MANILA, Philippines—The keynote speaker gave the audience plenty to think about. Preeminent Southeast Asia scholar Benedict Anderson lashed out at the “catastrophic” Arroyo administration, and lamented the isolation of public intellectuals from “the general public.”
But during the breaks on the side of the international conference in Quezon City to mark the 10th anniversary of the $2-million-a-year Asian Public Intellectuals (API) fellowship program over the weekend, one recurring question dealt with something a little more basic: Where are the journalists?
Out of 216 fellows from five countries who have completed their research under API’s generous terms, 88 are academics, or a full 40 percent of the total. There are 39 NGO workers (including, from the Philippines, political analyst Joel Rocamora and leading physician Fe de los Reyes), and 35 creatives (film directors like Nick Deocampo and Auraeus Solito).
However, only 15 of all fellows are journalists (with only four from the Philippines).
Clearly, said university professor Theresita Atienza, a fellow now serving on API’s regional committee who culled the statistics, “we need more journalists” to apply for the fellowships.
Research project
The program allows fellows from the Philippines, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia and Thailand to conduct a research project of their choice, for up to a year and with all expenses paid, in any or all of the five countries except their own.
“The idea is to support civil society, but to support it from the professional knowledge standpoint,” said Ambassador Yohei Sasakawa, chair of Nippon Foundation, which conceptualized, directs and funds the program.
The program provides this support, said Tatsuya Tanami, foundation executive director, by meeting its two main goals: “To identify and nurture public intellectuals” in Asia, and “to form a community of these public intellectuals.”
This emerging community of public intellectuals was on living display during the international conference hosted by Ateneo de Manila University—more than half of all API fellows attended the three-day forum, and the fruit of their work was showcased through books and art exhibits.
Herry Yogaswara, a fellow from Indonesia, identified an aspect of the API program that distinguishes it from other fellowships. “One of the features of this program is continuity.”
For instance, a “regional project” begun in 2008 has allowed over 55 fellows, after they had completed their research, to work together again on what Atienza described as “community-based initiatives for ecological balance” in five sites in the region. (In the Philippines, the activity site is Batanes.)
Partner institutions
Another distinctive feature of the program is the depth of its endowment. Tanami said the foundation had invested, “roughly speaking, US$20 million in 10 years.” He quickly pointed out that, “though it sounds like a lot of money,” the funds did not only bankroll some 30 fellows conducting research in five countries every year, but also “five research units in partner institutions.”
The API partner institutions are among the region’s leading educational centers: The Indonesian Institute of Sciences, Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University, Institute of Malaysian and International Studies at the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Institute of Asian Studies at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University, and Ateneo de Manila.
The 10th anniversary conference was held on Ateneo’s Quezon City campus, in part in tribute to the university’s 150th anniversary.
Some of the more prominent API fellows include Malaysian economist Jomo K. S., now an assistant secretary general at the United Nations; Kavi Chongkittavorn, a senior journalist from Thailand; and Indonesian election commissioner Sri Nuryanti.
The API is unusual among institutional donors in funding as many as 30 fellows every year. With the inclusion of applicants from Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam starting with the next cycle, the number of “Asian Public Intellectuals” will rise markedly in the next few years.
Thought-provoking
The conference began with a provocative keynote address by Anderson, the celebrated author of “Imagined Communities.”
Reading several volumes’ worth of API research findings, Anderson told a packed hall, “aroused in me an anxiety.” He noted that the years from 1998 onward were politically turbulent ones for the region. And yet: “What struck me in reading these volumes was the relative invisibility of this turmoil.”
In the research projects conducted in Thailand, he noted, “Thaksin [the controversial ex-prime minister] barely appears.” In those involving the Philippines, a reader gets “no idea of the catastrophic presidency of Gloria Arroyo Macapagal.” (He mistakenly inverted the President’s names.)
This relative invisibility led him to discuss “the rise and decline of the traditional role of the public intellectual”—a decline, he said, caused mainly by the growing separation of academics and other traditional intellectuals from the general public.
In the press briefing that concluded the first day of the conference, Surichai Wun’Gaeo, API fellow and director of Chulalongkorn’s Center for Peace and Conflict Studies, took issue with Anderson’s directly political model.
“We are too much concerned with power politics in this model,” he said. “In API, the issue of power relates also to understanding...The issue is much more basic than just political. For us, [the issue is] how to strengthen the power of understanding.”
In the same briefing, Fr. Bienvenido Nebres, SJ, Ateneo president, sought to base that understanding on the self-chosen research concerns of the new generation of knowledge workers.
“The API is giving opportunities to younger intellectuals precisely to develop a regional point of view,” Nebres said. “The future belongs to the younger generation—but you have to trust them.”
IT had all the elements for the perfect tabloid gossip item — a clash between star financial journalists, big egos and a surprise ouster that had Wall Street buzzing: Henry Blodget, the well-known disgraced-analyst-turned-financial-pundit and co-founder of the much-read blog, The Business Insider, stunned the financial community last week by firing John Carney, the star managing editor of the site’s Clusterstock blog, reportedly because of philosophical differences over the site’s coverage.
The news, which was quickly picked up by the Reuters financial blogger Felix Salmon, who subsequently sparked an online spat of his own with Mr. Blodget, did not break in a gossip column like The New York Post’s Page Six or in the pages of The Wall Street Journal, which in a previous era might have owned this story. Rather, the scoop came from a 25-year-old Village Voice gossip blogger and University of Utah dropout named Foster Kamer.
Surfing the Web after business hours one evening, Mr. Kamer ran across speculation about Mr. Carney’s job status on a Twitter post by Gawker Media’s owner, Nick Denton. After 90 minutes of phone calls to sources within the financial journalism subculture, Mr. Kamer nailed down the item and posted it on the Voice site. The lines between “reporter” and “blogger,” “gossip” and “news” have blurred almost beyond distinction. No longer is blogging something that marginalized editorial wannabes do from home, in a bathrobe, because they haven’t found a “real” job. Blogging now is a career path in its own right, offering visibility, influence and an actual paycheck. As more gossip action in a variety of fields moves online, young writers who might have hungrily chased an editorial assistant job at Condé Nast a few years ago now move to New York with the dream of making it as a blogger — either launching their own blog into the big time, à la Perez Hilton, or getting snapped up by a prominent blog network like Gawker Media or MediaBistro. And although the better-known newspaper gossip columnists still churn along, among them Richard Johnson and Cindy Adams of The New York Post, and George Rush and Joanna Molloy of The New York Daily News, much of the action has moved online, with the up-and-coming players having little in common with legendary predecessors like Walter Winchell and Liz Smith. While Ms. Smith, 87 and still active, toiled in journalism for nearly 30 years before getting her own by-lined column (working first, among other things, as a typist, proofreader and radio producer), some of the newest notables in gossip are still in their 20s and only a few years removed from the days when they blogged from their college dorm rooms about fraternity hazing mishaps and the quality of the cafeteria food.
