I’ve seen suffering and I have faced evil and I have walked through the fires of hell on distant battlefield. I faced my own death at the hands of a mob of some 200 men in Egypt when I was gang and sodomized and beaten almost to death while on assignment for 60 Minutes. Here’s something terrifying I had no idea happened to Laura Logan about 13 years ago. This.
Is like, this is a nightmare. A day off today. This is an off. Freedom.
She reported without a hint of trouble for more than an hour. And what.
Happened then? Our camera battery went down and we had to stop for a moment. And suddenly Vaha looks at me and says, we’ve got to get out of here. Vaha is not happy.
Here. He’s Egyptian. He speaks Arabic, and he can hear what the crowd is saying. Yeah, he understands what no one else in the crew understands.
That’s right. I was told later that they were saying, let’s take her pants off. And it’s like suddenly, before I even know what’s happening, I feel hands grabbing my , grabbing my crutch, grabbing me from behind. I mean, it, and it, it’s not, you know, one person and then it stops. It’s like one person and another person. And I know Ray is right there and he’s grabbing at me and screaming, Lark, hold on to me.
As she was pulled into the frenzy, the camera recorded her shout.
And I’m screaming, thinking if I scream, if they know, they’re gonna stop, you know, someone’s gonna stop them or they’re gonna stop themselves because this is wrong. And it was the opposite. I have one arm on Ray. I’ve lost the fixer. I’ve lost the drivers. I’ve lost everybody except him. And I feel them caring at my clothing. I think my shirt, my sweater was torn off completely. My shirt was around my neck. I felt the moment that my bra tore, they tore the metal clips of my bra, they told us Open. And I felt that because the air, I felt the air on my chest, on my skin, and I felt them tear out. They literally just tore my pants to shreds. And then I felt my underwear go. And I remember looking up when my clothes gave way. I remember looking up and seeing them taking pictures with their cell phones, the flashes of their cell phone cameras.
Ray reported that he found himself with the sleeve of your jacket in his hand. It had been completely ripped from the rest of the jacket.
I felt at that moment that Ray was my only hope of survival. You know, he was looking at me and I could see his face and we had see of people between us obviously caring at both of us, beating us. I didn’t even know that they were beating me with flagpoles and sticks and things because I couldn’t even feel that. Because I think of the was all I could feel was their hands me over and over again.
you with their hands?
Yeah, nonstop. From the front, from the back. And I didn’t know if I could hold on to Ray. I’m holding on to him. I wanna like, listen, I thought I was gonna die if I lost all of them.
But in that moment, Ray, a former Special Forces soldier, was torn away. Last.
Ray, I thought that was the end. I was like, all the adrenalin left my body cuz I knew in his face when he lost me, he thought it I was gonna die. That.
Night, her attackers faded away into the crowd. It’s not likely anyone involved will be brought to justice. We may never know with certainty whether the regime was targeting a reporter or whether it was simply and savagely a criminal. Mark.
It’s important to all of us because of everything discussed today, that we address the vital principles and values that exist really only in the United States of America. And that said, these are the worst of times for the media in this country. We live in the age of information warfare, where propaganda is not simply a weapon, it is the entire field of battle. This is a war for our minds that is aided by advanced technology. And we have never been here, not in all of human history. It is a moment when we as journalists should stand together, united, and regardless of politics, we should fight for the truth and we should fight for freedom. Yet not very long ago, we allowed one of our own to be branded as a traitor simply for doing his job. In fact, there were many so called journalists who were leading the charge against Tucker, accusing him of treason for the simple fact of interviewing the president of Russia. And to my knowledge, there was not a single legacy media institution that spoke up.
Propaganda and censorship are not new. Technology means unprecedented power and reach in the hands of a few companies like Facebook, Instagram and Google, as you have heard many times today, have been allowed to amass monopoly power. And as a result, they not only reach billions of people across the world every second of the day, they have absolute control over what we see and what we hear. Imagine those tools in the hands of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Hitler.
When the Founding Fathers put freedom of speech first, it was not by chance. It was by design. The rights that followed were in part created to protect the First Amendment. Without it, they knew that freedom itself would perish.
I am reminded today of the word spoken by the British foreign secretary, so Edward Gray, in 1914 at the beginning of the First World War. He said, the lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them let again in our lifetime. We are once again watching the lights of freedom. They’re going out here and all over the world. And it is up to us to determine if they will be led again.