British Journalist To Face Trial
in Afghanistan

Taliban threatens quick action for entering
country without documentation

New York, October 4, 2001--Journalists around the world were greatly alarmed by the Taliban's Friday, October 4, announcement that it will place British journalist Yvonne Ridley on trial for entering Afghanistan without proper authorization.

"She will be tried because she broke the laws of our land and entered the country without permission," Mullah Abdur Rahman Zahid, the Taliban's deputy foreign minister, told the Afghan Islamic Press (AIP). The AIP is a Pakistan-based news agency with close links to the Taliban.

Zahid remarked that officials must first "determine if she is really a journalist or [if] she had some other intentions," an obvious reference to Taliban accusations that Ridley may be a spy.

Zahid's statement follows ominous remarks made by the Taliban's information minister, Qudratullah Jamal, in an October 3 interview with the Reuters news agency, that Ridley "must have had ill intentions" in coming to Afghanistan.  "America and Britain talk of having their special forces in Afghanistan.  She could be one of those special forces," Jamal said.

Ridley, a reporter for London's Sunday Express newspaper, was arrested on September 28 by Taliban soldiers.  Also arrested were two male guides.  The seizures took place in a village near the eastern city of Jalalabad. Ridley reportedly was disguised underneath an all-encompassing burqa gown and was not carrying a passport or other travel documents.

On October 2, British high commissioner to Pakistan Hilary Nicholas Synnott met with the Taliban's ambassador to Pakistan, Abdul Salam Zaeef, to push for the reporter's release.   British officials have also provided the Taliban with documents establishing Ridley's credentials as a working journalist.  Nevertheless, Taliban officials in Kabul seem determined to investigate and try Ridley.

"The Taliban are effectively holding Yvonne Ridley hostage as Afghanistan prepares for a possible American attack," said Ann Cooper, director of the Committee to Protect Journalists.  "The Taliban have ample evidence of Ridley's journalistic credentials, and she has apologized for entering the country improperly. We call for her immediate and unconditional release."

Ridley, 41, is a veteran journalist who has reported from Cyprus, Syria, and Northern Ireland for various British publications, including The Sunday Times, The Observer, and The Independent. According to the Sunday Express, Ridley had failed several times to secure a visa to Afghanistan because the Taliban are currently barring entry to foreign correspondents.

Taliban officials have said that Ridley has been detained in a residential compound in Jalalabad and is being well treated, but British officials have not had direct contact with her.  Little is known about the condition of the guides, who were identified in some reports as Afghan nationals.

Under the laws of the ruling Taliban regime, espionage is punishable by death.

U.S. Feds "Bend"
First Amendment Rights

The State Department pressured the Voice of America to kill an interview
with a Taliban leader, according to the VOA

New York, September 27, 2001--Under mounting pressure from the U.S. Department of State, Voice of America (VOA) officials decided recently to delay the airing of a story containing parts of an exclusive interview with the leader of Afghanistan's Taliban movement, Mullah Mohammed Omar.

The federally funded broadcaster's decision came after Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage and senior National Security Council officials contacted members of VOA's board of governors to express their concern that broadcasting the interview would amount to providing a platform to terrorists, according to a story in The Washington Post. The VOA board then relayed the government's concerns to staff members.

The interview, conducted by VOA's Ed Warner, was scheduled to air on September 21. It contained excerpts from Warner's exclusive meeting with Omar and also quoted U.S. president George W. Bush's September 20 address to Congress.

Warner's report also featured commentary by John Esposito, director of the Center of Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University, and by a spokesman for the Northern Alliance, an Afghan military coalition that opposes the Taliban's extremist Muslim views and occupation of the capital city of Kabul.  The Alliance currently controls around 10 percent of the Afghan countryside.

VOA ultimately aired the piece on September 25, despite State Department objections.   When asked in a September 24 press briefing to explain the State Department's opposition to VOA airing the Omar interview, department spokesperson Richard Boucher said, "We didn't think that the American taxpayer, the Voice of America, should be broadcasting the voice of the Taliban."

VOA is an international multimedia broadcasting service funded by the U.S. government.   Since 1998, when it was removed from direct State Department control, VOA has operated under the oversight of a federally appointed board of governors, although the secretary of state or his designee still sits on the board.

News of the controversy prompted more than 100 VOA employees to send a letter to newspapers protesting that their work was being censored, according to an article in The New York Times.

The VOA report has been available since Tuesday, September 25, at www.voanews.com under the headline "Taliban Leader: God Promised to Protect Us."

American Freelancer in
Jail for Contempt

New York, August 7, 2001—For most of the time since mid-July 2001, a freelance U.S. journalist has been held in a Texas jail after refusing to turn over to federal authorities research materials about a high-profile murder.  In letters sent to U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, the American Society of Authors and Writers and other groups concerned with the federal government's erosion of Freedom of the Press have called for the release of freelance writer Vanessa Leggett.

ASAW's position is that no journalist should be jailed for carrying out his or her professional duties, a concept that has gained increasing global acceptance in recent years.  Today, countries tend to experience intense international pressure when they imprison journalists--often from journalistic sources within the United States.  This stigma has helped greatly reduce the number of journalists in jail around the world—from a high of 185 in 1996 to 81 at the end of 2000, the lowest figure ever recorded, according to the Committee for the Protection of Journalists, an active watchdog group that maintains a sweeping overview of the treatment of journalists globally.

