NATO troops free kidnapped NY Times reporter

Reuters ^ | 9/8/2009

[james500]

NATO troops released a kidnapped New York Times reporter in Northern Afghanistan in a raid before dawn on Wednesday, after he had been held for four days, an Afghan district chief said.

Reporter Stephen Farrell, who is British, was abducted on Saturday along with his Afghan interpreter while attempting to visit the scene of a NATO air strike.

[Kartographer]

GOOD! Just in time for the them to give him his pink slip and lay him off.

[jiggyboy]

Now now. The last couple of days have been hell for him.

[Jeff Chandler]

Are they sure he was being held?

[Jeff Chandler]

Why would the Taliban hold one of their own?

[mathurine]

He was identified as a reporter by his bag of lies.

[True Republican Patriot]

Thats a total Waste of Energy and Risk Taking! Hopefully No Soldiers were Hurt in this Rescue of an Obvious Buffoon..:-)

[whatisthetruth]

I would've rather it had been Bergdahl who they rescued......

[LdSentinal]

Good news. Hopefully, the interpretor is ok as well.

[Reagan is King]

NYT? He was probably just an embedded reporter with the Taliban.

Now I'm sure he wants to hurry back to the office so he can write an article about how the evil soldiers kidnapped him from the Taliban "freedom fighters".

Sheesh, I'm tired of our troops having to put themselves in harms way to rescue these leftist boneheads. A NYT reporter should probably be considered an enemy combatant anyway.

[Justaham]

Was it worth the time and energy?

[Tzimisce]

They can keep the SOB..

[max americana]

I hope the interpreter is OK.

[Proud_USA_Republican]

Given the quick release of 4 days, they most likely discovered he was working for NYT and....
1). Looked at the NYT stock price and knew a ransom paid was not likely.
2). Traded him for a bag of rice and a virginal goat.
3). That he is a member of their propaganda division.
4). 4 days with a NYT reporter and the Taliban was already experiencing swine flu like sickness.

[james500]

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5g8-DEMtAE9q4i4ySQ0eV_qZefmRQD9AJKC9O0

Western military officials in Afghanistan say a British commando was killed during a raid early Wednesday that freed a New York Times reporter from his Taliban captors.

[james500]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/Afghanistan/article6826974.ece

A British journalist kidnapped by the Taleban has been freed by British Special Forces in a pre-dawn raid in northern Afghanistan – but his Afghan colleague was killed in the operation.

...

His Afghan colleague, Mohammad Sultan Munadi, was killed in the crossfire, officials said today.

Moments after the raid Mr Farrell told his American colleagues: “We were all in a room, the Talebs all ran, it was obviously a raid. We thought they would kill us. We thought should we go out.”

The two hostages ran outside. “There were bullets all around us. I could hear British and Afghan voices,” he added.

At the end of a wall, Mr Farrell said Mr Munadi went forward, shouting: “Journalist! Journalist!” but dropped in a hail of bullets. “I dived in a ditch,” said Mr Farrell, who said he did not know whether the shots had come from allied or militant fire.

After a minute or two, Mr Farrell, who holds dual Irish-British citizenship, said he heard more British voices and shouted, “British hostage!” The British voices told him to come over. As he did, Mr Farrell said he saw Mr Munadi.

“He was lying in the same position as he fell,” Mr Farrell said. “That’s all I know. I saw him go down in front of me. He did not move. He’s dead. He was so close, he was just two feet in front of me when he dropped.”

[Tulsa Ramjet]

“He was lying in the same position as he fell,” Mr Farrell said. “That’s all I know. I saw him go down in front of me. He did not move. He’s dead. He was so close, he was just two feet in front of me when he dropped.”

yeah, and a british commando died too. just so this guy could peddle his walter mitty fantasies.

[cranked]

Will be interesting to see how the NYT writes this one up.

[SkyPilot]

The NYT slimeball reporter will accept the Pulitzer Prize, and then all his applauding liberal journalism colleagues, editors, and synchphants will dine on shrimp ceviche and applaud themselves.

Does anyone remember the movie "The Killing Fields?" The NYT reporter, Syndey Schanberg, abandoned his Cambodian friend, Dith Pran, at the US Embassy. Schanberg beat feet out of there on US military aircraft, while Pran suffered under the Communists in labor camps and witnessed mass murder and torture.

In real life, Schanberg was a Communist apologist, and this made it all a bit embarrassing for the NYT.

Following years of U.S. carpet bombing campaigns over Cambodia and Laos, Schanberg wrote positively in The New York Times about the departure of the Americans and the coming regime change, writing about the Cambodians that "it is difficult to imagine how their lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone." The Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia in 1975 and killed approximately two million people. A dispatch he wrote on April 13, 1975, written from Phnom Penh, ran with the headline "Indochina without Americans: for most, a better life."[1] However, in the same piece, Schanberg also wrote, "This is not to say that the Communist-backed governments which will replace the American clients can be expected to be benevolent. Already, in Cambodia, there is evidence in the areas led by the Communist-led Cambodian insurgents that life is hard and inflexible, everything that Cambodians are not." However, in the same article, Schanberg then went on to reject claims that the communist takeover of Cambodia could lead to state-sponsored genocide: "Wars nourish brutality and sadism, and sometimes certain people are executed by the victors but it would be tendentious to forecast such abnormal behavior as a national policy under a Communist government once the war is over." He won the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his Cambodia coverage.

In the move, the NYT scumbag needs to shed a few tears for his friend. So, instead of blaming the Communists, the screenplay (which Schanberg was a consultant on), show him playing a video tape of stock footage showing evil American B-52 bombers, supposedly bombing women and children. He plays it to classical music. Then, he cries some more, and slams his fist down to protest the evil American military. Later on in the plot, he gives it to an American General, but good! Boy, does he lay him out in a liberal tantrum of self righteousness!

The liberal media cannot see evil from good. They cannot blame Muslims who capture, behead, and torture, because that would make the military and Conservatives look too good.

[SF_Redux]

NATO troops free kidnapped NY Times reporter

why?