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Making
things happen - with integrity. A weekly CyberMemo designed to keep you on task. Monday March 4, 2002 Volume IV Number 9 |
FOCUS - Pearl
“The Media,” as it is commonly labeled, is hardly the monolithic force some claim it to be. The word (the plural of “medium”) is a reference to the collection of vehicles used to transmit information to the masses and includes print media, televised media, radio and Internet media. It has been popular among some to suggest that The Media is controlled by a certain segment of society and it is a most effective tool in shaping public opinion in a pre-determined way, so that the outcome benefits The Conspiracy and those who Design it.
That’s a cynical view, really. And hardly accurate. While the tools of communication have become more and more sophisticated, and information more readily available than ever, the idea that all the writers and journalists and editors and broadcasters march to the beat of the same drum is, well, preposterous.
We’ve got a basis for cynicism, no doubt. In the race for ratings or readership (which being translated is the race for profits), some in the media have come to rely on sensationalism and sloganism and bannerism to gather a crowd. When the headline SCREAMS!, more people will buy the paper than when the headline merely informs. The catchy phrase will always outsell the reasoned explanation. So it appears as though The Media is “dumbed down” to the lowest common denominator for the primary purpose of covering the overhead and then some.
That may well be the reason why journalists are no longer the respected class of professionals as they once were. They are partisans. They are profiteers. They are sensationalists. They are entertainers. They are Liberals. They are players in the Great Conspiracy.
(Come to think of it… where are the respected professions anymore? Clergy? Physicians? Politicians? Professors? Educators? Accountants? Attorneys? Professionals of every sort are casualties of the New Economy.)
But as of last month, journalists have a new example of a professional who modeled the ideals.
His name is Daniel Pearl.
* * * * * * *
Christmas day, just last December, Richard C. Reid attempted to board an American Airlines flight to Miami. The security team at Charles de Gaulle International Airport in Paris pulled him into a side room for interrogation. He fit the profile. His dark olive skin and long black beard and disheveled stringy hair were only the beginning. He traveled alone. He purchased his ticked with cash. One way. He checked no bags. His only luggage for the trans-Atlantic flight was a tattered back-pack. The police wanted to know more.
His Passport seemed spurious. It had been issued in Brussels on December 7. But if it was a fake, it was a good fake. Mr. Reid told his questioners that he was a Brit. Born in London. He traveled all over the world, and he traveled light, he said. His British accent convinced them, and they released him. But by the time he left their offices, the AA Jumbo Jet had left the gate. Reid checked into an airport hotel for the night.
In the weeks to come, the world’s press would follow up on Mr. Reid’s claims. Richard Reid was indeed born in the UK. He grew up in a poor Muslim community in South London and his record shows he had frequent problems with local police. One episode landed him in prison, and while there he converted to Islam. After his release, he attended the Brixton Mosque in the same community. The intent was rehabilitation. But the BBC reported evidence that Reid embraced a radical version of the religion, and associated with another Muslim by the name of Zacarias Moussaoui, the first person officially charged by authorities as a conspirator in the planning of the September 11 terrorist attack which killed more than three thousand people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.
The evidence is sketchy. But five years ago, friends of Reid became concerned by his decent into the dark shadows of more radical fundamentalist margins of violent religion. He disappeared for awhile. Some thought he traveled to Pakistan to study Arabic. ABC News confirmed that law enforcement officials have evidence that the two men, Reid and Moussaoui, indeed were in contact and spent months together in training. They learned the subtleties of terror; the secret methods of transporting explosives and achieving the kind of demolition that would disrupt economies and accelerate the collapse of Western Capitalism – the two men digested the abominable curriculum of the al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan and made it their own.
The
next morning, December 26, the day after Christmas, Richard C. Reid checked out
of his hotel put his ticket on the counter at the American Airlines terminal in
Paris, an early check-in for Flight 63 to Miami. This agent also picked up on
the profile, and alerted security. Mr. Reid was again shown to a side room
where he was questioned once more, this time by a different set of guards. His
single bag was thoroughly checked. He claimed to have been questioned the day
before. When this claimed was confirmed, and the guard noted that he had been
released the French security team nodded, apologized for the inconvenience, and
let him go to the boarding gate.
He sat alone. A window seat.
The Jumbo Jet climbed to cruising altitude as the Continent’s coastline passed by, leaving France behind and hours of open sea on every horizon.
Two hours out of Miami, a passenger and flight attendant were startled by the smell of sulphur. The sleepy passenger next to Reid awoke to a ruckus. That flight attendant was reaching over the seats in a furious attempt to prevent Richard Reid from lighting a suspicious string protruding from the heel of his shoe with a flaming match. Another passenger joined in the struggle. Then another.
Within moments, they pulled Reid into the aisle. A powerful twenty-eight year old man, Reid fought back. His teeth penetrated the skin of the flight attendant in a nasty, vicious bite. Several more passengers assisted until the bearded man was finally subdued.
Two doctors on board volunteered to help. The crew strapped Reid to a seat in the front of the aircraft with belts and one of the physicians sedated him until he was nearly unconscious. The passengers, numbering one hundred eighty five, cheered.
Flight 63 was diverted mid-Atlantic to Boston where after a safe landing authorities boarded the plane and arrested Richard C. Reid.
