The CJR Campaign Desk (that CJR as in Columbia Journalism Review) has posed a very relevant question. If The Terrorists are America's Number One foreign policy problem, as both presidential candidates remind us regularly, why isn't the press taking a more serious look at what the jihadists are actually saying and at how they see the world? More specifically, at the views of Number One Terrorist Enemy Osama bin Laden?
"And Now, Here's Wolf Blitzer, Fresh Back From a Sitdown With Osama bin Laden!" by Corey Pein 08/12/04.
It seems to us that both the candidates and a complicit campaign press corps are dodging a fairly essential question -- what drives the presumed enemy in this "war" that both Bush and Kerry have embraced? As the 9/11 Commission's report noted: "The history, culture, and body of beliefs from which bin Laden has shaped and spread his message are largely unknown to many Americans."
You can't blame the faltering public education system here. You can't even entirely blame the candidates, who always prefer garish caricatures of the enemy to detailed portraits. But you can blame the press. In the rare cases when al Qaeda's motives are characterized, the U.S. press has been content to portray "the terrorists" as a vague, "shadowy" amalgamation of "jihadis" whose horrific plots are fueled mainly by hatred for American freedoms and by whatever charities and dope pushers the Justice Department has fingered this week. The truth, as usual, is more complex, though the effort needed to explain al Qaeda is surely deserved. By default, Osama bin Laden is a major player in the election, but we know more about P. Diddy's struggle to get out the vote than we know about what drives bin Laden or what his goals are.
The article links to this editorial in the Tampa Tribune, which quotes the CIA analyst who wrote Imperial Hubris (2004) under the pseudonym Anonymous: Exactly What Does Bin Laden Want? 07/22/04.
In an interview with NBC, the unidentified veteran agent speculated on bin Laden's motives: "He's not a man who rants against our freedoms, our liberties, our voting, our - the fact that our women go to school. He's not the Ayatollah Khomeini.
"He really doesn't care about all those things. To think that he's trying to rob us of our liberties and freedom is, I think, a gross mistake. What he has done, his genius, is identify particular American foreign policies that are offensive to Muslims whether they support these martial actions or not - our support for Israel, our presence on the Arabian Peninsula, our activities in Afghanistan and Iraq, our support for governments that Muslims believe oppress Muslims, be it India, China, Russia, Uzbekistan. Bin Laden has focused the Muslim world on specific, tangible, visual American policies."
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