Many journalists and political experts say the Abe government is trying to engineer a fundamental shift in the balance of power between his administration and the news media, using tactics to silence criticism that go beyond anything his predecessors tried and that have frustrated many journalists. These have included more aggressive complaints to the bosses of critical journalists and commentators like Mr. Koga, and more blatant retaliation against outlets that persist in faulting the administration.
.. Members of the Abe government have openly hinted at revoking the broadcasting licenses of overly critical networks under a law that requires that TV news reports not intentionally twist facts.
Mr. Abe’s efforts have had a chilling effect on coverage at a time when he is pushing ahead with a conservative agenda to dismantle the nation’s postwar pacifist consensus and put forth more positive portrayals of Japan’s World War II-era behavior.
.. Scholars describe a mood of fear spreading beyond the news media into the broader society, including in education where the Abe government is pressing textbook publishers to adhere more closely to the official line on topics like the 1937 Nanjing massacre and the use of so-called comfort women in wartime military brothels.
.. The reporters and their editors demanded that the program show them its scripts beforehand to ensure that coverage was “balanced,” something Hodo Station’s producer resisted.
.. Still, the governing party is keeping up the pressure, summoning TV Asahi executives two weeks ago to explain how Mr. Koga was allowed to make his accusations on live television.
China Is Said to Use Powerful New Weapon to Censor Internet
“The position of the Chinese government is that efforts to serve what it views as hostile content inside China’s borders is a hostile and provocative act that is a threat to its regime stability and ultimately its national security.”
The attacks also show the extent to which Beijing is willing to sacrifice other national goals, even economic ones, in the name of censorship.
Q. & A.: Ali Soufan: Torture and Censorship
You were involved in the same sequence of events—the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah. How does your memory of them differ from the story Rodriguez is telling?
In this area it’s not a question of memory but of factual record. There are now thousands of pages of declassified memos and reports that thoroughly rebut what Mr. Rodriguez and others are now claiming. For example, one of the successes of the E.I.T.s claimed in the now declassified memos is that after the program began in August, 2002, Abu Zubaydah provided intelligence that prevented José Padilla from detonating a dirty bomb on U.S. soil, and identified Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the mastermind of the September 11, 2001, attacks. Mr. Rodriguez has been repeating this claims.
The reality is that both of those pieces of intelligence were gained by my partner and me, with C.I.A. colleagues, in early April, 2002—months before the August, 2002, start of the E.I.T. program. But in the memos they were able to promote false facts, even altering dates, to make their claims work. In the so-called C.I.A. Effectiveness Memo, for example, it states that Mr. Padilla was arrested in May, 2003. In reality, he was arrested in May, 2002. But saying 2003 fits with the waterboarding narrative. When the Department of Justice asked Steven Bradbury, acting head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel and the author of the 2005 O.L.C. memo to reinstate E.I.T.s, why he didn’t check the facts, he replied, “It’s not my role, really, to do a factual investigation of that.”
What about the identification of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed?
The claim about waterboarding leading to unmasking of K.S.M. as the mastermind of the September 11, 2001, attacks is similarly false. We got that information in April, 2002, before the contractors hired by the C.I.A. Counterterrorism Center even arrived at the site. One by one, the successes claimed by E.I.T. proponents have been shown to be false.
.. The more accurate way to portray it is that it’s the professionals from the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. versus bureaucrats in Washington. The C.I.A. professionals in the field weren’t happy that outside contractors with no Al Qaeda or terrorism experience were put in charge and they were pushed out. One C.I.A. colleague even left the secret location where we questioning Abu Zubaydah before I did—in protest of what was happening. Mr. Rodriguez, too, was not an Al Qaeda or terrorism expert, as he himself writes.
.. Some of the redactions are blatantly ridiculous even without knowing what’s underneath, such as censoring a portion of a public exchange between myself and U.S. Senator Lindsay Graham that was broadcast live on national television and that is still available on a government Web site. The redactions also expose double standards: while I’m prevented from talking about certain things, they allow others to talk about the same things, even to talk about me, as long as it fits their narrative.
.. ironically, in the long run, they’ve done a great service to the truth: Because you only redact what is true, when people eventually get to read the book unredacted, they’ll know it contains the truth. Also, despite the redactions, it’s pretty obvious what happened and what people are trying to cover up—so the thinking public can work it out.
.. On the contrary, using torture only makes us less safe. Not only does it generate false leads and unreliable information, passing up chances to get actionable intelligence, it also helps terrorists recruit—as we saw with Abu Ghraib in Iraq. Under torture, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi gave the information they wanted to hear, which turned out to be false, and that information was used to justify the Iraq War—it even made it to Colin Powell’s speech at the U.N.
What Kind of Town Bans Books?
During my time there, we had a chaplain for every sports team, creationists on the teaching staff, and a mandatory daily recitation of the Texas State Pledge. But people who live in places like my home town are not necessarily ignorant. People who ban books do sometimes read them. The towns my high school serves, Highland Park and University Park (collectively known as the Park Cities) are the two most educated municipalities in Texas. The Dallas Morning News reported that more than a hundred concerned residents attended a school board meeting to debate the suspension, many armed with “books flagged with sticky notes” from which they argued.
.. Anyone who knows the Park Cities will understand that the suspension of these books wasn’t driven so much by provincialism as by conservatism. It makes sense that a concerted faction of people in my mostly white home town would want to foreclose conversations about race and empire (goodbye “Solomon,” goodbye “Diary,” goodbye “Siddhartha”). The community does not want to talk about sex, abortion, or prostitutes, since it is largely pro-life and pro-abstinence (goodbye “Glass Castle,” goodbye to all the Katherines, goodbye “Siddhartha,” again). You should probably skip exposing your children to an investigation of the structural conditions that drive poverty and homelessness if you’re living in a ten-million-dollar home, and there are many of those where I come from, and many families who head enormous oil and real-estate companies. The Dallas Morning News reported that parents were concerned about books containing “anti-capitalist sentiment,” which is, again, unsurprising: in the state-mandated curriculum for Texas public schools, exposure to what is called the free enterprise system begins in kindergarten.