Study of Revenge

The destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center and the attack on the Pentagon - all within one hour on 11 September 2001 - demonstrate America's shocking vulnerability to terrorism. But the terrorists' war against America actually started eight years earlier, when the mysterious terrorist mastermind Ramzi Yousef bombed the World Trade Center in an attempt to fell the buildings. His attacks were viewed as the harbinger of a new terrorism, carried out by an elusive enemy driven by religious fanaticism to unprecedented hatred of the USA. But is that perception accurate? In this study, Laurie Mylroie argues that this "new terrorism", supposedly the work of "loose networks" of Muslim extremists, is nothing other than old-fashioned state-sponsored terrorism in a new disguise. The author ploughs through the copious evidence from the first attack on the World Trade Center and combines it with information from the intelligence community and from personal interviews she has conducted. She gleans from her research that Iraq has been working with, and using, Islamic extremists - such as Osama bin Laden - in its own ongoing war against America. Mylroie chronicles how, time after time, the Clinton administration focused on the extremist freelancers and vowed to bring the perpetrators to justice, while it turned a blind eye to the evidence that Iraq was also involved. Her story reveals the split between New York and Washington that emerged during the investigation and tells a terrifying tale of America left exposed and vulnerable following the mishandling of the first attack on the World Trade Center, which was once the most ambitious terrorist attack attempted on US soil.