Her book sounds like an interesting read. Was glad to see her on C-Span on this day to remember "9/11." She made clear that Saddam would have never allowed Al Qaeda to come into Iraq. She goes back into the 80's where we funded Al Qaeda and how we taught kids in Afgan Schools the alphabet of I is for Infidel, with other letters representing Russian Generals that were to be hated. Math was taught with questions like "If you have 10 Russian Soldiers and you kill 5 how many do you have left. In other words, we were teaching Afgani kids to Hate and Kill.
Anyway, here's what her books about and who she is:
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http://www.artsandlectures.ucsb.edu/pr/gannon.aspOn September 11, 2001, Kathy Gannon became the eyes and ears of the Western press in Kabul. She was one of the few international journalists in the Afghan capital when terrorists attacked the United States, and she moved quickly to cover the world around her as it erupted into war. Gannon was expelled from Afghanistan, but managed to return twice after the American bombing campaign started. At one point she was the only Western reporter in Kabul.
When Gannon was awarded a 2002 Courage in Journalism Award, the International Women’s Media Foundation wrote: “Gannon’s years of steady reporting on the region and her wide network of sources paid off in understanding that shone through in her steady stream of stories. Gannon was inexhaustible as she courageously reported what she saw around her. Working amid falling bombs in Kabul, writing her stories by lantern light, she recounted battles, explained the intricacies of Afghan politics and described the plight of ordinary Afghan people in clear, compelling prose. Bombs did not daunt her. Roadblocks of armed Taliban, who eyed her suspiciously because she was foreign and, even worse, a foreign woman, did not stop her.”
Gannon explains why she felt it necessary to write “I” Is for Infidel: “I read stories that didn’t seek to explain but perpetuated stereotypes. I read stories that identified every man with a turban as a Taliban and stories that would have you think the Taliban had invented the burqa. I read statements from U.S. intelligence officials that were blatantly wrong. I read stories in which Northern Alliance men whom I had witnessed raping women and then scalping them, who had destroyed the Afghan capital of Kabul, were made out to be heroes.
“History was being rewritten. Everything was divided into good and evil, black and white. The shades of gray that so characterized this region were gone. Worse, Afghan thugs and killers took advantage of the occasion to reinvent themselves and fool the world into believing they were somehow now the good guys.
“I knew then I had a story to tell, a book to write.”
Before publishing in The New Yorker and Foreign Affairs and prior to joining the Associated Press, Gannon freelanced for the Canadian newsmagazine Macleans, the Gamma-Liaison photo agency, Japanese newspapers and the Christian Science Monitor. She worked at newspapers in Western Canada and Ontario and was city editor at the daily newspaper in Kelowna, British Columbia.
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