Murders on the Nile: The World Trade Center and Global ... (ISBN 1893554635)

the beginnings of Islamoterror:
Here's a book that shows where all this terrorism began. It was in Egypt, not Palestine or Lebanon or any of the other hotspots you might expect. Trying to get rid of the Brits, the Egypstians pioneered "righteous murder"--assasination with a theological justification. The author shows that it was different from any of the terror yet practiced by anarchists in Russia and elsewhere, and what developed from it was different from anything practiced later by groups like the IRA and the Red Brigades. There is a scary portrait here of Sheikh Abdel Rahman, who brought Islamist terror to the U.S. in 1993 with the first bombing (these guys were obsessed with the symbolism) of the World Trade Center. This book is must reading for anyone who wants to know how jihadi terror began and where it might go.

This guy has seen it all:
Bell was a social scientist who stumbled into the study of terrorism early by being in accidently place early in the latest cycle of the Irish Troubles. He has studied, in his phrase, "talked up", one man's freedom fighter or another man's terrorist from the members of the Irgun to the Provos, including a few junkets to Beruit during the Israeli occupation. He saw the cross-fertilization of techniques as each of these groups studied the other. As fate would have it he was writing of the original Trade Center bombing when the airliners hit the wall. The one slim volume ties the latest wave of Middle Eastern terrorism together in a taut narrative. (I say latest because the West has been taking casualties in these conflicts since the 60's) His narrative of John O'Neill, fittingly the person Clarke dedicated his book to and a 9/11 casualty, is the worm's eye view on how a ragtag band of Arab exiles living in mud huts in the dying embers of the Cold War sucker-punched the Cray-driven intelligence apparatus of the West. Sadly, this work was Bell's last. He is missed.