When the activists who campaigned against the slave trade in Britain needed to get the word out about the horrors of the Middle Passage, they used a printing press. A 15th century invention, this machine was as revolutionary as the creation of writing itself, since it allowed books to be copied in large numbers, drastically reduced the cost of creating books and made it possible for manuscripts to be circulated beyond the reach of repressive regimes.
In 1517, for example, Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany, to protest the sale of indulgences (when penitents could pay the local priest to expiate their sins). The 95 Theses (here is a modern translation) were quickly translated into German, printed and widely circulated, kicking off an earthquake within Christianity that still reverberates.
Today, the Internet is our printing press. Activists can relay their message around media blackouts in places like Zimbabwe, Africa’s hidden human rights emergency (at least in contrast to Darfur). Video documenting abuses can instantly arouse condemnation, as with this YouTube posting showed Los Angeles police beating demonstrator José Villa. Villa was taking part in a protest of the Minutemen Project , which seeks to involve civilians in patrolling the border, among other things. Individuals can sign online petitions, email their congressional representatives, mount virtual museums, read the daily news from around the world, browse declassified documents and raise money.
Email and its surprising permanence is also part of the debate over the treatment of alleged terrorists by the US government. In an article in today’s New York Times, journalist Ray Bonner cites (and the online NYT provides an image) of an email sent by a US military prosecutor Col. Morris Davis to the judge overseeing a hearing involving David Hicks, an Australian charged with “providing material support for terrorism.” (The other charges of attempted murder and aiding the enemy have been dropped.)
The military claims that Hicks went to Afghanistan to train with Al Qaeda. In his defense, Hicks says he was fighting there, then seized by the Northern Alliance. According to ABC Australia, the Northern Alliance sold Hicks to the Americans for a $1,000.00 bounty in 2001.
In the email, Colonel Davis complains of statements made by Hicks’ defense lawyer, Maj. Michael Mori, who has described the military commissions as “set up by the civilian
administration to deliver political verdicts to justify their prior actions in Afghanistan and their PR statements that they have war criminals at Guantanamo” and “This is a process designed by the President and the Vice-President and the imperative is to get convictions” and “This process is nothing like a court martial, nothing like it. I’m still not an expert on international law, but I know enough to know this is not justice.”
Interestingly, Davis writes to the judge that the “truth or falsity of what Mori says is “immaterial.” So while Mori may be glaringly accurate – the Military Commissions Act, signed into law last year, is a terrible law that opens the door to torture and denies due process — Davis wants him punished or possibly pulled from the case for attempting a vigorous defense.
According to Human Rights First, which published a helpful Q & A on the act:
The MCA is the most sweeping legislation since September 11, 2001 on the powers of the President to detain, interrogate, and try people the administration deems to be “unlawful enemy combatants.” While Congress rejected White House efforts to downgrade the standard of basic humane treatment that all detainees are entitled to under the laws of war, the MCA includes a number of provisions that seriously undermine basic human rights. Among other things, the MCA makes it harder to prosecute those who commit war crimes – both U.S. officials and enemies of the United States who abuse U.S. personnel – under the federal War Crimes Act. It curtails the role of U.S. courts in reviewing the detention and treatment of people captured by the U.S. Government. It authorizes special military trials with fewer fairness protections for so-called “unlawful enemy combatants” than provided by America’s time-tested system of military justice. And it seeks to give the President unreviewable authority to label as “unlawful enemy combatants” a broad range of people, including U.S. citizens.
The email itself contains live links to press coverage of Maj. Mori’s visit to Australia as well as a YouTube video (Thanks for the handy tips, Col. Davis!) of Australians protesting Hicks’ treatment.
But there is a downside to the Internet, just as there was to the printing press. The printing press made great literature available to the masses, allowed for the creation of newspapers and magazines and provided a means for thinkers of all sorts to share and develop ideas. But this same technology circulated the “Blood Libel” — that Jews used the blood of Christian children in their worship (a medieval infamy still making its rounds in the Arab world and among anti-Semites everywhere) — when this kind of nonsense should have been retired in antiquity.
One of th
e most chilling elements of the Rwandan genocide was how the relatively “new technology” of the radio was harnessed to genocide. As Dina Temple-Raston pointed out in the Columbia Journalism Review, Rwandan journalists Ferdinand Nahimana (on the left), Hassan Ngeze, and Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza (on the right) are “the first journalists to be accused of crimes against humanity since Julius Streicher, the Nazi editor, was sent to the gallows by judges at Nuremberg in 1946.”
Temple-Raston continues:
Nahimana and Barayagwiza founded a talk radio station called Radio Milles Collines that, in the months leading up to and during the 101 days of the 1994 Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi, became the most popular spot on the radio dial. Hassan Ngeze edited an n extremist newspaper called Kangura, or Wake It Up! His anti-Tutsi screeds were a constant refrain on Radio Milles Collines.
Just as Julius Streicher had spent years honing his anti-Semitic message in the Nazi publication Der Sturmer, prosecutors at the tribunal say Radio Milles Collines and Kangura were part of a larger conspiracy to wage war against the Tutsi long before April 1994, when the genocide began. The new station hit the Rwandan airwaves in 1993, and from the start provided a soundtrack for an impending conflict. The lyrics in the music it played called on Hutu to kill Tutsi. Its newscasters told bawdy anti-Tutsi jokes. They broadcast the “Hutu Ten Commandments” — pulled from the pages of Kangura — which, among other things, called on Hutu to show no mercy to the Tutsi minority, which was plotting, they said, to seize power in Rwanda.
