CBS reporter's Cairo nightmare

CBS reporter's Cairo nightmare

Michael Shain, Don Kaplan and Kate Sheehy
New York Post
February 16, 2011

"60 Minutes" correspondent Lara Logan was repeatedly sexually assaulted by thugs yelling, "Jew! Jew!" as she covered the chaotic fall of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Cairo's main square Friday, CBS and sources said yesterday.

The TV crew with Logan, who is also the network's chief foreign correspondent, had its cameras rolling moments before she was dragged off -- and caught her on tape looking tense and trying to head away from a crowd of men behind her in Tahrir Square.

"Logan was covering the jubilation . . . when she and her team and their security were surrounded by a dangerous element amidst the celebration," CBS said in a statement. "It was a mob of more than 200 people whipped into a frenzy.

"In the crush of the mob, [Logan] was separated from her crew. She was surrounded and suffered a brutal and sustained sexual assault and beating before being saved by a group of women and an estimated 20 Egyptian soldiers.

"She reconnected with the CBS team, returned to her hotel and returned to the United States on the first flight the next morning," the network added. "She is currently in the hospital recovering."

A network source told The Post that her attackers were screaming, "Jew! Jew!" during the assault. And the day before, Logan had told Esquire.com that Egyptian soldiers hassling her and her crew had accused them of "being Israeli spies." Logan is not Jewish.

In Friday's attack, she was separated from her colleagues and attacked for between 20 to 30 minutes, The Wall Street Journal said.

Her injuries were described to The Post as "serious."

CBS went public with the incident only after it became clear that other media outlets were on to it, sources said.

"A call came in from The [Associated Press]" seeking information, a TV-industry source told The Post. "They knew she had been attacked, and they had details. CBS decided to get in front of the story."

Most network higher-ups didn't even know how brutal the sexual assault was until a few minutes before the statement went out.

"We were surprised it stayed quiet" as long as it did, one source said.

Another source insisted that Logan was "involved in the process" of deciding whether to make her attack public, and ultimately understood why the statement had to be released.

The horrific incident came a week after the 39-year-old reporter was temporarily detained by Egyptian police amid tensions over foreign coverage of the country's growing revolution.

As part of the anti-media backlash, CNN's Anderson Cooper had also been roughed up, and ABC correspondent Brian Hartman had been threatened with beheading.

"[Logan] was not in the country for long -- she'd been thrown out, if you remember -- and had just gone back in," one source said.

"She had security with her, but it wasn't enough."

Before the attack, Logan -- who is based in Washington, where she lives with her 2-year-old daughter and husband -- had been set to return to the States sometime over the weekend to tape a "60 Minutes" segment on Wael Ghonim.

Ghonim, Google's head of marketing in the Middle East, had been briefly kidnapped after helping to organize protesters.

But after she was assaulted, Logan went back to her hotel, and within two hours -- sometime late Friday and into early Saturday -- was flown out of Cairo on a chartered network jet, sources said.

She wasn't taken to a hospital in Egypt because the network didn't trust local security there, sources said.

And neither CBS nor Logan reported the crime to Egyptian authorities because they felt they couldn't trust them, either, the sources said. "The way things are there now, they would have ended up arresting her again," one source said.

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I keep saying, I fear this is not going to end well for anyone, and this only reinforces that fear.

Our mainstream media are whitewashing this "uprising." There is FAR too much we do not know about what is happening in Egypt.

Again, I do not see this ending well...

I still fail to see justification for the hinted 'Islamist uprising' suggested by the right wing media. After all, nobody said that the blacks in the USA were about to seize power because of the Rodney King riots. Or perhaps they did?

There have been several incidents of intimidation or attacks by small groups against members of the international media, so what? Perhaps the next time we hear of a Jew being lynched in the mid-west, instead of thinking to myself 'those people are mental, I'm glad they are a minority' perhaps I should use the story to prop up my xenophobia and nationalist narcissism?

This isn't aimed at anybody in particular, I just want to understand how instilling fear about the rest of the world and suggesting that they all think and do alike equates to being 'a balanced viewpoint'.

The funny thing is that the people who rave most about 'tyranny' and 'government freedom' are the people who support the dictators in many countries of the world. Of course, the US has been doing that for decades, so that's old news.

The_Amber_Spyglass wrote:I still fail to see justification for the hinted 'Islamist uprising' suggested by the right wing media. After all, nobody said that the blacks in the USA were about to seize power because of the Rodney King riots. Or perhaps they did?

