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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.”

Jammeh ‘Award’ Coverage Reflects Chill in Gambian Press

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Original story ran on the Committee to Protect Journalists blog.

PRI’s “The World” Oct. 1, 2010, interview on the story with Frank: http://www.theworld.org/2010/10/01/fake-awards-for-gambian-president/

“President Jammeh bags 4 awards,” trumpeted a September 17 headline of the Daily Observer, a pro-government newspaper in the Gambia, a West African nation whose idyllic façade as “the smiling coast of Africa” is maintained in part by President Yahyah Jammeh’s brutal repression of the independent press.

Under the headline, Observer reported that “two of the awards with an accompanying letter came from the president of the United States of America, Barrack [sic] Obama, who commended the Gambian leader for the accolade, and also commended him ‘for helping to address the most pressing needs’ in his community.” The Gambia State House’s website similarly reported: “In a letter accompanying his two awards, the U.S. President Barrack [sic] Obama described President Jammeh as an inspirational leader and thanked him for his exemplary dedication, determination, and perseverance for the development of the Gambia as well as the advancement of humanity at large.” The story quickly spread over the Internet, reaching the circulation of the widely read, Washington, D.C.-based news aggregator AllAfrica.

The claims are false. Regarding “your query asking for confirmation of Gambian reporting on the Gambian president receiving awards and a letter from President Obama,” White House National Security Council spokesman Bob Jensen wrote in an e-mail to CPJ: “Those reports are incorrect. The Gambian president did not receive what the media reports are claiming.”

In fact, among the four announced awards, only one from the United States was undeniably real: a Nebraska Admiralship or award denoting Jammeh as an honorary admiral in the Great Navy of the State of Nebraska. A tongue-in-cheek distinction from the Midwestern, landlocked state, “an ‘admiralship’ in the fictitious ‘Navy’ of Nebraska is meant to be a ceremonial acknowledgment of Nebraskans who have shown outstanding citizenship,” noted Nebraska governor’s office spokeswoman Jen Rae Hein in a statement to CPJ. “We regret that this individual has attempted to embellish a certificate for a Nebraska admiralship, claiming that it was a high honor bestowed upon him by the governor, when to the best of our knowledge, this person has no relationship with or ties to Nebraska.” The spokeswoman further noted that the Nebraska governor’s office routinely processes thousands of admiralship requests annually.

The Gambian State House website reported that three of the awards, including the Nebraska admiralship, were presented to President Jammeh in Banjul by an unnamed official from a Palermo, Sicily-based organization called the International Parliament for Safety and Peace. Its website states that it was founded in 1975 by an archbishop of the Cypriot Orthodox Church. The international parliament has been reportedly accused of providing credentials to educational institutions otherwise not accredited in their own nations, and of selling membership, titles and other distinctions for fees.

The fourth stated honor was an “Honorary Vocational Bachelor’s Degree” bestowed upon Jammeh by the “Printers and Publishers Guild of Northern Germany,” according to the Daily Observer. German authorities told CPJ they found no record of any such award; extensive Internet searches in English and German revealed no such guild or other organization with a similar name.

Speaking to CPJ on condition of anonymity for fear of government reprisals, a former Daily Observer staffer, who worked at the newspaper in recent years, expressed no surprise at the credulous reporting of the awards. “If [the story] wasn’t out in the paper, someone would be in Mile 2 [prison] today–the managing director or the editor.” The person described a newsroom of fear: “You’re terrified. Nobody wants to go that prison.” One Observer reporter who may have suffered this fate is “Chief” Ebrima Manneh who has disappeared in government custody since National Intelligence Agency officials seized him at the Observer office in July 2007. Despite repeated calls from U.S. senators, journalists, activists and a West African human rights court ruling, Gambian authorities have continued to deny their detention of Manneh. Former colleagues said Manneh was arrested after printing a critical BBC article about Jammeh.

Daily Observer columns consistently flatter Jammeh and refer to him as “His Excellency Sheikh Professor Alhaji Dr. Yahya A.J.J. Jammeh” in a cacophony of honorifics reminiscent of late Ugandan military ruler Idi Amin whose formal introduction was a recitation: “His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshall Al Hadj Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC., Lord of all the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda.”

