“What’s your name?”
The words were shouted inches from my ear, heavily accented, angry.
“What do you do?”
“I’m a reporter.” My words were muffled by the cloth bag over my head, the rope around my throat that tightened every time I started to straighten my duct-taped legs. My hands, wrapped in coils of rope, had lost all sensation.
“A reporter! A Jewish reporter!” the voice roared. “You work for the Zionists! Do you work for the Mossad?” And the blows rained down, not hard enough to hurt, but hard enough to make me happy when they stopped.
Then, the same voice: “Get the chain saw.”
I wasn’t too concerned. The voice was that of Doron Benbenisty, 37, owner and lead instructor of Las Vegas-based Crisis Response International. …the amount of muscle behind the beating was less amusing. But I had paid for this treatment: $800 for a three-day class on “Surviving Execution/Beheading/Assassination Attempts & Escaping from Captivity.” That’s with a holiday discount.

Read all about San Francisco’s new training course in hostage avoidance in today’s SF Chronicle.
I’m sure this is an important and probably vital part of training for journalists in some parts of the world these days, and in no way do I mean to trivialize this sort of thing, but why am I so delightedly unphased to find photos of hunky Israeli men – with guns no less – tying people up on the front page of the Chron? Oh yeah, because I live in San Francisco.