Nir Rosen Explains His 'Terrible' Lara Logan Tweets

Independent journalist Nir Rosen writes a mea culpa in Salon to again apologize for his Lara Logan tweets. He reiterates that he didn't know she'd been sexually assaulted, or that the attack was so severe, but says "there is no excuse for what I wrote" and that he hopes "Logan and other victims of sexual violence will one day forgive me for my terrible mistake." At another point, he adds this: "Had Logan been a non-white, non-famous journalist, this story would have never made it to the news."

When he wrote the tweets, Rosen said he had been frustrated with the US media coverage out of Cairo and figured that Logan—as Anderson Cooper did before her—would become the central story for Americans. That frustration fed into his "gallows humor" tweets, which were an attempt to provoke his Twitter friends into a discussion. They don't "reflect who I am," he writes. "I hope that people will take time to read my work and understand that I have spent my career taking a lot of heat for defending victims of all kinds, not just Arabs and Muslims." Click for the full column. (More Nir Rosen stories.)