Jeffrey Goldberg

AMERICAN GROUND Unbuilding the World Trade Center. By William Langewiesche. 205 pp. New York: North Point Press/ Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $22. At the very end of William Langewiesche's slim but powerful account of the dismantling of the wreckage of the World Trade Center comes a story that served, at least for me, as an antidote to the overwhelming saccharinity of the recent Sept. 11 commemorations--that great "emotional bath," as one television anchor put it. Langewiesche tells of a visit he paid this spring to a pier on Newark Bay, to watch, he writes, the heavy structural steel columns of the trade center "being sent away." Read more

I--The Meeting The village of Ras al-Ein, which is situated in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon, falls under the overlapping control of the Syrian Army, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the Shiite terrorist group Hezbollah, or Party of God. The village is seedy and brown, and is decorated with posters of martyrs and potentates-Ayatollah Khomeini is especially popular-and with billboards that celebrate bloodshed and sacrifice. I visited Ras al-Ein this summer to interview the leader of a Hezbollah faction, a man named Hussayn al-Mussawi, who, twenty years ago, was involved in kidnapping Americans. Many of those kidnapped were held in Ras al-Ein; they were kept blindfolded, and chained to beds and radiators. It is thought that Ras al-Ein is where William Buckley, the Beirut station chief of the Central Intelligence Agency, was held for a time before he was killed by Hezbollah, in 1985. Read more

It is a little-known fact, even among Mafia hobbyists, that John J. Gotti, a man seldom credited with sophistication, raised his children to be avid readers. His daughter Victoria, who is the smartest Gotti (and who, if the world were a different place, would now be the boss of the Gambino crime family), has a living room lined with books, many of which were not written by Sidney Sheldon, and she is a writer herself of halfway-credible mysteries. His son and sad-sack heir, John, who is known as Junior, is an autodidact and a compulsive reader of history, particularly the history of Native America. Read more

dialogues Iraq and Al-Qaida By Warren Bass and Jeffrey Goldberg Updated Monday, March 25, 2002, at 1:08 PM ET From: Jeffrey Goldberg To: Warren Bass Subject: Reason Enough? Posted Thursday, March 21, 2002, at 10:24 AM ET Dear Warren, I must say, I'm looking forward to this exchange; it's not every day that I get to have a discussion with a genuine, AAA-approved, USDA-certified foreign-policy establishment pooh-bah, which is what you are, yes? You've been doing great work, even if you've been doing it for the Man. Read more

In the late morning of March 16, 1988, an Iraqi Air Force helicopter appeared over the city of Halabja, which is about fifteen miles from the border with Iran. The Iran-Iraq War was then in its eighth year, and Halabja was near the front lines. At the time, the city was home to roughly eighty thousand Kurds, who were well accustomed to the proximity of violence to ordinary life. Like most of Iraqi Kurdistan, Halabja was in perpetual revolt against the regime of Saddam Hussein, and its inhabitants were supporters of the peshmerga, the Kurdish fighters whose name means "those who face death." A young woman named Nasreen Abdel Qadir Muhammad was outside her family's house, preparing food, when she saw the helicopter. The Iranians and the peshmerga had just attacked Iraqi military outposts around Halabja, forcing Saddam's soldiers to retreat. Iranian Revolutionary Guards then infiltrated the city, and the residents assumed that an Iraqi counterattack was imminent. Nasreen and her family expected to spend yet another day in their cellar, which was crude and dark but solid enough to withstand artillery shelling, and even napalm. Read more

The Mohandessin section of Cairo is a fashionable district on the west bank of the Nile that contains a number of embassies, boutiques, and American fast-food restaurants. It also houses the Mustafa Mahmoud Mosque, which is named after a physician and Islamic television personality who founded it, twenty years ago. On Friday, September 21st, I arrived at the mosque just as the first worshippers were making their way there, and the egalitarianism that is one of the great virtues of the Muslim prayer service was evident: they were dark-skinned and light, rich and poor; one man drove up in a blue Jaguar; others, wearing grease-stained galabiyas and crude sandals, came on foot, or by donkey cart. (Women, as is customary, prayed apart, in another, smaller hall.) I had arranged to meet the mosque's imam, Sheikh Nasser Abdelrazi. A slight, anxious man, he preemptively offered up the observation that "Muslims are gentle and Islam is peace." Many in Cairo are on the defensive in the wake of the terror attacks on New York and the Pentagon. Greater Cairo, a city of sixteen million people, is the intellectual capital of the Arab world-home to its moviemakers, many of its great writers, and some of its most respected interpreters of Islam. Muslim leaders here are sensitive to the image of their faith-especially now, because Egyptians are among those allegedly involved in the attacks. Muhammad Atta, who is believed to have flown one of the hijacked planes into the World Trade Center, is the son of a middle-class Cairo lawyer. Ayman al-Zawahiri, a former leader of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a fundamentalist group that sought to turn Egypt into an Islamic state, is said to be second-in-command to Osama bin Laden, the Saudi exile who is suspected of directing the attacks. Read more

