How 9-11 Happened.(The Age of Sacred Terror)(Book Review)

The Trojan Princess Cassandra suffered one of the crueler fates in Greek mythology: she could predict the future, but no one would believe her. Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon know the feeling. As director and senior director, respectively, for counterterrorism on President Bill Clinton's National Security Council staff, they worried that terrorists might use student visas to enter the United States and commit attacks. Working through the NSC, they pushed in the late 1990s for a revamped visa-tracking system, only to see the effort killed by the education lobby--and their worst fears come true on September 11, 2001.

Stories of such near misses abound in "The Age of Sacred Terror" (490 pages. Random House), Benjamin and Simon's gripping account of Al Qaeda's rise and America's response. The revelations serve a profoundly serious purpose: to explain how the United States could have been so blind on that terrible morning 14 months ago. By chronicling the many pitfalls of counterterrorism, the authors hope to help avert future attacks.

The book begins far beyond American shores, with a careful history of Islamist terrorism. Benjamin and Simon emphasize that Osama bin Laden and his followers represent a new, far more treacherous form of terror that seeks mass casualties; according to their account, one prominent jihadist has set a goal of 4 million dead Americans. The authors also make clear that Al Qaeda is not merely an American problem. Dysfunctional economies and illegitimate governments render nations such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan vulnerable to the jihadist tide. In Europe, a growing population of alienated and impoverished immigrants has proved a fertile recruiting ground for radical Islamists. Militancy is spreading in Southeast Asia as well, where--in a passage eerily presaging the recent bombings in Bali--Benjamin and Simon warn of explosives and terrorists unaccounted for in Indonesia.

But the core of the book describes how Clinton-administration officials grappled with the inchoate specter of radical Islam. To hear Benjamin and Simon tell it, they were fighting two wars: one against Al Qaeda, and one with the U.S. government to have the threat taken seriously. Despite several attacks during the 1990s--including the 1993 World Trade Center bombing--and rising agitation in the White House, the executive branch did not act with a unified sense of urgency. Miscommunication was rampant. The FBI, owing to its culture ...