The following are profiles of nine emerging gossip bloggers, whose names came up in interviews with influential blog entrepreneurs, fellow bloggers and other journalists as potential future stars of the online world. The list, by no means exhaustive, represents a cross-section of New Yorkers covering varied beats — entertainment, fashion, real estate, finance —for a variety of prominent blog networks. Some, like Sara Polsky of Curbed and Lilit Marcus of The Gloss, are relatively new to the business, but recently installed in a position of prominence by Web star-makers like Lockhart Steele, who runs Curbed and Eater, or Elizabeth Spiers, a founder of Gawker in 2002 who has introduced a number of successful blogs since then. Others, like Fred Mwangaguhunga of MediaTakeOut.com, are popular niche players who are quickly crossing into the mainstream.
If you’re starting a high-profile blog in the already saturated, and fiercely competitive, celebrity-gossip category, you had better have an edge. And Elizabeth Spiers, who debuted Crushable last month for the Canadian company b5media, says she has a plan to differentiate her new blog from the competition, including heavyweights like Perez Hilton, who happens to have been a roommate years ago, and new sites like Bonnie Fuller’s Hollywood Life. Go young.
Crushable, run by the 29-year-old Ms. Carlson, a former Associated Press entertainment reporter, seeks to leave the bulk of the Brangelina coverage to the other guys and focus more on a Teen Vogue-ish 15-to-25-year-old female market. So look out for more news on more hunky young stars like Matt Bomer of “White Collar” and Cory Monteith of “Glee,” as well as tweens like Lourdes Leon, Madonna’s 13-year-old fashion designer daughter.
Ms. Carlson seems well-pedigreed for her job. At The Associated Press, she reported the story of the $14 million sale of photos of the Brad-Angelina twins, and last year, the story of Sean Penn’s split from his wife, Robin Wright Penn.
NOTABLE SCOOP: Reported this week that the rumored relationship between Rob Kardashian and Angela Simmons, which some gossips had speculated was a Kardashian family publicity stunt, was real, according to a source.
Short indeed is the list of fashion influencers whose journey to that tent in Bryant Park took a detour through a biomedical-engineering course load at Duke University. But that’s what Ms. Fitzpatrick, now 25, was mired in when she started Fashionologie in her dorm room in 2005 as a kind of study break. In five years, she has managed to distance herself from the infinite number of would-be Anna Wintours blogging from their bedrooms and actually made the industry insiders take notice. Fashionologie now attracts 1.5 million page-views a month, and has seen a 45 percent increase in visits over the last year, according to Ms. Fitzpatrick, and is being linked to established fashion sites like Refinery29 and The Cut at New York Magazine.
While primarily a news aggregator and style curator, as opposed to a gotcha-style gossip columnist, Ms. Fitzpatrick, is driving traffic while providing plenty of original content of late. In competition with rival sites like Fashionista, she reports from the front lines at the shows in Paris, London and Milan, and interviews designers like Alexander Wang and Riccardo Tisci for Givenchy. She routinely mines online fashion forums for tips, sources and insider arcana (when Vogue’s André Leon Talley joined Twitter, you read about it in Fashionologie).
NOTABLE SCOOP: She recently reported that Alexander McQueen had done final fittings on a substantial part of his fall collection before his death.
MEMORABLE GAFFE: Posted one item recently describing a Twitter account supposedly belonging to Anna Wintour’s daughter, Bee Shaffer. But when she noticed that it linked to one purporting to be be her mother’s, which had only one tweet (“those poseurs got to stop”), she determined it to be bogus and quickly removed the item.
FOSTER KAMER: Staff writer, The Village Voice news blog, Runnin’ Scared
Mr. Kamer may cite The Village Voice’s co-founder, Norman Mailer, as a personal inspiration, but online he comes off a bit like a Wi-Fi era hybrid of J. J. Hunsecker and H. L. Mencken, delivering missives on the news media, politics and New York culture in an acerbic, knowing tone — even by Gawker alumni standards —sometimes at lengths that call to mind Op-Ed essays more than gossip items. The former weekend editor at Gawker and assistant editor at BlackBook.com, he seems to know everyone and everything about the tight-knit — some might say incestuous — New York online-gossip subculture. The big figures in that subculture consider Mr. Kamer a rising force. “He’s supremely talented,” said Mr. Steele, when asked his opinion on which rising stars to focus on for this article. “He qualifies as a must-include.”
Mr. Kamer, who started at The Voice last month, wasted little time afflicting the comfortable. An off-color wisecrack about James Dolan in a recent item about the media mogul’s rumored purchase of the Gothamist blog may have cost his paper more than $20,000 in advertising revenue; the IFC Center, a Dolan property, recently pulled a $400-a-week ad from The Voice, Mr. Kamer claimed in his blog. The square-off inspired Gawker’s Adrian Chen to joke in a recent item that his former colleague “has been busily blogging the Village Voice to financial ruin.”
It might be a reasonable price to pay for alternative weekly if Mr. Kamer can help The Voice, struggling for an identity along with most alternative weeklies in the Internet era, end up with its biggest gossip must-read since James Ledbetter in the ’90s.
NOTABLE SCOOP: The John Carney story.
MEMORABLE GAFFE: At Gawker, he ran an item about a University of Minnesota journalism professor excoriating the traditional news organizations for ignoring the Jon and Kate Gosselin story. The story, picked up from The Huffington Post, turned out to be a satirical piece written by the humorist Andy Borowitz.
No one thought the world needed another media gossip site when Dan Abrams, a former general manager of MSNBC, started Mediaite.com last July. But at least he brought in a credentialed team — including the well-known media blogger Rachel Sklar — to help him elbow his way into a crowded market. At 26, Mr. Krakauer is not only the site’s youngest editor, but also a seasoned reporter in his own right. He honed his skills as an assistant editor at MediaBistro’s influential TVNewser site, which became an industry staple under former editor Brian Stelter, now a New York Times media reporter.
He is already starting to break a steady stream of scoops, like his posts that reported that ABC was planning a major layoff in February, or the story last October that Fox News’s 3 a.m. show was getting better ratings than CNN’s 8 p.m. primetime show — a fact that Fox later worked into an advertising campaign. Some in the news media are starting to take notice. Last year, Rush Limbaugh quoted Mr. Krakauer’s TVNewser podcast with Terry Moran, the co-anchor of ABC’s “Nightline,” in his radio show. The Hollywood site The Wrap listed him along with Ryan Seacrest and The Los Angeles Times media reporter, Joe Flint, on its list of “50 TV Insiders to Follow Right Now” on Twitter last fall.
NOTABLE SCOOP: His post in February about the NBC cafeteria’s fried chicken menu in honor of Black History Month had Wanda Sykes joking about it on Jay Leno that night.
MEMORABLE GAFFE: Last August, reported that Fox News’s Twitter account had been hacked and littered with nasty comments about Sarah Palin and Bill O’Reilly — a juicy scoop, except that the account was a hoax.