Yet, it was not always so. The Daily Observer was once the standard-bearer of independent journalism in the Gambia. Launched in 1992 by Liberian editor Kenneth Best, the Observer was Gambia’s first daily newspaper and was once its largest circulation publication. Best, who arrived in Gambia as a refugee following the burning of the offices of his original Liberian Observer during civil war in Liberia, told CPJ the paper started with a circulation of 3,000 and peaked with a certain July 1994 edition that sold up to 30,000 copies. “‘Army coup in Gambia’ was the headline,” he recalled. “It was the first successful coup, and we told the whole story. We interviewed all the five lieutenants who staged coups.”
One of those lieutenants was then known simply as Yahya Jammeh. “We sold 10,000 copies in 15 minutes,” Best said. However, as Observer began scrutinizing the junta’s handling of transition to civilian rule, the newspaper became a target of government repression. Barely three months after taking office, Jammeh’s junta deported Best, who later sold the Observer to private businessman Amadou Samba.

That the handful of Gambian private newspapers has not challenged Jammeh’s questionable award claims is indicative of the chill of self-censorship that has fallen on continental Africa’s smallest republic. This is the result of years of repression, including a series of unsolved arson attacks on media outlets, the unsolved assassination of leading editor Deyda Hydara, ongoing arrests and Jammeh’s periodic threats to the media.

Hollman Morris, Labeled ‘Terrorist,’ Finally Harvard-bound

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Original Story ran on the Committee to Protect Journalists’  blog.

For a month, U.S. officials in Bogotá told Colombian journalist Hollman Morris that his request for a U.S. visa to study at Harvard as a prestigious Nieman Fellow had been denied on grounds relating to terrorist activities as defined by the U.S. Patriot Act, and that the decision was permanent and that there were no grounds for appeal. It was the first time in the storied history of the Nieman Foundation that a journalist had been prohibited from traveling not by his own nation, such as, say, South Africa’s apartheid regime back in 1960, but by ours, noted Nieman Curator Bob Giles in the Los Angeles Times.

A coalition of groups including the Nieman Foundation, Human Rights Watch, CPJ, the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma (where Morris was also a fellow), the Open Society Institute, the Knight Foundation, the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, the Inter-American Press Association, the American Civil Liberties Union, PEN American Center, the Washington Office on Latin America, and the North American Congress for Latin America rallied to Morris’ defense, publicly and privately imploring U.S. agencies to reverse the decision. Last week, the multilateral Organization of American States also asked the State Department to grant Morris the visa.

Morris wrote this afternoon in an e-mail to the above groups: “I just got out of the U.S. Embassy and they gave me the visa.” He went on: “I am very happy, and I know none of this would have been possible without you.”

CPJ and other groups are happy, too. Although the month-long denial of the visa raises questions that remain unanswered. Such as: Did U.S. officials accept information provided by their Colombian counterparts without independently verifying the claims? Did U.S. officials follow Colombia’s lead by (albeit temporarily) red-baiting one of Colombia’s most respected and critical journalists?

After news of the U.S. visa denial broke in Colombia, more than a few callers on radio and television talks threatened Morris’ life saying the U.S. decision was confirmation of his alleged “terrorist” ties.

This is a charge that has been levied against Morris before, by Colombian officials as high-ranking as President Alvaro Uribe, who has accused Morris of being “an accomplice of terrorism” over his reporting of the Colombia’s leftist guerrillas. But human rights groups suspect that senior Colombian officials have really lashed out at Morris over his reports on rightist paramilitary forces linked to senior Colombian government officials. At the same time, Morris was one of the Colombian journalists who was spied on and had phone calls and e-mails intercepted by Colombia’s Department of Administrative Security under the Uribe administration.

Morris has frequently visited the United States, including in 2007 when he received the Human Rights Defender Award from Human Rights Watch. Morris’ Nieman Fellowship at Harvard starts in the fall.

Global Media Forum Cites Risks of Environmental Reporting

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Original story ran on the Committee to Protect Journalists’ blog.

