Beware anonymous sources behind latest ‘cyberwarfare’ scares

So the big news now is that the West is facing a major new threat – cyberwarfare from China. I’m concerned. The newspapers are carrying prominent, lengthy articles about Chinese hackers (“cyberwarriors”), some from the People’s Liberation Army, attacking computer networks of British and German government departments. These latest disclosures come after reports that the Chinese military had hacked into the Pentagon military computer network in June.

Predictably the Chinese authorities have been quick to deny all the allegations. Equally predictably, these denials are swiftly dismissed in the news reports. Coverage by Clifford Coonan, in a double page spread in the Independent of 6 September 2007, is typical. The Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman’s comments (“China and the US are now devoted to constructive relations and co-operation…”) are buried in paragraph 25. Immediately afterwards, undaunted, Coonan returns to his main theme of China’s growing cyberwarfare threat. “In 2003, a cyber espionage ring code-named Titan Rain by US investigators was tracked to Guangdong province after a network break-in at Lockheed Martin.”

Equally worrying is the way in which so many of these features are dominated by anonymous sources. We know, for instance, how anonymous “intelligence”, “Whitehall”, “defence ministry” sources were used to promote the lies about those imaginary Weapons of Mass Destruction in the lead-up to the criminal US/UK assault on Iraq in 2003 and so have become highly suspicious whenever they reappear. But take a look at Coonan’s double-page spread. In 32 paragraphs, there is not one named Western source. Instead, we have authoritative statements from sources such as “one security expert who did not wish to be named”, an “analyst”, “computer security experts”, “a security analyst” and speculating “webheads”.

Michael Evans, Defence Editor, in The Times of 6 September, under the headline “China ‘tops list’ of cyber-hackers seeking UK government secrets”, quotes simply “Whitehall” sources. And he reports: “MI5 has told the Government that at least 20 foreign intelligence services were operating some degree against British interests and that China and Russia were of greatest concern.”

The previous day, Bernhard Warner, former Reuters’ internet correspondent, built a 10-paragraph feature in The Times on “the ongoing digital struggle between China and the West” around quotes from a single source, Roberto Preatoni. But take a look at Wikipedia on Mr Preatoni. In a brief entry, he is described, strangely, as “class 1967” and co-author “with a mysterious person going by the handle of Evil Angelica (named after the infamous web-defacer) of the hacker comics Hero-Z”. Certainly Wikipedia needs to be always handled critically – but surely there are more authoritative sources available on such a serious issue?

A Guardian feature on China’s “informationised army” by Ed Pilkington and Bobbie Johnson, on 5 September, relies in its opening paragraphs on reports in the Financial Times, Der Spiegel and on un-named “internet security experts”. Quotes towards the end come from Sami Saydjari, “who worked as a Pentagon cyber expert for 13 years and now runs a private company, Cyber Defence Agency” and Jody Westby, of “CyLab based at Carnegie Mellon University”. But these sources don’t supply any new information drawn from any original research; they merely rhetorically support the underlying theme of the feature.

A report in the Daily Mail of 5 September similarly relies almost entirely on anonymous sources. Just one named source, Alex Neill, “an expert on the Chinese military and head of the Asia Security Programme at the Royal United Services Institute” is quoted as saying cyberattacks had been emanating from China for four years. The same source is quoted in Richard Norton-Taylor’s front page splash on “Titan Rain” in the same day’s Guardian.
So, folks, if these “cyberterrorist” scare stories proliferate, let’s see if anonymous (and hence rather dodgy) quotes continue to dominate the coverage. Are the sources transmitting information – or disinformation?

• Richard Keeble has just co-edited, with Sarah Maltby, Communicating War: Memory, Media and Military (Arima), a collection of essays on the media’s handling of war and terrorism. And with Sharon Wheeler he has also just co-edited The Journalistic Imagination: Literary Journalists from Defoe to Capote and Carter (Routledge).

Human rights abuses ignored as Blair flits across Africa on his ‘glory’ tour

May 31, 2007

Interesting to see how Fleet Street’s coverage of dictators always shifts when they move from being Britain’s ‘enemies’ to ‘friends’ (or vice versa). Remember how Saddam Hussein, former President of Iraq, was fêted during the 1980s in Fleet Street – just as the West backed his country in its war with Iran – but then was suddenly transformed into a global monster in 1990, particularly following the invasion of Kuwait in August of that year.

Now as out-going PM Tony Blair travels Africa shaking the fists of the assembled big-wigs in Libya and Sierra Leone, the appalling human rights abuses (both past and present) in these countries are suddenly marginalised in Fleet Street.

