Man Bites Dog

Moe's Lament: the emptyness of modern journalism (#pr #blogger #media #journalism #socialmedia and all that)

2010-05-19T19:29:14Z

A writer's search for journalism in the age of branding

Moe Tkacik's bittersweet reflection on journalism in the age of meltdown makes compelling reading. Here's a flavor of what happened when she joined the Wall St Journal's LA bureau:

And so when the time came to resume the regimen of inquisitions into whether Barbie dolls could reclaim supremacy from the insurgent Bratz, or rappers could be convinced to switch sneaker brand allegiances from Nike to Reebok, and was the preeminent patron saint of pre-adolescent sartorial taste Britney Spears or Avril Lavigne . . . well, that was something of a relief, too. The biggest relief, though, would come when I was fired.

Moe's Lament: the emptyness of modern journalism, (#pr #blogger #media #journalism #socialmedia and all the rest) http://ow.ly/1NjmOless than a minute ago via HootSuiteLeonard Doyle
LeonardDoyle

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There were real stories on my beat, of course. It alarmed me, for instance, to learn that one of the companies in my "youth" sector, the mall chain Abercrombie & Fitch, made a weekly practice of purging its stores of hourly sales associates it deemed to be less than, in corporate parlance, "brand positive."

The purgees were identified, a former regional manager explained, every week at corporate headquarters in New Albany, Ohio, during a conference call held specifically to critique photographs taken that week by the chain's hundred or so district managers of all the "brand representatives" they had encountered in visits to their stores. The photos were uploaded onto some sort of company intranet, but my source told me his boss preferred printing them out on paper, so he could circle flaws, draw mustaches, scrawl racist epithets, etc. The source said braces, minor breakouts, the faintest possibility of weight gain, showing up to work in a prior season's ensemble, wearing shoes that had not appeared on the list of authorized footwear for that season, and/or belonging to an ethnic minority could all be grounds for immediate dismissal from the ranks of Abercrombie & Fitch's minimum-wage cadre of demand creators.  

I went to great lengths to corroborate the facts, which is where I fucked up; I e-mailed a draft of the piece (a decision inspired by a respected journalist I'd read about who said he did this all the time) to a trusted source, and he e-mailed it to someone else, and eventually it made its way to Abercrombie's corporate offices and in turn to the company's fearsome New York "crisis PR" firm. And because Wall Street Journal investigations are the sort of thing that affects the stock prices of companies, this was a fire-able offense. In retrospect, as much as I felt like a failure and a fuckup, I didn't actually mind being liberated from the constant, insane pressure not to fuck up. All year I'd been variously accused of being "in the pocket" of one company or its rival by analysts, money managers, publicists, lawyers, etc., and I'd found it preposterous. What did I care who prevailed in the sneaker wars or the doll wars or the Japanese-hipster-credibility-halo-effect wars?

What I couldn't understand, though, was why they killed the story. Sure, it wasn't Blackwater, but this was a store that at least half our readers' kids would have killed to work for, and it was being run by some racist, frat-boy cult, and the suburban teenagers it hired and fired so mercurially were going to grow into adults who thought this was . . . normal? That in the modern American workplace, this sort of Lord-of-the-Flies management strategy was just par for the fucking course?

I ended up handing over my notes to a civil-rights lawyer who was leading a class-action race-discrimination suit against Abercrombie. A few years later, more than ten thousand former brand representatives got checks in the mail as part of the $40 million settlement.

Now read Moe's full take down at the Columbia Journalism Review here

Africa's journalists are under attack - why the rest of us should help

2010-05-14T15:19:49Z

By Patrick Smith, Editor Africa Confidential

There is a worsening crackdown on journalists in many regions of the world, especially Africa, as governments and businesses struggle to deal with harsher economic conditions.

One of the latest victims in Africa is Ngota Ngota Germain, editor of the weekly Cameroon Express, who died in detention on 23 April in Yaoundé's Kodengui gaol. Along with two other journalists, Serge Sabouang and Robert Mintya, Ngota had been investigating allegations of corruption against Secretary General in the Presidency Laurent Esso and the state oil company.

]]> And on the following day, three journalists were killed in Nigeria in so far unexplained circumstances:Edo Sule Ugbagwu of the Nation was shot in his house; and Nathan Dabak and Sunday Bwede were shot while reporting on the clashes in Plateau State. Last September, an editor with the Lagos daily The Guardian, Bayo Ohu was shot in his house and the assailants stole his laptop and cellphone raising suspicions that someone was trying to silence him.

Sadly, this list of journalistic casualties in Africa is lengthening and regional governments appear indifferent as best and complicit at worst. President Dénis Sassou Nguesso's regime in Congo-Brazzaville is blocking the investigation into the burning to death of Franco-Congolese journalists Bruno Jacquet last year just before the flawed presidential elections. Jacquet had been investigating links between Sassou-Nguesso and international oil companies.

No progress has been made in finding the killers of investigative journalist Didace Namujimbo who was working for Radio Okapi in the east of Congo-Kinshasa. And President Yahya Jammeh in Gambiarefuses to respond to questions about the whereabouts of Daily Observer journalist Ebrima Manneh, who was arrested in the newspaper's officer by state security officials in July 2006 and hasn't been seen since.

In Egypt, Abdel Karim Suleiman who criticised some conservative religious figures in his blog known as 'Karim Amer', was sentenced to four years gaol in 2006. Since then he has been beaten several times by a prison guard and another inmate at the Borg Al-Arab prison in Alexandria. All these cases have been taken up by excellent lobby groups such as Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Borders but our journalistic responsibility doesn't stop there.

That was made clear by the African delegates to the Global Investigative Journalism conference in Geneva on 22-25 April. There journalists such as Mary Akuffo of Ghana's New Crusading Guide, together with freelance reporters Annie Mpalume from Zimbabwe and John Grobler from Namibia described the perils of reporting on illegal mining operations and corruption in the big mining houses. Mpalume was arrested by soldiers in Zimbabwe's disputed diamond fields at Chiadzwa and Grobler was attacked with a broken glass after his reports annoyed some local business interests.

Also speaking at the conference were the award-winning reporters, Ghana's Anas Aremeyaw Anas andUganda's Frank Nyakairu, who have produced insider stories on the international people trafficking business. And Kenyan journalists, Fatuma Noor and Kassim Mohammed explained their battles to investigate the business dealings among Somalia's pirates.

What emerged from all these accounts was the bravery of the individual reporters and their important contribution to the global coverage of corporate corruption and human rights issues in ways that many western readers and listeners, and even many journalists take for granted.

Organisations such as the Forum for Investigative Reporters (FAIR) do great work in promoting the braver and more intrepid journalists in Africa but publications and broadcasters outside Africa should find ways to do more.

We should ensure that the stringers and fixers that we work with in Africa are properly remunerated: our national journalist unions are very good at establishing minimum pay scales at home, it's time we did the same thing for payments to journalists and researchers that we work with around the world.

We should also get our journalists unions to dedicate a fixed percentage of their incomes to support those journalists in Africa who are hit by legal medical and expenses as a result of contributing to international coverage. And at the same time our news organisations should be more ready to accord full credit to the local journalists who take many of the risks and often have the story ideas in the first place. And we should all, through our newspapers and broadcasters as well as our trades unions, press for international attention to be firmly focused those journalists targeted by regimes and business interests who feel threatened by the power of independent reporting.

Sign up here to receive fortnightly email alerts listing the latest headlines, with extra news and commentaries from Africa Confidential's Editor, Patrick Smith.

Times Square and the evolving nature of radicalisation

2010-05-12T03:32:17Z

By Amil Khan aka Londonstani @ abumuqawama

I've avoided posting on the recent attempt to bomb Times Square as I'm not in Pakistan at the moment, and couldn't honestly say from London what Pakistanis think about it. However, a profile of suspect Faisal Shahzad printed in the New York Times brings up points which I think are worth expanding and putting into context.

Many people still believe that extremists must be poor and badly educated. It's almost the polite thing to believe because it seems we only have two options in explaining terrorism carried out in the name of Islam. If extremists aren't poor and angry then we have to find another common thread that might explain their ideas and actions, and the only other option seems to be Islam. Of course, this reading of events is the one preferred by bigots and so reasonable people would like to steer clear of it.

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However, we have more than two options. Islamist extremism has had a long evolutionary process. It can be argued that it started in the late 1700s in Arabia, found its modern voice through Syed Qutb in 20th century Egypt and tested itself on the field of battle against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. That fairly slow process was supercharged after 9/11 and the international events that followed. It is reported that Osama Bin Laden wanted the attacks on the United States to serve as a catalyst. To some extent he got what he wanted. What we are seeing now is the mainstreaming of Islamist extremism. The language and aims of Islamist extremism have become the premier mode of expressing anger at the world around you.

In the 1990s, when I was a teenager, the angry young men of London's inner cities were drawn to crime, the language of black supremacy movements in the US or radical leftwing politics. My favourite quote from a friend about Islam was "a bunch of Indian men in beards bowing to radiators". Now, to many of those young men's younger brothers and sons, Islam is a shadowy force capable of scaring "the establishment", "the man" etc.

What strikes me about the profile drawn up by the New York Times is not that Shahzad was from a well established and well connected professional Pakistani background, but rather that he seems to have made the same transition that I have seen taking place in Egypt, Sudan, inner city London and Pakistan. Shahzad came from a comfortable background and he and his family seemed on an upwards trajectory until something went wrong and he ended up facing "financial troubles". He then became sullen and withdrawn and "started talking more about Islam". My guess is that he wasn't talking about Ghazzali's classic The Alchemy of Happiness, or someother such work that is considered traditional Islam. Chances are that "talking more about Islam" means he was talking about war, invasion, drone attacks, Palestine, Kashmir and how the Western world was intent on making life miserable for Muslims.

A clue to this is in the observation of an acquaintance of Shahzad's:

"His personality had changed - he had become more introverted," Dr. Anwar said the classmate told him. "He had a stronger religious identity, where he felt more strongly and more opinionated about things..."

The genius of the al-Qaeda-type extremism that we see today is its ability to seize on the inner turmoil of a diverse range of people (from Texas to Brixton to southern Punjab) and link them to its central world view and then motivate them to take action to they believe will lead to change - change they are not likely to live to see.

