Posted on 12/26/2006 11:33:37 AM PST by ricks_place
New York Times correspondent Carlotta Gall tells ABC News she was assaulted by plain-clothed government security agents while reporting in Quetta, a Pakistani city near the Afghan frontier where NATO suspects the Taliban hides its shadow government.
Akhtar Soomro, a freelance Pakistani photographer working with Gall, was detained for five-and-a-half hours. According to Gall, the agents broke down the door to her hotel room, after she refused to let them enter, and began to seize her notebooks and laptop. When she tried to stop them, she says one of the men punched her twice in the face and head.
"I fell backwards onto a coffee table smashing the crockery," she recalled in a written account of the incident. "I have heavy bruising on my arms, on my temple and my cheekbone, and swelling on my left eye and a sprained knee."
Gall says the agents accused her and Soomro of trying to meet the Taliban. They identified themselves as working for Pakistan's Special Branch, an undercover police department, but Gall said other local reporters identified them as employees from one of the country's two powerful spy agencies: Inter-Services Intelligence or Military Intelligence.
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.abcnews.com ...
Right about now, the NSA guys are asking themselves: "Why didn't we try that?!?"
Nah, ya got it all wrong Laz. That's the "after" picture. After they beat her with an ugly stick.
Awwwww....too bad.
Better put some ice on that, Carlotta.
guilty.
Carlotta Gall had a ringside seat in Afghan court when Jack, Brent and Ed first appeared, with fresh wounds still visible from their beatings at Saderat. Carlotta Gall never reported a word of it. At NRO a commenter pointed out:
A quick Google search reveals, for example, that the Timess vitriolic Carlotta Gall is the daughter of Sandy Gall, a British citizen with long-term involvement with Afghanistan and who was a vocal Massoud supporter. Massoud and Dostum were sometimes allies but sometimes bitter rivals, and Sandy Galls writing about Afghanistan is peppered with references to the dangers posed by Dostum check it out on Google or Lexis. Perhaps the New York Times might have thought about the validity of sending her to report on her family enemy?
http://tinyurl.com/wuoxe
And the worst Times reporter in Afghanistan is beyond a doubt Carlotta Gall, who, as I detailed in a January 4 New York Post op-ed, went so far as to not report what Dostum said at a press conference in which he warned that the Taliban are still a threat and offered to go after them with his own forces. Instead, Gall replaced his words with her attacks again without any evidence on his character.
http://tinyurl.com/t5npz
the unsupported insinuations blossomed in the hands of New York Times correspondents. In a particularly egregious violation of good journalistic practice, Carlotta Gall quoted "one influential businessman, who gave only his first name, Siddiq," as her sole source for the very serious allegation that Khan has been receiving arms from Iran (New York Times, January 22). Can you imagine her newspaper accusing an American governor or mayor of a similar infraction based on "one influential businessman, who gave only his first name, John"?
The reporter is lucky to be still alive....Mullah Omar is reported to be living in Quetta...and snooping in that part of the world will get you killed.
More than likely she was beat up by Taliban.
What I think it all boils down to is that reporters nowadays think in terms of boarder free reporters and that they think they have rights that the U.S. and U.N. gives them in any country regardless of what is happening in the country they go to more so than any of that country's citizens and when they get rough up a little bit or maybe even killed it is never their own fault for being at the wrong place at the wrong time and acting as if nothing can happen to them, that they are above it all because all they are doing is reporting what is going on.
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