SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
press freedom
100+ Journalists Push Blinken to 'Immediately Cease' Arms Transfers to Israel
"By providing the weapons being used to deliberately kill journalists, you are complicit in one of the gravest affronts to press freedom today," wrote a coalition of reporters, news outlets, and press freedom groups.
Aug 15, 2024
A coalition of individual journalists, news outlets, and press freedom organizations sent a letter Thursday imploring U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken to immediately halt all American weapons sales to the far-right Israeli government as the official death toll from its assault on the Gaza Strip surpassed 40,000.
"Israel's military actions are not possible without U.S. weapons, U.S. military aid, and U.S. diplomatic support," reads the new letter, which was organized by the Courage Foundation, Defending Rights & Dissent, and RootsAction.
"By providing the weapons being used to deliberately kill journalists," the letter continues, "you are complicit in one of the gravest affronts to press freedom today."
Letter signatories include Pulitzer Price-winning journalists Spencer Ackerman and Laura Poitras, WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson, Tareq Hajjaj of Mondoweiss, and Ryan Grim of Drop Site News, along with around 100 others.
Current Affairs, In These Times, and Middle East Eye were among the news outlets that backed the letter, which was released less than 48 hours after the U.S. State Department approved a $20 billion sale of additional weapons and other military equipment to the Israeli government—including dozens of F-15 fighter jets and tens of thousands of mortar shells.
"By providing Israel the weapons it uses to kill Palestinian journalists, the U.S. is complicit in these horrifying crimes," Chip Gibbons, policy director of Defending Rights & Dissent, said in a statement Thursday. "It is not enough for the State Department to issue words of concern or request Israel investigate its own crimes. That is why in this historic move, journalists, news outlets, and press freedom groups are joining together to tell the State Department that the only way to support press freedom is to impose an arms embargo on Israel."
An arms embargo against Israel has the support of a majority of the U.S. public as well as United Nations experts and leading human rights organizations.
The new letter spotlights the devastating toll Israel's assault has taken on Palestinian journalists, 109 of whom have been killed since October 7, according to the latest tally from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). In a statement on Wednesday, CPJ condemned the Israeli government for trying to smear the journalists it has killed as "terrorists."
Most recently, Israeli forces killedAl Jazeera reporter Ismail al-Ghoul and cameraman Rami al-Rifee in an airstrike on their car in Gaza City. Targeting journalists is a war crime under international law.
"Journalism is not a crime, and must never be a death sentence," Ackerman said Thursday. "When Russia kills and imprisons journalists, the U.S. is appropriately vocal in condemnation, but when Israel does it, the U.S. falls silent. Yet every Palestinian, Lebanese, American—remember Shireen Abu Akleh—and other journalist that Israel has killed implicates its patron, the United States, which possesses the leverage to stop Israel's onslaught."
The press freedom coalition wrote to Blinken on Thursday that "the U.S. is providing the weapons Israel continually uses to target Palestinian journalists in Gaza."
"This is a violation of international law and U.S. domestic law," the letter continues. "We urge you to immediately cease the transfer of all weapons to Israel."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Calls for Release of WSJ Reporter Sentenced in Russia
Press freedom groups accused Russia of using Evan Gershkovich as a "pawn" to secure the release of a Russian assassin convicted of murder in Germany.
Jul 19, 2024
Condemning the apparent use of an American journalist as a "pawn" to secure the release of a Russian imprisoned in Germany, press freedom groups on Friday demanded the release of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who was sentenced to 16 years in a maximum security penal colony.
Gershkovich was convicted and sentenced after a secretive and unusually speedy trial, with a court in Yekaterinburg finding him guilty of espionage.
The journalist was detained in March 2023 while he was reporting in Yekaterinburg. Prosecutors accused him of collecting "secret information" about a state-owned factory which manufactures tanks for Russia's war in Ukraine. The factory is located in Nizhniy Tagil, about 87 miles from the city.
Russia accused him of spying on behalf of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, which Gershkovich, the Biden administration, and The Wall Street Journal have strongly denied.
Russian officials fueled speculation that Gershkovich had been targeted in order to negotiate a prisoner exchange when they immediately denounced him as a spy after his arrest, without presenting evidence.
During three hearings in recent weeks, journalists were permitted into Sverdlovsk Regional Courthouse only before evidence was presented.
"Targeting Gershkovich in this way is another blatant example of unacceptable state hostage-taking by Russia."
Prosecutors pushed for an 18-year sentence, but their reasoning "faced no public scrutiny and may never be disclosed," reported The Washington Post.
Russian President Vladimir Putin suggested in February that Gershkovich could be released for Vadim Krasikov, an assassin associated with Russia's Federal Security Service, who was convicted of murder in Germany for killing a former Chechen separatist commander in Berlin in 2019.
Rebecca Vincent, director of campaigns for Reporters Without Borders (RSF), said Gershkovich had been subjected to a "sham trial" for political purposes.
"The sentencing of Evan Gershkovich to 16 years in prison is outrageous, and is the result of a trial that cannot be considered fair or free by any means," said Vincent. "This verdict should be immediately overturned. Journalists are not spies, and conflating journalism with espionage has highly dangerous implications for press freedom."
"Targeting Gershkovich in this way is another blatant example of unacceptable state hostage-taking by Russia," she added. "We urge his own government, the United States, to do everything in its power to secure his immediate release and his safe travel home."
Carlos Martinez de la Serna, program director for the Committee to Protect Journalists, said Gershkovich's case demands an end to "hostage diplomacy."
