Human Rights Advocacy and Media Watch
Editor’s note: Given that this specific post has been banned by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on the advice of ex-CM Najam Sethi, we are cross-posting it to express our solidarity with LUBP and support for free speech. The post was banned on 6 June 2013 by Pakistan government
Another Baloch journalist, Javid Naseer Rind, was killed today. His mutilated dead body was recovered from Khuzdar.
Javid Naseer Rind, the former Deputy Editor of Daily Tawar, a leading anti-military-state Baloch newspaper published in Urdu language, was kidnapped on 10 September 2011 from Hub Chowki, Lasbela, the industrial town of Balochistan. Police quoting eyewitnesses said abductors were riding in two separate cars who held Javed Naseer at gun-point and bundled him into the car and drove
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It’s an unusual event: an open letter to the Prime Minister signed by the editor or editor-in-chief of almost every significant mainstream news medium in the nation – radio, television and newspapers – with the sole exception, interestingly, of The Australian‘s Chris Mitchell.
Its essential point is that WikiLeaks ‘is part of the media and deserves our support’; that prosecuting it or its editor, Julian Assange, because WikiLeaks has published confidential government documents would be unprecedented in the United States, and in Australia, ‘would seriously curtail Australian media organisations reporting on subjects the Government decides are against its interests’.
In other words, the Walkley Foundation’s letter is an elaboration of the attack made in his acceptance speech last Thursday night by Gold Walkley winner Laurie Oakes on the Government’s reaction to WikiLeaks.
All very admirable. And I want to make it clear, for what it’s worth, that I agree with the letter’s arguments as, he tells me, does Chris Mitchell.
But there are a few other points that bear repeating, lest the media get too carried away with the notion that by publishing the WikiLeaks cables it is exclusively serving ‘the public interest’.
First, nobody seems to be defending the alleged leaker of this unprecedented trove of secret documents, Private First Class Bradley Manning of the US Army. It seems generally agreed that Private Manning is facing up to 50 years in prison for his indiscretion. Yet despite all the talk about whistleblowers, shield laws and the media’s duty to let daylight into the processes of government, no-one is claiming, seriously, that Manning’s actions could be justified under the law of the United States or almost anywhere else.
If the allegations against him are proven, Private Manning will be revealed as a leaker, not a whistleblower. With some notable exceptions (Hillary Clinton’s requirement that her diplomats spy on the UN, for example) the vast mass of these documents do not reveal wrongdoing, corruption or malfeasance, but the normal activities of diplomats, reporting frankly under the understandable assumption that their reports would remain confidential.
Yes, of course their publication causes intense embarrassment, to the US State Department and to many of the subjects of the cables. Whether that embarrassment, and the effect it will have on the ability of diplomats everywhere (and anyone else who relies on the confidentiality of electronic communication) to report frankly to their superiors or colleagues, is ‘in the public interest’, is very much an open question.
Second, Private Manning went to WikiLeaks, presumably, because he felt that his identity would be better protected by that organisation than by any other. That may be the case. It does not seem to be through any action or negligence on WikiLeaks’s part, but through his own indiscretions, that Bradley Manning came to the attention of the US authorities. However, one reason why neither Julian Assange, nor WikiLeaks, nor any of the great newspapers which are its collaborators in the document release, have been under any pressure to reveal their source, is that the US government has convinced itself (rightly or wrongly) that the source is already known and in custody.
That being the case, the entire justification for WikiLeaks’s existence – its ability to protect its sources through its unique information-laundering and encryption techniques – is irrelevant in this instance.
Third, Julian Assange has made another claim for WikiLeaks, which he says sets it apart from other media organisations. According to this op-ed in The Australian last week:
WikiLeaks coined a new type of journalism: scientific journalism. We work with other media outlets to bring people the news, but also to prove it is true. Scientific journalism allows you to read a news story, then to click online to see the original document it is based on. That way you can judge for yourself: Is the story true? Did the journalist report it accurately?
