The 1998 U.S. Embassy Bombings in East Africa recur in the book not only as attacks attributed to Osama bin Laden’s network, but as the starting point for a consequential dispute over intelligence cooperation. The account says Sudan offered the United States access to suspects and extensive information about the network; Washington rejected the offers, and a later source from the CIA’s leadership called that refusal a grave failure whose consequences reached toward the September 11 attacks. The episode also illuminates the book’s larger argument: the label of terrorism and the policies pursued in its name depend on who wields state power.

Sudan’s Offer and the Suspects

Just before the 1998 missile attack on Sudan, Sudan held two men suspected of bombing U.S. embassies in East Africa and notified Washington. U.S. officials later confirmed that Sudan had offered to cooperate, but the United States declined. After the missile attack, Sudan released the suspects in anger; the book says they were subsequently identified as agents of Osama bin Laden.

The account adds a detail about why the opportunity to detain them was lost. Reports later made public by the FBI said the bureau had wanted the men extradited, but the State Department refused. That reported disagreement places the episode within the U.S. government itself: a prospective investigative step was available, but the department responsible for foreign relations blocked it.

Rejected Intelligence and the September 11 Attacks

Sudan’s offers went beyond the two suspects. According to a source described as coming from the CIA’s leadership, Sudan had repeatedly proposed providing evidence about Osama bin Laden, but the Clinton administration rejected the proposals because of what the source called an irrational hatred of Sudan. The source characterized the refusals, including the State Department’s decision concerning the suspects, as the most serious intelligence failure in the wider chain of events preceding the September 11 attacks, and called the rejected cooperation the key to what followed.

The proposed material was extensive: a major database on Osama bin Laden and more than 200 senior figures in his network, detailed files with photographs and biographies of many leading operatives, and information about the network’s financial interests in several regions. The source argued that access to these materials would have given the United States a better chance of preventing the later attacks. In the book’s account, the embassy bombings thus connect to a missed chance to gather information about the network responsible for them.

The Missile Attack and Its Strategic Context

The book sets Sudan’s rejected cooperation against the U.S. missile attack. Sudan had become a target of that attack, yet, according to the account, its offers of information were turned away. This contrast is central to the author’s criticism: the government that might have supplied evidence about Osama bin Laden’s network was also the government Washington had chosen to strike.

The author places such military action within a wider analysis of power and terrorism. He argues that calling a policy a war on terrorism is propaganda if the policy does not actually target terrorism, and that official definitions of terrorism resemble the stated doctrine of low-intensity warfare. In this framework, violence directed at civilians for political purposes cannot be classified solely by the identity of the actor: the same coercive methods may be treated differently when used by powerful states and their clients.

Consequences and the Book’s Argument

The book presents the refusal of Sudanese cooperation as more than a lost intelligence lead. It suggests that rejected evidence could have improved the chances of preventing the September 11 attacks, while stressing that the source’s assessment is an attributed judgment rather than a demonstrated counterfactual. The episode therefore carries both a concrete institutional consequence—the suspects were released after Washington rejected cooperation—and a broader question about how political hostility can shape decisions with later security costs.

The embassy bombings also serve as a point of entry into the book’s challenge to selective uses of the word terrorism. Its argument is that the same standard should apply to state and non-state violence, rather than treating coercion by powerful governments as categorically different from violence by their designated enemies. Read through that argument, the aftermath of the bombings is marked by a sharp reversal: Sudan’s offer of information was refused, while the state that refused it attacked Sudan and later faced a reported reckoning over the intelligence it had declined to receive.