"Russia's decision to jail Evan Gershkovich for 16 years on sham charges is outrageous," said Martinez de la Serna. "Journalists are not pawns in geopolitical games."
U.S. President Joe Biden also described the 32-year-old journalist as a "hostage" and said the White House is "pushing hard for Evan's release and will continue to do so."
Several American citizens have been detained in Russia in recent years, raising alarm about Putin's government possibly using the tactic to secure the release of Russians who have been convicted in other countries. Biden secured the release of professional basketball player Brittney Griner in 2022, in exchange for the release of a Russian arms dealer.
Other American citizens imprisoned in Russia include musician Michael Travis Leake, who was sentenced to 13 years in a penal colony on Thursday; Marc Fogel, a teacher who was sentenced to 14 years for drug smuggling in 2022; and Marine veteran Paul Whelan, who was arrested in 2018 and accused of spying.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Julian Assange's Freedom Also Belongs to Us
My emotional relief at his escape from the clutches of this government far outweighs my feelings about the broader implications of the guilty plea, which has justifiably stirred concern and controversy.
Jun 30, 2024
fter twelve years — including five years of solitary confinement at Belmarsh Prison in London — Julian Assange is free. God bless America! He wasn’t extradited to the U.S. to stand trial, where he faced a sentence of 170 years in prison for violating the so-called Espionage Act.
Instead, he took a plea deal with the U.S. government, pleading guilty to one count of violating that act — you know, threatening America’s freedom — for which he had paid by his time already served. He was officially pronounced free at a U.S. federal court in Saipan, capital of the Northern Mariana Islands (a U.S. territory), after which he flew home to his wife and two children in Australia.
My emotional relief at his escape from the clutches of this government far outweighs my feelings about the broader implications of the guilty plea, which has justifiably stirred concern and controversy. The government got its little triumph: a “legal” acknowledgment of its right to keep monstrous secrets about what it does and punish any unauthorized spilling of the beans as “espionage.”
“He’s basically pleading guilty to things that journalists do all the time and need to do,” according to Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, quoted by the New York Times.
And Matt Taibbi said the decision “will remain a sword over the heads of anyone reporting on national security issues. Governments have no right to keep war crimes secret, but Assange’s 62-month stay in prison is starting to look like a template for Western prosecutions of such leaks.”
While such concerns are no doubt worrisome, I don’t think the legal system is a mechanism for seriously addressing them. Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, was hardly an equal in this hellish controversy. He was in the legal crosshairs of the most powerful country on the planet, which he had had the nerve to defy, by publishing an enormous amount of “classified” — that is to say hidden — data, given to him by government-employed whistleblowers.
This is called journalism, no matter that part of the U.S. case against Assange was that he doesn’t count as a real journalist. Mainstream, corporate journalists know how to behave themselves, I guess. They’re far more likely to “respect” the do-not-cross lines the government establishes.
As I wrote in 2010, at the beginning of the WikiLeaks controversy: “In a time of endless war, when democracy is an orchestrated charade and citizen engagement is less welcome in the corridors of power than it has ever been, when the traditional checks and balances of government are in unchallenged collusion with one another, when the media act not as watchdogs of democracy but guard dogs of the interests and clichés of the status quo, we have WikiLeaks, disrupting the game of national security, ringing its bell, changing the rules.”
As long as “national security” includes the waging of war, honest — a.k.a., real — journalism will be a nuisance to those in charge, because it includes actual reportage, not simply press-releases and public-relations blather. In the real world, war equals murder. War is not an abstract game of strategy and tactics. War itself is a “war crime” — especially when it’s waged not to gain freedom from an oppressor but to maintain control over the oppressed.
WikiLeaks releases were outrageous acts of espionage — from a war-waging government’s point of view — because the data was raw, real and unsanitized. They included 90,000 classified documents on the US war in Afghanistan and nearly 400,000 secret files on the Iraq war, which . . . uh, bled beyond the official propaganda and, among other things, showed that civilian deaths in the two wars were, according to Al-Jazeera, “much higher than the numbers being reported.”
In addition, WikiLeaks released data that, as Al-Jazeera noted, “unearthed how the Geneva Conventions were being violated routinely in the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba. The documents, dating from 2002 to 2008 showed the abuse of 800 prisoners, some of them as young as 14.”
And then, of course, there was the infamous “collateral murder” video, which showed a U.S. helicopter firing at people on a street in Baghdad, killing seven of them, including a Reuters journalist, and wounding a number of others, including two children, who were sitting in a van that had pulled up to aid the wounded people in the street. And all this happened as helicopter crew members snickered about the deaths. This was the United States in full view, waging its “war on terror” by unleashing terror at the level only a superpower could commit.
Showing snippets of truth about the war on terror is Julian Assange’s crime: his act of espionage. And I get the government’s point of view. Assange put war itself into the forefront of collective human awareness — as a hideous reality, not a political abstraction. What he did bears striking similarity to what Emmett Till’s mother did. She exposed the raw horror of Southern racism by insisting that her son, a 14-year-old boy who was beaten and drowned by Mississippi racists for allegedly speaking to a white woman, have a public funeral with an open casket, so the whole world could see what had been done to him. This was in 1955. Not long afterward, the Civil Rights Movement was fully underway.
Human evolution isn’t a legal issue, decided by the courts. It involves humanity facing and transcending its own dark side, which can be a messy and chaotic process. This is the nature of truth.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular