WSWS on Pearl

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Tue Feb 26 09:16:15 PST 2002



>I would say the 'blather' was the boilerplate
>invocations of the CIA in the alien context of
>a crime against a journalist.
>
>mbs

The thought appears to occur to many, though, and not just to leftists. The Daniel Pearl murder evoked the following memory in the mind of John Kifner, who writes for the New York Times:

***** The New York Times February 24, 2002, Sunday, Late Edition - Final SECTION: Section 4; Page 7; Column 1; Week in Review Desk HEADLINE: Correspondence/Dangerous Stories; Doing Your Best to Gauge the Risks Where Reporting Isn't Too Safe BYLINE: By JOHN KIFNER

...I can still remember the chill, years ago in Beirut -- when hostage taking was in vogue -- during a rare, prized interview with Sheik Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, the Hezbollah leader, when he suddenly looked at me and said, "You ask questions like a spy."

The sheik almost never gave interviews, and the go-between that day was a wonderful Shiite Muslim taxi driver named Fahti. He had assisted me partly out of gratitude for my having helped to talk two Christian militiamen out of killing him near the Green Line that then divided the city. "My heart was in my shoes," Fahti had told me. This is the kind of murky, often violent world we must navigate. *****

Getting suspected of being a spy must be a familiar experience to many foreign correspondents. -- Yoshie

* Calendar of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Anti-War Activist Resources: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/activist.html> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osu.edu/students/CJP/>



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