One day last month, I visited the terrorist Abdullah Shami at his home in the Shejaiya neighborhood of Gaza City. Shejaiya is said to be a stronghold of Islamic Jihad, a group that conducts suicide attacks against Israeli targets, and Shami is the group's leader in Gaza. He lives on the third floor of a concrete-and-plaster apartment house. Before I went upstairs, I met three of his sons in the sand-covered alleyway that leads to the building. The sun was boiling hot, and the building provided shade for the boys and their friends. They were playing a game called shuhada, which means martyrs. The youngest son, Ahmed, who is three, played the shaheed, the martyr, and charged a make-believe Jewish bunker. The other boys made the sound of rifles firing, and Ahmed dropped to the ground and pretended to be dead. His brothers Mahmoud, who is five, and Muhammad, who is six, then carried his limp body down the alleyway, and performed a mock funeral. The game ended when Ahmed rose from his imaginary grave, shouted "Allahu Akbar!" and giggled. An Islamic Jihad official accompanied me to Shami's sitting room, which was furnished with huge red-and-gold couches. Framed photographs of the Dome of the Rock hung on the walls. Shami, a genial and open-faced man of forty-five, greeted me warmly. He is tall, and has smooth skin and a carefully trimmed beard. He was dressed in a white djellabah and a gray cape with a gold fringe. Read more

From: Jack Shafer Subject: Pols, the Press, and the Sad Bastard Story Posted Monday, Feb. 5, 2001, at 7:46 AM ET Dearest Goldberg, During the campaign, the press busted the presidential candidates every time they harvested a mawkish anecdote from some specific sad bastard's life to make one of their policy pitches. (Often the sad bastard was strategically placed in the audience to give the TV citizenry that throat-clogging Oprah moment.) I cringed whether it was George Bush demonstrating his compassionate conservatism in one of the debates by misting up over the Texas convict who asked him who really cared about his jailed ass or Al Gore jawboning against pricey pharmaceuticals by complaining that his mother-in-law was paying three times as much for the same arthritis drug that her dog Shiloh consumed (a claim that turned out not to be true). Politicians rely on cheap, emotional anecdotes for obvious reasons. Theirs is a cheap and emotional business. But what's to explain our press comrades' overreliance on the same technique? Scanning the morning papers I find two sad bastard ledes without even searching. My friend Rachel Zimmerman begins her Page One Wall Street Journal story about drug patent extensions with the up-close and personal story of "Mary Robinson, a Philadelphia X-ray technologist," who enrolled her 7-month-old baby in a drug-testing program in return for a $50 Toys "R" Us gift certificate. It's a fine story about the politics of patent extension, but the anecdote never pays off. Baby Robinson pops up only one more time, deep, deep in the story, where we find out that the diluted drug she was fed in the drug trial cured her indigestion. Read more

I--The Bulldozer Sycamore Farm, which is said to be the largest private farm in Israel, comprises a thousand acres of citrus groves and grazing land near the desert town of Sederot. It is the home of Ariel (Arik) Sharon, the retired major general and, if the polls are to be trusted, Israel's next Prime Minister. One afternoon, he took me on a tour. We stepped out of the main house, a spare, white stucco building, and got into a dirt-smeared four-by-four. Sharon drove. A second truck followed, filled with plainclothesmen from the Shabak, Israel's internal security service, who carried Uzis. Sharon is Israel's most polarizing public figure; he goes nowhere unprotected, not even to the sheep pens downwind from his house. Read more

