the world as the stage and it s a big issue so without any further ado, let s plunge in. what is the core thesis? what is the heart of the book? guest: the book tells the story of two women. one is ayaan hirsi ali. she is the somali born activist and the author of the best-selling autobiography infidel and she was notoriously threatened for her criticisms of islam. her polar opposite who is a woman called aafia siddiqui, and she is a pakistani neuroscientist who for a long time was the only woman wanted as an associate of al qaeda and was eventually captured in 2008 and convicted of firing at american personnel in afghanistan. so the book follows these two muslim women of about the same age who became complete opposites and it tries to sort of tell the story of the war on terror through their story. host: two women, such of these extremes in their positions and yet you talk about the symmetry between the two. could you explain this? guest: i think they are about the
to be able to deal with and prevent a follow-on attack and to deal with those who were responsible for what had happened. we had a pretty good idea of the afternoon of the attack that this was al qaeda, belated. that was the advice we were getting from the intelligence community so it wasn t a big mystery about who was behind it. by then, pretty well focused in on osama bin laden, but there was a lot we didn t know about al qaeda. now he know we have heard so much about it for 10 years. there s a bit of a 10 tatian to sort of think we know everything there is to know about al qaeda but the day of the attack, this was a group of terrorists, but there were a lot of key questions that nobody could answer. we didn t know how big they were and we didn t know who was financing them. we didn t know whereof they were operating and there was a lot we needed to learn. we drove our search for intelligence that generated some of the policies that took place, but i sat as i recall, and ma
arrest of illegal aliens about 5,000 after the september 11th attacks and various other steps taken. i think the key attribute of this state of exemption which we are still living under, though the bush administration has gone is extreme interrogation, other than known as torture. : he thought he was smart enough, clever enough, new hades history well enough, though he had come to power in this transparently undemocratic manner, he thought he could in effect sees real power from the military. he failed and was overthrown in a brutal coup d état which i describe in the book but he said to me while he was in office, political violence is like stripping bare the social body. the better to place the 10 stethoscope and trap the true life and be the skin. he meant by that that if you want to understand a society, understand its political and moral conflicts, understand its inner structure than look at it closely during a time when it is written by conflict, by political violence.