PressEthic

"We Win" is the headline of the cover story of the September issue of the Atlantic Monthly. Journalist James Fallows interviewed sixty experts in America, Middle East, and Europe and concluded that, surprisingly, the United States has won the war against al-Qaeda.

How come? Well, al-Qaeda has done wrong, while the United States has done right, Fallows reported. Well, then, what did they do wrong, and what did the United States do right? Al-Qaeda gradually lost support of the Muslim mass population in Middle East and Southeast Asia by killing Muslim civilians over and over again with the numerous suicide bombing, Fallows quoted many experts as saying. The United States made it extremely difficult for the terrorists to do their job, mainly by increasing intelligence efforts, Fallows again quoted many experts as saying.

It is an interesting article. Well written, easy to follow the logic, and full of assuring information. After all, it's good to hear "we win," since "we" here are good people.

Yet, all is well until you read another story headlined "American Gulag" from the September issue of Harper's Magazine. It's a story about Arab detainees who have been kept prisoners in U.S. detention facilities such as Guantanamo. Here’s an excerpt from a story of an affluent Bahraini named Abdullah al Noaimi. He had been kept in Guantanamo for four years for “traveling to Afghanistan with the intention of fighting jihad,” journalist Eliza Griswold reported.

...There are three kinds of detainees: high-ranking Al Qaeda suspects ; men who are not necessarily accused of anything but may have intelligence value; and those, like Abdullah, who were supposedly rounded up on the battlefield, fighting against Coalition troops. ... “When I was told I was going to be taken to the Americans, I was relieved, Please, take me to an American prison,” he said. Under American justice, he believed, innocent men like him were sure to be released. That was more than four years ago. ... (The interrogation went on) ...Abdullah told them he was nineteen; they decided he was thirty. ...

The main point here is that Abdullah has been illegally kept in a prison for four years because the U.S. authority believed he “intended” to do harm to America and that Abdullah is just one of the “450 prisoners held at Guantanamo, let alone the 13,000 people currently detained in Iraq, the 500 or so in Afghanistan, and the unknown number (estimated to be about 100) at secret CIA “black sites” around the world,” the reporter writes.

These two stories form the Atlantic and Harper’s made me think about journalism a lot, although I believe both of the stories are very fine. Of course, journalistic pieces are not books, so we journalists cannot possibly cover all aspects of a given topic. Indeed we are only dealing with one topic at a time. But things such as the war on terror have dark and bright sides. My question is, do we, either intentionally or unintentionally, serve a certain cause by choosing our topic? If so, is it right? Should the Atlantic story have elaborated more on what “increased intelligence efforts” really meant? Should the Harper’s story have elaborated more on the result of the inhuman and illegal imprisonment of terror suspects? I don’t have an answer. Nor do I think there will be an answer that is definitely right. But it’s worthwhile to think about it, I believe.