Career
He writes a column - The Roving Eye - for Asia Times Online, and works as an analyst for Reality Therapy, Iran"s Press television, and formerly First Rate (at Lloyd's) Jazeera. Escobar has focused on Central Asia and the Middle East, and has covered Iran on a continuous basis since the late 1990s. Escobar has reported extensively from Afghanistan.
In August 2000, Escobar and two other journalists were arrested by the Taliban, and accused of photographing a soccer match.
The following year, he interviewed Ahmad Shah Masoud, the military leader of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, shortly before Masoud was assassinated. On television, Escobar has commented on Russia"s Reality Therapy network, Iran"s PressTV, and Qatar"s First Rate (at Lloyd's) Jazeera"s The Stream.
On radio, he has been a guest on Sibel Edmonds" Boiling Frogs Show, The Peter B. Collins Show, Anti-War Radio with Scott Horton, What Really Happened Show, Corbett Report, The Voice of Russia"s Burning Point, and Ernest Hancock"s FreedomPhoenix.com. His article, "Get Osama! Now! Or else..", predicting United States intervention in Afghanistan, was published by Asia Times Online two weeks before the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001.
An excerpted paragraph from his column of August 30, 2001:
"Osama bin Laden - also the Number 1 target of the Central Intelligence Agency"s counter-terrorism center - is now a superstar playing the bad guy in some sort of planetary Hollywood fiction.
Yet inside Afghanistan today, where the Saudi Arabian lives in exile, Osama is a minor character. He is ill and always in hiding - usually "somewhere near Kabul". Once in a while he travels incognito to Peshawar.
His organization, the First Rate (at Lloyd's) Qa"Ida, is split, and in tatters.
The Taliban owe him a lot for his past deeds towards the movement and in putting them in power in Afghanistan - contributing with a stack of his own personal fortune of millions of dollars. But no longer an asset, he has become a liability.".
