Sympathy for the devil

By Editor on July 29, 2008 4:57 pm

In covering the story behind the story of Osama bin Laden, Peter L Bergen has left us grappling with some inconvenient ethical issues. Dan Hogan draws on the works of literary journalists such as Capote and Bowden and philosopher Grayling to answer the ‘unaskable’: can a 9/11, a Hiroshima, be justified?

ONE OF THE FEW journalists to interview the world’s most wanted man has left us with a whacking great moral dilemma. Peter L Bergen sat down and interviewed Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in 1997. Bin Laden’s al Qaeda later killed 2,998 people in the 9/11 attacks.

Bergen, with an impressive army of helpers, has compiled his fascinating book, The Osama bin Laden I Know. It is a compelling narrative woven from interviews with people who have met the al Qaeda leader.

Bergen forces the reader to grapple with some complex moral issues about the War on Terror. He dares to ask: can terrorism ever be justified? Bergen also repeats a powerful question raised by bin Laden – was dropping an atom bomb on Hiroshima – an act which killed 100,000 men, women, and children in World War II – comparable to the 9/11 attacks?

John Hersey’s remarkable book Hiroshima (1946) chronicles the appalling misery suffered by countless numbers of survivors when the United States bombed Japan. Hersey’s account, originally published in the New Yorker, a year after the devastation, provokes immense sympathy for the suffering of innocent people. A few months earlier these people had just been a faceless enemy.

Sixty years later in asking his “unaskable” questions is Bergen risking provoking sympathy for bin Laden’s cause? Could this be a classic case of a journalist getting too close to his subject and being too sympathetic?

Bergen’s aim is to find out the truth about bin Laden – as an antidote to (Bergen 2006, p xxix): “the tsunamani of nonsense that has been written about him.” It is ironic that such a misunderstanding exists when Bergen describes bin Laden’s 18 broadcasts since 9/11 as possibly the most widely distributed political messages of all time.

Bergen spent eight years on his project, and this thoroughness is reminiscent of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. Capote racked up 4,000 pages of typed notes to produce his masterpiece (Clarke 1988, p331) which was concerned with the killing of an affluent Kansas family. Capote is believed to have become infatuated with Perry Smith one of the killers he interviewed. Capote (1967, p290) ended up concluding:

The crime was a psychological accident, virtually an impersonal act; the victims might as well have been killed by lightning. Except for one thing: they had experienced prolonged terror, they had suffered.

Is this a case of a journalist going too far and becoming too sympathetic with his subject? Or was it a case of a reporter being able to find some truth and being courageous to take such an unconventional line? It’s comparable to Mark Twain’s casual observation (cited in Gouvrevitch 2002): “If the desire to kill and the opportunity to kill came always together, who would escape hanging?”

It is a classic ethical dilemma. Journalists have the rare opportunity to have counsel with killers. Both Bergen and Capote set out to ‘get the story behind the story’. Bergen spoke to a man who would go on to mastermind 9/11; Capote interviewed a prisoner on death row who slaughtered an unfortunate Kansas family. Capote invited the reader not to judge the killer in a dismissive way.

Bergen and Capote were both saturated with information. Even if as journalists they managed to remain aloof, detached, and clinical in their judgements, there is a possibility that the material they selected could influence impressionable minds among their audiences.

Bergen is far less emotive and flowery in his prose than Capote. From the start, he (2006, p xxix) sets out with a clearly declared objective:

My intent is not to perform an exercise of that the French term tout compredre, c’est tout pardoner (to understand everything is to forgive everything). What bin Laden has done is unforgivable. But bin Laden is a man and we need to understands him neither through the fog of our own propaganda – he has never, for instance expressed an interest in attacking the West because of our “freedoms” – nor through the mythomania of his supporters, who style him as a defender of Islam, despite the fact the Koran is full of injunctions against the killing of civilians.

Bin Laden was questioned about killing in an interview with the American ABC TV news network in 1998. The reporter, John Miller, asked bin Laden about targeting innocent civilians in the first bombing of the World Trade Centre in 1993.

Bin Laden told Miller (Bergen 2006, p216):

This is a very strange question coming from an American. Was it not your country that bombed Nagasaki and Hiroshima? Were not the women and children and civilians and non-combatants there? You were the people who invented this terrible game and we, as Muslims, have to use those same tactics against you.

Bergen quotes Miller’s reaction: “It was a very well-formed argument.” This is a bold statement that makes a reader stop and ponder.

Bergen quotes from the only interview bin Laden gave after 9/11, noting that “Al Jazeera chose not to air the interview for a number of reasons that have never made much sense, such as that it wasn’t ‘newsworthy’” (Bergen 2006, p321). Osama bin Laden tells Al Jazeera’s correspondent Taysir Alouni:

The killing of innocent civilians, as America and some intellectuals claim, is really very strange talk. When we kill their innocents, the entire world from east to west screams at us. Who said that our blood is not blood, but theirs is? Who made this pronouncement? Who has been getting killed in our countries for decades? More than one million children died in Iraq and others are dying.

To answer bin Laden’s point it is useful to look at A C Grayling’s book Among the Dead Cities (2006). Grayling asks a similar  “unaskable” question: were the Allied bombings in World War II tantamount to war crimes? Grayling catalogues examples of the slaughter British and United States bombers inflicted on innocent civilians. In addition to the atom bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima conventional high explosives also caused grotesque losses with almost the same rapidity. In one 48-hour period 85,000 people died when firebombs were dropped on Tokyo by American forces. A similar raid by the RAF, during Operation Gomorrah, killed at least 45,000 in a notorious firestorm in Hamburg. Grayling also records how Allied bombers even killed civilians during the D-Day operations to liberate the French port of Caen.

