful mission, but they fear his presentation of the attack might be something less than heroic. Karima is caught between these two forces, either of which could have terrible consequences for her. How she resolves this dilemma is the climax of the novel.

It is tempting to regard the perpetrators of the September 11th terrorist attacks as evil incarnate. But their motives, as Bruce Lincoln’s acclaimed Holy Terrors makes clear, were profoundly and intensely religious. Thus what we need after the events of 9/11, Lincoln argues, is greater clarity about what we take religion to be. Holy Terrors begins with a gripping dissection of the instruction manual given to each of the 9/11 hijackers. In their evocation of passages from the Quran, we learn how the terrorists justified acts of destruction and mass murder “in the name of God, the most merciful, the most compassionate.” Lincoln then offers a provocative comparison of President Bush’s October 7, 2001 speech announcing U.S. military action in Afghanistan alongside the videotaped speech released by Osama bin Laden just a few hours later. As Lincoln authoritatively demonstrates, a close analysis of the rhetoric used by leaders as different as George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden—as well as Mohamed Atta and even Jerry Falwell—betrays startling similarities. These commonalities have considerable implications for our understanding of religion and its interrelationships with politics and culture in a postcolonial world, implications that Lincoln draws out with skill and sensitivity. With a chapter new to this edition, “Theses on Religion and Violence,” Holy Terrors remains one of the essential books on September 11 and a classic study on the character of religion. “Modernity has ended twice: in its Marxist form in 1989 Berlin, and in its liberal form on September 11, 2001. In order to understand such major historical changes we need both large-scale and focused analyses—a combination seldom to be found in one volume. But here Bruce Lincoln . . . has given us just such a mix of discrete and large-picture analysis.”—Stephen Healey, Christian Century “From time to time there appears a work . . . that serves to focus the wide-ranging, often contentious discussion of religion’s significance within broader cultural dynamics. Bruce Lincoln’s Holy Terrors is one such text. . . . Anyone still struggling toward a more nuanced comprehension of 9/11 would do well to spend time with this book.”—Theodore Pulcini, Middle East Journal

Terrorism has long been a major shaping force in the world. However, the meanings of terrorism, as a word and as a set of actions, are intensely contested. This volume explores how literature has dealt with terrorism from the Renaissance to today, inviting the reader to make connections between older instances of terrorism and contemporary ones, and to see how the various literary treatments of terrorism draw on each other. The essays demonstrate that the debates around terrorism only give the fictive imagination more room, and that fiction has a great deal to offer in terms of both understanding terrorism and our responses to it. Written by historians and literary critics, the essays provide essential knowledge to understand terrorism in its full complexity. As befitting a global problem, this book brings together a truly international group of scholars, with representatives from America, Scotland, Canada, New Zealand, Italy, Israel, and other countries.