White Slaver? We Blog; You Decide!

As Instapundit makes abundantly clear, every blogger worth his salarium (Latin for "salt" -- the salary of classical days) is tearing Bill O'Reilly a new one because of his attacks on the Internet. Instapundit Lileks Volokh Matt Welch, ad infinitum. O'Reilly has taken on the entire blogosphere.

As a lowly little fish, I can't do much more than echo their criticism, and altruistically offer up one more tidbit.

I think I know the real reason O'Reilly hates the Internet: his journalism is so bad that he knows that sooner or later, the bloggers will have at his carcass. The guy has much to hide, and this is not my accusation. I'll just play the parrot fish.

A woman named Pat Roush made the mistake of marrying a Saudi who kidnapped her daughters, taking them back to Saudi Arabia. Imagining that O'Reilly would be on her side, Ms. Roush enlisted his help. According to the Wall Street Journal's Jack McGurn, instead of helping this desperate woman, O'Reilly stage-managed a classic back-stab:

- Stabbing an American mother in the back. Mr. O'Reilly admits he did not tell Pat Roush that her daughters--and her granddaughter--were in London. He arranged that secretly with Saudis. He further admits that he did this because he knew the Saudis would not go for a deal that included the mother.

- Dria Davis. All Mr. O'Reilly seemed to know about her was that she was an American girl who escaped from Saudi Arabia. More pertinent, though, was that she too had been interviewed by a State Department representative who concluded that her father "is clearly fond of his daughter"; this at a time, as we know now, when her father was threatening to kill her. "If he [O'Reilly] had just shut up for a moment and listened," Miss Davis told me, "he would have known why Pat's daughters could not be speaking freely."

- Colluded with the Saudis. Mr. O'Reilly originally proposed to Rep. Dan Burton (R., Ind.) that the delegation meet the Roush sisters inside Saudi Arabia before a Fox camera; the Burton people responded that such a meeting was unwise. Burton staffers say they were stunned to learn, upon their arrival in Riyadh, that the Saudis had spirited Ms. Roush's daughters out of the country on the precise day the delegation was there to press demands the women be brought to America.

Mr. O'Reilly admits that he set the whole thing up with Adel al-Jubeir, the Saudis' point man. As he said, "We convinced the Saudis to fly the women, now ages 19 and 24, to London, where our producer interviewed them." In other words, the deal was: The Saudis supplied the women, he supplied the interview.

In a statement issued on his return, Rep. Burton scored the Saudis for their "bad faith" in removing the Roush sisters out of the country, saying, "It is clear that they [the Saudis] purposefully were involved in an effort to undermine" his visit. If we are to believe Mr. O'Reilly's own words, it all happened at his instigation. My contention is not that Mr. O'Reilly deliberately set out to do Mr. al-Jubeir's dirty work. The point--as I stated on the show--is that Mr. al-Jubeir and Co. were looking for a sucker and they found him.

On the one hand, O'Reilly besmirches the girls for making statements in favor of Osama bin Laden:

That sealed it. If two American citizens are that far gone -- for whatever reason -- there is little anyone can do.

Except he doesn't end it there. Next, O'Reilly admits they were brainwashed:

...the hard truth is that human beings can be brainwashed, especially when they are kidnapped as young children. Both Alia and Aisha are married to Saudis, and Aisha has a baby. They are not going to fight for their freedom. They are going to stay where they are.

How about slaves? Can't they also be so brainwashed that they identify with their captors? Wouldn't it be better to just recognize the "hard truth" that they are not going to fight for their freedom, and that they are just going to stay where they are?

Freedom? I guess that depends on whether Bill O'Reilly likes what you say.