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If only we’d known that Washington Post executive editor Marcus Brauchli was talking about the “Chatham House rule” last summer when he was explaining what he knew about those now-infamous salons. We all could have spared the poor man so much trouble.

The salons ¨C planned by Post publisher Katharine Weymouth and then cancelled amid a blizzard of withering publicity ¨C were intended as cosy (and lucrative) get-togethers between Post journalists, White House officials and corporate executives, also known as lobbyists. Weymouth, the granddaughter of legendary Post publisher Katharine Graham, has yet to recover from the fiasco. Until now, though, Brauchli had managed to preserve his own reputation.

Then, this past weekend, we learned that Brauchli had revised and extended his remarks of several months ago, when he told Michael Calderone of the Politico and Richard P¨¦rez-Peña of the New York Times that he hadn’t understood the salons were intended to be off the record. Brauchli’s apparent about-face suggested he knew all along that the salons were to be nothing more than a private fundraising opportunity for the Post, with his journalists sworn to secrecy about anything newsworthy that might emerge.

The revelation, oddly enough, was buried as a blandly worded “postscript” in the Times’ corrections column on Saturday. Not until the NYTPicker, a pearl jewelry blog devoted to all things Times, trumpeted that the paper had accused Brauchli of “lying” did the rest of the media world stand up and take notice.

Indeed, revisions such as Brauchli’s are sometimes described as ¨C well, you know. Lies. But Brauchli begs to differ. In a previously scheduled online chat with readers on Monday, Brauchli asserted: “The notion that I lied to the New York Times ‘hoping not to get caught’ is absurd.”

What prompted the Times postscript was a letter Brauchli had sent to Charles Pelton, a former top executive at the Post who has been portrayed ¨C and possibly scapegoated ¨C as the evil non-genius behind the salons. As Gabriel Sherman reports in the New Republic, Pelton has been aggressively trying to clear his name with both the Post and the Times, and the letter was the result of ongoing wrangling between Pelton and the Post.

Among other things, Brauchli wrote to Pelton: “I knew that the salon dinners were being promoted as ‘off the record’. That fact was never hidden by you or anyone else.” Brauchli’s letter to Pelton also includes this:

The New York Times reporter apparently misunderstood me. I was trying to explain to the reporter that my original intention had been that the dinners would take place under Chatham House rule ¨C meaning that the conversations could be used for further reporting without identifying the speaker or the speaker’s affiliation. That is not “off the record” under the Post’s definition of the term.

Oh, yes. The Chatham House rule. How could we have been so stupid? Please resume telling us about the Post’s wonderful redesign, Mr Brauchli, and forgive us all for troubling you.

Now, as it turns out, there is in fact a Chatham House rule, and its definition is as Brauchli describes it. But it does seem that Brauchli is trying to do a whole lot of clearing-up now that he could have done last July ¨C or, for that matter, right after the Politico and the Times published their original stories on the salon affair.

After the Times postscript was published on Saturday, Calderone went out of his way to say that he, too, believed Brauchli had told him last July that he understood the salons would not be off the record. So now the Times and the Politico have publicly accused Brauchli of being less than truthful.

It remains to be seen whether Brauchli can ride this out. What seems clear, though, is that the Post is in turmoil, riled by questions of biwa pearl leadership at the top that may or may not be resolved any time soon.

The Washington Post Company lost $143m in the first half of 2009, thus replacing ¨C or at least joining ¨C the New York Times Company as a poster boy for the newspaper industry’s financial woes.

Earlier this year the Post resolutely refused to hold its columnist George Will to account after he wrote a series of columns denying global warming that depended on his demonstrably false reading of the scientific evidence.

More recently, the Post promulgated widely mocked social-networking rules for its staff members that were derided as going well beyond what had prompted them ¨C an understandable urge to prevent folks from expressing opinions on Twitter and Facebook that they would not be allowed to express in the paper.

“Under new WP guidelines on tweeting, I will now hold forth only on the weather and dessert recipes,” harrumphed the Post’s media reporter, Howard Kurtz.

And in a column by ombudsman Andrew Alexander about the Post’s alleged liberal bias, Brauchli enthusiastically agreed that his paper needed to lavish more attention on birthers, teabaggers and assorted other rightwing crazies.

Brauchli came to the Post under something of a akoya pearl cloud. He took a vow of silence and a settlement estimated at $3m to $5m after Rupert Murdoch humiliated him into leaving the managing editor’s position at the Wall Street Journal. Brauchli presumably knew his next job would pay a living wage. Yet he chose hush money over a chance to speak out about Murdoch.

