Volume 53, Number 16 · October 19, 2006
Al-Qaeda's Inner Circle
By Robert F. Worth
The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
by Lawrence Wright
Knopf, 469 pp., $27.95
Five years after the September 11 attacks, Osama bin Laden is a diminished figure. President Bush has started mentioning him again in recent speeches, but mainly to highlight American success in crippling and isolating al-Qaeda's leaders. Last year, the CIA disbanded Alec Station, the unit assigned to hunt down bin Laden and his top lieutenants. The US government appears to consider the world's most famous terrorist a faded star, elusive in a mountain hideaway but largely irrelevant. The greater emphasis now—at least in public—is on a new generation of jihadists in Europe, Asia, and North America whose names no one knows. Al-Qaeda is seen as threatening not so much because of its famous leaders but as an ideological virus—a spore that floats invisibly across borders and replicates itself anywhere there are discontented young men and Internet connections.
Review, 5015 words
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