News in the News
Awful news about death of New England War Correspondent James Foley; in Boston, Juliette Kayyem returns to Boston Globe
The headlines begin to meld together in August. Horror in the United States Midwest; horror in Iraq, Syria, and Kurdistan. Disfunction in Afghanistan; disfunction in the U.S. House of Representatives. New England’s premiere low-price supermarket chain loses customers and millions of dollars by the day as it inexorably explodes despite the efforts of two governors to intervene.
Then today, news is the news.
Again, a U.S. war correspondent was executed for policies he did not enact. James Foley, age 40, of Rochester, New Hampshire, just north of Portsmouth, was killed by representatives of ISIS, the nascent Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
Taking a page from the murder a decade ago of Daniel Pearl of the Wall Street Journal (and a former news intern at The Indianapolis Star), Foley met his end with a video in which he is made to deplore American policies he had no hand in creating. The role of the journalist is to report on the situation on the ground, to discover the results from day to day of those policies. That makes Foley no more complicit in the policies than the people he is covering.
According to a report in the Boston Globe, Foley’s family is focused more on his life and his talents and his love, rather than on the outrageous cause of his death.
May he rest in peace. (If there’s an Ernie Pyle war correspondents’ lounge in Heaven, I presume Foley will be honored with a banquet and lots of story-telling.)
I hope ISIS does not carry through on its threat to execute yet another hostage journalist, Stephen Sotloff of Time and Foreign Policy magazines.
On a more positive note, the policy sensibility from then pen of Juliette Kayyem has returned to the editorial pages of The Globe.
In today’s column, Juliette reviews what I called, in fractured French, the “policy faux pas du jour,” namely militarization of U.S. local police agencies with equipment sold or disposed by the American military.
I wrote some comments at the end of Juliette’s column, and I’m repeating them here.
First: "Hi, Juliette. Glad to have your byline back in The Globe.
"Police militarization has become the policy faux pas du jour. You acknowledge the actions of medics in the Boston Marathon Bombing. But military-grade equipment was evident throughout the end of that ordeal, especially in Watertown. I think much of the equipment arrived on the scene from the Watertown Police Department the the Middlesex Sheriff's Department.
"Looking back on that awful, horrible, scary 36 hours in Watertown and surrounding communities, would we say that it was example of wise deployment of military-grade equipment and wise use of it? At the time, I thought so. I was surprised to see all that equipment, but I felt safer. Now, after Ferguson, would we say that there were other options?
"What would Watertown and Middlesex have deployed in the absence of the military stuff? Would it have been just as effective? Would we have still caught our suspect? Would all of us -- police, neighbors, community-at-large, and even the suspect -- been as safe?”
And then I added: "Some other thoughts:
"1. If this equipment is in good shape, then why is the military disposing of it?
"2. If we don't sell or grant it to state or local governments, then would foreign countries become the market for selling it?
"3. If we sell it abroad at bargain prices, then do we risk being complicit in militarization of local police in other countries?
"4. Upshot: Should this equipment be destroyed when the military is done with it?"
Doug Davidoff: New Yorker, New Englander, Tar Heel, Hoosier, Chicagoan. Father, Democrat, Unitarian Universalist and Jewish. History Lover, Traveler, Sailor. Writer/Editor. Aspiring Vermonter. Principal Consultant for Straight Talk Public Relations at www.StraightTalkPR.com. Personal website: www.DouglassDavidoff.com.