A family affair

My latest New Matilda column is about the Bin Laden family and its influence in the world:

The Western world still understands little about the motivations behind the September 11, 2001 attacks nearly seven years after the fact. American journalist Steve Coll, a Pulitzer Prize winner, foreign correspondent, Washington Post managing editor and contributor to the New Yorker, details in his acclaimed 2004 book, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, from the Soviet invasion to September 10, 2001, that the events of that fateful September day were both predictable and would probably not have happened without the former assistance of the CIA.

“As the years passed”, he argues, “these radical Islamic networks adopted some of the secret deception-laden tradecraft of the formal intelligence services [Western and Pakistani], methods they sometimes acquired through direct training.”

In his new book, The Bin Ladens: The Story of a Family and its Fortune, Coll continues his thesis about the expansive Bin Laden family and its intimate relationships with the highest echelons of the American political elite. Osama Bin Laden is only one small part of the puzzle, his influence greatly exaggerated by a Western media keen to find a bogeyman for the rise in Islamic fundamentalism.

Text and images ©2024 Antony Loewenstein. All rights reserved.

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