Success is often just being in the right place at the right time. So it was perhaps fortuitous that Bess Levin’s former co-editor at this sharp-fanged financial gossip site, John Carney, left it for Ms. Levin to run solo in the fall of 2008, just as blood was starting to flow on Wall Street. Since then, Ms. Levin has elbowed her way into an exclusive and still heavily male club, becoming a must-read not only for $250,000-a-year-bonus investment bank drones wondering which boss’s head is about to roll, but also among the corner-office types themselves. Financial powerhouses like JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, as well as hedge fund managers like Steve Cohen, Dan Loeb, and Ken Griffin, have been known to visit the site.
In February, Dealbreaker was named one of the 10 best Wall Street blogs by The Wall Street Journal’s David Weidner, who wrote that “Dealbreaker is full of Wall Street snark and has a potty mouth to boot.” Of the 10, Ms. Levin’s was only one of two written by a woman (though a few are anonymous), and certainly the only one by a woman who was 25 and never worked on the Street.
NOTABLE SCOOP: After BusinessWeek published a profile of Mr. Cohen in 2003 that referred to, but did not show, party invitations that his wife sent out of the prominent but discreet hedge-fund manager dressed up in a king costume, the invitations entered into Wall Street lore, sight unseen. Ms. Levin finally dug up an image of the regal invitation and ran it last November.
MEMORABLE GAFFE: Published an “unfounded rumor” that a major hedge fund’s prime brokers were threatening liquidation at the height of the financial mess in late 2008. It turns out the rumor was indeed “unfounded,” so she quickly removed it under pressure.
The Gloss, a fashion and beauty site that also focuses on career, dating, women’s issues and culture, is another new site in the growing b5 media stable that was overseen by Elizabeth Spiers, a challenge of sorts to Jezebel.com. Ms. Marcus, 27, is its highly regarded editor. Before taking over at Jewcy.com, an irreverent blog about Jewish issues and culture, in 2008, Ms. Marcus founded SaveTheAssistants.com, a forum that gave beleaguered assistants a place to sound off anonymously about their jerk bosses, like the one who stole a book from his assistant and gave it to his girlfriend. The site grew out of her grueling experience as an administrative assistant for a media company.
The site, which she later spun off into a book, attracted attention on National Public Radio and CNN.com, which compared the tales on the site with those on “The Office”: “Bosses like Michael Scott do exist and employees have to deal with them every day,” the article reported. “The good news is they don’t have to commiserate alone.” Even though Ms. Marcus has never named the company that inspired the site, its management still threatens to sue her, she said. “There’s a saying where I come from: ‘if they’re shooting at you, you’re doing something right,” the North Carolina-bred Ms. Marcus said. “I think about that a lot as a gossip writer.”
While Ms. Marcus and Ms. Spiers acknowledge the inevitable Jezebel comparisons, they also bristle. The site, which focuses on fashion and beauty as much as the latest from the feminist writer Cynthia Ozick, aims to be lighter, Ms. Spiers said. “The Gloss is more playful, it’s funnier,” she said of her site, which relies heavily on fashion and beauty as well as stories about bigger women’s issues. “Jezebel is more Ms. Magazine. The Gloss is not a humor site, but humor is one of its key components.”
NOTABLE SCOOP: A recent Gloss item about tensions between Tinsley Mortimer and her sister-in-law Minnie Mortimer, a fashion designer, was picked up by Page Six.
MEMORABLE GAFFE: It’s early, and no major strike-throughs yet, although the site did take some heat from fashion bloggers for not doing more to get the other side on a recent post about an alleged sexual overture by the photographer Terry Richardson toward one of his models.
A Columbia Law-educated former corporate lawyer from Hollis, Queens, whose previous professional apogee was founding a high-end laundry and dry-cleaning service, Mr. Mwangaguhunga came to blogging in his third decade of life, a little late to qualify as a prodigy. But that doesn’t seem to have held him back. In four years, his site, which focuses on the urban culture industries, now attracts a following of five million unique visitors a month; traffic grew by 125 percent last year alone. His items are routinely picked up by sites like TMZ.com, enhancing his reputation — which he is perfectly happy to encourage — as the Matt Drudge of African-American entertainment.
And lately, mainstream journalists and sites are starting to pay a lot more attention. Mediaite.com, the media gossip blog, called him one of the top online blog editors of 2009 and explaining: “The site, which covers black celebrity gossip, boasts an enormous readership and regularly breaks big stories. To wit: they called Lady Gaga’s decision to pull out of Kanye West’s tour a day before it was reported elsewhere, and — if this can be called a scoop — they were the first to run the infamous nude Rihanna pictures.” Meanwhile, the site’s first post about Chris Brown’s assault on his former girlfriend attracted 100,000 hits in its first few minutes, Mr. Mwangaguhunga said.
Last year, The New York Beacon, a newspaper that focuses on African-American issues, praised his “significant reach in the vastly ignored urban community.” And Mr. Mwangaguhunga himself seems supremely confident about his site’s future: “If done properly, I don’t see any reason why MediaTakeOut can’t be as popular as TMZ.”
NOTABLE SCOOP: That news about Lady Gaga.
MEMORABLE GAFFE: Announced the birth of the N.F.L. player Vince Young’s daughter, before paternity tests showed that the child was not his.
MAUREEN O’CONNOR: Weekend and night editor, Gawker
Talk about coming of age in the Internet era. Ms. O’Connor, 25, has never had a journalism job that even remotely involved a print product, having started at Princeton blogging for the IvyGate, a popular gossip blog about the Ivy League. “Our bread and butter was the scandals and follies of Ivy League students and faculty — hazing bloopers, secret societies, campus controversies,” said Ms. O’Connor, who tracked campus stories like that of Aliza Shvarts, the Yale art student who stirred a national controversy with her hoax project supposedly involving aborted fetuses, during her time there.
After graduation, Ms. O’Connor landed a job at Tina Brown’s Daily Beast as a home-page editor, and then, in November, started as weekend editor for Gawker, the Nick Denton site that has been the launch pad for nearly a whole generation of blogosphere stars, including Choire Sicha and Jessica Coen, who served the online managing editor for New York Magazine before recently returning to Jezebel, a Gawker Media blog.
Ms. O’Connor is off to a strong start at Gawker. Her lengthy obituary of the heiress Casey Johnson — “among the first celebutantes to decamp to Hollywood in search of 21C fame,” she wrote — attracted 100,000 hits in January.
NOTABLE SCOOP: In January, she began an “investigation” into the White House budget director Peter Orszag’s hair — a rug or a barber’s misfire, you be the judge — that became a fleeting Internet meme in its own right.
MEMORABLE GAFFE: Took Fox News to task over a typo in a chyron (a term for the graphics at the bottom of a TV screen) identifying former the Arizona Congressman J.D. Hayworth as a “congresswoman.” Too bad Ms. O’Connor misspelled the word chyron in the post.
