Willful Blindness

From Publishers Weekly: In this annotated retrospective, the prosecutor responsible for leading the investigation of Blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and others involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing dissects the miscues between federal agencies that led to that event while laying bare the challenges facing the war on terror today. The pre-1993 comedy of errors begins with the CIA's decision to funnel arms and money to Afghanistan during the Soviet-Afghan war and continues with inexplicable lapses of communication between the State Department and immigration officials (despite having been placed on a State Department terror watchlist, the sheikh travels freely to the United States). The most enduring oversight, however, at least from McCarthy's perspective, is the refusal among academics and political leaders to confront fundamentalist Islamic tenets, the 800-pound gorilla that is somehow always in the middle of the room when terror strikes. The jihadist philosophy that guided the Blind Sheikh is traced through generations of Islamic thinkers to the Prophet Mohammed himself. Though McCarthy's language is at times cumbersome, his firsthand account of jihad's rise and the sheikh's trial of the century is an important contribution (and in some instances, counterpoint) to existing literature on the attack that foreshadowed disaster to come. (Mar.) Copyright (c) Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. "Finally, from the legal front line, a devastating account of the peril we put our country in when we treat terrorist atrocities as if they were mere crimes. Andy McCarthy was there when the jihad began. Read this book and you'll understand why this war is a war, and why we have no choice but to fight it and win it." - Rush Limbaugh "Willful Blindness is the best book I have ever read about terrorism, bar none. It is arguably the most stirring, brilliantly written, and devastatingly honest book on terrorism that has ever been published. Written by one of our nation's greatest prosecutors, who understood early on from his successful prosecution of the 1993 World Trade Center plotters what our country was up against, Andy McCarthy tells the shocking story of our nation's refusal to acknowledge the deadly adversary we are facing. His mesmerizing analysis of the nature of radical jihad's war against the West will change the way you look at our future. Brutally candid and eloquent, this book is one that you MUST read. You simply have no choice. I have been writing about or working in national security for the past nearly 30 years, and from the moment I opened this book, I could not put it down until I finished the last page. I sat in stunned silence, but also eternally grateful that one of our top public servants finally had the guts to tell it like it is: a worldwide jihadist movement has operated in plain sight in our country, where policymakers were, and are, too politically correct to recognize it." - Steven Emerson Author of the bestseller American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Amongst Us Executive Director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism "In any intellectual street fight or battle, I want Andy McCarthy on my side--he is a smart and forceful intellectual ally. In a time of war, this is all the more so, and America is lucky to have him on hers." - William J. Bennett Host, Bill Bennett's Mor