Markmedia

Guantanamo Is Not a Prison

Karen J. Greenberg (co-editor of The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib and editor of The Torture Debate in America) has writte on how journalists who visit Guantanamo are "coached" on the appropriate ways to report on the situation there:
I give you the 11 points here. The entire article is at:
tomdispach.com

Guantanamo Is Not a Prison - 11 Ways to Report on Gitmo without Upsetting the Pentagon

1. Guantanamo is not a prison.
2. Consistent with not being a prison, Guantanamo has no prisoners, only enemies
3. Guantanamo is not about guilt and innocence -- or, once an enemy combatant, always an enemy combatant.
4. No trustworthy lawyers come to Guantanamo.
5. Recently, at least, few if any reliable journalists have been reporting on Guantanamo;
6. After years of isolation, the detainees still possess valuable information -- especially today
7. Guantanamo contains no individuals -- inside the wire or out.
8. Guantanamo's deep respect for Islam is unappreciated.
9. At Guantanamo, hard facts are scarce.
10. Guantanamo houses no contradictions.
11. Those who fail to reproduce the official narrative are not welcome back.

UN documents: a starting point

The UN publishes a large amount of documents. A good starting point for searching for them is the United Nations Dag Hammarskjöld Library Research Guide.

The guide is designed for researchers and information professionals with an interest in United Nations documentation. It presents an overview of the various types of documents and publications issued by the Organization (e.g, reports, resolutions, meeting records, sales publications, press releases) and gives guidance on how to work with them.

The Research Guide also provides information on actions taken by the General Assembly as well as the Security Council and introduces researchers to major fields of UN activities: human rights, international law and peacekeeping.

Tsunami lessons

The report (A/61/699-E/2007/8) of the Joint Inspection Unit entitled, 'Towards a United Nations Humanitarian Assistance Programme for Disaster Response and Reduction : Lessons learned from the Indian Ocean tsunami disaster' has been released. Find out more about the UN's response to the tsunami disaster.

The Imperative of Proxies

Amongst the many things I learned during my latest stay in Ethiopia was that censorship is a real and present danger. The Ethiopian government has, despite its denials, enforced a draconian web censoring policy. Web sites that provide uncensored news and information, that could in any way be deemed regime critical or defend the "unacceptable" are routinely blocked in a growing number of countries.

Quite a few of these countries (here is one list, see CitizenLab for more, or view the updated list of arrested cyber dissidents from Reporters without Borders) receive aid in different forms. Donor nations and organizations need to apply pressure on these countries to ensure the free flow of information to their citizens.
We know this. They know this. Not a lot happens.
Donor countries say that they are talking to officials in each of these countries. Donor organizations say that they are talking to officials in these countries. The mill of diplomacy grinds slowly. The mill of oppression grinds frighteningly fast and is increasingly effective. When a proxy server ( a server at an unblocked URL that allows access through it to blocked sites: eg anonymouse.org) pops up it does not take a lot of time before it too joins the banned sites list.

There is however something that could be done immediately. By organizations that perceive themselves as standing for freedom of thought, exchange of ideas and unfettered curiosity. Universities.

If every university had a freely available proxy server (particularly universities that have a development or exchange program with countries like China, Vietnam, Syria, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe etc.) it would make it close to impossible to block them all.  Students could not access course material, teaching resources or professors web pages at the partner university. Not blocking the Universities web site could (and should) be a prerequisite for signing a contract.

We know that commercial companies have no morals other than those dictated by the bottom line.
Google, Skype, Murdoch, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Cisco Systems- they all have agreements with China to censor their search-engines to filter out websites overcritical of the authorities.

Donor organizations like UNICEF talk the talk but lack the political will/muscle to implement.

But Universities - dependent as they are on their reputation as bastions of free and independent thought as well as excellence in teaching -  could be in the forefront of a global campaign to free speech.

Teacher and student unions - got to it.
Journalists with Universities in your area, ask them why not.
Alumni -put the pressure on. Start campaigns. Do it now.

Webcast -- Face to Face with a Guantánamo Detainee

A video conference with former Guantánamo detainee, Moazzam Begg, followed with remarks by Gitanjali Gutierrez, attorney, Guantánamo Global Justice Initiative, Center for Constitutional Rights.

Begg's recent book, "Enemy Combatant: My Imprisonment at Guantánamo, Bagram, and Kandahar" (New Press, 2006), details his incarceration at Guantánamo, Kandahar, and Bagram. He talks about his experience and takes questions from the audience.

Gutierrez was one of the first lawyers to visit Guantánamo and currently represents detainee Mohammed Al Qahtani. She also recently filed a habeas petition on behalf of detainees in Bagram and will discuss her experience visiting those imprisoned in Guantánamo.

Global Employment Trends 2007

The International Labour Organization has published Global Employment Trends Brief 2007.
According to the report, the number of people unemployed worldwide remained high in 2006 despite global economic growth. Read more in the press release or the full report (pdf, 175 KB).

WikiLeaks- helping anonomize whistle-blowers

At the campaigns by various governments (Ethiopia, China, Zimbabwe etc) to block internet access to sites deemed "unacceptable"  ramps up, any and all ways to help whistle-blowers and users locate and access each other are welcome.
Here is one initiative reported on by the New Scientist mag:

http://www.newscientisttech.com/article.ns?id=mg19325865.500>

How to leak a secret and not get caught
By Paul Marks

[Excerpts]

Leaking a sensitive government document can mean risking a jail sentence -- but not for much longer if an online service called WikiLeaks <http://www.wikileaks.org/index.html> goes ahead. WikiLeaks is designed to allow anyone to post documents on the web without fear of being traced.

Normally an email or a document posted to a website can be traced back to its source because each data packet carries the IP address of the last server that it passed through. To prevent this, WikiLeaks will exploit an anonymising protocol known as The Onion Router (Tor), which
routes data through a network of servers that use cryptography to hide the path that the packets took.

There are however, fears that whistle-blowers might still be at risk. "I would not trust my life or even my liberty to Tor," says Ben Laurie, a London-based computer security expert. In the past, determined cryptographers have breached Tor's security, and though each breach has
led to improvements to Tor there is always a risk others will be discovered.

WikiLeaks will provide a forum for the entire global community to examine any document relentlessly for credibility," the site claims.

IRINnews.org: Horn of Africa

News reports on events in Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, and the Horn of Africa region in general. Covers conflicts (such as the Ethiopia-Somalia conflict), food security, weather events, disease outbreaks, humanitarian aid, and related topics. From the Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN) of the United Nations (UN) Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
Unfortunately there is no RSS-feed.

white house lies again

The Bush regime is looking more and more revisionist.
From the producers of we have never been "stay the course" we now get "Mission accomplished - we don't need no stinkin Mission accomplished!"

View the pedagogical video and weep.

UK Gov wants to increase costs of FOI requests

I have been having a look at the Campaign for Freedom of Information site and see that there is push to have an early day motion on the threat to increase dramatically the cost of Freedom of Information requests:

The motion which the Campaign has helped to co-ordinate, follows the publication in The Sunday Times of a leaked memo indicating that the Government is considering making it substantially easier for authorities to refuse requests on costs grounds and/or introducing new charges for information under the Act. The result would be either to deter significant numbers of requests under the Act or to allow authorities to refuse large numbers of requests which currently have to be answered.

The motion: Early Day Motion No.2699 Freedom of Information   has been signed to date by 112 MP:s.

Has your local MP signed? If not why not? What do they not want us to know? 

theyworkforyou.com will let you see what your local MP has or has not signed, and a whole lot more besides.