Curbed, the real-estate blog that attracts two million page views a month, is a something of an addiction for many in a town that is (still) addicted to real estate, even after the crash. Ms. Polsky, 24, is its newest voice, an understudy to longtime editor Joey Arak and Lockhart Steele, the site’s founder, who is one of the most influential blog personalities in town, and thus a star-maker of sorts. Ms. Polsky, whose prior experience consisted of a year as an editorial assistant at Real Deal magazine, is up against stiff competition. The field is dominated locally by older, established real estate professionals, like Jonathan Miller of the Matrix, who is the head of a major appraisal company,; and Douglas Heddings of TrueGotham, a long-time broker. Even Jonathan Butler of chief competitor Brownstoner used to run a hedge fund. The big rivals are generally “written by people who are in the industry,” she said. “They can write about how brokers work, or what the statistics say. We have more of a laypersons’ approach.” But unlike bloggers of old, this Harvard graduate is not above old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting, like the time she trekked out to Greenpoint in November to watch a developer silence the gavel at a major auction of new condominium units when early sales on units priced up to $599,000 started selling in the $200,000s. Like the best bloggers, Mr. Steele said, “she’s got the jaundiced eye, that I’m always looking for, but it’s not knee-jerk negativity.”
NOTABLE SCOOP: Polsky posted an item about the townhouse in TriBeCa that was once designated by John and Yoko’s as the “embassy” for their conceptual country of Nutopia, hitting the market for $3.25 million; the item got picked up by Beatles fan sites around the world.
MEMORABLE GAFFE: No whoppers, but mistakes happen, like the recent item where she mistakenly identified the firm behind the renovation of the developer Adam Gordon’s Jane Street town house.
Of the 779 known detainees who have been held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — terrorism suspects, sympathizers of Al Qaeda, people deemed enemy combatants by the United States military — only one was a journalist.
Now, more than a year after his release, Mr. Hajj, a 40-year-old native of Sudan, is back at work at the Arabic satellite news network, leading a new desk devoted to human rights and public liberties. The captive has become the correspondent.
“I wanted to talk for seven years, to make up for the seven years of silence,” Mr. Hajj said through an interpreter during an interview at the network’s headquarters in Doha, Qatar.
Among Al Jazeera’s viewers in the Arab world since the 9/11 attacks, perhaps nothing has damaged perceptions of America more than Guantánamo Bay. For that reason, Mr. Hajj, who did a six-part series on the prison after his release, is a potent weapon for the network, which does not always strive for journalistic objectivity on the subject of his treatment. In an interview, Ahmed Sheikh, the editor in chief of Al Jazeera, called Mr. Hajj “one of the victims of the human rights atrocities committed by the ex-U.S. administration.”
But Mr. Hajj has not restricted himself to Guantánamo and his own incarceration. He has expanded the network’s coverage of other rights issues, including press freedom in Iraq, Palestinians in Israeli prisons and the implications of the USA Patriot Act. On a Wednesday morning in mid-August, Mr. Hajj pushed Al Jazeera’s news desk to cover a hunger strike by political prisoners in Jordan, and he happily pointed to a nearby television when the Jordan news scrolled on the bottom of the screen.
Nor has his experience radicalized him: he said that, despite his upbringing in a violent and often repressive country and his experience in detention, he maintained a sustaining belief in democracy and the rule of law.
Terry Anderson, an Associated Press correspondent who was detained in Lebanon from 1985 to 1991 by Islamic fundamentalists, said he could understand Mr. Hajj’s chosen assignment.
“In prison, what do you do? You think about your life. You think about what you were doing, and how it led you here,” Mr. Anderson said.
Mr. Hajj’s story is well known to Al Jazeera viewers, but not to most Americans. (As with the experiences of many detainees at Guantánamo Bay, his version is uncorroborated by American officials or any documents.) After working at a beverage company and then trying to start a business in Azerbaijan, he began working as a cameraman for Al Jazeera in 2000. He was captured on Dec. 15, 2001, trying to cross the border back into Afghanistan with his camera and a correspondent.
He later came to believe that the Americans were seeking another Al Jazeera cameraman, one with a similar name who had recorded an interview with Osama bin Laden after the Sept. 11 attacks.
After being detained by local authorities in Pakistan, Mr. Hajj was transferred into American custody and, he says, tortured and beaten at a prison at the Bagram air base in Afghanistan. He was moved to Kandahar and then transported to Guantánamo Bay in mid-2002. Looking back, he says he thinks that he was sent there in part because he was a journalist.
“I had seen a lot of things that I shouldn’t have seen,” he said, citing the treatment of prisoners at Bagram in particular. Mr. Hajj claims that in lengthy interrogations he was asked for details of the network’s staff, policies and processes and that some guards started calling him “Al Jazeera” as a nickname.
He said an interrogator once asked him, “How much does bin Laden pay Al Jazeera for all the propaganda that Al Jazeera supplies?”
“You’re asking the wrong question,” he replied, emphasizing that bin Laden was not a propaganda partner of Al Jazeera, “he’s a newsmaker.”
In American custody, he tried to keep practicing journalism, he said, writing eyewitness accounts for his lawyers and family members, interpreting fellow detainees’ stories of abuse and even making drawings of forced feedings during a hunger strike.
“I felt that I needed to document this for history,” he said, “so that the next generation knows the depth of the crime that was committed.” He audibly emphasized the Arabic word for depth as he spoke.
During the interview, Mr. Hajj displayed a deep wound on his left leg, which he said he suffered when he was pinned against cell bars during a beating at Guantánamo. He reiterated that the emotional trauma was more extensive than the physical; he says he continues to see psychotherapists.
Asked about questioning about Al Jazeera, a Pentagon spokesman said members of the media “are not targeted by U.S. forces, but there is no special category that gives members of media organizations immunity if captured engaging in suspicious, terror-related activity.” The spokesman added that all detainees were treated humanely while in custody.
According to Zachary Katznelson, the legal director for Reprieve, a human rights group that represented Mr. Hajj, the allegations changed over the years: “First, he was alleged to have filmed an interview of Osama bin Laden. It was another cameraman. So, that allegation disappeared. Then the U.S. said Sami ran a jihadist Web site. Turns out, there was no such site. So that allegation disappeared. Then, the U.S. said Sami was in Afghanistan to arrange missile sales to Chechen rebels. There was no evidence to back that up at all. So that allegation disappeared.”
Mr. Hajj’s release, back to Sudan on a stretcher, came in May 2008 after lobbying by human rights groups and the government of Sudan. The Pentagon spokesman said Mr. Hajj’s release to Sudan “indicated our belief that the government of Sudan could effectively mitigate the threat posed” by him.
Since his release, he has put on weight and honed his rhetoric. He splits his time between Al Jazeera and the Guantánamo Justice Center, a group he co-founded for former detainees. Through the center he is helping to prepare legal action against former President George W. Bush and officials of his administration.
Even during a translated interview, he remained keenly sensitive to language, calling the detainees at Guantánamo “captives,” to call attention to what he says is a “place outside of law.”
When a visitor mentioned “enhanced interrogation techniques,” an American term that characterizes harsh treatment of detainees, Mr. Hajj interrupted the interpreter and said, in Arabic, “instead of torture?”