Well, WikiLeaks clearly doesn’t insist on ‘scientific journalism’ being practised by all the media outlets with which it’s working. The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald are still publishing story after story by Philip Dorling – stories that have deeply embarrassed or compromised Kevin Rudd, Mark Arbib, Joel Fitzgibbon, and Stephen Gumley, to name just a few, not to mention the US Embassy in Canberra. But we can’t judge for ourselves if Dorling has reported accurately or fairly, because Fairfax hasn’t posted a single cable online.
On Monday I sent an email to SMH editor-in-chief Peter Fray, asking him why not. His response (read it in full here) makes it clear that the primary reason is to protect not the public, but Fairfax’s commercial, interest:
…the volume of material in the Australian referenced cables means we are still mining the source documents. There are, for instance, several potential stories in each cable; to put the material online would be to give access to our competitors in the local market.
That’s not a line of reasoning that has prevented The Guardian, the New York Times, Der Spiegel, Le Monde or any other of WikiLeaks’s collaborators from posting cables online to support their stories; and it would seem to be in direct contravention of the principles espoused by Julian Assange. Perhaps he’s been too preoccupied by other matters recently to have noticed.
Philip Dorling has undoubtedly scored a major scoop for Fairfax. Most of the stories he’s writing – and there are goodness knows how many to come – are fascinating, especially to politics and foreign policy junkies. But we’re having to take them on trust, and we shouldn’t have to. And very few are telling us stuff we didn’t already know (Kevin Rudd’s a control freak; Defence Procurement is a mess; China doesn’t like the Defence White Paper): what they are telling us is that the US Embassy knew it too, often before we did. Surprise, surprise.
Government ministers hold power because their party secured a majority of votes (or it did before August 2010). Nobody elected a single one of the signatories of the Walkley Foundation’s letter.
So while we’re all enjoying the humiliation of ministers and ex-ministers – a great Australian sport, which right now we seem to be better at than cricket – we should also remember to exercise towards the media’s more grandiose claims that other talent for which Australians are supposedly famous: bullshit detection.
Jonathan Holmes is the presenter of ABC TV’s Media Watch.
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People hold images of Julian Assange in front of their faces at a demonstration in Brisbane, Australia. Photograph: Steve Gray/EPA
According to The Guardian’s report, protests will be held around the world today against the detention ofJulian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks.
Demonstrations are planned in the capitals of Spain, the Netherlands, Colombia, Argentina, Mexico and Peru to demand Assange’s release, the re-establishment of WikiLeaks domain name and the restoration of Visa and Mastercard credit services to allow supporters to donate money to the whistleblowing site.
A statement on the Spanish-language website Free WikiLeaks said: “We seek the liberation of Julian Assange in United Kingdom territory.” The website called on protesters to gather at 6pm (17.00 GMT) in Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia and Seville and three other Spanish cities.
It also calls for “the re-establishment of the WikiLeaks (wikileaks.org) internet domain,” and the restoration of Visa and MasterCard credit card services to enable the “freedom to move money” because no one has “proved Assange’s guilt”, nor charged WikiLeaks with any crime.
Assange is in Wandsworth prison in south London after being refused bail on Tuesday. Sweden is seeking his extradition over allegations of sexual assault.
His lawyers said yesterday they are preparing for a possible indictment by the US authorities.
Jennifer Robinson said her team had heard from “several different US lawyers rumours that an indictment was on its way or had happened already, but we don’t know”.
According to some reports, Washington is seeking to prosecute Assange under the 1917 act, which was used unsuccessfully to try to gag the New York Times when it published the Pentagon Papers in the 1970s. However, despite escalating rhetoric over the past fortnight, no charges have yet been lodged, and government sources say they are unaware any such move is being prepared.
Robinson said Assange’s team did not believe the US had grounds to prosecute him but understood that Washington was “looking closely at other charges, such as computer charges, so we have one eye on it”.
Earlier this week, the US attorney general, Eric Holder, said the US had been put at risk by the flood of confidential diplomatic documents released by WikiLeaks and he authorised a criminal investigation.
In another op-ed, published in the Vancouver Sun says, terrorists win if Julian Assange and WikiLeaks are silenced.
When animals perceive an external threat they close ranks. Torture becomes acceptable. Senior advisers to prime ministers publicly call for assassinations. We’re scared. We’re running scared, all of us. We’re wondering when Canada will get its first major terrorist attack. We’re wondering if Julian Assange’s big mouth will facilitate that terrorist attack.
