Heroes and villains

Two new books try to illuminate the conspirators behind the 9/11 hijackings -- and the Americans who fought them in the sky.

By Laura Miller

Aug 8, 2002 | One thing that heroes and villains share, it seems, besides the likelihood of an early death, is the probability that the first version of their stories will be hack work. Not that the writers behind the two newest Sept. 11 books, "The Cell" and "Among the Heroes," aren't fine journalists when on their regular beats, but they're primarily reporters, not authors. (Some wondrous writers are both; these aren't.) We turn to books rather than newspapers when we want more than the facts about a historical event. In books, we seek a wider and deeper context for those facts, not just who met with whom and where and when and what they did, but why they did it and what it all means.

Even the very best of the daily press suffers from this focus on trees at the expense of forest. The special section the New York Times produced in the months after Sept. 11, A Nation Challenged, is a case in point. It won a Pulitzer Prize, and it certainly devoted more inches to covering the attacks and their aftermath than any other newspaper, but much of the time the information in it rattled around randomly like loose nails in a tin can -- endless columns of undigested information that left many who read them feeling more confused and ignorant than before. Perhaps that's why so many Americans, even those who managed to wade through long stories on the ongoing skirmishes in Afghanistan, don't fully realize how perilous the situation there is. On the other hand, readers of Ahmed Rashid's excellent book, "Taliban" (which was written before Sept. 11 but which still provided a better overview of Afghanistan's political dynamics), will perceive that the nation (particularly outside Kabul) is slipping back into exactly the same violent chaos that caused so many exhausted Afghans to accept the Taliban regime to begin with. When journalist-authors such as Michael Ignatieff deliver stories like his invaluable report from Afghanistan in the July 28 issue of the New York Times Magazine, we get the best of both worlds: recent developments and the background we need to make sense of them.

Both "The Cell" and "Among the Heroes" promise to provide readers with definitive accounts of what we now know about two aspects of the Sept. 11 story. "The Cell" -- written by John Miller (of ABC's "20/20"), New York crime reporter Michael Stone and journalist Chris Mitchell -- traces the activities of the cell of hijackers responsible for crashing the four airliners. "Among the Heroes," by New York Times reporter Jere Longman, recreates the trajectory of United Airlines Flight 93, from its beginning as an ordinary nonstop to San Francisco from Newark International Airport to its hideous end as a smoking crater in a field outside Shanksville, Pa.

Both books are presented by their publishers as if they contain revelations -- "Among the Heroes" was embargoed to the press until its publication date last week, apparently because Longman persuaded several family members who were permitted to listen to the cockpit recorder tape to debrief him. It's not clear that anything in either book constitutes a significant news flash, unless you're one of those people whose strategy for coping with major catastrophes is to spin out conspiracy theories. If you are, be advised that Longman persuasively dispatches the "it was shot down" theory on Flight 93.

The hot story touted in "The Cell" involves El Sayyid Nosair, an Egyptian who ostensibly shot and killed Rabbi Meir Kahane of the extremist Jewish Defense League in Manhattan in 1990 (he was convicted only of a weapons charge, but no one seems to much doubt his guilt). The authors demonstrate that Nosair had close ties with several Middle Eastern men who hung around the al-Kifah Refugee Services Center in Brooklyn, a recruiting outpost for mujahedin hankering to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden's mentor and al-Kifah's founder, Abdullah Azzam, made several fund-raising visits to the center during the 1980s and it was frequented by Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman (known to newscasters everywhere as "the blind Egyptian cleric"), as well. Nosair's pals would eventually go on to participate in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center with the blessing of Abdel-Rahman and under the direction of Ramsi Yousef.

Whether this is a big deal or not is a matter of opinion. Even judging by the events as described in "The Cell," Nosair's shooting of Kahane seems to have been a largely impulsive act (though he'd talked big about it among his buddies beforehand) triggered in part by his frustration over a job transfer. The alleged co-conspirator who was with Nosair at the time had wandered off to the men's room and didn't seem to know what was going on until after the shooting; the "getaway car," a taxi driven by another of the al-Kifah crowd, wasn't anywhere in sight while Nosair attempted to flee the scene and he had to commandeer another one instead. In short, these guys sure look like a pack of jokers, even if Nosair, the head joker, managed to overcome his general ineffectuality long enough to kill somebody. It wasn't until Ramsi Yousef -- an evil genius if there ever was one -- showed up in 1992 and whipped Nosair's pals into shape long enough to execute the first attack on the Trade Center that they became genuine terrorists. Yousef got out of Dodge the day of the bombing, leaving the jokers -- including one who tried to get a refund on the security deposit for the rental truck they'd used as a bomb -- to be scooped up by the cops.

Next Page: A member of al-Qaida and U.S. Special Forces, at the same time

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