Thursday night NBC Nightly News aired Bill Neely's "exclusive" interview with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. As Neely later explained, he's been angling for an interview with Assad for 5 years, and finally it came through.
Thus Neely adds his name to a list of journalists who have lowered the standards of their profession by wallowing in the depths of moral corruption as they pride themselves on securing a big "get." What makes so many journalists want to sit down with a tyrant like Assad? Because he's edgy and buzz-worthy. Ok, but he's a mass murderer. Exactly. He's a big "get" precisely because he's killed lots of people.
Diane Sawyer chatted up Assad in 2007, back before the despot amped up the buzz saw and was just sending foreign fighters across the Iraq border to kill Americans. Sure, it was cool to know what he had on his http://www.weeklystandard.com/giving-cover-to-assad/article/611683" target="_blank">iPod</a> but the interview wasn't markedly different from Ann Curry's "<a href="http://www.today.com/id/18535452/ns/today/t/transcript-syrian-president-bashar-assad/#.V4fzQI6bd74" target="_blank">exclusive</a>" the same year. Joan Juliet Buck <a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/the-dictator-wears-prada/article/552536" target="_blank">palled</a> around with Assad and the lovely and stylish first lady for a gushing Vogue profile published in Spring 2011 right when the regime started to send Syrian parents the mutilated corpses of their little boys. "Brian Williams, Bob Simon, and Scott Pelley all flattered Assad in hope of getting the scoop, but it was Barbara Walters who won the up close and personal in December 2011, when the genial, Western-educated, computer savvy, reform-minded president's death count hadn't even broken four digits yet.
Cue Bill Neely. Apparently the man has no olfactory nerve or how else could he have withstood the stench of corpses as he procured his scoop in the midst of maybe half a million dead Syrians? And what did he want to know? If Assad thought it was a problem that Donald Trump has no foreign policy experience? Yep, NBC provided a platform for an Oriental despot dripping with gore to opine about the American political process.
Oh sure, he's got lots of other hard-hitting questions, and you can imagine what Team Neely is telling the boss. __When you asked him how it feels when people say you have blood on your hands, that's a question they'll be teaching for years at every J school in America. Man, you saved lives with that interview.__
"You know what the first draft of history is saying," Neely says to Assad, "that you're a brutal dictator, you are a man with blood on your hands, more blood on your hands than even on you father."
"No," Assad replies. "I will draw that example if you have a doctor who cut the hand because of a gangrene to save the patient, you do not say he's a brutal doctor. He's doing his job in order to save the rest of the body. So, when you protect your country from the terrorists and you kill terrorists and you defeat terrorists, you are not brutal; you are a patriot. That is how you look at yourself, and that's how the people want to look at you."
There you have it—an American news network has given airtime to a dictator to explain himself. It doesn't matter how hard you think your questions are, this particular regime, as one of Assad's American-educated press aides boasted, prides itself on manipulating the media. Further, the way Assad sees the interview, his real audience isn't American, rather it's Syrian. The purpose is to signal anyone who opposes him that their rebellion is pointless. The Americans aren't going to help, not Obama, not Clinton, not Trump, no one. America isn't against him, they see he's the answer—they love him, and that's why they put him on American TV. Neely's interview legitimized Assad and disheartened the opposition.
But of course that doesn't matter to the kind of moralizing fraud whose career goal the last five years was to interview Assad—the head of a police state that uses chemical weapons on its own population. Do Syrian lives matter?
These journalists don't even care about their own. The Assad regime has been in the business of murdering journalists for four decades, like Samir Kassir, Gebran Tueni, and of course Marie Colvin. Sure, Neely asks Assad if he is responsible for the death of Colvin, and guess what? Assad says he didn't do it. "It's a war and she came illegally to Syria," said Assad. "She worked with the terrorists, and because she came illegally, she's been responsible of everything that befall on her."
The Colvin family thinks otherwise. They've filed a wrongful death suit against the Syrian government and accuse it of targeting and killing Colvin "as part of a systematic strategy to silence civilian journalists and activists covering the war." The suit contends that Assad and other high-ranking regime officials tracked foreign journalists, like Colvin, who was killed February 22, 2012 when the regime shelled a building used by foreign journalists located in the Baba Amr neighborhood of Homs.
The complaint says that in January 2012 Syrian intelligence chief Ali Mamlouk and Assad's late brother-in-law Asef Shawkat told Arab League monitors that foreign journalists were intelligence agents, demanded information on them and said they could "destroy Baba Amr in 10 minutes" if "there were no cameras." In February, according to the New York Times, Mamlouk and a deputy, Rafiq Shehadeh, learned from intelligence contacts in Lebanon that foreign journalists were en route to Baba Amr. On Feb. 21, military intelligence officials intercepted their phone signals, the complaint says, and an informer in Baba Amr identified the media center's location. Early the next day, artillery attacks on the center killed Colvin and a colleague, Remi Ochlik.
Joshua Landis, a Syria expert at the University of Oklahoma known to be sympathetic to the Assad regime, has published on his Syria Comment blog a long, and anonymous, refutation of the Colvin family's charges. Like Assad, the author says Colvin is responsible for her own death. The article seeks to correct some of the points made in the complaint, and most significantly contends that the regime's capabilities were not sophisticated enough to electronically track targets and besides the regime was too busy fighting insurgents and had little time to worry about journalists.
"Syrian security chiefs," the post argues, "surely wanted to detain and expel foreign journalists who had entered Syria illegally to report and at least in their view promote an insurgency, but they did not want to kill them, even in Syria western lives have more value than those of locals."
How does the author know that the regime did not want to kill journalists? Did regime figures tell him this? And in any case, what is the evidence it is true? Did he read their minds? Or is he just running interference? The regime may believe that "Western lives" have more value, but that hasn't prevented it from targeting Westerners before, in Iraq for instance. If the regime believes that Western journalists are, like their own regime friendly journalists, intelligence assets, why not target them, at least for the purpose of discouraging others to report on the war?
We don't know because the author of a post that details the thinking of the regime, as well as its military and intelligence operations, has chosen not to identify himself.
When I asked Landis on Twitter if he was subpoenaed in the Colvin case he would continue to protect the identity of the author of a blog post defending a sanctioned and designated state sponsor of terrorism against charges regarding the wrongful death of an American citizen, the publisher of Syria Comment declined to answer.