In the wake of Sept 11, the spook industry has never had it so good. Now, more than ever, practically every hack writer, tabloid journalist, psedo-social scientist and self-proclaimed security 'expert' can write and publish anything and get away with it, provided that their works have the subtitle 'terror network' added on the cover.

In time, we are bound to be treated with the 'al-Qaeda cookbook' and the 'Osama bin Laden do-it-yourself Jihadi kit'. For now, however, we will have to make do with books about international terror networks and transnational subversive movements instead.

So much nonsense has been written about Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda that one would have thought that we would all be suffering from 'Osama fatigue' by now. So when the security expert, consultant to the US Congress and Australian Parliament, and principal investigator for the United Nations' Terrorism Prevention Branch Rohan Gunaratna came out with his latest offering 'Inside al-Qaeda: Global Network of Terror'(1), many scholars of international politics and security studies were hoping for an antidote to all the twaddle they had been fed so far. We were, sadly, disappointed.

Having said that, it would be unfair to state that everything Gunaratna has said in the book is inaccurate or off the mark. In fact, the earlier chapters in the book show that he has clearly conducted some extensive and in-depth analysis into the al-Qaeda al-Sulbah (The Solid Base) organisation that was first formed by the Palestinian-Jordanian activist Sheikh Abdullah Azzam in the 1980s.