Before reading Mightier than the sword all I knew about 9/11 was that Osama Bin Laden ordered people to take down the twin towers. Almost every media outlet showed Iraqi people as terrorist and Bin Laden as their leader. After reading this book I learned a lot about why the towers were brought down and why we went to war. To start off the mass media has an obligation to tell the public the truth about important events. They have to tell the whole story in an unbiased way. It’s usually up to the reporter to report the truth and nothing more. But sometimes either the reporter or the publisher leave out some important information that they think will change
the public towards a view that they don’t agree with.

When the towers fell on 9/11 every news media was determined to cover the story. Their job was to answer the questions that were going through everyone minds. These questions were formed around the five W’s that every writer aims to answer when coving a story. Those five W’s are who, when, what where, and why. The media seemed to cover all of the W’s but one. That one W was why. When you’re reading an article that covering such an historic event like 9/11 the first question you want answered is why. The media failed to answer that. Some people believe that they didn’t want to answer this question because they didn’t want to justify the attack. The media has a lot to do with why the public was so mislead. If it wasn’t for the media not reporting the whole truth we wouldn’t have gone to war and lost so many troops. In the book Mightier Than The Sword there are quotes from an interview that Osama had done in 1998 that explains three main reasons why he felt like he had to attack the United States. (This interview was done three years before that attack). In the newspaper titled “Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders” Bin Laden explains his view. The first reason was

“For over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula: plundering it’s riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors.” Osama Bin Laden

After the Persian War, Bin Laden explained that the Americans have stayed on their soil torturing and killing his people and trying to dominate over them. They were mostly upset because the military bases were located in Saudi Arabia and that’s where two of their holy sites Mecca and Medina are located. They saw it as disrespectful. The second reason was

“The Americans’ aim is also to serve the Jews’ petty state.” Osama Bin Laden

He believed that the Americans were using their military and economic power to weaken the other countries.Among those countries were Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan. He believed that the Americans wanted Israel to be the dominate country in the Middle East.
The third reason he hated the United States was because he believed that Americans targeted Iraq because they wanted a “horrible massacre”. He believed that the United States saw them as a threat because Iraq was the strongest country in Arabia. He believed that the United States wanted to take Iraq down so they could make Israel dominant. I believe that if the reporters would have look a little bit deeper and researched the history instead of jumping the gun and labeling everyone in Iraq as terrorist than maybe we wouldn’t be at war today. Reading this chapter in this book makes me upset when it comes to this topic. Osama clearly expressed his thoughts in the public eye and I feel like we just brushed it off as an oh well.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfYQAPhjwzA

The media helped in misleading the public. Our own President and Vice president lead the world an in angry rage towards Iraq and the Iraqi people. Before reading this book I didn’t know that the war started under false accusations. Vice president Dick Cheney made a statement to the public that filled them with hatred for the Iraqi people. He announced that “Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, against us”. This statement scared many Americans. It made them feel unsafe and pushed them towards the war for revenge. Later on in 2002 he went on NBC and released another statement

“There is a pattern of relationships going on back many years between Iraq and al-Qaeda. We have reporting that places Atta in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official five months before that attack on the World Trade Center”. Dick Cheney

President Bush and Vice President Cheney believed that Atta was plotting with Iraq to attack the United States. Because of their accusation the United States went to war with Iraq. We bombed training camps that held many people. Thousands of people died due to these assumptions that Iraq was planning an attack. It turned out that these statements were false. There were no weapons of mass destruction and this alleged meeting between Atta and Iraqi never happened. It was said that Bush made up these lies because he wanted to get back at Iraq for their mistreatment for women and to gain their resources.Thousands of people have died because the media failed to tell the whole story. They chose to tell only what they wanted the public to know.When we look at the media we expect them to tell the whole story and not just half. The media has failed us. Months after the towers fell they published Bin Laden’s view and explanations in the paper on page twenty. It was as if they decided for us that his thoughts and feelings are not important. Years later we are still at war. People are still dying and it seems like this is a never ending war.Americans were filled with joy when it was announced that Bin Laden was dead. They believed that this brought them closure. To many Americans it did but to others it didn’t. Many have lost close family members and friends to a war that shouldn’t have ever taken place. Hopefully soon we can finally end this war.