War Riddles: Ten Questions the Media Isn't Answering

Since September 11, the media have been lost in the fog of war. Lacking official answers, certain questions hang in the air, fostering conspiracy theories and eluding rational consensus. Here are 10 questions to which journalists either cannot or will not deliver straight answers. As the proverb goes, "Those who say, do not know. Those who know, do not say."

Where is Osama bin Laden?

After the attacks in September, President Bush said he wanted the top evildoer "dead or alive" and promised that "we will find those who did it, we will smoke them out of their holes. We'll get them running, and we'll bring them to justice." But by December, officials admitted they had yet to capture any high-ranking Taliban or Al Qaeda leaders, and bin Laden was either dead or on the lam. Only Allah knows if and where that body is buried.

How many civilians did they kill in New York?

The New York Times continues to run a daily body count under the headline "Dead and Missing." On September 30, the Times reported 5960 missing and 306 confirmed dead in the World Trade Center attack. But on February 14, the number of WTC dead had dropped to 2838. The exact number fluctuates day by day, but survivors' grief is incalculable.

How many civilians have we killed in Afghanistan?

No one is officially keeping track. At first the U.S. claimed civilian deaths would be minimal, but The Guardian of London reported on February 12 that experts estimate total civilian deaths at between 2000 and 8000. An economist at the University of New Hampshire puts the death toll at roughly 3767; a UN official told The Guardian, "It is definitely in the four figures." But the U.S. government writes the deaths off as collateral damage, so U.S. journalists have had to conduct their own investigations, many of which have been published in recent weeks. A New York Times reporting team estimated the number of deaths to be "certainly hundreds and perhaps thousands," but a recent Times editorial reduced that to the conservative "hundreds."

Is the air safe to breathe in Lower Manhattan?

That's a good one. Back in September, city officials saw no long-term risk, and the EPA declared there was no need for concern. But as Alyssa Katz reported recently in The American Prospect, local papers have seriously underplayed studies showing high concentrations of toxic particles inside buildings downtown. The Times has been "shy" on the subject, emphasizing the uncertainty of it all*and the Daily News has not published several columns by air quality skeptic Juan Gonzalez, according to Katz. But soon after the News reported that the EPA was investigating itself, media attention picked up. The Wall Street Journal now reports that in October, researchers found a high concentration of fine, sometimes toxic, particles downtown*higher than in the Kuwaiti oil fires during the Gulf War.

Who's to blame for the kidnapping of Danny Pearl?

If war is fog, the Pearl case is a virtual steam room. At first, officials suspected militant Islamic leaders who wanted Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf to stop kowtowing to the U.S. In ensuing weeks, various theories blamed Pearl's disappearance on ransomers' greed, on India, on The Wall Street Journal (for sharing info with the U.S. government), and on Pearl (for an unusual lack of caution). Finally, the investigation focused on Ahmad Omar Saeed Sheikh, a British citizen who was arrested in 1994 for kidnapping Western backpackers in Kashmir. Last week, Sheikh confessed and said Pearl was dead, but at press time, the body was still missing*and the blame game had just begun.

Would the U.S. kill a journalist during wartime?

In October, Harper's publisher Rick MacArthur predicted that, in light of media censorship during the Gulf War, "this may be the first war where an American reporter is killed or garroted by a Green Beret for getting in the way." Extreme at the time, MacArthur's words ring truer now that U.S. newspapers are aggressively reporting on civilian casualties in Afghanistan. In early February, Washington Post reporter Doug Struck tried to enter a village where three civilian men had been killed. To his surprise, he was stopped by a U.S. commanding officer who trained a machine gun on him for about 20 minutes and said, "Don't move or we'll shoot." Upon hearing about the incident, MacArthur quipped, "This is the 'New Information Order.' "