I'm sorry, but since Mockingbird I view all US reporters as spies, especially foreign journalists.
A close escape for Richard Engel and NBC team
Fortunate to have a big organization like NBC to safeguard their interests; hundreds of freelance journalists in global hotspots lack such protections.
Speak of freelancers....
"War reporter kidnapped a second time; Boston-based; captured in Syria" by Peter Schworm | Globe Staff, January 02, 2013
The family of James Foley, a Boston-based foreign correspondent who was abducted in Libya in 2011, said Wednesday that he was kidnapped again on Thanksgiving Day, this time while reporting from Syria, and remains missing.
Foley was reportedly taken by unidentified gunmen in the northwest of the country, his family said, an area with heavy fighting and high death tolls in the ongoing conflict. Foley’s family initially had asked that the kidnapping not be disclosed, but decided to make his capture public in an appeal for his release....
No group has claimed responsibility for taking Foley, and there have been no reports of his whereabouts.
I'm already forming my suspicions.
Syria has banned almost all foreign journalists from the country, and specialists said Foley’s capture underscores the dangers correspondents face there.
At least 28 journalists were killed in Syria last year, and kidnappings have become more common.
I may or may not like what they write, but I don't want them showing up dead.
“In the past year, it’s been the deadliest country in the world” for news media, said Sherif Mansour of the Committee to Protect Journalists, a nonprofit group that promotes press freedom.
Foley, a Marquette University graduate, has reported on conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, where he was taken captive in April 2011 by forces loyal to Libya’s leader, Moammar Khadafy, while on assignment for GlobalPost, a Boston-based international news organization.
Foley and two other journalists spent 44 days in Libyan prisons before being released, the organization said. Foley later returned to the country to cover the overthrow of the Khadafy regime.
On Thanksgiving Day, Foley was traveling toward the Turkish border when he was intercepted by an unmarked car, according to a GlobalPost story posted on Wednesday.
A Syrian witness later recounted that armed men forced Foley from his vehicle, the story stated.
“The witness said he noticed nothing that would indicate whether the aggressors were rebel fighters, individuals looking for a ransom, members of a progovernment militia, or a religious-based group with other motivations,” the organization reported.
GlobalPost’s chief executive, Philip S. Balboni, said the organization has been “working intensively” over the past six weeks with parties in the United States and the Middle East to secure Foley’s freedom.
“Jim is a brave and dedicated reporter who has spent much of the past year covering the civil war in Syria, believing like so many of his colleagues that this is a very important story for the American people to know more about,” he said in a statement. “We urge his captors to release him.”
The GlobalPost report said it was unclear whether Foley had been seized by the same group that captured an NBC News correspondent, Richard Engel, last month. Engel and three members of his team, who were abducted in the same region as Foley, were held captive for five days.
Foley was recently working for the French news service, Agence France-Presse....
In a column last year for a field guide for GlobalPost correspondents, Foley described the “harrowing experience” of being captured in Libya.
“I saw a colleague killed.... ,” he wrote.
Related: The Solution to the Libyan Question
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"30 killed in blast at gas station outside Damascus" by Anne Barnard | New York Times, January 03, 2013
BEIRUT —Also Wednesday, the family of James Foley — a freelance reporter for Agence-France Presse, the Global Post website, and other media outlets — announced that Foley was kidnapped Nov. 22 by gunmen in northwest Syria. Foley had survived detention by government forces in Libya while covering the conflict there.
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Related: Parents appeal for release of journalist kidnapped in Syria
"For war reporters, safe passage always a gamble; For correspondents, wrong choices can mean capture, death" by David Filipov | Globe Staff, January 06, 2013
It was July 2011, and I was in northern Afghanistan with a story to report: the return of the Taliban to a region that had celebrated the Islamists’ defeat in 2001. A translator I had met only a few days earlier was offering to set up an interview with village leaders who were trying to keep out militants who had taken control of nearby towns.
It would be quite a coup, but there was a catch. Afghan police barely patrolled the area. NATO forces had no presence there. To avoid capture, I would have to dress in Afghan clothes, speak only Dari in public, and not tell anyone where I was going. If I did not stay long, I could probably get my story and get out before the militants discovered I was there. Or so I was told.
