Countdown to terror

Congressman Curt Weldon presents his account of a plot he says was real: the arrest of Muslim terrorists who, in 2003, allegedly planned to fly a plane into the Seabrook nuclear power plant in Massachusetts. He writes that he tried to alert American intelligence to the threat, but his warnings were not taken up by the intelligence community.

Weldon bases the book on a confidential source, an intelligence contact known only by the code name Ali, whose reports he says were consistently passed over by the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies. He draws directly on these reports to make his case.

The book argues that Iran, rather than al Qaeda, directs radical Islamic terrorism and will determine where the next attack on America comes from. It also claims that a major planned strike was canceled because its planners believed it would benefit President Bush politically, and it examines who is working against efforts to build a stable, peaceful Iraq. Weldon compares Iran to the Soviet Union of the 1980s, a dangerous power that is nonetheless close to internal collapse, and he describes Iran's nuclear program as further along than many people realize.