Decade of Fear Reporting from Terrorism's Grey Zone

by Shephard, Michelle

• ISBN13: 9781553656586
• ISBN10: 155365658X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-09-13
• Publisher: Douglas & McIntyre

Summary

One of Canada's leading journalists takes readers on a rollicking ten-year journey around the globe to uncover the tragic mistakes made in a post-9/11 world. In the complicated world of terrorism and national security, issues are frequently reduced to sound bites or 500-word stories. But for a decade, the Toronto Star's national security correspondent Michelle Shephardhas travelled where others have not, witnessing the impact of Western foreign policies that all too often make the world a more dangerous place, rather than a safer one. The intrepid journalist's ten-year journey through terrorism's grey zone began on September 11, 2001, when as a young crime reporter she stood where the World Trade Center once towered, her arms coated with debris that still fell from the sky. Like everyone else, she asked, "Why?" Shephard chased answers from Syria to Somalia, from the mountains of Pakistan and Yemen and into the notorious Guantanamo Bay prison. She had tea with men on the U.S. terrorism watch list, Osama bin Laden's bodyguard, a leader of Somalia's al Shabab; celebrated her thirty-sixth birthday in an Irish pub in Cuba's Gitmo; chewed the leafy narcotic qat in Yemen with high-level government officials and tribal leaders; and met a seventeen-year-old teenager in Mogadishu who broke her heart. She was one of only a handful of journalists to experience the "Arab Awakening" from the streets of Sanaa in Yemen. Shephardends where she began, at Ground Zero, reporting on the death of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Decade of Fearis a sweeping non-fiction narrative, a journalist's journey, an analysis and indictment of all that went wrong since 9/11. It is also a look ahead at what could now go right after 2011's "Arab Spring."

