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This Is Why the NRA Endures

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Earlier this year, long before this week’s latest tragic shooting at the Washington, D.C., Navy Yard, one expert after another predicted the gun lobby’s demise. The horrific massacre of mostly first-grade children in Newtown, Connecticut, seemed to have changed the nation’s views of guns. President Obama and Congressional leaders promised action in Washington. Governors in states from New York to Colorado pledged to pass stricter gun laws in their states, too.

For seven long days after Newtown’s Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, the gun lobby said not a word. When the National Rifle Association chief executive Wayne LaPierre finally did speak on national television, commentators ridiculed him for sounding so “tone deaf” to the still raw emotions of the nation. His proposed solution of solving gun violence by having more guns rang hollow. The gun lobby looked vulnerable for the first time in decades since it emerged on the national stage during the unsteady, often violent times of the late 1970s.

Gun reform groups stepped up after the Newtown tragedy to do something they had never done before: They tried to match the NRA dollar for dollar in electoral campaigns to help gun reform candidates win. National trends seemed to be on their side. Analysts noted that gun ownership has fallen from half of American households back in the 1970s to a third today, and that politicians have won elections even in conservative states despite having defied the NRA. Soon one New Republic author boldly proclaimed, “This is How the NRA Ends.”

Today, however, the NRA seems strong and at no risk of going away nine months after Newtown’s Sandy Hook school shooting. NRA membership is, by any measure, at a record high. Gun sales across the nation are also breaking records. More importantly, this spring in Washington and this summer in Denver, the NRA has shown it still has the clout to influence major legislation in defiance of what opinion polls post suggest voters want, and to punish individual officials who respond to t voters’ wishes by defying the NRA and its gun rights agenda.

Underestimating the gun lobby has been the gun reform movement’s biggest mistake. Defeating an organization so deeply rooted across so much of American society will require a different approach. The side that wins this debate will be the one that manages to appeal to more gun owners and countless other Americans who share many of the same fears. It will require taking on the gun lobby where it is most vulnerable: its absolutist, if not extremist, ideology that puts forth a false choice between freedom and tyranny. Instead the gun reform movement needs to reframe the debate as a choice between gun violence and gun safety.

Nine months after the Sandy Hook school massacre, millions of Americans are actually living with fewer gun restrictions than before. Six out of the nation’s fifty states have passed stricter gun laws in the wake of the Newtown shooting.

New York, Connecticut, and Maryland have improved background checks before gun purchases, limited military-style, semi-automatic weapons and large capacity magazines, along with requiring safety training and strengthening measures to keep guns away from domestic violence abusers and the mentally ill.

Delaware and Colorado now require background checks on all gun sales. Colorado also limited magazine capacity.

California strengthened laws to confiscate guns from criminals and the mentally ill.

But many other states have moved in the opposite direction.

Arkansas now allows firearms to be carried inside churches and other places of worship.

Wyoming now lets judges decide whether to allow guns to be brought into their courtrooms.

Virginia made the records of concealed carry permit holders private.
This month in Missouri legislators tried to override Gov. Jay Nixon’s veto of a bill that aspired to make it illegal for state police and other authorities to enforce federal gun laws.

Moreover, in Washington, after their defeat this spring, gun reform groups are not expecting to make any progress until the November 2014 elections. Even then it remains far from certain how many or whether enough gun reform candidates may win.

What accounts for the gun lobby’s uncanny pull across the nation?

Many critics blame the influence of the gun industry. No doubt the gun industry plays a major role. In January I reported first in Mother Jones and later The Progressive how George K. Kollitides II, the CEO of Freedom Group that made the Bushmaster AR-15 semi-automatic rifle used in Newtown, had quietly served on the NRA’s Nominating Committee for its own internal elections. Last year Freedom Group led the gun industry with record sales of $931.9 million. Freedom Group CEO Kollitides is also a Trustee of the NRA Foundation.

Other gun industry executives sit on the NRA’s board. One is Pete Brownell, the third-generation family CEO of Brownells, Inc., America’s largest supplier of firearms parts, tools and accessories, whose father and chairman, Frank R. Brownell III, is President of the NRA Foundation. Another is Ronnie G. Barrett, the CEO of the Tennessee-based Barrett Firearms Manufacturing, which designed the first .50-caliber rifle for civilian use. A third is Stephen D. Hornady, an NRA board director who, like Kollitides, is an NRA Foundation Trustee. Hornady is the second-generation family CEO of the Nebraska-based ammunition-making firm, Hornady Manufacturing.

Other gun industry figures, like Larry and Brenda Potterfield of MidwayUSA, stay out of NRA board politics while still contributing heavily to the gun lobby. A Missouri-based retailer and wholesaler of firearms products, MidwayUSA, has contributed generously to the NRA through programs like “Round-Up,” which allows firearms consumers to round-up their purchase to the next dollar to make a donation in the name of defending the Second Amendment. To date MidwayUSA’s Round-Up program alone has contributed $8.9 million to an NRA endowment.

But gun industry money is only part of the story. Gun ownership may be down across the United States. But gun culture and politics surrounding it still thrive, especially in rural and even many suburban areas in nearly every state.

Moreover, gun rights activists have been organizing voters at the grassroots decades before anyone ever heard of the Tea Party. So-called Second Amendment activists may not have majority appeal, but they seem have to deep support across sizable minority of the population, which translates into a majority in many predominately white and rural voting districts.

Here the recall votes in September of Colorado are instructive. State senators John Morse from Colorado Springs and Angela Giron from Pueblo became the first elected officials ever recalled in the Rocky Mountain state. Colorado voters in their respective districts and across the state, much like voters across the nation, favored recent gun control legislation requiring background checks on gun purchases and limiting ammunition magazines to no more than fifteen rounds. The incumbents were put at a disadvantage in the recall election by a court ruling disallowing mail-in ballots. At the same time, they were helped by funds poured into the state by gun reform groups that in the case seem to surpass even campaign spending by the gun lobby.

The two Colorado state senators, one of whom is a former police chief, lost at the polls due to a truly impressive turnout by voters favoring gun rights.
This is what many commentators and NRA critics missed. The gun lobby may not enjoy majority appeal. But it has a larger army of organized, devoted supporters than any other single-issue lobby in America.

The gun reform lobby includes Mayors against Illegal Guns, funded by billionaire New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and Americans for Responsible Solutions, organized by former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (who survived a 2011 shooting in her Phoenix, Arizona, district that left six people dead, including a nine-year-old girl). These groups have money, but nowhere near the NRA’s kind of grassroots organization.

This also helps explain the defeat in Congress in April of a bipartisan bill sponsored by Senators Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia, and Pat Toomey, a Republican from Pennsylvania. The bill was widely criticized as a weak and ambivalent piece of legislation that divided advocates on both sides of the debate, but it would have required background checks for at least all commercial sales of guns. Its defeat was a symbolic, but still powerful victory for the gun lobby, demonstrating the ongoing national power of the NRA.

What is the lesson of the gun lobby’s success since Newtown?

The NRA does not need majority support across the nation or even individual states. As long as it can effectively divert money and mobilize voters to defeat key candidates who vote for gun reform, it can tip local locations in its favor to protect its gun rights agenda.

Promoting any meaningful gun reform in the United States will require organizing people in their communities in a way that progressives in this nation have long dreamed about but rarely been able to do, or sustain for very long. Ironically, if done properly, the need for an effective gun rights movement could finally bring progressives such a chance.

What is not needed to effectively promote gun reform across the nation is for ultra-liberal cable TV commentators who live in cities on either coast throwing up their hands and asking why anyone would ever even need a gun.

Instead, what is needed to finally promote gun reform may seem counterintuitive to some progressive: to acknowledge and respect gun owners on their own terms.

People keep firearms for many reasons. Millions of Americans hunt prey from waterfowl to deer every year. Many homes across America have shotguns, rifles, and other firearms that have been passed down through generations. For many young boys and increasingly girls, getting their own hunting rifle is a rite of passage.
Many other Americans enjoy target shooting, including in highly organized competitions.

