The Looming Tower. Amazon prime.

Anyone watch this? Finished it last night and fair enjoyed it, hadn’t realised

Spoiler for

the Americans actually knew the terrorists beforehand.

Well acted too, though there were a couple of sex scenes I really didn’t need to see…..but on the whole very enjoyable and entertaining/enlightening.

For anyone who hasn’t seen it, have you just dropped a huge spoiler there?

Yeah.   Erm.

I’ll not bother now 🤔

I don’t know if it is or not, but I’ve amended the OP just in case.

Ah yes well maybe😬 it is based on (alleged) fact and the information is out there, the hearings were televised in 2004 etc. But yes if you didn’t know (like me ) then it would be a bit of a spoiler, sorry. Loads more to it though and I’d imagine that it might even have been in the blurb for the series.

Quite enjoyed it.

Depending on how much artistic license was used it the storyline, or how much is fact, the buildup to the event and how US departments behaved with each other was shocking.

I liked it, but it was “based on real events”, not “a true story”.

It was written from the perspective of the FBI who had a turf war with the CIA. If it had been written by a retired CIA officer, I’m sure things would have been portrayed quite differently.

Funnily enough, Ali Soufan liked one of my tweets yesterday…

Expanding on the above for the weekday crew…

Ali Soufan is the ex FBI agent the Looming Towers is based on, who could’ve stopped 9/11 if the CIA hadn’t been so shady:

Shortly after the attack, Ali Soufan, a twenty-nine-year-old Lebanese-American, was driving across the Brooklyn Bridge when he received a page from the New York office of the F.B.I., where he was employed as a special agent. He was told to report to work at once. At the time, Soufan was the only F.B.I. agent in the city who spoke Arabic, and one of only eight in the country. He had joined the New York office in the fall of 1997, and his talents were quickly spotted by John O’Neill, the head of the F.B.I.’s National Security Division, which is devoted to combatting terrorism. The following February, when bin Laden issued a fatwa declaring war on America, Soufan wrote a trenchant report on Islamic fundamentalism that O’Neill distributed to his supervisors. After the 1998 embassy bombings, Soufan helped assemble the initial evidence linking them to bin Laden. Soufan’s language skills, his relentlessness, and his roots in the Middle East made him invaluable in helping the F.B.I. understand Al Qaeda, an organization that few Americans were even aware of before the embassy bombings. O’Neill, who had joined the F.B.I. twenty-five years earlier, referred to the young agent as a “national treasure.” Despite Soufan’s youth and his relatively short tenure, O’Neill placed him in charge of the Cole investigation. As it turned out, Soufan became America’s best chance to stop the attacks of September 11th.

If you want to know more about John O Neill, have a look for that 9/11 thread that caused so much kerfuffle.

He’s also the guy who questioned Abu Zubaydah…

Just to clarify, this was in the tweet he liked:

Not forgetting Bandar’s Rigg’s bank account which his wife (Turki Bin Faisal’s sister) used to send money to some of the 9/11 hijackers support network.

The bank account was set up by the UK Paymaster General as part of thevast slush fund created for the Al-Yamamah deal:

To avoid being accused of spoilers, I’ll let you work out how this relates to the current APPG on Extraordinary Rendition…

And the Child Abuse Inquiry…