During three months with radicals in London and six months in Pakistan as well as various trips to Palestinian refugee camps, I have marvelled at the genius of a simple and powerful message that needs only the most minimal promotion - taking full advantage of the modern world, it's viral and encourages recruits to "self start"."Dr. Anwar said he had asked the classmate whether this change had come through association with a group, and the friend said it seemed to be "on his own that he was learning all these things."

There's no one thing that results in someone trying to kill civilians in the name of Islam. Among the clever al-Qaeda messaging, the personal turmoil, individual personality and a host of other elements, there's the unavoidable connection to Pakistan.

Another family friend in Pakistan, Kifayat Ali, called Mr. Shahzad "emotional" and said that he used to carry a dagger around with him as a boy. He speculated that Mr. Shahzad had become enraged by the United States' military actions, fuelled by the Pakistani press blaring conspiracy theories and anti-American vitriol.

Pakistan is a country of 170 million people that used to value it's status as a US ally. Although, the government is still technically a key ally and relations between Islamabad and Washington seem to have improved, Pakistanis live amid violence and economic catastrophe much of which they blame - directly or indirectly - on US intentions towards their country. I work on a project that aims to remove the plank of religious legitimacy from the call of extremists in Pakistan. And in the past six months I have seen that we have our work cut out for us as that call finds followers and sympathisers in upper income urban areas as well as impoverished villages.

Preventing more Shahzads, underwear bombers, Ft Hood Shooters and Jihad Janes will involve challenging the wrong and simplistic view of the West as the ultimate source of all problems and of Islamist extremism as the only force capable of challenging it.

Think Social Media is a Fad? Watch this Video...

2010-05-12T00:52:51Z

Skeptics of Social Media should watch this extraordinary video. The Social Media Revolution 2 video has vaulted up the Youtube hit parade since it was published last week. The new and updated social media & mobile statistics are hard to ignore

Yar' adua's Death and the Fate of Nigerian Youth

2010-05-11T20:23:30Z

Ezekiel Nworie, Imo State, NIgeria
It was a black Wednesday in Nigeria as she lost her 13th Head of State.
Sadness and sorrow engulfed the Presidential Villa, Nigeria's seat of
power, on Wednesday, as ailing President Umaru Yar' Adua died at the age
of 58.

It was indeed regrettable that Nigeria has lost a true visionary leader,
peace-loving man, a father, and man whose motto was Rule of law. It may
not be an overstatement to say that the vacuum created by his death can
never be filled by anybody in Nigeria.

Late President Yar'Adua style of leadership brought succor to Nigerians
and especially to the youths and most especially the youths from Niger
Delta region, who before his administration and the amnesty program, had
suffered all kinds of inhuman treatments and humiliation from the
government of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

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In Nigeria, youths are more or less, like ordinary material objects that
our intellectually bereaved and morally porous politicians use to achieve
their selfish and villainous political ambitions. The youths are so
neglected by the leaders in such a way that their welfares are not taken
into consideration. They can only be remembered when they want to use them
to facilitate political unrest. They are hired as thugs, political
assassins, kidnappers, ballot box snatchers and robbers by these political
"big weights".

Everyday, Nigeria looses as many as 40 youths due to their involvement in
crimes as a result of the frustration they feel from the hands of most of
our leaders. One thing that baffles me is that, as these youths are killed
like this, the evil politicians who sponsor them go scotch free.

The late President must be commended by the way he carried the interest of
the youths along, though most a times, only good are said of the dead, but
here, without any form of sentimentality, Yar'Adua's short stay in office
impacted positively in the lives of Nigerian youths. Despite that Nigeria
was handed over to him when the nation was at the verge of disintegration
and ruination; he managed to pool the country together despite his serious
health challenges.

He was known for the enthronement of law and electoral reform. The
greatest achievement will be seen in the light of the amnesty granted to
Niger Delta militants, through which many lives of our youths especial
those living in the troubled Niger Delta have been saved.

Furthermore, now that the President is dead and a new President, Goodluck
Jonathan, has been empowered, what does the future hold for Nigerian
youths who have a bit been salvaged from their protracted humiliation? How
prepared is President Jonathan to tackle the challenges of Niger Delta as
he is from that place or is he going to leave the militants to bounce back
to action? Is he going to carry youths along as the former President did
or are they going to go back to square one from where they were elevated?.

It was very unfortunate that the health condition of the late President
created a serious leadership hold up or logjam in the country, which made
Nigeria to be known as ONE COUNTRY WITH TWO PRESIDENTS. Now the leadership
vacuum has been filled, how prepared is Nigeria to move to the next
level?. Though, it is not as if we skeptic about Goodluck's ability to
deliver, but just that the situation that brought him in as the President
of the Federal Republic of Nigeria is a very challenging one.

The acting capacity which he was found was made possible due to section
144 and 145 of 1999 Constitution which says that the president should
transmit a letter to the Senate if he is going on medical vacation and if
the President can't discharge his function as a result of ill health, the
Vice President should take over in acting capacity.

The same constitution in section 146 (1) has empowered Mr. Jonathan as the
President. This section says: The Vice President shall hold the office of
the President if the office of the President becomes vacant by reason of
death or resignation, impeachment, permanent incapacity. It is no longer
questionable whether he has the right to be President or not, since the
constitution has empowered him, the question now is, can he turn our
fortunes for better especially that of the youths by creating jobs,
addressing unemployment that have ravaged this nation and turned our
youths to armed robbers, kidnappers and perpetual job seekers? Other
issues he should look at are electoral reform and elections.

As 2011 general election is fast approaching, how prepared is Mr. Jonathan
and the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to deliver a
credible election, especially now that the INEC Chairman, Prof. Maurice
Iwu, has been removed?. What is the likelihood that whoever is going to
replace him may not be prepared enough as the time frame before the
election is so near?, I think the experience that Iwu has under his belt
may have helped in championing free and fair election come 2011.

However, somehow, the action of the president is good because it will
allow fresh blood to be injected into the system. But, are we sure that he
is not going to use another over used or recycled politician to fill in
the post?. However, some youth organizations will continue to ask the
President not to leave the future of this country to the hands
unscrupulous politicians who do not have our interest at heart; such
programs like Youth for Technology Foundation's "YES, YOUTH CAN!" are set
out to ensure that youth feel empowered and play a role in this democratic
process.

Youth for Technology Foundation (YTF), an international citizen
organization, has stepped forward to play its part in ensuring that
Nigeria has a free, fair and credible election in 2011. YTF is doing this
through different enlightenment programs, by going to all the whole LGAs
and wards, to enlighten people especially the rural populace about the
forth coming election. Yes, Youth Can! also teaches them how to vote, why
they should vote and why citizens should avoid selling their vote because
their votes are their power. The people cannot come out to challenge any
bad government if they fail to vote. They let them know the different
penalties involved should anyone indulge in electoral fraud.

The youth are hereby appealing to Mr. President to make sure that our
votes count this time around. Mr. President should take note that the
youths say that we are tired of using recycled politicians, our youths can
do it and even better if the chance is given to us. Other youths who have
not joined this movement, should.

I am calling on the young people not to wait for opportunities to be given
to them by our villainous politician because they will rather die than
relinquish power to anybody, rather, the youths should, as matter of
urgency, scout for opportunities to enable them change this nation for
better.

NWORIE EZEKIEL CHINEDU, YOUTH FOR TECHNOLOGY FOUNDATION (YTF), OWERRI NIGERIA
08034136646

Ezekiel Nworie
Program Coordinator, Owerri Digital Village
Youth for Technology Foundation (YTF)
#2 Nworie Lane
Owerri, Imo State
Nigeria
p: 08038665843
e: ezekiel@youthfortechnology.org
http://www.youthfortechnology.org
.... Delivering to the Community.

Mexico: Human rights defender Bety Cariño killed by paramilitaries

2010-05-07T03:06:58Z

Update UN independent experts in Geneva condemn killing of Bety Cariño and the international observer Tyri Antero Jaakkola in Oaxaca. For full report, please read on below

Bety Cariño with United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Defenders Margaret Sekaggya

A violent paramilitary attack on a peaceful solidarity campaign in Oaxaca, Mexico, has resulted in the killing of WHRD Bety Cariño as well as an international observer from Finland, Tyri Antero Jaakkola.

Bety Cariño was a participant at the Fifth Dublin Platform which was held by Front Line in February 2010. Bety was widely respected for her defence of human rights in Oaxaca and her courage in continuing to work for the rights of indigenous populations and women and children.

A culture of impunity has developed in Mexico under the cover of fighting drug traffickers, with the result that human rights defenders and journalists have become ready targets.

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You can view Bety's powerful testimony to the 5th Front Line Dublin which took place in February 2010 and in which she speaks with passionate conviction of the struggle for human rights of all the people of Mexico.

The testimony of Bety Carino to the 2010 Front Line Dublin Platform

The translation of Bety's testimony is attached as a pdf.

Front Line has received information from our contacts in Oaxaca about a violent attack on a peaceful solidarity caravan of human rights defenders yesterday, 27 April 2010, as it tried to enter the autonomous indigenous municipality of San Juan Copala. It has been confirmed that at least two human rights defenders have been killed and others remain unaccounted for.

On 27 April 2010, at approximately 14:40, a humanitarian group made up of 30 human rights defenders as well as international observers were on their way to attempt to enter San Juan Copala in order to deliver provisions to indigenous communities who have been under siege by armed groups.

As they entered the community of La Sabana, a town reportedly controlled by paramilitary organisation Unión de Bienestar Social de la Región Triqui UBISORT (Social Welfare Union of the Triqui Region), their vehicles came under fire. Beatríz Alberta (Bety) Cariño Trujillo, of the Centro de Apoyo Comunitario Trabajando Unidos CACTUS (Centre for Community Support Working Together), and Tyri Antero Jaakkola, international observer from Finland, were both killed in the attack.

Noe Bautista Jimenez, David Venegas Reyes and Daniel Arellano Chavez,all members of Voces Oaxaqueñas Construyendo Autonomía y Libertad VOCAL (Voices from Oaxaca for Autonomy and Liberty) remain missing. The three human rights defenders escaped when the attack broke out and it remains unknown whether they were captured by paramilitaries or whether they are in hiding.

