Excerpts From 'The Looming Tower'

But cooperation was still very slow in coming. “This investigation has hit a rock,” General Naji admitted. “We Arabs are very stubborn.”

Ali Soufan teased him, saying, “You’re dealing with another Arab, and I’m also stubborn.”

When Soufan translated this exchange, O’Neill contended that the Arabs were not the equal of the Irish in that department. He told a story about the O’Neill clan in Ireland, who he said had the reputation of being the strongest men in their county. Every year there was a boat race to a giant stone in the middle of a lake, and the O’Neill’s always won. But one year, another clan was rowing faster and pulling ahead, and it appeared that they would touch the stone first. “But then my great-grandfather took his sword,” said O’Neill, “and he cut off his hand and threw it at the rock. You got anything that can match that?”

Soufan and the general look at each other. “We’re stubborn,” said Soufan, “but we’re not crazy.”
…

After the incident in the FBI parking garage, O'Neill began reading the Bible every day. In Yemen, he kept a Bible on his bedside table, along with a recent biography of Michael Collins. He returned to Catholicism in spring of 2001, attending Mass every morning.
...

Immediately after that episode, he buried himself in prayer. He had a couple of prayer guides, and he marked his favorites with ribbons or Post-it notes. He was particularly drawn to the Psalms, including number 142.

On the way where I shall walk
they have hidden a snare to entrap me.
Look on my right and see:
there is no one who takes my part.
I have no means of escape,
not one who cares for my soul.
I cry to you, O Lord.
I have said: “You are my refuge
all I have in the land of the living.”
Listen, then, to my cry
for I am in the depths of distress.
...

In the back of one of his red-leather breviaries, he clipped a schedule of Catholic prayer times, and on July 30 he began to obsessively check them off. It is now a rare practice for ordinary Catholics to pray four or five times as day, as Muslims do, but the ancient practice is still available to members of the clergy and extremely fervent believers. Perhaps in his worship O'Neill drew parallels between the early church and certain aspects of modern Islamism, since the church calendar is full of martyrs and stern ideologues who would be seen as religious extremists today. He began this regimen on the feast day of Peter Chrysologus, the bishop of Ravena, who banned dancing and persecuted the heretics. The next day, July 31, celebrates Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the indomitable Spanish solider who founded the Jesuit order. The vision these saints had of a society governed by God is far more like that of Sayyid Qutb than that of most modern Christians.

In his schedule, O'Neill checked off every prayer until Sunday, August 19, the day the article about the briefcase incident finally appeared in the Times. Then the marks abruptly stopped.

"The duties of this religion are magnificent and difficult," bin Laden said in a videotaped speech that was later discovered on the computer of a member of the Hamburg cell. "Some of them are abominable."

Bin Laden spoke about the Prophet, who warned the Arabs that they would become weak because of their love of life and their fear of fighting. "The sense of less, this misery that has befallen us: all these are proof that we have abandoned God and his jihad," bin Laden said. "God has imposed inferiority on you and will not remove it from you until you return to your religion."

Recalling the Prophet's injunction on his deathbed that Islam should be the only religion in Arabia, bin Laden asked, "What answer do we have for God on the day of reckoning?... The ummah in this time have become lost and have gone astray. Now, ten years have passed since the Americans entered the land of the two holy places.... It becomes clear to use that shying away from the fight, combined with the love of earthly existence that fills the hearts of many of us, is the source of this misery, this humiliation, and this contempt."

These words reached into the hearts of the nineteen young men, many of whom had skills, talent, and education, and were living comfortably in the west; and yet they still resonated with the sense of shame that bin Laden sang to them.

What do we want? What do we want?
Don't we want to please God?
Don't we want Paradise?

He urged them to become martyrs, to give up their promising lives for the greater glory that awaited them. "Look, we have found ourselves in the mouth of the lion for over twenty years now," he said, "thanks to the mercy and favor of God: the Russian Scud missiles hunted us for over ten years, and the American Cruise missiles have hunted us for another ten years. The believer knows that the hour of death can be neither hastened nor postponed." Then he quoted a passage from the fourth sura of the Quran, which he repeated three times in the speech -an obvious signal to the hijackers who were on their way:

Wherever you are, death will find you,
even in the looming tower.