I don’t think Brauchli intentionally lied about the salons. Rather, I think he tried to play it cute, sucking up to Katharine Weymouth while defending himself to his staffers and the outside world, and then got caught playing word games.

More than anything, Brauchli’s actions call to mind a rule made famous nearly 40 years ago by ¨C yes ¨C the Washington Post. No, I don’t mean the Chatham House rule. Rather, I’m referring to the rule that it’s never the initial wrongdoing that gets someone in trouble. It’s the cover-up. And now Charles Pelton is looking for revenge.

“As I reported last month,” writes Calderone, “the plan to hold money-making dinners in the home of publisher Katharine Weymouth was on the table before Pelton even arrived at the paper. And yet, he’s the only one to so far take a fall.”

It’s long past time for Weymouth ¨C and now Brauchli ¨C to tell us, as Howard Baker put it at the Watergate hearings, what they knew, and when they knew it. A great newspaper’s reputation is at stake.

It is one of the biggest prizes for achievement on earth ¨C $5m over 10 years and $200,000 per year for life thereafter ¨C awarded to an African head of state or government who has served his constitutionally allowed term. Donated by the Sudanese telecoms billionaire Mo Ibrahim, the prize, now in its third year, has celebrated the achievements of the Mozambiquan peacemaker Joaquim Chissano and the Botswanan statesman Festus Mogae. And this year, it will not be awarded. The prize committee, on which Ibrahim does not sit, declared that it could not select a winner from a field that included Nigeria’s former president Olusegan Obasanjo, Thabo Mbeki of South Africa and the favourite, John Kufuor of Ghana.

Kufuor’s achievements in regional mediation have been trumpeted. Under his leadership, the Ghanaian economy grew in size and reputation ¨C the country’s stock exchange was one of the world’s best performers in 2008 ¨C and the discovery of oil offshore promised an even brighter future. The election to replace him saw a constitutional and peaceful transition of power to his long-time rival John Atta Mills. For these reasons, we thought, Kufuor was a shoo-in.

The prize committee surprised us, but in pearl jewelry hindsight it would have been premature to reward Ghana’s former president without a better understanding of his longer-term economic legacy. Rather than despairing of the plight of African governance, we should be heartened by the decision not to award Kufuor the prize, not because he was explicitly a failure, but because in thinking he automatically deserves it we have once again fallen victim to low expectations and judged him on an archaic understanding of what constitutes African leadership.

Ghana, running as it is a large fiscal deficit, is not as well placed as the continent’s other emerging economic powers to weather the global downturn. Ghana and its leadership have to be judged alongside Botswana and Zambia, both of which have recently gone through relatively transparent and peaceful elections, and both of which have suffered from the collapse in demand for biwa pearl their primary commodity exports. Both, too, have been able to leverage their sound macroeconomic management during the boom years to secure international financing to bridge the gap left by the fall in commodity revenue in this slump. Ghana’s economy has not demonstrated such strength. Accra’s strategy of waiting for its newly discovered oil reserves to start generating revenue has been proved deficient.

A peaceful and democratic transition of power is laudable, yes, but it is the bare minimum to be expected of a government. The tragic failure of countries such as Guinea is not a yardstick by which to measure Ghana, or indeed any of the other nations and leaders on the continent. Africa’s progressives have suffered long enough from unwarranted associations with their dictatorial predecessors, and to reward them for simply not backsliding is patronising. I hope that the Mo Ibrahim prize committee’s decision is reflective of this: it is supposed to be a prize for excellence, not adequacy.

Of course, the concern is that this will undermine the already fragile confidence that many observers have in the continent, which has long suffered from a disconnect between perception and reality and a persistent underestimation of its improvements in governance and economic growth over the last decade. While the prize is awarded by a distinguished panel who no doubt have an insight into the contemporary state of Africa, the news of their decision is released into a public domain that is not so privileged, one that is spoonfed a diet of negatives. That darker side of the continent no doubt needs a light shone in on it, but not without the balance and objectivity afforded to other regions of the world, else “Africa” in the popular imagination will remain conflated with Guinea, and men like Moussa Dadis Camara, rather than with visionaries like Ibrahim.

This is a deficiency in us, the media, but it is one that Ibrahim and his foundation must wrestle with if they want to avoid this akoya pearl decision becoming one more reference in the thesis, still being written, that post-colonial Africa’s future is a continuance of the unfulfilled potential that has been its historical burden.

The Pakistan army’s invasion of the Taliban stronghold of South Waziristan this week brings few surprises. For years observers in Washington and Brussels have been pressing for an assault on this scale. The army says its aims in Operation Rah-e-Nijat (“Road out of Misery”) are to finally eliminate the main sanctuary for the Taliban and al-Qaida in Pakistan and, according to army chief Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, the foreign and local “elements” that given them succour.