One member of the group, Mónica Citlali Santiago Ortiz, was injured in the attack but was able to get to a hospital for medical attention. Those who did not escape and who remained in the vehicles were interrogated by the paramilitaries. Some have reported receiving death threats prior to being released.

UBISORT paramilitaries have reportedly sealed off the area and are refusing entry or exit to anyone, including medical teams and ambulances. There are further reports that the State Police of Oaxaca have refused to enter the area to assist locating those members of the peaceful movement who have not yet been accounted for.

The human rights organisations were attempting to enter San Juan Copala to provide support to the local community who have been without electricity, water, medical access and basic provisions as a result of the ongoing paramilitary blockade. Schools have also been shut down since January 2010.

The caravan of observers included individuals from Finland, Italy, Belgium and Germany, members of the CACTUS, VOCAL, Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca APPO (Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca, the Red de Radios y omunicadores Indígenas del Sureste Mexicano (Network of Indigenous Radio Stations and Broadcasters of the Southeast of Mexico), as well as a group of teachers from the municipality who have been unable to give classes.

Front Line is gravely concerned by reports of this violent attack on peaceful human rights defenders and the killing of Beatriz Alberta Cariño Trujillo and Tyri Antero Jaakkola. Front Line remains extremely concerned for the physical and psychological integrity of all of the Mexican human rights defenders who make up the group, in particular those whose whereabouts remain unknown, as well as international observers accompanying the solidarity campaign.

The violent attack is directly linked to the peaceful activities of those national and international individuals as they attempted to defend the rights of the local communities affected in areas controlled by paramilitary groups.

UN independent experts in Geneva condemned the recent
killing of Ms. Beatriz Alberta (Bety) Cariño Trujillo and the international
observer Mr. Tyri Antero Jaakkola in Oaxaca.

Vea abajo la versión en español*
*Spanish version, see below*

*Media Statement*

12 May 2010

*Human rights defenders continue to pay with their lives in Mexico, warn UN
experts*

GENEVA - A group of UN independent experts* warned about the deteriorating
situation for human rights defenders in Mexico, strongly condemning the
recent killing of human rights defender Ms. Beatriz Alberta (Bety) Cariño
Trujillo and the international observer Mr. Tyri Antero Jaakkola in Oaxaca,
south east Mexico.

"Defenders continue to face significant threats to their lives in Mexico as
a result of their work," said Margaret Sekaggya, UN Special Rapporteur on
the situation of human rights defenders. "We are deeply concerned about the
deteriorating situation for human rights defenders in the country, including
women and human rights defenders working on issues related to indigenous
communities."

On 27 April 2010, Bety Cariño and Tyri Antero Jaakkola were part of a
mission to monitor human rights in Oaxaca when they were ambushed by
paramilitaries and killed. Several other human rights defenders and
journalists suffered injuries. Four other members of the mission, including
two journalists of the magazine Contralínea, spent two days in a forest
following the attack, before being rescued by the police on 30 April.

"The situation in Mexico is extremely complex and no-one could doubt the
gravity of the challenges confronting the Government in its fight against
the drug cartels" added Philip Alston, Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial,
summary or arbitrary executions. "But there is no justification for failing
to take strong steps when human rights defenders, journalists and others are
killed. Human rights must not be permitted to be a casualty in the fight
against drugs and crime."

"The increase of armed clashes and violence in the community of San Juan
Copala over the past few months is affecting not only the armed groups
involved but also the population of the district, most of them women and
children belonging to the Triqui indigenous community," stated with concern
the UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights and fundamental freedoms of
indigenous people, James Anaya.

On his part, UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression and opinion,
Frank La Rue, urged the Mexican authorities to protect the right to life and
guarantee the right to freedom of opinion and expression, as stated in
articles 6 and 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political
Rights. "The role of journalists is crucial in reinforcing human rights as
well as the enjoyment of all rights and freedoms of all persons."

The group of UN experts called on the Mexican Government "to take all
necessary steps to protect the right to life and security of human rights
defenders in the country against any violence and any other arbitrary action
which may be a consequence of the legitimate exercise of their activities."

"We urge the authorities to initiate a prompt and impartial inquiry into the
mentioned events so that perpetrators are identified, brought to justice and
appropriate penalties are imposed", they said. "The international community
will closely follow the response of the Mexican Government regarding such
events."

Ms. Sekaggya had met with Bety Cariño in February 2010, at the Fifth Dublin
Platform, a meeting of over 100 human rights defenders from around the
world. The UN independent expert praised the defender for her tireless work
campaigning on indigenous, environmental and women's rights. Bety Cariño was
Director of the Centro de Apoyo Comunitario Trabajando Unidos CACTUS (Centre
for Community Support Working Together).

*(*):* Margaret Sekaggya, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human
rights defenders; Philip Alston, Special Rapporteur on summary,
extrajudicial or arbitrary executions; James Anaya, Special Rapporteur on
the human rights and fundamental freedoms of indigenous people; and Frank la
Rue, Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the rights to
freedom of opinion and expression.

ENDS

*Check the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights: **
http://www2.ohchr.org/english/law/ccpr.htm*

*Visit the Special Rapporteurs' websites:*
*Situation of human rights defenders: **
http://www2.ohchr.org/english/issues/defenders/index.htm*
*Summary, extrajudicial or arbitrary executions: **
http://www2.ohchr.org/english/issues/executions/index.htm*
*Situation of human rights and fundamental freedoms of indigenous people: **
http://www2.ohchr.org/english/issues/indigenous/rapporteur/*
*Promotion and protection of the rights to freedom of opinion and
expression: **http://www2.ohchr.org/english/issues/opinion/index.htm*

*OHCHR Country Page - Mexico: **
http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Countries/LACRegion/Pages/MXIndex.aspx*

*For more information and media requests**, please contact Dolores Infante
(Tel.:+ 41 22 917 9730 / e-mail: **dinfante@ohchr.org**)*

*
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
*

*Declaración a la Prensa*

12 de mayo de 2010

*Defensores de los derechos humanos continúan pagando con sus vidas en
México, advierten expertos de la ONU*

GINEBRA - Un grupo de expertos en Derechos Humanos de las Naciones Unidas*
advirtió sobre el deterioro de la situación para los defensores de los
derechos humanos en México y condenó firmemente los recientes asesinatos de
la defensora de los derechos humanos Beatriz Alberta (Bety) Cariño Trujillo
y del observador internacional Tyri Antero Jaakkola, en Oaxaca, sureste de
México.
"Los defensores continúan haciendo frente a graves amenazas contra sus vidas
en México como consecuencia de su trabajo", dijo Margaret Sekaggya, Relatora
Especial sobre la situación de los defensores de los derechos humanos.
"Estamos profundamente preocupados por el deterioro de la situación de los
defensores de los derechos humanos en México, incluidas las mujeres y los
defensores que trabajan en temas relacionados con las comunidades
indígenas".

El 27 de abril de 2010, Bety Cariño y Tyri Antero Jaakkola formaban parte de
una misión de observación de los derechos humanos en Oaxaca cuando sufrieron
una emboscada por parte de los paramilitares y fueron asesinados. Otros
defensores de los derechos humanos y de periodistas sufrieron heridas.
Cuatro miembros de la misión, incluidos dos periodistas de la revista
"Contralínea", pasaron dos días en la selva tras el ataque antes de ser
rescatados por la policía el 30 de abril.

"La situación en México es extremadamente compleja y nadie puede poner en
duda la gravedad de los desafíos a los que se enfrenta el Gobierno en su
lucha contra los cárteles de las drogas", añadió Philip Alston, Relator
Especial sobre las ejecuciones sumarias, extrajudiciales o arbitrarias.
"Pero no hay justificación para no tomar las medidas necesarias cuando
defensores de los derechos humanos, periodistas u otros son asesinados. No
se debe permitir que los derechos humanos sean víctimas de la lucha contra
las drogas y el crimen."

"El incremento de los enfrentamientos armados y la violencia en la comunidad
de San Juan Copala durante los últimos meses está afectando no sólo a los
grupos armados involucrados, sino también a la población civil del
municipio, en su mayoría pertenecientes a la comunidad indígena triqui",
señaló con preocupación el Relator Especial sobre libertades y derechos
fundamentales de los pueblos indígenas, James Anaya.

Por su parte, el Relator Especial de la ONU sobre la promoción y la
protección del derecho a la libertad de opinión y de expresión, Frank La
Rue, exhortó a las autoridades mexicanas a proteger el derecho a la vida y a
garantizar libertad de opinión y de expresión, tal y como se contempla en
los artículos 6 y 19 del Pacto Internacional de Derechos Civiles y
Políticos. "El papel de los periodistas es crucial tanto en el
fortalecimiento de los derechos humanos como en el disfrute de todos los
derechos por parte de todas las personas".

El grupo de Expertos de la ONU hizo un llamamiento al Gobierno mexicano "a
tomar las medidas que sean necesarias para proteger el derecho a la vida y
la seguridad de los defensores de los derechos humanos en el país contra
todo tipo de violencia y acción arbitraria que se produzca como consecuencia
del ejercicio legítimo de sus actividades."

"Exhortamos a las autoridades a iniciar una investigación pronta e imparcial
sobre los hechos mencionados con el fin de que los culpables sean
identificados, puestos a disposición judicial y se impongan penas adecuadas.
La comunidad internacional seguirá de cerca la respuesta del Gobierno
mexicano en relación a estos hechos."

Margaret Sekaggya había conocido a Bety Cariño en Febrero de 2010 durante la
Quinta Plataforma de Dublín, una reunión de más de 100 defensores de los
derechos humanos de todo el mundo. La Sra. Sekaggya elogió a la defensora
por su trabajo incansable en favor de los derechos de los indígenas, las
mujeres y el medio ambiente. Bety Cariño era Directora del Centro de Apoyo
Comunitario Trabajando Unidos (CACTUS).

