Perfect Soldiers(完美战士：9/11劫机者)

Book Description
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.

Amazon.com

From Publishers Weekly
It's taken three-plus years for a serious study of the hijackers, but the wait was worth it. L.A. Times reporter McDermott has dug deep, interviewing scores of friends, relatives and officials worldwide and trawling through troves of documents. Engrossing and deeply disturbing from the start, the book begins with two events Americans rarely connect: Russia's retreat from Afghanistan in 1989, followed in 1990 by Western troops pouring into Saudi Arabia after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. McDermott shows victory in Afghanistan electrifying Islamic warriors who hated Christianity as much as communism; a new "infidel" army to fight proved an irresistible challenge. For McDermott, this moment marks the beginning of organized, nonstate-supported terrorism. Not very organized, he adds, describing half a dozen plots cobbled together by clumsy enthusiasts who were often caught—though often too late. Despite the media attention paid to bin Laden, McDermott paints him not as the führer of terrorism, but as a rich leader with the most aggressive P.R. Bin Laden, for example had nothing to do with the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993—but he was inspired by it. McDermott's detailed biographies of the hijackers go far beyond the characterizations of the 9/11 report, and he is skeptical of accounts that portray them as deeply disturbed: all came from intact families, most were middle-class, few were deeply religious, none were abused or estranged. Recruited for the hijackings and informed they would die, they thought it over and agreed. McDermott's clear rendering of that decision is just one of this book's strengths. (May 3)

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Earlier this year the British writer Gerald Seymour constructed an exceptionally good novel, The Unknown Soldier, around the premise that the men who are drawn into the embrace of al Qaeda are not at all who we think they are. We believe, as one of his characters puts it, that they are "brainwashed," when in fact "Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants . . . have refined a skill in identifying young men of varying social backgrounds and economic advantage who are prepared to make supreme sacrifices for a cause." They are not necessarily loners but are attracted to "the excitement of being a part of that select fugitive family," they have strong "personal self-esteem," they seek "adventure and purpose."

Now, in Perfect Soldiers, Terry McDermott provides the hard facts behind the fictional picture that Seymour so persuasively draws. A reporter for the Los Angeles Times who has been on the story of the September 2001 terrorist attacks since the day they occurred, McDermott has talked to everyone -- everyone who will talk, that is -- and read everything, the result of which is what may well be, for now at least, the definitive book on the 19 men who brought such devastation and terror to this country nearly four years ago. Clearly written in good, plain English, Perfect Soldiers is a group portrait of ordinary men who were driven to do a surpassingly evil thing.

McDermott takes his title from Dashiell Hammett: "He was the perfect soldier: he went where you sent him, stayed where you put him, and had no idea of his own to keep him from doing exactly what you told him." The last part of that equation is not wholly true of these young men -- Mohamed Atta, for example, was a planner of the Sept. 11 attacks as well as an instrument of al Qaeda's will -- but the overall description is accurate. Having discovered a cause for which they were ready -- indeed, often eager -- to sacrifice their own lives, these young jihadists followed orders as precisely and dutifully as the most assiduously trained U.S. Marine.

They were not born to be soldiers -- none seems to have come from a military background -- and there was little in their early lives to suggest that they would become what they did. The pilot of the first plane to hit the World Trade Center, Atta, came from "an ambitious, not overtly religious middle-class household in Egypt" and had led "a sheltered life" until he arrived in Hamburg, Germany, in 1992 to do graduate study in architecture. The pilot of the second plane, Marwan al-Shehhi, was an amiable, "laid-back" fellow from the United Arab Emirates who had joined the UAE army, "not the world's most effective fighting force but one of its most generous, paying [its scholarship] students monthly stipends of about $2,000," which may have been his primary reason for enlisting; this enabled him to go to Hamburg, though there is little evidence that he "had any serious scholarly ambitions."

Hani Hanjour, the Saudi pilot who flew American Airlines flight 77 into the Pentagon, "had lived in the United States off and on throughout the 1990s, mostly in Arizona, intermittently taking flying lessons at several different flying schools." He was, in the view of one of his flight instructors, "intelligent, friendly, and 'very courteous, very formal,' a nice enough fellow but a terrible pilot." He finally got a commercial license from the FAA but was unable to find work here or in the Middle East. As for Ziad Jarrah, the pilot of the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, he was "the handsome middle child and only son of an industrious, middle-class family in Beirut," a "secular Muslim" family that "was easygoing -- the men drank whiskey and the women wore short skirts about town and bikinis at the beach." At university in Germany he met Aysel Sengün, "the daughter of conservative, working-class Turkish immigrants"; eventually they got married, but he disappeared for long periods, usually without explanation, leaving her frantic.

His disappearances, like changes in the other men's lives, were traceable to his discovery of radical Islam and jihad -- not jihad as "the individual's daily struggle for his own soul," but jihad as a Muslim's "obligation to fight on behalf of his beliefs, against nonbelievers and corrupters of belief." Eventually he too found his way to Hamburg, where he joined many other young Muslims in prayer and discussion, sometimes at a mosque called al Quds (the Arabic name for Jerusalem), sometimes in one of the various group houses where the men lived austerely and piously: "The Hamburg men who joined their plights to that of fundamentalist Islam chose not simply a new mosque or religious doctrine but an entry to a new way of life, the acquisition of a new world view, in fact, of a new world." To Atta and a friend who called himself Omar (ultimately he became the backstage coordinator of the 2001 attacks under his real name, Ramzi Binalshibh), "no matter where they fought, their real enemies were the Jews, and ultimately the Americans. 'One has to do something about America,' Omar said."

