Preventing Torture within the Fight against Terrorism 16

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NEWSLETTER Volume 3, Issue 6

Preventing Torture Framing the Issue

November 2009

within the fight against terrorism Inside this issue:

Journalists speak out:

Journalists speak out

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Highlights from an IRCT-FIDH conference Torture and my

On 6 November, the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims and the International Federation for Human Rights welcomed more than 35 journalists from around the globe to a conference in Copenhagen. The event aimed to support and connect those in the media who report on human rights abuses in the war on terrorism, often at great risk to their own lives. What follows are highlights from the day’s speakers about managing to get difficult stories told. “MAKE SURE THIS HAPPENS” There could be no doubt that the so-called “torture

memos” drafted in the highest echelons of the Bush administration reached all the way to the detention facility at Abu Ghraib in Iraq. Five months after the infamous photographs of inmates in humiliating poses were released to the public, U.S. journalist Tara McKelvey began to hear more sinister stories, including that women and children were detained at the facility. McKelvey described how researching their stories was not a straightforward matter; administration officials withheld documents about the detainees, claiming they were state secrets, and what was released was heavily redacted.

McKelvey dug deeper, making two trips to Iraq and speaking to more than 20 ex-prisoners and interrogators from Abu Ghraib. Her research – later published in the book

Monstering: Inside America’s Policy on Secret Interrogations and Torture in the War on Terror – revealed how the abuses came to occur. In bold, capital letters “MAKE SURE THIS HAPPENS” was written on the interrogation guidelines and posted on the walls. Those same techniques, designed for high-level Al Qaeda operatives, were used on women and children as well. It was enough for McKelvey to conclude that “those memos led directly to torture”. “There is no such thing as objective journalism”

Sami Al Haj spoke to the conference attendees about his experience as the only journalist to be imprisoned at Guantanamo.

Erling Borgen comes from Norway, a country that has a reputation for peace building, but that’s a misperception, he told the assembled group. Despite Norway’s disavowal of direct participation in the Iraq war, Borgen – an investigative journalist and filmmaker – found that Norwegian companies have nonetheless played a

journalism: the view from 2 Bangladesh

Recommended resources 3

supporting role in the war. In his documentary film, A little piece of Norway, Borgen revealed how the Norwegian firm Aker Kværner kept the detention facility at Guantanamo running by fuelling aircraft that transported prisoners, and building the water and power supply at the camp. Objectivity, he contended, does not exist in journalism. Instead Borgen stressed the potency of fair and balanced investigative journalism: “Investigative journalism exposes the power that the power does not want exposed.” “Iguanas were treated with more humanity” Sami Al Haj knows firsthand the threats faced by journalists reporting on the war on terror. In 2001, while covering the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan for Al Jazeera, he was detained by Pakistani intelligence officers looking for a different man named Sami. They later accused him of interviewing Osama bin


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