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.

How does a engineer become a religious leader. He issues a fatwa, and declares himself the leader. His knowledge of his religion is sketchy. No problem for his followers. He himself might have participated in one battle, but mostly he lives in Peshawar, planning political intrigue. The he is Bin Ladin. This book is about the soldiers he recruited in planning his murders.
The book follows Atta and the other pilots in their religious education. Many of these individuals were trained in Hamburg, under generous provisions of the Germans. They used their training to perpetrate mass murder in the United States.
The book shows how Moslem fundamentalism is spreading on the campuses of Western countries. This book paints a disturbing portrait of what is happening under the very noses of the United States.

Terry McDermott's "Perfect Soldiers: Who They Were, Why They Did It" gives the inside view of the lives of many of the 9/11 hijackers. McDermott does an excellent job recounting the lives of many of the hijackers, but he is limited by his source materials and only tells part of the story.

McDermott begins by focusing on the background of some of the hijackers: where they grew up, what education they had, what type of family they had. Interestingly, many did not come from fundamentalist families or have any type of radical Muslim education or exposure during their childhood. It was only after many went to the West for college that they were exposed to radical Islamic teachings.

McDermott paints a very murky picture of the hijackers. They were living mostly Western lives, but they insulated themselves into their small, radical groups, and they didn't leave a large mark where they lived. McDermott's work is based on personal and police interviews (including the girlfriend of one of the hijackers) and their paper trail of school and credit card records.

This is a very good, illuminating book. Still, despite the title, McDermott never really explains why they did it: his narrative story is very good, but his explanation of why they were so radicalized falls short. Still, anyone with any interest in 9/11 or modern radical Islam should read this book to help understand more about how our enemy operates.

McDermott has done an excellent job weaving together from disparate sources and facts, an interesting reporter's tale. The facts are about the 911 terrorists; the story beyond the facts, is about how yet another group of misguided foot soldiers for God has marched off the end of the cliff in search of their religious calling. This time they march off of it in defense of Allah's last revolution against the Judeo-Christian infidels; and they would like to take us along for the ride. Theirs is a kind of "poor man's Crusades in reverse."

This story is about the whos, whys, hows, wheres and wherefores of this last ride into the religious sunset. Although less important, the factual answers are straightforward:

Who Were they?: They were extraordinarily ordinary Arab men living diminished lives, uncertain about the place of their manhood in the world, and without direction or much hope for the future in their respective homelands.

Why have they done this? Because of Israeli embarrassment of the Arabs after the 1967 war and U.S. closeness to what they perceive as the Jewish invaders and occupiers; and because of what the Jews have done to dehumanize, humiliate and embarrass the Palestinians and destabilize the Middle East; and because the U.S. abandoned the Muslims after helping them defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan; and because the infidels were allowed to occupy consecrated Islamic holyland in Saudia Arabia, Iraq and to a lesser extent Somalia; and because of the Crusades, etc., ad infinitum. There is in fact no end to their list of grievances against the West.

How have they done this? With Western technology and always a U.S. or Western scientific education, and a willful and racist under-estimation by the White West of all things Arab and of the Islamic militants abilities to act out their political designs on the international stage.

Where do they do it? In any (non-Arab) nations, free enough to "turn a blind eye" to the single-minded madness of their narcissistic designs.

What are the wherefores (The real reason they have done this)? To again make the world safe for Islam. To restore a sense of pride and respect in Arab manhood; to cut the West and Jewish arrogance down a peg; to carve out an Arab role on the world stage; and to redress long-standing grievances between Islam and Christanity.

In the end however, it is safe to say that McDermott's story is more about the subtext (the imperfections in the current world order) than about the context (the committed acts of fifteen of Allah's latest foot soldiers). Indeed, need it be said openly? The subtext of the tale is a metaphor about any modern day disenfranchised group of true believers: Men who can figure out how to "act" even when they cannot figure out how to "be." Religion gives them a template for acting out.

In this sense, McDermott's well-researched story is a timeless and familiar tale about all of the true believers we have come to know historically. As Eric Hoffer has reminded us, that the firmest belief (and the deepest self-deception) of these self-appointed and self-anointed "soldiers of fortune for God," is that they always see themselves as marching according to the drumbeat of god's strictest canons and rules, in search of something larger than themselves, and necessarily not of this world. But in truth, they are always a couple of centuries late and a thimbleful short of the one thing they desperately desire more than God's guidance and love: more testosterone. Testosterone is the one thing that Freud would claim the modern man desperately needs to be able to live a truly psychologically healthy, happy and fulfilled life, in the present dimension.

For those who have forgotten, testosterone is spelled: respect, control, order, power, money, and heroism. Without them, the only other substitute is violence.

The so-called religious calling of the fifteen hijackers is but a thin veil to cover their collective lack of empowerment in "this world." It is a search for an alternative, less hostile stage, to be heroes in a drama of their own making. And thus, in a real sense, it is Islam and God that have been hijacked. Just like to a lesser degree, even in the West, religion has again become the escape hatch to retreat from an otherwise desperately unfulfilled, shallow, empty and weak way of life. When there is no other stage to be a hero, God will always accept us in his drama of good and evil, of heaven and hell.

