The Real Deal

One of the most disgusting aspects of the fantasy world of faux bravery and pretend peril created by self-described "courageous" American journalists who claim to be making a difference by speaking truth to power in George Bush's Amerika at great personal risk--arrogant fools like Keith Olbermann, Bill Moyers, and Nick Coleman to name a few--is that they trivialize the real risks being run by journalists with real courage who do make a real difference by daring to speak real truth to real power. For the latter, having their dissent crushed doesn't mean having to face criticism for something they wrote or said, it means literally having their ability to speak and sometimes their very lives extinguished.

An editorial in today's Wall Street Journal notes the latest real journalist victim of real political repression, Anna Politkovskaya (subscription required):

On Saturday, one of the Russian President Vladimir Putin's fiercest critics was shot dead in her apartment block. Anna Politkovskaya was famous for her coverage of human rights abuses in Chechnya -- a conflict largely ignored by most of the increasingly state-controlled Russian media. She accused the region's Moscow-backed prime minister, Ramzan Kadyrov, of torture and abductions of civilians.

In her last interview, given to U.S.-run Radio Free Europe, Ms. Politkovskaya said she was a witness in a criminal case against the Kremlin's strongman in Chechnya. "These are cases of kidnappings, including one criminal case concerning an abduction personally involving Ramzan Kadyrov, a kidnapping of two people, whose photographs are now on my desk," the AP quoted from Sunday's rebroadcast on Ekho Moskvy.

Today, her newspaper Novaya Gazeta had planned to run her latest investigative report on the dirty war in Chechnya. Her death disrupted the publication. "We never got the article, but she had evidence about these (abducted) people and there were photographs," Deputy Editor Vitaly Yerushensky told Ekho Moskvy radio, according to the AP.

Prosecutor-General Yury Chaika personally took charge of the investigation of her murder, his office said Sunday. We'd have more confidence in the state's determination to find the killer and his contractors if the death of journalists, particularly critics of the Kremlin, wasn't such a routine affair. Ms. Politkovskaya is the 13th journalist murdered in Russia since former KGB agent Putin has become president. Among the many unsolved murder cases is that of American journalist Paul Klebnikov. The editor of Forbes Russia was gunned down in Moscow in 2004. Then-Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov also said he'd take "personal control" of the investigations. Two years later, the Klebnikov family is still waiting for any convictions.

In another piece in the same newspaper, Garry Kasparov also remembers her (subscription required):

To know Anna was to know how profoundly she cared. She felt the pain of others deeply and communicated that passion in her work. She documented the illegal acts of the Russian security forces in the Northern Caucasus and the brutality of Ramzan Kadyrov and other Kremlin proxies in the region. She tenaciously investigated the government cover-ups around the Beslan and the Nord-Ost theater terrorist attacks, in which hundreds of civilians were killed. She took on the most sensitive stories and the most painful subjects. She was an inspiration because she was never intimidated, because she never wrote a line she didn't believe in passionately.

And on Saturday -- President Vladimir Putin's 54th birthday -- Anna Politkovskaya was murdered. Her killers made no attempt to disguise what their act was, no attempt to make it look like anything other than a politically motivated assassination. Even Russian politicians who always worked to contradict and downplay her reports are calling it a political murder.

Real convictions, real courage, real consequences.