And a lot of people have guns for what they perceive as their need for personal protection. Pointing out, as many liberal critics are prone to do, how one is statistically safer in a home without a gun rather than with one is unlikely to resonate across much of the heartland. Instead effective gun reform advocates need to reaffirm Americans’ right to keep their firearms, while making the discussion one about gun safety.

The gun lobby’s core argument is not about gun safety, though groups like the NRA deserve credit, in fact, for organizing more gun safety classes across the nation than any other groups.) The NRA’s driving principle is that guns in the hands of citizens are the first check and necessary bulwark against the possibility of government oppression. That’s is why the Founding Fathers wrote the Second Amendment into the Constitution, the NRA says.

“Our Second Amendment is freedom’s most valuable, most cherished, most irreplaceable idea,” said NRA CEO LaPierre before a United Nations panel last year in New York.

“History proves it. When you ignore the right of good people to own firearms to protect their freedom, you become the enablers of future tyrants whose regimes will destroy millions and millions of defenseless lives.”

This is a bogus, ahistorical argument as I wrote in The Progressive in March in “Gun Control and Genocide.” But it is a view that many self-described Second Amendment absolutists in and out of the NRA share.

Only in recent decades did the NRA first become such anideological organization. In fact, for the first 106 years of its existence, the NRA was a gun club devoted to sports shooting and safety training. But in 1977 the NRA got taken over by Second Amendment absolutists and underwent a metamorphosis into the gun lobby.

The late 1970s was a precarious time, marked by rising inflation, oil prices, and crime rates, along with a widespread lack of faith in government institutions. The popular film genres of the decade involved rogue actors taking matters, if not the law, into their own hands often through the use of righteous violence. Films like Dirty Harry, Taxi Driver, Serpico, and Death Wish all come to mind, and each in their own way seems to validate many of the basic precepts of today’s gun lobby.

NRA conventions are filled every year with predominately white men who all seem to share a fear of the future. Economic decline, decreasing incomes and rising health care costs, combined with the steady pace of changing demographics toward an increasingly “browner” America, along with what many see as eroding social mores exacerbated by mass media, combine to generate fear. The American lifestyle depicted in Norman Rockwell paintings is long gone.

For many Americans, the guns they keep in their homes make them feel like they still have some power in the face of a world they no longer know nor understand.

“It’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations,” said then-Senator Barack Obama in a famous 2008 electoral campaign gaffe that actually touched on some truths.

Ideological extremism is where the gun lobby and the NRA are most vulnerable. Clinging to guns and bibles as a way of trying to hang on to a fleeting past is not the same as arming oneself to fight a future war against one’s own government. But the latter notion has been the driving ethos behind the gun lobby over the past 26 years, even though, until recently, most NRA leaders tried to keep such views quiet and away from public scrutiny.

Now the NRA’s most frequent keynote speaker is Glenn Beck, the former Fox News commentator and rightwing radio talk show host. Survivalists and conspiracy theorists are only growing in importance at the NRA’s base, and they hold views that often go well beyond those of even conservative libertarians. At the same time, the NRA is fighting to retain its mainstream influence within the conservative wing of the Republican Party.

Fear of a future tyrannical government is the main barrier to passage of effective gun control laws in the United States. In states like New Jersey, for instance, one can have an arsenal of weapons in one’s home to protect oneself, as long as the gun owner himself and each handgun are all individually registered with the state.

Most gun owners would have no problem with that. But the Second Amendment activists who dominate and support the NRA do.

Gun reform advocates need to promote the notion that government efforts to regulate gun ownership, to provide background checks for gun purchases, to prevent guns from being in the hands of domestic abusers and other criminals, to prevent guns from ending up in the hands of mentally ill individuals who have been found to be the shooters in so many recent tragedies, are all achievable, desirable ends.

And the legitimacy of the government’s role in regulating firearms transactions was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, in the same decision, written by Justice Antonin Scalia, that upheld the notion that every American citizen, unless there is specific reason to forfeit it, has a right to keep and bear arms.

In short, the gun lobby can be defeated. But only if gun reformers start seeing most American gun owners on they’re own terms and start organizing voters at the grassroots.

Do news blackouts help journalists held captive?

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Read the original article at CPJ’s Journalist Security Blog here.

Do news blackouts help journalists held captive?

At any given time over the past two years, as wars raged in Libya and then Syria, and as other conflicts ground on in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, a number of journalists have been held captive by a diverse array of forces, from militants and rebels to criminals and paramilitaries. And at any given time, a small handful of these cases–sometimes one or two, sometimes more–have been purposely kept out of the news media. That is true today.

News organizations have invoked the captives’ safety in seeking media blackouts. But do the blackouts really benefit the individuals being held captive?

Different actors hold journalists for various reasons. Ransom can be one, as captors have demanded cash for journalists in Colombia, Somalia, and Afghanistan. Politics can be another, as captors have used journalists like the late Daniel Pearl in Pakistan to communicate a political message. Influencing coverage can be another motive. This month, five employeesincluding three non-journalists of El Siglo de Torreón in northern Mexico were held for over 10 hours before being released.

Extracting information can be another motivation. Last June Mining News editor Franck Fwamba was abducted in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and interrogated for 11 hours about his finances, sources and relationships. Concerns over espionage can be yet another motive. In 1991, a French photojournalist and I were held by Iraqi government forces who, for a time, accused us of being spies.

The key tests are whether press coverage will work for or against the captive individuals (whether they are news personnel or not) and how the captives’ interests are balanced against the public’s right to information.

“This is not a uniform thing. Each case is different,” said David Rohde, a Thomson Reuters foreign affairs columnist and a former New York Times correspondent who was held hostage for seven months in Afghanistan.

It’s a divisive issue among the press corps, whether to honor a request not to report about a journalist in captivity. In December, Turkish news outlets and the U.S.-based website Gawker, whose slogan is “today’s gossip is tomorrow’s news,” broke a blackout sought by NBC News on the kidnapping in Syria of correspondent Richard Engel and his crew.

The effect of breaking that blackout is largely unknown; the NBC crew was freed within hours of the first public reports. But John Cook’s report in Gawker, in particular, provoked outrage from journalists and human rights defenders who often work alongside each other in conflict areas. Human Rights Watch’s Emergencies Director Peter Bouckaert encouraged members of a closed, war correspondents’ group on Facebook to bombard Gawker with emails demanding the website remove the story.

“Yo @johnjcook, ever put yr life on line in hostile country to report story 4 Gawker? Don’t 2nd guess @NBCNews if you havent,” tweeted Rajiv Chandrasekaran, a Washington Post senior correspondent and associate editor and CPJ board member.

Cook said he spoke with NBC but decided not to go along with the network’s request. “No one at NBC made a case to me that reporting Engel’s situation might cause anything concrete to happen to him, because they didn’t know anything about his current circumstances,” he wrote. “And as a more general question, it’s not clear how publicity as a rule increases risk to kidnapping victims.”

Research by the Committee to Protect Journalists does offer some insight. Engel later said that his captors seemed most interested in getting a ransom. The captors, Syrian militiamen, executed the news crew’s Syrian rebel escort but acted to keep the Western journalists alive. “I didn’t think they were going to execute us at first,” Engel said in an on-camera interview after their release. “They clearly wanted us as hostages. This was a hostage-taking scenario.”

Many observers maintain that publicity in ransom cases complicates efforts to secure the captive’s safe return. “Negotiations with kidnappers could be more difficult if they become aware that they’re holding a ‘big fish,'” noted the Canadian Association of Journalists after the CBC requested a media blackout in 2008 during correspondent Mellissa Fung’s four-week kidnapping in Afghanistan.

“My kidnappers had a delusional idea about the kind of ransom they could get for me,” Rohde told CPJ, saying that press would have only worsened his and a colleague’s chances of survival. The New York Times requested a blackout after an initial report by Al Jazeera about his abduction, and all but a few isolated news outlets honored it. As his ordeal dragged on, Rohde and a colleague eventually managed to escape.

