We spend a great deal of time being warned about the bogeyman by the right. It’s seldom we hear much about the actual enemy.
Time magazine:
Yet in other ways, [Mohammed] al-Qahtani emerges as an innocent abroad–uneducated, almost from another era. He asks whether the sun revolves around the earth. He wonders about dinosaurs and is told of their history and demise.
The New Yorker magazine:
As it turns out, [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] is earthy, slick in a way, but naïve, and seemingly motivated as much by pathology as ideology. Fouda describes Mohammed’s Arabic as crude and colloquial and his knowledge if Islamic texts as almost nonexistent…
His plots were scattered, frenetic, even feral; they had an almost random quality… The mastermind of 9/11 seems to have no grand strategy, or, really, any strategy at all.