He’s young, unemployed, and carries himself with the innocence of a man who hasn’t spent much time outside his own village. But Egyptian blogger Tamer Mabrouk is the real deal. Appearing at an international media conference in Bonn, Mabrouk’s description of chemical dumping into a brackish lagoon on the northern Nile Delta near the Mediterranean Sea was punctuated by photos of unmistakable filth. He won over the audience when, in response to a question on how one travels with sensitive material, Tamer deftly removed a memory card secreted in an electronic device and held it in the air. That, he said, is where he had carried documents for this trip.

The lines between journalism and blogging have never been blurrier, but the risks and challenges of reporting on environmental issues are clear. BP workers and U.S. Coast Guard personnel have denied access to photographers and camera crews trying to document the ongoing oil spill off shore of the U.S. coastline in the Gulf of Mexico. In many other nations, extreme and sometimes violent reprisals have been reported in the wake of stories on environmental degradation.

Before I tell you about the journalists who made it to the June 22 environmental panel at the third annual Global Media Forum, hosted by the German state broadcaster, Deutsche Welle, I’d like to tell you about a few who were unable to travel. Few journalists have done more to document illegal logging and other encroachments on the Brazilian Amazon than Lúcio Flávio Pinto. But, in response to his stories, private companies, government officials, and other actors have filed more than 30 lawsuits against him in courts whose integrity is challenged. The point of the suits is to harass, if not drive him into bankruptcy, says Pinto who turned down the invitation to join the panel in Germany. If he were to leave Brazil for even a few days, he explained, he might fail to respond to a judge’s unexpected ruling and thereby lose a case seeking damages.

Another potential panelist just couldn’t physically travel. Mikhael Beketov was a Russian reporter who criticized the local government’s plans to deforest an area in order to build a highway between Moscow and St. Petersburg. He was later found in a coma lying in the garden of his home, at least a day and a half after assailants broke his skull, smashed his fingers, broken his legs, and left him in the freezing cold. One leg and several fingers were later amputated. Elsewhere, environmental journalists in Guinea and Bulgaria have been threatened; journalist Joey Estriber was abducted by unidentified men in the Philippines, never to be seen again.

But one thing that all the panelists in Bonn made clear is that subtle forms of pressure can also silence environmental reporters. Liu Jiangiang is one of China’s few journalists whose stories have led authorities to suspend if not stop dams and other construction projects with potential environmental consequences. He explained that the unwritten rules about what is and is not permitted in China may change without warning, and that pressure often comes from hidden sources to communicate “don’t do that again.”

Elsewhere in Asia, however, the environment is still seen as a minor concern. Rena Saeed Khan writes the weekly “Earthly Matters” column for Dawn, Pakistan’s largest English-language daily. She told a packed room in Bonn that terrorist bombings still make the front page in Pakistani papers, and that climate change or other environmental stories make page two at best–even though, she added, there is sometimes a connection between them. There is a nexus between militants and what Khan called the “timber mafia” in the nation’s northwest tribal areas. She also warned that in South Asia, like on several other continents, stories about competition over dwindling water supplies are looming.

In Haiti, it’s not the water but plastic water bottles that are adding to the country’s growing waste in the wake of the January earthquake, according to relief agency sources. Roosevelt Jean Francois is the leader of a community-minded journalist organization called CECOSIDA that promotes leadership development and training on reporting health, environmental and other matters. He noted that one yet untold effect of the relief efforts is the corruption, especially among local officials, over controlling distribution of foreign aid. Francois also noted that Haitian journalists covering any sensitive matter operate in an environment where reporters enjoy little protection against threats and violent reprisals.

Environmental reporters are more often silenced quietly through economic pressure, noted Jean François Julliard, secretary-general of Reporters Without Borders. The pressure may be so great on traditional journalists, noted Julliard, that bloggers may emerge as the chroniclers doing the best reporting. By then I had already underscored to the audience that RSF, the Paris-based press freedom watchdog, had issued a report on the myriad risks of environmental reporting worldwide.

The case of the young Egyptian blogger, Tamer Mabrouk, illustrated the point. He not only got fined for his online exposés, including documents and photographs of dumping by Trust Chemicals Company into Manzala Lake. He lost his job at the factory, too.

This blog is dedicated to colleague and friend Persephone Miel, a champion of press freedom, kindness, and humor.

‘Crude’ Filmmaker’s Raw Footage Subject to Subpoena

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Original story ran on the Committee to Protect Journalists’ blog.

