Showing posts with label Steven Sotloff. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Steven Sotloff. Show all posts

Friday, September 19, 2014

Sotloff Family Tells CBS They Were 'Bullied' By Obama Administration

By Kyle Drennen, Sept. 17, 2014, Newsbusters.org



Read the full story:  www.newsbusters.org

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Wednesday, September 17, 2014

Dem Congresswoman Blames Reporters For Their Beheadings--Says They Should Be More Careful

 

Source:  www.teaparty.org

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Monday, September 15, 2014

Families Of Foley And Sotloff Were Threatened With Criminal Prosecution

Shirley Sotloff
By Paul Szoldra, Sept. 12, 2014, Businessinsider.com

The families of murdered American journalists Jim Foley and Steven Sotloff are speaking out against the US government for making their efforts to free their loved ones a "helpless" endeavor.

The parents of Steven Sotloff, a freelance journalist who was kidnapped by militants in Syria, told Yahoo News on Friday that a member of the president's National Security Council threatened them with criminal prosecution if they attempted to pay a ransom to get their son freed.

"The family felt completely and utterly helpless when they heard this," Barak Barfi, a friend of Sotloff who is serving as a spokesman for his family, told Yahoo News. "The Sotloffs felt there was nothing they could do to get Steve out."

Sotloff's mother, Shirley, recorded an emotional video directly addressing ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in late August. Despite her plea for mercy, the group murdered her son one week later.

The claim that the government would bring charges against the Sotloff family echoes similar points made in a CNN interview with Jim Foley's mother Diane, in which she said she was "embarrassed and appalled" by the US government's handling of her son's case.

Read the full story:  www.businessinsider.com


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Friday, September 12, 2014

An Imminent Beheading?

By Bill Gertz, September 12, 2014, Washingtontimes.com

Counterterrorism officials are concerned that the Islamic State will behead a British hostage next week, noting consistencies in the terrorist group’s decapitations of two American journalists.

Analysts say the video releases of the beheadings of James Foley and Steven Sotloff took place two weeks apart and both were made public on a Tuesday evening.

If the timing was calculated, officials are concerned that the Islamic State will similarly murder British hostage David Haines on Tuesday.

Mr. Haines, a worker for a French non-governmental organization, was shown at the end of the Sotloff video dressed in an orange jumpsuit. The terrorist who spoke on the video said Mr. Haines would be the group’s next victim.

The videos of the Foley and Sotloff beheadings showed a masked, British-accented jihadist cutting off the American journalists’ heads, sparking global outrage and prompting calls for U.S. intervention against the Islamic State.

The first video was released Aug. 19 on an official Islamic State account on the small-scale social networking service called Diaspora.

The second video was released almost exactly two weeks later on an Islamic State account on the Russian social media service Vkontackte — the new outlet for the al Qaeda offshoot following the shutdown of official accounts on Twitter and Diaspora.

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan Greenert outlined the Navy’s role in the so-called pivot to Asia this week, stating that the shift to the region has three elements: “forces, capabilities and understanding.”

In a speech Monday to a think tank, Adm. Greenert said there are no plans to end U.S. surveillance flights of China, despite pressure from Beijing to do so.

As part of the shift, the Navy will move its most advanced forces to the region, including two new Aegis-equipped destroyers to Japan, another attack submarine to Guam, and four littoral combat ships to Singapore — a modest increase in firepower that reflects the service’s problems resulting from the Obama administration’s sharp cuts in defense spending.

Enhanced naval capabilities in the Pacific, the four-star admiral said, include better electronic warfare, undersea warfare, advanced anti-aircraft warfare and cyber warfare capacities.

The “understanding” element involves creating closer “relations and exchanges” with allies and partners in Asia and bolstering security assurances, Adm. Greenert said in a speech at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Read the full story:  www.washingtontimes.com

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Wednesday, September 3, 2014

Despite Dangers, U.S. Journalist Sotloff Was Determined To Record Arab Spring's Human Toll

Steven Sotloff
By Warren Strobel and Mark Hosenball, Sept. 2, 2014, Reuters.com

(Reuters) - Even for a freelance journalist covering the tumult in the Arab world, Steven Sotloff's travels seemed nonstop.

In October 2012, the American reporter was in Benghazi, Libya, covering the aftermath of the deadly raid on the U.S. diplomatic compound there. In December, he was in northern Syria, writing about the lives of destitute, displaced Syrians and the war, according to his published reports and his communications with colleagues and editors.

"I've been here over a week and no one wants freelance because of the kidnappings. It's pretty bad here," he e-mailed another journalist. "I've been sleeping at a front, hiding from tanks the past few nights, drinking rain water."

In August 2013, telling colleagues he understood the dangers, Sotloff returned to Syria, slipping across the border from Turkey. He was quickly kidnapped and fell into the hands of Islamic State, the violent militant group that wants to establish a jihadist hub in the heart of the Arab world.

Islamic State said in a video released by a monitoring group on Tuesday that it had beheaded Sotloff, 31, in retaliation for U.S. airstrikes against the group, the second such killing of a U.S. journalist in two weeks. His family said in a statement they believed he had been killed.

Colleagues and acquaintances recalled Sotloff as a generous man fascinated by journalism and the changes gripping the Middle East, and determined to tell stories from the perspective of average people, not army movements on the battlefield.

"He struck me as a very, very decent guy ... he wasn't chasing headlines, he wasn't hyping a pitch," said James Denton, publisher and editor of the Washington-based journal World Affairs, one of several publications that hired him for freelance work. Others included TIME and Foreign Policy.

Read the full story:  www.reuters.com

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Tuesday, September 2, 2014

McFarland: Obama Has Stuck His Head In Sand Over ISIS Threat


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Steven Sotloff 'Beheaded By Islamic State'


Source:  www.telegraph.co.uk

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REAL RAW VIDEO!: Steven Sotloff Beheaded By Islamic State



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