Al-Qaeda: The Terror Network that Threatens the World (Nation Books) - Hardcover

Corbin, Jane

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1560254262 ISBN 13: 9781560254263

Publisher: Nation Books, 2002

Synopsis

Jane Corbin, Emmy nominee and the BBC’s award-winning senior correspondent specializing in the Middle East, has broken many stories on the growth of Al Qaeda over the past decade. Here she explores how one man with a medieval view of good and evil, living in a cave, brought the world’s only remaining superpower to its knees. Exploring the methodology of Al Qaeda (The Base), Corbin shows how they used the training instilled in them in the Afghan terror camps to stay below the radar of the world’s most sophisticated intelligence agency. Here, too, are descriptions of the parallel deadly plots to kill hundreds in Europe, only uncovered in their final stages. Further attacks are not only feared but also expected. Al Qaeda continues to grow. Bin Laden is still at large and has a growing if silent constituency now, not only among young and dispossessed Muslims but among a wider and more-educated audience in cities and suburbs. As Bush’s “war on terror” poses more questions than answers, Corbin examines the West’s response to September 11 and—eviction of the Taliban notwithstanding—declares it a failure. Corbin has conducted hundreds of interviews with key eyewitnesses, investigators, and intelligence officers around the world. She also has the advantage of reporting from an unmuzzled European perspective, unlike her American counterparts who are denied information from both State and Pentagon sources, and who are caught up in a patriotic “us vs. them” mentality.

About this title

About the Author

Jane Corbin is an award-winning senior reporter for the BBC’s flagship current affairs program Panorama, and has covered major news stories around the world. In recent years she has made a specialty of studying the growth of terror movements, particularly in the Middle East. Following the September 11 atrocities her Panorama Special "Towards the Zero Hour" revealed in meticulous detail how the hijackers plotted their attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

She has won the Royal Television Society award four times, and has been nominated several times for Emmy awards in the U.S. for her films about war crimes in the former Yugoslavia and for her trilogy of investigative programs which revealed the existence of Saddam Hussein’s "Super Gun" and his nuclear and chemical weapons programs.

She is married with two children.

From Publishers Weekly

BBC correspondent Corbin has been pursuing bin Laden for a long time ("For three years he was my screen-saver"). The West's response to terrorism, she says provocatively, is characterized by "weakness and exploitation and a failure of imagination... not to mention political correctness...." She raises questions about, for instance, the failure of the siege at Tora Bora, but most of her background history and account of events up through the present, though compact and readable, will be familiar to American readers. Maps.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Nation Books
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 1560254262
• ISBN 13: 9781560254263
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 296