Lara Logan's Egypt Interrogation Tell-All: "The Army Is Not on the Peoples' Side. The Army Is on Its Own Side."

Lara Logan has, so far, not been declared insane. This despite arriving in Cairo today, just as President Mubarak was leaving, just a week after her driver was beaten there and she — a CBS News reporter, one of America's most visible foreign correspondents — was detained and interrogated in secret along with her crew, by the army, in an undisclosed location, and told to leave the country, post-haste. Because Mubarak was about to step down, and chaos would break out anew. And yet, a voice comes on in the background over the phone Thursday night: an airline pilot reminding Logan and her fellow passengers that they're in for what should be a smooth, overnight flight to Egypt.

But Lara Logan, you see, is not afraid. "There's no doubt in my mind that the situation we were caught in before, we are now arriving into again," she tells The Politics Blog. And about that situation, which resulted in Logan and her crew's widely reported secret detention for a night: What the hell happened? For starters, the government flipped the circuit breaker on standard procedure and started using checkpoints that foreign journalists could breeze through, in order to interrogate them. This change took place over the course of a day. "Those suddenly became like running the gauntlet," Logan says. She excuses herself, she bumped into someone. On the jetway. "They searched the journalists until they found the cameras. My producer got through that checkpoint because he didn't have any cameras with him, but I was with one, and when they found the cameras, that was it."

"It" being the start of a very bad way to end one's business trip. She continues: "One guy got in our car, then the next check point they climbed all over the car, then the next check point we went higher and higher and higher up the chain. They don't tell you what's going on because they don't want you to have any defense. They don't want you to be able to help yourself."

And just so we're clear, who are "they"? Are "they" the mobs in city squares of thousands? The police we first saw in clashes? No, Logan fumes. Try again. Try the same group that is about to take control of the thirteenth largest country in the world. "We were not attacked by crazy people in Tahrir Square. We were detained by the Egyptian army. Arrested, detained and interrogated. Blindfolded, handcuffed, taken at gunpoint, our driver beaten. It's the regime that arrested us....

Source: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/lara-logan-egypt-5219471?src=rss

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