Crown Center forum hosts prominent journalists who reported from the Middle East after 9/11

Brandeis Stories

Crown Center forum hosts prominent journalists who reported from the Middle East after 9/11

By Steve Foskett
October 22, 2026 • General

Journalists covering the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were able to relay a reality to their audiences that was often at odds with official accounts. Two prominent reporters explored those nuances in a recent panel discussion convened by the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis.

"Reporting the Middle East After 9/11," part of a series of forums and conferences this fall examining the lasting impact of the attacks, hosted Hannah Allam, national security reporter at ProPublica, and C.J. Chivers, writer at large for The New York Times Magazine. Gary Samore, Crown Family Director of the Crown Center and professor of the practice of politics, gave introductory remarks.

In the wide-ranging talk moderated by by Neil Swidey, director of the journalism program at Brandeis and editor at large of The Boston Globe Magazine, Chivers and Allam recounted the atmosphere in the days after 9/11, when it quickly became all but certain that the U.S. was preparing for war. They detailed how they found themselves heading to the Middle East to report on the unfolding conflict.

Chivers, a Marine Corps Veteran and award-winning reporter for the Times, traveled with rifle companies and platoons to get a first-hand account of the war effort. Allam, a young reporter based in Minneapolis, was recruited by Knight-Ridder in 2003 to lead its Baghdad Bureau. She reported on the war's impact on everyday life in Iraq, and developed sources in government and religious circles.

Allam said she had a "baked-in skepticism" about the promises that were made about how the war would unfold, but added that at least initially, there were scenes of joy and progress in the post-Saddam Hussein era. That optimism quickly evaporated as an insurgency took hold. She said one of the first stories she covered was the truck bombing that destroyed the United Nations headquarters in Iraq.

"Then it was 'off to the races' and it never got better,'" she said.

Chivers said he started his post-9/11 reporting in the Middle East in Afghanistan, where a mission to find the 9/11 attack's perpetrators quickly morphed into a two-decade exercise in nation building. He said it quickly became apparent that U.S. leadership was starting to shift goals and doctrines to justify the war to the point of incoherence.

"It looked like a failure," he said. "This wouldn't work anywhere we tried it on Earth."

Whatever the U.S. military's motivation was to create the "embedded reporter" system in the Middle East wars after 9/11, it gave journalists tremendous access to the battlefield, and to soldiers, Chivers said. While intended to showcase the expertise and lethal capabilities of the U.S. military operation, he said it often functioned as a check on the official word coming out of press conferences.

Allam said she found telling the stories of ordinary Iraqi citizens revealed its own set of truths. She recalled asking civilians about what it felt like voting in the first real elections of their lifetimes; they responded that they would rather have a reliable electrical grid. Her ground-up reporting was more of a necessity than a choice, without the unfettered access of better-resourced news organizations. Whether it was talking with people at military checkpoints or in nail salons, "there was a richness in the details there," Allam said.