A strength of the report is its great detail concerning the execution of the attacks (pp. xv-46 and 145-324). Readers will find the chapter “Terrorist Entrepreneurs” especially provocative; take, for example, its description of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM): “Highly educated and equally comfortable in a government office or a terrorist safehouse, KSM applied his imagination, technical aptitude, and managerial skills to hatching and planning an extraordinary array of terrorist schemes” (p. 145). Perfectly capable of leading a normal, productive life, this particularly twisted murderer instead made a conscious decision to kill innocents in cold blood. Such psychoanalysis of the terrorists is mildly interesting but should be more chilling¾rather than apply their energies to helping their people build a better life, terrorists prefer to destroy and kill. Fortunately, the 9/11 report points out that Islamist terrorism is “the catastrophic threat” (p. 362), representing a way of thinking that completely opposes American values and Western civilization. It also validates the assertion that we must vigorously guard against mirror imaging in war planning and homeland defense.

The report’s explanation of terrorist motivations, however, suffers from the lack of any regional, political, and religious history that underlies the terrorist threat. Without a sense of continuity, the full texture of the terrorist psyche and their malevolent Weltanschauung (worldview) becomes simplified and homogenized. A better study would include a historical review, perhaps beginning with early Middle Eastern history and the emergence of Muhammad. Certainly it should have included a summary reaching back to the region’s colonial past.

Following an opening chapter on the details of the 9/11 hijackings, chapter 2, “The Foundation of the New Terrorism” (pp. 47-70), recounts the ascendancy of Osama bin Laden. Disappointingly, the authors never really tell us about “old terrorism,” part of that missing history. One might argue that the genesis of modern Islamic extremist violence extends from the fall of the Ottoman Empire, when the Levant, North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and Iran enjoyed an abundance of both culture—Muslim, Jewish, Zoroastrian, and Christian—and science. Extremists use the Crusades, which occurred a millennium ago, as an excuse for modern Islamic violence. Another common, though illogical and naïve, excuse for terrorism is poverty. But we have always had both poor and rich, and most of the 9/11 terrorists, including Osama, were middle class, fairly intelligent, and educated—certainly capable of contributing to society in meaningful, productive ways. Yet, they chose mass murder. Why?

Indisputably, after the British redrew the maps, after the balance of power changed in the region with the creation of the new state of Israel in 1948, and after decades of Cold War politics, coexistence in the region gave way to the embracing of radicals. Islamic extremists, including those who assassinated Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and those violently crushed by King Hussein I of Jordan and Pres. Hafiz al-Assad of Syria, among others, fomented rabid hatred of Israel and then of the United States. As fourth world countries gained access to the wide distribution of images and signals, media began to play a growing part in the promulgation of hate, expanding it to encompass all of Western civilization (except, of course, for technologies useful in keeping the region’s powerful strongmen comfortable and secure) (pp. 47-55). There is a long history of states supporting terrorism in the region, particularly since the 1980s: Iraq and Saudi Arabia have done so with “charity” telethons and donations to the families of suicide bombers in Israel; Saddam Hussein gave refuge to terrorists such as Abu Nidal; mullahs in Iran supported Hamas and other terror groups who regularly attacked Americans and Israelis; Syria used Lebanon as a base of operations; and Libya trained terrorists and destroyed American aircraft in international airspace. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, easily accessible media had become integral to the tacit acceptance of terrorists as part of Middle Eastern Islamic society. Even today, the United Nations and many European capitals fail to condemn terrorism with any sort of consistency, seeking instead to find moral equivalence between murder and self-defense where none exists.

Because the report does not fully consider the huge impact of the Information Age, a temporal perspective can prove helpful in examining this gap critically. We know that slaughtering or enslaving the inhabitants of a town was not an unusual practice in the classical world. Rumors of brutality increased the cache of despots, augmenting their income through the collection of protection money and taxes. The war on terrorism differs significantly from previous conflicts with respect to this tradition of violence and aggrandizement, in no small part because of today’s obsequious media. Obvious to all who watched, 9/11 became a media event¾precisely the effect desired by the terrorist leadership, who sought not only to commit murder, but also to create mass panic and hysteria, culminating in the cracking of the Western world. Clearly, the media has become an essential and willing tool of the terrorists.

In the past, the media did not push live pictures of battlefield action into every American’s home, let alone hundreds of millions of homes around the world. Beginning with Vietnam, a pervasive media gained power. By 2001 we learned it had the ability to rivet helpless onlookers with images of planes crashing into the World Trade Center or, by 2004, to do so with footage of terrorists gruesomely beheading innocent civilian captives. Of course, it is easier to find this type of coverage in open societies such as the United States, Israel, or Spain. Atrocities that occur in dictatorships (e.g., Saddam’s Iraq or present-day North Korea) generate little fanfare or international reaction because the images are not as available to the wired West or to repressed populaces. As Eric Larson notes in his RAND study entitled Casualties and Consensus, the influence of the media, including the Internet, on policy—especially in the West—has made it a critical variable that terrorists understand and that counterterrorists need to understand quickly (pp. 99-103).