Robert Young Pelton, an author, journalist, and publisher of the Somalia Report, is skeptical of news organizations’ motives behind blackouts. “In many cases, these blackouts are just a bald-faced attempt to buy time, mitigate bad publicity, reduce financial impact, and hide corporations’ incompetence in their ability to get their employees back,” he wrote in a piece for Gawker on the NBC case.

The blackout in Rohde’s case went as far as to include sites such as Wikipedia, which erased user-editor posts about his kidnapping a dozen times before finally freezing the page. New York Times journalists also altered Rohde’s bios on the Times‘ website and, using a pseudonym, also on Wikipedia, as the paper later disclosed in a story once Rohde was free. Colleagues removed the name of his prior employer as it included the word “Christian” along with Rohde’s investigations of groups like Al-Qaeda, while emphasizing his investigation of the Srebrenica massacre of Bosnian Muslims.

Some were disquieted by such widespread manipulation. Poynter Institute ethicist Kelly McBride said she was “really astounded” by the media blackout. “I find it a little disturbing, because it makes me wonder what else 40 international news organizations have agreed not to tell the public,” McBride told NPR.

Journalists do have a duty to report the news. It was one thing to withhold information about the kidnapping of Rohde, who is very prominent in the field but is not a household name. But would it have been practical or ethical for dozens of news organizations to withhold information for many months about Engel, whose face is seen in millions of homes on a regular basis?

History and context provide some guidelines. Withholding information so as not to endanger individuals, including U.S. soldiers, has been an accepted journalistic practice over time. In 1994, all four major American network television news divisions voluntarily withheld information that U.S. war planes had lifted off from Fort Bragg, N.C., to support a planned invasion of Haiti, only to report the news after the invasion was cancelled.

But some critics complain that news organizations don’t apply media blackouts to non-journalists. “Stopping the flow of information about a kidnapped foreign correspondent suggests that media outlets value the lives of their own personnel above those of other people they report on,” wrote Blake Lambert, a Canadian freelance journalist for the Christian Science Monitor and other news outlets, on the website of the London-based International News Safety Institute after Fung’s Afghan ordeal.

For news outlets to give fellow journalists special treatment would seem indefensible. But it’s not clear-cut that is happening. More than 1,000 people, virtually all non-journalists, have been held hostage in Somalia every year, for example, according to news reports. Only a handful of them receive press attention.

Some news organizations have maintained that journalists held hostage receive no special treatment. Back in 1994, at least 15 news organizations honored an AP request not to report the kidnapping of its correspondent, Tina Susman, who was released after 20 days of captivity in Mogadishu. “We would withhold news of a kidnapping of anyone if we felt that it was not already in the public domain, and if we felt that coverage would further imperil the person’s life or the prospect of an early release,” AP’s then-International Editor Tom Kent explained toAmerican Journalism Review after the ordeal.

Another matter concerns freelance journalists. Several analysts point out that the abductions of freelance journalists are not subjected to the same level of pre-publication scrutiny as those of staff journalists who are kidnapped. Some cases of freelancers are publicized even when they appear similar to those involving staff journalists that are kept quiet. Other cases of freelancers receive little press attention even when coverage of their status would help them.

I know from my own experience how corporate interests can work against journalists held captive. In 1991, during the post-Gulf War uprisings against Saddam Hussein, colleagues and I crossed into Iraq with anti-Saddam rebels. A European colleague, Gad Gross, was executedalong with our armed rebel escort. A French colleague, Alain Buu, and I were captured an hour later and held captive for 18 days. We were missing as far as our editors and family members knew.

A longtime, accredited CBS News radio stringer, I was also carrying network video equipment that CBS television producers asked me to bring in once the radio desk told them that I was going into Iraq. Once my colleague and I went missing, my family still had to push the network to report the case. A debate ensued at the network, with CBS lawyers arguing that giving our story press could be perceived as implying network liability, CBS colleagues later told me. Having CBS News step up to confirm that I was a journalist was key, as Iraqi authorities were accusing me of being an intelligence agent. In any such case, press coverage can help by convincing suspicious captors that the captives are independent journalists, and by underscoring that any actions to harm them would also not go unnoticed. Conversely, sometimes keeping the kidnapping of a journalist -whether a freelancer or not– out of the press can help persuade captors to release the captive and still save face.

There is no single template showing how to handle such cases, as each deserves its own careful examination. But a few guidelines come to mind:

 

  • Each case is unique, but standards should be consistent. News organizations need to apply the same test of balancing the captive’s interest against the public’s right to know. That is true whether the captive is a journalist or not. And the scale can tip the more any hostage is well-known, whether he or she is a journalist or not.
  • Evidence suggests that publicity can fuel ransom demands for anyone held hostage, although more research needs to be done. Publicity can put captives in danger if it leads to higher ransoms that family members or news organizations are unable to meet.
  • The motive of captors must be scrutinized in each case to determine whether their goal is ransom, political gain, media influence, or something else. This may be difficult to determine. But it should nonetheless help guide any decision weighing whether press would be more likely to help or hinder the captive’s well-being.
  • The decision over whether or not press is desirable should be made by a coalition of stakeholders led by family members, who should independently evaluate the recommendations of news directors and security advisers. (This is especially important in the case of freelancers.) And they should remain open to changing their decisions as a situation develops.
  • Keeping a case out of the public eye is increasingly difficult today due to the Internet; the challenge increases if the captive is a well-known public figure. News organizations may be able to persuade other major outlets to keep a case quiet, but they face extraordinary challenges in scrubbing information posted across the Web. It may be more practical to release limited information about an abduction early, then manage the flow closely.
  • If publicity is desired, close management of information is essential. Colleagues and family members may decide it best to release some information, but still try to keep the case relatively quiet. Advocates may also decide to shape the narrative of a journalist held captive–highlighting one nationality over another, for example, in the case of a person with dual citizenship. Or by highlighting stories captors might see favorably. Or by downplaying information about matters like financial holdings.
  • Journalists do deserve special treatment in one respect. In the case of media blackout or manipulation of information, the public trust must be maintained and readers or the broadcast audience should be informed afterward what was done and why, and the record should be set straight.
  • Do no harm should guide decisions. Claiming that there is no evidence that harm would be done by publicizing a case is not an argument in favor of publicity. Instead, every news outlet should consider whether press is likely to help or hinder the interests of not the news organization or any other entity, but the individual –whether they are news personnel or not–at risk in captivity.

 

The matter is hardly an academic one for journalists and others either known to be in captivity or still missing today. Freelance journalist James Foley, a contributor to Global Post, was kidnapped in northwest Syria late last year; his family waited six weeks before deciding to make the case public. He remains missing. Austin Tice, a freelance journalist for McClatchy newspapers and The Washington Post, was seized in Damascus in August, and what appears to be a staged video of him in captivity leads observers to suggest that Syrian government forces may be holding him. His parents recently traveled to Beirut to try and appeal to whoever may be holding him.

Neither is the risk limited to Western correspondents. Mohamed al-Saeed of Syrian State TV was kidnapped last August in Damascus and he, like many others, remains missing. Bashar Fahmi of the U.S.-government broadcaster Al-Hurra and his Turkish cameraman disappeared in Syria reporting in Aleppo. The Turkish cameraman was captured and released almost 90 days later. But Fahmi is still missing, and his fate remains unknown.

The over-riding guideline: Every captive situation requires the same degree of care and balance of interests as any story where lives are in peril, whether the captives are journalists or not.

Frank Smyth is CPJ’s senior adviser for journalist security. He has reported on armed conflicts, organized crime, and human rights from nations including El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia, Cuba, Rwanda, Uganda, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan, Jordan, and Iraq. Follow him on Twitter @JournoSecurity.

What the Judiciary Committee Should Ask Wayne LaPierre

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http://www.progressive.org/what-judiciary-comm-should-ask-wayne-lapierre

What the Judiciary Committee Should Ask Wayne LaPierre

by Frank Smyth, January 29, 2013, TheProgressive.org

On Wednesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on gun violence featuring testimony from the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre, as well as Mark Kelly, the husband of former Representative Gabrielle Giffords, Democrat of Arizona, who was shot in the head while holding a public meeting in her district two years ago.