*(*):* Margaret Sekaggya, Relatora Especial sobre la situación de los
defensores de los derechos humanos; Philip Alston, Relator Especial sobre
las ejecuciones sumarias, extrajudiciales o arbitrarias; James Anaya,
Relator Especial sobre libertades y derechos fundamentales de los pueblos
indígenas; y Frank la Rue, Relator Especial sobre la promoción y la
protección del derecho a la libertad de opinión y de expresión.

ENDS

*Pacto Internacional de Derechos Civiles y Políticos: **
http://www2.ohchr.org/spanish/law/ccpr.htm*

*Visite las páginas web de los Relatores Especiales:*
*Situación de los defensores de los derechos humanos: **
http://www2.ohchr.org/english/issues/defenders/index.htm*
*Ejecuciones extrajudiciales, sumarias o arbitrarias: **
http://www2.ohchr.org/english/issues/executions/index.htm*
*Libertades y derechos fundamentales de los pueblos indígenas: **
http://www2.ohchr.org/english/issues/indigenous/rapporteur/*
*Promoción y protección del derecho a la libertad de opinión y de
expresión: **http://www2.ohchr.org/english/issues/opinion/index.htm*

*ACNUDH, página por país - México: **
http://www.ohchr.org/SP/Countries/LACRegion/Pages/MXIndex.aspx*

*Para más información y solicitudes de prensa**, favor contactar a Dolores
Infante (Tel.:+ 41 22 917 9730 / e-mail: **dinfante@ohchr.org**)*

A cracked Greek vase

2010-05-03T01:29:21Z

For 150 years, Greece has relied on clientelism and political favors to run its economy, now with its $40 billion loan program for Greece, the International Monetary Fund is back in the nation-building business..

By Takis Michas

The debacle of the Greek state should not be seen simply as the result of fraudulent budget statistics or a few years of profligate spending. Instead, it signifies the collapse of a model of economic development that from its very inception in the 19th century has always placed politics above markets.

The central organizing principle of Greek society has always been political clientelism--a system in which political support is provided in exchange for material benefits. In this situation the state's role as the main provider of benefits to various groups and individuals becomes paramount. As Greek left-wing historian Kostas Vergopoulos puts it:

"The fundamental structure of Greece has never been civil society but the state. Ever since the middle of the 19th century nothing could be done in Greece without it necessarily passing through the machinery of the state."

In the Anglo-Saxon world the state was primarily seen as a protector of certain Lockean rights, especially the right to private property. This concept went hand in hand with the existence of a ruling class with vested interest in large property holdings.

In Greece, however, the social group that took over after the liberation from the Ottomans were the local notables whose power lay not in their ownership of land but in the fact that they acted as tax collectors for their Ottoman rulers. Thus in Greece the ruling class that emerged after independence saw the state not as an instrument for the protection of pre-existing assets, but as its chief source of income.

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Barbara Kelley

Art: Barbara Kelly

At the same time, control of the apparatus of the state became the primary mechanism for the distribution of material rewards and benefits. The most important of these benefits was the provision of jobs in the civil service. By the late 1880s, Greece already had one of the largest state bureaucracies in Europe: For every 10,000 inhabitants there were 200 civil servants in Belgium, 176 in France,126 in Germany and 73 in Great Britain. In Greece, the number was 214. As the French nobleman and author Arthur Gobinau observed at the time:

"In Greece a whole society seems to be operating on the motto that to the extent that only the state has money one should take advantage of this fact and work as a civil servant."

Much water has of course flown under the bridge since those days. Greece experienced wars, occupation, dictatorships, revolutions, earthquakes etc. Yet one thing remained constant: Political clientelism as the leading doctrine of governance.

Today there are three types of benefits that the state provides to various client groups and individuals. The first and the most coveted benefit is a sinecure in the civil service. Approximately one million people, or one out of four working Greeks, is employed by the state. More than 80% of public expenditure goes toward the wages, salaries and pensions of these public-sector workers.

The second way the system of benefits operates is by granting privileges to various professional groups, such as lawyers, public notaries, truck owners, loaders in central markets, pharmacists, and opticians, creating in effect "closed shops" that limit competition to the benefit of the insiders.

The third category of benefits are levies imposed on various transactions for the benefit of groups that are not part of the transaction. For example, if you start a business in Greece you have to pay 1% of the starting capital to the lawyers' pension fund. Each time you buy a boat ticket, 10% of the price goes to the pension fund of the harbor workers. If you sell supplies to the army, you will have to pay 4% of the money you receive to the military officers' pension fund. Intriguingly, sometimes levies are imposed for the benefit of groups that no longer exist. Such is the case with the lighters on the island of Santorini. These launch-boat operators long ago became extinct. Yet part of the price of the passenger tickets for ships that dock at the Santorini harbor is still for the association of the (non-existent) lighters. Nobody knows where the money goes.

As a result of these schemes, more than 70% of the Greek population receives its income wholly or partly from taxes or levies. This in turn implies very intense and fierce struggles over the distribution of benefits--what economists call "rent-seeking." Thus a considerable amount of resources that could otherwise be used to generate wealth and income are wasted in fighting over the slices of a shrinking economic pie.

Unfortunately, there are no economic studies that have looked into how much money is being wasted in rent-seeking. But we can get an idea by looking at what the restrictions on the economy cost in lost output. For example, some academic studies suggest that if Greece opened up its closed professions it would boost its GDP by 1%, and if it eliminated restrictions in various markets it would increase economic output by 2%. If it brought the bureaucratic costs of doing business in Greece in line with the rest of the European Union, this would bring about an increase of 3.5% of GDP.

Particularly in the past few years, the left has been arguing that the main drawback to capitalism is that it allegedly puts "markets above people." That's why they believe that political intervention is needed to tame the markets and restore the people to their rightful place as "masters" and not as "slaves" of the market.

The Greek model provides the perfect realization of this vision. Greece has always placed "people"--that is, "clients"--above markets, with the tragic results we see today.

Takis Michas is the author of the study "Putting Politics above Markets: A Greek Tragedy," to be published by the Cato Institute later this year.

Don't get nicked in China, you may not return...

2010-04-30T15:31:05Z

Many Chinese citizens die "unnaturally" in the detention center run by the Ministry of Public Security. This animated video asks what is the true function of detention centers and why so many unjust deaths occur there?

"Five Key Reforms of the WB" by David Shaman

2010-04-27T15:03:50Z

by David Shaman,
author of The World Bank Unveiled: Inside the Revolutionary Struggle for Transparency
The world has come to a line in the sand. Over one and a half billion people live in abject poverty today. Millions die each year of malnutrition or from treatable disease. This condition has existed for decades and yet help from the rich nations of the world has been inadequate, inefficient and achingly slow.

In the post-9/11 period (from 2001 to 2008), the world's largest donors said they would increase development assistance. In 2002, in Monterrey, Mexico, the richest countries pledged to raise aid levels to 0.7% of their gross national income. In 2005, in Gleneagles, Scotland, they again promised to send $150 billion in aid to Africa.

]]> However, at the end of 2008, the New York Times reported donor aid had declined 13% from 2005 to 2007. Commitments made in Monterrey had not been met. In fact, promises by most of the Monterrey participants were not even near 0.7%. And, the most egregious defaulter was the U.S. at 0.16%. Today, there is widespread agreement among most experts that Millennium Development Goals (poverty reduction and development targets the United Nations established in 2002 to be achieved by 2015) will not be met in key impoverished global regions.

The World Bank, as the key global development institution dedicated to reducing poverty, failed to convince donors during this period to meet their aid commitments. In my recently released book, The World Bank Unveiled: Inside the Revolutionary Struggle for Transparency, I note three reasons why this happened. First, significant analysis from a number of external experts suggests the Bank's lending had not been fully effective. Weak portfolio performance undermined appeals by the Bank to rich countries for more aid. Second, borrower countries found the Bank's lending "conditions" stringent, draconian and often creating unnecessary hardships on their populations. As a result, borrowers increasingly shied away from the Bank and sought private capital financing for their development needs. In turn, the Bank's portfolio's changed toward financing more projects in emerging markets rather than the countries with the greatest development needs. Finally, shareholders - donor and borrower countries - and stakeholders such as NGOs, community-based organizations and private citizens view the Bank as a monolithic society with a culture of secrecy, an aversion to transparency and a lack of accountability. As a result, shareholders and stakeholders hesitate to trust the Bank, the moral standing of the institution is weakened and its ability to advocate for policies it supports is undermined. The World Bank Unveiled links the Bank's lack of transparency with underperformance in the institution's lending portfolio and weak borrower confidence.

The global economic downturn that emerged in 2008 changed the development paradigm and has resulted in two important changes. First, a number of international agencies including the Bank itself estimate that the economic contraction is pushing as many as 100 million people back into abject poverty. Second, donor countries are revisiting their foreign assistance policies and without viable alternatives the G-20 in April, 2009 pledged to fund the Bank with hundreds of billions of dollars to help poor countries through the crisis. After years as an ineffective advocate on behalf of the poor, the Bank today is wealthier and more powerful than ever. The question moving forward is whether it will become any more effective.

The pressures on the Bank are enormous, both on a humanitarian level and from a political point of view. An ineffective Bank would be intolerable for the poor and found intolerable by donors, borrowers and civil society actors. Significant pressure from external sources in recent years has compelled the Bank to acknowledge a need to examine weaknesses in its internal governance. As the crisis broke in the fall of 2008, the Bank announced it would convene a commission to examine internal governance reforms. In October 2009, the commission led by former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo offered recommendations.

Reform minded agents, included the Zedillo Commission, have focused primarily (but not exclusively) on the need for four basic changes at the Bank. These include: Changing the composition and size of the Board of Directors as well as increasing its expertise on the Bank's operational affairs; increasing public access to Board meetings and documents; giving emerging and developing country members a greater voice and vote power in operational decisions; and changing the process for selecting future Bank presidents so it is more open and merit-based. Will these reforms help? Certainly they will. They are all valuable because they make important adjustments in the top-level decision-making structure. They will also make the Bank's decisions more transparent and representative of its membership.

But will such reforms, if enacted, be enough? Based on my experiences of a more than a decade working at the Bank, I suspect not. The reforms noted above target the upper echelon of the institution's political framework. Policy decisions may be orchestrated from above, but they are implemented by the mid-level managerial corps. The relationship between these two groups is of paramount importance.

