Free Republic

We spent 10 months in Iraq, working on a story, understanding who the people are who are fighting, why they fight, what their fundamental beliefs are, when they started, what kinds of backgrounds they come from, what education, jobs they have. Were they former military, are they Iraqi or foreign? Are they part of al-Qaida? What we came up with is a story in itself, and one that Vanity Fair ran in July 2004 with my text and pictures. [My colleague Steve Connors] shot a documentary film that is still waiting to find a home. But the basic point for...

By Matthew McAllester Staff Correspondent April 23, 2003 PART ONE: NIGHT The first inmate I saw in Abu Ghraib prison did not wear a blindfold. He could barely see through his eyes. They were swollen ovals of purple and blue. Someone's fists, I supposed, did that to him. His shoulders slumping forward, he walked behind a guard into the cell block where we were being processed and was told to stand in the corner like a naughty school boy. He wore blue-and-white-striped pajamas and turned his face to the cinder-block walls, silent and stripped of any dignity. That man, I...

“WE KILL, we kill,” muttered the Iraqi driver of the pick-up truck speeding through the night-time streets of Baghdad bringing his helpless cargo of handcuffed Western journalists to Saddam Hussein’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison. Thus began the first of eight days in Iraqi captivity for Matt McAllester, a British foreign correspondent, the photographers Moises Saman, Molly Bingham and Johan Spanner, and a peace activist, Philip Latasha, who were seized without warning or explanation from their rooms in the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad while covering the war on Iraq. During the week in which neither families nor friends had any idea...

Freelance photographer contacts family LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) The family of a missing freelance photographer was overwhelmed Tuesday after receiving a telephone call from their daughter who was safe at the Iraqi border. Barry Bingham Jr., former publisher of The Courier-Journal in Louisville, received a call from his daughter, Molly, at 1:15 p.m. EST. ''His heart was pounding, you could see it in his throat,'' said Edie Bingham, referring to her husband's phone conversation with their daughter. The Binghams held a news conference Tuesday afternoon in downtown Louisville. ''Molly said she is OK,'' Barry Bingham said. ''She said she had...

MELVILLE, N.Y. (AP) -- Two Newsday journalists who disappeared from Baghdad may have been detained by Iraq's government, the newspaper's editor said Saturday. Reporter Matthew McAllester and photographer Moises Saman were last heard from Monday, and the newspaper has been unable to obtain information about their whereabouts from Iraqi officials, said editor Anthony Marro in a statement. Journalists expelled from Iraq have told Newsday that security officials on Monday came to the Baghdad hotel where they were staying and questioned reporters. Some were taken from the hotel. No one saw McAllester and Saman removed, but their room was empty...