I don’t know that I have a lot to write about the killing of Osama bin Laden (maybe not yet) but I thought I would offer a review I wrote a while back of The Secret History of al Qaeda – a good primer on both bin Laden and al-Qaeda, written by the first Western journalist to interview and spend time with him in the caves, in 1996  (Peter Bergen got there a year later, in 1997).

One of the book’s particularly salient points is that the author, Abdel Bari Atwan (Palestinian-born, but living in London for 35 years) is the editor-in-chief of the London-based Arabic paper al Quds al Arabi, often the first outlet to which al Qaeda would release its communiques over the years.

The Secret History of al Qaeda

Osama bin-Laden and al-Qaeda have featured endlessly in the Western media since 2001, but for all that, author Abdel Bari Atwan, Editor-in-Chief of the London-based al-Quds al-Arabi makes clear that we hardly know either. (more…)