Columnist Dan Gardner is right — ever since Sept. 11, 2001 — when many of us felt that external threat for the first time and no one knew what was happening and the only people running the world were a few CNN anchors -our Canadian mind-sets changed and we were willing to become less liberal for the first time if it meant ensuring our own survival. Animals closing ranks. Taking sides. No longer were we a fly on the wall … we were what the fly was watching.
We are now at war. We are no longer safely, comfortably, arrogantly and sanitarily observing from the wings. We don’t have that luxury any more. We are direct participants in a major world conflict. But shutting up Assange isn’t the answer. Stifling the free flow of information is like giving in to the terrorists. If we let anyone make us close ranks such that the democratic values Canada stands for are thrown out the window we become animals.
Assange is right -surely in the year 2010 human beings have evolved enough such that we don’t need secrets any more and closing ranks should be a cliquish anachronism.
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“We Liberals strongly support Julian Assange and the democratic spirit and meaning behind his Wikileaks, as we have continuously been arguing and advancing for core liberal democratic values such as, independent approach, free will, freedom of thought and expression, citizen’s empowerment especially via access to information, transparency, accountability, the rejection of old divine beliefs of secrecy (classified information) and people’s participation in the state affairs”
WIKILEAKS deserves protection, not threats and attacks.
Mr Assange is in custody in Britain facing extradition to Sweden. (Time magazine)
IN 1958 a young Rupert Murdoch, then owner and editor of Adelaide’s The News, wrote: “In the race between secrecy and truth, it seems inevitable that truth will always win.”
His observation perhaps reflected his father Keith Murdoch’s expose that Australian troops were being needlessly sacrificed by incompetent British commanders on the shores of Gallipoli. The British tried to shut him up but Keith Murdoch would not be silenced and his efforts led to the termination of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign.
Nearly a century later, WikiLeaks is also fearlessly publishing facts that need to be made public.
I grew up in a Queensland country town where people spoke their minds bluntly. They distrusted big government as something that could be corrupted if not watched carefully. The dark days of corruption in the Queensland government before the Fitzgerald inquiry are testimony to what happens when the politicians gag the media from reporting the truth.
These things have stayed with me. WikiLeaks was created around these core values. The idea, conceived in Australia, was to use internet technologies in new ways to report the truth.
WikiLeaks coined a new type of journalism: scientific journalism. We work with other media outlets to bring people the news, but also to prove it is true. Scientific journalism allows you to read a news story, then to click online to see the original document it is based on. That way you can judge for yourself: Is the story true? Did the journalist report it accurately?
Democratic societies need a strong media and WikiLeaks is part of that media. The media helps keep government honest. WikiLeaks has revealed some hard truths about the Iraq and Afghan wars, and broken stories about corporate corruption.
People have said I am anti-war: for the record, I am not. Sometimes nations need to go to war, and there are just wars. But there is nothing more wrong than a government lying to its people about those wars, then asking these same citizens to put their lives and their taxes on the line for those lies. If a war is justified, then tell the truth and the people will decide whether to support it.
If you have read any of the Afghan or Iraq war logs, any of the US embassy cables or any of the stories about the things WikiLeaks has reported, consider how important it is for all media to be able to report these things freely.
WikiLeaks is not the only publisher of the US embassy cables. Other media outlets, including Britain’s The Guardian, The New York Times, El Pais in Spain and Der Spiegel in Germany have published the same redacted cables.
Yet it is WikiLeaks, as the co-ordinator of these other groups, that has copped the most vicious attacks and accusations from the US government and its acolytes. I have been accused of treason, even though I am an Australian, not a US, citizen. There have been dozens of serious calls in the US for me to be “taken out” by US special forces. Sarah Palin says I should be “hunted down like Osama bin Laden”, a Republican bill sits before the US Senate seeking to have me declared a “transnational threat” and disposed of accordingly. An adviser to the Canadian Prime Minister’s office has called on national television for me to be assassinated. An American blogger has called for my 20-year-old son, here in Australia, to be kidnapped and harmed for no other reason than to get at me.
