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El libro de Peter Bergen, analista en temas de terrorismo de la CNN, fue una de las grandes estrellas de la feria de Francfort, y hay que decir que si solo se tiene tiempo para una biografia del hombre mas odiado de Occidente, lease Bin Laden, esta debe ser la eleccion. Cuatro anos tardo Bergen en recopilar la informacion y otros dos en redactar esta biografia, que finalmente tuvo que ser revisada a toda velocidad para ponerla al dia tras el 11-S.

Professor Sir Michael Howard MC knows a great deal more about warfare than I do, or ever shall. His elegant analysis of the current crisis, first delivered as a lecture to the Royal United Services Institute last week, has been hailed as “brilliant”, has been widely reported, reprinted in full, and is fast becoming the locus classicus of those opposed to military intervention in Afghanistan. Who am I to criticise a former Regius professor? I feel, metaphorically, like a Taliban fighter loosing off a couple of rifle rounds at a passing B52.

CNN’s terrorism analyst, Peter L. Bergen, observes in his new book on Osama bin Laden that the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were “the deadliest salvo” yet in a holy war against the United States that began “almost a decade earlier with the little-noticed bombing of a Yemen hotel that housed American soldiers.” “An Australian tourist was the sole casualty of that assault,” he writes, “but with every passing year the attacks became more sophisticated and more deadly.”

few hours after the first American air strikes against Afghanistan, on October 7, a pre-recorded videotape was broadcast around the world. A tall, skinny man with a scraggly beard, wearing a camouflage fatigue jacket and the headdress of a desert tribesman, an AK-47 assault rifle at his side, stood placidly before a rocky backdrop. In measured language Osama bin Laden again declared war on the United States.

From Booklist Books rushed out in the wake of historical calamities tend to be a patchwork of sloppy research and poor writing. But Bergen, who spent 10 years reporting on the Islamic world as a producer for CNN, has written a penetrating examination of al-Qaeda, which he compares to a multinational corporation with Osama bin […]

Una lectura esencial para cualquiera que pretenda comprender las amenazas terroristas del futuro y los movimientos islamistas radicales que podrian determinar el destino de gobiernos –y de vidas humanas- en todo el mundo.”

With the 24-hour news cycle providing a messy first draft of history, context has become a scarce commodity, especially when it comes to a figure as frightening and unknowable as Osama bin Laden. Will he be remembered down the line as an evil tactician who touched off a tectonic clash of civilizations? Or will his ideas end up, as President Bush memorably put it, “in history’s unmarked grave of discarded lies”? <em>Holy War, Inc.</em> doesn’t address such questions directly, but it does offer a comprehensive and well-balanced look into the militant world that gave rise to bin Laden and his army of believers.

CNN terrorism analyst Peter Bergen has been studying Osama bin Laden and his operations for several years and is the author of an upcoming book on the man the United States suspects in the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington. Saturday, he discussed the geography of Afghanistan and bin Laden’s links to the country with CNN anchor Kyra Phillips.

Hiding out somewhere in Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden must be a happy man. U.S. officials have identified him as the principal suspect in the disasters visited upon the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. And there are several reasons why. First, the operation required recruits sufficiently well-motivated that they were prepared to commit suicide. Bin Laden’s group, Al Qaeda (“the base”), employed suicide bombers in the 1998 attacks against two U.S. embassies in Africa and in the bombing of the USS <em>Cole</em> in Yemen eleven months ago. Tuesday’s attacks also required pilots capable of flying jets into their targets. And Al Qaeda has actively recruited pilots capable of flying such planes; in 1993 the group even purchased a jet in Arizona, which was flown to bin Laden’s base, then located in Sudan by a pilot the group had hired. Al Qaeda also has a long history of attacking U.S. government buildings and military targets. And bin Laden himself recently indicated that he was planning to attack more Americantargets.

JIM LEHRER: Three perspectives now. Peter Bergen is a journalist who interviewed bin Laden in 1997, he is now writing a book about him and Islamic militant groups; Bruce Hoffman is vice president at Rand, a research organization, and editor-in- chief of the journal “Studies in Conflict and Terrorism;” and Juliette Kayyem runs Harvard University’s Executive Session on Domestic Preparedness, and she was a commissioner on the National Commission on Terrorism.