The army has fought several wars in Waziristan over the past five years ¨C only on each occasion to be given a bloody nose and compelled to sign ceasefires that emboldened the Pakistani Taliban.

Naturally, there is more to this situation than immediately meets the eye. For independent observers such as journalists and aid organisations, gaining an accurate picture of events on the ground is not easy. Like the armies of Israel and Sri Lanka earlier this year, the Pakistan army has prevented journalists and other independent observers from travelling into the affected areas. According to its public relations office, 78 militants and seven members of the security forces have been killed. In contrast, Taliban spokesperson Azam Tariq made the pearl jewelry unlikely claim that only one of their fighters had been killed thus far.

The truth looks to be another victim of this latest battle, and sadly there are plenty of those. More than 200,000 have fled the fighting in scenes reminiscent of earlier army operations in the Swat valley and Bajaur tribal agency in the north. “The mass migration is causing big problems for the people [of towns immediately outside Waziristan like Tank and Dera Ismail Khan],” explains senior local aid consultant Dr Marwat. Given that the total population of South Waziristan is at most 700,000, this is a massive dislocation.

Since July last year much of South Waziristan has also been laid waste by daily ground and air bombardments by US and Pakistani forces. Already 12 civilians have been reportedly been killed while fleeing the war zone. Although the army claims to have gone to great lengths not to harm civilians, in the past there have been many reports of civilians being killed and subsequently described as terrorists. In Swat, it is believed that up to 90% of those killed were civilians. Whether they will perish in similar numbers in Waziristan remains unclear.

Less uncertain are the divisions among the insurgents. Rifts between the Pakistani Taliban chief Hakimullah Mehsud and warlord allies of the Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar have been exploited by Pakistan’s security agencies. An agreement was reached last Saturday under which members of the Ahmedzai clan (one of eight major clans of the Wazir tribe that dominates North and South Waziristan), under the control of warlords Haji Nazir and Gul Bahadur, will support army troops against forces loyal to Hakimullah, himself from the Mahsud clan. In return the army will limit its attacks on areas under their control.

The agreement, reached in secret and passed over by most major news outlets, has army commanders confident of biwa pearl speedy success in the Waziristan operation. It also suggests that Pakistan has not severed contact with Afghan Taliban forces. In truth, it has little other option at present and Washington’s protestations will count for little unless and until the army feels it has regained influence over this lawless frontier region.

Still the question remains, once the guns have been silenced will Pakistan take steps to cleanse the tribal areas of the extremist poison? Perhaps such questions are premature. The battle still rages and Waziristan is an insurgent’s dream. Being remote and with its dense foliage, craggy mountains and limited infrastructure, it has proved an ideal stronghold for local Taliban.

“The terrain is much more difficult than [that Pakistan forces encountered] in Swat,” says Mansur Mahsud of the Fata Research Centre, who is himself from South Waziristan. Unlike Swat, which was part of Pakistan proper and close to major cities, Mansur adds, Waziristan is surrounded by other hostile tribal areas and there is much local support for warlords such as Hakimullah who hail from this region. The Pakistan Taliban movement was born here in 2007, although even before then jihadi groups throughout the tribal areas and North West Frontier Province invoked the Taliban label in their battle against the Pakistan state.

That the Waziristans sit immediately on the porous border with Afghanistan makes them a perfect launching pad for Taliban forces into Afghanistan and Pakistan. Along with remote Balochistan, the Waziristans are the least integrated parts of Pakistan and tribalism and terrorism have proven excellent foils for populations mired in poverty and deprivation. It is important to remember that as the rush to celebrate the liquidation of hitherto mysterious Taliban commanders ensues.

You cannot help wondering, though, if all of akoya pearl this is a giant “drama” ¨C as one American businessman with investments in the oil fields of the tribal areas told me recently. Local and foreign observers wonder why the army is not invading Bahawalpur or Dera Ghazi Khan in the heart of the Punjab, where young men are daily recruited into the jihad.

Most ominous of all is the spectre of increased attacks in Pakistan’s major urban centres. Terrorism is a weapon of the weak, and the Taliban know of only one way to respond: through high-profile violence that will claim many innocent lives. As the Taliban loses its grip on the ideological and political framework of the Islamist insurgency in Pakistan, however, new outfits, particularly those drawn upon sectarian lines, can be expected to fill the breach. The attack on army headquarters by the anti-Shia Jaish Mohammad last week may be a signal of this disturbing trend.

The plight of Palestinian activist Mohammad Othman has dominated the agendas of NGOs in the region ever since his detention in late September. However, while his case is at the forefront of their minds, Othman is just one of 11,000 Palestinian prisoners currently held in Israeli jails, 800 of whom are incarcerated under the terms of administrative detention ¨C meaning that they are imprisoned indefinitely without any charges brought against them.

