Nearly nine years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States still has 100,000 troops fighting and dying in Afghanistan, and another 50,000 holding down the fort in Iraq. One hundred seventy-six inmates remain at the U.S. prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. A number of disturbing near-misses -- the attempted Christmas Day bombing of Northwest Airlines Flight 253, the Times Square fizzle, and various other plots -- have put the threat of terrorism back in the news. In a Gallup poll conducted in late August, 47 percent of Americans surveyed said that terrorism would be "extremely important" to their vote for Congress this year, with another 28 percent rating the issue "very important."
Yet there's also a sense that terrorism has faded as a political issue as the economy and general dissatisfaction with Washington have crowded out all other concerns. The intense debates on the op-ed pages and in the blogosphere of the war on terror's go-go years have quieted. The military tribunals in Guantánamo have evoked little public interest. Anti-Islam fervor may be rising, but terrorism just doesn't seem to elicit the passions it once did. Indeed, it would be hard to imagine outgoing Newsweek columnist Fareed Zakaria, always a reliable barometer of conventional wisdom, writing this sentence in, say, 2008 -- "Nine years after 9/11, can anyone doubt that Al Qaeda is simply not that deadly a threat?" -- and barely making a splash.
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Enter My Trip to al-Qaeda, a new documentary by filmmaker Alex Gibney, who won an Oscar in 2008 for Taxi to the Dark Side. Gibney's latest film, which premiers Sept. 7 on HBO, is an adaptation of a one-man play by Larry Wright, the New Yorker writer and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Looming Tower, which remains the definitive account of 9/11, the events leading up to it, and the cast of heroes who tried in vain to stop it. In My Trip to al-Qaeda, Wright has become the protagonist, telling the story of his quest to understand what motivates Islamist radicals to take up arms.
Wright initially hoped to change subjects after finishing The Looming Tower. "I was so sick of terrorism; I just wanted to write a musical comedy," he told me in an interview. But when he pitched André Bishop, the artistic director at Lincoln Center Theater, on the musical idea, Bishop just "rolled his eyes," Wright says. So, remembering a solo staging of Stations of the Cross that he admired, Wright switched gears and sold Bishop on a one-man play about al Qaeda. An hour later, he had signed up Rhonda Sherman, the New Yorker's director of special projects, as a producer, and Greg Mosher as the play's director. (Wright is now working on another one-man show based on his Nov. 9, 2009, New Yorker article on the Gaza war. "I've gotten typecast as the Grim Reaper," he jokes glumly.)
My Trip to al-Qaeda is centered on a live performance of the play, with Wright standing on a sparsely furnished set meant to evoke his home office in New York, with its old-fashioned boxes filled with index cards. Gibney made a few adjustments for the film, such as making the screen behind Wright somewhat bigger than the original stage set and transforming it into a jumping-off point for further exploration. And so we see incantatory clips from al Qaeda martyrdom videos, footage from one of Wright's trips to Cairo, and rare photographs of the most intimate rituals of the hajj in Mecca.
"I wanted it to be a kind of magic portal," Gibney says, using not only real-life imagery of al Qaeda and the Middle East, but also first-person material on Wright's life. "To understand it, you had to know a little bit about Larry. ... Yes, he's a journalist; yes, he's an experienced writer; but he's also a citizen trying to come to grips with these things. He's not a stentorian expert trying to lecture you from on high."
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