A filmmaker’s raw footage is much like a photographer’s unedited images or a reporter’s notebooks—a private record of their reporting that is rarely disclosed to others. On Thursday, a federal judge in New York ruled that a private firm could subpoena the unedited footage used to make a news documentary. The reason? To help the company defend itself against a lawsuit.

In his ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Lewis A. Kaplan quoted an adage from 20th century Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis: “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.” The New York federal judge went on to write that allowing the firm to review the filmmaker’s outtakes “will contribute to the goal of seeing not only that justice is done, but that it appears to be done.”

The irony in the judge’s choice of language is as thick as crude. The raw footage from “Crude,” a documentary called “thorough and dispassionate,” by The New York Times, is now vulnerable to a subpoena by Chevron. “Crude” investigates alleged health and environmental degradation resulting from oil extraction by Texaco, now owned by Chevron, in Ecuador. The company is being sued by Ecuadorans for millions of dollars in damages in [Ecuador], and “Crude” is the documentary shot largely in Ecuador to tell their story.

What would the late Supreme Court Justice Brandeis think? He made his famous sunlight statement about the need to expose bankers and investors who controlled “money trusts” to stifle competition, and he later railed against not only powerful corporations but the lawyers and other members of the bar who worked to perpetuate their power.

“Instead of holding a position of independence, between the wealthy and the people, prepared to curb the excesses of either, able lawyers have, to a large extent, allowed themselves to become adjuncts of great corporations and have neglected the obligation to use their powers for the protection of the people. We hear much of the ‘corporation lawyer,’ and far too little of the ‘people’s lawyer,’” he said in a 1905 speech before the Harvard Ethical Society.

Judge Kaplan’s ruling this week means that the independent filmmaker Joe Berlinger who made “Crude,” may have to turn over more than 600 hours of footage to Chevron, which Forbes lists as the third largest U.S. corporation.

“We’re obviously very surprised at the court’s lack of sensitivity to the journalist’s privilege,” the filmmaker’s lawyer, Maura J. Wogan, told The New York Times. “The decision really threatens grave harm to documentary filmmakers and investigative reporters.”

FOIA Needs New Muscle Behind It, Not Just Promises

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Original story ran on the Committee to Protect Journalists blog.

These are busy days for Freedom of Information. On April 5, the watchdog Web site that knows no borders, WikiLeaks, posted a classified U.S. military video showing U.S. forces firing on Iraqi civilians, killing many, including two Reuters journalists, as well as wounding children. Two days later, the Pentagon posted a redacted U.S. military assessment of the same incident concluding that U.S. troops fired “in accordance with the law of armed conflict and rules of engagement.” The very same day President Obama hailed the scheduled release of a new Open Government Initiative by all Cabinet agencies to improve transparency and compliance with information requests.

Congress is frustrated with the lack of transparency, too. On April 15, the Senate Judiciary Committee sent a bill with bipartisan support to the full Senate for consideration. Sponsored by Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), the Faster FOIA or Freedom of Information Act 2010 would establish a new oversight commission to study why U.S. agency responses to information requests are often incomplete or delayed.

It’s about time. Until now, U.S. military commanders had largely covered up the July 2007 incident above in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad, telling the press that they were firing on insurgents, killing approximately a dozen people along with two journalists who got caught up in the crossfire. But the now-posted U.S. military video shows as many as two armed men among the group that was fired on, and both of the armed men, who may or may not have been insurgents, carrying their weapons over their shoulders and not firing at all; U.S. military helicopters firing on a wounded individual being rescued by other men with no weapons within reach or even sight of all three of them, which U.S. forces’ voices recorded on the video also confirm. CPJ sent a letter today to Defense Secretary Robert Gates pointing out that several experts on international humanitarian law are calling for investigations to determine whether U.S. forces complied with such law when they fired on unarmed, wounded men.

Moreover, over the past three years while U.S. military commanders concealed most of the information, officials at the Pentagon in Virginia and U.S. Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida also refused to release the video, which was taken from a U.S. Apache helicopter gunship, even though Reuters had long requested it along with other information through the U.S. Freedom of Information Act.