Members of the Judiciary Committee should take the opportunity to press LaPierre on whether his organization truly represents the views of most American gun owners–and on what, specifically those views are.

While the NRA boasts a 4 million strong membership, it has a secretive and tightly controlled process for choosing its board of directors.

That’s why journalists did not find out that one of the NRA’s most trusted, top officials lives just a few miles from Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

Patricia A. Clark, a longtime Newtown resident, is chairman of the NRA’s shadowy, but powerful nominating committee.

She is also an instructor in the Eddie Eagle GunSafe program–heralded right after the Newtown tragedy on NBC’s “Meet the Press” by Wayne LaPierre–but she has been on the NRA’s governing board of directors since 1999, entrusted with ensuring that the NRA board’s own ruling clique remains in power.

I have spoken with numerous NRA members who complain about the obscure, Politburo-like governance of the NRA, which keeps ordinary members in the dark about how the organization is run and by whom.

One of the figures whom the NRA board quietly appointed to the 2012 Nominating Committee is George Kollitides II, the chief executive of one of America’s largest consortiums of gun manufacturers. Kollitides last year also became head of the consortium Freedom Group, which includes the company that made the Bushmaster semi-automatic rifle used not just at the Sandy Hook school in Newtown, Connecticut, but also at last year’s movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado, and, a decade before, by the DC sniper in and around Washington.

The NRA’s executive vice president and chief executive officer, Wayne LaPierre, has artfully managed the gun lobby’s message for more than 20 years. His skills include knowing what not to say and when.

A little more than one week after the Newtown shooting on “Meet the Press” with David Gregory, LaPierre made a wholly pragmatic (and not necessarily convincing) argument. When asked whether he would support any gun control measures including restrictions on high-capacity magazines, LaPierre replied, “We don’t think it works, and we’re not going to support it.”

Instead he said the NRA will “support what works,” making the case to put armed guards or police in every school. LaPierre’s TV comments then and in a “no-questions” press conference right after Sandy Hook seemed to resonate, as, for weeks, news outlets explored how and whether armed guards in schools might work.

But the main argument driving the modern NRA is not a pragmatic, but an ideological one.

“American gun owners will never surrender our Second Amendment freedom. Period,” LaPierre said in July, expressing the NRA’s opposition to a proposed U.N. Arms Trade Treaty. “Our Second Amendment is freedom’s most valuable, most cherished, most irreplaceable idea. History proves it. When you ignore the right of good people to own firearms to protect their freedom, you become the enablers of future tyrants whose regimes will destroy millions and millions of defenseless lives.”

That statement suggests the NRA sees the Second Amendment as being more important that all nine other articles of the Bill of Rights, or any other principle or article of government including perhaps the original U.S. Constitution that became law by itself several years before.

LaPierre made no reference to the Second Amendment at all last month in his overly hyped press conference at NRA headquarters one week after the Newtown shooting. On “Meet the Press,” he only referred to it negatively, saying he and the NRA will not back any effort “to destroy” or “lose the Second Amendment.”

But what exactly does than mean after Newtown? NBC’s David Gregory was credited with challenging LaPierre on his vague, unsubstantiated claims that gun control measures won’t work. But he missed an opportunity to probe the longtime NRA chief on whether his interpretation of the Second Amendments means he would never support gun control measures, even if they could be proven to work.

LaPierre, who earned close to $1 million in salary and other compensation from the NRA and related organizations in 2010, has been at the NRA’s helm for the last 22 years.

Few people remember that, before LaPierre, the NRA was not always so extreme. Back in 1968, the NRA’s then-executive vice president, retired general Franklin Orth, supported what still stands as America’s most important gun control law. The Gun Control Act regulated the interstate sale of firearms and effectively rewrote a prior, post-Prohibition-era law banning machine guns or fully automatic weapons. The act passed in 1968 just months after the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy, and five years after Lee Harvey Oswald killed President John F. Kennedy with a single, bolt-action rifle he bought through an ad in the NRA’s American Rifleman magazine.

But a group of hardline gun rights advocates resented what they saw as a sell-out of Americans’ Second Amendment rights. LaPierre began working as a paid lobbyist for the NRA in the late 1970s, just as the hardline advocates were consolidating control of the NRA board. For the next two decades, the NRA’s internal debate boiled down to one question: whether to try and repeal the ban on fully automatic weapons, or let it stand while allowing no other gun control regulations. (A chronology of U.S. laws concerning “Fully-Automatic Firearms” compiled in 1999 and still posted on the website of the NRA’s lobbying wing is sympathetic to a Georgia man who unsuccessfully tried to register a fully-automatic weapon in 1986.)

LaPierre became the NRA’s operations chief in 1991, right before a series of raids by U.S. agencies lead to many violent deaths over illegal guns. In 1992 federal charges related to the sale of two illegal, sawed-off shotguns eventually led to a federal raid in Ruby Ridge, Idaho resulting in the wounding of two men including the suspect, Randy Weaver, who was a white supremacist, and the killing of his wife, and their 14-year-old son along with an agent of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms or ATF.

But it was another federal siege, this one over illegal, fully-automatic firearms, less than a year later that became nothing less than a call to arms for gun rights hardliners. In February 1993, federal ATF agents attempted to serve a search warrant to look for the illegal, fully automatic firearms at the compound of a small religious sect known as the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas. After a 50-day standoff, ATF agents launched an assault, and the ensuing firefight along with a fire of still unclear origins resulted in the deaths of at least 74 people including 25 children.

LaPierre soon wrote unambiguously in his first book published the following year: “The people have a right to take whatever measures necessary, including force, to abolish oppressive government.”

The government crossed another line for even more gun rights advocates when Congress passed and President Clinton signed the assault weapons ban, prohibiting a number of high-capacity, semi-automatic weapons. Seven months later, on April 13, 1995, LaPierre signed a fund-raising letter to NRA members: “The semiauto ban gives jack-booted government thugs more power to take away our constitutional rights, break in our doors, seize our guns, destroy our property, and even injure or kill us.”

But his timing was unfortunate for his cause. Six days later, on exactly the second anniversary of the Waco siege, Timothy McVeigh, an NRA member, and an accomplice used a fertilizer bomb hidden in a truck to blow up the federal building in Oklahoma City killing 168 people including 19 children under the age of six. Not unlike LaPierre in his letter, McVeigh in his terrorism was reminding people of the Waco tragedy, which for them both along with other hardline gun rights advocates still holds significance as a deplorable federal raid over fully automatic guns.

LaPierre was forced to apologize for his “jack-booted thugs” remark, after former President George H.W. Bush, a decades-long member of the NRA, resigned from the organization over his letter. But few NRA members followed suit. Instead the NRA has increased from over three million then to over four million members today.

Extremist groups including white supremacists have long operated in the NRA’s shadow. The National Alliance is a neo-Nazi party whose members have quietly handled out literature to try and attract recruits on the floor of NRA conventions. (I was handed one at the annual NRA convention in Phoenix in 1995 –two months after the Oklahoma City bombing– after I showed a man my New Jersey Firearms Purchaser Identification Card to demonstrate that I was a gun owner.) The late head of the National Alliance also wrote a novel, The Turner Diaries, about a coming race war and insurrection against a Jewish-dominated government; McVeigh used scenes in the novel as an explicit blueprint to make the bomb and choose his target in Oklahoma City.

LaPierre has become expert at handling the press. But there is little question that he holds an absolutist interpretation of the Second Amendment. “[T]here is no such thing as a free nation where police and military are allowed the force of arms but individual citizens are not,” he wrote in a 2003 book.

WOULD U.S. courts agree? In 2008 the Supreme Court made its first ruling on the Second Amendment in 69 years, affirming the right in the District of Columbia v. Heller of an individual to keep a handgun in his home for self-defense within the district, and then in 2010 affirming the same right throughout the United States.

Yet Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority, still allowed for some limits on the right to bear arms including “laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.” Scalia went on to say he could also find “support in the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons.”

