Men without scruples: one prescient author measured the terrorist mind a full century ago.

It took an act unprecedented in all history--the ramming of passenger planes into national landmarks--to awaken Americans to the reality of international terrorism. Long protected by geography and circumstance from a contagion that has for a century plagued the major European countries, Israel, the Near East, and parts of Asia, the September 11 attacks drove home the unpleasant reality that in a globalized world America is no longer safe. Hardly had the smoke cleared, however, before legions of intellectuals at home and abroad rushed in to "explain" the motivations of the perpetrators. The most common excuses offered were poverty and injustice in the Third World; American ...