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Maher Arar is not a terrorist, according to a report released this week by a government commission in Ottawa. The document describes how Canadian and U.S. law enforcement blunders led to Arar’s deportation to his native Syria, where he was held for ten months as a suspected Al Qaeda sympathizer and tortured. Toronto Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente tells Mark Jurkowitz how the Mounties used the media to help smear Arar.
The Associated Press revealed this week that its Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer, Bilal Hussein, has been detained by the U.S. military since April. Military officials say they believe Hussein has close ties to insurgents. The AP says “then charge him with something!” AP executive editor Kathleen Carroll speaks with Mark Jurkowitz.
As the Bush administration returns to the airwaves to re-sell the Iraq war, critics continue to question how it got sold in the first place. In the new book Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War, David Corn and Michael Isikoff look at how a system of leaks and anonymous sources allowed misleading information to wend its way from the administration to the press and back again. Corn joins Brooke to discuss the lifespan of a lie.
A little under a year ago, it was revealed that the Lincoln Group had been contracted by the Pentagon to pay for good press in the Iraqi media. Details were sketchy, but this month Harper’s published an account by Willem Marx of his summer in Baghdad interning for the Lincoln Group. Marx talks to Brooke about when the news is too good, and too lucrative, to be news at all.
After an investigation into U.S. propaganda efforts in Iraq, the Pentagon decided the Lincoln Group’s efforts were not illegal. Last month, the military again called for bids for a two-year, twenty-million dollar contract for help conveying its side of the story. Bob speaks with Lieutenant Colonel Barry Johnson, spokesman for the Multi-National Forces in Iraq, about waging the war of message management.
President Bush’s description and defense this week of U.S. standards for interrogating terror suspects put the issue of torture back in the news. In 2003, Abu-Ghraib caused a flurry of attention. But much of what we know about U.S. torture policies is the result of dogged reporting. Eric Umansky surveyed post-9/11 torture reporting for the Columbia Journalism Review, and tells Bob what the coverage teaches us about the press.
Erstwhile CNN anchor Aaron Brown anchored much of that network’s coverage of the September 11th attacks and their aftermath. Five years later, he joins Brooke to reflect on the moment when media earned unprecedented good will from the American people…and the intervening years when they lost it again.
The view from here is that Iran is a closed society with no outside (aka Western) news, information, or entertainment slipping in. Is it true? Or, are Iranians offered a variety of global views via satellite television and the internet? As America’s diplomatic stalemate with Iran becomes increasingly prominent in the headlines, Bob asks Tehran-based Time reporter Azadeh Moaveni about the perceptions, and misperceptions, across the cultural divide.
