Notes on isolation, from those who know it well
The Economist | 6th April 2020
The window was sealed behind a sheet of solid steel. The door was locked. Thick chains bound one arm and one ankle. The room was bare apart from a thin foam mat for a bed and a plastic bottle to pee into. I was alone. That was the summer of 1987, when Hizbullah was holding me hostage in Lebanon. They had many other hostages, but I didn’t see them. In fact, I saw no one. When a guard came into the room, I had to put on a blindfold so that I couldn’t identify him. The only conversations I had were a few interrogations, when I was also blindfolded. The questioning involved threats and verbal abuse, but mercifully no torture. As unpleasant as they were, they broke the monotony. The rest of the time left me thinking, remembering, imagining. One way of relieving the loneliness was to pretend that one…
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Free Julian Assange!
The Nation
If WikiLeaks did not exist, the public would know much less than it does about what government and politicians are doing in its name. When a 35-year-old Australian named Julian Assange launched WikiLeaks with a few like-minded friends in 2006,…
Reflections on the Life and Death of an Iraqi Militant
Stratfor
They buried Jamal Jaafar Ibrahimi in Najaf, Iraq, on Jan. 8. Although Ibrahimi was born far to the south in Basra province, Najaf was the chosen resting place for the reputed martyr. Najaf houses the Imam Ali mosque, an ancient…
What Are David’s Options When Goliath Makes Geopolitical Reality?
Stratfor
The new year will inherit a handful of "frozen conflicts" from the old in which a much stronger nation looms over a weaker party. In Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy is unwilling to pay the heavy price of challenging Russia; so,…
Charles Glass is a broadcaster, journalist and writer, who began his journalistic career in 1973 at the ABC News Beirut bureau with Peter Jennings. He covered the October Arab-Israeli War on the Egyptian and Syrian fronts. He also covered civil war in Lebanon, where artillery fire wounded him in 1976. He was ABC News Chief Middle East correspondent from 1983 to 1993. Since 1993, he has been a freelance writer in Paris, Tuscany, Venice and London, regularly covering the Middle East, the Balkans, southeast Asia and the Mediterranean region. He has also published books, short stories, essays and articles in the United States and Europe.