Exactly what kinds of weapons might meet that criteria, however, remain unclear. Justice Scalia in an interview in July on Fox News –after the Aurora movie theater shooting– made seemingly more ambivalent comments. Scalia said the Second Amendment only applies to arms that can be borne or carried, but added that whether it would allow for arms like “hand-held rocket launchers that can bring down airplanes” will have be decided in future court decisions.

Could government airplanes be legitimate targets?

Fear and hatred of government agencies, especially the ATF, helps explain why many gun rights advocates were so supportive of House oversight Chairman Darrell Issa’s investigation last year into Operation Fast and Furious, which involved ATF agents planting up to 2,000 guns into the Mexican black market in an effort to trace them to drug cartels.

Besides absolutist ideology, gun manufacturers play an important role in the NRA’s uncompromising stance.

NRA revenues from fundraising –including donations from gun manufacturers—have grown twice as fast as income from members’ dues, according to Forbes. Over 50 firearms-related companies have given the NRA almost $15 million since 2005 –the same year that NRA lobbyists helped get a federal law passed that limits liability claims against gun makers. Two gun-making firms’ chief executive officers, Ronnie Barrett and Pete Brownell, sit on the NRA board.

Yet nearly half of the NRA’s total annual revenues still come from its (rarely-voting) dues-paying members.

Members of the Judiciary Committee should ask LaPierre whether NRA opposition to gun control is rooted in the view that the Second Amendment allows citizens to have the same “force of arms,” to borrow LaPierre’s phrase, as police and military forces.

And they should pin him down on automatic weapons: NRA leaders and other their supporters often try to change the conversation when questions like whether they believe fully automatic weapons should be legal.

Providing unfettered access to enough firepower, as LaPierre’s own writings suggest, to “take whatever measures necessary, including force, to abolish oppressive government,” to quote him again, is simply incompatible with any integrated effort to curb today’s gun violence.

For LaPierre and most NRA directors including, apparently, Newtown’s Chairman Clark, the slaying of 27 people including 20 children in Newtown is an acceptable price to pay for upholding what they maintain is “freedom’s most valuable, most cherished, most irreplaceable idea” embodied in the Second Amendment.

Today’s NRA leaders are not just “gun nuts.” They are ideologues wielding extraordinary power, and secrecy is part of their success. After all, who knew their board’s nominating chairwoman lives just a few miles from the now shuttered Sandy Hook school? Or that the executive of the firm that made the gun that killed the kids there had been appointed to the same shadowy committee?

Frank Smyth is a freelance journalist who has been covering the NRA and related groups since the early 1990s, writing for publications including The Village Voice, The Washington Post, The Texas Observer and Mother Jones.

Guatemala’s Cycles of Crime

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Original story found here.

Guatemala’s Cycles of Crime

January 13, 2012 – 6:06pm | World Policy Journal

By Frank Smyth

For Guatemala and its majority Mayan population time is repeating itself. A former military commander and intelligence chief with a bloody past promises to bring law and order to the Central American nation. Worried about rising crime and the increasingly violent penetration by Mexican drug cartels, voters elected Otto Pérez Molina as president.

The president-elect’s loyalties may be divided, however, between his promise to fight organized crime and the U.S.-backed institution to which he owes his career. His dilemma is rooted in the anti-communism shared by the two nations during the Cold War. Only by strengthening Guatemala’s long struggling civilian law enforcement and judicial institutions will the nation achieve stability. Unfortunately, Pérez Molina has already indicated his preference to rely instead on military force.

On January 14, Pérez Molina will become the first ex-military officer to assume Guatemala’s presidency since the end of military rule in 1986. But every elected government since has been marked by two trends. First, there’s the ongoing influence exercised by different and sometimes rival cliques of military intelligence officers. Second, there’s the endemic lawlessness that has given rise to violence and Guatemala’s increasing role as a transshipment and now also a production point for U.S.-bound illegal drugs.

With names like the “Brotherhood” (Cofradía) and the “Operators,” the intelligence cliques “developed their own vertical leader-subordinate network of recognition, relationships, and loyalties,” noted the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency in a 1991 cable. The cable identified Pérez Molina as one of the “Operators,” and it credited the intelligence cliques for dramatic military successes during the Guatemalan Civil War in the 1980’s.

A U.N. truth commission later found the same military operations included “acts of genocide.” Concentrated in the Mayan highlands, these included targeting entire village populations suspected of supporting leftist guerrillas for annihilation. Internal Guatemalan Army documents show that Pérez Molina was an infantry commander in the Ixil triangle in 1982 during some of the most severe abuses. U.S. military documents from the mid-1990s, albeit with contradictory accounts, show him either disappearing or ordering the disappearance of Efraín Bámaca, the leftist guerrilla leader married to the Harvard-trained, U.S. lawyer Jennifer Harbury.  President-elect Molina, while declining to address specific allegations, denies any role in abuses.

The president-elect deserves some credit. He plans to keep, even if it is due to international pressure, the country’s current Attorney General, Claudia Paz y Paz. Unprecedentedly, and often working with international officials, she has arrested both military personnel for prior human rights crimes and suspected international drug bosses, including one alleged kingpin indicted in Tampa. She continues to investigate other abuses, too, including Bámaca’s disappearance after being captured. But more must be done to establish accountability and the rule of law.

Human rights groups fear the new government will usher in a new era of state-sponsored violence. The president-elect has named former Kaibil military commanders to lead the police and military. Kaibiles are elite military forces, who have been linked to some of the nation’s grisliest massacre, including the slaughter of over 200 civilians at Dos Erres in the remote, northern region of Petén in 1982. More recently ex-Kaibil soldiers have been linked to drug trafficking in collaboration with Mexico’s feared Zeta cartel, who themselves are former Mexican special forces soldiers turned drug lords. Leading Mexican analysts maintain it was the Guatemalan ex-Kabiles who taught the Zetas the use of decapitation as a terror tactic.

President-elect Molina and his cabinet say they will expand police and Kaibil operations in Guatemala, and lead a regional effort to share intelligence about organized crime. They might start with their own peers. Dozens of Guatemalan officers of all ranks have been formally accused of drug trafficking, according to U.S. government documents, dating back to before the end of Guatemala’s armed conflict.

Guatemala’s record of prosecuting its own drug kingpins lags far behind Mexico and Colombia. Not one Guatemalan was extradited on drug charges for well over a decade after the 1994 murder of Epaminondas González Dubón, the nation’s chief justice. The Clinton administration covered up the extradition case surrounding his murder.

His murder reveals the power of the intelligence cliques linked to the drug trade in Guatemala. Chief Justice Dubón led the nation’s Constitutional Court in a four-to-three vote in favor of extraditing Lt. Col. Carlos Ochoa Ruiz, according to court documents later cited by the Costa Rican daily La Nación. Nine days later, on April 1, as the family was returning from observing a Good Friday pageant, gunmen shot and killed Dubón near his home in his car in front of his wife and youngest son. On April 12, the same top court with a new chief justice quietly ruled not to extradite Ochoa. The State Department took four years before finally admitting in a few lines buried in a thick report to Congress that the chief justice’s assassination stopped the extradition of the Army lieutenant colonel over multi-ton level cocaine charges.

Since then, the nation’s importance to drug traffickers has only climbed.  The State Department reports that Guatemala is a midpoint for over 60 percent of all the South American cocaine reaching the United States, most of which then passes through Mexico. Guatemala is a transshipment point for heroin too. Recently, Mexican traffickers have started producing methamphetamine in Guatemala.

The Mexican cartels first moved into Guatemala to fight each other over who would emerge with the largest share of Guatemala’s huge cocaine export market. But Guatemala’s own cartels—who still primarily receive drugs from South America—have long been quieter than their Mexican counterparts. Classified U.S. cables obtained by WikiLeaks identify five major Guatemalan cartels that, for some reason, have rarely fought each other over territory or profits.

