person:richard engel

L’enlèvement de Richard Engel sent mauvais : la version de NBC est totalement improbable.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/12/22/richard-engel-s-kidnapping-a-behind-the-scenes-look.html

He says the kidnappers were members of the shabiha, a government militia loyal to President Bashar al-Assad, who talked of exchanging the crew for four Iranians and two members of the Lebanese Shiite paramilitary group Hizbullah being held by FSA rebels.

The NBC version, though, omits much and is at odds with what security sources involved in the freeing of the group say happened. Declining to be named for this article, they say the abduction and rescue of the TV crew “wasn’t as clean cut as stated.” They say the network is at pains to present the incident in the best possible light, masking a series of basic security lapses that may have contributed to the capture of Engel and his production team.

First, the sources say the gunmen who seized the crew may also have included rogue members of the rebel FSA–something top FSA commanders are keen to obscure. According to one source, “NBC’s security advisers were convinced that there was some FSA involvement in this and contacted wealthy Syrian-American donors of the rebel group, pointing out that Richard had been supportive of the uprising against Assad. They urged them to put pressure on the FSA. They really screwed down on them.” Top FSA commanders were alarmed and promised to help.

The disclosure that rogue FSA fighters may been involved in the abduction of the NBC crew will alarm Western correspondents working in Syria, who have to rely on FSA rebels for their safety in a particularly testing war zone of constantly shifting frontlines.

The proliferation of fringe armed groups, some with criminal and smuggling backgrounds, and Jihadist militias, especially in the Syrian province of Idlib, where the NBC crew was kidnapped, and in Aleppo, where they’d been for several days before the abduction, is making the conflict zone especially dangerous for reporters. So too is the fragmentation of the FSA when it comes to command and control.

Ce qui n’empêche pas France 24 de s’aligner sur une dépêche AFP qui reprend sans distance les élucubrations de Engel :

Selon M. Engel, leurs ravisseurs ont été entraînés en Iran et recrutés par le Hezbollah libanais, et voulaient échanger les journalistes contre quatre agents iraniens, deux individus libanais et d’autres personnes capturées par les rebelles syriens.

« Ils voulaient nous emmener dans une place forte du Hezbollah en Syrie (...) On était en route quand on couru vers un poste de contrôle tenu par des rebelles » syriens, a-t-il précisé.

Israel teams with terror group to kill Iran’s nuclear scientists, U.S. officials tell NBC News – Rock Center with Brian Williams
http://rockcenter.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/02/08/10354553-israel-teams-with-terror-group-to-kill-irans-nuclear-

Deadly attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists are being carried out by an Iranian dissident group that is financed, trained and armed by Israel’s secret service, U.S. officials tell NBC News, confirming charges leveled by Iran’s leaders.

The group, the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, has long been designated as a terrorist group by the United States, accused of killing American servicemen and contractors in the 1970s and supporting the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran before breaking with the Iranian mullahs in 1980.

The attacks, which have killed five Iranian nuclear scientists since 2007 and may have destroyed a missile research and development site, have been carried out in dramatic fashion, with motorcycle-borne assailants often attaching small magnetic bombs to the exterior of the victims’ cars.

U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the Obama administration is aware of the assassination campaign but has no direct involvement.

The "Anderson Cooper Effect" on American TV Reporting from Cairo
http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/525/the-anderson-cooper-effect-on-american-tv-reporting-from-cairo

During the afternoon of February 2, from the start of attacks by men on horseback and camels to the lobbing of molotov cocktails into crowds and hurling blocks of cement from rooftops, the journalists on the ground were making sense of the mayhem. They validated the narrative coming from tweeted and blogged accounts by pro-democracy protesters: the thugs started it, the response was defensive, the will to resist was strong, and the like. By the night of February 2-3, the American TV media was projecting the line that Mubarak was to blame and that the violence was a one-sided “dirty trick” of bald proportions. They also forced their producers and US-based reporters to address the fact that Americans—including President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—who  had believed that “peaceful transition” was what the Egyptian regime had committed to the day before had been had. MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell was scathing in her criticism of Mubarak’s incitement of violence and the US government’s gullibility.

Bon sang, il faut attendre que des journalistes reçoivent des coups de barre de fer dans la gueule pour que la profession prenne conscience de ce qu’est une dictature ? Pfiou. Si seulement Bush avait envoyé un peu plus de reporters de CNN se faire torturer à Guantanamo...