Programs examine Mumbai attacks

By: By Mike Hale | THE NEW YORK TIMES
Published: November 23, 2009

"The first 360-degree view of terrorism" -- that's the promise that writer Fareed Zakaria makes at the beginning of Terror in Mumbai, an HBO documentary about the attacks in that Indian city last November that left more than 170 people dead. In addition to the usual eyewitness interviews and surveillance videos, the film, which Zakaria narrates, makes use of hours of intercepted telephone conversations between the 10 gunmen and their controllers in Pakistan. "This time you are with the terrorists," Zakaria intones.

The documentary made its debut last week and will be repeated today at 2 and 10:30 p.m.

Terror in Mumbai is what's known as a tick-tock, untangling a large and confusing story and laying it out in chronological order, in this case trying to make sense of the nonsensical. It's a model of the genre, with a combination of clarity and breathless pace. And the phone calls are a big part of that: the gunmen's updates on their movements, and the handlers' instructions, give structure to events unspooling simultaneously in multiple locations.

The calls have another effect, though, one that may have been unintentional but was also predictable: They humanize the killers.

It's one thing to know that a young man facing a life of grinding poverty has been indoctrinated in jihad, taught to kill and promised a place in heaven for doing so. It's quite another to hear his voice as he sits trapped in a Jewish center and appears to stall for time when he's ordered to execute his remaining hostages.

Another look at the Mumbai attacks will be shown at 8 p.m. Wednesday on UNC-TV in "Mumbai Massacre," an episode of the PBS series Secrets of the Dead. Survivors who came in contact with the gunmen, including some who were held hostage, express more sorrow than anger when describing them.

The PBS show uses some of the same video footage, telephone recordings and interview subjects as the HBO film, but it's an altogether more conventional television treatment, employing re-creations and shading toward the melodramatic and sentimental.

It focuses on Western survivors of the attacks, where Terror in Mumbai speaks mostly with Indians.