Thursday, February 07, 2008

"Terrorist Hunter", a book review

If you like Laura Mansfield and the work she does to keep us informed, you have to read “Terrorist Hunter” by anonymous. For obvious reasons, the author keeps her identity a secret. While she now lives in the United States, the writer chronicles her life in Iraq as Saddam Hussein came to power. Her prominent Jewish family was forced into squalor once her father was arrested, tortured and ultimately hanged for being a Zionist spy. Realizing it was only a matter of time before the rest of the family would be murdered, the decision was made to escape to Israel. The 5 day trek with 4 children and her younger siblings, anonymous’ mother found Israel to be welcoming and full of opportunities.

We follow anonymous through school, a stint in the IDF and her career selling clothes made by her mother. Her ability to sell to the diverse Israeli community depended on her chameleon like talent. The need to appear ultra conservative to some and trendy to others propelled her mothers clothing business to prosperity.

Once her husband accepted a job in America, the family made their home in New York. Responding to a newspaper ad, anonymous uses her Hebrew and arab linguistic skills to propel her as one of this nations top counter-terrorism expert. By simply reading the material published by the terror front groups operating as charities, searching public records and going undercover to tape sermons and rallies, anonymous links over one hundred charities to a handful people. She also exposes the complete uncooperative nature of the FBI, who end up investigating her instead of the terrorists in this country.

I was amazed and dismayed by this book. We’re an extremely safer nation because people like anonymous work so hard to unearth the dirt needed to expose these groups. We should all be alarmed at the FBI’s inability to share information that would enable the dismantling of these charities. Even after 9/11 and the “wall” between all these agency’s came down, the FBI still maintains a death grip on any and all information it obtains. And that scares me.

2 comments:

SkyePuppy said...

Wow! This book looks great.

The problem with the FBI (and all the rest of those three-letter organizations) is that they're government bureaucracies filled with empire-builders and people who believe knowledge is power. People are the same, no matter what "walls" come down. Such a shame.

janice said...

Oh Skye, it a great read. One of my top five. I highly recommend it.