OK, this will be a short diary, but this is very good news. Libya has acknowledged capturing Pulitzer-prize winning NYT reporter Anthony Shadid and three of his colleagues and will release them. They were captured near Ajdabiya on Tuesday during the government counter-attack against rebels. Here's the link to the NYT story:
http://www.nytimes.com/...
The four journalists include a videographer who is either very reckless, or very lucky, or both - having been captured by the Taliban and rescued by British SAS.
The journalists are Anthony Shadid, The Times’s Beirut bureau chief and a two-time Pulitzer-prize winning foreign correspondent; two photographers, Tyler Hicks and Ms. Addario, who have extensive experience in war zones; and a reporter and videographer, Stephen Farrell...
Here's a rather bizarre quote from Saif al-Islam Qaddafi, the "good cop" among the younger Qaddafi thugs, and the one they trot out when they want to make nice to the West. He's referring to one of the female photographers. Muammar Qaddhafi has always had a thing about young women, in a kind of "action flick with female gunslingers" kind of way and surrounds himself with female bodyguards, so it is not too surprising that they would focus on the captured woman during their press release. I find it an odd statement and strange in that they seem to be trying to kiss up to the US administration.
“They entered the country illegally and when the army, when they liberated the city of Ajdabiya from the terrorists and they found her, they arrest her because you know, foreigners in this place,” Mr. Qaddafi said, according to the transcript of the interview. “But then they were happy because they found out she is American, not European. And thanks to that, she will be free tomorrow.”
Anyway, I feared for these journalists lives (and still fear for them until they are released) especially given the UN Security Council Resolution.
The story resonates slightly with me on a personal level. Anthony Shadid was in my Arabic class at University of Wisconsin - although he was a really nice guy, he got on my nerve from time to time because he drove up the grading curve and made it harder on the rest of us with more impoverished language skills. He is from a Lebanese family and spoke pretty good Arabic already. The class was a wonderful interactive language class with a great Moroccan teacher named Idris Sharqawi. Idris was always getting us to role play, speak to each other extemporaneously, interact. So I remember Anthony pretty well and have always felt the slight nervousness of seeing his by-line from so many dangerous places. Glad he and his colleagues will be released, and I hope this happens before the bombing starts.