“We are giving the wrong impression” with that term, he said. “We as journalists are violating human rights because we are changing the perception of reality.”
Oddly, while in a prison sanctioned by American authorities, Mr. Hajj put his faith in the American political system. He gathered bits of news from the guards and, leading up to the 2004 election, was sure that American voters would reject Mr. Bush, which would lead to his freedom. When the guards informed him that the president had been re-elected, he was stunned.
MOSCOW — A prominent opposition journalist in Kyrgyzstan, whose autocratic president has been courted by the United States as an ally for the war in Afghanistan, died on Tuesday after being thrown last week from a sixth-story window, his arms and legs bound with duct tape.
The journalist, Gennadi Pavlyuk, was on a business trip in Almaty, the commercial capital of neighboring Kazakhstan, when he was attacked on Dec. 16, the authorities said. He was in a coma before dying of severe trauma on Tuesday. His colleagues said he was 40 years old, with a wife and son.
Opposition politicians in Kyrgyzstan blamed the Kyrgyz president, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, for the killing, saying that he was escalating his efforts to eliminate dissent in the country. Mr. Bakiyev’s spokesman said the government had nothing to do with the attack on Mr. Pavlyuk.
Since taking power in 2005, Mr. Bakiyev has steadily tightened his grip on Kyrgyzstan, a poor former Soviet republic in the mountains of Central Asia, and in recent years, numerous opposition leaders and journalists have been attacked. Some have died, and rarely if ever has anyone been held accountable.
In just the last few weeks, a well-known political scientist, a former senior official and a journalist were severely beaten in Kyrgyzstan. They all attributed the attacks to the security services, according to local news media.
While human rights groups have assailed Mr. Bakiyev, the United States has largely focused on maintaining good relations with him in order to keep an important air base on the outskirts of Bishkek, the Kyrgyz capital, that supports NATO’s mission in Afghanistan.
Mr. Bakiyev announced in February that he would evict the United States from the base. After intensive lobbying by the Obama administration, he reversed course in June, in return for additional rent and other concessions.
Investigators in Kazakhstan said Mr. Pavlyuk arrived in Almaty on Dec. 16 and checked into a hotel before leaving with an unidentified man. Two hours later, he was pushed out the sixth-floor window of a rented apartment in a residential building, landing on a first-floor canopy.
A roll of the duct tape that had been used to bind his hands and legs was found in the apartment.
Mr. Pavlyuk was the former chief editor of the Bishkek edition of Komsomolskaya Pravda, a major Russian tabloid newspaper based in Moscow.
Over the last year, he had become more politically active, working closely with Omurbek Tekebaev, a former speaker of the Kyrgyz Parliament who is a senior opposition leader.
To support Mr. Tekebaev’s party, Mr. Pavlyuk was planning a new opposition Web site.
Mr. Tekebaev said in a telephone interview that he had no doubt that the Kyrgyz government had ordered Mr. Pavlyuk killed because he had become more outspoken against the president. Mr. Tekebaev said the Kyrgyz security services often lured people to nearby countries and killed them.
“They do that to avoid suspicion. They do their activities outside of Kyrgyzstan,” Mr. Tekebaev said. “This is not the first time that this has happened abroad to a member of the opposition. We believe that this was a political killing directed at intimidating the news media. It is an attempt at frightening society.”
Almaz Turdumamatov, Mr. Bakiyev’s spokesman, said he hoped that the police in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan would conduct a thorough inquiry and bring the culprits to justice.
“The murder of any person, whether a journalist or not, concerns us,” Mr. Turdumamatov said. “Who is responsible for this must be determined by the investigators.”
Asked about the opposition’s allegations that its supporters were being persecuted, he said: “It is unfortunate that this killing happened. But it is wrong to say that this was connected to any kind of political motivation.”
In an interview in July at the presidential residence, Mr. Bakiyev suggested that journalists who had been attacked might have been involved in shady dealings or were perhaps just unlucky.
“Sometimes, things happen by chance,” Mr. Bakiyev said. “For it to have been purposeful from a political point of view, that sort of politics doesn’t exist here.”
Daniil Kislov, chief editor of Ferghana.ru, a Web site based in Moscow that covers Central Asia, said Mr. Pavlyuk’s killing had shocked journalists in the region because it was so brazen, as if it were an organized crime hit.
Mr. Kislov said the killing reminded him of the slaying of another Kyrgyz journalist, Alisher Saipov, who contributed to Ferghana.ru and the Voice of America. Mr. Saipov was shot to death in 2007 while waiting for a taxi in a Kyrgyz city. No one has been arrested in the case.
“These killings are being done by people who are absolutely convinced that they will never be caught and never be punished,” Mr. Kislov said.
Mr. Pavlyuk was chief editor for Komsomolskaya Pravda in Bishkek in 2006 and 2007, said the newspaper’s current chief editor, Aleksandr Rogoza.
Mr. Rogoza said Mr. Pavlyuk had a lifelong affection for Lake Issyk-Kul in Kyrgyzstan, which is famous for its beauty and is one of the largest mountain lakes in the world.
“He wrote a lot about the lake,” Mr. Rogoza said. “He built a house there, and he spent a lot of time there. He just loved that place.”
Reporter Prosecuted for Reporting Sexual Harassment Claims by Abuse Victims
October 27, 2009
(New York) - The Libyan government should investigate allegations of sexual harassment in a state-run residence for women who had been orphaned instead of charging the journalist who reported the story with criminal defamation, HumanRights Watch said today.
On October 21, 2009, Mohamed al-Sareet, a Libyan journalist, wrote on Jeel Libya, an independent news website based in London, about a rare demonstration in Benghazi by women who live in a state-run care residence for women and girls who were orphaned as children, calling for an end to sexual harassment they said they had experienced in the center. The demonstrators were also demanding the return of the center's former director. After the article appeared, the police and then the General Prosecutor's office summoned al-Sareet for interrogation and charged him with criminal defamation.
"Libya should investigate the alleged abuse and ensure the protection of these women instead of intimidating the man who wrote about it," said Sarah Leah Whitson. "A journalist should not have criminal sanctions hanging over his head for doing his job."
In the October 21 demonstration, at least 10 women and girls between the ages of 18 and 27 who live in the care center walked through the streets of Benghazi to the Center's governing body, the Social Solidarity Center, holding up placards calling for the reinstatement of the Care Center's former director, who marchers said had treated them well and protected them.
Several of the women told Libyan journalists that officials who run the center had sexually harassed them and allowed security officers into their rooms at night. One woman said that an official had propositioned her and threatened to beat her if she did not comply. Besides Jeel Libyaanother Libyan website, Libya al Youm, published photos of the demonstration and interviews with some of the residents.
On October 22, local police summoned al-Sareet to the Hadaek police station for questioning. On October 26, the General Prosecutor's Office summoned him for further questioning and charged him with criminal defamation, which carries a prison sentence. Jeel Libya's director told Human Rights Watch that al-Sareet had received threats to burn down his house to intimidate him into retracting his article.