NYPD A City and Its Police. By James Lardner and Thomas Reppetto. Illustrated. 368 pp. New York: A John Macrae Book/ Henry Holt & Company. $27.50. A friend of mine, an ex-New York City police officer, once told me the following story: One night during his rookie year he had given chase to a robbery suspect. The chase led to a stairwell, where the suspect turned on my friend, pummeling and kicking him. My friend managed to subdue the suspect, but not before he was bloodied up good. The rookie officer brought the handcuffed suspect, who was unhurt and ostentatiously nonchalant about his arrest, to the precinct house, expecting praise, or if not praise--this was the N.Y.P.D. after all--then silent approval for his valiant deed. He did not expect to be met by withering scorn. Read more

A Little Too Close to God The Thrills and Panic of a Life in Israel. By David Horovitz. 311 pp. New York: Alfred A Knopf. $26. When I first picked up David Horovitz's "A Little Too Close to God," my first thought was, "Dayenu" (loose translation for those reading the English-only Haggadah: "Enough already"). It is a well-known fact that the People of the Book are in reality the People of the Book Proposal, and so the world has been overly blessed by books that make the following two observations: (1) Israel is filled with Jews! And (2) They're all nuts! But despite the title, Horovitz gives us an entertaining (if occasionally exasperating and disorganized) memoir of his life as an English immigrant in Israel. What makes "A Little Too Close to God" particularly interesting, however, is the jeremiad embedded in the narrative. Read more

About two hours east of the Khyber Pass, in the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan, alongside the Grand Trunk Road, sits a school called the Haqqania madrasa. A madrasa is a Muslim religious seminary, and Haqqania is one of the bigger madrasas in Pakistan: its mosques and classrooms and dormitories are spread over eight weed-covered acres, and the school currently enrolls more than 2,800 students. Tuition, room and board are free; the students are, in the main, drawn from the dire poor, and the madrasa raises its funds from wealthy Pakistanis, as well as from devout, and politically minded, Muslims in the countries of the Persian Gulf. The students range in age from 8 and 9 to 30, sometimes to 35. The youngest boys spend much of their days seated cross-legged on the floors of airless classrooms, memorizing the Koran. This is a process that takes between six months and three years, and it is made even more difficult than it sounds by the fact that the Koran they study is in the original Arabic. These boys tend to know only Pashto, the language of the Pathan ethnic group that dominates this region of Pakistan, as well as much of nearby Afghanistan. In a typical class, the teachers sit on the floor with the boys, reading to them in Arabic, and the boys repeat what the teachers say. This can go on between four and eight hours each day. Read more

Midway through bellview Airlines Flight 204 from Abuja to Lagos, Nigeria--shortly after a delightful in-flight lunch of warm fish-paste sandwiches--our pilot made the following announcement: "Now is speaking Captain Popovich. Weather outside plane is nice. Weather in Lagos also nice. Soon we land Murtala Muhammed Airport." Captain Popovich was a Serb, and a Serb of few words. He was also, I would soon see, a Serb with bloodshot eyes, a three-day growth of beard, and a shirt held together by an inch of thread and a gallon of sweat. But neither his appearance nor his taciturnity could dampen my excitement as we approached what is possibly the worst airport in the world. Millions of Americans who have never left the United States are familiar with Murtala Muhammed: until recently, the FAA required U.S. airports to post notices at all security checkpoints warning travelers that the airport was extremely unsafe. And, for a long time, it was: corruption was said to be universal--everyone from customs officers to desk agents was looking for shakedowns, and passengers risked being robbed outside, or even inside, the terminal. Popovich brought us in low--disconcertingly low--over Lagos and wrestled his DC-9 to the ground. This was a moment of great joy, because our plane was by all appearances the oldest DC-9 in the world and, paradoxically, a virgin to mechanical inspection. Read more

Q: Several pharmaceutical companies have recently decided to slash the price of antiretroviral drugs for developing countries, most notably Africa. But even with the price cut, a year's supply of drugs still would cost about $1,000--more money than most Africans earn in a year. So is there less to this than meets the eye? It is true that most Africans with H.I.V. won't have access to the drugs. But not everybody is living below the poverty line. People working in the private sector often have insurance. This is going to benefit tens of thousands of people. But for the vast majority of Africans, this is only symbolic gesture. Look, we aren't naive. Ninety to 95 percent of Africans who carry the virus don't even know they are infected. So we've got to work on a lot of very basic issues. This is just one step, but it's important because it's the first time the big pharmaceutical companies accept the principle of equity pricing, that the same product can be sold in a poor market for less than it's sold in a rich market. Read more

