Perfect Soldiers

<p><strong>The definitive book on the 19 men who brought such devastation and terror to this country ... a well-told meticulously researched cautionary tale. -- <em>Washington Post Book World</em></strong></p><p><strong>Using research undertaken in twenty countries on four continents <em>Los Angeles Times</em> correspondent Terry McDermott provides gripping authoritative portraits of the main players in the 9/11 plot. With brilliant reporting and thoughtful analysis McDermott brings us a clearer more nuanced and in some ways more frightening understanding of the landmark event of our time.</strong></p><p>The attacks of September 11 2001 were a calamity on a scale few had imagined possible. In their aftermath we exaggerated the men who perpetrated the attacks shaping hasty and often mistaken reporting into caricatures we could comprehend--monsters and master criminals equal to the enormity of their crime. In reality the 9/11 hijackers were unexceptional men not much different from countless others. It is this ordinary enemy not the caricature that we must understand if we are to have a legitimate hope of defeating terrorism.</p>