There have been several incidents of intimidation or attacks by small groups against members of the international media, so what? Perhaps the next time we hear of a Jew being lynched in the mid-west, instead of thinking to myself 'those people are mental, I'm glad they are a minority' perhaps I should use the story to prop up my xenophobia and nationalist narcissism?

This isn't aimed at anybody in particular, I just want to understand how instilling fear about the rest of the world and suggesting that they all think and do alike equates to being 'a balanced viewpoint'.

I can understand where their concern comes from - though it is not necessarily justified in this case. The Muslim Brotherhood, though only representing 20% or so of the Egyptian people, are the most politically organized party in the country, now that the NDP is out. One needn't be a majority to effect a takeover of a country. We saw that in Iran. This is the only thing that concerns me. With no real traditions and institutions of democratic self-rule, there is a vacuum that begs to be filled with the first party that has the organization to make things happen and get people elected. Remember, having one free vote does not a democracy make. There have to be successive free votes. ONE free vote only would simply be trading one tyrant for another.

That is why I am reserving judgment until I either get more reliable information, or events on the ground tip in one direction or another.

I don't see any stuff from right wing media that I haven't in the "regular" media. Each and every one of them has toyed with the idea that Egypt could turn into another Iran. Unlikely but plausible.

But that wasn't the point of this article.

But here's another take on this very article's issue.......

CBS complicit in news coverup

Michael Graham
Boston Herald
Thursday, February 17, 2011

“[60 Minutes] correspondent Lara Logan was repeatedly sexually assaulted by thugs yelling, ‘Jew! Jew!’ as she covered the chaotic fall of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Cairo’s main square Friday.”

Powerful reporting on an important story. Two problems: It didn’t run until yesterday, and CBS didn’t run it. The quote is from the New York Post. And it was The Wall Street Journal that reported “the separation and assault lasted roughly 20 to 30 minutes.”

But CBS? They sat on their own story. For five days, as reporters reveled amid giddy celebrations in Tahrir Square, and as President Obama praised President Obama’s handling of the Egyptian crisis, CBS reported nothing.

Only when other media had the story did CBS break the news that its own chief foreign correspondent was the victim of “a brutal and sustained sexual assault.”

Five days of silence — not even “60 Minutes” coverage of the Egypt story. No mention of the “mob of more than 200 people whipped into frenzy” who attacked their own reporter.

How is that not news?

Some women journalists, like WGBH’s Callie Crossley, complain that CBS should never have reported the story, that Logan should be treated like a rape victim in the United States. But I’m with liberal columnist Richard Cohen of The Washington Post:

“The sexual assault of a woman in the middle of a public square is a story  . . .  particularly because the crowd in Tahrir Square was almost invariably characterized as friendly and out for nothing but democracy,” Cohen wrote.

Watching the same complicit media we all saw, Cohen notes most journalists covered the mobs “as if they were reporting from Times Square on New Year’s Eve, stopping only at putting on a party hat.”

Even CBS’s own statement said Logan was “covering the jubilation” and was attacked “amidst the celebration.”

Having 200 “good guys” gang assault a female reporter while screaming “Jew! Jew!” doesn’t fit the narrative. Is that why CBS sat on the story?

Or is it the cultural issue? A rape in a bar is a sex crime. But a pack of political protesters who rape a “Jew” in public is a story about culture.

Rapes happen everywhere, it’s true. And political protests are a global phenomenon, too. But as Slate.com’s Rachel Larimore says, “there’s a huge difference between flipping over a truck and spraying friends with beer and prying a woman away from her security detail and sexually assaulting her.”

Larimore wonders if “Logan’s attack [is] an anomaly, or is it to be expected from men raised in a culture that treats women as lesser citizens?”

I would point her to the 2008 broadcast on the Al-Aribiya network of a female (!) lawyer arguing that it’s OK for Muslim men to sexually assault Israeli women, because the Jews have “raped the land.” Or this week’s story of Hena, the 14-year-old Bangladeshi girl raped by a family member, then sentenced to 100 lashes by Muslim authorities for having sex out of wedlock. After 80 lashes, Hena died.

There are stories like this — and Logan’s — every week, all with the same cultural denominator.

For the record, Logan isn’t Jewish. And because she’s not Muslim, there’s no possibility she’ll face the lash.

But Lara Logan is a story. Why did CBS work so hard not to tell it?

I think something that visually points to the increasing Islamization of Egypt's population are the following four photographs of the females in the graduating class of Cairo University over the years.

