Poor Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson couldn't do a decent report out of Afghanistan if someone else wrote it and handed it to her. On Tuesday's ATC she describes an assassination attempt against one of the sleazy Karzai brothers [this one - not this one] as follows:
"For now, provincial council members meet in the well-guarded home of council chair Ahmed Wali Karzai...the brother of Afghan President. He was himself the target of an assassination attempt outside Kabul last week when gunmen ambushed his convoy."Given that Ahmed is widely believed to be a key drug lord in the thriving Afghan heroin trade you might expect that information to find its way into the story. Not a chance; the possibility that the assassination attempt was related to Ahmed's criminality doesn't fit NPR's narrow script of good guys (the US and any and all followers) v. bad guys/Taliban (any Afghan who takes up arms against the US-led occupation of Afghanistan). Introducing Nelson's report, Michele Norris reinforces the narrative with this bit of speculation:
"In Kandahar...just yesterday suspected Taliban militants tried unsuccessfully to assassinate the brother of President Hamid Karzai...head of the area's provincial council."To add insult to injury, not only does Nelson stick with this interpretation but then she hands the microphone to this thug so he can lecture us about "the struggle" (I think it's called Enduring Freedom...hee, hee):
"This is a war for justice and for freedom and for democracy, and we're not going to just run away from it. So it's tough but we will continue with our struggle against the terrorists and al-Qaeda."To cut her a bit of slack, perhaps Nelson featured this truth, justice and the American way cant because she was afraid of what freedom-lovin' Ahmed Karzai might do to her if she did any actual reporting on him...
