Mort Report is a labor of love by old-style correspondents with lifetimes on the road and young ones with fresh eyes. Our philosophy is simple: we report at first hand with analysis based on non-alternative fact, not opinion. If we get something wrong, we fix it.
PARIS — Terry Anderson and Don Mell drove home after tennis on the Beirut corniche, a beautiful seafront by bombed-out rubble in a city where in 1985 it was hard to hear the penny drop. That green Mercedes reappeared yet again. Don said, “I don’t like the look of this.”
Too late. Men bundled Terry into the Merc. One stuck a gun in Don’s face and waved him back. He chased them in his own car but lost them. In any case, what could he do with a wooden racket against assault weapons?
Don, an AP photographer, later spoke with Hassan Nasrullah and asked why he was spared. “Do you fish?” the Hezbollah leader replied. “If you catch a big one, you throw the other ones back.” He wanted prisoners freed in Kuwait, and AP’s Middle East bureau chief was a bargaining chip.
Terry spent 2,454 days in dank cells, often chained to a radiator. Like so many hostages who were eventually freed — and survivors of those who weren’t — he saw the fast-worsening risk to reporters as the reason it is so essential for them to stay at their jobs.
PARIS — After months in a Barbie-bedazzled America heedless of Oppenheimer’s dark warnings, approaching elections terrify me. I’ve covered Trump-type despots who con their way to power since the 1960s. Almost invariably, they do what they say they will, then follow with worse.
Nations that learn the hard way why history matters share what the French call a longue mémoire. Too many Americans with the attention span of fruit flies on fentanyl may soon dump a remarkably effective president to bring back a monster.
I heard an MSNBC anchor tell a panel, with an amused laugh, “Yes, we don’t want to relitigate Covid.” Why not?
Ukraine and Gaza wars sparked by Donald Trump’s folly have taken 60,000 lives. His depraved disregard for a deadly virus killed well over 10 times that many in America alone. It caused the soaring inflation and global bedlam that so many people blame on Joe Biden.
As if insurrection, purloining state secrets, election tampering, fraud and sexual assault were not enough, that is a clearcut crime against humanity. Americans ignore at their peril his favorite catchphrase: “blood bath.”
A brash outsider had a reasonable appeal in 2016 to Americans eager for change. Today, he aims to replace democracy with demagogy. Eight billion people share a fragile lifeboat; he is chopping holes in the hull. November 5 will amount to a national referendumb.