The Moscow Times covers the outrage in Russia over a Russian journalist's ABC News interview with Chechen terrorist mastermind Shamil Basayev. Predictably, the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists issued a condescending lecture to the Kremlin on freedom of speech, after Russia's Defense Minister declared ABC News persona non grata.
"It reflects the Kremlin's lack of understanding that free speech means tolerating the broadcast of views it finds uncomfortable or even reprehensible," CPJ executive director Ann Cooper said in an e-mailed statement. "It also exposes the Kremlin's failure to comprehend that -- in sharp contrast with Russia -- U.S. television operates independently of government."
Of course, the Kremlin understands that the U.S. government had nothing to do with the Nightline special, as a prominent Russian analyst made clear.
Mikhail Margelov, the chairman of the Federation Council's International Affairs Committee, said U.S. President George W. Bush should not be blamed for the broadcast. "I can say with confidence that no one should judge the position of President Bush's administration based on this interview," he told RIA-Novosti. "After the terrorist attack in Beslan, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said that the inhuman Basayev was not worthy of existence, and I think this exact position is close to that of the U.S. leadership."
The U.S. State Department's spokesman was asked if the U.S. government was not engaging in a double standard, since the Defense Department has condemned false and propagandistic broadcasts by Al-Jazeera before (when Al-Jazeera dutifully passed along the laughable pronouncements of "Baghdad Bob", violated the Geneva Conventions by parading captured U.S. troops, and presently when Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya regularly show terrorists in Iraq threatening to behead hostages).
McCormack said Al-Jazeera had in the past broadcast misleading information about U.S. policy and played tapes that might have included signals from bin Laden and other terrorists to terrorist cells. Still, he said, the U.S. government has always left issues of news judgment to television networks. He also said he knew of no concerns about a signal in the Basayev interview.
So are potential "signals" for more terrorist attacks the only criterion by which the U.S. government can condemn an interview with one of the world's deadliest terrorists? In fairness to the State Department, the spokesman did go on to condemn Basayev as a terrorist - but he was only added to the list two years after 9/11, in spite of his connections to Osama bin Laden. Russians whose children were murdered at Beslan might understandably feel some contempt for the notion that freedom of the press is all that matters in this case.
Of course ABC News has the First Amendment right to run an interview with an enemy of civilization like Basayev. That does not mean that they ought to, even in the name of "understanding the enemy". Our Islamofascist enemies have issued enough statements to make their intentions crystal clear, indeed, they understand us much better than we understand them. Russian analysts noted that Basayev ommitted any references to jihad and Islamism from his speech, trying to portray himself as just another secular nationalist fighting for his homeland. Basayev believed that his American and international audience might just overlook his years as a close comrade of Osama bin Laden in the late 1990s - long after the Red Army left Afghanistan.
Guerilla attacks on poor Russian conscripts who have no desire to be stuck in Chechnya, in the name of fanatic ethnic nationalism, are one thing. Butchering "infidel" children and boasting about it to the entire world is something else - rising to a genocidal level of depravity.
The notion that once the hated Russians are gone from Chechnya (along with an ethnic cleansing of Russian civilians in neighboring Dagestan) that Islamofascists like Baseyev will be satisfied is a myth. As in Iraq, Russia is not fighting secular nationalist guerillas, but a "blood and soil" tribal/Islamofascist insurgency. Make no mistake - in spite of all the brutality and stupid waste of human life in Russia's botched Chechen campaigns, when Basayev says "sovereignty for Chechnya", he means the ability to spread sex slavery, narco-trafficking, and jihad throughout the Caucuses and southern Russia unmolested. Indeed, the tentacles of Chechen organized crime extend to the heart of Moscow's underworld. Imagine if the Iraq insurgents were fighting a demoralized conscript American army on the Mexican border, and were raising cash by running prostitution and drug rings in Manhattan or D.C. - then you might be able to put yourself as an American in Russia's shoes.
Advocates of Israel's case have asked why the BBC could bring itself (if only for 48 hours) to use the "t-word" for suicide bombings on buses in London, but not for suicide bombings against equally innocent civilians on buses in Jerusalem. The international news double standard for Russian as opposed to American, Briton and Spanish victims of terrorism also needs to change, and fast.
UPDATE: Apparently lawblogger Ron Coleman shares my sentiments. (hat tip: Instapundit)
UPDATE 2: Dan Darling posting at Winds of Change goes into more detail about Basayev's extensive ties to Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda.
UPDATE 3: For the benefit of our Russian readers, Andre Babitsky's employers at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty have disavowed his interview with Basayev. So hopefully it is crystal clear that no agency of the U.S. government or non-profit foundation like RFE/RL tha receives American taxpayer dollars funded Babitsky's project.
