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Kudos where it's due

Thursday, May 17, 2007

I know I spend a lot of time bemoaning poor-quality media work. So it’s good to write this week in appreciation of some excellent investigative reporting. The worst in government can bring out – sometimes at least – the best in journalism.

The latest edition of PBS’s program Frontline is the result of seven months’ probing work by correspondent and senior producer Hedrick Smith (pictured left) to reveal the vast extent of warrantless domestic wiretapping conducted by the National Security Agency – which turns out to be much bigger than anyone outside the NSA knew when it was first revealed by New York Times writer James Risen back in December 2005, in both his paper’s pages and his book “State of War”.

 

Smith’s sleuthing for Frontline rams home the fact that a combination of probably a dozen commercial, privatized spying efforts, plus no less than a couple of hundred government data-mining programs are now in operation. The earlier journalistic revelations forced President George W Bush to admit surveillance of “some” phone-calls and email traffic, which was “narrowly targeted” and limited to communication between known Al Qaeda operatives overseas and their contacts here in the US.

 

The White House and the Department of Justice, plus obedient media outfits like Fox News, soon spinningly relabeled the effort not the warrantless domestic spying initiative that it is, but the “Terrorist Surveillance Program” or TSP (which Smith jokes, when he’s speaking off his tight, coolly-written narration script, is oddly evocative of the teaspoon measure in baking recipes). In the documentary Smith expands his horizons of investigation from what he has called this “admitted program” to all the other “unadmitted programs”.  (His show was helped by appearing on the day former Deputy Attorney General James Comey revealed to a Senate committee how even the admitted program came close to not being renewed in 2004 because of some Justice Department officials’ convictions that it was unconstitutional.)

 

Appreciation of the spying’s widening arc began – as often – with a brave whistle-blower, Mark Klein, a retired AT&T employee. As THE MEDIA BEAT highlighted in April 2006, Klein revealed the existence of a secret “listening room” in the giant communication company’s San Francisco hub. Now, thanks to Klein and a whole slew of information technology experts coming forward, we know that the main instrument for this blanket spy coverage (in San Francisco and probably more than ten other centers around the country) is a system built by Narus Inc, a high-tech company based in (where else?) Mountain View, California – the home also of Google, Netscape and Verisign.  It includes on its board a former NSA Deputy Director, William Crowell.

 

The company’s super-devious device, which searches for keywords and/or any number of patterns in the passing of data, is called the Narus STA 6400 (the initials stand for “semantic traffic analyzer”) and it has the power to monitor a remarkable 10 billion bits of data per second – prompting uber-geek Bruce Ewert, writing for the Daily Kos, to say: “This is one damned powerful machine, one of the most powerful I’ve heard of in 25 years in IT”. And in its promotional material, the Narus company itself boasts, somewhat threateningly (and certainly with some verbal ugliness) that the system also has “unparalleled extensibility”.

 

It extended, in fact, to vacuuming up detailed information (including conversations recorded in the back of taxicabs, disturbingly enough) about 250,000 Americans who happened to visit Las Vegas over Christmas 2003. All of which, we needn't be surprised to learn, was to no avail in fighting terrorism.

 

But to return to Frontline's original work, and the "Best in Show" award I want to give – best quote that is. Hedrick Smith got from former CIA senior attorney Suzanne Spaulding this crisp statement: “It is inevitable that totally innocent Americans are going to be affected by these programs”.

 

 

 

SOME ACTUAL, IF STILL SMALL, RESULTS CAME this week, much further south in California, out of dogged reporting versus official cover-up operations.

 

The beaches just above San Diego can be idyllic – especially at St Malo – but the continual not-too-distant murmur of helicopter traffic doesn’t let you forget the presence of Camp Pendleton. The media have descended upon this taproot of the proud US Marine Corps ethic, as it has now become the sombre site of a military criminal hearing; the proceedings are to determine whether a Marine officer failed to investigate accusations of a deliberate massacre of civilians by his battalion members in Haditha, Iraq in November 2005. Other officers, including the battalion commander, Lt Col Jeffrey Chessani, are being accused of varying forms of complicity in trying to keep the matter secret.

 

It all came to light because Time magazine’s Tim McGirk was shown some video of men, women and children evidently mown down by gunfire inside a house, even though the Marines had claimed Haditha’s deaths were the result of an insurgents’ roadside bomb. (A bomb, incidentally, which did kill a young, much-admired lance-corporal in the battalion.)

 

The military authorities tried to get him to drop the story as a piece of Al Qaeda sympathizers’ propaganda, but McGirk’s suspicions became hardened when he heard the testimony of an 8 year-old girl – evidently uncoached and limited to only what she herself saw. That is, her 78-year old grandfather and grandmother being shot, by two marines standing in her living-room doorway.

 

McGirk, already a veteran overseas correspondent, can expect now to be remembered in company with noted massacre reporters like Ray Bonner and Alma Guillermoprieto in El Mozote, El Salvador, and Seymour Hersh in My Lai, Vietnam. It’s a sad but necessary - and virtuous - roll-call.

 

 

 

TODAY HAPPENS TO BE THE FORTY-FIFTH BIRTHDAY OF THAT DOGGED BBC correspondent, Alan Johnston (pictured above right). It is also his sixty-sixth day in captivity, being held somewhere (almost certainly) in the ever more violent and fractious Palestinian territory of Gaza. 

 

Vigils for him are being held today in London, Tehran, Moscow, Hong Kong and in the West Bank. Let's add our hopes, prayers and efforts for his release. The international online peition in his support has now topped 91,000 signatures.  It can be signed right here.