Heroes and villains

Most of the significant facts about Nosair that are reported in "The Cell" also appeared in Peter Bergen's "Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden," a book published in November 2001. There's also been some fuss over 16 boxes of documents seized from Nosair's home when he was arrested after the Kahane assassination; they included training manuals from the Army Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg and some communiqués addressed to the secretary of the Army and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as maps of New York City landmarks.

As Bergen also reported, this material was given to Nosair by a remarkable character named Ali Mohamed, who had the distinction of being a member of al-Qaida, a soldier in the U.S. Army and an instructor of U.S. Army Special Forces at the same time. Mohamed even popped over to fight a bit of jihad in Afghanistan when he got time off from paratrooper training at Fort Bragg. Shocking, isn't it? Well, no, not really. This was during the '80s, when the U.S. and the mujahedin were on the same side: against the Soviets.

Again, all of this is in Bergen's book, though "The Cell" does contain more details about the bureaucratic limbo that the 16 boxes fell into when the FBI gave them to the Manhattan D.A. and the D.A. forgot to tell the NYPD that the FBI had released the material and so it never got read, let alone translated, until after the 1993 Trade Center bombing. A major vein in "The Cell" concerns all the ways that various government entities -- usually the FBI and the CIA -- screwed up in investigating Islamist militants in the U.S. and overseas. Most of the authors' sources are detectives and special agents, line staff who understandably and perhaps justifiably would like to see higher-ups -- overly cautious managers and meddling politicians -- blamed for the failures. But it's clear that venomous turf wars between the FBI and the CIA, the FBI and the NYPD, various divisions within the NYPD itself, and New York's Joint Terrorism Task Force (an NYPD and FBI collaboration) and everyone else are equally if not more culpable. Serious structural reform is in order, to say the least.

What does all this stuff about the Kahane shooting really have to do with Sept. 11, anyway? It's hard to say, which is why "The Cell" itself could do with a little structural reform. The book is a mess, with no index, no footnotes and a propensity for slipping into first-person passages -- very confusing in a book with three authors -- that you eventually realize relate John Miller's own experiences in covering the events. Mostly these passages (sometimes set in type smaller than the rest of the book's text, and sometimes not) consist of Breslin-esque yarns about the "colorful" New York law enforcement characters he befriended in various "watering holes," alternating with starry-eyed vignettes of his life as a TV personality. (Variations on the phrase "as I sat next to Peter Jennings at the ABC News desk" appear no fewer than four times in the first 30 pages.) Miller has been covering terrorism for years, and he did interview bin Laden in 1998, so surely some of the actual reporting in "The Cell" comes from his notepad, but these preening interludes only foster the impression that he contributed little of substance to the project beyond a famous name to put on the book's cover.

Most of "The Cell" is padding, workmanly retellings of the highlights of al-Qaida-related terrorist actions over the past decade -- Riyadh, the African embassies, the U.S.S. Cole, etc. -- grisly greatest hits that have been covered in other books. However, its reconstruction of the Sept. 11 cell's history and movements is new and valuable, even if it's a bit sketchy and it doesn't amount to much more than a quarter of the entire book.

The only hijackers about whom the authors have much information are Mohammed Atta and Ziad Jarrah, the man who led the team that commandeered United Flight 93. Much of this has been reported in news outlets, but it's helpful to have it compiled in one place, particularly because Atta, a complex personality, may embody the psychological prototype of a "new" breed of terrorist. As Gilles Kepel has pointed out in his excellent "Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam," the majority of the most vehement militant Islamists don't conform to the American stereotype of disenfranchised, downtrodden Palestinian youths pushed past the brink. Atta, like Yousef and several of the other leaders of the Sept. 11 attack as well as many of Islamism's most fervent champions in the Mideast, had an engineering degree and came from a family of comfortable means. (Many of these men, like Atta, faced difficulty finding work commensurate with their education, though.) The story of Atta's fraught relationship with his prosperous, egotistical father, who derided him as a mama's boy, is intriguing, but the authors of "The Cell" don't do much with it.

Jarrah, however, is truly a baffler. While Atta became more puritanical and unpleasant to outsiders as he grew increasingly religious, Jarrah was invariably characterized by the Westerners who met him as "nice" -- a warm and jovial fellow who had a serious romantic relationship with a Turkish woman whom he lived with in Germany. He met her in a disco, reportedly drank alcohol, and was described by a fellow student as a "weak Muslim" who had to be dragged to prayers. He is not known to have uttered a word against America and sometimes seems to have liked it. Atta, by contrast, was thoroughly disgusted by the depravity and "chaos" of one Western film a roommate persuaded him to see: Walt Disney's "Jungle Book."

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