It took me forever to find a photo of Lara Logan that I thought was appropriate to accompany this report that she'll soon discuss the brutal assault she suffered in Cairo near Tahrir Square on 60 Minutes.
You don't wanna go with a photo of her smiling or something from an formal event where she's in an evening gown and I really didn't want to use that last image of her from Tahrir, I keep looking at the men behind her in that famous image and wonder if they were the men who attacked her.
I've been watching this woman report from dangerous places for a lot of years and I have always been impressed with her courage and pluck. Though it might be easier to get a job in broadcast journalism if one is blonde and attractive and female it certainly doesn't help you do the job. It actually probably impedes the work. Certainly in a Middle East war zone it's not convenient to have blonde hair sticking out of a helmet.
So I was thinking about all those things when the news of the tragic events in Cairo came to fore.
On Sunday, the CBS News chief foreign affairs correspondent will speak for the first time about what happened on 60 Minutes with Scott Pelley:
Logan lost contact with her colleagues for approximately 25 minutes and endured a sexual assault and beating that she feared she would not survive. "There was no doubt in my mind that I was in the process of dying," she tells Pelley. "I thought not only am I going to die, but it's going to be just a torturous death that's going to go on forever..."
Thoughts of her two young children helped reinforce her determination to survive the assault, she says, which finally ended when she was rescued by a group of Egyptian women and soldiers. The soldiers drove her and her team back to their hotel, where she was examined by a doctor. She returned to the U.S. the next day and went directly into a hospital, where she was treated for four days.
When Logan saw her children, "I felt like I had been given a second chance that I didn't deserve...because I did that to them. I came so close to leaving them, to abandoning them," she says.
I am also interested in finding out if anything was ever done in an attempt to find the men who did this. With all the coverage of the event at the time it was not clear at all if there was anything done toward that effort.
60 Minutes airs Sunday at 7 eastern on CBS. Logan will also be featured on the 60MinutesOvertime.com site after the broadcast.
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