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Lowell Bergman
Producer/Correspondent, PBS's "Frontline" & The New York Times; Former Staff Producer, "60 Minutes"
Answers to Written Questions from the Floor:
Q: Will terrorism increase in the United States?
A: There are people we have classified as terrorists in the past who become political leaders whom we then deal with. Menachem Begin started out his political career blowing up British barracks, organizing the destruction of the King David Hotel in Israel, which was filled with British troops. He was definitely classified, even by some of his colleagues in Israel, as a leader of a terrorist organization. He later became a political leader, a prime minister and one of the people at Camp David. The indiscriminate use of the word "terrorist" on our side isn't that helpful. It doesn't help to explain whether there are going to be more terrorist attacks or who is a terrorist. We have to start looking at people and situations where people have no hope, where people have no alternative; there, we'll find potential areas of danger.
An example would be Argentina, which is becoming a failed state and which has, by the way, a large Muslim population. It had two of the biggest terrorist attacks in the Western Hemisphere prior to 9/11, which most people in this country don't know. That case has actually never been solved, but it appears it's linked in some way to the Hezbollah. There are many potential places where things could come from. How we use our language is a very important thing that we have to start talking about.
Q: Is it possible to cover terrorist attacks and stay neutral, or does the reporter eventually or intentionally find himself taking sides?
A: Any situation that extreme you take sides. The question is, Can you be somewhat objective in trying to cover what has happened? If you've seen a war zone or been in one or had the living daylights scared out of you because you're in a situation, it can't help but affect you in one way or another. Survival is a basic instinct. What usually works, in terms of survival, is being honest with people. That's true here in the U.S. It was also true, I remember, dealing with Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Q: Comment on the impact the media has on the public's opinion of current events. Can network news twist a story into what it wants it to be, not necessarily what is really happening?
A: I would come back to the whole issue of criticizing Al Jazeera, because they called suicide bombers in Palestine and Israel "martyrs" but bin Laden a "terrorist." Why is someone a martyr here and a terrorist there? We call all of them terrorists. It's the use of language that's the biggest problem that we're up against, in terms of the "evil doers" versus "the good guys." The latest polls the Pew Center has done overseas show we're not such good guys in the views of leaders around the world.
Q: The U.S. media admitted that they were self-censoring in post 9/11 Afghanistan. Are we getting the whole story, and does it matter?
A: Lots of self-censorship goes on in the media about a lot of things. In a wartime situation, you're not going to reveal things that would put troops or operations in danger. Are we getting the whole story? No. News coverage is, as they say, "the first draft of history." We'll learn more as time goes on. We'll learn more about how many people died in that prison in Mazar e Sharif. We'll learn more once we hear John Walker talk about what it was like to be in the Taliban, if they let him talk.
One of our problems in the past: After the Nairobi bombings, a number of people were arrested and indicted and held in New York. There were special, pre-trial rules. They were all found guilty in the end, and none of those defendants or anyone else like Ramsey Yousef, who did the original World Trade Center bombing, were allowed to talk, even before they were convicted. They were held for 23 1/2 hours a day in solitary confinement and not allowed to talk to anyone except their attorneys and members of their family, who were then under a restriction from the court not to repeat anything they said to anyone else. That gets in the way of finding out who these people are and why they're doing what they're doing. That's likely to happen here again with all of the people who have been taken prisoner and shipped to the U.S.
Q: Where was the media regarding terrorism during the Clinton administration?
A: The news media in many ways is responsible for the fact that many people in the federal government who thought that a Pearl Harbor was going to happen didn't have enough "media clout" or coverage to get the political momentum to do something about it. Senator Rudman's report, along with Paul Bremmer's report, predicted this. They talked about how "nobody in the intelligence community speaks Arabic," and how "we have all these problems of jurisdiction," and "we can't keep track of this stuff." But nobody read it. The media didn't report on it.
When we did the original documentary, "Hunting bin Laden," for PBS, no one noticed. It got a couple of reviews. We had people on camera in Muslim communities saying bin Laden is great and Sheik Rahman's people talking about all this, but no one cared.
Q: 15 out of 19 hijackers were Saudi. Has it been determined whether or not the Saudi government was involved in the attack?
A: I don't think that anybody believes that the Saudi government was directly involved. There is some indication that sympathy for bin Laden or what he stands for symbolically is pervasive in the country. Some wonder whether people who are government officials had some knowledge of these particular people or these activities. There isn't hard evidence.
In one situation, which will apparently play itself out in court, the U.S. Treasury Department was freezing assets, and they froze the assets of a wealthy Saudi businessman related to a particular charity. The charity in question was funded by an even wealthier guy who is the banker to the Saudi royal family. The implication is that the ruling group in Saudi Arabia somehow was funding terrorist activities. That's about as close as anybody has gotten. The individual in question is challenging this in court in the United Kingdom and probably here.
Q: Do you think America's interest in keeping Saddam Hussein in power will be changing in months to come? And who do you envision will be his replacement?
A: I did spend some time in Iraq during the Iran/Iraq war. I have to say, of the many places I've been, that's got to be the scariest, because it is Saddam's place. He's everywhere. His picture is everywhere. It is going to be very difficult to overthrow Saddam Hussein in any neat antiseptic way. As to who might replace him, there is an opposition group. The opposition group has had a lot of trouble with the U.S. government over the years. It's led by a very articulate guy by the name of Ahmed Chalabi, who was educated partially in the U.S. Apparently, we don't want him to take over, so I don't know what the alternative might be.
Q: What is your reaction to Rumsfeld relating the war on terrorism to the Cold War?
A: That's his perspective. That's their perspective in general. As to whether it's the same as the Cold War, it appears that what they are doing is actually creating the "new world order" that George Bush, Sr. talked about.