After a detailed examination of the legality of killing civilians in war, Grayling says (2006, p278):
 
A surprise attack on a civilian population aimed at causing maximum hurt, shock, disruption and terror: there comes to seem very little difference between the RAF’s Operation Gomorrah, or the USAAF’s atom bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the destruction of the World Trade Centre in New York by terrorists on September 11, 2001.

As a way of justifying the Allied bombing Grayling adds (p280):

…We do not pretend to have clean hands ourselves. What we can claim is that they were far cleaner than those of the people who plunged the world into war and carried our gross crimes under its cover, and that the explanation- not the excuse – for why we allowed our own hands to get dirty at all is because of what we had to clean up.

Grayling quotes the words of Vera Brittain that such actions were “criminal lunacy.” (p281). As readers, we are left deeply disturbed by this debate on bombing and the moral calculations involved in such actions. There is a moral ambivalence at the core of World War II and the battle to rid the world of Fascism.

In attempting to assess the actions of bin Laden, Bergen presents a view that is starkly different from the usual portrayal of bin Laden as unhinged hermit. Consider this passage which tackles the second issue of using terrorism to achieve political change (Bergen 2006, p389-390):

In my view bin Laden is an intelligent political actor who is fighting a deeply felt religious war against the west. Bin Laden, like others before him, has adopted terrorism as a rational choice to bring certain political goals nearer, and as a shortcut to transforming the political landscape. After World War II, Israel’s future prime minister Menachem Begin and his Irun organisation, for instance, conducted a campaign of terror against British targets in Palestine to hasten the British withdrawal from the country, a strategy that proved successful. Bin Laden’s organisation has killed thousands, while Irgun’s victims numbered only in the scores, but the use of terrorism is motivated by the same strategic choice – it is a weapon the weak use against the strong.

Menachem Begin went on to become world statesmen and Nobel Prize winner. Yet there is no hope of bin Laden following such a path. Bergen concludes al Qaeda’s leaders have (p393) “painted themselves into a corner,” and “…If I were to write an epitaph for Osama bin Laden, it would be that he was a man whose violent tactics became his only strategy.”

In reaching this conclusion Bergen exemplifies the perspective presented by Kevin Williams (1992) in his article Something More Important Than Truth. The title of Williams’s article suggests that in war it is possible for journalists to take sides and tell lies for the greater good. Yet Williams concludes (p168):

It may be difficult for the war correspondent to tell the truth all the time. But it should be easy to distinguish between not telling the truth and telling lies…Perhaps telling the truth – not propaganda – sits uncomfortably with the work of the war correspondent.

Bergen is to be commended for seeking the truth. He wonders if bin Laden had any justification for its attacks. Al Jezeera found it difficult to engage with this difficult question. It avoided broadcasting both propaganda and bin Laden’s excuses. Bergen decides to include everything in his account of bin Laden and forces his readers to confront some uncomfortable ethical issues.

The hunt for bin Laden is reminiscent of the attempts by the United States to get another of its “most wanted” – the Columbian “narco-terrorist” Pablo Escobar. Mark Bowden of The Philadelphia Inquirer recounts the convoluted path to Escobar’s death in his book in Killing Pablo (2001). Bowden’s account is an example of what critic Andrew Belsley calls a Faustian pact (Andrew & Chadwick 1992). To assassinate Escobar, the United States had to operate unconstitutionally and step over many ethical boundaries to get their man. As Bowden states (2001, p246): “A notorious cast of characters had been assembled to assist in the manhunt.” To capture a big devil the United States had to do deals with many smaller devils. All this was kept out of the public domain. To the mainstream press Escobar was a pantomine villain killed by the good guys.

Bergen, Bowden, Gourevitch, and Capote cover the story behind the story in a superb forensic, and often dazzling, way. And they all uncover inconvenient ethical issues which are often ignored in the mainstream press. In doing so, Bergen shows that the world is more complex than it might first appear in popular headlines.

The real problem about reporting on bad guys is what it tells us about the nature of good. This is summed up by Gourevitch in A Cold Case when he quotes Murray Richman, a lawyer defending Frankie Koehler, a self-confessed killer. Koehler went on the run and then led what might be considered a decent life. As Richman says:

I don’t buy this concept of the sociopathic personality, the person that has no sensitivity, no feeling, cold blooded, the cold blooded killer. I never met a cold blooded killer. I just had a guy in here today, very tough kid. He comes in and kisses me, so humble. I mean literally a humble kid. The two don’t fit together. These are people that – everybody’s a diamond. There’re so many facets. It depends on what angle you come at the person at.

Knowing the truth inconvenient facts might make the reader face uncomfortable issues, but it better than a diet of lies and propaganda. The bad guys may not be totally evil in every way, and the forces of good might have to resort to Machiavellian and bloody means to bring about justice. What distinguishes the exceptional reporting of Bergen is his ability to pull off the tricky balancing act of reporting of producing a complete picture. As Capote said to his biographer Gerald Clarke: “I won’t respect you unless you tell the whole truth.”

Dan Hogan is a UK-based journalist and journalism lecturer, currently researching aspects of literary journalism. 

References 

Bergen, Peter L (2006), The Osama bin Laden I Know, Free Press: New York
Bowden, Mark (2001), Killing Pablo, Atlantic: London
Capote, Truman (1967), In Cold Blood, Penguin: London
Clarke, Gerald (1988) Capote: A Biography, Simon and Schuster
Gourevitch, Philip (2002) A Cold Case, Picador: London
Grayling, A C (2006), Among The Dead Cities, Bloomsbury: London
Hersey, John (1946), Hiroshima, Penguin: London
Williams, Kevin (1992) Something More Important Than Truth, in Ethical Issues and Journalism and the Media, Belsey, Andrew and Chadwick, Ruth (Eds), pages 151-170, Routledge: London

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