AL QAEDA'S GREAT ESCAPE: The Military and the Media on Terror's Trail
By Philip Smucker
Brassey's Inc (2003)

When President Bush announced in a televised speech the week after September 11 that he wanted Osama bin Laden “dead or Alive,” a grieving nation seeking justice and revenge roared in agreement. Two years later, as al Qaeda’s associates mounted almost weekly attacks against U. S. interests and bin Laden still roamed the earth as a free man, American’s wondered why. With both the military and the media declaring the war in Afghanistan over and a resounding success, Christian Science Monitor correspondent Philip Smucker examines in Al Qaeda’s Great Escape what kind of victory we can rightly claim.

Primarily focusing on the major battles of Tora Bora and Operation Anaconda, Smucker details how Osama bin Laden and scores of other highly trained al Qaeda fighters managed to slip unnoticed out of eastern Afghanistan, despite the presence of the overwhelming U.S. military power that successfully decimated the Taliban. To balance his reproach, turns his critical eye on post-9/11 developments in his own profession. Smucker charges the western media outlets, eager to satisfy their audience’s thirst for revenge, began losing their grip on journalistic objectivity while covering the military’s pursuit of bin Laden. Blinding patriotism and an unhealthy reliance on the Pentagon’s official press releases led the media to portray events that did not reflect the reality on the grounds in Afghanistan. Further, Smucker contends that to satisfy the press and the public’s need for vengeance, the Bush administration aggressively pushed to achieve some early highly visible successes, leading to a shortchanging of long-term strategy. Impatience at the top forced a rush into war aimed primarily at “regime change,” but it left the military largely empty-handed when it came to capturing its Al Qaeda prey.

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