Congratulations Lawrence Wright!

On winning the Pulitizer for your book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. You can buy your copy here. It's a great read.

Also check out his article on Al Qaeda in the "Must-Read" section of this blog.

How did the USG link 9/11 to bin Laden?

There is a terrific detail in Lawrence Wright's July New Yorker article, "The Agent: Did the C.I.A. stop an F.B.I. detective from preventing 9/11?" that you might have missed. In this article, Wright unearths how exactly the U.S. government determined that the 9/11 hijackers were in fact members of al Qaeda.

An F.B.I. agent, Ali Soufan, was in Yemen at the time of the attacks investigating the U.S.S. Cole bombing. He knew that an al Qaeda leader who was in Yemeni custody, one Abu Jandal, had nursed one of the hijackers back to health while he was staying at an al Qaeda guesthouse in Kandahar in 1999.

After he was given pictures of the hijackers, he asked Abu Jandal whether he knew any of them. He reluctantly admitted knowing Marwan al-Shehhi, but he didn't know that at the time he was being questioned, that he was the pilot of the plane that had crashed into the second tower and that he was already dead. Abu Jandal then went on to identify six others, again not knowing that they were also dead. He did know about the attacks but he couldn't believe that Muslims were responsible or that al Qaeda was involved. As Wright reports, he told Soufan that "The Sheikh is not that crazy," referring to bin Laden. He was certain that the attacks had to have been the work of Israelis.

As Wright goes on to report the exchange that then occured between the two men:

"I know for sure that the people who did this were Al Qaeda guys," said Soufan. He took seven photographs out of the book and laid them on the table.
"How do you know?" Abu Jandal asked. "Who told you?"
"You did," said Soufan. "These are the hijackers. You just identified them."
Abu Jandal turned pale. He covered his face with his hands. "Give me a moment," he pleaded. Soufan walked out of the room. When he came back, he asked Abu Jandal what he thought now. "I think the Sheikh went crazy," he said. And then he told Soufan everything he knew.