Once the killing started, bands of Hutu went from house to house wielding machetes and looking for Tutsi to kill. Radio Milles Collines newscasters helpfully announced where key Tutsis were hiding. The station broadcast license plate numbers of cars carrying Tutsi and their Hutu sympathizers, and urged listeners to hunt them down. The station broadcast death tolls as if they were traffic reports. “The Rwandan government should supply us with tools, guns,” said Kantano Habimana, a popular Milles Collines newscaster, to “kill the Inkotanyi.” Inkotanyi is Kinyarwandan for cockroach, a Hutu nickname for Rwanda’s Tutsi.
If this sounds completely foreign and impossible to replicate in the United States, consider this. Human Rights First has launched a “Primetime Torture” campaign to get the creators of the Fox show “24” to change the way they depict interrogations. In interviews with
former interrogators and retired military leaders, Human Rights First learned that the portrayal of torture in popular culture, notably on this show, has an undeniable impact on how interrogations are conducted in the field. U.S. soldiers are imitating the techniques they have seen on television – because they think such tactics work. In addition to “24” (actor Kiefer Sutherland, right, plays Agent Jack Bauer), the site features chilling excerpts from shows like “Lost,” “Alias” and “Law and Order.”
The blogosphere is also a new arena of censorship and even arrest. Geoffrey Mock has been blogging about the fate of Egyptian blogger Abdel Kareem Suliman Amer, a former student at Al-Azhar University whose four year sentence for criticizing Egypt’s government was just upheld by an appeals court. Amer is not the only Egyptian blogger facing charges for what he has written. Alaa Seif, who helped design web sites for leading opposition group Kifaya and many of its candidates, was arrested after helping organize protests in solidarity with two Egyptian judges who faced expulsion from the bench after they had called for judicial independence and criticized the fraudulent 2005 parliamentary election.
In an excellent piece in yesterday’s Washington Post, one of my favorite reporters, Anthony Shadid quotes Seif as saying, “Search for Egypt on YouTube, and all you’ll find is tourism and torture.” (And male belly-dancing I should add.)
Shadid describes Egypt’s pro-democracy movement as divided and withering under unrelenting repression by a government that remains one of America’s key allies in the region.” The United States has been mild, to put it mildly, about the burgeoning reports of repression coming from Egypt.
Both Google and Yahoo have been roundly criticized for signing a “Public Pledge on Self-discipline for the Chinese Internet Industry” with the Chinese government, effectively, in the words of Human Rights Watch executive director Ken Roth, going from “an information gateway to an information gatekeeper.” China’s system of Internet censorship and surveillance, popularly known as the “Great Firewall,” HRW concluded in a 2006 report, is the most advanced in the world.
But they are not alone. In “Race to the Bottom,” HRW documented extensive corporate and
private sector cooperation – including by some of the world’s major Internet companies – with Chinese censors. Yahoo!, Microsoft, Google, and Skype block terms they believe the Chinese government will want them to censor. Yahoo! was singled out for releasing the identity of private users to the Chinese authorities., leading to imprisonment and heavy sentences for four Chinese government critics: Shi Tao, Li Zhi, Jiang Lijun, and Wang Xiaoning.
In a response to Human Rights Watch, Yahoo! claimed
that it was only “following local laws.” Well, so did the French and Belgians and Poles and Hungarians when they deported their Jews to Nazi death camps.
Yahoo! Senior Vice President Michael Callahan testified in February 2006 before the House Subcommittees on Africa, Global Human Rights and International Operations, and Asia and the Pacific, claiming that “the facts of the Shi Tao case are distressing to our company, our employees, and our leadership. Let me state our view clearly and without equivocation: we condemn punishment of any activity internationally recognized as free expression, whether that punishment takes place in China or anywhere else in the world. We have made our views clearly known to the Chinese government.”
However, Callahan reiterated that Yahoo! was only “following the law” by turning over information requested by Chinese authorities.
Callahan did commit Yahoo! to addressing this issue, which is a real one. And I think this is where people who care about human rights and the positive impact of the Internet should act. These companies need to develop and implement policies that promote the principles of freedom of speech and expression. Specifically, companies should not store user data in places where it is vulnerable to seizure solely because the user is exercising basic rights such as freedom of expression. All companies should refuse to take on the role of censors; and if they are obligated to, they should make that clear to the users.
And we, the users, need to make sure this happens, by contacting these companies and expressing our views (even if we are wearing pajamas!). You can write or fax Google CEO Eric Schmidt at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043 (phone: (650) 253-0000, and fax: (650) 253-0001) or write them an email.
You can write or fax Yahoo! CEO Terry Semel at 701 First Avenue, Sunnyvale, CA 94089 (Tel: (408) 349-3300 or Fax: (408) 349-3301) Click here to send Yahoo a message.
Or you could write actor Kiefer Sutherland, said to be concerned about the depiction of torture on his Emmy-winning show:
Kiefer Sutherland
“Twenty Four”
20th Century Fox Television
Imagine Television
21050 Lassen Street
Chatsworth, CA 91311