I know I’m not out on a limb here, but John F. Burns’ reporting for the New York Times from Iraq is up there with the greatest. What he was able to do was to report factually, carefully, objectively, while still giving the Saddamite police state no quarter. He saw what tyranny does to people, and his obviously deep love of human freedom enabled him to get at deeper truths than so many others did. Now we find that he was targeted by Saddam and lived in fear of his life in the final days of the war:
At midnight on April 1, without warning, a group of men led by Mr. Muthanna, identifying themselves as intelligence agents, broke into my room at the Palestine Hotel. The men, in suits and ties, at least one with a holstered pistol under his jacket, said they had known “for a long time” that I was an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency, that I was from that moment under arrest, and that a failure to “cooperate” would lead to more serious consequences. “For you, it will be the end,” Mr. Muthanna said. “Where we will take you, you will not return.”
Burns, mercifully, endured till the end, decried by one Iraqi Information Ministry official as “the most dangerous man in Iraq.” Not quite. But truth is always a danger to tyrants. And Burns carried it high. Kudos to him and, yes, to Howell Raines, for giving him the prominence and space he so richly deserves.
THE MEANING OF FAMILY: Sometimes a picture says it all.
The Dish 