What U.S.-Trained Forces in Indonesia Do to Terror Suspect

Islamic militant commander Mustofa, alias Abu Tholut, leaves the police headquarters in Solo as he is transferred to Jakarta December 14, 2010. Indonesia arrested Tholut in Kudus, Central Java province, for alleged involvement in paramilitary training in Southeast Asia, a move that will reduce the threat of terror attacks in Southeast Asias largest economy

Cambridge (News Today) - Governments around the world still cling to secrets and, despite citizen journalism or WikiLeaks document dumps, the mainstream media play a critical role in ferreting out that information and giving it context, the top Associated Press editor said Thursday.

Kathleen Carroll, executive editor of the world’s largest news cooperative, said AP reporters have used 1,500 state and federal public records requests each of the past two years to obtain facts such as how many airliners had struck birds in the aftermath of the US Airways crash-landing in the Hudson River.

AP reporters around the globe also hand-counted nearly 550 new Israeli settlements; pored through court records to determine no suspect has been convicted in any of the 20 worst Pakistani terrorist attacks during the past three years; and used legwork and contacts to glean that one terror suspect was killed for every four captured by U.S.-trained forces in Indonesia.

“It turns out that reporting is hard. It’s sometime boring and repetitive. Sometimes people are mean to you, and they won’t give you what you’re ask for, and they encourage you to go away,” Carroll told an audience at the Harvard University Nieman Foundation for Journalism.

“So, the increasingly lonely task of ferreting out secrets continues to fall primarily to journalists, like the media organizations represented here, and to a few hardy folks who are applying good journalistic principles to their own self-publishing,” she said. Carroll said she thinks the U.S. government and others will use the WikiLeaks release of State Department cables and American military communications “as reason for secrecy for many years to come.”

She also said a third-party told the AP that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange decided not to give the cooperative prepublication access to the cables because the global organization is based in the United States. Ultimately, they were given to The Guardian in Britain — which shared them with The New York Times — as well as Der Spiegel in Germany, Le Monde in France and El Pais in Spain.

Carroll said the AP would not have agreed to some prepublication restrictions, such as limits on where the cables were held or who could see them, “but when they became available, we went to work with them.”

Source : kompas

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