On October 23, some of the women who had been quoted called another Libyan news website, Al Manara, and denied that administrators had sexually harassed them. Libya al Youm reported that officials had threatened to expel those who demonstrated from the center, and pressured them to retract their statements and to sue al-Sareet for slander. On October 26, Quryna, one of two private newspapers affiliated with Saif al-Islam al-Gaddafi, the son of Libyan leader Mu'ammar Gaddafi, published an article in which several of the women denied that any sexual harassment had taken place. "We are now without honor in the eyes of society after what this journalist did," the paper quoted them as saying.
During a visit to Libya in 2005, Human Rights Watch found widespread official denial that violence against women exists in Libya, and a lack of adequate laws and services, leaving victims of violence without effective remedies and deterring reporting. A group of students conducting a study on sexual harassment in Tripoli in April 2009 had great difficulty in persuading women to talk about their experiences, since some felt it would bring shame on them to discuss it.
Human Rights Watch said that countries have a duty to investigate and prevent sexual harassment, a form of violence against women. Libya was among the first countries to ratify the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa, Article 8 of which requires state parties to adopt all necessary measures to prevent, punish, and eradicate all forms of violence against women. Gender-based violence is a form of discrimination prohibited by the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), to which Libya is party. Furthermore, both the African Charter and the ICCPR require Libya to protect freedom of expression. Journalists should be able to report freely without fear of imprisonment for their writings.
"Official denial and reprisals against journalists is not the way to protect women in Libyan society," said Whitson, "Women should be encouraged to bring forward complaints of sexual harassment and other forms of violence so the government can act to prevent abuses."
TORONTO — For two months Ehsan Maleki traveled around Iran with a backpack containing his cameras, a few pieces of clothing and his laptop computer, taking pictures of the reformist candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi during the presidential campaign. He did not know that his backpack and his cameras would soon become his only possessions, or that he would be forced to crawl out of the country hiding in a herd of sheep.
Mr. Maleki, 29, is one of dozens of reporters, photographers and bloggers who have either fled Iran or are trying to flee in the aftermath of the disputed June presidential election. Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based organization that promotes press freedom and monitors the safety of journalists, said the number of journalists leaving Iran was the largest since the years after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
The wave of departures reflects the journalists’ anxiety over the retribution many of them have faced for reporting on the government’s violent suppression of the post-election protests. As bloody clashes unfolded in the streets of Tehran, the government went to great lengths to restrict the flow of information to the outside world. Foreign journalists were banned, and local reporters and photographers were warned to stay at home.
A number of Iranian journalists defied those orders, disseminating information in phone interviews, on Internet sites and through pictures sent to photo agencies. Now, they say, they are paying the price.
Many journalists in Tehran, including a Newsweek reporter, Maziar Bahari, who is also an independent filmmaker, were among the hundreds of Iranians arrested and jailed. Some are defendants in the mass trials the government is conducting. The wife of one journalist, Ahmad Zeidabadi, said he had been tortured while in prison.
The editors of some opposition blogs, which reported the killings and the mass burial of protesters, have gone into hiding, and their whereabouts are not clear. The homes of some journalists, like Mr. Maleki, have been ransacked.
Mahmoud Shamsolvaezin, a veteran journalist and media expert in Tehran, estimated that 2,000 Iranian journalists had lost their jobs recently. He said about 400 of them had approached him for reference letters so they could get work abroad. “Journalists are leaving more than other groups because the government has closed newspapers and it has intimidated and terrorized them,” he said in an interview.
The government, which has closed at least six newspapers in the past three months, has accused the media of lying about the protests. Last week, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called the media a major weapon, “worse than nuclear weapons,” in the hands of Western countries, according to the Fars news agency. Almost all news agencies in Iran are affiliated with the government and rely on it for financing. The state news agencies IRNA and Fars are run by arms of the government.
Mr. Maleki was covering a demonstration on June 20 when he and dozens of protesters were chased by members of the Basij paramilitary force. They fled to an apartment building, where Mr. Maleki had enough time to hide his camera inside a chimney before members of the militia arrested them. He was jailed with hundreds of others for a day. Without his camera, authorities could not identify him as a photographer, but they recorded his national identity number.
Mr. Maleki never went home. A few days later a neighbor told him that his house had been ransacked and that his computer and personal documents, including his passport, had been taken. “They found out that I was sending pictures to Sipa,” he said, referring to an international photo agency.
He said he slept in a different place every night and continued to take photos of the protests, but finally decided it was too risky to stay. He paid $150 to a smuggler who drove him to Kheneryeh, near the border with Turkey and Iraq. Accompanied by a Kurdish guide, he crawled among a large herd of sheep for half an hour until they crossed the Iranian border and reached a steep cliff.
“It took us seven hours to climb down and reach a road in northern Iraq,” he said in a telephone interview from Iraq. He would not disclose which city he was in for security reasons.
The journalists leaving Iran come from a range of news organizations, not just those sympathetic to the opposition. A Web site supportive of Mr. Ahmadinejad, Parcham.ir, reported last week that two journalists for state-run television had defected to Italy and Britain. At least two photographers who worked for Fars have also left. Among the journalists who have left is this reporter, who covered the election and subsequent protests before leaving Iran in early July because she felt her safety was threatened.
The exact number of journalists who have left is not clear. Some worry that their families could be harassed if the government learns they are gone. Others are reluctant to reveal their locations in neighboring countries like Turkey and Iraq, fearing that government agents might find them and return them to Iran. Reza Moghimi, a photographer who worked for Fars, acknowledged that he became emotionally invested in the protests.
“The protesters were young, just like me,” Mr. Moghimi, 24, said in a telephone interview from Turkey. “It was impossible to be indifferent. I felt it was my duty to take pictures and reflect their voices abroad.”
With the camera given to him by Fars he began taking pictures every day. He said one of his pictures appeared on the cover of Time magazine anonymously, but he never told anyone he had taken it.
Mr. Moghimi said his fear increased after he saw a former colleague, Majid Saeedi, who was jailed for a month. Mr. Moghimi said he looked terrorized.
A few days later the director of Fars delivered a stern warning. “We have learned two of our photographers have been taking pictures secretly and sending them to foreign media,” he said. “We are just waiting for more information and will confront them soon.”
Mr. Moghimi got on the first plane to Turkey the next day and has applied for asylum.
Abubaker Saddique: 9/12/09 A EurasiaNet Partner Post from RFE/RL
Criticism and anger are mounting over the rescue of a Western journalist from Taliban militants.
The September 9 predawn raid in a remote corner of northern Afghanistan rescued "New York Times" correspondent Stephen Farrell. But four people died in the shoot-out, including Farrell's Afghan colleague Sultan Munadi and a British commando.
Afghan journalists are holding remembrance ceremonies and have staged protests across the country blaming international troops for Munadi's death. They have also criticized NATO commandos for leaving Munadi's body behind after the raid.
Angry Afghan journalists want this incident to be thoroughly investigated. They claim it is emblematic of a larger problem, when such operations often result in freeing Western hostages while caring little for Afghan nationals.
