Introduction
Jeffrey Toobin’s Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism and Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 examine terrorist attacks that emerged from very different ideological and organizational environments.... Read together, the books can be counted among those published, including the 9/11 Commission Report, in the years since these events occurred to demonstrate that terrorism succeeds not only through fanaticism and operational skill, but also through a variety of information gaps between institutions meant to prevent them. McVeigh exploited the limited national attention then devoted to domestic extremism, while al-Qaeda benefited from the separation of foreign intelligence, immigration administration, domestic law enforcement, and local public safety.