For ……

Terry McDermott has been a reporter at eight newspapers for twenty-five years, the last seven at the Los Angeles Times, where he is a national correspondent. He has won prizes for his journalism in a number of fields, including foreign affairs, economics, and science.

Book Description
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.

Amazon.com

From Publishers Weekly
It's taken three-plus years for a serious study of the hijackers, but the wait was worth it. L.A. Times reporter McDermott has dug deep, interviewing scores of friends, relatives and officials worldwide and trawling through troves of documents. Engrossing and deeply disturbing from the start, the book begins with two events Americans rarely connect: Russia's retreat from Afghanistan in 1989, followed in 1990 by Western troops pouring into Saudi Arabia after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. McDermott shows victory in Afghanistan electrifying Islamic warriors who hated Christianity as much as communism; a new "infidel" army to fight proved an irresistible challenge. For McDermott, this moment marks the beginning of organized, nonstate-supported terrorism. Not very organized, he adds, describing half a dozen plots cobbled together by clumsy enthusiasts who were often caught—though often too late. Despite the media attention paid to bin Laden, McDermott paints him not as the führer of terrorism, but as a rich leader with the most aggressive P.R. Bin Laden, for example had nothing to do with the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993—but he was inspired by it. McDermott's detailed biographies of the hijackers go far beyond the characterizations of the 9/11 report, and he is skeptical of accounts that portray them as deeply disturbed: all came from intact families, most were middle-class, few were deeply religious, none were abused or estranged. Recruited for the hijackings and informed they would die, they thought it over and agreed. McDermott's clear rendering of that decision is just one of this book's strengths. (May 3)

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Earlier this year the British writer Gerald Seymour constructed an exceptionally good novel, The Unknown Soldier, around the premise that the men who are drawn into the embrace of al Qaeda are not at all who we think they are. We believe, as one of his characters puts it, that they are "brainwashed," when in fact "Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants . . . have refined a skill in identifying young men of varying social backgrounds and economic advantage who are prepared to make supreme sacrifices for a cause." They are not necessarily loners but are attracted to "the excitement of being a part of that select fugitive family," they have strong "personal self-esteem," they seek "adventure and purpose."

Now, in Perfect Soldiers, Terry McDermott provides the hard facts behind the fictional picture that Seymour so persuasively draws. A reporter for the Los Angeles Times who has been on the story of the September 2001 terrorist attacks since the day they occurred, McDermott has talked to everyone -- everyone who will talk, that is -- and read everything, the result of which is what may well be, for now at least, the definitive book on the 19 men who brought such devastation and terror to this country nearly four years ago. Clearly written in good, plain English, Perfect Soldiers is a group portrait of ordinary men who were driven to do a surpassingly evil thing.

McDermott takes his title from Dashiell Hammett: "He was the perfect soldier: he went where you sent him, stayed where you put him, and had no idea of his own to keep him from doing exactly what you told him." The last part of that equation is not wholly true of these young men -- Mohamed Atta, for example, was a planner of the Sept. 11 attacks as well as an instrument of al Qaeda's will -- but the overall description is accurate. Having discovered a cause for which they were ready -- indeed, often eager -- to sacrifice their own lives, these young jihadists followed orders as precisely and dutifully as the most assiduously trained U.S. Marine.

They were not born to be soldiers -- none seems to have come from a military background -- and there was little in their early lives to suggest that they would become what they did. The pilot of the first plane to hit the World Trade Center, Atta, came from "an ambitious, not overtly religious middle-class household in Egypt" and had led "a sheltered life" until he arrived in Hamburg, Germany, in 1992 to do graduate study in architecture. The pilot of the second plane, Marwan al-Shehhi, was an amiable, "laid-back" fellow from the United Arab Emirates who had joined the UAE army, "not the world's most effective fighting force but one of its most generous, paying [its scholarship] students monthly stipends of about $2,000," which may have been his primary reason for enlisting; this enabled him to go to Hamburg, though there is little evidence that he "had any serious scholarly ambitions."

Hani Hanjour, the Saudi pilot who flew American Airlines flight 77 into the Pentagon, "had lived in the United States off and on throughout the 1990s, mostly in Arizona, intermittently taking flying lessons at several different flying schools." He was, in the view of one of his flight instructors, "intelligent, friendly, and 'very courteous, very formal,' a nice enough fellow but a terrible pilot." He finally got a commercial license from the FAA but was unable to find work here or in the Middle East. As for Ziad Jarrah, the pilot of the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, he was "the handsome middle child and only son of an industrious, middle-class family in Beirut," a "secular Muslim" family that "was easygoing -- the men drank whiskey and the women wore short skirts about town and bikinis at the beach." At university in Germany he met Aysel Sengün, "the daughter of conservative, working-class Turkish immigrants"; eventually they got married, but he disappeared for long periods, usually without explanation, leaving her frantic.

His disappearances, like changes in the other men's lives, were traceable to his discovery of radical Islam and jihad -- not jihad as "the individual's daily struggle for his own soul," but jihad as a Muslim's "obligation to fight on behalf of his beliefs, against nonbelievers and corrupters of belief." Eventually he too found his way to Hamburg, where he joined many other young Muslims in prayer and discussion, sometimes at a mosque called al Quds (the Arabic name for Jerusalem), sometimes in one of the various group houses where the men lived austerely and piously: "The Hamburg men who joined their plights to that of fundamentalist Islam chose not simply a new mosque or religious doctrine but an entry to a new way of life, the acquisition of a new world view, in fact, of a new world." To Atta and a friend who called himself Omar (ultimately he became the backstage coordinator of the 2001 attacks under his real name, Ramzi Binalshibh), "no matter where they fought, their real enemies were the Jews, and ultimately the Americans. 'One has to do something about America,' Omar said."

For ……