For a fleeting moment, we see them as we've never seen them. Members of the al-Qaida network, sitting around with associates in Pakistan, are seen relaxing and smiling. They look like picnickers, not the sinister purveyors of terrorism they appear to be in news photos.
This up-close footage appears in a new program, "Al Qaeda 2.0," that airs at 7 tonight on the new Discovery Times Channel. And there couldn't be an unlikelier source for the video: an American from Kansas City who moved freely among the Pashtun camps where al-Qaida members lived.
Chris Turner was a young seeker who converted to Islam and moved to Afghanistan. Starting in 1967, he filmed the Pashtuns, a tribal people whose traditional, insular way of life impressed him deeply. He said he left in 1985 after being wounded in the Russian-Afghan war.
Now 56, Turner went back to Pakistan last year to make more video of the Pashtuns and combine the two sources into a documentary with local funding.
He visited 10 camps near the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, a lawless hotbed of drug running that's said to fund much of the worldwide terror movement. There Turner saw not only al-Qaida members but Taliban living as the Pashtuns' guests.
He also visited Islamic schools just outside the city of Karachi in southwestern Pakistan and saw more al-Qaida.
"Their main objection to us," Turner said in an interview, "is that they feel we've corrupted their spiritual leaders - the Saudis and so on - with materialism. That's their biggest complaint."
Discovery Times, which is on Time Warner digital cable at Channel 225, is a partnership between Discovery and the New York Times. That it is launching tonight with "Al Qaeda 2.0" suggests the new channel will present original, up-to-the-minute reporting instead of the journalistic rehash so often found on cable.