In the entire Western Hemisphere, from Canada to Chile, only three journalists were in jail in July because of their work, according to CPJ researchers: José Orlando González Bridón and Bernardo Arévalo Padrón in Cuba, and Vanessa Leggett in the United States.

As a matter of strategy and policy, according to a spokesperson for the CPJ,  the committee concentrates its efforts on countries where journalists are most in need of international support and protection.  As a result, they do not systematically monitor press freedom violations in the United States.  CPJ only takes up a U.S. case when it involves a serious press freedom violation that is likely to have far-reaching effects on journalists here as well as abroad. Leggett's unjust incarceration is such a case.

An amici curiae brief was filed with the Appeals Court on July 30 by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the Radio-Television News Directors Association, and the Society of Professional Journalists.  The brief asks that the contempt order against Leggett be reversed.   Arguing that the impact of this case is "real and immediate," the brief asserts, "Reasonable journalists will fear that the use of similar subpoenas will allow prosecutors and civil litigants to use journalists as private investigators, thereby restricting the free flow of information to the public."

Local authorities investigating the suspected murder case gave some of Leggett's materials to a federal grand jury, but her problems began late last year when she refused to become a paid informant for the FBI.   She also refused to let them decide when she could publish her book.  The FBI responded with a subpoena, which FBI agent Cindy Rosenthal, wife of Chuck Rosenthal, the district attorney prosecuting the case, personally served on Vanessa Leggett.  The subpoena demanded that she turn over to the FBI every note she had had about her book in progress—and all copies of the notes.  In other words, she was supposed to surrender control of the book to the FBI, with her ability to continue writing dependent on whether the FBI ever decided to give her the notes back.  Now, she's in a federal detention center for contempt of court because she defied the subpoena.

Ironically, even though Leggett was co-editor (along with Paul Blackman and two others) of a book which has already been published by the FBI Academy, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, in a recent decision keeping Leggett in jail, sneered that she wasn't a real journalist anyway, because she doesn't have a contract for her forthcoming book. (Leggett's published volume is The Varieties of Homicide and Its Research: Proceedings of the 1999 Meeting of the Homicide Research Working Group, published in 2000 by the FBI Academy.)

Although neither the U.S. Code nor Texas have a specific immunity statute for journalists, the Fifth Circuit acknowledged that subpoenas to journalists must be quashed when there is abuse or harassment.  Not that the Fifth Circuit could see any evidence that the FBI was retaliating against Leggett for refusing to become an informant and to let the FBI take control of her book.

Leggett's prolonged incarceration--now approaching three months--sends a disturbing message to journalists in the United States and abroad.  Fewer journalists are incarcerated around the world today because of the opprobrium attached to governments that use jail, or the threat of jail, to suppress critical and oftentimes embarrassingly uncomplimentary reporting.  By detaining Vanessa Leggett, the U.S. government is effectively reducing the stigma associated with the jailing of journalists and broadcasting the belief that authoritarian governments are within their rights to arrest, detain, and incarcerate working journalists involved in the performance of their duties.  The result could well be a greatly diminished free press at the expense of escalating oppressive governments.

Columnist Dave Kopel, writing for National Review Online, summed up the bizarre case: Is Robert Angleton guilty of murder? We don't know for sure, but the United States Constitution says that the last word on that matter belongs to the Texas jury which acquitted him.  We do know that Vanessa Leggett, a writer who has done absolutely nothing wrong, may spend the next 18 months in a federal jail because she wouldn't become an informant and wouldn't let the FBI control her book.

"Attorney General Ashcroft, make the Department of Justice once more worthy of its name. Free Vanessa Leggett."

Going, Going, Done Gone

Proponents for the right to publish and sell the TheWind Done Gone, a parody of Margaret Mitchell's famous tale of life in the south, Gone with the Wind, won a major legal battle recently when the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals quickly vacated a ruling by a lower court issuing an injunction against publication.  In overturning the injunction, the Appeals Court ruled, "It is manifest that the entry of a preliminary injunction in this copyright case was an abuse of discretion in that it represents an unlawful prior restraint in violation of the First Amendment."   The higher court allowed the publication of The Wind Done Gone to continue, even as the infringement lawsuit continues through the legal system.

The judicial panel emphasized that, in order to grant an injunction, the party seeking it must show clearly (1) that there is a substantial likelihood that the party will prevail on the merits of the case; (2) that there is a substantial threat that the party will suffer irreparable injury if the injunction is not granted; (3) that the threatened injury to that party outweighs the threatened harm that the injunction might do to the defendant; and (4) that granting the preliminary injunction will not "disserve the public interest."

The suit and the injunction were brought by the Mitchell Trust, which owns the copyright to the book and its characters.  Traditionally, sequels, "requels," and parodies have a lucrative literary history, from works that re-write a story from a minor character's point of view (such as Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead) to works that tell the previously untold story of minor literary characters (such as Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys and Ahab's Wife by Sena Jeter Naslund).

Attorneys for the Mitchell Trust are asking the full 12-judge federal appellate court to rehear their motion and reinstate the injunction until the copyright claim is fully litigated.  In the meantime, The Wind Done Gone has been released to the public and has sold tens of thousands of copies worldwide.

NOTE: All material on this site  is copyright protected.  No portion of this material may be copied or reproduced, either electronically,  mechanically, or by any other means, for resale or distribution without the written consent of the author.  All copy has been dated and registered with The Author's Guild.  Copyright 2001 by D. J. Herda