Let’s take as an example President Mu’ammar al-Gaddafi, of Libya. He was demonised as ‘mad dog’ by President Reagan for daring to challenge the United States in the 1970s and ‘80s. Gaddafi’s expansionist ambitions in Chad, lying to the south of Libya and with substantial oil reserves, were of particular concern to Washington, Paris and London. Thus the eleven-and-a-half minute attack by US jets on 14 April 1986 on Tripoli and Benghazi represented a deliberate attempt to assassinate the head of a foreign state. The first bomb to drop fell on Gaddafi’s home. Hana, his adopted daughter aged 15 months, was killed; his eight other children and wife Safiya were all hospitalised, some with serious injuries. The president escaped.

Reports of US military action against Libya disappeared from the media after the 1986 assault. But away from the glare of publicity, the CIA launched its most extensive effort yet to spark an anti-Gaddafi coup. A secret army was recruited from among the many Libyans captured in border battles with Chad during the 1980s. And as concerns grew in M16 that Gaddafi was aiming to develop chemical weapons, Britain funded various opposition groups in Libya. In 1996, as former intelligence official David Shayler revealed, an MI6 plot was hatched to assassinate Gaddafi in a car bomb attack. It failed. Significantly, at his trial in November 2003 for leaking ‘official secrets’, Shayler was denied the right (under the European Convention of Human Rights) to speak out about the 1996 anti-Gaddafi plot. Since it is obvious there are a lot of shady secrets from the years of the dirty, anti-Gaddafi war to conceal, such a decision by the court must have come as a relief to the government.

Recently, relations between the US, UK and Libya have thawed, with Gaddafi pledging support for the “war against terrorism” and agreeing to pay compensation to the victims of the 1988 Flight 103 Lockerbie bombing, for which a Libyan intelligence agent was jailed. And thus, as Blair travels Africa meeting his new-found friends, no mention of the appalling attempts at “regime change” in Libya in 1986 and 1996 appears in Fleet Street’s coverage.

Also missing from the coverage are reports of the appalling human rights abuses in Libya. Remember Robin Cook’s much heralded “ethical foreign policy” in which concerns for human rights were supposedly prioritised? The policy is clearly dead and buried. According to Amnesty International, while acknowledging a few recent human rights improvements in Libya, the overall situation remains bleak. AI’s newly published annual report comments: “Law enforcement officials resorted to excessive use of force, killing at least 12 demonstrators while breaking up a protest and one detainee during a prison disturbance.” It continues: “Freedom of expression and association remained severely restricted. Several Libyans suspected of political activism abroad were arrested or otherwise intimidated when they returned to the country. Five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor were sentenced to death by firing squad for a second time. There were continuing concerns about the treatment of migrants, asylum seekers and refugees. No progress was made towards establishing the fate or whereabouts of victims of enforced disappearances in previous years.”

Similarly Human Rights Watch comments on Libya: “The government still restricts freedom of expression and bans political parties and independent organisations. It continues to imprison individuals for criticising Libya’s political system, the government, or its leader. Due process violations and torture remain concerns as do disappearances unresolved from past years.”

Little mention of this in Fleet Street. Reporters were more concerned to hail BP’s return to Libya – with the company granted the right to explore for gas in a deal worth $900 (£450) – and Gaddafi’s decision to buy British missiles and air defence systems in a new military co-operation agreement.

Then in Sierra Leone, Blair was pictured smiling again as he was ‘made an honorary chief by a grateful African nation’, as the Guardian reported. Britain’s military intervention in Sierra Leone in 2000 is universally applauded on Fleet Street as helping to bring peace to a war-ravaged country. The Guardian continued: “The British intervention is seen as both a decisive moment in the restoration of democracy in Sierra Leone and the high water mark of Tony Blair’s interventionist foreign policy.” Likewise, the Independent reported on May 31:

“For Britain, the Sierra Leone intervention was a demonstration of that now long-forgotten concept, the ethical foreign policy. It was also the fulfilment of a Blairite African fantasy, born out of his father Leo's memories of visiting Fourah Bay College several times in 1960 to lecture in law and mark papers. On a previous visit to Lungi on 10 February 2002, he recalled: ‘My father always told me what friendly people the Sierra Leoneans are.’ Yesterday, he again recalled his father, but also elevated Britain's role in Sierra Leone to the rank of an example for others to follow.”

Mark Curtis, in his book Unpeople: Britain’s Secret Human Rights Abuses (Vintage, 2004) seriously challenges the official story on Sierra Leone. He suggests that the unilateral intervention (ignoring the UN) in May 2000 was undertaken more as an attempt to demonstrate Britain’s “great power status” and influence in West Africa than out of any concern for human rights. As Curtis comments: “If Britain had been serious about human rights, perhaps it might not have exported 7,500 rifles to Sierra Leone as part of a £10 million package in 1999.

