Thanks for all of the comments to the last blog posting. I wish I could say that it was the first time I had stolen such commentary regarding the treatment of journalists in the past, but those who are lifers to the old 360 blog know that isn't the case, as I had posted about Yahoo's role in jailing Chinese dissidents back in April 2006. I also posted a Christopher Hitchen's piece from even further back, 2005, on the United States role of closing newspapers in Iraq after the toppling of Saddam. Still I doubt that all of you were here way back when, so a refresher course if you will.......
Yahoo accused of helping jail China Internet writer
BEIJING (Reuters) - Yahoo Inc. may have helped Chinese police to identify an Internet writer who was subsequently jailed for four years for subversion in the third such case, an advocacy group for journalists said on Wednesday.
News implicating Yahoo in the imprisonment of Jiang Lijun in 2003 surfaced on the eve of a summit between Chinese President Hu Jintao and President Bush in Washington.
It was the third such case involving the U.S. Internet giant.
Yahoo was accused of providing electronic records to Chinese authorities that led to an eight-year prison term for Li Zhi for subversion in 2003 and of helping to identify Shi Tao, who was accused of leaking state secrets abroad and jailed last year for 10 years.
The Paris-based Reporters Without Borders said it had obtained a copy of the verdict showing that Yahoo! Holdings (Hong Kong) helped Chinese police to identify Jiang by confirming that the e-mail account ZYMZd2002 had been used jointly by Jiang and another pro-democracy activist Li Yibing.
"Little by little we are piecing together the evidence for what we have long suspected, that Yahoo! is implicated in the arrest of most of the people that we have been defending," the group said.
"We hope this Internet giant will not, as it has each time it has been challenged previously, hide behind its local partner, Alibaba, to justify its behavior. Whatever contract it has with this partner, the e-mail service is marketed as Yahoo!," it said.
But the watchdog conceded that the access code could also have been provided by Li, who is suspected of having been a police informer in the case.
Yahoo could not immediately be reached for comment. The company has defended itself in the past, saying it had to abide by local laws.
The 40-year-old Jiang was accused of seeking to use "violent means" to impose democracy, Reporters Without Borders said.
Police believed Jiang to be the leader of a small group of Internet dissidents, including Liu Di, a university student who was detained for one year and released in November 2003 after police decided against pressing charges.
The case is the latest in a string of examples that highlight the friction between profits and principles for Internet companies doing business in China, the world's number-two Internet market.
Web search giant Google Inc. has come under fire for saying it would block politically sensitive terms on its new China site, bowing to conditions set by Beijing.
In December, Microsoft Corp. shut down a blog at MSN Spaces belonging to outspoken blogger Michael Anti under Chinese government orders.
China has intensified a crackdown on the media in the past year, sacking newspaper editors, arresting journalists and closing publications.
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And this from back in 2005.....
fighting words
Secrets and Lies
The DoD's disgraceful plot to plant rosy stories in the Iraqi press.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, Dec. 5, 2005, at 1:27 PM ET
This time, someone really does have to be fired. The revelation that Defense Department money, not even authorized by Congress for the purpose, has been outsourced to private interests and then used to plant stories in the Iraqi press is much more of a disgrace and a scandal than anyone seems so far to have said.
It helps discredit free media in Iraq at a time when that profession is very new and very hazardous (and one of the unarguable moral gains of the original intervention). In a situation already dominated by rumor and conspiracy-mongering, and in a country rife with death squads, it exposes every honest Iraqi reporter to the charge that he or she is an agent of a foreign power. Who at the Pentagon could possibly have needed to have this explained to them?
It comes on the heels of a credible report about a threat, from President George W. Bush, to bomb the Qatari headquarters of Al Jazeera. The British government, from whose inner circle the relevant memo has been leaked, might have taken credit—in that Tony Blair appears to have dissuaded Bush from this course of criminal insanity—but instead has threatened to use the Official Secrets Act against the newspaper that published it, thus somewhat strengthening the supposition that the story is true. Since certain people and places associated with Al Jazeera have been hit in the past, it appears more plausible than ever in retrospect that some deliberate "targeting" may have been involved.
It follows the deaths, at the hands of American soldiers, of several Iraqi journalists in "friendly fire." I wrote about this for Slate in July and pointed out that a British general had warned American commanders that these tactics might be quite an easy way of losing the war.
It is not just a matter of lying to the Iraqis and to neighboring countries, bad as that would be. The feedback must also have been intended to deceive the American taxpayers whose money was used for the fraud in the first place.
