Lawrence Wright, author of The Looming Tower and Going Clear, is a staff writer for The New Yorker.

"If I had the chance to interview Osama Bin Laden, should I kill him? It’s a fair question. Suppose we’re having dinner — should I stab him with the bread knife? Do I have a moral obligation to kill him? Or do I have a moral obligation as a reporter to simply hear him? … It’s sometimes difficult to take away the judgements that you naturally have. But when you do that, when you strip yourself and you’re morally naked, it’s sometimes surprising how infectious the relationship can become."

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Show notes:


lawrencewright.com
@lawrence_wright
Wright on Longform
[6:00] Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (Knopf • Jan 2013)
[6:00] The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Knopf • Aug 2006)
[7:45] The Siege (Twentieth Century Fox • 1998)
[14:45] "The Apostate" (The New Yorker • Feb 2011)
[30:15] My Trip to Al-Qaeda (Jigsaw Productions • Apr 2010)