Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
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day. At the time, I thought his death was ironic: instead of getting bin
Laden, bin Laden got him. I now think of ONeills death as a Greek
tragedy. He willingly placed himself at what he expected would be
Ground Zero in the tragedy he saw approaching.
A related piece, included here, is The Agent, my prole of Ali
Soufan, John ONeills talented protg, who was the case agent of the
USS Cole bombing by al-Qaeda in October 2000. Soufan also played an
unwitting role in my research for The Siege. I had heard about a skillful
undercover operative in the New York ofce of the bureau, a Muslim
American who was born in Beirut and spoke uent Arabic. I based
the Tony Shalhoub character on him, although Soufan
fan and I wouldnt
actually meet until several years later. In this piece,
ece, I raise questions
q
about the failure of the CIA to cooperate with
h Soufans investigation into the murder of seventeen American
Had the agency
can sailors. Ha
responded to Soufans requests for information
nformation
mationlleads that would
have exposed the presence of al-Qaeda
America twenty months
Qaedaa in Amer
Ame
before 9/11it is very likely thatt those
ose attacks would never have happened. To this day, the CIA has failed to hold
ho
h anyone accountable for
this catastrophic negligence.
nce.
I knew that Osamaa bin
was going to be one of my central
n Laden w
characters in The Looming
ooming
ming Tower,
Tower but for more than a year the Saudis
refused to give me a visa
journalist. Finally, I got a job as the menisa as a jjo
tor to youngg reporters
the Saudi Gazette, an English-language daily
orte at th
in Jeddah,
h, bin Ladens hometown.
h
Normally, when I am researching a
hote
piece, I am in a hot
hotel, making calls, trying to set up appointments. In
i a middle-class Saudi at, and I went to work every
this case,, I lived in
om
day. I was nominally
teaching the craft of journalism, but my students
were teaching me far more about their country than I could ever have
learned on my own. It was a chastening lesson about the blinders that
reporters wear when they drop from the sky into another culture. My
experience is chronicled here in The Kingdom of Silence.
Silence was a theme that drew me to another country, Syria, in
2006. The Middle East is a quarrelsome, voluble regionparadise for
reporters, except when it is a lethal trapbut Syria was oddly mute.
At a remove, it seemed progressive and secular compared with its
Arab neighbors, but also elusive and enigmatic. How could I hope to
decipher such a reticent culture? I reected on how much the world
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to prepare him to deal with the possibility of being held captive. Later,
while the article was being fact-checked, McConnell denied that he
had made such a statement. When I reminded him that the interview
had been taped, he asked me to drop that statement because he said it
would cost him his job. It wasnt my goal to have McConnell red, and
he had been unusually generous in granting me access. But I did wonder if I made a mistake in omitting that portion of the conversation
from the New Yorker prole that followed, since I believe it was pertinent to the national conversation we were having about torture at the
time. McConnell is now retired from government, and Ive restored
his remarks.
This book can be seen as a primer on the evolution
olution
n of the
th jihadist
movement from its early years to the present,, andd the parallel
parall
paral actions
mericas
icas involvement
involve
involv
of the West to attempt to contain it. Americas
in the
Middle East since 9/11 has been a long
Our own
ng series
ries of failures.
ffai
h of the un
unf
actions have been responsible for much
unfolding catastrophe.
The 2003 invasion of Iraq by U.S.
S. andd coalition partners stands as one
hist
histo The Islamic State, also
of the greatest blunders in American history.
known as ISIL or ISIS, rose
throwing the region into
se out of the chaos,
ch
c
en equaled
qualed since
sinc
sin the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
turmoil that hasnt been
The fecklessness of U.S.
S. foreign ppolicy was made shatteringly clear to
rching a piece about young American reporters
me while I was res
researching
and aid workers
kers wh
who hadd been captured in Syria (Five Hostages).
milies were largely
larg left to themselves to try to negotiate their
la
Their families
childrens
ens
ns release. The
Th
T heroic efforts of David Bradley, the publisher of
ntic, on ttheir behalf cast a light on the failure of the U.S. govThe Atlantic,
ernment to re
render any real assistance. Its a tragic reection of American power neutralized in a world it fails to understand.
All of these pieces appeared originally in The New Yorker, although
I have taken the liberty of editing and updating them for this book.
(They also include material that was drawn from my two one-man
plays, My Trip to al-Qaeda and The Human Scale.) My relationship with
that magazine has gone on now for almost a quarter century, and my
debt to that organization and to my longtime editor, Daniel Zalewski,
is bottomless.
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