Joel Simon is the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. He has written widely on media issues, contributing to Slate, Columbia Journalism Review, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian. He has led numerous international missions to advance press freedom. He is the author of The New Censorship: Inside the Global Battle for Media Freedom, and We Want to Negotiate: The Secret World of Kidnapping, Hostages and Ransom.
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Starting in late 2012, Westerners working in Syria -- journalists and aid workers -- began disappearing without a trace. A year later the world learned they had been taken hostage by the Islamic State. Throughout 2014, all the Europeans came home, first t... SEE MORE