To best understand the Bank, one must grapple with its structural inefficiencies. There are a number of them, but the key one is that institution has three rigidly distinct and hierarchical layers: Senior management; mid-level management; and staff. Senior management sculpts visionary decisions and reforms to internalize, address and reduce geo-political pressures brought upon it by the Bank's member countries, external watchdogs, the media and the ever-evolving business and financial environment. As these external pressures have grown, the information revolution and heightened interconnectivity of the global economy have reduced the amount of time senior officials have to react. Historically, this has led management to engage in regular reorganizations.

To implement reforms, senior officials must rely on the institution's mid-level management. Concurrently, mid-level management is in reality a series of fiefdoms. Top-level officials don't have the time or expertise to delve into the administration of individual fiefs, so the way units are managed can be quite different from the prevailing mantra from above. This is because the Bank is governed by an internal culture that, hardened by more than six decades of existence, rewards managers for subservience, conservatism and adherence to the status quo. Maintaining the status quo is the principle strategy for advancement and accruing power. And, accruing power at the Bank can mean managing hundreds of personnel, holding the purse strings to billions of dollars and orchestrating decisions made by developing country governments and even global regions.

If loyalty is a central barometer for advancement, why wouldn't mid-level managers implement exactly those directives that senior officials request? The answer can be found in the fact that Bank reorganizations have been continual for almost a quarter century. Senior management routinely genuflects to the greater external pressures brought upon the institution by implementing new strategies to tack with the wind. Mid-level managers caught moving too far down the road in one direction can become suddenly vulnerable when the wind shifts. The safest strategy is to adhere to a time-honored tradition that moves little in any direction.

Therefore, to enact true change at the Bank, reforms must address an internal culture that propagates the wrong incentives. I would seek the following reforms:

The Bank has several key internal accountability mechanisms that have been enacted during its history to address different sorts of concerns or inequities. These include the Independent Evaluation Department (IED), the Inspection Panel and the Conflict Resolution System (CRS). In all these cases, the Bank's senior management retains ultimate control over the process or of whether recommendations arising from each mechanism will be implemented. This creates an inherent conflict of interest. The Bank cannot be judge and jury over instruments designed to measure whether the institution adheres to its own rules, regulations or code of ethics. Not surprisingly, calls to move these accountability mechanisms outside the Bank have been fiercely resisted by management. Losing control over these processes to independent evaluators leaves the Bank vulnerable when inequities arise. Keeping control allows management to muffle problems before they become public.

Let's examine two. A key variable for measuring success is best known inside the institution as the "approval" culture. Managerial success is measured by the volume of outputs: The amount of projects approved and lending disbursed. Personnel who are successful in getting projects accepted by the board climb through the hierarchy. This often translates into safe projects, but significant research (both externally and internally) suggests it does not translate into insightful or successful lending. In fact, a number of analyses suggest the failure rate of Bank projects is significant. The Bank has defended itself from such criticism by stating that its project success rates are strong and improving. The Independent Evaluation Department (IED) is the branch of the institution that evaluates lending success. To be sure, IED has offered critical analysis of the Bank's lending effectiveness in recent years. But its recommendations are not always implemented by management and its personnel are part of the institution. IED staff seeking to move to other units in the Bank can often experience a kind of unofficial excommunication, so the pressure to reduce or blunt criticism is omnipresent. This pressure would disappear if the project evaluations were conducted by an independent unit outside the Bank. Moreover, if evaluations conducted emphasized analysis of how projects fared five and ten years after implementation rather than shortly after disbursement of funds, the approval culture that dominates the Bank would begin to dissipate.

The CRS system was designed to provide staff with opportunities to address grievances with supervisors. As noted, management has jurisdiction over CRS decisions. Moreover, when staff has managed to win a decision historically this has translated into modest monetary penalties and abusive managers have rarely been penalized. As a result, abuses of authority and personnel continue because whistleblowers and staff have little confidence in the objectivity and legitimacy of the system. Putting CRS-related decisions in the hands of independent arbitrators with the authority to impose binding and sufficient penalties would weaken the institution's culture of fiefdoms, increase managerial accountability and give staff tangible protections from managerial abuses.

A third important reform would be to revise the managerial selection process. The Bank recruits and promotes technocrats and academics who have excelled in their fields. The institution reputedly has more PhDs and individuals with credentials of academic excellence than any other organization in the world. But does this translate into excellent results? Internal and external Bank surveys have found its managerial cadre well educated but overly technical, excessively arrogant and highly bureaucratic. The institution needs a more holistic approach to finding managers or promoting from within that places greater emphasis on leadership and entrepreneurial skills. This would revitalize the institution's personnel that staff surveys over the last two decades have indicated work in fear and are mired in complacency.

A fourth reform, albeit an unorthodox one, would be to create a seat on the board for a civil society representative. This would increase civil society's inclusion and participation in the Bank's policy making as well as reduce and de-politicize NGO criticisms of the institution. Alternatively, it would also increase civil society's accountability for Bank decisions. It should be acknowledged that the establishment of such a seat would create its own political hurdles: Such a person would need to represent civil society interests of both the North and the South.

A fifth reform would be to reconfigure the World Bank Institute (WBI), the pedagogical arm of the institution, from one that imposes institutional viewpoints on development theory and practice upon developing country government officials to an open-learning model that not only tolerates but fosters contradictory views. Former Bank economist Daniel Ellerman's research notes development agencies such as the Bank have traditionally served as library storehouses dispensing knowledge nuggets. Instead, he suggests the Bank should serve as a knowledge broker offering a variety of experiences and allowing recipients to decide which nuggets of knowledge fit. Ellerman believes that in the current information revolution the library storehouse model, the one on which WBI is based, will lose influence over time. So do I.

A final reform would be to re-establish a transparent Internet-based broadcasting medium to which development practitioners inside and outside the Bank have easy and affordable access. I built such a platform in the early 2000s called B-SPAN, but it was largely disassembled by key bureaucrats opposed to transparency and wedded to maintaining a monolithic culture. Such a medium would provide a platform for discussion and debate on development ideas, theories and practices. The Bank would benefit because it would have a venue attracting global attention (and business) and allow it to market itself as the place to come to for information and expertise. The rest of the world would benefit by having unprecedented access to development knowledge from an institution that had once been secretive and insular.

The reforms I have suggested are not being discussed by those "officially" involved in the reform process. Nevertheless, I am convinced they are ones that will have a dramatic impact on improving the Bank's efficiency and effectiveness in reducing global poverty. Decisions about what reforms the Bank will accept and enact are expected at its annual spring meetings in April 2010. The world, and particularly the developing world, will be watching.

David Shaman worked at the World Bank for 12 years where he co-created and managed B-SPAN, the World Bank's webcasting station for development. He is the author of "The World Bank Unveiled: Inside the Revolutionary Struggle for Transparency", where he documents the experiences described above.

Global Research Articles by David Shaman

"Some boys' mothers have very slow sons....."

2010-04-24T12:29:55Z

Looking at a sea of puzzled Dubin schoolboy faces unable to grasp an intricate point of Algebra, a frustrated teacher of mine liked to remark that: "some boys' mothers have very slow sons."

That lost feeling returned last week when I attended the World Bank's Innovation Fair in Cape Town and the discussion kept returning to Ushahidi and social mapping.

The sceptical journalist in me demanded evidence that all the energy going into mapping and geo-location was capable of doing any good. What was going to stop a government, with evil intent in mind, from undermining an Ushahidi project by disseminating false information?

"How many Haitians had been pulled from the rubble thanks to Ushahidi's enormous texting and geo-location efforts by volunteers around the world and on the ground?" I asked.

"We don't know" came the honest reply.

It took time to penetrate, but after learning about several social mapping projects taking place around the world, I finally 'get' why mapping is central to the future of communication. Its already being used around the world to empower traditionally voiceless people.

Take the Map Kibera for example a project in which local residents of the famous Nairobi slum collaborated to map what they believe is important in their community. Kenyan government maps depict Kibera as a forest! This is very convenient because trees don't need services. Thus, almost a million people living in Kibera get virtually no services from the government.

Not any more. Thanks to Map Kibera, the slum now has a political personality all its own. At a click on a map its residents can make the case for resources. Along with video and twitter feeds the community is finally gaining a voice of its own.

The worry that Ushahidi's technology might be deliberately undermined by a repressive government still lingered, however. Given the behavior of Chinese hackers and Iranian secret police this seems a looming danger. This morning I received an email of a post about a TED talk by Patrick Meier, one of Ushahaidi's founders and current spokesperson of the organisation.

Its well worth a read.

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Patrick Meier's TEDx Talk: From Photosynth to ALLsynth

April 16, 2010 · 4 Comments

Here is basically a blog post version of the TEDx talk. The presentation played off a recent blog post of mine entitled "Wag The Dog, or How Falsifying Crowdsourced Information can be a Pain."

We all know that open crowdsourcing platforms are susceptible to information vandalism, i.e., false information deliberately used to mislead. For example, if anUshahidi platform were used in Iran, the government there could start reporting events to Ushahidi that never happened; perhaps events that suggest protesters attacked first and that riot police were just acting in self defense. But, I'm going to argue that falsifying crowdsourced information can actually be a pain. And I'm going to use the analogy of "Wag the Dog" to explain why. If you haven't watched the movie, the story is based on a White House Administration that pretends a war has broken out in Albania to divert public opinion and hopefully increase the President's ratings prior to re-election.

Here's a 30 second highlight on how they created a fake war:

In a way, Wag the Dog already happened for real. Except the story was called "The War of the Worlds" and it was played as a radio broadcast in 1938. "War of the Worlds" is drama about a Martian invasion of Earth. What was particularly fun about this radio broadcast was that the first 2/3 of the 1-hr long story was just a series of simulated news bulletins. And the story ran uninterrupted, ie, without commercials. So many radio listeners in the US freaked out, thinking a real invasion was taking place!

The panic this caused even made it on the front page of the New York Times! Clearly, pulling of a Wag-the-Dog in the 1930s was a piece of cake!