Graduating Class - 1959


Graduating Class - 1978


Graduating Class - 1995


Graduating Class - 2004



From no women wearing a hijab, to nearly ALL of the women wearing a hijab.

Again, we all hope for the best possible outcome for the Egyptian people, but it is by no means certain that this ends well for anyone.

Because more people at the university wearing hijabs? That is the basis of your concern that the Muslim Brotherhood with stage a coup?

I still think this is a storm in a teacup designed to scare people into thinking that this is the beginning of a worldwide caliphate. I guess the media has been sorely lacking the external enemy since the collapse of the Soviet Empire (which itself suffered decades of internal struggle between various factions despite the idea being promoted of a hive-mind like entity).

The_Amber_Spyglass wrote:Because more people at the university wearing hijabs? That is the basis of your concern that the Muslim Brotherhood with stage a coup?

I still think this is a storm in a teacup designed to scare people into thinking that this is the beginning of a worldwide caliphate. I guess the media has been sorely lacking the external enemy since the collapse of the Soviet Empire (which itself suffered decades of internal struggle between various factions despite the idea being promoted of a hive-mind like entity).

You scoff at this physical evidence of the gradual Islamization of Egypt? Honestly? That seems rather shortsighted just to maintain your view that this is all a tempest in a teacup.

As I recall, that was the very same kind of thinking that was going on at the time of the fall of the Shah of Iran. Iran was a very progressive, Westernized nation. The majority of the people were very pro-America, pro-West. So Carter just cut the Shah loose... abandoned him to the radical Islamists who were the most organized elements in the country (and the main people agitating against the Shah), even though they were not a majority.

There is this phenomenon called Islamization, and the photos above seem to indicate that this phenomenon is what is happening in Egypt. Now, does it mean that Egypt will become another Iran? No, it does not. But, it DOES mean that this is not beyond possibility.

And just so you know, our mainstream media have been largely silent on this. They are not running a scare campaign, they are ignoring the signs that this might not turn out well for anyone. They even sat on a story of the repeated raping of ONE OF THEIR OWN FEMALE REPORTERS at the hands of an angry mod at Tahrir Square all the while shouting "Jew" at her.

dblboggie wrote:And just so you know, our mainstream media have been largely silent on this.

So you keep pointing out. But whereas the "mainstream media" you feel are sitting on it, I would like to know who is whipping up fear that the global caliphate is about to be born. Are you suggesting that they ought to be believed because they are not mainstream? Does "not mainstream" translate to "pure truth"? Hell, perhaps I ought to start reading Socialist Worker because with a circulation of under 10,000 that is about as far as you can get from "mainstream" here.

Egypt is a country of three very different worlds. Whereas the north (including Cairo) is very much arab (and women dress far more Islamic). I saw much less of that in Luxor and the south. Further south still, into Nubia around Aswan, you wouldn't even know it was the same country. The population are largely black and when I was there, I cannot recall seeing any sign of "Islamification".

The_Amber_Spyglass wrote:

dblboggie wrote:And just so you know, our mainstream media have been largely silent on this.

So you keep pointing out. But whereas the "mainstream media" you feel are sitting on it, I would like to know who is whipping up fear that the global caliphate is about to be born. Are you suggesting that they ought to be believed because they are not mainstream? Does "not mainstream" translate to "pure truth"? Hell, perhaps I ought to start reading Socialist Worker because with a circulation of under 10,000 that is about as far as you can get from "mainstream" here.

I don't know who, I haven't heard anyone whipping up fear that a "global caliphate is about to be born." I have heard some of the usual talking heads on the mainstream media's network opinion shows discussing the possibility that Egypt could go the way of Iran, but that's the minority opinion on those shows. As for the usual conservative talking head suspects - they simply acknowledge that no one has all the information to hand as yet and that the mainstream media's optimism about Egypt could well be misplaced. But nary a peep about a "global caliphate."

The_Amber_Spyglass wrote:Egypt is a country of three very different worlds. Whereas the north (including Cairo) is very much arab (and women dress far more Islamic). I saw much less of that in Luxor and the south. Further south still, into Nubia around Aswan, you wouldn't even know it was the same country. The population are largely black and when I was there, I cannot recall seeing any sign of "Islamification".

I am quite sure you are right about that, and I have no reason to doubt you. And while the far south may be quite free of Islamic influence, the far south of Egypt is not the seat of national power, nor is it nearly as populous as the north.