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Caveat emptor. A tidal wave of tomes related to the Sept. 11 anniversary is washing up at your local bookstore as you read this. Some of these are data dumps from the police blotter, others the sad tales of victims and their families. Still others weave conspiracy theories purporting to show that energy interests in Central Asia shaped American policy toward Osama bin Laden or that “state sponsors” such as Iran or Iraq play important roles in his organization.

I quit my job at CNN in the autumn of 1999, to start working full time on a book about Osama bin Laden. I had become interested in the mysterious multimillionaire Saudi after I met him in eastern Afghanistan in 1997, and spent most of the next four years trying to understand the man. Finally, at the end of August last year, I gave my manuscript to my publisher. Having worked for more than a decade in the news business there were many things I did not understand about publishing, not least the seemingly geological time scale on which publishers work.

Wie is Osama bin Laden en hoe ver strek sy tentakels? Waar woon hy en wie werk saam met hom? Hoeveel moet ons vrees vir sy wereldwye netwerk, en wat kan ons volgende van hom verwag?

Wel, dis nou nie asof die CIA, die FBI of die Amerikaanse weermag matelose sukses behaal met hul kruistog om hom uit sy gate te rook nie, so miskien is dit nodig om ‘n joernalis kans te gee om dit te doen.

Was Sept. 11 the beginning of something or the end of something? Are militant Islamists a significant ongoing threat to the West, or is militant Islam a force that will eventually exhaust itself? Daniel Pipes has been sounding the alarm about the threat posed by militant Islam for more than a decade and posits that it threatens the West “in many and profound ways,” while Rohan Gunaratna has written a well-researched investigation of al Qaeda, the group that best embodies that threat.

It has become increasingly clear since 11 September that Western intelligence agencies have completely failed to understand or to penetrate successfully the networks of Islamist ultra-radicalism. No intelligence agency predicted the attacks on New York or Washington. Nor were there any warnings of the attacks since then in Kenya, Bali or Morocco. Intelligence briefings linking Saddam to anthrax attacks in the United States, or to a nuclear and chemical weapons programme at home, have all proved wildly inaccurate or, in the case of the documents detailing Saddam’s search for nuclear materials in Africa, were simply made up.

HOLY WAR, INC.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden, by Peter L. Bergen; Simon & Schuster, 320 pages, $14 (trade paperback edition).

Last August, when CNN correspondent Peter Bergen was finishing “Holy War, Inc.,” only a handful of people in the world knew what was about to happen in New York City and Washington, D.C., on Sept. 11.

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Federal officials have captured a U.S. citizen with suspected ties to al Qaeda who allegedly planned to build and explode a radioactive “dirty bomb” in the United States, the Justice Department said Monday. U.S. officials said Washington was the probable target of the plot. FBI Director Robert Mueller said the plot was in the “discussion stage” when the suspect, Abdullah Al Muhajir, was arrested. Mueller said the plot had not gone any further, to the knowledge of U.S. authorities.

Nearly a month before Sept. 11, terrorism analyst Peter Bergen told a New York Times reporter that he should write about an al Qaeda propaganda videotape that Bergen had obtained.

“I think there is a major story to be told,” he wrote to Times reporter John Burns, “wrapping around the new bin Laden videotape and the various threats against U.S. facilities in the past months which can paint both a compelling picture of the bin Laden organization today, and responsibly suggest that an al Qaeda attack is in the works. . . . Clearly, al Qaeda was and is planning something.”

CNN terrorism analyst Peter Bergen had finished the manuscript of Holy War, Inc. – his book about Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda – only a few weeks before the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C.

Surveying bin Laden’s violent shadow world was a prescient choice for the Oxford-educated U.S. television journalist’s first book. In fact, Bergen’s publisher rushed Holy War, Inc. into print with some quick updating from its author ? and without a full index.

Analitiear Si-En-Ena za terorizam, Piter Bergen, dovr?io je rukopis ove svoje knjige, koja govori o Osami Bin Ladenu i Al Kaidi, samo nekoliko nedelja pre teroristiekih napada na Njujork i Va?ington
Kao da je predose?ao ?ta ?e se desiti, amerieki televizijski novinar ?kolovan na Oksfordu, Piter Bergen, analizirao je jo? pre 11. septembra u svojoj knjizi Firma za Sveti rat mraenu senku Bin Ladena. Bergenovi izdavaei po?urili su da ubace tu knjigu u ?tampu ?to pre, sa nekoliko dopuna koje je autor hitno dopisao ? ali bez kompletnog indeksa.