Abstract
At a time when emails thud thick and fast into my inbox about publications and conferences on the demise of journalism, this book is a delight and a beacon for the value and importance of the profession, and its craft.
As the title implies, terrorism is not a subject to be considered from a mindset of a binary black versus white template, and Shephard’s great journalistic ability is to be able to look at her subject with passion and with the facility to rationally question this template and try to understand and explain its complexity. Shephard is the Toronto Star’s national security correspondent, and her book opens with a surreal assignment on a spy cruise when she asks the former US spy chief whether torture can be justified. The following chapters are accounts of people and stories she reported on in the decade subsequent to 9/11 with this initial question always in mind. The individual stories from the terror zones are part of a fundamental examination of whether the events of 9/11 justified the subsequent ‘war on terror’, whether violence can be countered with violence and whether giving up freedom will preserve freedom.
Shephard’s starting point is 9/11 where she states the attack ‘created a whole new generation raised on war and rhetoric and bent on revenge’ (p. 25), and, as her subsequent chapters show, this was not just in the USA but in many other parts of the world. Although Although throughout this period I have not been a reporter but a documentary-maker, many of her observations strike familiar chords, such as the expectations of editors sitting at home and the questioning of the picture of Cindy Barkway, a 9/11 widow who apparently didn’t look sad enough in her photo; and the importance of fixers such as Sahal and the journalist Ali Sharmarke in Mogadishu, where the stories of the former’s tortoise and the latter’s death in the second chapter give life and heart to the ‘war on terror’.
Her next stop is Karachi where her investigations into terror suspects after the raid and siege of the Red Mosque show that, as in Somalia, the use of violence is ‘disastrously counterproductive’. She writes of the USA’s misunderstanding of the Taliban, and then moves on to cover a home-grown terrorist cell in Toronto, which has parallels to the film Four Lions, where she again demonstrates her journalistic skill of personalizing a very human story to illustrate its wider issues and ask fundamental questions. This is most evident in her coverage of Guantanamo Bay, from where her first question had its origins. One of its most infamous inmates, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged number three in Al Qaeda and mastermind of the September 11 attacks, had been waterboarded 183 times by the CIA. The value of any information gained from this method of torture is doubted, and, as Shephard demonstrates in her next section on the Yemen, the existence of Gitmo is a major instigator in the decade of fear. Terrorism is not black and white. As the Foreign Minister of Yemen says to Shephard, sometimes injustice is one of the factors that leads to terrorism. There are those who ‘will always find a reason to fight … This is the dilemma we face fighting terrorism’ (p. 203).
In her story of Ismail, the young amputee from Somalia who was rescued and given refuge in Norway, Shephard decries academic criticism that the story of one person’s saving absolves guilt for the wider suffering, quoting her friend and fixer Sahal who says, ‘little by little you can change the whole country’ (p. 223). So, little by little you can change people’s mindsets. This thought is conveyed in her final chapter on the Arab Awakening, when she writes of the Tunisian Mohamed Bouazizi, who initiated the events of 2010, where the ‘symbol of Mohamed became bigger than Mohamed the man’ and one man’s story compelled the West to justify a decade of politics and counterterrorism, practices that had kept the dictators in the Middle East and North Africa standing.
Although she writes that she does not ‘book end’, it is here that she answers her initial question on the use of torture and violence, writing that it was peaceful, secular, democratic demonstrations that pushed Mubarak and others out, not terrorism. This is a brief account of 10 years of reporting on a complex and difficult subject which demonstrates that, despite the changing nature of the tools of journalism, nothing can replace the humanity and humour of a professional and highly gifted journalist.