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For
me, watching The Mighty Heart was like having people enter my home,
rearrange the furniture and reprogram my memory. As the credits rolled,
I murmured to my mother, “Danny had a cameo in his own murder.
-- Asra Q. Nomani
On Wednesday, Jan. 23, 2002, I stood at the gate of my rented house
in Karachi, watching my friend Danny Pearl juggle a notebook, cellphone
and earpiece as he bounded over to a taxicab idling in the street.
He was off to try to find the alleged al-Qaeda handler of “shoe
bomber” Richard Reid in Pakistan. For me, watching The Mighty
Heart was like having people enter my home, rearrange the furniture
and reprogram my memory. As the credits rolled, I murmured to my mother,
“Danny had a cameo in his own murder. -- Asra Q. Nomani
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On
Wednesday, Jan. 23, 2002, I stood at the gate of my rented house in
Karachi, watching my friend Danny Pearl juggle a notebook, cellphone
and earpiece as he bounded over to a taxicab idling in the street.
He was off to try to find the alleged al-Qaeda handler of “shoe
bomber” Richard Reid in Pakistan. “Good luck, dude,”
I called, waving cheerfully as he strode off, a lopsided grin on his
face. His pregnant wife, Mariane, stood smiling and waving beside
me as the taxi pulled away. A gaggle of parrots swooped through the
trees above, squawking in the late afternoon sun. That was the last
image I had of Danny until late last month, when a PR executive for
Paramount Vantage pulled up to my house in Morgantown, W.Va., in a
black Lincoln Town Car. She was carrying a DVD of A Mighty Heart,
the just-released movie, based on the book by Mariane Pearl, about
the staggering events that unfolded after that innocuous moment in
Pakistan: Danny’s kidnapping and eventual beheading. With my
parents and a friend beside me, I pressed “play” on my
DVD player and settled in to watch. Slowly, as the scenes ticked by,
my heart sank. I could live with having been reduced from a colleague
of Danny’s to a “charming assistant” to Mariane,
as one review put it, and even with having been cut out of the scene
in front of my house in Pakistan. That’s the creative license
Hollywood takes. What I couldn’t accept was that Danny himself
had been cut from his own story. The character I saw on the screen
was flat - nerdy, bland and boring. He’s not at all like Danny,
who wrote “ditties” about Osama bin Laden while he was
investigating Pakistan’s nuclear secrets and jihadist groups
as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. On screen, he’s warned
three times to meet with Sheik Mubarik Ali Gilani -- the man with
whom he thought he had an interview -- only in public. But off he
goes, ignoring the warnings. The message: Reckless journalist. That
was nothing like the Danny I knew.
As the credits rolled, I murmured to my mother, “Danny had a
cameo in his own murder.” For me, watching the movie was like
having people enter my home, rearrange the furniture and reprogram
my memory. I’d known it was a gamble when I agreed to help with
a Hollywood version of Danny’s kidnapping, but I’d done
it because I thought the movie had the potential to be meaningful.
I’d hoped it could honor the man I’d worked alongside
for nine years at the Journal by explaining why he was so passionate
about his work as a reporter. I’d hoped that it would tell the
story of the unique team of law enforcement agents, government officials
and journalists -- of varying religions, nationalities and cultures
-- that had searched for him. And I hoped it could spark a search
for the truth behind Danny’s death. But the moviemakers and
their PR machine seemed intent on two very different and much shallower
goals: creating a mega-star vehicle for Angelina Jolie, who plays
Mariane, and promoting the glib and clichéd idea that both
Danny and Mariane were “ordinary heroes.” I think Danny
would have rolled his eyes at that.
In the prologue to her book, Mariane wrote to her son: “I write
this book for you, Adam, so you know that your father was not a hero
but an ordinary man.” In a movie voiceover, that dedication
becomes: “This film is for our son so he knows that his father
was an ordinary man. An ordinary hero.” But there weren’t
any real heroes in the story of Danny’s tragedy. Danny would
have said he was just doing his job. When he went off that day in
Karachi, he didn’t give any impression that he thought what
he was doing was especially dangerous. He just had a story he wanted
to pursue and an interview he thought would help him. After he vanished,
I don’t think any of us, not even Mariane, did anything particularly
courageous, either. We each had a duty to try to find him -- either
as professionals or because of the bonds of friendship or family.
I know that movies need a dramatic arc and that there has to be room
for artistic license in the telling of a true story, because reality
is often so chaotic. I know that it’s natural to search for
a compelling narrative structure to make sense of tragedy and pointlessness.