In Britain, media outlets are questioning whether military force should have been used, as negotiations with the hostage takers appeared to be making progress.
The two were kidnapped in northern Konduz Province while reporting on the recent controversial NATO bombing of two hijacked fuel tankers, which killed scores of people.
In a telephone interview with RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan from Paris, Reza Moini, a regional researcher with Reporters Without Borders (Reporters Sans Frontieres), joined the call for a thorough investigation.
"Our efforts will not be limited to conveying condolences and expressing our sympathies," he says.
"What is important for us is that Munadi's killing happened under circumstances that have raised many questions. That's why our [formal] statement demanded an investigation into this incident. And we want the troops involved in this rescue operation to answer our questions."
Major Rethink
The raid was the second major incident this month which has brought the West's military role in Afghanistan into the spotlight.
According to Afghan officials, an earlier NATO air strike on two hijacked fuel tankers on September 4 killed scores of people, including many civilians. The incident has created rifts among NATO allies and fueled Afghan concerns about the West's military effort in the country.
A quest for a major rethink on Afghanistan is increasingly obvious in Western capitals.
Last week Britain, Germany, and France jointly called for a United Nations-led conference on Afghanistan to develop a plan for transferring more security responsibilities to the Afghan authorities.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced the initiative at a news conference in Berlin on September 6, saying they were launching it together with French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
Many hopes had been pinned on the August 20 Afghan presidential election, which had been expected to deliver a new administration that would work with its international partners to deliver improved governance and play its role in defeating the Taliban insurgency.
Instead, the elections results have been marred by allegations and investigations of fraud as the Afghan political elite splits into increasingly hostile camps.
In a week of bad news for the country, the London-based International Council on Security and Development (ICOS) issued a report on September 11 saying that the Taliban and other militants now have a "permanent presence" in 80 percent of Afghanistan. Another 17 percent of the country, according to the report, has "substantial" Taliban or militant activity.
Training Locals
Nobody seems to have clear answers to the troubling question of what happens next in Afghanistan.
In an interview with RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan, the new Canadian Ambassador in Kabul, William Crosbie, remained cautiously optimistic that despite the deteriorating security situation in southern Afghanistan, where 3,000 Canadians are battling Taliban insurgents, greater training of the Afghan forces could still help in improving the situation:
"We have been working closely in the [Kandahar] Province and the national government to train policemen and to train the Afghan national army to assume a greater role in providing security," Crosbie says.
"But I think the security situation in Kandahar reflects the deterioration in security in various parts of the country, which is of concern to us. The additional resources which ISAF will be bringing into Afghanistan, the increased training, the increased number of Afghan national security forces -- those will be critical to turn around the security situation."
But experts suggest that training Afghan security forces cannot happen in a political vacuum as clouds of uncertainty hang over the Afghan election.
Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan, has urged critics of the poll not to "jump to conclusions."
Meanwhile, despite an expected request for more troops for Afghanistan by top U.S. and NATO Commander General Stanley McChrystal, senior leaders in America's Democratic Party are now publicly questioning the logic of sending additional soldiers in harm's way.
Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat and the chairman of the powerful House Armed Services Committee, is expected to oppose more troops for Afghanistan in a speech on September 11. This comes a day after the speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, said that she sees little support among U.S. legislators for sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan.
Such comments put President Barack Obama in an uneasy position.
Pelosi is the highest-ranking Democrat to signal that any White House or Pentagon push for more troops will be resisted in Congress. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, meanwhile, said he is urging Democrats to withhold judgment until Obama decides what to do.
Earlier this year, Obama ordered 21,000 more troops to Afghanistan, which would bring the total number of U.S. forces there to 68,000 by the end of 2009.
Editor's Note: RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan correspondents Jawad Mujahid and Sharifa Esmatullah contributed to this report
BAGHDAD — Nearly 100 Iraqi journalists, news media workers and their supporters protested in Baghdad on Friday against what they said was a growing push by the country’s governing Shiite political parties to muzzle them.
“No, no to muzzling!” they shouted as they marched down Mutanabi Street. “Yes, yes to freedom!”
The government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has sought to censor certain publications and books, block Web sites it deems offensive and pass a new media law that would clamp down on journalists in the name of protecting them.
The proposed law, which was sent to Parliament last month, offers government grants to journalists and their families if they are disabled or killed because of “a terror act.” According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 167 Iraqi reporters and media support workers were killed in Iraq between March 2003 and July 2008. But the bill also defines what the government considers “moral” and sound journalistic practices.
Zuhair al-Jezairy, editor in chief of the Aswat Al Iraq news agency, who was in attendance, said that while the journalists’ grievances were legitimate, their message was diluted by the fact that most of them still viewed the government as their patron. “There are journalists who expect guns, land and salaries from the government,” he said.
Mr. Jezairy said that many Iraqi journalists — employed by outlets owned by the government, political parties and even neighboring countries with agendas in Iraq — had been turned into tools in the political struggle. There were abundant signs of this at the demonstration itself, which seemed to have as much to do with a recent spat over a bank robbery as with press freedom.
Sheik Jalaleddin al-Saghir, a Shiite cleric and member of Parliament from the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq Party, lashed out last week at news media reports that he said insinuated that his party was behind the robbery, in which eight billion dinars, or $7 million, was stolen and eight people were killed. He said many of the journalists were members of Saddam Hussein’s banned Baath Party and promised to punish the offenders.
Among those leading Friday’s protest were two Shiite politicians who are rivals of Mr. Saghir’s. As the event got under way, word spread that the journalists who organized it were in the camp of the interior minister, Jawad al-Bolani, who has ambitions of becoming the next prime minister. And the event was boycotted by the Iraqi journalists’ union, which was promised plots of land for its members earlier this year by Mr. Maliki.
One journalist in particular, Ahmed Abdul-Hussein, was the target of much of Sheik Saghir’s wrath. In a recent Op-Ed article in the state-owned newspaper Al-Sabah, which is loyal to Mr. Maliki, Mr. Abdul-Hussein wrote that “we know, that they know, that we know” that the party that stole the money was going to use it to bribe people in the national elections next year. He offered no proof and did not name the party.
“How many blankets can you buy with eight billion dinars?” he wrote. Sheik Saghir took that as a reference to his party, which distributed blankets and electric heaters to voters during the provincial elections last January.
By N.C. Aizenman Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, August 14, 2009
U.S. immigration officials have detained a Pakistani journalist employed by the U.S.-sponsored Voice of America news service who was hoping to find refuge in the United States after Islamic militants in Pakistan destroyed his house and threatened his life.
Rahman Bunairee, 33, was taken into custody Sunday afternoon upon arriving at Dulles International Airport, according to VOA officials.
It is not clear why Bunairee was detained.
Joan Mower, a spokeswoman for VOA, declined to comment on the particulars of Bunairee's detention other than to say: "VOA is obviously extremely concerned. We're really upset about what's happened to this guy."
