InternationalLaw

Here is an interview with Richard Sambrook, Director of BBC Global News from October 5, 2005 at the We Media Conference. Sambrook talks about the future of journalism and the latest experiments with citizen journalism by BBC. He also discusses UK press coverage during the build-up to the war in Iraq, and some differences between the US and UK press.

The BBC is subsidized by the UK government, and therefore is a lot more free to experiment with participatory media when there isn't an explicit business model attached. As a result, the BBC is shaping up to be a worldwide leader in "We Media" innovation, and making news a more collaborative process.

(19:41 / 5.6 MB / Subscribe to Interview Audio)

Click here to listen to the MP3

A discussion of the Downing Street Memos has kicked up briefly in the New Media blogosphere after Jay Rosen's post on Sunday.

I thought I'd drop a few signposts from my daily blog surfing from this morning [my Internet connection went down delaying this post.]

All of these following posts have interesting discussions going on in their comment sections.

Dan Gillmor weighs in by excerpting the following passage from Russ Baker's Why Bush Went to War -- "Bush wanted a war so that he could build the political capital necessary to achieve his domestic agenda and become, in his mind, 'a great president."

Jeff Jarvis says that the Downing Street Memos aren't a big deal because everyone knows "the truth is that WMDs were never the real justification" and that this is all just "a scandal of bad PR."

Gillmor updates his post in response to Jarvis "What Jeff fails to note is that Congress would never have backed the war so fecklessly had the phony WMD issue been off the table..."

Jay Rosen's latest essay deals with why the Downing Street memos weren't originally covered by the US media, and quotes Josh Marshall as saying, "New stories have a 24 hour audition on the news stage, and if they don’t catch fire in that 24 hours, there’s no second chance."

But now with the Internet, the attention span of news editors have been extended by Internet Activism and political blogs. Rosen says that "when the second look was taken, some key editors judged themselves at fault" and concludes that this is "called winning on appeal."

There are many other stories that have broken over in Britain both before the war and after the war that have failed to break through the US media bubble, and deserve a second look and "appeal" to US editors and investigative journalists.

The US bureau chief of the Guardian of London Julian Borger describes the myopia of the US media in an interview with the Echo Chamber Project:

If a story breaks abroad, especially in Britain, and the American press haven't got there, the instinctive reaction is, "Well, Ah. Those Brits -- Who knows if it's true?" And there's almost more of a tendency to ignore the story rather than even to check it out. And I found that again and again. If a story breaks in Britain, there's almost the automatic reaction is "Ah. It's the British press. It's tabloid. It's sensational" -- which is justified in many, many instances. The tabloid press and some of the broadsheet press in Britain can be fairly wild, and a lot of unsubstantiated stories get out. But on top of that instinctive reaction of "Well, it must be sensational because it was in the British press" is a reluctance to check it out properly. Or an over-readiness to accept assurances from the institutions -- the White House, whatever -- that although -- "There's nothing to the story. It's just a British story. Ignore it." There's a lack of -- almost a lack of hunger when it comes to stories that question the Administration's position. Until, that is, the Administration was so weakened by the failure of any WMD to appear. There was almost a turning of tides sometime last year, in 2003, when you suddenly saw a greater readiness to go over these stories. It was like the herd changing direction. It was very visible.

The tide seems to be shifting again with the Downing Street Memos because they provide documentary evidence for theories about the justifications and true motivations for the war that have long been suspected but never confirmed by primary sources or documents.

Almost all of the focus in the US media up to this point has been on the question of WMD and the intelligence around it, but this is only half of the story of how the Bush Administration sold this war. The other half has to do with how they used the UN as a legal pretext for going war, and the documentary evidence has started to pour out of the UK press like a sieve.

Yesterday The London Times published yet another "Downing Street" memo -- legal advice that goes through all of the options that the United Nations could be used as a pretext for going to war in Iraq -- the Associated Press actually published the same document in PDF on Saturday.

What is clear is that the United Kingdom cares about the normative standards of International Law while the United States could care less about what the rest of the world thinks.

There are new revelations regarding the United States' controversial positions on International Law in this latest memo, but since there has never been a news peg for Iraq and International Law in the United States up to this point, then this latest memo will be inevitably be completely ignored by the US media.

But there are some revealing insights that confirm that the UK had many of the same doubts that academics have had about the legality of the war

What does this legal document transcribed by the The London Times and published in full by the Associated Press reveal about the United States and International Law?

I've been flooded this week with e-mail notices about the upcoming Downing Street Memo Congressional hearings being held tomorrow initiated by Representative John Conyers (D-MI).

I think it's interesting to watch how these progressive grassroots organizations have helped keep this issue alive through the Internet. I'll pass along all of these e-mails for you to read through down below.

I used to consume about 90 minutes of political news a day, but I've parsed that down to about 10 minutes of scanning headlines per day with the rest of my 30 minutes of spent surfing blogs covering the New Media movement.

I pick up the slack by scanning the titles of e-mails that I'm sent by a number e-mail lists (mostly progressive but a few conservative).