And that's because the information ecosystem looked something like this in the 1930s. Largely disconnected and broadcast only, ie, one-to-many. Can anyone point out an important node that should be included in this ecosystem? That's right, the newspaper. But the paper would not have been printed at the speed that the radio broadcast was taking place to help counter fears; unlike today, of course, thanks to online news.

Today's information ecosystem obviously looks little different. Many-to-many, peer-to-peer, 2-way, real-time information and communication technologies. Now, we might argue that this kind of ecosystem makes it easier for repressive regimes to game since the system is closely integrated and interoperable, which means information can propagate very quickly. Secretary Clinton recently called our information ecosystem the new nervous system of the planet. But then again, these diverse sources of user-generated content could also make it easier to triangulate and filter out false information.

For example, in the case of Iran, the high volume of pictures and videos posted on Flickr and YouTube made it rather difficult for the government to claim nothing was happening. Information blockades are likely to join the Berlin Walls of history. Today, you can get pictures of the same incident from three different camera phones, in addition to tweets and text messages, etc.

This is what Ushahidi is about, aggregating crisis information across different media and mapping that information in near real time to improve transparency, accountability and coordination.

Take the Ushahidi-Haiti map, for example. Crowdsourcing crisis information on Haiti allowed us to map several thousand incidents over just a few weeks, which actually saved lives on the ground. The incidents we mapped came from a myriad of sources: thousands of text messages directly from Haiti, hundreds of Tweets, information from Facebook Groups, online media, live Skype chats with the Search and Rescue Teams in Port-au-Prince, list serves, radio, you name it. Volunteers at The Fletcher School mapped this information in near real-time for several weeks and first responders used the map to save lives.

Check out this animation of the events unfolding from just a few hours after the quake.

What you see are events "overlapping" and clustering, ie, on several occasions we get two or more text messages from different numbers reporting the same event. And then a Tweet with similar information, for example. The crowdsourcing of crisis information allows us to triangulate and validate information thanks to the reporting coming from a myriad of sources in near real-time. This would hardly have been possible in the 1930s, which is what prompted my colleague Anand at the New York Times to write an article on our work and ask,

They say that history is written by the winners, will future history be written by the crowd?

Ushahidi's crowded map of Haiti reminded me of Photosynth. Taking hundreds crowdsourced pictures and "stitching" them together to reproduce historical monuments. In 3D no less!

Here's a quick 20 second video demo:

So the question is, can Ushahidi become the "ALLsynth" by stitching together crowdsourced crisis information across many different types of media? Ushahidi platforms have been deployed hundreds of times across the world. Here are just four examples.

From mapping the Swine Flu outbreak to reporting on the war in Gaza, to citizen-powered election monitoring in India and disaster response in the Philippines. Would stitching together these hundreds of platforms amount to creating an ALLsynth? What would it take to game an ALLsynth?

As I mentioned in my Wag the Dog post, perhaps some of the following:

Dozens of pictures from as many different camera phones of an event that never happened.
Text messages using different wording to describe an event that never happened.
Tweets (not retweets!).
Fake blog posts, Facebook groups and Wikipedia entries.
Fake video footage. Heck, you'd probably want to hack the international media and plant a fake article in the New York Times home page.
If you really want to go all out, you'd want to get hundreds of (paid?) actors like in The Truman Show.
You'd likely want to cordon off an entire area of the city or city outskirts.
Then you'd want to choreograph a few fight scenes with these actors.
A few rehearsals would probably be in order too.
Oh and of course props, plus lots of ketchup if you want things to look like they went badly.

In other words, you'd probably want to move to Hollywood to fabricate all this... That said, there's another way that repressive regimes could deal with an unwanted Ushahidi platform, like this one being used by Sudanese civil society groups in the Sudan to monitor the elections currently taking place. We found out yesterday from our Sudanese colleagues that the site was no longer accessible in the Sudan (see official press release here in PDF). Blocking and censoring websites is really easy for governments to do, and we expected that Sudan would be no different.

So our Sudanese colleagues have been working with their tech-savvy friends to circumvent the censorship and continue mapping election irregularities--this is my applied dissertation research in action, I just never thought that my own actions would influence the data. They set up a mirror site under an different domain name. This may become a cyber-game-of-cat-and-mouse, there is plenty of precedents for this: civil society finds a loophole, which is then blocked by the state, which prompts the search for another loophole, etc, etc. I expect that repressive regimes may eventually give up on blocking websites given the likely futility. Instead, they may try to game the platforms by falsifying crowdsourced information.

But as I have just argued, falsifying crowdsourced information can be a pain. So if repressive regimes start pouring money into their domestic film industries, particularly in blue screen technology, you'll know why, and this is what you can expect to happen next:

Patrick Philippe Meier

Categories: Crowdsourcing · Digital Activism
Tagged: TEDx, Ushahidi

Gunning for the judge

2010-04-22T14:14:44Z

Reed Brody,European Press Director

Human Rights Watch

Thirty-five years after the death of General Francisco Franco, Spain is finally prosecuting someone in connection with the crimes of his dictatorship, and of the Spanish civil war which came before it. Unfortunately, the defendant in the case is Baltasar Garzon, the judge who sought to investigate those crimes.

Garzon, of course, is one of the most high-profile judges in the world and what makes the case particularly ironic is that he is being prosecuted for trying to apply at home the same principles he so successfully promoted internationally.

Garzon's daring 1998 indictment of the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet for crimes committed in Chile in the 1970s triggered Pinochet's arrest in London and ushered in the heyday of international justice.

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Many people contested the right of a judge in Spain, which had never come to grips with its own past, to open up wounds in foreign countries. But the Pinochet case inspired victims of abuse throughout Latin America to challenge transitions from dictatorship which allowed the perpetrators of atrocities to go unpunished.

These temporary accommodations with the anciens regimes did not extinguish the thirst of victims and relatives to find out the truth and to bring their tormentors to justice. International and national courts ruled that amnesties could not stand in the way of a state's duty to investigate the worst international crimes. Justice is now part of just about every transition to democracy anywhere in the world.

Then in 2008, Garzon set his sights inwards. In the last several years, a growing movement has challenged the "pact of forgetting" which was part of Spain's "model" transition to democracy, and the children and grandchildren of victims filed complaints regarding the enforced disappearances of more than 100,000 people between 1936 and 1952. Garzon took up the complaints, saying that under international law Spain's 1977 amnesty law for "political acts" could not apply to crimes against humanity, before an appeals panel ruled 10 to five that Garzon did not properly have jurisdiction. Far-right groups, including one linked to Franco's dictatorship, then accused Garzon of an abuse of power and an investigating judge has just decided to proceed against Garzon for knowingly taking on a case he knew not to be within his jurisdiction.

In his long career, Garzon has made many enemies. Conservatives are gunning for him now because he helped unearth alleged massive corruption in the financing of the opposition Popular party, but many in the Socialist party haven't forgiven him for probing government support for an anti-Eta death squad in the 1980s. The decision by the investigating judge to proceed means Garzon will soon be suspended from his duties. If he is convicted it would effectively end his judicial career.

Prosecuting a judge for issuing a controversial decision, even one overruled on appeal (in a split decision), is a dangerous attack on judicial independence. Many undemocratic rulers would love to use criminal sanctions to silence meddlesome judges. The assault on Garzon (there are two other cases against him in the pipeline) comes on the heels of the Spanish government's decision to curtail its law permitting the prosecution of foreign atrocities which had been used to indict Pinochet, convict an Argentine official for "dirty war" killings, investigate crimes in El Salvador and Guatemala and issue warrants for top Rwandan leaders.

But after cases involving powerful countries such as China, the US and Israel - for alleged crimes in Tibet, Guantanamo and Gaza - created headaches for the Spanish government, both major parties agreed that the law would be limited.

Thanks to Garzon, Spain became a symbol of justice for atrocity victims around the world. Now justice itself may be the victim in Spain.

Reed Brody is counsel for Human Rights Watch and was a lawyer in the Pinochet prosecution

The Arabist: Fact-checking Hitchens on Animal Farm

2010-04-21T15:53:59Z

Reposted from The Arabist

By Issandr El Amrani

Get it on Amazon.comThis morning I read this piece by Christopher Hitchens on Animal Farm, George Orwell's classic work of political satire. It's always great to read Hitchens on this kind of stuff, because of his Orwell fetishism, and well because he's such a great writer when he writes about what he knows well, as opposed to endorsing late fascist1dictatorships in the Arab world.

I have two issues with the piece. One is trivial. Hitchens offers this tantalizing morsel, but no interpretation:

There is, however, one very salient omission. There is a Stalin pig and a Trotsky pig, but no Lenin pig. Similarly, in Nineteen Eighty-Four we find only a Big Brother Stalin and an Emmanuel Goldstein Trotsky. Nobody appears to have pointed this out at the time (and if I may say so, nobody but myself has done so since; it took me years to notice what was staring me in the face).

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That's fascinating, I had never noticed it. It's hard to believe that Orwell would have spared Lenin. But perhaps it's that Stalin and Trotsky emerged rapidly as the prime engines of the Bolsheviks, each carrying out acts of mass violence (first Trotsky as army commissar during the civil war, then Stalin in his own military decisions during the civil war and later as architect of command center economics and permanent political terror.) Too bad Hitchens doesn't elaborate.

(Update: a commenter points out that there is a Lenin pig, Old Major, who's the one who has the idea for the revolution. He dies at the beginning of the second chapter (just like the real Lenin!) but before the animals take over, so it's not quite chronologically accurate -- or perhaps he's meant to represent not Lenin but something between Marx and Lenin.)

The second thing comes at the end of the article, where he hopes that Animal Farm will come to the countries it is currently banned in, such as China, North Korea, Burma or Zimbabwe. He also writes:

In the Islamic world, many countries continue to ban Animal Farm, ostensibly because of its emphasis on pigs. Clearly this can not be the whole reason - if only because the porcine faction is rendered in such an unfavourable light - and under the theocratic despotism of Iran it is forbidden for reasons having to do with its message of "revolution betrayed".

I don't think this has been fact-checked. The Wikipedia entry "List of banned books" says:

In 2002, the novel was banned in the schools of the United Arab Emirates, because it contained text or images that goes against Islamic and Arab values.

