Hugh Pope

An interview about Dining with al-Qaeda with Christopher Isham of CBS news for the network’s ‘Washington Unplugged’ webcast (here) shows how the Internet allows a traditional broadcaster can now spend quality time showcasing a non-mainstream point of view (14 minutes in this case). Isham – Washington bureau chief for CBS and the man who organized the first major network interview with Osama bin Laden in 1998 – called my book “very intriguing”. He then let me sink or swim, allowing me to say things about Israel, Iran and U.S. policy that would have had me shooed off screen not so long ago. Too bad I fluffed my line about the cat and mouse games of dictatorship in the Middle East. For the record, the old Arabic proverb under the title of Chapter 12 (‘The Central Bank Governor Has no Socks’, about Afghanistan and Pakistan) is ‘The tyranny of the cat is better than the justice of the mouse.’