Read "American Military History, Volume 2" by Richard W. Stewart online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
Even as the World Trade Center still smoldered and the first rush to reinforce homeland security was on, American intelligence ascertained that Osama bin Laden's shadowy Islamic extremist al Qaeda (literally "the base") terrorist network had organized the devastating 9-11 at- tacks.
Al Qaeda was ferociously hostile to Israel and to the American presence in the Middle East, and was already suspected of numerous attacks, including the spectacular and deadly car bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and the suicide ramming of the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000. The American response to these attacks had been cruise missile strikes against suspected terrorist training camps in Afghanistan so ineffectual they seemed to reinforce a smug sense of invulnerability within the al Qaeda leadership.