Cori Bassett, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, confirmed that Bunairee is in the agency's custody but said she could not release further details because of privacy reasons.
Bunairee, in addition to filing reports for VOA's Pashto-language radio service, is a popular reporter with the privately owned Pakistani broadcaster Khyber TV. He is usually based in the southern port city of Karachi, but he is originally from the Buner district of Pakistan's embattled North-West Frontier Province near the Afghanistan border, where the Taliban and other Islamic militant groups are active. He recently returned to that region to cover a series of major offensives against the militants by the Pakistani military.
In the past, the militants enjoyed a measure of support, or at least tolerance, among many Pakistanis. But the public mood shifted markedly against the militants this spring, partly because of local media reports about their cruel practices in Buner and other districts then under their control.
On July 7, Bunairee participated in a VOA call-in radio show in which he discussed the Taliban's continued presence in Buner despite a major campaign by the Pakistani military to oust them last May, Mower said.
Two nights later, several dozen armed militants went to Bunairee's family compound in Buner.
Bunairee was not there. The militants told his father that because Bunairee was "speaking against them," they had orders to destroy the house. The men allowed Bunairee's family, including his wife and four children, to leave, then ransacked the house and leveled it with explosives.
That night in the Buner district, militants bombed the home of another journalist, Behroz Khan, a reporter for Pakistan's English daily, the News.
Most recently, Taliban militants flattened the houses of at least six journalists in the neighboring district of Swat before fleeing advancing Pakistani forces, according to Bob Dietz, Asia program coordinator for the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.
Soon after Bunairee's home was destroyed, gunmen scaled the wall surrounding Khyber TV's bureau in Karachi, several hundred miles south of Buner, and announced that they were looking for him, Dietz said.
Alarmed, officials at VOA arranged to bring Bunairee to the United States on a J-1 visa, often used by research institutions to bring in scholars and experts on temporary visits.
"We're expanding our Pashto broadcasting, and he was going to be working on that," Mower said.
Dietz stressed that Bunairee was not seeking to relocate to the United States but wanted to spend some time outside Pakistan until matters cooled.
He added that he was particularly concerned about the message that Bunairee's detention sends.
"It's mortifying," he said. "Here's a journalist who has performed a valuable service by reporting from an area critical to U.S. security. And our country is slamming the door in his face."
By Tara Bahrampour Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, August 9, 2009
Among the more than 100 people on trial after Iran's disputed presidential election are two dual citizens: Kian Tajbakhsh, 47, an American Iranian urban planner, and Maziar Bahari, 42, a Canadian Iranian filmmaker and Newsweek reporter.
Bahari was arrested June 21 at his mother's Tehran apartment, where he was staying while reporting on the post-election turmoil. Tajbakhsh, who lives in Tehran with his wife and daughter, was arrested July 9 while leaving his home to attend a party.
Friends and family members say they do not know where the men are being held. They have not been allowed visitors or access to lawyers, though both have been allowed a few phone calls and appeared in a Tehran courtroom last week.
Their arrests, along with those of opposition politicians and other journalists, came after Iranians poured into the streets protesting what they said was the rigged reelection of the incumbent president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Iranian officials have blamed the protests on foreign governments and news agencies, and friends of Tajbakhsh and Bahari worry that the two are being held because of their Western links.
"They are trying to make a case to their own constituents, and to international constituents, that what has taken place has a foreign element behind it, so dual nationals, people with ties to Western NGOs, are targets," said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a friend of Tajbakhsh. "I don't believe for a second that they genuinely perceive Kian to be a threat to national security."
Last month, Iranian news reports quoted Bahari as stating that "as a journalist and a member of this great Western capitalism machine," he had "either blindly or on purpose participated in projecting doubts and promoting a color revolution" similar to those in Georgia and Ukraine.
Last week, Bahari, whose partner is pregnant in London, apologized before Iranian reporters. Friends and colleagues say they think the statements were made under duress.
Both men looked haggard and tense in photos released last week by Iran's semiofficial Fars News Agency.
Their arrests follow a pattern during Ahmadinejad's tenure of high-profile detentions of dual citizens. Since he took office in 2005, at least seven have been detained, including Woodrow Wilson Center scholar Haleh Esfandiari in 2007 and freelance journalist Roxana Saberi, who was convicted of espionage this year and later pardoned.
Tajbakhsh, who has lived in Iran since 1999 and has done some projects for its government, was held for four months in 2007, during which authorities accused him of trying to foment a "color" revolution. He stayed in Iran afterward and had plans to teach at Columbia University this fall.
Friends said he had purposely avoided the election-related turmoil, even abstaining from voting. "He felt confident there was no rationale for him to be imprisoned," Sadjadpour said. Two days after the vote, Tajbakhsh wrote to him in an e-mail: "I'm keeping my head down. I have nothing journalistic to add to all the reports that are here."
Bahari had been filing reports for Newsweek and for television stations in Britain; the Iranian government has accused him of sending reports to foreign news media in exchange for payment, said Nisid Hajari, Newsweek's foreign editor.
"That's exactly what he's been doing for more than 10 years," Hajari said, adding that the Iranian government had renewed Bahari's press accreditation each year and had not complained about his work. "What they've accused him of doing is a job that they themselves had licensed and approved him to do."
Bahari's writing had not been particularly critical of the Iranian government, according to analysts. "Newsweek coverage has been quite favorable in the past, so I'm surprised that they would target him," said Ervand Abrahamian, a history professor at the City University of New York's Baruch College.
Esfandiari, the scholar who, like Tajbakhsh, spent four months in an Iranian prison in 2007, said the government may simply have looked for convenient targets to blame for the post-election unrest.
"I can guess that they were digging into the velvet revolution file, and they needed a credible voice to talk about this velvet revolution, and the only person who was there was Kian," she said. "I've heard they have rooms full of charts about universities, think tanks, NGOs and are then drawing parallels from Georgia, Ukraine and so on. And then they go after truly, truly innocent people like Kian."
Shiva Balaghi, an Iran scholar at Brown University, said the arrests are part of a historical pattern in the Islamic republic. "Whenever they feel they're losing their grip on power is when they do these things," she said.
In past weeks, as cracks have appeared in the top echelons of the Iranian government, it has been unclear who is in charge of detainees. When Tajbakhsh checked in with his Intelligence Ministry minder after the election, Sadjadpour said, he was told, " 'It's not us that's behind the imprisonment now; it's the Sepah, the Revolutionary Guard.' "
The U.S. and Canadian governments have called for release of the men, and writers, filmmakers and artists have signed petitions. Iran is also holding a French academic, who apologized in court Saturday, and three U.S. citizens who hiked over the border from Iraq last week.
Jacki Lyden, a National Public Radio reporter who has worked with Bahari inside and outside Iran, said his arrest signals an end to the reassurances journalists there used to count on.
"Every little thing you tell yourself about why they would not come after you, those little half-truths over the last 20 years, are gone," she said. "Anybody who subscribes to the idea that there's a doormat-sized civil society in the Islamic republic has found that doormat yanked out from under them."
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