And Australians should observe with no pride the disgraceful pandering to these sentiments by Julia Gillard and her government. The powers of the Australian government appear to be fully at the disposal of the US as to whether to cancel my Australian passport, or to spy on or harass WikiLeaks supporters. The Australian Attorney-General is doing everything he can to help a US investigation clearly directed at framing Australian citizens and shipping them to the US.
Prime Minister Gillard and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have not had a word of criticism for the other media organisations. That is because The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel are old and large, while WikiLeaks is as yet young and small.
We are the underdogs. The Gillard government is trying to shoot the messenger because it doesn’t want the truth revealed, including information about its own diplomatic and political dealings.
Has there been any response from the Australian government to the numerous public threats of violence against me and other WikiLeaks personnel? One might have thought an Australian prime minister would be defending her citizens against such things, but there have only been wholly unsubstantiated claims of illegality. The Prime Minister and especially the Attorney-General are meant to carry out their duties with dignity and above the fray. Rest assured, these two mean to save their own skins. They will not.
Every time WikiLeaks publishes the truth about abuses committed by US agencies, Australian politicians chant a provably false chorus with the State Department: “You’ll risk lives! National security! You’ll endanger troops!” Then they say there is nothing of importance in what WikiLeaks publishes. It can’t be both. Which is it?
It is neither. WikiLeaks has a four-year publishing history. During that time we have changed whole governments, but not a single person, as far as anyone is aware, has been harmed. But the US, with Australian government connivance, has killed thousands in the past few months alone.
US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates admitted in a letter to the US congress that no sensitive intelligence sources or methods had been compromised by the Afghan war logs disclosure. The Pentagon stated there was no evidence the WikiLeaks reports had led to anyone being harmed in Afghanistan. NATO in Kabul told CNN it couldn’t find a single person who needed protecting. The Australian Department of Defence said the same. No Australian troops or sources have been hurt by anything we have published.
But our publications have been far from unimportant. The US diplomatic cables reveal some startling facts:
► The US asked its diplomats to steal personal human material and information from UN officials and human rights groups, including DNA, fingerprints, iris scans, credit card numbers, internet passwords and ID photos, in violation of international treaties. Presumably Australian UN diplomats may be targeted, too.
► King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia asked the US to attack Iran.
► Officials in Jordan and Bahrain want Iran’s nuclear program stopped by any means available.
► Britain’s Iraq inquiry was fixed to protect “US interests”.
► Sweden is a covert member of NATO and US intelligence sharing is kept from parliament.
► The US is playing hardball to get other countries to take freed detainees from Guantanamo Bay. Barack Obama agreed to meet the Slovenian President only if Slovenia took a prisoner. Our Pacific neighbour Kiribati was offered millions of dollars to accept detainees.
In its landmark ruling in the Pentagon Papers case, the US Supreme Court said “only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government”. The swirling storm around WikiLeaks today reinforces the need to defend the right of all media to reveal the truth.
Julian Assange is the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks.
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It is ironic that the Saudis have labelled Zardari as a “rotten head”, while their whole body polity is rotten. This comment is like the pot calling the kettle black. Pakistan has much more respect for human rights and freedom to criticise the government, while Saudi Arabia is politically far behind.
Blessed are the people who live in post-Second World War times, when humankind has progressed more than it has ever done before. Blessed are the people who live in the times of information technology. Blessed are the people who live in the times of democratisation of information. Blessed are the people who are using this technological revolution to bring out in the open what our rulers do behind closed doors.
Throughout human history, information has been the key to progress. It was always jealously guarded by the privileged classes to further their personal and class interests. But now information is flying in cyberspace and is easy to access at very little cost. The WikiLeaks creator and his unknown soldiers are thus the revolutionaries of cyberspace, bringing current information to the people that in the past was found only in the researched history of politics.
I remember when I came across the first book based on diplomatic papers declassified by the US State Department in 1982. The book — The American Role in Pakistan, 1947-1958 — was written by Professor M Venkataramani. As the book was not available in Pakistan, it was with great difficulty that I managed to get a photocopied version (pardon me for copyright violation). The book is not just a collection of declassified papers, but Venkataramani has used the information to trace the history of the US’s role in Pakistan.