Excerpts

From Chapter 5 about GUANTANAMO BAYSURREAL. If 'Kafkaesque' became the hackneyed term for civil rights advocates describing the trials of suspected war criminals held at the U.S. prison in Cuba, then "surreal" was the overused descriptor of journalists trying to explain the place. But really, there was no better word.Consider the fact that the Navy base had a gift shop that sold "Kisses from Guantanamo" magnets with big red lips, and snow globes, stuffed iguanas, and camouflage beer cozies that read, "It don't GTMO' better than this." There once were pink baby onesies for sale with the words, "Future Behavior Modification Specialist."Surrounded by U.S. servicemen and women, I sat at the base outdoor movie theater, eating a $1 tub of popcorn and drinking a Red Stripe, watching Matt Damon run around Iraq in The Green Zone. On another night a few months later, we cheered on the sexy and deadly Russian double agent Angelina Jolie in the movie SALT. I have a Starbucks card "Good for all GTMO locations," even though there is just one. For three hours one November sunrise, crouching in the shadows of a guard tower and photographing detainees as they prayed, I wondered how they had survived eight years in a place Amnesty International dubbed "the gulag of our times." On my 23rd trip to the base, the ferry ride passengers shuttling us to the airport included Madonna and Cher impersonators who had entertained the troops at the Tiki Bar that weekend.In a Guantanamo courtroom, we watched behind a double Plexiglass window and scribbled furiously as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, aka: KSM, Al Qaeda's number three, mastermind of the September 11th attacks, laughed and preened, stroked his long grey-flecked beard, proclaimed "Death to America" and happily confessed to his crimes. His arrogance was palpable, and brought to tears the relatives of the 9/11 victims who had been flown by the Pentagon to the base as court observers. I thought of Cindy Barkway and how her husband David had become a victim of KSM's war. Nobody had any sympathy for KSM, but I also wondered if the CIA's 183 waterboarding sessions had tainted any possibility of a fair trial? Conservative writer Christopher Hitchens got the CIA to waterboard him for a story and he lasted mere seconds before activating the "dead man's handle" which was the pre-determined signal that would make his tormentors stop. Hitchens wrote in a 2008 Vanity Fair article, "If waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture." It was sad watching KSM and knowing that his mistreatment would cloud what otherwise should have been a straightforward trial to lock up a mad man for life.I've been to Guantanamo spinning classes with Marines, watched karaoke on a humid, salty Cuban night, and debated into the wee hours of the morning with a military public affairs officer about why my photo of the prison camp, with a blue sliver of the ocean in the background, should not be deleted. Included among the pages of Pentagon Ground Rules we had to sign in order to report from the island base was a list of all we could, and could not shoot. Every frame had to undergo a painful censorship process known as OPSEC (Operational Security). The coastline was a no-no."But Al Qaeda knows Cuba is an island," I whined."Those are the rules ma'am.""But anyone can see the entire base on Google Earth?""Sorry. It's the rule."Ah, the rules. Some made sense - we were after all working on a military base where KSM was housed. Some, however, were nonsensical edicts from Washington that had to be enforced by hapless PAOs (public affairs officers) and prompted spectacular fights between the media and military. It didn't help that it was already a clash of cultures. The antithesis of a soldier is probably a journalist. They follow orders, defer to rank and learn not to challenge the rules. It is our job, if not our nature anyway, to challenge authority and ask questions. So when we were told only one pen was permitted in the war crimes court, since two was considered a national security risk, we naturally asked why. What if we ran out of ink? And while we're at it, please tell us why we can't have photos with orange barriers? Why are photos of three tents in a frame allowed, but not four? Why does that picture you just deleted look a lot like one a PAO took and posted to the Department of Defense website?Why can't we talk to detainees or photograph their faces when they have given their consent?"Geneva Conventions.""But that's the whole point of Guantanamo. It was why the Bush administration created it - to circumvent the Geneva Conventions and traditional rights afforded prisoners of war?""These are detainees, not prisoners.""Exactly.""Exactly.""Huh?" In the spring of 2010, I was one of four journalists banned by the Pentagon from future coverage at Guantanamo. Our offence was that we named a former army interrogator who had been convicted of detainee abuse and given a sentence of five months in return for his cooperation in another case, the trial of Canadian detainee Omar Khadr. It was well-known that former army Sgt. Joshua Claus had been indicted for his role in the death of an Afghan detainee, a taxi driver whose killing would become the subject of the Oscar-winning documentary Taxi To The Darkside. Claus admitted that he twisting a hood over the head of the taxi driver, Dilawar (like many Afghans he only went by one name), and forced water down the innocent man's throat. The 21-year-old interrogator also confessed to forcing another detainee held at the U.S. prison in Bagram to lick the boots of a U.S. soldier. Claus was Khadr's chief interrogator so a major part of the story and trial. Two years earlier, I had tracked Claus down and he had given me an on-the-record phone interview, professing his innocence in Khadr's case. But when the four of us wrote his name in 2010, the Pentagon said we had violated the Ground Rules by naming someone under a protective order. Claus got five months in jail for his role in the death of a detainee - we got a three-month ban for writing about it.The ban was eventually lifted altogether (not coincidentally after the Washington Post wrote an editorial, and the NewYorker, Harper's, New York Times, among others, decried the Obama administration's banning of journalists. We also hired a New York lawyer who specialized in First Amendment rights and the Pentagon Press Association protested on our behalf, which of course didn't hurt either). The Pentagon concluded Claus had waived his right to anonymity by talking to me in 2008 and therefore the protective order no longer applied.After more than five years and almost two-dozen visits to the prison, it is hard to pick one story - one surreal moment - that best demonstrates the insanity of covering this sad chapter of history.So here's just one: On my 36th birthday, a Filipino waiter presented me with a Ronald McDonald's cake in the base's Irish pub called O'Kelly's, as reporters, photographers, lawyers, marines, sailors, coastguards, soldiers and who-knows-who-else, sang Happy Birthday and laughed as I tried to blow out a trick candle protruding from Ronald McDonald's crotch.Welcome to Gitmo.