You may say: Why strain at this gnat while a huge controversy about more consequential "lies" is in progress? Stupidity and propaganda are inseparable from even the noblest war, but this consideration cannot be allowed to excuse everything. One expects that commanders at home and in the field will talk up their successes, play down crimes and errors on the ground that such information is useful to the enemy, do black propaganda in the enemy camp, and try to get their own version into the public record. But sometimes a whole new line is crossed and "propaganda" corrupts the whole process by becoming a covert operation against one's "own" side. The worst violation so far has been the spreading of a falsified story about the death of Pat Tillman in Afghanistan. Not only was he slain by "friendly fire" instead of by the foe—which is a tragedy in far more ways than just as a setback for recruitment—but the family and friends of this all-American hero were purposely deceived about what had really happened. It would be trivial to add that they were also pointlessly deceived (how long do the geniuses at DoD imagine that such a thing can be kept quiet?) except that it greatly added to the callousness of the thing, and except that this same pointlessness and moral idiocy are now apparent in the "good news" scandal in Iraq.
I remember reading, decades ago, of a moment when Richard Nixon had made some desperate speech from his bunker and had then arranged for telegrams of support to be sent to the White House. And I wondered—did he eagerly tear them open and turn moistly to his aides, saying, "See: You can always count on the horse sense of the American people"? Was he, in other words, utterly and happily insulated and yet alarmingly insane?
I mean, just picture the scene for a moment. An Iraqi family living in, say, Anbar Province, picks its way down the stoop to collect the newly delivered newspaper. This everyday operation is hazardous, but less so than going down to the corner to pick it up, because there are mad people around who do not believe that anything should be in print, save the Quran, not to mention nasty local potentates who do not like to read criticism of themselves. Further, the streets are often dark and littered with risky debris. The lead story, however, reports that all is well in the Anbar region; indeed, things are going so well that there is even a slight chance that they will one day get better. Who is supposed to be fooled by this? The immediate target is, one supposes, the long-suffering people of Iraq. But over time, the printing and dissemination of cheery reportage must have been intended to be picked up and replayed back into the American electorate. If done from state coffers, that is probably not even legal.
It is, anyway, not so much a matter of fooling people as of insulting them. The prostitute journalist is a familiar and well-understood figure in the Middle East, and Saddam Hussein's regime made lavish use of the buyability of the regional press. Now we, too, have hired that clapped-out old floozy, Miss Rosie Scenario, and sent her whoring through the streets. If there was one single thing that gave a certain grandeur to the change of regime in Baghdad, it was the reopening of the free press (with the Communist Party's paper the first one back on the streets just after the statue fell) and the profusion of satellite dishes, radio stations, and TV programs. There were some crass exceptions—Paul Bremer's decision to close Muqtada Sadr's paper being one of the stupidest and most calamitous decisions—but in general it was something to be proud of. Now any fool is entitled to say that a free Iraqi paper is a mouthpiece, and any killer is licensed to allege that a free Iraqi reporter is a mercenary. A fine day's work. Someone should be fired for it.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent book is Thomas Jefferson: Author of America. His most recent collection of essays is titled Love, Poverty, and War.
Sorry about all of the reading there, but there is a method to my madness, as soon as I collect my thoughts in a more coherent manner. I am sure I will get to it. I will call it the "Yes, but...." argument and it goes to why a significant number of Americans just don't care what the world thinks of them. It goes to Angie's comment that she found it amusing that Congress would take a stand against Yahoo because of actions of the President. Let it be said first and foremost that the two are completely different entities, and there are plenty of people in both the House and Senate that are trying to unearth the extent of the whole eavesdropping program, let alone the legality of circumventing the FISA court to do so, and the White House has cited executive privilege regarding such matters time and again, something a private corporation can't do so it is not as though Congress has taken a blind eye to the whole process, rather it is a matter of what can they get done with a executive branch very much thwarting their efforts.
Still, it is these "Yes but...." type arguments that by and large give people pause, if not out right disregard for opinions beyond our shores, because honestly, that argument can be made about anything, because it isn't an argument at all. You can say "yes but" to anything and then proceed to bridge to something else that is troublesome because there will always be troublesome things out there, every country has them and if that is going to be the basis for all argument, then nothing will ever get done. Say Great Britain were going to take a lead in environmental cleanup. I would argue that this is a good thing, but by the same token, the argument could be turned on its face by saying "Isn't it interesting how Great Britain is so worried about the globe, but they have an occupying force in Iraq." Under that guise the statement is true, everybody is indeed a critic.
I prefaced the last entry by saying it was a small victory, and that is what I believe it to be. For the most part, I doubt that the world at large even noticed the effort, it wasn't front page news and had I not been working and trying to find material to use for the show (we ended up using the article this morning on the show) I am quite sure I would have missed the story entirely, it registered that small of a blip on the radar screen. Given the amount of surprise that showed up in the comments section, I tend to think it wouldn't have been just me who would have missed it. For a brief moment on Tuesday, a couple of corporate cockroaches had the light of reality shown upon them and weren't afforded the luxury of scurrying off into another dark corner. Nothing earth shattering, just a brief moment in history where a small degree of accountability for actions was brought to bear.
Yes but the United States hasn't signed the Kyoto Treaty.
Just remember history is written by the winners with some inserts of the losers. No matter who wins, I can imagine people reading 500 years from now. "What were they thinking?"
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