'Happy' Hostage Homecoming (Pelf paid for Frog femme's freedom)

FrontPage Magazine ^ | June 24, 2005 | Nidra Poller

[quidnunc]

Paris – Where was Amnesty International last winter when French journalist Florence Aubenas sat crouched in a dark airless cellar somewhere near Bakuba, blindfolded, hands and feet bound, half-starved, forbidden to speak, hardly allowed to move, punished for the slightest infraction? Speaking at a packed press conference in Paris on June 14th, Aubenas told how she spent five months as a prisoner of vaguely identified mujahidin whose low-level cruelty — after all, they didn’t behead her — should set off bells at Time and Newsweek, where exposing the alleged mistreatment of jihadi prisoners at Guantanamo seems to be a new kind of religion. 

What was the French journalist guilty of, why was she treated so badly, how could it take the ultra sophisticated French government five months to liberate her, what did they give and promise in exchange? Did she or did she not share 55 days of captivity with the Romanian journalists released on the 22nd of May? 

The press conference was a one-way street: Aubenas told her story with disarming charm, gave evasive answers to serious questions, and abruptly closed the session without letting her colleagues probe any further. You could not help being impressed by the strength of character of the 44 year-old journalist with the smiling blue eyes and sweet sense of humor, clearly delighted to recover her freedom…and her coquetterie too. Her exotic earrings dangled and sparkled in sharp contrast to the ordeal she described: one shower per month, meager rations, two trips to the bathroom per day, deprived of light and fresh air, deprived of her identity by captors who downgraded her from Florence to Leila to Number 6. 157 days of uninterrupted gratuitous cruelty.

-snip-

[boofus]

She had it good compared to the sanitized, air conditioned, 3 meals and 5 prayers a day hellhole known as Gitmo. /sarcasm

[TheMightyQuinn]

Florence Aubenas sat crouched in a dark airless cellar...

she must have strong lungs.

[StormEye]

Why are French citizens allowed into Iraq?
Why are French "journalists" allowed into Iraq.
Can't the US military just arrest them if they are
found and kick them out?

[cake_crumb]

They didn't make her wear her panties on her head, so it's not newsworthy.

[cake_crumb]

Florence Aubenas, who works for the free-wheeling leftwing daily Libération, and her Iraqi fixer, former fighter pilot Hussein Hanun Al Saadi, were captured on January 5th just two weeks after Georges Malbrunot and Christian Chesnot were pried out of the clutches of the “Islamic Army of Iraq.” Aubenas was captured after interviewing refugees from, as she expresses it, “Al Falluja, the city the Americans destroyed.” Her fixer Hussein, joyously reunited with his wife and four children in Baghdad, describes his jailers as “Islamic salafists, Iraqi patriots who are fighting against the Americans,” adding that they are “moderates.” They did not behead him either.

[cake_crumb]

And the reward for dhimmitude is...

…further humiliation. Greater cruelty. Harsher conditions. Abject surrender.

Well, that's France for ya.