If more opposition Congressmen and Senators pick up on this, then this story could have legs -- especially if more documentary evidence or testimony turns up tomorrow. Otherwise this story will have a hard time breaking out of progressive anti-war circles and into the mainstream consciousness.

I personally think the Downing Street documents contain some pretty compelling circumstantial evidence that the Bush Administration never took the United Nations weapons inspection process seriously. It reinforces the hypothesis that the US only went through the UN because Tony Blair's demanded it as one of two conditions for being a part of the Coalition of the Willing -- (the other being a concrete plan for Israel & Palestine).

The UK takes International Law seriously, and the US political establishment and therefore media don't think it's all that important. But these latest memos have helped introduce these International Law issues into the US media bubble where they have been almost universally ignored leading up to the war and up to the present moment.

After the Congressional resolution passed in early October 2002, war was seen as inevitable by the US media and the inconsistencies in the Bush administration's arguments presented at the UN and the ones presented at home were largely overlooked by a myopic US media.

A more detailed overview is here and here are all of my blog postings tagged International Law.

Plenty more about the latest Downing Street developments can be found in the flood e-mails listed below...

I'm posting all of the pre-war talking points from White House that I aggregated back in August of 2004.

If journalists were paying attention, then they'd realize that the Bush Adminstration was trying to scare the hell out of the domestic population with a self-defense argument while trying to claim to the UN that we already the US already had prior authorization to attack Iraq.

These two PR campaigns were often conflicting with each other, and it wasn't a very difficult task to identify that the Bush Adminstration was hellbent on going to war regardless of whatever the UN said. I make a much more convincing argument in this Overview of the Bush Administration's PR campaign to sell the war in Iraq.

It's taken the Downing Street Memo to reintroduce this concept that Bush was hellbent on going to war in Iraq -- journalists need documentary proof to be able to report on these things.

I'm trying to apply more sophisticated analytical techniques to journalism that could be used to scrub the public record and form theories that contain sets of facts over time.

It's pretty evident that the Bush Administration was more interested in using the UN inspections process as a tripwire for war than they were with actually wanting to find and disarm the prohibited weapons.

I'd suggest reading through my overview of the Bush administration's PR campaign to sell the war in Iraq
Read through these daily talking points below.
And decide for yourself...

July 26th, 2004
Transcription by Volunteer Citizen Journalist Augustino Patti

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself and you’re role at George Washington.
SEAN MURPHY: I’m Sean Murphy, Professor of International Law at George Washington University. I’ve been here about six years.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Why don’t you go ahead and describe to me the consensus within the international legal community, when they look at the justifications that the U.S. was making, and what they think of that.
MURPHY: Well, like any community, I don’t think the academic community is monolithic in its view about the legality of invading Iraq, but I would say that the vast majority of scholars in the field of international law would say that the justification asserted by the United States and its allies for invading Iraq is not regarded as being adequate under international law. There is a minority group of academics who believe that the intervention -- invasion is permissible under international law, but I would say that it’s a small minority. And I would further say that it’s mostly based in the United States and is not found so much abroad.

I'm interested in trying to apply the principles of open source development to the process of producing The Echo Chamber documentary. So far, I've been using EchoChamberProject.com and its blog as the primary mediums to facilitate this integration.

I'd like share my thoughts for how the integration of the Internet and Filmmaking mediums could leverage the power of open source to find new methods to:

* Recruit volunteer help for post-production tasks
* Develop film content throughout the post-production process
* Recruit post-production expertise
* Market independent documentary films
* Create new economic competitive advantages through meaning creation
* Handle complexity and defy media logic
* Integrate objectivity and subjective judgments
* Reach new audiences

The Echo Chamber documentary interview with Sean Murphy is now posted online here.

Murphy describes himself as a moderate International Lawyer from George Washington University. His GWU bio shows his impressive credentials including representing the US government before the Hague and working for the State Department.

Murphy's background brings even more credibility to his following statement:

"I would say that the vast majority of scholars in the field of international law would say that the justification asserted by the United States and its allies for invading Iraq is not regarded as being adequate under international law."

Volunteer Citizen Journalist Nanci Miller has completed the Michael O'Hanlon transcription. O'Hanlon is a Defense Analyst for The Brookings Institute and frequent guest on NBC news and occassionally on the ABC and CBS nightly newscasts.

Here is one of the more prolific think tank scholars. He is a liberal hawk who was in favor of confronting Saddam. He says, "I had one of the more probably complex sets of views on Iraq, and so I was not always trying to maintain a single position."

He's got an interesting take on the war, and criticizes the Bush Administration for not trying harder to get a second resolution at the United Nations. But his critique comes from a political perspective and not a legal one. He is essentially still supportive of going to war and was upset that we couldn't get more allies to go along with this misadventure.

Thanks to wah at Quantum Philosophy for the plug over at the Daily Kos comments.

In my brief effort to start promoting the site a couple of weeks ago, I asked him to help spread the word.

I have received a couple of volunteer researchers from his plug including a "third-year measurement and statistics graduate student." Awesome.

Someone noticed my mention of lobbying journalists in the comments. I have alerted a number of investigative journalists that I interviewed about my timelines (UPDATE June 6, 2005: these timelines currently offline), but I'm not sure if anyone is using them yet.