REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK

(London) A Radio Journalist's Confession: Not all stories are radio stories. It's true.

There are some stories that work best in print. Watergate with its mystery informant speaking runically in a D.C. garage is the best example. Deep Throat didn't want his picture taken and he certainly didn't want his words on tape. Some stories work best for radio: Those that have unique sounds and engage people's imaginations in a way that that a picture never can. Most news photos are too literal and take away the connection between the reporter and the reader or audience member's imagination. But there are other stories that really do work best visually. And here's the confession: The terrible truth about reporting from Iraq's Borders is that the story is astoundingly visual and incredibly difficult to make work for radio.

The problem is two-fold: You are constantly working in three-way conversations. You ask questions through an interpreter to an interviewee and then the response comes back the same way. You are wholly dependent on the interpreter's skill in English. If they can't translate your conversational style as well as the literal meaning of the words, going back and forth it is very difficult to engage with folks at the level you want to.

The second problem is taking the raw material and cutting it down so that your listeners will stick with it. Inside Out rates its audience's intelligence highly. We believe you're curious and will stay with us a long way. But translated conversations take double and sometimes triple the time of ordinary conversation. How much Arabic or Kurdish will you listen to in order to get the nugget of insight that my trialogue produced?

The third problem in the region around Iraq is trust. In countries where the secret police operates and the army takes people away for brutal interrogations, how many people will blindly trust a stranger with a tape recorder accompanied by someone they've never met before but who speaks their language?

And the authorities don't trust you. There were many places I had to visit for this documentary because I needed to see things with my own eyes. But I was unable to take out my tape recorder when I got there because the authorities wouldn't allow it.

That's why I say this was a story where photographers had the upper hand. The photos I took for this website show the life being lived in the region that will bear the brunt of the war clearly.

If I had tried to interview the shepherds standing underneath the bridge on the Tigris River over which a Turkish Army convoy was passing I'm not sure how clear our conversation would have been. And the view through barbed wire from Jordan into Iraq was snatched quickly through my car window as a Jordanian Army officer was approaching.

So look closely at these photos - snapshots, really - and use your imaginations to think of what life sounds like in these places.

There is one particular conversation I had that I was unable to squeeze into the finished documentary. I want to tell you about in greater detail. That was my lunch in Ma'an with Adel Mohamit and his extended family. You can see him in one of the pictures as well as the lunch he served us: Manzaf, Jordan's national dish. A lamb is slowly boiled for hours in its own juices and yogurt. The pot is constantly skimmed. When it is finished. The lamb is sectioned and place on an enormous platter of almond rice. The color of the meat is not terribly appetizing but its flavor and texture is absolutely extraordinary.

Ma'an is the one place in Jordan where people take on the government. It is an Islamist stronghold. Adel is a retired schoolteacher and former Education Ministry representative. He is clearly a man of respect around the town. Ma'an is essentially occupied by the Jordanian Army following several years of sporadic civil disturbances. Its twenty thousand residents move around past intersections guarded by armored personnel carriers. But when Adel took me out to show me houses that had been strafed by helicopter gunships [SEE PHOTOS] and introduce me to a young man whose face had been shattered by soldiers, we weren't disturbed ... although the trip ended when my driver noticed someone writing down his license plate number. Adel said we should leave town since the fellow was known to him as a secret policeman.

Before the tour and lunch Adel had given me a free history lesson.

I noticed that throughout our conversation he had referred to himself as an Arab or a Ma'ani, never as a Jordanian. During my time in the country I had noticed that one rarely saw maps of Jordan but that frequently on banners and shop walls the outline of Africa and Arabia with the area from Morocco to the Gulf colored in. It was the silhouette of the greater Arab world. The message I took from it was that the people of the region owed their allegiance to that undeclared superstate rather than the nations of which they were citizens.

I asked Adel whether he thought that borders in the Arab world should come down. "Yes," he replied without hesitation. "These borders were invented by the British after World War I and we don't recognize them." How would he describe himself? "I am an Arab from Ma'an."

His loyalty was to his extended clan. There were Mohamit's in Libya, Egypt, and Syria. Even in Israel. He had a cousin who was a member of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. I pointed out that his family probably had more influence in Israel than Jordan. He agreed, "Absolutely, the government in Jordan does not listen to the people." I don't think Adel understood the irony of the situation. Much of his political activity is against normalization of relations with Israel, the one country in the region where his clansmen have democratic representation.

Everywhere I went in the area bordering Iraq people had the same question: why did the U.S. need a war to remove Saddam? Why not just assassinate him and have the CIA install a puppet government? My stock response was, "Yeah, let's bring back the good old days. Where's the CIA when you really need them?"

But the question was usually asked with a degree of seriousness, not irony. For all the anti-war feeling in the Jordanian and Turkish street, there is very little love for Saddam. People are aware he is a brutal tyrant. They would love to see him dead. They just wish it wouldn't cost so many Iraqi lives to accomplish this. So they ask in all seriousness why can't the CIA do what it used to do?

I got used to being asked the question. At lunch in Ma'an, Adel's brother, a farmer whose sheep we were eating, was the person who asked it. And I gave him my usual answer. It did not produce a laugh. It is extraordinary the degree to which all political phenomena in the region are explained by the CIA being behind it. Or the CIA working with the Mossad. Jokes about the CIA don't resonate here.

Adel's brother went on a little rant about the evils of the CIA. The gist of it was that the CIA controlled the whole world.

"If the CIA controlled the whole world, how did September 11th happen?" I asked.

"The CIA controls the whole world," Adel's brother explained. "But al-Qa'eda is from God."