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TCHS Grad Establishes Personal Reporting Network from Asian War Zones
Frontline Media web site presents personal view of Afghan war zones. |
Pair Take Unorthodox Approach to War Coverage
War: Former UC Santa Barbara students sneak into Afghanistan to provide a different perspective. The two post dispatches on their Internet site.
By DOUG SMITH and ERIC MALNIC
Times Staff Writers
December 29, 2001
...[I]t's a typical Mojave Desert scene.
But the caption says it's a former Al Qaeda entrenchment in the vicinity of Tora Bora, Afghanistan.
If that is true, the two young men from Southern California have accomplished a journalistic coup at least as bold--if not as breathless--as Geraldo Rivera's encounter with hissing Al Qaeda bullets. Without credentials or the resources of a news organization, they have trekked halfway around the world and inveigled their way to the front of America's war in Afghanistan.
Former UC Santa Barbara students Todd Ruiz, 26, and Adam Prentiss, 27, say they are attempting to offer a different perspective on "marginalized, forgotten and misunderstood" parts of the world.
According to the[ir] Web site, Ruiz and Prentiss crossed into Afghanistan and reached the Tora Bora front around Dec. 19, [,2001]. They stayed five days witnessing the last stand of Al Qaeda and are now in Islamabad furiously writing up their war dispatches.
In an interview with The Times, Reuben Ruiz, a Pasadena resident, said his slight, friendly, vegetarian son grew up in the San Gabriel Valley, graduating from Temple City High School before attending UC Santa Barbara for a couple of years, leaving before he earned a degree.
In a bio posted on the Web site, Todd Ruiz describes himself more floridly as "environmental extremist, performance artist, experimental musician, computer programmer, writer and graphic designer."
He also worked long enough as a computer technician to save up for an eight-week trip to Asia last year, Reuben Ruiz said.
"This year, after Sept. 11, he decided to do something different," his father said. "On Oct. 2, he announced he was going to Afghanistan. I thought he was just talking. I didn't believe him."
He teamed up with his old school friend Prentiss--last employed teaching digital art and theoretical approaches to visual literacy at UC Santa Barbara, according to the Web site. They flew to Taiwan and made their way through Thailand and India to Pakistan by rail, bus and other unspecified transport. How they entered Afghanistan isn't clear, other than that it involved an "ordeal of charming, cajoling, ignoring and ultimately bribing and lying to various offices of Pakistani officialdom."
"I have always aspired to be a photojournalist, and decided that I had done enough aspiring and it was time to just go and do it," [Ruiz] said in ... e-mail.
Read the team's continuing updates at frontlinedispatch.com.
Original article copyright © 2002, The Los Angeles Times.
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