U.S. cable television networks only showed short clips, editing out the more graphic images and audio commentary by U.S. soldiers involved in the shooting to their U.S. audiences. But non-American networks from the BBC to Al-Jazeera broadcast the video to hundreds of millions of viewers in nations worldwide. Hmm? Perhaps the Vatican is not the only large institution these days in need of reviewing how it communicates and manages information. Obama’s plan is to create not only new avenues for faster compliance to information requests in nearly every U.S. agency, but to also establish a “FOIA Dashboard” or Freedom of Information Act “visual report card” at the Department of Justice to both promote transparency and monitor compliance across U.S. agencies.

Obama has made similar promises before, however, only to break them later. The very day after his inauguration he instructed U.S. agencies to “adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure” when handling FOIA requests. But instead, agencies only increased their use of possible legal exemptions to avoid replying to FOIA requests during Obama’s first year in office, according to a review of agencies by The Associated Press. Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, sought legislation to examine how U.S. agencies handle FOIA requests after the AP investigation.

Similarly, most of CPJ’s FOIA requests in recent years have either been denied or delayed, or somehow fallen into a bureaucratic black hole. One day in April 2003 in Baghdad, U.S. military forces separately fired airstrikes on the Baghdad bureaus of two critical Arabic-language satellite networks, Al-Jazeera based in Qatar, and Abu Dhabi TV based in the United Arab Emirates. The same day, a U.S. tank unit fired on the Palestine Hotel where many “unilateral” or journalists moving independently of U.S. forces were based. Three journalists were killed and four were wounded in the three attacks. CPJ filed FOIA requests to the Pentagon asking for more information about all three incidents.

The U.S. military eventually released its own detailed investigation looking into why a U.S. tank commander ordered the strike on the Palestine Hotel: The tanks were coming under increasingly close artillery fire and they feared that figures on the hotel roof with binoculars (who may or may not have been journalists) may have been directing the artillery fire; the report also repeated unsubstantiated claims that hostile gunfire was also coming from inside the hotel. By then CPJ had already completed its own comprehensive investigation, which concluded that with better U.S. military communication as well as command and control over targeting decisions this particular tragedy at the Palestine Hotel might have been avoided.

But the Pentagon has simply failed to provide any information at all concerning the two U.S. air strikes the same day on the Baghdad bureaus of two significant broadcast critics.

The U.S. military has also failed to respond to a CPJ FOIA request about another incident. Three weeks earlier, a camera crew from the British-based ITN television network disappeared while covering combat involving U.S. forces near Zubayr, Iraq; correspondent Terry Lloyd’s corpse was later found, but both Fred Nerac and Hussein Othman remain missing.

In total, no fewer than 16 journalists have died in incidents involving U.S. forces in Iraq, according to CPJ research. But the Pentagon has released comprehensive information in only two other attacks in which journalists were killed besides the incident involving the Palestine Hotel. One was the fatal shooting by a machine gunner atop a U.S. tank of Reuters cameraman Mazen Dana (who less than two years earlier had been awarded CPJ’s International Press Freedom Award for his work in his native West Bank and Gaza). Not unlike the scenario shown in the WikiLeaks video, in which U.S. soldiers clearly mistook at least one Reuters journalist with a camera for an insurgent armed with a rocket-propelled grenade, the machine gunner who shot and killed Dana also appears to have mistook the Palestinian cameraman, whom he later told U.S. military investigators had “dark skin and dark hair,” for an insurgent holding not a camera but a rocket-propelled grenade.

The U.S. military report on the Dana shooting, like the one on the Palestine Hotel tank firing, exonerated the U.S. soldiers involved. But the military report on the Dana shooting also recommended that the Pentagon review its own rules of engagement to try to avoid such tragic cases of misidentification in the future. “Recommend that [commanders] review [the] Rules Of Engagement against the current enemy threat in the Iraqi theater to make a formal assessment if modifications are necessary to the Rules Of Engagement,” reads the “Investigation Recommendations” of the 117-page U.S. military assessment.

That sounds a lot like the recommendations made by both CPJ and Human Rights Watch in a 2005 letter to then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. In fact, the whole point of pressing the Pentagon to release information is not necessarily to assign blame to any soldiers involved in such incidents, depending upon the circumstances. But to try and find common sense ways to see if such incidents—that everyone now agrees in hindsight are tragedies—could have been avoided. Or, as the U.S. military report on the Dana shooting succinctly puts it, to explore whether it might be possible to make “modifications to the Rules Of Engagement without compromising force protection.”