There's nothing on other countries. Reading Hitchens' article, you'd think that there are no Arabic editions of Animal Farm. In fact you can get a bilingual Arabic-English edition here (or download a digital version) and, I would assume, the regular Arabic one in bookshops in most countries (hopefully not all editions have as ugly a cover as the one on the right.) You can find an extensive Arabic wikipedia entry here. Amazon.com sells an "Egyptian Animal Farm" in Arabic, by Mohamed Morsey, adapting Orwell to an Egyptian setting.2 If you're a fan of the cartoon version3, you can get Arabic subtitles here.

I'd be willing to bet that Animal Farm is used in schools in various countries, too. If anyone has information on whether it is banned elsewhere, do let us know.

Footnotes:

1. "Late fascist": A term I use to describe the political systems most of the Arab republics, in comparison to Franco's Spain or Salazar's Portugal in the late 1970s or similar regimes based on public mobilization where the original ideological edifice of the regime is spent. Will have to elaborate someday, but today it applies to Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Syria. Also in some respects Iran. I think it may well have applied to most Eastern bloc countries in the 1980s.

2. It's self-published, you can get more details here.

3. Watch it on YouTube or get it on torrent sites.

Unfreemedia.org makes the cut for World bank's Cape Town Innovation Fair: Moving Beyond Conflict

2010-04-07T17:21:10Z

Innovation for the Development Sector (Hint: The iPad Probably Isn't It)

SUBMITTED BY SUSAN MOELLER ON TUE, 04/06/2010 - 14:53

Reposted from the World Bank's People Spaces deliberation Blog

This past weekend's launch of theiPad has had me thinking more and more about the future of information because I'm not entirely convinced that we should go in the direction thatSteve Jobs is taking us.

Or what I really mean (since I have every intention of getting an iPad) is that I'm not convinced that that's the ONLY direction we should go.

Let me step back for a moment and briefly explain what the media gurus believe is in our future.

We live now in the age of Web 2.0 and the next BIG thing on the horizon is being called Web 3.0 or the "Semantic" Web. In other words, we are heading, we are told, for a web that has "meaning."i

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According to MediaBistro, one of the must-read websites for media professionals, "Web 3.0 is a web in which data is linked to allow for more meaningful, actionable insight to be extracted."ii Or as John Markoff of The New York Times put it a few years ago: "In its current state, the Web is often described as being in the Lego phase, with all of its different parts capable of connecting to one another. Those who envision the next phase, Web 3.0, see it as an era when machines will start to do seemingly intelligent things."iii

That's all as fine as it goes, but that vision of the future is chiefly focused on how easily and well the newest enabling and linking hardware and software can sift through and make sense of the more than 500 exabytes of information that are already out there.

But what I think we and the development sector as a whole need to focus on is what information has NOT already been collected.

Because despite all the data stored on all the computer hard drives everywhere in the entire world, there's a lot we don't know yet. There remain black holes of news and information.

Those black holes are not just in worlds such as particle physics and nanotechnology. They are in worlds such as North Korea and Burma, Somalia and Zimbabwe, Iran and the NW Frontier Province in Pakistan.

Steve Jobs at Apple, Steve Ballmer at Microsoft and Eric Schmidt at Google are bankrolling the cool technologies on the leading edge of Web 3.0. In other words, most tech R&D money--and most of the virtual column inches that report on the high tech world--are given up to the interests of the North.

There are no titans of industry who are bankrolling R&D divisions to find the newest app to bring news out of the global black holes.

What does exist, however, are some intriguing web models that offer cool ways to get some trickles of global news out to audiences. Each is committed to bringing undercovered news to light and unheard voices to speak. Each has a different vision of how to do that. All need financial nurturing.

There are private foundations and philanthropists, as well as governments and international organizations that recognize the importance of news and information circulating inside and beyond those societies. But not enough. And not with sufficient resources.

The World Bank is making a small effort to signal its interest in supporting such web models through its Innovation Fair: Moving Beyond Conflict, being held next week, April 12-15 in Cape Town, South Africa. One of the thirty projects that has made it to the final stage is the Un Free Media website which features reporting from "independent journalists... operating in some of the world's most repressive places, Zimbabwe, Cuba, Iran.... Some are in exile, having been branded 'enemies of the state'. Others publish courageously fearing the knock on the door from the security services. From behind bars, one Cuban journalist on our network delivers his blog in his weekly phone call to his wife."

What the Innovation Fair offers to the 30 "winners" of travel and hotel support to South Africa is exposure and networking, although cryptically the Fair materials do note that "Some projects will be eligible for funding and technical assistance." What's clear is that the funding to be made available will not look like anything Jobs or Ballmer might throw at a great idea.

But it could help.

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Check out these other seven websites that are working hard at bringing news of the world to the world:

First, and arguably the best of all at identifying locally-generated news from around the globe is GlobalVoices: "a community of more than 200 bloggers around the world who work together to bring you translations and reports from blogs and citizen media everywhere, with emphasis on voices that are not ordinarily heard in international mainstream media." (Take a look, too, at its farm-team site,RisingVoices.)
Then there's the activist journalist site called The Hub, this one also organized as a community: "an interactive community for human rights, where you can upload videos, audio or photos, or simply watch, comment on and share what's on the site."
Then there's the stripped-down, NGO-consortium model of FromTheGround, that "pools RSS-feeds from major, field-based NGOs to offer all of the organisations' output in a single feed, or in separate feeds for individual regions. FtG was originally started by the International Crisis Group and built in collaboration with Human Rights Watch."
And there's the hybrid-consortium model of Reuter's AlertNet, that joins news on "fast-moving humanitarian emergencies and on the early warning of future emergencies" from Reuters, with news and information uploaded by "a network of 400 contributing humanitarian organizations... actively involved in emergency relief."
Yet another business model is Demotix, a citizen-journalism website and photo agency which sells user-created content and photographs to mainstream media: its "objective is nothing if not ambitious - to rescue journalism and promote free expression by connecting independent journalists with the traditional media."
Another variant is GlobalPost: "dedicated to broad coverage throughout the world and especially of those geographic areas that have been historically under-reported by the American news media." Targeted at a US audience, GlobalPost's slick tripartite business model marries online advertising, syndication of content and a paywall for "elite" content.
Then there are those websites which want to reach across language lines. GlobalVoices uses volunteer translators to publish blogs not written in English. But the site that relies most dynamically on translation is Meedan which describes itself as "a digital town square where you can share conversation and links about world events with speakers outside your language community. Everything that gets posted on meedan.net is mirrored in Arabic and English - whether it's the headlines you read, the comments you write, or the articles you share."

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i Consider Microsoft's Live Labs' Pivot, for example, launching later this year, which will allow its users to view "the relationships between individual pieces of information.... by visualizing hidden patterns [of] thousands of things at once."

ii Depending on who you talk to, Web 3.0 and the Semantic Web are either distinctive possibilities--distinct from each other, let us say--or more or less the same thing. MediaBistro is holding a summit at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston this coming November, and actually changed the name of the conference from the Web 3.0 Summit to the Semantic Web Summit.

iii If "the classic example of the Web 2.0 era is the 'mash-up' -- for example, connecting a rental-housing Web site with Google Maps to create a new, more useful service that automatically shows the location of each rental listing," wrote Markoff in 2006, "the Holy Grail for developers of the semantic Web is to build a system that can give a reasonable and complete response to a simple question like: 'I'm looking for a warm place to vacation and I have a budget of $3,000. Oh, and I have an 11-year-old child.'"

Photo Credits: 1) "Periodic Table of the Internet" - Flickr user Yudi Setiawan, and 2) A map from a 2006 campaign by Reporters Without Borders

Greenwald: How Americans are propagandized about Afghanistan

2010-04-06T12:00:44Z

On February 12 of this year, U.S. forces entered a village in the Paktia Province in Afghanistan and, after surrounding a home where a celebration of a new birth was taking place, shot dead two male civilians (government officials) who exited the house in order to inquire why they had been surrounded, and then shot and killed three female relatives (a pregnant mother of ten, a pregnant mother of six, and a teenager). The Pentagon then issued a statement claiming that (a) the dead males were "insurgents" or terrorists, (b) the bodies of the three women had been found by U.S. forces bound and gagged inside the home, and (c) suggested that the women had already been killed by the time the U.S. had arrived, likely the victim of "honor killings" by the Taliban militants killed in the attack.

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Although numerous witnesses on the scene as well as local investigators vehemently disputed the Pentagon's version, and insisted that all of the dead (including the women) were civilians and were killed by U.S. forces, the American media largely adopted the Pentagon's version, often without any questions. But enough evidence has now emerged disproving those claims such that the Pentagon was forced yesterday to admit that their original version was totally false and that it was U.S. troops who killed the women:

After initially denying involvement or any cover-up in the deaths of three Afghan women during a badly bungled American Special Operations assault in February, the American-led military command in Kabul admitted late on Sunday that its forces had, in fact, killed the women during the nighttime raid.

One NATO official said that there had likely been an effort to cover-up what happened by U.S. troops via evidence tampering on the scene (though other NATO officials deny this claim). The Times of London actually reported yesterday that, at least according to Afghan investigators, "US special forces soldiers dug bullets out of their victims' bodies in the bloody aftermath of a botched night raid, then washed the wounds with alcohol before lying to their superiors about what happened."

What is clear -- yet again -- is how completely misinformed and propagandized Americans continue to be by the American media, which constantly "reports" on crucial events in Afghanistan by doing nothing more than mindlessly and unquestioningly passing along U.S. government claims as though they are fact. Here, for instance, is how the Paktia incident was"reported" by CNN on February 12:

Note how the headline states as fact that the women were dead as the result of an "honor killing." The entire CNN article does nothing but repeat what an "unnamed senior military official said" about the incident, and it even helpfully explained:

An honor killing is a murder carried out by a family or community member against someone thought to have brought dishonor onto them.
The U.S. official said it isn't clear whether the dishonor in this case stemmed from accusations of acts such as adultery or even cooperating with NATO forces.
"It has the earmarks of a traditional honor killing," said the official, who added the Taliban could be responsible. . .
The operation unfolded when Afghan and international forces went to the compound, which was thought to be a site of militant activity. A firefight ensued and several insurgents died, several people left the compound, and eight others were detained.

