Product Description

Andrew C. McCarthy takes readers back to the real beginning of the war on terror--not the atrocities of September 11, but the first bombing of the World Trade Center in February 1993 when radical Islamists effectively declared war on the United States. From his perch as a government prosecutor of the blind sheik and other jihadists responsible for the bombing, Andrew McCarthy takes readers inside the twisted world of Islamic terror.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5387 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-14
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 250 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In this annotated retrospective, the prosecutor responsible for leading the investigation of Blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and others involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing dissects the miscues between federal agencies that led to that event while laying bare the challenges facing the war on terror today. The pre-1993 comedy of errors begins with the CIA's decision to funnel arms and money to Afghanistan during the Soviet-Afghan war and continues with inexplicable lapses of communication between the State Department and immigration officials (despite having been placed on a State Department terror watchlist, the sheikh travels freely to the United States). The most enduring oversight, however, at least from McCarthy's perspective, is the refusal among academics and political leaders to confront fundamentalist Islamic tenets, the 800-pound gorilla that is somehow always in the middle of the room when terror strikes. The jihadist philosophy that guided the Blind Sheikh is traced through generations of Islamic thinkers to the Prophet Mohammed himself. Though McCarthy's language is at times cumbersome, his firsthand account of jihad's rise and the sheikh's trial of the century is an important contribution (and in some instances, counterpoint) to existing literature on the attack that foreshadowed disaster to come. (Mar.)
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Customer Reviews

Excellent book!
A masterful expose' of the democrat's 9/10 viewpoint that has taken over the 2008 campaign

Willful blindness to blowback.
In McCarthy's world, Arab militants apparently come out of a vacuum, or out of some passage from the Koran. What he and his admirers are willfully blind to is the brutality of U.S. foreign policy. Osama mentioned part of a long list of injustices - sanctions on Iraq that killed 500,000 children Iraq Under Siege, Updated Edition: The Deadly Impact of Sanctions and War, U.S. support of Israel's aggression against Palestine Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land: U.S. Media & the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, and U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project). There is barely a word of any of this, and so much more, in the countless books like McCarthy's that seek to demonize our victims. Keep in mind, these allegedly evil people are the same people we were arming, training and applauding when they were killing Russians Terrorism: Theirs and Ours. Authoritarian Islamic fundamentalists are the same people that the U.S. is happy to work with in countries like Saudi Arabia The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity, or in Indonesia The United States and Right-Wing Dictatorships, 1965-1989.
The sort of denial that McCarthy perpetuates is not only dishonest, it is dangerous. Most people are more civilized than us, and they don't seek vengence for all the suffering we heap upon them (i.e. - Vietnamese, Guatemalans, Haitians, El Salvadorans, Iranians, etc.), but we may someday receive another attack of blowback and it may be worse than the horror of 9/11. By the way, there is another 9/11 that we are willfully blind to; that is the September 11th that the corporate jihadists Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger inflicted upon Chile Chile: The Other September 11: An Anthology of Reflections on the 1973 Coup (Radical History).

For those who choose to see inconvenient truths about U.S. militarism:
Our Own Private Bin Laden
Collateral Damage: America's War Against Iraqi Civilians
Why We Fight

too scary to read at bedtime
Everyone who doesn't want to learn Arabic and wants to keep their Bibles should read this book and think about what it says.

Keep a dictionary handy, however. He uses a few Bill Buckley quality words.