Posted on January 16, 2009 by Rob
Following up from the previous post, here’s a subtitled episode of the Al-Jazeera TV show “Top Secret.” Yousri Fouda investigates “the path to 9/11” and travels to Pakistan to interview Khalid Sheikh Mohamed before he was arrested.
A couple points:
1) Mohamed Atta, the lead 9/11 hijacker, was once a student of English at the American University in Cairo. See 03:30
2) It’s interesting the conspiratorial tone of this program. While the host interviews several no-name crackpots who present wild theories about 9/11 , this gives a misleading impression about 9/11 doubting in the Arab world. It definitely is widespread but mostly at the popular or street level and not the intellectual level. I am not aware of any serious thinker in Egypt, for example, who would deny that Al-Qaeda committed the act. Also, I’ve heard Fouda speak in person at a serious academic talk and he didn’t display the slighest doubt that he thought Al-Qaeda was behind 9/11. But for Al-Jazeera, I guess, conspiracy mongering is what draws ratings.
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Posted on January 16, 2009 by Rob
I am not aware of any station in the world except for Al-Jazeera that makes the transcript_and_audio of every single program available. Its an amazing resource but now its even better- you can watch the actual TV program on Youtube.
Yesterday, I was thrilled to come across the TV (or visual) of a 2006 episode of “Top Secret” by Yousri Fouda on “Al-Qaeda in the Levant.” For two years, I had been hoping to catch a rerun on Al-Jazeera but no such luck (previously I had only read the transcript but it becomes much clearer seeing the accompanying tv). In part one ( transcript / video) Fouda sneaks into Iraq during the height of the insurgency and in part two ( transcript / video) he examines whether Al-Qaeda is gaining a foothold in the Levant. Its as good an investigative journalism piece I’ve seen on Al-Qaeda.
I often talk about how important cultural, historical, religious context is when trying to analyze Al-Qaeda and this series is great at this. Even though this episode is a bit dated (2006) it should be translated and screened at the Al-Qaeda unit of every US intel agency. Even for those who know no Arabic its still worth skimming through.
The series brings up so many critical points which I will be blogging about over the next week.
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