Another such case of tragic misidentification occurred at a U.S. military checkpoint in Baghdad in March 2004 when soldiers fired on a press vehicle killing two journalists from the Al-Arabiya satellite network based in the United Arab Emirates. The U.S. military investigation of this incident, however, failed to reconcile conflicting statements between civilian witnesses and U.S. soldiers. But the report is nonetheless valuable to help further a constructive discussion. The military completed its own investigation of this incident within 11 days of the fatal shooting, according to the report itself. CPJ filed a FOIA request to the Pentagon asking for information the same month. But the Pentagon inexplicably waited three years before finally releasing the report.

The Freedom of Information Act purports to provide “an important means through which the public can obtain information regarding the activities of Federal agencies” and requires Federal agencies to make their FOIA programs “citizen-centered and results-oriented.” But in practice the many legal loopholes in the law along with the process’ irregular as well as secret forms of oversight have left it largely up to individual administrations and their respective agencies to decide how responsive they wish to be to information requests. Obama’s nice, new initiative sure looks bright on the White House Web site. But it will need teeth and muscles if the new promise is to produce any better results.

Here’s food for thought: If the Pentagon had been more forthcoming, say, about the 2007 New Baghdad shooting long before WikiLeaks posted the military’s own embarrassing video of it for countless people to see, then the debate today would not be over the actions and words of the U.S. soldiers involved. Instead it would have been over how to best adjust the rules of engagement toward both saving civilian lives while still protecting U.S. troops. That’s hardly a radical or even idealistic notion. It’s exactly what the Pentagon’s own report on the Dana shooting recommended.

In Oakland, Progress in Bailey Murder Prosecution

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Original story ran on the Committee to Protect Journalists’ blog.

The murderers of journalists around the globe presume they won’t get caught. Unfortunately, they’re often right: Only one case in 10 results in any convictions; just one in 20 results in convictions of those who ordered the murder. For more than a year it seemed like the August 2007 slaying of U.S. journalist Chauncey Bailey might not result in the prosecution of all those involved, including the suspected mastermind. Now, however, due largely to the persistence of Bailey’s Bay Area colleagues, an indictment of suspects, including the alleged mastermind, may come soon.

The expected indictments are based in part on the ongoing grand jury testimony by one man who, for the past 20 months has been the only suspect charged with the murder. His statements to authorities have been reported by The San Francisco Chronicle as well as a group of journalists known as the Chauncey Bailey Project that was formed in the wake of the murder. Last week both outlets also reported that Oakland, California police authorities, including the lead detective on the case and two of his superiors, have come under administrative investigation.

The killers of journalists in many less developed nations often work in collusion with corrupt government officials, CPJ research has long shown. For more than a year irregularities in the Oakland police investigation into the murder of one of the Bay area’s most respected community journalists rivaled the botched or compromised murder investigations in nations from Mexico to Mozambique.

Take Sgt. Derwin Longmire, the homicide detective in the Bailey murder case. The Oakland Police Department assigned him to lead the investigation, even though his superiors knew the detective was closely associated with a man then suspected of multiple crimes, Yusuf Bey IV, and whom a grand jury is now considering indicting on charges of ordering the journalist’s murder.

“It’s unusual but not unethical,” then-Assistant Chief Howard Jordan told Anderson Cooper of CBS News’ “60 Minutes” in February 2008. In an interview today with CPJ, Jordan said he has reconsidered his position.

“The allegations as to Sgt. Longmire were not [then] available,” now-Acting Chief Jordan told CPJ. “I felt he was the best officer for the job,” he added. “I have changed my position on that.”

Sgt. Longmire and two of his superior officers, Lt. Ersie Joyner, the former head of the homicide unit, and Deputy Chief Jeff Loman are each under administrative investigation, Jordan told CPJ. All three officers face possible disciplinary action for their handling or supervision of the Bailey murder case.