Sadly, this model of empowerment is again becoming the leitmotif of the modern era. If no one has noticed yet, the same kind of religious fundamentalism that the terrorists are using to commandeer the world stage, is also slowly taking over America under the very guise of defending against terrorism.

For those who are narcissistic enough, and have the necessary means and will to act, over night, religion allows them the ability to transform their perceived weaknesses into a ruthless and instant, kind of all-encompassing empowerment. This model of empowerment is smooth enough to conceal even the most obvious of evils.

Under the rubric of "religious calling," they can construct on the spot, and transform any kind of evil into "heroism for the moment;" the kind that invariably gets played out on the international stage as so much "shock and awe." The international stage has become the one stage that, overtime, can be commandeered and manipulated in god's name for any group's narcissistic purposes.

In the end, McDermott's tale shows us how frighteningly fragile and impotent our so-called international order is; and despite our attempts to make it otherwise, how interconnected our contemporary world remains.

As Mohammed Atta is reported to have said after watching his first and only Hollywood movie: The Western World is nothing but chaos, pure chaos. Somehow, even when the last thing we want to do is legitimize a murderer's grievances, eerily in our bones we know what Atta meant. His sense of moral revulsion about our own way of life somehow resonates with our own revulsion about it: There is moral and social chaos and pollution as far as the eye can see - avarice, hedonism, materialism, corruption,self-righteousness, mean-spiritedness, greed, spiritual emptiness, and always deep reservoirs of racism.

At an even deeper level McDermott's story is familiar in another way: It shows what can go wrong in a world where there is a perceived shortage of meaningfulness; that is a perceived shortage of respect, control, order and most of all reasons for true heroism. Yet, at the same time, our world provides many technologically sophisticated and dangerous ways for redressing these perceived shortages.

The "Perfect Soldier' is an unnerving metaphor of our times. Unless we begin to learn new ways of dealing with the complex issues that confront us, it will become a fixture, and that does not bode well for the future. Five stars

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 nonetheles supplies critical questions in the endnotes. Overall an important book, the "Perfect Soldiers" are shown really to be ordinary men, made extraordinry by the forces of radical Islam. The starke evil of the hijackers could wear an alarming human face. Highly recommended.

A friend gave this to me after he read it. At times a bit tedious, however, it give you true insight into the twisted thinking of the terrorists who flew the planes into the world trade center and Pentagon. A must read for anyone who want to understand why?

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.

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.

Defeating one's enemies over the long run requires first understanding them. For too long Americans have been led to believe the 9/11 hijackers were part of a super-organized and managed group of monsters, motivated by hatred of America's freedoms. McDermott's detailed reporting chronicling the lives of several hijackers shows that none of this is true - and thus is must reading. It also shows that the thousands trained in Afgan camps had little or no role leading such activities.

The book first impresses readers with the desperate poverty throughout much of the Middle East - in fact, young Egyptians with graduate degrees are 32 times more likely to be unemployed as illiterate peasants. This clearly is a breeding ground for trouble. Further symptoms include coverage of the machinations many undergo to emigrate to Europe for "asylum" (eg. generous welfare benefits). Once overseas, McDermott reports how several of the 9/11 leaders, despite having come from relatively non-religious families, became Islam militants - they simply became malleable by Islamic extremists while looking for companions in a foreign culture.

The first World Trade Center bombing cost about $3,000 and caused damage in the hundreds of millions. Why the WTC - because "many Jews worked there." Reading McDermott's accounting we learn that the operation was more slap-dash than professional, and would have been much worse if the terrorists had more money.

Ramzi Yousef then went ('95) to the Phillipines intending to blow up several 747's in roughly the same timeframe. This plot failed as a result of a freak fire caused by disposing of chemicals. Unfortunately, this effort also led to Yousef meeting a friend who had taken flight training in the U.S. - and the suggestion for crashing a plane into the CIA. This was relayed to Bin Laden in '96 and a meeting to initiate it in '99 - instead targeted at the WTC. Clearly such a long delay is not indicative of a well-managed organization.

As for Saudis making up the bulk of the hijackers - McDermott points out that this was because Saudi passports were the least scrutinized for entry into the U.S. (most of the screening was to weed out those coming over for 'economic' reasons - such as in Europe).

Meanwhile, those chosen as pilots took U.S. pilot training, and despite reports to the FBI, no action was taken. (One agent did note that Moussaoui "was the type guy who might hijack a plane and fly it into the WTC.") As the pilots literally muddled through their training, the FBI failed, for 19 months, to find two of the hijackers known to be in the U.S.

Then came 9/11. The FAA "no-fly" list doesn't even have the name of the bombing plot in the Phillipines - in fact, it only has 14 names total, with none of the hijackers. (Meanwhile, the State Department's list of "monitor/do-not admit" names totals about 61,000 - and is not available for use.

Lessons to Learn: 1)It takes a very few seemingly ordinary people to create unimaginable havoc. 2)Hatred of the U.S. derives from our support for Israel, occupation of Saudi Arabia, and undoubtedly also Iraq. 3)Therefore, the U.S. needs to seriously focus on removing these major sources of Islamic irritation.