Talk:9-11 Attack

Returning to previous edits

A year on, much of this article remains problematic, particularly the 'immediate response' and 'world response' sections. There is this collection of edits by myself that were editor-reverted in 2007. They sought to remove much exaggeration and present a more balanced picture (e.g. contrary to what it currently says, there were reports of looting after 9/11, and burglaries were higher than during the same time period in 2000 - see WNBC). There were also edits by Stephen Ewen on the overthrow of the Taliban that tried to bring this article back to neutrality. Edits like these should be reincorporated, or new ones made in a similar vein. John Stephenson 20:04, 22 September 2008 (CDT)

I've just incorporated some of these previous edits by Stephen and myself back into the text. However, I then removed the links because they're dead and replaced them with various others covering the argument about looting. See here for all the edits. John Stephenson 11:59, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

Time for major rework

I removed what I consider, as a Military Editor, a atrained attempt to explain al-Qaeda motivations. At best, this belongs in the al-Qaeda article.

Sedgwick (2004) argues the goal was to provoke a response from the United States that would have a radicalizing impact on al-Qaeda's constituency. Reference to public opinion in the Middle East, especially in Egypt, shows that this is indeed what has happened. Such an impact is a purely political objective, familiar to historians of terrorism from at least the time of Errico Malatesta and the "propaganda of the deed" in the 1870s. While no direct link between Malatesta and al-Qaeda exists, al-Qaeda was certainly in contact with contemporary theories that Malatesta would have recognized and seems to have applied them. Even though its immediate objectives are political rather than religious, al-Qaeda is a distinctively Islamic group. Not only is its chosen constituency a confessional one, but Al-Qaeda also uses - and when necessary adapts - well-known Islamic religious concepts to motivate its operatives, ranging from conceptions of duty to conceptions of ascetic devotion. Terrorism that can be understood in political terms, Sedgwick argues, is susceptible to political remedies.

There is an abundant amount of primary and secondary information about why al-Qaeda carried out this operation, and I can say, quite confidently, that Malatesta did not enter into their thinking. See al-Qaeda. It is, I believe, intellectually dangerous to try to force al-Qaeda into molds of Western thinking; while I do not always agree with Michael Scheuer; his book, Through our Enemies Eyes, has a pertinent title. Howard C. Berkowitz 22:50, 26 July 2009 (UTC)