Later, those same authorities at Logan Airport reported their discovery. Inside the sole of Reid’s sneakers, they found C-4, a plastic military explosive, a clay-like bomb that can be molded and shaped and have devastating impact. It was the same explosive used in the attack on the USS Cole that killed seventeen American sailors.
Without the alert response of the flight crew and courageous passengers, Flight 63 would have been destroyed, its wreckage sinking somewhere at sea to the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.
Richard Reid nearly succeeded. Today, he sits in a prison cell. A posted guard is on suicide watch twenty-four seven.
Daniel Pearl wanted to know more.
* * * * * * *
Lance Morrow writes for TIME Magazine. For a couple of decades, he’s been one of my favorites. In an essay this week, he speaks rather wistfully about Daniel Pearl. The Wall Street Journal Southeast Bureau Chief was never content with secondary sources. Just log on to the Internet and you can research secondary sources all day long from the comfort of your living room. The only real question you must answer has to do with the credibility of the source. But Pearl was one of those guys who needed to go beyond the easy assimilation of stories already published by someone else… he wanted access to the primary source.
Pearl was intrigued by the terrifying close call on American Airlines Flight 63, and the renegade terrorist named Richard Reid. Most every authority agreed, he could not have acted alone. But who was the connection? Who knew? Who provided him with the now famous high top leather sneakers with a bomb packed in the rubber sole with and a dangling fuse? How could any human being be so obsessed with his mission to light a match in plain view and attempt to ignite a bomb which would certainly send not only himself into oblivion, but nearly two hundred innocent passengers and crew along with a sophisticated jumbo jet? Who was he? Who prepared him for such a mission? Pearl wanted to know.
So he
bid farewell to his wife Marianne, a French freelance journalist, pregnant with
their first child, and left for Pakistan to find answers.
Lance Morrow reminisces about those reckless days in the sixties when he, too, went after the story, no matter what the risks. He infiltrated angry anti-war demonstrations, rocks and bottles and “Molotov Cocktails” flaming overhead… generally considering himself immune from bodily harm. He said, “I imagined that as a journalist, I was merely an invisible witness, as harmless as a recording secretary, as if I had letters of transit allowing me to pass between cops and rioters completely without consequence.”
I remember those times, too. I was a student in the big city of Chicago in the days of the 1968 Democrat Convention when Mayor Daley called out the troops to quell the mob. I wandered outside the gates of protection… and in that year of rioting in the city (later, the city raged in the aftermath of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King) when the smell of rage and destruction and violence hung over the air like Apocalypse Now and like my contemporary Lance Morrow, I believed somehow that I was protected, too. I was an innocent observer... too nice a guy to be caught in the crossfire of warring factions.
Now, I think I must have been crazy to have wandered so eagerly, so innocently towards the vortex of violence.
But that said, there is something pure, something noble about Pearl’s quest.
He was driven by the need to know. It was a noble curiosity, according to Morrow, that prompted Pearl to pursue his story. In these cynical days of media star quest, Pearl’s quiet pursuit of the truth, his striving to uncover the source of the madness of terrorism, made Morrow proud of his profession again.
It turned out to be a headlong clash between an open mind and a closed mind.
On January 23rd of this year, Pearl made contact with Islamic extremists in Karachi, Pakistan. He was not heard from again, until the Wall Street Journal received an e-mail from "The National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty" accusing Pearl of working clandestinely for the CIA and demanding a ransom and the release of Pakistani detainees held in Cuba.
The US does not negotiate with terrorists. Journalists know this. Missionaries know this. To meet the demands of terror is to invite more of the same. It’s a well known part of travel and work in some parts of the world. An understood risk.
The Journal pleaded with Pearl’s captors to release their Bureau Chief. For a month, the outcome remained unknown. Marianne Pearl waited.
February 21, nearly one month later, the State Department received incontrovertible evidence that Pearl’s captors brutally took his life; it was an unspeakable crime, videotaped by his sadistic captors.
The world identified with our President’s reaction – “We are saddened; and angered.”
Marianne Pearl is seven months into her first pregnancy. She is thirty three years old. Her baby, due in May, will never know his/her father.
* * * * * * *
It’s Monday morning. You are a leader. We live in a dangerous world. The risks are real.
We may be annoyed sometimes by the noisy clash of point/counterpoint under the banner we call “The News.” But we are accustomed to freedoms we often take for granted. We are free to pursue the truth. To get to the heart of the matter. To peel back the layers, and know what’s underneath. But there remain people on the planet who know nothing of these freedoms. These values.
Robert Reid was willing to sacrifice his life for what he must have believed was some kind of noble cause. Thankfully, alert crew and passengers cut him short. His recklessness was anything but noble. It was infamy.
Daniel Pearl was an ordinary American going after the story. “I know he knew what he was facing,” says Mariane Pearl. “He was completely aware…”
Let’s be glad that we live in a country where real professionals do their work without fanfare; tend to their medicine, their dispensing of justice, their watching the books, their teaching in the classroom, their governing… all with a sense of loyalty to their country’s ideals and the nobility of their work.
Professionals like Daniel Pearl… who sometimes get caught in the crossfire, and leave behind an aching void.
You are a professional. A leader. You may never publish a New York Times bestseller or be showcased on the cover of TIME. But your work matters.
To us all.
Do it well.
© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2002
LeaderFOCUS is brought to you by Good Stewardship Associates
Special Thanks for Design by my good friend David Belcher, owner of Rhino Media Group and creator of WisdomGram
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