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Perfect Soldiers : The 9/11 Hijackers: Who They Were, Why They Did It

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McDermott has written what is so far the definitive narrative of the 9/11 hijackers. He divides his book into three parts: First, he profiles the backgrounds and personality profiles of the hijackers, many who started as regular citizens and slowly drifted into their extremism, often by chance. Second, he explains the political forces in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan that helped to revive Jihad and give power to Osama Bin Laden. Third, he focuses on the actual plot to hijack the planes on 9/11. The reportage is remarkable and provides clues to the hijackers' personalities that have so far not been publicized. What's scary is the effective way the author shows the hijackers often came from privileged backgrounds and then drifted into the fringes of society where, needing direction and identity, they were susceptible to the extremist rhetoric of fundamentalism and violent jihad. Where I might disagree with McDermott is his characterization of the hijackers as "fairly ordinary men." Perhaps I have a different definition of "ordinary" than does McDermott who uses hundreds of salient illustrations to paint these men anything than as ordinary: They are often portrayed as sullen spoiled narcissistic brats and bullies. One of the most prominent of the hijackers, Mohamed Atta, in particular is an extreme personality study in repressed sexuality, narcissism, and sociopathic hatred of others. He cannot smile or enjoy life in the slighest so that when he eats food he mutters to himself how boring and tedious the task of eating is. Everyone who knew him, even people who shared in his beliefs, found him an obnoxious presence. Sullen, brooding, and controlling, he made the hairs on people's neck bristle whenever he entered a room. In spite of his fastidious religious adherence, he takes to the mysterious and disturbing desire to wear eye mascara. I'll let you decided if he is "ordinary" or not. In any event, Atta, like the others, is misogynistic; women are shunned and held in contempt. The total sum picture you get of these hijackers is a bunch of malignant malcontents who need an extreme cause to be a vehicle for their personal frustration and deeply-set anti-social tendencies.

For an excellent companion book to better understand the types of personalities who get drawn to extreme forms of belief, I highly recommend Eric Hoffer's slim masterpiece The True Believer.

I've read a number of the 9/11 related books out there and this is one of the best. I learned many things I either didn't know or had misconceptions about. For example, I'd heard that most of the 9/11 hijackers didn't know it was a suicide mission- a somehow comforting thought. McDermott makes the convincing case that every one of them knew they were about to die and embraced their path to paradise. This is a must read for anyone who wants insight to what these fanatics were really thinking.

Terry McDermott has made a well-written and well-researched investigation of the 9/11 hijackers. His work focuses on the pilots, plus Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the 9/11 mastermind. Osama bin Laden is to a lesser extent covered, though his 1996 and 1998 fatwas against Americans are included in the appendix. Steering clear of conspiracy theory nonsense, McDermott nonetheless supplies critical questions in the endnotes. Overall an important book, the "Perfect Soldiers" are shown really to be ordinary men, made extraordinary by the forces of radical Islam. The starke evil of the hijackers could wear an alarming human face. Highly recommended.

This account reads well and should be read by anyone still trying to sort out, or to create, the meaning of the events of 9/11. It is the best account of the hijackers that we have to date. However, in the end it does not begin to answer the question: why?

Atta seems not to have been, despite the author's contention, an ordinary person. He seems to have been intensely, perhaps morbidly, introverted; to have been under extreme family pressures for achievement, which he did not satisfy; to have been raised in a family environment that was extremely rigid, unfriendly, cold; to have had no capacity whatever for understanding anything outside of his own extremely narrow views; and to have had no capacity to adapt socially. He was almost universally disliked, by both those who had brief exposure and those who had long-term exposure to him, with the exception of a few of his radical Islamist associates. Every prospect of change or difference forced him into an even more intense withdrawal. His will, written in 1996, shows a morbid fascination in the contemplation of his own dead body, a horror of women, and a dread of sexual humiliation (he specified that those who would have contact with his body's genital areas must wear rubber gloves).

There is an element of pathos in Jarrah's story, but not enough detail to tell a complete story. He split his time between jihadist plotting and living the high life of a foreign student in Germany and, eventually, the U.S. He engaged in a long-term and passionate romance with a Turkish/German woman who seems to have had no inkling of his murderous plans or Islamist mindset. Jarrah seems to have been a virtual split personality, or at least possessed of a level of profound ambivalence that he could not consciously acknowledge.

There is not enough information provided about the other hijackers to really get any sense of what made them tick.

Conclusions:

1. The problem of Islamist terrorism is one of culturally-based, popularly supported, non-state sponsored groups that cultivate young, intelligent, idle, fanatic Islamists to commit acts of terror. They are, in so many words, murder and suicide cults who believe that their acts of murder and suicide are divinely and socially sanctioned acts of valor and redemption.

2. The Islamist radicals who become terrorists outside of the Middle East appear to be mostly created in certain European countries, who are content to take anyone from the Middle East claiming a need for asylum, and support them in an idle lifestyle where they can devote full time to hate-mongering, brainwashing, and plotting. America's security is far more threatened by Germany and Britain, which harbor and do not control large numbers of Islamists of terrorist inclination, than by the ancestral homes of the terrorists. 9/11 originated in Germany, not Pakistan or Saudi Arabia. Germany's welfare system and asylum rules were a standing invitation for Islamic terrorists to move there. Germany's impotent court system, a reaction to the courts' subversion under the Nazi regime, meant they could operate there with impunity. Germany's pathetic and mostly unsuccessful prosecutions of surviving members of the 9/11 Hamburg cell do honor to the memory of the appeasement at Munich in 1938. Germany seems to have great difficulty finding a golden mean for anything connected with statecraft or government.

