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Each of the three networks offered a fascinating feature from overseas. NBC had Richard Engel provide us with a backgrounder from Islamabad on Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister, now held in house arrest under Pakistan's martial law. Engel called the Harvard-educated Bhutto a "shrewd, complicated and controversial politician" whose return from exile has produced a series of "media moments" including the rent-a-crowd rally that greeted her in Karachi and her "behind the barbed wire" press conference in Rawalpindi. Engel reminded us that Bhutto "has already ruled this country unsuccessfully" during two terms in office being "something of the dictator herself." Her exile came in response to charges of pocketing "$1.5bn in kickbacks on government contracts."
On CBS, Elizabeth Palmer claimed Exclusive access to the smuggling tunnels that are a lifeline for the Gaza Strip. Beneath the "wasteland" that is Gaza's western border with Egypt, Palmer found "a subterranean maze that makes a mockery of Israel's effort to seal off Gaza." Palmer ticked off the contraband that passes down the two-feet-wide conduits: weapons, explosives, human beings, cigarettes, medicine, Iranian cash--fully 10% of all imports, according to the United Nations. She asked a smuggler how the tunneling is financed: a venture capitalist provides start-up funds and then when the tunnel opens and goods begin to flow "we split the money between us."
In New York, ABC's Brian Ross narrated footage from Afghanistan's Korengal Valley by Vanity Fair's Tim Hetherington. Operation Rock Avalanche, conducted by the USArmy's 173rd Airborne, was designed to disrupt "militants operating out of homes in the villages" who were "connected" with the Taliban and al-Qaeda. "From day one the mission goes bad." An initial helicopter airstrike kills five villagers and injures seven more, including children. "The village elders are furious and tempers on both sides flare when the elders say there are no Taliban here." A GI accuses an elder of calling him "a liar," implying that if he was shot at, it could only have been by a Taliban bullet. Days later ambushes struck and three platoon members were killed. "The hunters had become the hunted," Ross asserted--although he did repeat the claim of unidentified "military commanders" that the Taliban in the valley had been "badly disrupted."
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