Reporting terror: CNN journalists reflect

The following roundtable article features accounts from CNN and CNN Headline News journalists who have covered multiple aspects surrounding the September 11 terrorist attacks and Operation Enduring Freedom. Each journalist has a particular story and perpective to share, revealing how the war on terrorist has affected their lives on very personal levels. Their stories reflect the details and emotions that the public rarely sees.

Michele Mitchell

The night I met Abdul Haq, he was limping down a cobbled Roman street - his prosthesis had broken two days before. I had thought I was meeting a legendary mujahidin. But this guy was overweight, graying, and looking far older than the forty-three years he claimed.

This was less than a week after the 9/11 attacks and well into long-planned meetings in Rome with the former Afghan king and many mujahidin commanders such as Haq. They wanted to flip the Taliban from within the organization. Two weeks before, U.S. diplomats had laughed at them (one even told me, "The only way any of us will take the former king seriously is if there is a terrorist attack in the states"). Now, those meetings had assumed new urgency. Dignitaries from around the world were flying in to the exiled king's home in Rome.

Haq, however, had endured his fill. "There is too much talk," he said as we walked into the restaurant, where the Italian waiters rushed to him, clasping his hands, and saying, "Comandante! Comandante!" This was a restaurant I had chosen. I knew the waiters. They were not easily impressed.

Some people slammed Haq as a self-promoter. The press did like him. He had a salty sense of humor (once, he pointed to a particularly phallic cactus and said, "Michele, we should use these on the Taliban!"), and he spoke what he called "street English" - a brand picked up through years of talking to journalists. And Haq had racked up a drama of a life. A distinguished fighter during the Afghan-- Soviet War, he lost a foot after stepping on a land mine (the operation took place on the battlefield, without anesthesia). He kept out of the warlord squabbles that split the country in the early 1990s, moving his family to Pakistan. He became a patron of sorts. Once, he heard that the former king's falconer was living in a refugee camp. He brought the elderly man to a house in Peshawar and bought him a falcon, for what else is a falconer to do? The other residents of the house, who included American journalists, named the hawk Haq. And then the Taliban assassinated his first wife and one of his sons. He took his family to Dubai and plotted his return to Afghanistan.

Haq was a Pashtun. Many people thought, especially since he bridged the East-West gap, that Haq could be a political leader upon the Taliban's fall. But Haq was not really interested in that. "I want my family in Afghanistan, and I want to walk down the street without having the people spit in my face," he said. He was unable to realize any of this. Haq was captured by the Taliban and executed in a horrible way.

I had spoken with him many times, right up until two days before he crossed into Afghanistan. He was pleased because he had been working very hard to put in place local political structures in the south to facilitate a future loya jirga [the newly formed, 1,500-- member Afghan national council]. "It doesn't matter what happens to me because this is ready," he said. It still is.

Michele Mitchell is the political anchor for CNN Headline News. She appears in the network's daily segment, "In The Loop," which takes viewers inside national and international politics. Soon after September 11, Mitchell obtained the last - and one of the longest sit-down interviews with Abdul Haq before the hero of the Afghan resistance was captured and executed by the Taliban. She was one of the only journalists inside the loya jirga planning meetings in Rome.

Kate Snow

How far away from the Capitol building do I have to be?

How far away do I have to be to survive when the plane hits? The questions kept coming inside my head. Two blocks? Three blocks? Was I far enough away at the corner where I stood, trying in vain to call out on my cell phone? I could still see the Dome clearly. I envisioned the plane hitting and how far the fuel and debris would spray.

A few minutes earlier, a Capitol Hill police officer had passed me in a sprint. In fact, we were all sprinting away from the Capitol. As he ran past me, I grabbed his sleeve. "What's going on?" I asked.

He glanced at my reporter's notebook. "You didn't hear this from me," he said. "There's a plane heading for the Capitol. It'll be here in minutes."

And that was how the most terrifying day of my life began.

We were lucky at the Capitol. We saw no death, no horror. It was nothing like the Twin Towers or the Pentagon. That plane never arrived. To this day, most of us who work on the Hill - journalists and staffers and lawmakers - are convinced that the plane destined for us crashed in a field in Pennsylvania.