Speaking With the Enemy By Mark Ames, AlterNet Posted on August 11, 2005 http://www.alternet.org/story/23970/
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"Freedom of speech is never an issue when a popular person expresses an acceptable point of view. It is of real value only because it guarantees us access to the unpopular, espousing the unacceptable. Then, we can reject or accept it, condemn it or embrace it. No one should have the authority to make that decision for us. Not our government, and certainly not somebody else's." -- Ted Koppel, ending the Nightline interview with Shamil Basayev, July 28, 2005
"[I]f I'm running a war and I've got representatives of ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, Al Jazeera, and the BBC, and they're out there with my troops and they've got the technical capacity to feed back what is happening live, so that the folks who are sitting in Baghdad have only to turn on their set to CNN and they can see what's happening on the front lines from the American vantage point -- I'm saying it would be criminal to permit that." -- Ted Koppel, Media Law Resource Center 2nd Annual Dinner Celebration, November 13, 2002
Russia's hysterical protest against the Nightline interview with Shamil Basayev offered up a rare opportunity for Americans on the left and right to unite and celebrate our deepest cultural virtues.
The story was almost too perfect. A villain -- the Kremlin -- who needs no complicated explanation beyond a "Soviet" or "authoritarian" modifier to drudge up the old archetype.
The hero -- America's religious commitment to free speech -- is immediately understood by all.
The object of the Kremlin-American clash -- Shamil Basayev, the Chechen warlord/terrorist who masterminded several spectacular terror attacks in Russia, including the one in Beslan last year that left nearly 350 people, mostly children, dead -- a mere backdrop to this tale. After all, Basayev doesn't threaten America, and he even seems to like us. It's the Kremlin that's the real villain.
Flying monkeys To recap: On July 28th, Nightline ran an interview with Basayev conducted by Radio Liberty reporter and Russian dissident Andrei Babitsky. The Russian government officially protested the broadcast, first by appealing to the U.S. government to pressure ABC not to run the interview, and afterwards, lashing out publicly and through diplomatic channels.
Within days, Russia's Defense Ministry declared a boycott of ABC, and on August 2, the government announced that it would not be renewing ABC's accreditation in Moscow, effectively shutting down their operations.
The White House's response was morally unassailable. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters, "The U.S. Government has no authority to prevent ABC from exercising its constitutional right to broadcast the interview."
A few days later, Tom Casey, acting spokesman for the State Department, added, "[W]e believe that ABC as well as all other members of the media should have the opportunity for freedom of expression and have the right to report as they see fit."
A strange thing happened right after Casey said that -- dozens of winged primates burst out of his ass, flew around the briefing room screeching and tearing at people's hair, then escaped through an open window. Not a single American reporter saw it happen. They were too busy preparing yet another story about Russia's return to the bad old days, like this New York Times lead published August 2: "Russia announced Tuesday that it was barring journalists from ABC News from working here, effectively expelling a foreign news organization for the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union." [italics mine]
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