Criticisms:

1. The book desperately needs maps it doesn't have, and far more photos than it does have. There are not enough photos of the individual hijackers, or maps to trace their origin and movements, to allow one easily to keep track of who is who throughout the narrative.

2. The book has little information on the folkways and social structure(s) of the Middle Eastern countries from which the hijackers originated.

3. It is an interesting book, a page-turner, but ultimately less than fully satisfying because it does not have enough detail to tell a story that is dramatically more revealing than what was already known about the hijackers. It's account of "that day" is perfunctory.

4. For a depiction of the mindset of the Islamist suicide terrorist, see the astonishing first-hand narrative of Anne Marie Oliver and Paul Steinberg, The Road to Martrys' Square: A Journey into the World of the Suicide Bomber (Oxford 2005).

Far from wild-eyed raving religious fanatics, the 19 men who struck on 9/11, were by and large middle class and from secular backgrounds. How these seemingly unexceptional young men became suicide soldiers for Al Qaeda is the story that's told here. It's their decided ordinariness and their descent into fundamentalist jihad that makes this such a frightening read.

McDermott paints chilling portraits of the leaders of the 19. Young and lonely Middle Easterners floundering in German colleges, their insecurities lead them to the Islamic fundamentalism preached in Hamburg mosques. Like moths drawn to a flame, they find the direction, certainty and purpose they so crave. Once immersed in the tenets of jihad, they move on to Al Qaeda's terrorist training camps in Afgahnistan. Here, they are hand-picked by Al Qaeda's leadership to go to the U.S. to train to be pilots. The rest, as they say, is history.

The question that's never really answered here is why these men did it, why they sacrificed their own lives to kill innocent civilians. Perhaps no one will ever know. Perhaps the answer is beside the point.

I have had the view that the 9/11 highjackers were a bunch of militants, trained in Afghanistan camps and raised in ultra strict Muslim families. This narrow and simplistic view on my part has been somewhat comforting, after all it took a number of factors and many years of indoctrination for these folks to calmly take their lives and the lives of thousands of incidents. I say comforting because just how many of these guys can there be? Unfortunately this book details that the men involved in the 9/11 attacks were primarily bored, unemployed and living in societies with significant economic problems. They just happened to chose a course that lead them into performing the worst terrorist attacks ever. This is concern because as the author points out , there are millions more young men in the same position that can only turn to religion for comfort and need a enemy to hate.

This book gives the reader a very interesting view of some of the 9/11 highjackers. The author writes in a way that is as captivating as a fiction book. He makes even the most normal run down of facts interesting. It helps that the ultimate event has so much drama surrounding it. Overall I enjoyed the book. It is full of facts presented without a lot of over the top reasoning about how these people hate us because of our freedom. It is an eye opener and if you are interested in the war on terror or the 9/11 attacks I think you will find the book well worth the time.

I read this book after hearing about it on National Public Radio. McDermott said, as I recall, that his findings revealed how dangerous people are who believe their religion to be absolutely unfallible. That was revealed in the book, but many of these "soldiers" were not particularily religious until they became isolated from their home culture and found themselves in foreign cities where the local mosque brought them a sense of identity. Unknowingly, they fell in with often very radical beliefs and became "soldiers" for Allah. The parallels with radical religious groups (in all religions) are striking. In the current age of conservatism in our country, with so many espousing blending fundamentalist spiritualism with politics, Perfect Soldiers might just offer a little warning: religious radicals can evolve anywhere in any religion. Religion, in itself, is usually good in that it makes people good, but, taken to extremes, it can be very dangerous. The book, Perfect Soldiers, of course, is much more than a commentary about the dangers of religious zeal. It is very well done and a worthy read.

Right after 9/11 there were a lot of people who called the 19 young men cowards. It reminded me a lot of the British calling the American forces during the Revolutionary War cowards because they wouldn't stand up in straight lines and shoot at each other, instead they hid behind trees to make it harder to be hit.

Whatever else they were, these nineteen young men were not cowards. A coward is not going to deliberately crash an airplane into a building knowing it would cost his life.

In this book gives us a careful look at these men. Mostly middle class, generally well educated, from families no more dysfunctional than average, the hijackers became convinced that they were soldiers of God, chosen to do his bidding. How they were converted to radical fundamental Islam is perhaps not so different than what is happening in this country with the fundamental Christians who blow up abortion clinics.

The conclusion in the book is that finding such soldiers to perform other terrorist activities in the future. Unfortunately this doesn't seem to be wrong. Suicide bombers and Japanese Kamikaze pilots seem fairly easy to find.

Frightening book, that we can only hope does not fortell the future.

The book and the movie come across very well. If you don't have the time to read the book, watch the Hamburg Cell. Both are excellent portrayals of the men who carried out the 9-11 attacks.

What I found most compelling was that Atta and company were not radicalized at home in Cairo or Lebanon but rather in the West. Hamburg became the unlikely setting of Islamic fundamentalist change in the leaders of the 911 cells. In retrospect they were ripe for the picking. McDermott gives us a line-by-line accounting of these men . . . from their childhood to radicalization in the west to their 'slipping off the map' enroute to the Bin Laden camps in Afghanistan back to the west as 'The Perfect Soldiers.' Scary and creepy in its implication that it was so easy to do . . . and could happen again.