And I do believe that Danny’s last moments, as he declared his
Jewishness for his kidnappers’ video camera, showed his strength
of character. But recasting a story just so we can tell ourselves
that we’ve found a hero is too easy. It’s the quickest
way to convince ourselves that what happened wasn’t such a bad
thing, that it had redeeming value, that we can close the book on
it and move on with our lives. We do it too often -- with television
shows about ordinary people with extraordinary powers, with magazine
features that extol the “heroes among us” and with our
impulse to elevate every story -- think Jessica Lynch, ambushed and
wounded in Iraq -- to one of heroism.
For me, A Mighty Heart and all the hype surrounding it have only underscored
how cheap and manufactured our quest for heroism has become. Paramount
even launched an “ordinary hero” contest to promote the
movie. “Nominate the most inspiring ordinary hero,” its
Web site shouts. “Win a trip to the Bahamas!” Lost in
the PR machine and the heroism hoopla is Danny, whose death is at
the center of the story. After all, as one person involved in the
production candidly told me: Danny can’t do interviews. So in
the Associated Press review, he amounts to nothing more than a parenthetical
phrase. But Danny was not parenthetical. He deserves to be remembered
fully. He was charming and charismatic. He was an outstanding investigative
reporter with an irreverent streak. The year before he died, I’d
taken a leave from the Journal to work on a book, and he faxed me
an article from an Indian magazine that he thought would help with
my research. “From your assistant, Danny,” he scrawled
across the cover sheet, in his self-deprecating style. He observed
the media machine with a contrarian, skeptical eye.
In November 2001, after the war in Afghanistan had begun, he wrote
to me: “I’m getting to Pakistan just in time for the lull
between ‘well, more bombings, more deaths -- who cares now?’
and ‘shit, it’s December, we have to round out our prize
packages’ “with big articles for awards such as the Pulitzers.
“Okay, no more cynicism from here,” he signed off. “I’m
going to be a father and must maintain an idyllic view of the world.”
Danny had me teach him how to say “Do I look like a fool?”
in Urdu so he could tell off Mumbai taxi drivers who tried to overcharge
him. Once, shortly after arriving in Peshawar on an assignment, he
wrote me: “I’m at the Pearl Continental, wasn’t
able to get a free room despite my argument that I was the owner.”
Don’t look for that personality in the movie. You won’t
find it. I know I’m guilty of assisting in Hollywood’s
mythmaking. In the fall of 2003, I went with Mariane to the Los Angeles
home of Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston, where we ate bagels and drank
coffee by the pool while listening to their pitch for buying the movie
rights to her book. When Mariane decided to sell, Warner Bros. Pictures
sought my “life rights,” too.I agreed to sell them, even
though a friend told me that making a movie about Danny’s death
seemed exploitative. A year passed. Pitt and Aniston got a divorce.
Pitt and Jolie got together. The movie rights passed to Paramount
Vantage. Paramount hired British director Michael Winterbottom. And
a script emerged. When I read it last summer, I felt as though I’d
been punched in the gut. I sat across from British actress Archie
Panjabi, who had been dispatched to my home in Morgantown to learn
to play me. I lamented that none of the characters were fully developed,
least of all Danny. When I watched the movie last month, I was relieved
that I wasn’t a servant girl, as I felt an early script had
it. So I wrote to a producer, “Thumbs up okay on my end.”
But I wasn’t being true to myself. I was reacting to the power
and seduction of Hollywood. A few days later, when I saw the photos
of stars in evening gowns and tuxedos floating down the red carpet
for the Cannes premiere of A Mighty Heart, Danny’s not-quite-5-year-old
son among them, I had that sinking feeling again. Other friends of
Danny’s said they did, too. It was so not Danny. Worst of all,
the pomp came at the same time as a chilling reminder of his death.
On the night of the Cannes premiere, a Pakistani newspaper ran a photo
of an emaciated man said to have been the owner of the plot of land
where Danny had been held and where his remains had been buried. The
accompanying story alleged that the man had been held in the U.S.
naval prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, then released to Pakistani intelligence
authorities, who had recently dumped him at his family’s home.
The headline: “Most wanted man in Daniel Pearl case: Saud Memon
dies.” On the eve of the movie’s New York premiere earlier
this month, I was in Phoenix at the Investigative Reporters and Editors
conference. I was there to announce the establishment of the Pearl
Project, a joint faculty-student investigative reporting project at
Georgetown University that will aim to find out who really killed
Danny and why. It’s my own way of honouring him. His story isn’t
over for me. I set up the project because -- despite a confession
from Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the alleged mastermind of 9/11 and of
Richard Reid’s failed shoe-bombing, that he killed Danny --
I believe we still don’t know the real truth behind what happened
to him. After the conference, I had to decide whether to go to New
York for the premiere or head back home. I went home. In my home office,
I stood in front of a copy of the chart I had started in Karachi to
make sense of everything that happened after that January day in 2002.
At the center is a single name: Danny.
– Courtesy Outlook India |
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