What Actually Happened: Courageous or Caught?

Written by Jessica

8.25.08

I began this morning the way I always do -- skimming through the hundreds of articles that piled up on my Google Reader since Friday. As usual, I optimistically assumed I'd take the time to empty out the less interesting ones over the weekend, and as usual, I came to work on Monday morning and had over 500 headlines from various newspapers around the world waiting for me. Being a diligent person (and having not had a cup of coffee that morning to get my brain working), I set down to read at least every single headline. Even the ones in French and Spanish, a strain on my single semester of French for Reading Comprehension and my high-school Spanish classes more years ago than I care to admit.

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One of the Spanish articles caught my attention. El Pais was relating a fascinating, short little story of a teenage girl who walked into a police station, wearing a suicide vest, and chose to turn herself in rather than explode the vest. The report held me for a number of reasons. I am always interested in the situation of women and children across the world, and have a particular interest in how teenage girls deal with the stresses of the world around them.

As the article in El Pais commented, men, women and boys have been suicide bombers, but young girls are (thankfully) rare. And even rarer than teenaged girl suicide bombers are any suicide bombers who have the courage to turn themselves in rather than commit homicide. This girl's courage and conviction immediately interested me. How many teenagers, struggling with the questions of who they are and who they want to be, could overcome whatever pressures were on them that lead them to don the vest? How many would be able, in the last moment, to put life (their own, their potential victims') above death?

I put the article in our Digging Deeper section, so our readers with some knowledge of Spanish could see and think about the same report. But then I continued slogging through my Reader, I found that USA Today had picked up the same story ... or rather, they were reporting the same event. The two stories were drastically different.

USA Today's headline declared: Iraqi teen girl caught with bomb vest! That short story (which, like the El Pais piece, was credited to the Associated Press), said that the girl had been caught, rather than turned herself in. The stunning courage and determination to take control of her own life that had so interested me in the piece by El Pais was gone. Now, the story was the success of the Iraqi police in capturing a potential bomber.

I admit my biases here -- I wanted the El Pais story to be true. I wanted the girl to have made a choice, to have agency, as my professors used to say. What I want, however, is sadly irrelevant. The question is what actually happened ... and that question looks unanswerable.

Being versed in the detailed-oriented (some might say anal retentive) research methods of the humanities, I determined to do a survey of the coverage of this story, to see who was reporting it as the girl's choice and who was reporting it as a triumph of the Iraqi police. Here are the headlines I found. They are in no particular order, and many of them are the same article -- but the point is more who is reporting what than if the articles are from the same source.

Gulfnews: Girl surrenders before carrying out suicide bombing in Iraq

UK Times Online: Girl suicide bomber, 13, hands herself in to Iraqi police

Sydney Morning Herald: Iraq parades teen girl 'bomber'

Reuters UK: Iraqi girl aborts suicide bombing

Washington Post: Iraqi girl aborts suicide bombing

Lebanon Daily Star: Iraqi authorities show off would-be female suicide bomber to media (this article highlights the disparity in other accounts)

International Herald Tribune: Iraqi teen girl caught with bomb vest

Associated Press: Iraq girl caught with bomb vest interrogated

The Press Association: Iraq girl, 15, caught in bomb vest (her age changed here)

NDTV Arabia had an entirely different take on the story -- in their version, Suicide bomber surrenders in Iraq, an older woman turned herself in and that woman then lead police to the 13 year old girl mentioned in El Pais.

Agence France Presse had a story (Iraq police detain teenage girl with explosives vest) that I can only assume is the same, since it involves a teenage girl, an explosive vest and the city of Baquba in the same time frame, but the details about the girl's mother aren't in the other stories I'd read.

A search in Google News found a few more articles covering this, which I didn't list for brevity's sake (I know, too late). But the truth of the story remains unfortunately elusive. I could, if I wish, decide that I trust the Washington Post to give me the most accurate retelling of the event, and stick with their version. Unfortunately, I'm a bit too cynical for that. Media literacy has been drummed into me.

The only real conclusion we can draw from all of this is that no matter how informed you try to be, no matter how many papers you read, there's still a wide gap between what happened and what we get from the media. This is not to say that all of those reporters are misrepresenting the truth -- it's possible, of course, that one or two might be, but my guess is that all are reporting the facts they were given them, as best they understand them. But one man's understanding differs from another, and when all the reporters have to go on is the words of the Iraqi police, a grainy video and a few eyewitness reports ... no wonder the news differs. For myself, given no better way to determine what happened, I choose to believe that the girl took control of her life at this critical juncture, and choose a future for herself and her potential victims.