AP story on this. Guess I could make a wise crack, but I will refrain.

D

Keep the ILLEGALS out, join NumbersUSA to send free faxes to your reps.

If the guy had gotten bumped off, they could revel in having known such "a brave and noble journalist" as this.

This is just the NYT proving any news that puts our enemies in a bad light is not fit to print.

Maybe I'm wrong.  Maybe they were hoping for an exclusive of the beheading.

♣

NYTimes. CNN. Both can keep a secret. They do conspire! And they have plenty of friends.

This remindes me of an infamous op-ed in the NY Times back in April of 2003. Eason Jordan was the chief news executive at CNN. As soon as the US under President Bush had initially successfully caused the fall of the Hussein regime - a regime which had caused the deaths of over 2 million human beings in the 2 decades preceeding the invasion - the NY Times published this confession from Jordan:

The News We Keep to Ourselves

I felt awful having these stories bottled up inside me. Now that Saddam Hussein's regime is gone, I suspect we will hear many, many more gut-wrenching tales from Iraqis about the decades of torment. At last, these stories can be told freely.

That afternoon, I engaged Mr. Jordan in a unique e-mail exchange in which I challenged him to do just that: to lead CNN in producing specials to illustrate to the world what they had learned and kept hidden from all of us for those many years. His response was not to worry, all would be told, in due time.

Hmmph!

Although our national media spent the next many years more focused on doing their best to undermine the effort in Iraq, it was obvious that Eason Jordan's column had been read - as it popped up from time to time. Later on, of course, he would be forced to resign over disgraceful charges he made about our men and women in uniform. His true identity is no secret.

In an interesting twist to the comment I just made -  that his column of 2003 had made the  rounds - the selective reading, or is it memory, or is it what one [journalists) wants to see when one has an agenda - came to light when the LA Times published a piece by Ned Martel, in covering Jordan's resignation. He offerred up this piece of fiction:

"While at CNN, Jordan also had provoked many activists and critics in an April 2003 opinion piece in the New York Times. Jordan asserted that he sometimes could not allow his network to report all it had learned during the intense early days of combat in Iraq, for fear that releasing certain confidential information would put lives in jeopardy."

 No.. no..  no! That's not what Jordan wrote about in his op-ed. It was not about the US action in Iraq in early 2003, it was about the horrors of the Saddam Hussein regime. Surely the NY Times and CNN would not have hidden from their public any perceived horrors of war involving US troops in action.

The LA Times did issue the correction - a weak one, however.

(;~/ gary  

After listening to Keller pontificate about why they exposed the secrets of our war on terror, putting the country in danger and putting our military in danger, and then we see the steps the Times was willing to take to protect one of their own.  Does Keller really understand how strange that all sounds to, what one would assume, are his fellow Americans?  Are we in this together?  Apparently, the NY Times in in a world of its own which may be why it's falling apart at the seams. 

Anyone want to bet how many secrets the Times can keep for Obama?  

Election 2008-God's way of showing us that elections count.  

He didn't escape from the Taliban. He was embeded with them. In the near future we are going to see endearing stories about the brave Taliban freedom fighters in the NYT.

  What we say and do and reveal will have an effect on our enemies.

  Like for example revealing pictures of naked terrorists, wrongly reporting we flushed a large book down a super toilet, wrongly reporting the number of civilians deaths in a bombing, electing candidates that tell us how wrong our war was, constantly showing idiots opposing the war, wrongly accusing marines of murder and revenge (haditha), or reporting our exact legal procedures for interrogating captured terrorists?

 Thank you New York Times for the timely lesson. 6 years in.

Sincerely,

a Veteran of a 1000 psychic wars.

Since this story is coming out of the NY Times, I question whether it's even true?  They are so pathetic in trying to prop themselves up that it wouldn't surprise me that this is totally made up and the guy has been vacationing in Bali for the last 7 months, or doing whatever, then decides to fabricate some Rambo Super Hero story about himself.  Climbing over a wall of a Taliban stronghold doesn't sound realistic.  Why was he allowed to wander around?  Why wasn't he in restraints?  Why was he able to walk back from this stronghold without anybody catching him or even noticing that he was missing?  It sounds like the Taliban is either totally asleep here and they could care less who comes and goes in their territory, or something is missing from the story.

 As for the ability to keep a secret, I wonder if anybody even knew he was kidnapped?  If it never happened, it would explain why nobody mentioned it or made a big deal of it. Remember Pearl?  When a journalist gets into trouble, they all band together to an extreme extent that you'd think god himself was in trouble.  The only people that they truly care about are themselves. If one of them were kidnapped and held by the Taliban, I think it would have been front page news from the day it happened.

 Nothing about this story adds up and allot of it seems like a scam.

My initial reaction was also an amazement at the NYT (along with the rest of the news media) for being able to keep such a secret. After years of screaming about the public's right to know trumping all else, we learn that when a journalist is in danger, the story becomes top secret and classified.

Upon reflection, I've been wondering about a different aspect of the story. When one combines the two facts that "no ransom was paid" and Rohde "escaped" by climbing over a compound wall and simply ran away, one wonders about these things.

Is the Taliban really so inept as to let a captured American escape like this? (Has this ever happened before?)

Does the NYT really have the backbone to resist paying ransom?

I'm not normally one to entertain conspiracy theories, but assuming that a ransom was paid, wouldn't the Times be too embarrassed to admit it and need a cover story...like "he bravely escaped his captors"?

Its too bad that there isn't a Freedom of Information Act that applies to news organizations where we could demand access to their documents in an attempt to know the truth. Unfortunately, the FFA is a one-way street that works in favor of journalists... journalists who feel they have the right to dispense what they learn as they see fit.