Similarly, The New York Times, while noting that there were "varying accounts of what happened" among U.S. forces and their allies in the Afghan police, also passed along the Pentagon's false version of events with no questioning. Here's the NYT's February 12 article in its entirety:

Several civilians were killed in Paktia Province on Friday when a joint Afghan-NATO force went to investigate a report of militant activity, but NATO and the Afghan police gave varying accounts of what happened. A NATO statement said the joint force went to a compound in the village of Khatabeh, in the Gardez district, where insurgents opened fire on them from a residential compound. Several insurgents were killed and a large number of men, women and children fled and were detained by the NATO force. Inside the compound, soldiers "found the bodies of three women who had been tied up, gagged and killed," the NATO statement said. The Paktia Province police chief, Aziz Ahmad Wardak, confirmed the episode but said thedead in the house were two men and three women, who he said were killed by Taliban militants. He said the killings took place while the residents were celebrating the birth of a baby.

CNN conveyed its version of events without the slightest contradiction or doubt, and the NYTsimply ignored entirely the claims of the residents of the village -- notwithstanding the fact that serious conflicts about what actually took place were known from the very beginning. Consider, for instance, this February 12 article by Amir Shah of the Associated Press, who actually bothered to pick up a phone to determine if the Pentagon's claims were true before "reporting" them as fact; this is what Shah found:

However, relatives of the dead accused American forces of being responsible for the deaths of all five people when contacted by The Associated Press by phone.
A man who identified himself as Hamidullah said he had been in the home as some 20 people gathered to celebrate the birth of a son when a group of men he described as "U.S. special forces" surrounded the compound.
When one man came out into the courtyard to ask why, Hamidullah said he watched U.S. forces gun him down.
"Daoud was coming out of the house to ask what was going on. And then they shot him," he said.
Then they killed a second man, Hamidullah said. The rest of the group were forced out into the yard, made to kneel and had their hands bound behind their back, he said, breaking off crying without giving any further details.
A deputy provincial council member in Gardez, Shahyesta Jan Ahadi, said news of the operation has inflamed the local community that believes the Americans were responsible for the deaths.
"Last night, the Americans conducted an operation in a house and killed five innocent people, including three women. The people are so angry," he said.

The Pentagon's version of events was vehemently disputed from the start. But there was not a hint of any of that in the CNN or NYT "reporting," which simply adopted the press release claims of NATO forces. That Press Release, false from start to finish, claimed that "acombined force of Afghan and international troops last night found the bound and gagged bodies of two women and the bodies of two men during an operation in the province's Gardez district," and "members of the combined force found the bodies inside." Ironically, the Pentagon Press Release ended this way: "'ISAF continually works with our Afghan partners to fight criminals and terrorists who do not care about the life of civilians,' ISAF spokesman Canadian army Brig. Gen. Eric Tremblay said." On March 16 -- more than a month later, and only after a major investigative report about this incident was published by Jerome Starkey of The Times of London -- the NYT ran a story detailing the gruesome claims of residents about what really happened; click that link for the horrific details and to get a sense for how false were the Pentagon and U.S. media's original claims about what took place.

Contrast the pure propaganda dissemination of the American media with the immediate reporting of the Pajhwok Afghan News, an independent news agency created in Afghanistan to enable war reporting by Afghans. Here is how they reported the Pakita incident from the beginning, on Febraury 12 (via NEXIS):

US Special Forces have shot dead a district intelligence chief along with four family members in the volatile southeastern province of Paktia, a senior police officer claimed on Friday. Brig. Gen. Ghulam Dastagir Rustamyar explained that Daud and his family were celebrating the birth of his son. But acting on a misleading tip-off, foreign troops raided the intelligence official's residence. . . . He said the dead included Daud, his brother Zahir, an employee of the attorney's office, and three women. . . .
But the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) claimed Afghan and international forces found the bound and gagged bodies of three women during the operation in Gardez late Thursday night. "The joint force went to a compound near the village of Khatabeh, after intelligence confirmed militant activity. Several insurgents engaged the joint force in a firefight and were killed," the ISAF press office in Kabul said. . . .
When the troops entered the compound, according to the press release, they conducted a thorough search and found the bodies of three women who had been tied up, gagged and killed. "The bodies had been hidden in an adjacent room."

Note the crucial difference: the Afghan news service shaped its report based on the statements of actual witnesses on the ground and local investigators, while also including the Pentagon's version of events. Put another way, anyone reading about what happened from American news outlets would be completely misled and propagandized, while anyone reading the Pajhowk Afghan News would have been informed, because they treated official U.S. claims with skepticism rather than uncritical reverence.

* * * * *

All of this is a chronic problem, not an isolated one, with war reporting generally and events in Afghanistan specifically. Just consider what happened when the U.S. military was forced in 2008 to retract its claims about a brutal air raid in Azizabad. The Pentagon had vehemently denied the villagers' claim that close to 100 civilians had been killed and that no Taliban were in the vicinity: until a video emerged proving the villagers' claims were true and the Pentagon's false. Last week, TPM highlighted a recent, largely overlooked statement from Gen. McChrystal, where he admitted, regarding U.S. killings of Afghans at check points: "to my knowledge, in the nine-plus months I've been here, not a single case where we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it and, in many cases, had families in it. . . . We've shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force." And as I documented before, the U.S. media constantly repeats false Pentagon claims about American air attacks around the world in order to create the false impression that Key Terrorists were killed while no civilians were.

At the Nieman Watchdog Foundation, Jerome Starkey, the Afghanistan war reporter forThe Times of London who published the March 13 investigative report, has a crucial, must-read piece on all of this. Amazingly, his Nieman piece was written three weeks ago, and recounted in detail: (a) how clearly the U.S.-led forces had lied about what happened in Paktia; and (b) the reasons why the U.S. media continuously spews false government propaganda about the war. Starkey wrote under this headline:

In this mid-March piece, Starkey explained how he had discovered that NATO's claims about the Paktia incident were false (he recounted that evidence in gruesome detail in the Times on March 13, three days before the NYT finally returned to the story to correct its original reporting), and more importantly, highlighted why the U.S. media so frequently disseminates false NATO claims with no questioning:

The only way I found out NATO had lied -- deliberately or otherwise -- was because I went to the scene of the raid, in Paktia province, and spent three days interviewing the survivors. In Afghanistan that is quite unusual.
NATO is rarely called to account. Their version of events, usually originating from the soldiers involved, is rarely seriously challenged. . . .
It's not the first time I've found NATO lying, but this is perhaps the most harrowing instance, and every time I go through the same gamut of emotions. I am shocked and appalled that brave men in uniform misrepresent events. Then I feel naïve.
There are a handful of truly fearless reporters in Afghanistan constantly trying to break the military's monopoly on access to the front. But far too many of our colleaguesaccept the spin-laden press releases churned out of the Kabul headquarters. Suicide bombers are "cowards," NATO attacks on civilians are "tragic accidents," intelligence is foolproof and only militants get arrested.

Starkey describes some of the understandable reasons so many reporters do nothing more than regurgitate officials claims: resource constraints, organizations limits, dangers of traveling around, and the "embed culture." But he also recounts how NATO tries to intimidate, censor and punish any reporters like him who report adversely on official claims. Illustratively, in response to Starkey's March 13 article detailing what really happened at Paktia and the cover-up that ensued, NATO issued a formal statement singling him out and accusing him of publishing an article that was "categorically false." As recently as that mid-March statement, NATO was still claiming -- falsely -- that the women in Paktia were killed prior to the arrival of American troops, and they were impugning the integrity of the reporter (Starkey) who was proving otherwise (see the Update below for my interview with Starkey today).

There are some very courageous and intrepid reporters in Afghanistan, including some who work for American media outlets. It was, for instance, a superb and brave investigative reportby the NYT's Carlotta Gall in Afghanistan that uncovered what really happened in that air attack on Azizabad and who documented the Pentagon's false claims. But far more often, Americans are completely misled about events in Afghanistan by the combination of false official claims and mindless stenographic American "journalism." And no matter how many times this process is exposed -- from Jessica Lynch's heroic firefight to Pat Tillman's death by Al Qeada -- this relentless propaganda machine never seems to diminish.

UPDATE: I spoke this morning with Jerome Starkey, who is in Kabul, regarding his investigation into this incident and the various ways reporters are deterred from investigating NATO claims. The discussion, which is roughly 20 minutes in length, can be heard by clicking PLAY on the recorder below:

UPDATE II: As I noted in the piece I wrote on the War on WikiLeaks, that site had obtained a videotape highly incriminating of the Pentagon. Today, they released it: it shows the gruesome killing of Iraqi civilians, including Reuters journalists, by American troops, an incident which the U.S. military insisted involved the killing of "insurgents." I'll be on MSNBC today at 4:00 p.m. EST to discuss these matters.

Glen Greenwald is a Salon.Com bogger

Foreign Correspondents' Club of China site attacked

2010-04-06T01:04:35Z

New York, April 2, 2010--The denial of service attack on the Foreign Correspondents' Club of China (FCCC) Web site is contributing to an atmosphere in which journalists feel their communication is not secure and their reporting is under threat, the Committee to Protect Journalists said.

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The FCCC confirmed in an e-mailed statement today that it has shut down its Web sitebecause of denial-of-service attacks, and that the attacks apparently came from computers within China and in the United States. Denial-of-service attacks can be intentionally generated when many users try to connect to a Web site simultaneously, overwhelming the server that hosts the Web site.

"We do not know who is behind these attacks or what their motivation is," the FCCC's statement said.

As part of a report on Wednesday on attacks on foreign correspondents' Yahoo e-mail accounts in China, CPJ reported that the site was unavailable, apparently due to a shutdown.

"We are concerned about the hostile environment this creates for foreign journalists inChina and the potential risk it poses to their sources," said Bob Dietz, CPJ's Asia program coordinator. "Journalists working in China are increasingly concerned about online communication and the implications Web interference has for their reporting."

The FCCC's membership is made up of many of the foreign correspondents working in the country, though it is not officially recognized by the Chinese government.

On March 22, search engine Google rerouted users in China to its uncensored Hong Kong site, after it decided to no longer censor search results to users in China. CPJ welcomed the decision