The U.S. has taken some action. The Bush Administration revoked the U.S. entry visas of two former Guatemalan intelligence chiefs over suspected drug trafficking. One, Francisco Ortega Menaldo, who publicly denied the accusation, is a longtime rival of Molina. But a decade ago, he was a frequent companion of then-President Alfonso Portillo, who is now facing extradition to New York to face money laundering charges.

However, the military intelligence cliques have hardly gone away. On 2010, a U.S. State Department cable obtained by WikiLeaks read “A powerful group of former senior military officers known collectively as “The Brotherhood” (“La Cofradía,” suspected of narcotrafficking and other crimes), who colluded with then-President Portillo to embezzle millions from the state, might seek to murder him in order to ensure he does not collaborate with Guatemalan or U.S. authorities.”

Molina’s iron fist will no doubt drive out some Mexican traffickers. But only independent law enforcement will rescue Guatemala from its own powerful crime lords linked to the military intelligence cliques who have long enjoyed immunity from prosecution. Only by supporting civilian over military institutions could Molina move Guatemala forward. But, like many other retired intelligence officers, he has an interest in not exhuming the past.

*****

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Frank Smyth began his career reporting from El Salvador in the 1980s. He has covered Guatemala, Rwanda, Colombia, Eritrea, and Ethiopia.  He has written for The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.

Journalist security: An evolving field

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Original story ran on the Committee to Protect Journalists blog.

The garden city between the mountains and the sea founded by Vikings in 871 cast an historic hue over the discussion. Journalists from nearly every continent gathered this past weekend to discuss journalist security issues in a hotel in Tønsberg, Norway, outside of which a replica of a Viking ship was being constructed.

Marcela Turati is a Mexican journalist who explained that she never expected to cover violence or organized crime. The founder of Mexico’s first group established by journalists to help each other, Journalists on Foot, she perhaps set the tone when she tossed aside the bravado that often accompanies such forums and frankly said, “We need help in how to handle our fear.”

The journalist security community only began to identify itself as such less than a decade ago in the wake of events since 9/11. It remains an emerging field which now seems to have at least as many questions as answers.

For years journalist security was associated with “hostile environments and emergency first-aid training” provided by private security firms led and staffed almost exclusively by former British military personnel. Such skills remain invaluable for journalists covering ongoing conflicts in nations like Yemen or Libya, or ongoing wars in nations like Afghanistan or Iraq. But one fact remains: In every single nation in conflict around the world–including in both Afghanistan and Iraq–more journalists have been murdered outright than have been killed in combat or other circumstances like suicide bombings.

“I’ve taken one of those classes,” said Kirstin Solberg, who is based in Pakistan for the Norwegian daily Aftenposten, referring to a battlefield awareness and first-aid class. “They help,” she added. “But there are many things they don’t cover.”

Take a matter like how to handle coverage of organized crime. Javier Garza, editorial director of the Mexican newspaper, El Siglo de Torreón, said that he and his colleagues are literally making it up as they go along. They have no doubt earned credibility along the way. Rotating reporters in and out of crime beats to lessen their own stress and make them less of a target, and removing bylines as needed are among the steps he and his colleagues would recommend to others.

But covering organized crime in a nation like Mexico poses another set of challenges. Don’t identify by name the groups involved in shootouts, arrests, or raids, Garza recommended. Take violent stories off the front page as much as possible. In other words, Garza explained, don’t allow yourself as journalists and news outlets to be a conduit for criminal groups seeking to use the press to pass on grisly messages as a way of flaunting their strength to one another.

Or take the issue of sexual assault against journalists. Most of the paramilitary and emergency first-aid courses offered by private security firms did not include separate training or awareness on how to avoid sexual assaults. The journalist security community took most of their cues from these military-oriented experts and courses. Yet, some relief agencies working in unpredictable, field situations have long included sexual assault avoidance and awareness as part of their security training curriculum.

Or take the issue of stress reactions by journalists covering violent or traumatic events. The Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma only began offering fellowships to journalists in 1999. Since then, the journalist trauma awareness community has worked to have the matter integrated into journalist security training curriculums. Another security concern for journalists that has become only more apparent in recent years is the need for digital information and communications security. How to protect notes and documents on your hard drive, like how to safely communicate with sources and editors are increasingly complex questions in an interconnected world of ever-evolving technology.

Whether it’s safe or even wise to be either on Facebook (or to be too transparent on it) was one of the last points of discussion. Afterward, I noticed that my friend and colleague, the Mexican editor Garza, posted a picture on Facebook of the Viking ship replica being built outside the hotel.

Frank Smyth is CPJ’s Washington representative and journalist security coordinator. He has reported on armed conflicts, organized crime, and human rights from nations including El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia, Rwanda, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan, and Iraq. Follow him on Twitter @SmythFrank.

April 7, 2011 2:10 PM ET

Murdering with Impunity: The Rise in Terror Tactics Against News Reporters

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Original story found here.Frank Smyth Bookmark and Share

Murdering with Impunity

The Rise in Terror Tactics Against News Reporters

November 14, 2010 by

Frank Smyth is the Washington representative and Journalist Security Coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists. He serves as board member of the International News Safety Institute and was a former investigator for Human Rights Watch.

More journalists were killed last year than ever before. No doubt the world has become a more dangerous place for journalists, but not necessarily in ways that people might expect. The risks to foreign journalists, especially for (but hardly limited to) Western correspondents, have risen dramatically. Some of us are old enough to recall a time back in the 1980s when raising a white flag and writing TV in masking tape on a vehicle might help keep one safe. But in recent years reporters for outlets from The Wall Street Journal to Al-Arabiya have been attacked in ways which demonstrate that being a journalist may only make one more of a target.

The untold story, however, is the following: the risks to local journalists, or journalists who report within the borders of their own nation, have never been greater. In fact, the risks that local journalists face have long been severe. The difference is that, now, perhaps more Western-based international observers and groups are taking notice.

Nearly three out of four journalists killed around the world did not step on a landmine, or get shot in crossfire, or even die in a suicide bombing attack. Instead, no less than 72 percent of all 831 journalists killed on the job since 1992, according to data compiled with other figures cited below by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), were murdered outright, such as killed by a gunman escaping on the back of a motorcycle, shot or stabbed to death near their home or office, or found dead after having been abducted and tortured.

The pattern of most journalists murdered in reprisal for their work, as opposed to being killed by the hazards of combat reporting, holds true even in war zones. In Somalia, more than half (53 percent) of journalists killed did not die in anything like a firefight or bombing attack; instead, they were individually murdered. Similarly, in Afghanistan, outright homicides account for 59 percent of journalists killed. In Iraq, which by any measure has been the most dangerous nation for journalists on record, 63 percent of journalists killed since the US-led invasion in 2003 were murdered.

Atwar Bahjat was an Iraqi journalist and contract correspondent in Iraq for Al-Arabiya, a television network based in the United Arab Emirates and partly owned by the Saudi broadcaster Middle East Broadcasting Center. Bahjat had previously reported from Iraq for Al-Jazeera, the satellite television network based in Qatar and partly financed by the nation’s Emir-led government. In 2006, Bahjat and her TV crew were reporting at the site of the Shi’ite Askariya shrine, also known as the Golden Mosque, in Samarra immediately after it had been bombed. A surviving crewmember said that armed men driving a white car attacked the crew and demanded to know the whereabouts of the on-air correspondent. Her remains and those of two crewmembers were found the following day. Bahjat’s corpse in particular, according to a mutual friend interviewed by this author, bore unmistakable signs of torture.

The killing of local journalists is most common. Nearly nine out of ten journalists killed on the job, or 87 percent, were murdered or otherwise killed within their own nation. Many people have heard of the Russian investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who, after her repeated exposés on human rights abuses in the Russian province of Chechnya, was shot to death in October 2006 in the elevator of her apartment building.