Those who are now crying wolf and loss of sovereignty to the US should read this book to get the right historical perspective. Unfortunately, ultra-nationalist friends forget that the Americans were invited to dinner by the founder of Pakistan: “On May 1, 1947, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, leader of the Muslim League, received two American visitors at his Bombay residence. They were Raymond A Hare, Head of the Division of South Asian Affairs, Department of State, and Thomas E Weil, Second Secretary of the US Embassy in India…he sought to impress on his visitors that the emergence of an independent, sovereign Pakistan would be in consonance with the American interests.
Pakistan would be a Muslim country. Muslim countries would stand together against Russian aggression. In that they would look towards the United States for assistance.” The meeting was reported by the US Charge de Affairs in Delhi, George E Merril, on May 2, 1947.
This is not the only incident that shows how Pakistan offered to play a strategic role to defend the region from ‘Russian aggression’, i.e. communism, and the spread of ‘Indian imperialism’ in the region. Right from day one, Pakistan has been asking for US arms to protect itself from the ‘Indian threat’. Liaquat Ali Khan followed this policy and, in his trip to the US in early May 1950, stressed: “Pakistan therefore politically, ideologically and strategically, holds the position of great responsibility…In addition to this, Pakistan is resolved to throw all its weights to help the maintenance of stability in Asia.”
In 1999, Oxford University Press published a book, The American Papers — Secret and Confidential, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh Documents, 1965-1973, compiled and selected by Roedad Khan, a former senior Pakistani bureaucrat. These papers give an insight into behind-the-doors American diplomacy during the liberation struggle of Bangladesh and the happenings before and after the Pakistan-India 1965 war. As it does not include all the papers and the selection was done by Roedad Khan, one wonders what the criterion for this selection was. But, unlike WikiLeaks, the compilation is from the archives that had been declassified officially.
Even in the case of WikiLeaks, one does not know whether some documents were held back by its editors as not much can be found on the assassination of Ms Benazir Bhutto. Although on the very next day of her killing, one finds that American Ambassador Anne Patterson wrote a rather long assessment of Chaudhry Pervaiz Elahi, who she thought could be the next prime minister. The assessment is quite favourable. In this memo, she has mentioned Benazir Bhutto as “late”. Interestingly, in the same memo she has dealt in detail with the personal enmity between Elahi and the Bhutto family because of Chaudhry Zahoor Elahi’s assassination by Al Zulfikar (a militant group of PPP headed by Murtaza Bhutto). One reason for the omission of the US embassy’s memos on Bhutto’s assassination could be that the top secret category communication channel is perhaps still beyond WikiLeaks’ hackers.
While the media is outraged about the US administration and Pakistani politicians’ axis, they have underplayed the interference in Pakistan by the Saudi government. The Saudis have accepted that they are not just mere observers in Pakistan’s politics but were “participants”. Their interference in Pakistan’s politics and unabated support to the Islamic extremist groups has damaged the country’s peace.
Whether it is an issue of our leaders, closeness with American and British diplomats or unabated drone attacks, outraged media and some politicians shout from the pulpit that our sovereignty is being violated by the big powers. But very seldom do these protagonists of sovereignty mull over the fact that our political and territorial boundaries are breached by other countries. When we speak against the interference of foreign powers in our politics — and rightly so — we should keep in mind the basic principle of international laws regarding sovereignty. These laws have evolved over the last many centuries.
According to Professor Dr Douglas Stuart, “State sovereignty still remains an ambiguous and convoluted theory. As one looks at the role of state sovereignty in today’s international system, it is important to set some basic guidelines.” He argues that “the empowerment of local movements by strong international non-state actors poses a serious challenge to the theory of state sovereignty”.
This is where Pakistan’s predicament begins with its paranoia about India. Dictated by the same sense of insecurity and myopic view, our establishment has also gotten itself stuck in the quagmire of Afghanistan. The desire to have a client state in Afghanistan has made us pushy to the extent that most governments in Kabul have remained unhappy with Islamabad. And in the process we have willingly become a client state of the US and Saudi Arabia.
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