Andrew Mitrovica (“Hear No Evil, Write No Lies,” January) has done a superb job of laying bare the discreditable role of certain reporters and news organizations (especially the CanWest conglomerate) in acting as willing tools of those elements within the rcmp who attempted to cover up their bad behaviour by smearing Maher Arar’s reputation.
Particularly odious are the self-congratulatory accolades much of the media has accorded Juliet O’Neill of the Ottawa Citizen as a martyred heroine of the “free press.” The heavy-handed rcmp raid on her house had the unintended effect of precipitating the O’Connor inquiry (the Paul Martin government knew that once the media is on the receiving end of state security actions, all political hell breaks loose). But Ms. O’Neill is no heroine, as Mitrovica rightly points out. She was a dupe, and she’s never shown any glimmer of recognition of the hurt her actions caused an innocent man. Instead, she has invoked her “duty” to protect her sources, winning unjustified praise for her “courage.”
From the standpoint of journalistic ethics, one might well ask if the honourable thing would not be for O’Neill to reveal her sources, who used her as a tool of disinformation. She chooses not to do so and has even won a court decision declaring the parts of the law used in the raid unconstitutional. The law may have been flawed and the raid ill-advised, to say the least, but the ethical issue remains unresolved.
The larger issue raised by Mitrovica’s article has to do with the quality of reporting on the “war on terror,” so crucially dependent on information jealously guarded by state security agencies. The lesson of the Arar affair is to beware Greeks bearing gifts. The promise of a scoop based on exclusive leaks from within the state may be very tempting indeed to reporters, but they should treat these with extreme skepticism lest they become pawns in games played by those who control the secrets.
The spectre haunting the press today is that of the US media rolling over for the Bush administration’s “war on terror” and especially its invasion of Iraq. Reporter Judith Miller went to prison for refusing to give up her source in a grand jury investigation into the leak that outed cia agent Valerie Plame. For a time, Miller gained a reputation as a martyr for the free press, but when she finally yielded the name and was released, the New York Times dumped her. Miller was the ultimate embedded reporter, and her “retirement” from the Times, along with the public apology the paper issued for its complicity in perpetuating official lies, should be an object lesson for the media in Canada. As should the Arar affair, which required an official inquiry to reveal a sorry truth that much of the media had done nothing to uncover and much to obfuscate.
Reg Whitaker
Policy review advisory panel member for the Arar inquiry
Victoria, BC
Facts were hard to come by in the Arar case. As a reporter who did some of the early spadework, I can speak first-hand of the difficulties involved. Maher Arar was in a Syrian jail, and the details of his case were in a secret file. Any reporter who has ever covered the police or political beat knows how you get access to that kind of material: by cultivating relationships with the officials who guard it. It’s a Faustian bargain. You get information tidbits that serve the interests of those officials in exchange for scoops that get you on the front page.
Arar was a victim of that ugly process, and I agree with Mitrovica that the case produced some journalistic travesties. But the real villains in the Arar saga are the officials in Ottawa and Washington who engineered Arar’s fate, not the reporters who chronicled it. The press hacks (including myself) covered Arar’s case with varying degrees of skill and skepticism. All of us wanted to get to the bottom of the Arar case. None of us did.
There is a self-correcting quality to a narrative like Arar’s, and the pendulum has swung: Arar is no longer a suspected terrorist. Instead, he has emerged as something of a Mandela figure. The head of the rcmp has gone down in flames. The findings of the Arar commission have been covered in relentless detail, and Arar has been handed the national press megaphone to have his say.
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