The four New York Times journalists who were kidnapped in Libya have now written their story. Here's an excerpt:
All of us had had close calls over the years. Lynsey was kidnapped in Falluja, Iraq, in 2004; Steve in Afghanistan in 2009. Tyler had more scrapes than he could count, from Chechnya to Sudan, and Anthony was shot in the back in 2002 by a man he believed to be an Israeli soldier. At that moment, though, none of us thought we were going to live. Steve tried to keep eye contact until they pulled the trigger. The rest of us felt the powerlessness of resignation. You feel empty when you know that it's almost over.
"Shoot them," a tall soldier said calmly in Arabic. A colleague next to him shook his head. "You can't," he insisted. "They're Americans."
They bound our hands and legs instead — with wire, fabric or cable. Lynsey was carried to a Toyota pickup, where she was punched in the face. Steve and Tyler were hit, and Anthony was headbutted.
Even that Tuesday, a pattern had begun to emerge. The beating was always fiercest in the first few minutes, an aggressiveness that Colonel Qaddafi's bizarre and twisted four decades of rule inculcated in a society that feels disfigured. It didn't matter that we were bound, or that Lynsey was a woman.
For a long time during the Iraq War, it was fashionable in some quarters to pour derision on journalists who reported accurately from Iraq, explaining to Americans just how horrifying the situation was. They were called biased, even called traitors, for doing their job with courage their armchair critics couldn't muster in a hundred years. It's important that we remember that the people who do this are every bit as worthy of praise as the men and women of our military. They risk their lives so that Americans can understand the events in which their government involves itself.
Sometimes they get kidnapped, and sometimes they lose their lives. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 44 journalists were killed either in the act of reporting or because of their reporting in 2010.
