Picking Up the Pieces

For most Americans, the events of September 11 came like a bolt from the blue on that beautiful, terrible morning. But as Strobe Talbott and Nayan Chanda observe in their well-written introduction to The Age of Terror, "the unforgivable is not necessarily incomprehensible or inexplicable." In fact, all three of these books make clear that although the attacks on New York and Washington were unexpected for many, the warning signs had long been evident -- at least to some of those who focus on terrorism.

There was, for example, the report by the U.S. Commission on National Security in the 21st Century (known, for its co-chairs, as the Hart-Rudman report). As several of the essayists in these books point out, in the spring of last year this commission predicted that there would likely be a catastrophic terrorist attack on American soil within the next two decades.

By last summer, it had also become clear to those monitoring Osama bin Laden that al Qaeda was plotting an attack; the only question was when and where. The arrests of al Qaeda associates in Yemen and India in June had revealed plans to blow up the American embassies in those countries, and a propaganda videotape, which circulated widely in the Middle East during the summer, showed bin Laden calling for more such assaults.