The Story of Al Qaeda on Stage: Lawrence Wright’s “My Trip to Al-Qaeda”

By Brigitte L. Nacos
After reading Laurence Wright’s first-rate book “The Looming Tower” that describes how and why Al Qaeda and like-minded terrorist organizations and terrorists-in-chief like Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri became major global threats, I attended yesterday’s last preview of Wright’s stage show “My Trip to Al Qaeda” that premiers today in a small theater (Cultureproject) in New York’s SoHo area. When I left the “show,” I had tears in my eyes—not because Wright drove home the anger, hate, and perceived humiliation of these terrorists but because of the powerful closing segment, in which Wright speaks about his return from abroad to post 9/11 America and how we--not those terrorists—disregarded our most esteemed values in the name of counterterrorism after 9/11.

I have spent many years before and after 9/11 studying terrorism and especially the terrorist propaganda scheme and its objectives. I read Wrights always informative articles in The New Yorker and I saw “The Siege,” the pre-9/11 motion picture about a major terrorist attack on New York that he authored. In short, while I followed Wrights words as he sat or stood on the small stage and looked at the video-clips on the large screen, I didn’t learn anything terrible new. And yet, I was completely taken by his presentation from beginning to end—probably because Wright is so successful in weaving two threads skillfully into one story—the overall picture of Al Qaeda’s roots and motives on the one hand and his very personal experiences during his travels to piece together that picture on the other hand. Gathering from what I heard from people leaving the theater, I assume that most of them left with a far greater understanding of the many facets of the Al Qaeda reality than they had before.

Early on, after Wright speaks of Zawahiri’s imprisonment in his native country, he mentions the inhumane treatment of detainees in Egyptian prisons, the prevalent torture and in particular the practice of letting hungry, wild dogs attack defenseless prisoners. Towards the end, when Wright describes how he himself became the target of eavesdropping and how other civil liberty were curbed in post-9/11 America, the image of the horrible Abu Ghraib scene appears on the screen: a dog, controlled by an American guard, threatening a terrified detainee. With a flashback to the earlier discussion of Egyptian prisons, the message is painfully clear: this is pretty much the same inhumanity practiced in countries with repressive regimes—precisely the ones that are on the receiving end of the American “extraordinary rendition” practice of outsourcing torture.

Lawrence Wright cites bin Laden as proof that terrorists want their target societies to overreact and to weaken the fabric of their best values. Of course, that’s what terrorists aim for. 

And therefore we must resist when these measures are taken in the name of counterterrorism but in fact further the goals of our terrorist foes. 

Comments

[Will Carr]

Mr. Wright worked for the US State Department when GHWB was UN Ambassador. He went to Egypt to lean to speak Arabic and Farsi. He is very knowledgable about Al Qaeda's roots within the Moslem Brotherhood. This puts him in a unique position to share what he knows about the connection between the Moslem Brotherhood and the CIA, yet there is no mention of CIA agent Robert Baer's revelation (Sleeping With the Enemy 2004...two years before The Looming Tower) that the Brotherhood had been doing the CIA's dirty work across the Muslim world for decades and that Thomas Tweeton's son-in-law, Matt Gannon, also CIA, was returning from Europe to press the question...why do rank and file CIA and FBI agent have NOTHING on Al Qaeda and their relationship to the Muslim Brotherhood? Gannon went down on Pan Am 103 before he could make his complaints known.

John McNeil is painted as an untrustworthy baffoon who just happens to find his way to the head of security at the Twin Towers. No mention is made of Marvin P. Bush, the President's relative whose company owned the security program at the Towers...Securacom. Nor is Rudy Giuliani's decision to put the city's 911 command post in the Towers after the first World Trade Center bombing.

Neither does Wright mention Rick Rescorla, another high profile American, whose story is told by Joe Galloway in his book and Mel Gibson movie We Were Soldiers Once and Young.

By his own admission, Lawrence Wright's mentor was relative of GHWB, Louisianian, Walker Percy. Could this have contributed to the oversights?

-WHC