I would also have to put my faith in people whom I did not know. Could I trust them? Was this piece of the story worth the risk?
This is the kind of delicate calculation reporters in war zones make all the time. James Foley, the freelance journalist whose family in New Hampshire last week reported him missing in Syria after he was kidnapped on Thanksgiving Day, has had to face similar choices. For the past three years, he has reported on conflicts in the Middle East and Afghanistan for Boston-based GlobalPost and other media.
Twice it has not worked out. In 2011 Foley was abducted while reporting in Libya and held for 44 days. The news of his latest capture has raised questions about the risks he took.
Were there precautions he could have taken?
Why put himself in harm’s way a second time?
Why travel, presumably unarmed and unprotected, in Idlib Province, the site of fierce fighting between Syrian government forces and rebel groups of various loyalties, where there are no clear battle lines and, therefore, no truly safe places?
Why even work in the country where at least 28 journalists died on assignment last year, making it the deadliest place in the world for media in 2012?
These are legitimate questions. And any journalist who has decided the story is worth covering has already answered them.
“The job is just very dangerous, no matter how you approach it, no matter how experienced and well-equipped you are,” said Matt McAllester, a senior editor for Time magazine who has covered conflicts in the Balkans, the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Africa. “And 99 times out of 100 you get away with it without any damage to your person. When that happens you get told you’ve done well and, often, your career progresses. It’s only after the times it goes wrong that anyone mentions mistakes.”
I met McAllester in Baghdad in 2003, just days before the US-led invasion of Iraq. And, as it turns out, just days before we both got in trouble with Saddam Hussein’s regime. I was thrown out of the country for using my satellite phone at the wrong time and place. McAllester was one of several journalists rounded up and held for eight terrifying days in Abu Ghraib prison....
Were they tortured like Iraqis?
Were they tortured like Iraqis?
* * *
In Afghanistan in 2011, I had to consider my translator’s proposal carefully. As a reporter in Chechnya, Afghanistan, and Iraq, I had learned, often through missteps, that the best first step before entering a war zone is to talk to other journalists who have been there.
The trouble was that no journalists had been to this village in Sholgara district in some time. It is in a remote valley in the southern edge of Balkh Province, where there has been little violence compared with other parts of Afghanistan. It mattered to me because I was retracing the route I had taken in 2001 as I reported on the Taliban’s defeat. The story of the militia’s return here was the point of my trip.
Before I arrived in the north, I asked for advice from people who are based in Kabul. One Western aid worker showed me a map of the north, indicated a highway that I would need to use, and said “No one goes here.” He wished me luck and asked me to let him know how it went.
In Sholgara, the best intelligence came from the assurances of Syeed Shafe, a security guard for a cellular phone company that has a tower near the village.
I had placed worse bets. In the fall of 2003, I worked with a translator in Iraq who dressed me and a photographer in traditional Iraqi clothes and spirited us into the insurgent hotbeds of Fallujah and Ramadi for a rare, and harrowing, interview with a Sunni fighter who was mounting attacks on US military convoys. It was a risky move, but I thought it was important to relay what America’s enemies on the ground were saying, and it seemed like the safest way to do it.
I felt less safe when the same translator later told me, “As a friend I like you, but as an Iraqi, I want to kill you.”
* * *
In the post-9/11 world, reporting from war zones has only gotten more dangerous for journalists. Charles M. Sennott, executive editor and cofounder of GlobalPost and a former Globe reporter who has covered conflicts for more than 20 years, reminded me how journalists used to write “PRESS” in fat letters on their flak jackets and helmets, and use duct tape to write “TV” on their vehicles.
“There was this experience that you were protected by that,” Sennott told me last week. “We are no longer protected by the fact that we are out there to bring home the truth.”
Oh, is that what they are doing?
Oh, is that what they are doing?
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"Rocket slams residential site in Aleppo" by Bassem Mroue | Associated Press, January 19, 2013
BEIRUT —An Al-Jazeera TV correspondent was killed in Syria on Friday, the second journalist to lose his life in as many days covering the brutal civil war.
Mohammed al-Masalmeh was shot to death by a sniper while covering fighting in his hometown of Busra al-Harir in the south.
A day earlier, French journalist Yves Debay was killed by a sniper in Aleppo....
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