But how many people beyond the northern Mexican town of Saltillo have heard of Valentín Valdés Espinosa, a young general assignment reporter for Zócolo de Saltillo, whose tortured corpse was found in January 2010 after he reported the arrest of an alleged local drug lord? Or how many people outside of the Sindhi-speaking area of Pakistan have heard of Ghulam Rasool Birhamani, a middle-aged reporter for the Daily Sindhu Hyderabad, who was abducted, tortured and left for dead in May 2010 after reporting on an arranged, tribal marriage involving a 12-year-old girl? Or how many people outside of Indonesia have heard of Ridwan Salamun, a young correspondent and cameraman for Sun TV, who was stabbed to death in August 2010 while filming violent clashes between two villages?

The evidence in 2009 continues to bolster the same point. CPJ recorded a record 72 journalist deaths last year. The unprecedented toll stemmed largely from the November massacre of 30 journalists out of 57 people killed in one incident during election unrest in the Philippines’s Maguindano province. Keep in mind that CPJ figures are by and large consistent with those provided by other global monitors, including the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders and the Brussels-based International Federation of Journalists, except for two possible cases. When it comes to journalist murders, CPJ only includes those cases where researchers have investigated the motive to determine that a journalist was murdered in retaliation for his or her work, as opposed to, say, a business arrangement gone bad, a land dispute, or even a love triangle. In 2009, for example, no fewer than 24 journalists were murdered that year whom CPJ excluded from the record total of 72 journalists killed because a motive in each of these outstanding cases has yet to be determined. Each year, on average, CPJ records dozens of outstanding cases with motives under investigation. CPJ’s annual figure of journalists killed worldwide also excludes murders of media workers such as drivers and translators, which in 2009, for example, numbered three.

The resulting figures still stand up under scrutiny, and they are staggering. At least 599 journalists have been murdered since 1992, according to CPJ statistics. To put it another way, a journalist is murdered somewhere around the world at least once every 11 days. Most of them were not even investigative journalists, but simply beat reporters trying to get the story. More than nine out of ten of the murdered journalists, or 93 percent, were local newsmen and women.

Unsolved Crimes

There is another trend that is even more disturbing. When it comes to journalists, the killers get away with the murders in nearly nine out of ten cases. In no less than 89 percent of journalist murders worldwide, there has been little or no prosecution whatsoever. Moreover, only in four percent of journalist murder cases has full prosecution occurred, which in most cases means that both the assassins and the masterminds who ordered or hired them, have been brought to justice.

In 2005, a judge in Nicaragua found a local politician guilty of the murder of journalist Maria José Bravo, a correspondent for the Managua daily La Prensa. Bravo had been killed in the previous year upon leaving a voting booth during claims of election irregularities. In 2004, a military court in the Ivory Coast found a police officer guilty of the murder of journalist Jean Hélène, a French correspondent with Radio France Internationale, who was shot in the head outside the national police headquarters while waiting to interview an opposition activist. But such convictions remain rare, especially when they involve local correspondents.

To help illustrate the problem, CPJ developed an Impunity Index. The methodology is simple: The index calculates the number of unsolved journalist murders as a percentage of a nation’s population. The size of the population is used as the base of the calculus since it is a discernible figure, unlike attempts to guess at the number of journalists in any one nation at any given time. Determining who is a journalist has long been problematic. In a digital age, it becomes nearly impossible. The percentage of journalists belonging to a trade union or professional association varies from nation to nation, and local journalists such as community radio reporters often belong to no formal group. Moreover, defining who is a journalist in the blogosphere can be done only on a case-by-case basis. (Most observers would seem to agree that journalists, noted in The Elements of Journalism by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosentiel, as opposed to other disseminators of information, engage in some process of verification.)

The number of unsolved journalist murders is a figure which hits as hard as a bullet, however, in all too many nations. The latest Impunity Index covers the years 2000 through 2009, and includes nations with at least five unsolved journalist murders over the same period. Iraq tops the list with no fewer than 88 journalist murders out of a population of over 31 million, followed by the much smaller nation of Somalia with nine unsolved journalist murders in a nation of nine million people.

Few are surprised to see either nation top the list. But the countries that follow may not be expected. Three democratic nations (nations with a reasonably long history of competitive national elections) come next: the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Colombia. The Philippines has had 55 unsolved journalist murders so far in the past decade out of a population of 90.3 million. The smaller nation of Sri Lanka has seen 10 unsolved journalist murders out of a population of 20 million; Colombia, 13 out of over 44 million.

All the remaining nations on the list are also all at least nominal democracies, although a few if not more for different reasons may not be arguably worthy of even that term: Afghanistan, Nepal, Russia, Mexico, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India. The ongoing problem of such impunity in murdering journalists cuts across geographic and political boundaries, perhaps the single greatest threat to press freedom worldwide. But it also raises questions that go beyond the traditional bounds of press freedom monitors. One thing, however, is clear: in the post-Cold War era, civilian government institutions, which include judicial and law enforcement capabilities, remain woefully weak in many nations, while military or intelligence agencies continue to dominate many of the same nations.

Who is behind all these journalist murders? The answer is also not what many might expect. Government officials of one kind or another have killed nearly as many journalists as terrorists or other political movements and groups. In fact, if one adds government-backed paramilitary groups to the list, government officials along with their paramilitary allies have murdered more journalists than terrorists and other anti-government groups.

Individual CPJ case capsules — which, along with all other data cited here, are available online—have identified anti-government political groups and movements, including terrorist organizations, as being the most likely perpetrators of at least 30 percent, or 180 cases, out of a worldwide total of 599 murders since 1992. Civilian government officials are considered the probable perpetrators of 24 percent of journalist murders. Military government officials are responsible for another five percent, and pro-government paramilitary groups are responsible for seven percent, or of about 41 murders over the same period.

The repercussions of the murder also stretch beyond the incidents themselves. The murder of any one journalist sends a signal to countless others that they or members of their family could well be next. Many journalists have been threatened, sometimes repeatedly, before being murdered. But countless more journalists have been warned not to travel the same path. Unfortunately, from the perspective of the perpetrators or those who wish to keep the press from reporting on their own wrongdoings, murdering a journalist makes cold-blooded sense. In the 1980s, many journalists were murdered while covering human rights abuses. In the past two decades, more journalists have been killed while reporting on corruption, such as collusion between government actors and organized crime.

Murdering some journalists, while threatening to target even more, generates fear that is hard to measure. Self-censorship has become routine in nations from Colombia to Mexico. After the tortured remains of previously mentioned Mexican reporter Espinosa were discovered, no other reporter in the city of Saltillo attempted to report on why Espinosa had been killed. In fact, his newspaper, Zócolo de Saltillo, went in the other direction entirely and stopped reporting on organized crime, according to a senior editor who asked to remain anonymous.

The unchecked proliferation of journalist murders also challenges some of the precepts behind global press freedom indices produced by groups like the Washington, D.C.-based Freedom House as well as Reporters Without Borders. Based on a multiplicity of factors, their global indices, when evaluating another democratic nation like the Philippines, must somehow weigh the value of a relatively open environment for the press to criticize the government and report on a wide range of other topics against the disvalue of journalist murders.

Multilateral institutions like the World Bank are only beginning to come to grips with this ongoing problem, and how to factor it into decisions concerning loans and other economic support to nations. In fact, while economic and health indicators like gross national product and infant mortality per capita have long been used to determine levels of economic development, another way to measure development would be to examine the rate of prosecutions for murders. Hard, comparative data on the topic is not readily available. But one factor that clearly separates the world’s most developed nations from most other nations is that in most G-8 nations, for example, most murders are solved. In contrast, throughout much of the world, the global rate of impunity for unsolved journalist murders approaches 90 percent and largely appears to be replicated for the murders of other citizens as well.

Danger at the Front Lines

At the same time, combat journalists and other reporters who cover dangerous situations still face great risks. No less than 18 percent of the journalists killed on the job in all circumstances since 1992 died covering combat or some other form of military engagement. Another ten percent were killed during reporting on matters like violent demonstrations.

Among field reporting incidents, disputed shootings have received the most attention. What’s the difference between a murder and a disputed shooting? In a murder, no one doubts that a homicide occurred; the question is who did it. In most disputed shootings, everyone knows who fired the ordinance that killed the journalist; the question is whether the firing was justified.

