You’d think the international community could have thought to do it. Ambassadorship 101: send convivial fat man to make entreaties. The US has enjoyed outrageous success springing its non-combatant innocent- trespasser media-propagandists from Iran and North Korea. The so-called axes of evil have granted special pardons to accommodate air-brained Americans, lest our public opinion start crying for blood. Evil has more grace than the US has shown for its innocent detainees in Guantanamo, which it force-feeds through hunger-strikes as they protest indefinite and wrongful internment. But when our enemies release their captives, we call it saving face.
Now of course Iran is faced with the capture of three more itinerants, hikers Shane Bauer, Sarah Shourd and Joshua Fattal. And lo, Bauer is now revealed to be a journalist for New American Media. Easily confused with Laura Ling and Euna Lee’s “Current Media LLC?”
[UPDATE 1: NOW TWO of the hikers are known to be journalists, having reported about Genocide in Darfur and the Golan Heights, among other US State Dept approved stories.
UPDATE 2: NOW media mouthpieces are expressing fears that delicate information carried by Laura Ling and Euna Lee about North Korea escape routes was uncovered by their NK captors. Meaning… uh, Ling and Lee were actually working against NK interests after all?]
The three –how improbable– Berkeley grads were apprehended where the US military has long admitted to be operating special forces. Are we to expect that all US commandos do not have a media-ready cover? What are the Delta Forces but American recreation nuts, crazy for outdoor hardship and manly games with knives and balaclavas?
Only Burma stand obstinate, determined that Mormon-playing-idiot John Yettaw, is more a bumbling Hasenfus than an Aung San Suu Kyi groupie. The bumbling, epileptic ideologue archetype serves America well when its intelligence agents are apprehended. Was Yettaw trying to spring Suu Kyi, or was he there to trip the wires and send the iconic freedom worker to prison?