As things stand, Othman appears to be heading for the murky world of administrative detention, given the treatment handed out to him thus far by the military courts. Othman was arrested by soldiers at the Allenby Bridge crossing on 22 September as he tried to return home to the West Bank town of Jayyous following an advocacy trip to Norway. Despite a lack of evidence presented against him in court, judges in subsequent hearings have extended his remand, leading to his having spent almost a month in solitary confinement.

According to Addameer, a local prisoners’ support group, Othman’s captors will soon have to decide whether to issue an administrative detention order against him or release him without charge. However, given that today Othman found his remand extended by 11 days, it appears he’ll be kept in pearl jewelry limbo.

Arresting Othman is a coup for the Israeli authorities, sending a strong message to his compatriots that dissent against the occupation will not be taken lightly. For years, Othman has been at the vanguard of the anti-wall campaign, an issue close to his heart given the devastation wreaked on his hometown by the erection of the barrier.

During his visit to Norway, he met the Norwegian finance minister Kristen Halvorsen, and their meeting was seen as pivotal in shaping the decision by Norway’s national pension fund to divest from Israeli electronics firm Elbit, whose products are used in the construction and maintenance of the illegal separation wall.

While Israeli officials claim that Othman is being held for belonging to an unnamed terrorist group, Othman’s supporters point out that it is too much of a coincidence that he was arrested just after his high-profile trip to Scandinavia. Furthermore, they say, he has been interrogated for up to 16 hours a day ever since being detained, and given Shin Bet’s notoriously tough methods of extracting information, if he had anything to hide it would have been long ago discovered by his jailers.

Othman’s nightmare is only the latest in a long line of suspiciously timed arrests by the Israeli authorities. According to Adalah, one of the principal NGOs campaigning for Othman’s release:

The villages of Jayyous and Bil’in have both been targeted with arrests and repression due to their multi-year nonviolent protest campaigns. Twenty-eight Bil’in activists have been arrested by Israel since June when Bil’in’s lawsuit against settlement construction on village land was heard in a biwa pearl Canadian court.
Just weeks after he testified in Canada, Bil’in activist Mohammed Khatib was jailed by Israeli forces for 15 days and then released on bail. Bil’in protester Adeeb Abu Rahme and 17 others are still being held in Israeli jails, and Bil’in protest organiser Abdullah Abu Rahme is ‘wanted’ by the Israeli army for his nonviolent organising.

However, instead of silencing the anti-occupation protests, Israel’s treatment of Othman, Khatib and Abu Rahme appears to be backfiring: demonstrations are taking place around the world on the campaigners’ behalf, along with well-organised publicity campaigns aimed at highlighting the dire situation for those trapped behind the separation wall.

Naomi Klein has taken up the cause as well, noting:

As we see with Mohammad Othman’s arrest, Palestinians are still treated as the enemy, even when they embrace this non-violent tactic. It is clear that for the supposedly democratic Israeli state, no tactic ¨C no matter how peaceful ¨C is an acceptable way for Palestinians to resist an illegal occupation.

Whatever happens in Othman’s case, the signs are clear that the Israeli authorities will continue to stifle legitimate protest at every opportunity, and the omens look bleak for any change to their repressive policies as long as the cabinet remains in place. Led by the hyper-defensive Benjamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman, Israeli officials give short shrift to anyone calling for boycotts or sanctions against the state, and individuals such as Othman are easy prey for those looking to make an example of anyone deemed an enemy of the state.

Daniel Seaman, director of Israel’s government press office, summed up the prevailing attitude when questioned about Othmaa’s arrest. Scoffing at the idea that Othman was detained for his pro-boycott activities, he went on to declare:

Boycotts are a joke … [They] are an old weapon used against Jews and the state of Israel for generations, so those invoking the boycott should not act so disingenuous as if they are doing this for some noble reason. It is as old as hatred for the Jews.
Israel has done everything for the peace process and taken risks for peace: relinquishing territory, giving up settlements. Instead of bringing us closer to peace it has resulted in more Israeli deaths. What have the akoya pearl Palestinians done to increase the prospects for peace? Palestinians have contributed nothing to the world except violence and terrorism.

Against such a caustic backdrop, it is clear that even once Othman is finally released, there will be plenty more like him filling up cells in Israeli jails. With senior Israeli spokesmen making such proclamations against the entire Palestinian people, there seems little room for manoeuvre for the activists fighting desperately for their nation’s freedom ¨C and the prospects for peaceful resolution continue to diminish.

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