The Looming Tower is a prequel if you like to the devastating attack on the Twin Towers in New York on 9/11 which took the lives of thousands of Americans and visitors. It’s drama but it’s true.
A number of things about it make or ought to make it uncomfortable viewing for US policy makers of that period and now.
To start with the simplest. A complete systemic failure within the US government, turf wars between the CIA and the State Department and the FBI left the security forces utterly blindsided and it’s extraordinary that it took a young Englishwoman Bathsheba ‘Bash’ Doran to write this.
More difficult still for the west is the clear inference of this BBC TV show that what became Al Qaeda did not appear out of thin air but emerged from a toxic swamp in part filled by western policy towards the Arab and wider Muslim world.
Both directly and indirectly Al Qaeda and Isis and the alphabet soup of Islamist extremism have benefitted greatly from western leaders, fools and knaves or both.
Our support for mediaeval kings and their head-chopping systems and brute dictatorships whose only pre-requisite is that they rule in our interests rather than those of their own people has left hundreds of millions of Muslims drawn – up to one point or another – to the obscurantism of Bin Laden et al.
More directly our financial military and propaganda support for actually existing Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq and Syria on the principle that my enemy’s enemy is my friend has made this a Frankenstein monster.
The Looming Tower shows too that these foes are not – only – a Criminal death cult but a formidable clever and self-sacrificing enemy. No point in trying to put the fear of death in people when death is what it’s all about.
It is brilliantly written acted and directed. As someone who lived through these 1990s events observing them at close hand I can vouch for its verisimilitude. You’ll thank me for this encouragement to watch it as soon as you can.
George Galloway
London