February 6, 2012

On September 10, 2001, Michelle Shephard was working the crime beat, reporting on a purse-snatching for the Toronto Star. The next day she was headed to Ground Zero in New York City, and her beat was morphing from crime to national security.

She has spent the past ten years chasing the shadows of terror, trying to understand the impact on the world of the events in the U.S. on that day in September. And trying to understand whether those post-9/11 policies have made the world a better or worse place.

"You know, I think that we made a lot of mistakes over the last 10 years ... when we talk about the west, I think here in Canada, in the U.S., we loved the policies we developed after 9/11 - they ended up making the world a more dangerous place."

Michelle says her role is to try and bridge the distance between Western policies and their effects in other parts of the world:

"I think I want to bring parts of the world that people don't understand home to them...people are not going to be able to go to Somalia, people are not going to be able to go to Yemen, parts of Pakistan, Guantanamo Bay...so what I try to do is bring the people who are there, their stories so that they're not just thought of as 'the other' or a country that we don't understand. I try and bring that home."

Related Stories on Strombo.com:

Thinking Through the Outcomes of 9/11

Terry Jones on the Need to Respond to War