Few cases have received more scrutiny than the August 2003 shooting of Reuters cameraman Mazen Dana outside the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. He was in a car with members of his crew after filming outside the walls of the jail when a US Army tank approached their position in the street. Dana got out of the car, put his camera on his shoulder, and began walking in the direction of the tank as he was filming it. A gunner atop the tank opened fire, hitting Dana fatally in the chest.

The soldier who fired later said that he had seen a dark-skinned, dark-haired man in black clothing, and mistook Dana’s camera for a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, according to a US military investigation of the shooting that was later declassified and released to the public. The US military exonerated the soldiers involved. But the same report also included a recommendation that commanders should review the military’s own rules-of-engagement for potential modifications to try and avoid such incidents in the future. Human Rights Watch and CPJ would later make a similar recommendation in a 2005 letter to then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

In fact, since 2003, at least 16 journalists have died and others seriously wounded by US forces’ fire in Iraq. US military authorities have conducted investigations in less than a handful of cases, but the investigations exonerated the soldiers involved in each case. It remains unclear whether, or to what degree, the US military may have reviewed its procedures in response to the recommendations by its own investigators and others.

Another well-known disputed shooting involved Israeli Defense Forces and British freelance cameraman and film director James Miller, who was working on a documentary for the TV channel HBO in Gaza in May 2003. Miller and his crew were working out of the home of a Palestinian family as they filmed the army’s demolition of houses in an area that the Israeli army alleged contained tunnels used to smuggle arms. Near midnight, the television crew decided to leave the home and walked toward a fixed position of Israeli troops and armored personnel carriers 300 feet away.

The journalists were wearing jackets and helmets marked “TV,” as was later shown in the HBO documentary. One crewmember waved a white flag, while Miller used a flashlight to illuminate the flag and also shouted a greeting as they approached. A shot was fired. The group yelled that they were British journalists, and a second shot was fired immediately after. The video shows the second shot hitting Miller, who was struck in the neck. Several more shots followed. An Israeli army spokesman first said that troops in the area returned fire after being fired on by rocket-propelled grenades. Later, the army said that Miller was struck by a bullet from behind, claiming that he may have been hit by Palestinian fire. Israeli authorities exonerated the soldiers involved; exhortations by CPJ and others for the Israeli army to conduct a transparent investigation into the shooting were not heeded.

These incidents and others helped compel a group of journalists based in Geneva, Switzerland, who cover the United Nations and other multilateral agencies, to form a group with two goals: to establish a universal press emblem and to work to modify the Geneva conventions, making it an explicit war crime to target journalists. Most global press freedom groups including CPJ, Reporters Without Borders, the International Federation of Journalists, as well as a consortium of groups based in Europe known as the International News Safety Institute opposed the changes.

Global press freedom groups argued, first, that establishing a universal press emblem would require the formation of a regime to determine who would be eligible to don the emblem and that this would be tantamount to establishing a licensing regime which would determine who is and who is not a journalist. Such a step would only feed efforts by repressive regimes, the global press freedom groups went on, which already sought to restrict journalists by licensing them according to political criteria.

Second, it is already a war crime to target civilians, a category which includes journalists (journalists who are embedded with military forces may be legitimately targeted, as they legally become a part of the military unit to which they are embedded). Thus, to make the targeting of journalists an explicit war crime would not only be redundant and unnecessary; it would also send the message to the public that journalists saw themselves as special and somehow more important than other civilians.

Moreover, the entire debate over the changes proposed by the Geneva-based group, now known as Press Emblem Campaign, does not address the facts underscored here that nearly three out of four journalists killed are murdered outright in non-military situations in direct reprisal for their work. But the discussion has managed to generate more dialogue over the issue than ever before, starting largely with the International News Safety Institute and its watershed 2006 report, “Killing the Messenger: Report of the Global Inquiry by the International News Safety Institute into the Protection of Journalists.”

Reporting, Past and Future

Violence, of course, is only one way to silence the press. In many so-called closed or restrictive nations, especially those controlled or dominated by a single political party or monarchy, outright censorship of the press and imprisonment for individual journalists who persist in crossing the line is the most common reprisal. For 11 consecutive years, China was the world’s leading jailer of journalists. But Iran usurped China to hold that dishonor after jailing dozens of journalists in the wake of election unrest in 2009. Cuba is next on the list, followed, unfortunately, by sub-Saharan Africa’s newest nation, Eritrea.

Two trends also stand out. In 2008, online journalists of one form or another surpassed print and broadcast journalists as the largest single category of journalists imprisoned around the world, comprising nearly half of those incarcerated. In the following year, the number of jailed freelance journalists nearly doubled from the previous three years to similarly make up almost half of incarcerated journalists. Both trends are likely to grow: Further digital advances will empower more freelance journalists to venture out on their own, while newsroom cutbacks, especially in newspapers in most developed nations, will lead to more freelancers on the market.

One should also not forget that many methods to restrict the press fall somewhere in between the more obvious means of violence or imprisonment. For instance, ruling party thugs have intimidated and attacked journalists in the streets from Zimbabwe to Venezuela; government officials and other public figures have brought criminal libel suits against journalists from Thailand to Morocco; national agencies have ordered impromptu tax audits against news outlets from the Ukraine to South Korea. In nations such as Hong Kong and Argentina, governments have manipulated private or public advertising to punish media outlets’ critical reporting, as was recently documented by the Center for International Media of the US-funded National Endowment for Democracy.

Serious challenges lie ahead. The Committee to Protect Journalists has launched a Global Campaign Against Impunity, which aspires both to raise awareness among the public in nations like the Philippines about the value of journalism to society, and to pressure law enforcement authorities to bring the murderers of journalists to justice. Some progress has already been made in Latin America to resolve a number of journalist-murder cases, due to efforts by the Inter-American Press Association. There is no doubt, however, that progress will take time.

But the first step toward solving any issue is to acknowledge it. One should also keep in mind that behind every figure is a face, and most likely also a family, friends, and colleagues, all of whom suffer from a journalist’s persecution or death.

Think Daniel Pearl, Atwar Bahjat, or Valentín Valdés Espinosa. Clearly, there is much more to say.

In U.S., Dangerous Misconceptions from TSA Poster

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Original story ran on the Committee to Protect Journalists blog.

Back in 2004, Iraqi gunmen loyal to the radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr abducted U.S. freelance photographer Paul Taggert because, as they later told The Associated Press, they thought he was a spy. Now, a new poster from the U.S. Transportation Security Administration reinforces dangerous misconceptions by depicting a photographer as a terrorist.

“Don’t let our planes get into the wrong hands,” reads the poster’s caption beneath an image of a man holding a camera with a telescopic lens pointed through the chain-link fence of an airport. The poster comes a year after U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano went on Fox News and urged viewers to be suspicious. “If they see, for example, somebody continually taking photographs of a piece of critical infrastructure that doesn’t seem to make any sense.”

The National Press Photographers Association sent a letter on Monday to Napolitano, asking her to order U.S. security authorities to remove the poster from display. “It is my understanding that airport administrators have been directed to post and prominently display this material around airports ‘one poster per entrance,'” stated NPPA General Counsel Mickey H. Osterreicher, who signed the letter. “I would have hoped that DHS and TSA would have been more sensitive to free speech concerns after your statement last year on Fox News regarding photography.”

Worldwide, photographers are regularly detained and harassed for doing their job. And that’s true in the United States as well. Lance Rosenfeld was on assignment this year for ProPublica and the PBS program “Frontline,” taking photographs related to the Gulf oil spill, when he fell under suspicion. Rosenfeld was detained in July near BP’s refinery in Texas City, Texas by police and released only after authorities reviewed his images and collected his personal identification information, which they then shared with BP, the company whose off-shore drilling resulted in the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

“In any free country, the balance between actual vigilance and overzealous enforcement is delicate,” the photographers association wrote last year to Napolitano. “It is one thing for DHS to act when there is probable cause; it is quite another to abuse that discretion in order to create a climate that chills free speech under the pretext of safety and security. It is our position that the material targeted at the general aviation community does just that.”