The country was already awash with weapons, whose availability contributed to the phenomenon of child soldiers. If Britain were serious about human rights now, perhaps it would try to weed out from, rather than absorb into, the reconstituted army it is currently training those past human rights abusers.”

The current reports by both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch on Sierra Leone are damning. HRW comments: “Since the end of Sierra Leone’s brutal armed conflict in 2002, few improvements have been made in the dynamics that contributed to the emergence of the conflict in 1991 – rampant corruption, gross financial mismanagement, inadequate distribution of the country’s natural resources and weak rule of law.“

AI is equally bleak: there has been little progress in strengthening the justice system or in reforming laws that discriminate against women. Several suspected political opponents were recently arrested and tried. Sierra Leone remained one of the poorest countries in the world with 70 per cent of the population living on less than US$1 a day and high illiteracy rates. Rates of mortality and disease were at crisis levels due to the inadequate health infrastructure.

A report in The Times by Africa correspondent Jonathan Clayton highlighted these appalling statistics but added: “Nevertheless, the country is at peace and, though corruption is endemic, there are signs of a mini economic boom.” In contrast, and more realistically, HRW comments: “The government’s failure to address crushing poverty despite massive international aid and alarmingly high unemployment rates among youth, render Sierra Leone vulnerable to future instability.”


Richard Lance Keeble is Professor of Journalism at the University of Lincoln. His two latest co-edited books Communicating War: Memory, Media and Military (Abramis) and The Journalistic Imagination: Literary Journalists from Defoe to Capote and Carter (Routledge) are to be published shortly.

Frontline: a journal carrying a serious critique of US/UK militarism

And so to New Delhi – to interview Indian journalists hoping to join a British Council-sponsored programme we are running at the University of Lincoln next term. The visit gives me the opportunity to catch up on India’s flourishing leftist print media.

For instance, Frontline, edited by N. Ram, has maintained a consistently rigorous critique of US/UK militarism for many years and is always worth a read. In the current issue, John Cherian examines the Bush administration’s recent military adventures in Africa, highlighting the announcement in February of the creation of a US military command for Africa, “Africacom”.

This comes soon after the American-backed Ethiopian invasion of Somalia. As Cherian reports: “There are credible reports of US troops participating in special operations inside Somalia after a gap of more than a decade. The Americans provided the Ethiopian army with satellite pictures of Somali militia positions, and American planes bombed parts of southern Somalia. Seventy civilians were killed and more than a hundred wounded. More than 1,500 American troops have been based in nearby Djibouti since 2002. They played a key role in the planning and execution of the invasion of Somalia.” And significantly last year, Bush announced plans to expand the Camp Lemonier base in Djibouti from 88 acres to over 600 acres.

Also according to Cherian, the US is backing the secessionist movements in southern Sudan. “The subterfuge of ‘humanitarian intervention’ could be resorted to in the ongoing bid for regime change. The American preoccupation with Darfur is a case in point. Darfur, which is the size of France, is known to have vast oil and gas reserves…Neighbouring Chad is already exporting huge quantities of oil to the West. The US is also unhappy that the oil from southern Sudan is flowing to China, India and other emerging nations.”

The future importance of West African oil reserves to the US cannot be under-estimated. As Cherian reports: “Senior American officials have expressed the hope that the Gulf of Guinea on the West African coast would be able to meet a quarter of the US’s oil needs within a decade.”

America already supplies more than $1 billion worth of military equipment to Egypt every year. US troops help train anti-terrorism forces in Algeria, Chad, Kenya, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda while the US has spent over $500 million on the Trans-Sahel Counter-Terrorism Initiative. And as the US expands its ring of permanent military bases on the continent, plans are being developed to set up a naval base on the small West African island state of Sao Tome. Cherian comments: “Sao Tome, along with Nigeria, controls huge off-shore oil reserves. Washington installed a friendly ruler in Sao Tome after a stage-managed coup in 2002.”

Elsewhere in the same edition, Aijad Ahmad examines the mass revolts against imperialism and neo-liberalism in Latin America and argues that “for the first time since its rise as a superpower the US is facing a serious threat to its hegemony”. And Vladimir Radyudin, in Moscow, argues that Russia’s geopolitical resurgence is causing major shifts in the international balance of power. He reports on the formation of the Gas Exporting Countries Forum in Doha, Qatar, on April 9 uniting Russia, Iran and Qatar. “The idea of a gas OPEC has rattled the US and Europe as it would shift the alignment of forces in the energy markets and leave them out in the cold.”

It’s hard to find such well-researched, incisive reporting of American militarism in the UK print market. So why not check out Frontline at www.frontline.in?