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Idealists without
illusions
By Katherine Stapp
NEW YORK - When researchers from the
Center for Public Integrity decided to delve into
the arcane world of US government contracts in
Iraq and Afghanistan, they were met with the
bureaucratic equivalent of stony silence. Although
the deals were paid for with taxpayer money, the
Pentagon and the State Department fought tooth and
nail to avoid disclosing details. This was perhaps
not surprising, since it turned out that nearly
every one of the 10 largest contracts was awarded
to companies employing former high-ranking
government officials.
After filing 73
Freedom of Information Act requests and several
lawsuits, Center investigators also discovered
that nearly one-third of the members of the
influential Defense Policy Board, a Pentagon
advisory group, had ties to companies that earned
more than US$76 billion in defense contracts in
2001 and 2002.
"It's stunning to me, the
level of control and increasing secrecy," said
Charles Lewis, who stepped down as the
Washington-based Center's executive director last
month. "And there's no dissent on Capitol Hill.
The oversight mechanism is not working because
it's the same party."
In a new essay on
the decline of investigative reporting in the
United States titled "A Culture of Secrecy", Lewis
examines the increasingly "cozy" relationship
between the US news media and the officials and
institutions they cover, and the advent of a
"national security state" since the terrorist
attacks of September 11, 2001.
"What
concerns me is that the so-called mainstream media
[are] overly reliant on officialdom and not
independent outside the talking points," he said
in an Inter Press Service interview. "This means
that there is no dissonant information from
official sources to speak of. And when you cover
national security and intelligence, the ability to
report outside officialdom is 10 times harder.
"It's a mysterious and difficult world to
traverse," said Lewis, an award-winning
investigative journalist himself. "The best
reporting I see now is from these old warhorses
who have had the same sources for 20 or 30 years.
They have enough scar tissue from being spun or
outright lied to, and the public trusts them
because they stared into the abyss and survived,"
he said with a laugh.
Lewis's article is
one of a four-part series published by
the Center last week in which leading reporters
from four countries share compelling, first-person
accounts of their probes into state corruption.
"It helps reporters get new information on
the mechanisms to prevent abuse of power," said
Marianne Camerer, who organized the project.
"These scandals don't just come out of nowhere."
In other essays, Yevgenia Albots, a
respected freelance journalist and author in
Russia - where as many as 15 reporters have been
killed in recent years - describes the repressive
tactics used by President Vladimir Putin to
silence the private media.
Geoff Nyarota,
the former editor-in-chief of Zimbabwe's Daily
News, which fearlessly criticized the excesses of
the Robert Mugabe government (in power since
1980), relates a surreal encounter with a would-be
assassin and the man's change of heart after
exchanging pleasantries with Nyarota in an
elevator.
And in "The Spy Who Would Rule
Peru", Gustavo Gorriti tells the long, strange
tale of Vladimiro Montesinos, the seemingly
untouchable eminence grise behind president
Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000), who was driven into
exile when a bribery scam backfired and proved the
final straw for a fed-up Peruvian public.
Gorriti wrote his first expose on
Montesinos 22 years ago, and pursued his quarry
relentlessly, despite being thrown in jail and
later forced to flee to the United States. There
from the beginning, the journalist also played a
part in Montesinos' final disgrace, tipping off
the news media that the fugitive was sneaking back
into Peru from his hideout in Panama.
"Strangely enough, despite the fact that
[my] and Montesinos' family were close for two
generations, I never met him formally in person,"
Gorriti told IPS by e-mail from Peru. "After his
arrest, I tried to arrange an interview with him,
but the authorities refused their permission to do
so. I keep trying."
Gorriti firmly
believes that even though the former spymaster is
facing up to 30 years in prison for human-rights
abuses and arms and drug smuggling, "Montesinos is
not finished.
"He is fighting for his life
against a very weak democratic regime. He has
covert allies within the military, the police and,
most importantly, the political and business
sector. He also can count on his extortion
capability through the videos of people whose
complicity with him has not been hitherto
revealed."
Gorriti pointed to the example
of Ernesto Schutz, a businessman who controlled
Peru's powerful Channel 5 television station. When
Schutz refused to pay off Montesinos - after his
arrest - Montesinos made arrangements to reveal a
video in which Schutz is shown being bribed by
Montesinos with several bags of cash. Schutz
insists he is innocent.
On a more recent
occasion, Montesinos was filmed at his trial
dictating a cover page to the publisher of the
tabloid La Razon, Gorriti said.
Now the
executive editor of La Republica newspaper,
Gorriti lamented that "it is not easy to keep on
reporting on my own".
"Nevertheless, I
make sure that the newspaper covers energetically
all issues related to Montesinos and his mafia,"
he said, "and keep dreaming [about] going back to
do my own reporting."
(Inter Press
Service) |
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