Grand jury indictments are expected soon, and they may include Bey. In testimony before the grand jury this week, gunman Devaughndre Broussard said he committed the killing at the behest of Bey, his boss at an Oakland establishment called “Your Black Muslim Bakery,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

“Broussard,” Jordan told CPJ, “is affirming the things that we’ve suspected all along.”

Then why did it take more than 20 months to finally prepare a case against him? “We’ve said that Mr. Bey is a suspect,” Jordan said. “But we didn’t have enough information then to charge Mr. Bey.”

Jordan declined comment on other irregularities in the Oakland police investigation, many of which were brought to light by journalists reporting for the Chauncey Bailey Project.

Broussard was part of the kitchen crew of “Your Black Muslim Bakery,” an Oakland establishment that Bey, 23, inherited from his late father. The bakery’s ownership and staff have long been linked through felony convictions and press reports to crimes including extortion, fraud, car theft, sexual abuse of minors, assault, and murder. Bey was already wanted on various felony charges and was under police surveillance at the time of Bailey’s murder. Bailey was investigating the finances of the bakery at the time of his death.

This week, Broussard told the grand jury that Bey ordered him to take sole responsibility for the Bailey murder, according to Broussard’s attorney, La Rue Grim, who was quoted in the Chronicle. Broussard had previously confessed to the crime but said he had acted alone. Now Broussard is negotiating a plea agreement for his different roles in murdering the journalist and two other men, the Chauncey Bailey Project reported. The grand jury is weighing whether to indict Bey along with another young man associated with the bakery, Antoine Mackey, in Bailey’s murder. Bey’s attorney, Anne Beles, told the Chronicle that Bey had nothing to do with the murder. Mackey has yet to respond to news reports about his alleged involvement.

Chauncey Bailey had just been promoted to editor of the Post Newspaper Group, a consortium of African-American-owned weekly newspapers focusing on the Bay area’s black communities when he was shot dead one morning on the way to his office. Immediately after, police raided the bakery and arrested Bey and other suspects on unrelated charges of kidnapping and assault, including the torture of women. But police charged only Broussard in Bailey’s murder.

Sgt. Longmire then did something that, on the face of it, seems highly irregular. The homicide detective put the murder suspect, Broussard, in a closed interrogation room with his former boss, Bey, then incarcerated on other charges. Sgt. Longmire allowed the two suspects to speak to each other alone without recording their conversation.

The police action seems even odder in the face of other evidence uncovered by Bailey’s colleagues. The Chauncey Bailey Project obtained Bey’s cell phone records, reporting that they show that Bey made a series of calls to his bakery associates and others within minutes of Bailey’s murder. The project also reported that other police detectives investigating crimes prior to Bailey’s murder had placed a tracking device on Bey’s car, and that the device placed the car outside Bailey’s apartment building the night before his murder.

For more than a year, however, Oakland police charged only Broussard with the crime, suggesting that he murdered Bailey on his own. Only in response to a series of investigative reports by the Chauncey Bailey Project did the police finally admit, in November 2008, that they had suspected Bey of being involved in the murder “within the first 24 hours of our investigation.”

The evidence produced by the project and other Bay-area news outlets included a video of Bey speaking with other suspects associated with the bakery in a different interrogation room in a nearby police department. The video was recorded by the San Leandro Police Department just four days after Bailey’s murder. On it, Bey says he put the gun used to kill Bailey in his closet after the shooting. He mocks the fatal blast to the journalist’s head. He boasts that Longmire was protecting him from being charged, and that together he and Longmire decided to blame Broussard alone for the murder. Bey later said in an interview, according to the project, that he made up stories to mislead police in the interrogation room conversation captured on video.

Last November, in response to reporting by the project, both the city of Oakland and the state of California opened separate oversight investigations into the Oakland Police Department’s murder investigation. Longmire was also removed from the case and reassigned to patrol duty, according to recent news reports. The head of the homicide unit, Lt. Ersie Joyner, was also removed from the unit and put on patrol duty.

Acting Chief Jordan told CPJ that Lt. Joyner’s transfer from the homicide unit was “part of an overall transfer of lieutenants” within the department and that it had nothing to do with the Bailey murder investigation.

Longmire was put on paid leave last week while he is under administrative investigation, Jordan said. Deputy Chief Loman has been on paid leave since February on unrelated charges of sexual harassment.