"What is it that Americans call Africa?" asked the president of Nigeria, Olusegun Obasanjo, looking up from his bowl of Rice Krispies. "A basket case?" The president was amused by the idiom, and a smile momentarily crossed his face. It was a bright morning in Abuja, Nigeria's capital, and the presidential peacocks, strutting outside Obasanjo's villa, were screeching in the heat. Obasanjo, who is a former general, a former political prisoner and, for the past year, the democratically elected president of Africa's biggest country, let the smile fade as he asked: "And why is it a basket case? How did it come to be this basket case?" We were talking about Sierra Leone. More to the point, we were talking about blame. Whom do we blame for everything that has gone wrong in Sierra Leone? Certainly not Nigeria: Nigeria spent billions of its own dollars, and sacrificed the lives of hundreds of its soldiers, trying to keep the peace. Could it be the United States? Read more

As part of my never-ending and so far entirely fruitless campaign to get high-ranking Clinton administration officials to change my children's diapers, I recently dragooned Jamie Rubin to my baby girl's room in order to teach him a thing or two about the real world. For those of you not keeping up with the latest shifts in State Department personnel, a primer: Rubin, who was Madeline Albright's assistant secretary of state for public affairs and her close adviser--as well as a C-Span media-briefing sex god--recently gave up his high-powered job and all its high-powered accouterments to follow his wife to London, where he will care for his new baby while his wife works. Read more

When you're a superhero, no one ever cuts you a break. The Shopping Avenger knew it was only a matter of time before some sort of Avenger manqué would try to seize the scepter of consumer advocacy for his own pathetic self. After all, given the fabulous success and worldwide renown (and healthy self-regard) of the Shopping Avenger, why wouldn't some cheap hustler follow him on the path of glory he has single-handedly hacked through the jungle of corporate malfeasance and customer dissatisfaction? So now comes a publication calling itself Consumer Reports, a sad spectacle of faux-Shopping Avengerness. Consumer Reports is published by a group calling itself the "Consumers Union," which claims to have been founded in 1936. The Shopping Avenger laughs at this claim, because the Shopping Avenger knows that he himself is the originator of American consumer advocacy, back in 1999, or possibly 1998. Read more

"The things is," says His Majesty Abdullah II, the 38-year-old king of Jordan and 43rd-generation direct descendant of the prophet Muhammad, "is that I've become a bit like Elvis." People see him where he ain't, in other words. "There are sightings all over the place," he says. Since ascending the Hashemite throne last February, Abdullah has made it a habit to inspect his kingdom in mufti. "The bureaucrats are terrified. It's great." Today, Elvis is flying to Zarqa, outside of Amman, in one of the Royal Squadron Black Hawk helicopters--like his father, the late King Hussein, he is his own pilot. Once in Zarqa, he will execute a quick costume change and then pay surprise visits to the city's public hospital and to the local offices of the finance ministry. Read more

Salvatore (Sammy the Bull) Gravano is dining on the patio of a Ruth's Chris Steakhouse in Phoenix. A cold wind blows in from the desert. The patio is empty. In movies, people get whacked on nights like this. The waiter, whose name tag reads "Sean," recognizes Gravano. Sean avoids our table as much as he can. Gravano, late of the Gambino crime family, is dining on filet mignon, and calling me a liar. Here is the reason he is calling me a liar: I told him, in the course of a rambling conversation about the "The Godfather," that Mario Puzo wrote the book, and collaborated on the screenplays, without the expert advice of the mob. "No way," Gravano says. "Somebody had to be helping him." I ask Gravano why he is so sure about this. "Because he knew about our life cold," he answers. "He had the whole atmosphere, the way we talked. That wedding scene--I mean, that was so real. I mean, my book isn't a pimple on his book, and I'm in my book." Read more

Steven Van Zandt, the original white boy funk soul brother, is dressed for lunch pretty much the way he always dresses, which is to say he looks like some kind of purple-paisley snakeskin hippie gypsy pirate. Little Steven thinks his mode of dress may cause problems today, because we will be dining in a Jersey City restaurant called Casa Dante, the sort of place that could hold meetings of the DeCavalcante Crime Family Alumni Association. And, as everybody knows, the mob doesn't much like freaks. "We're in trouble here," Little Steven says. "No, we're not," I say. "I've been kicked out of a lot of places," Little Steven says, as we walk through the door. This is a kind of acid test, because I'm trying to prove a particular theory of mine, which is that Little Steven is the coolest guy in the entire state of New Jersey. "You're the coolest guy in the entire state of New Jersey," I say. "They're not going to kick you out." Read more