Antony Loewenstein

In a time of war, great journalists are rare. Ghaith Abdul-Ahad is a truly unique reporter.

His recent dispatches from deep inside Yemen, including Al-Qaeda territory, were remarkable.

Now he’s inside Syria, alongside rebel forces (his photos are here). Read him to understand what is happening inside a civil war:

The column of eight rebel fighters picked their way along the street in Deir el-Zour at sunset, moving carefully through the debris of crushed glass and concrete, keeping their heads low and backs bent under the weight of the guns and rockets they carried.

They worked their way along the cratered road, past buildings chipped with multiple bullet holes and apartments and shops that had spilled out their contents on to the warm tarmac: burned mattresses, sofas, a fridge.

Nearby, mortars and shells were pounding out a rhythm. The men stopped in front of a collapsed building whose remaining walls were black with soot. There was a stench of rotten bodies. “We lost three men here two days ago,” said the commander. He pointed at three dark puddles of congealed blood. “They lay here next to each other.”

One fighter picked up a melted black flipflop. Another picked out the charred remains of a man’s robe. He sniffed it. “This belonged to Abu Qutada,” he said. “This is the smell of a martyr.” He tucked the stinking fabric into his bag.

The eight men moved off, darting across the burned and newly named Freedom Square in the centre of the eastern Syrian city, zigzagging through the arcades that once housed shops selling gold, spices and electrical goods, but now home to packs of dogs half-crazed by the shelling. In Deir el-Zour, the battle appears to be on an endless loop. Every day, loyalist troops and tanks stubbornly try to take the city from the rebels.

The rebels push them back and the army retaliates by pounding the city with mortar shells and rockets.

The barrage starts in the morning and stops at midnight. Its aim is arbitrary: shells can land almost anywhere in the city.

…

Until recently, when more sophisticated weapons began to flow in from Turkey, the province of Deir el-Zour was the main supply route for the rebel arms and ammunition which came over the border from neighbouring Iraq. Now most of the desolate countryside in the region is in the hands of the rebels, including the main border post.

“We control 90% of the province,” said Abu Omar, a defected Syrian army major with a thick beard who headed of one of the two military councils leading the fight. “Is this province liberated? Not yet. We have more men, but they have the bases and we can’t capture them without ammunition.”

According to the rebels, a month of fierce fighting and artillery bombardment in Deir el-Zour city has seen hundreds of civilians, rebel fighters and loyalist soldiers killed, and 86 tanks and armoured vehicles destroyed.

But even as the civil war has moved into Damascus, the regime’s security forces have continued to fight on this far edge of the country. In the past week government forces managed to take over two major intersections in the city, occupying them with tanks and establishing sniper positions. Many of the rebels are close to exhaustion. Food is served once a day to the fighters and supplies have dwindled to a trickle. They take four hours to travel a gruelling route through government lines.

The soldiers fare better than the civilians, however, as smuggled food comes with smuggled ammunition. The civilians are reduced to begging food from the fighters. One day during a week-long stay, a woman approached us.

“We need food. I have four kids and nothing to feed them,” she said. “I will send you some tins later,” said the fighter, sounding tired. “I have asked three units before and no one gave me anything,” the woman retorted, before walking away.

The ragtag army can fight a war of attrition with the government, but with no leadership and no command structure, they are unable to organise a concentrated attack on its bases.

Opposition forces in Deir el-Zour are organised into around 20 battalions. The fighters consist of secularists and salafis, townspeople and tribesmen from the country, civilians and defected soldiers. They frequently bicker among themselves and accuse each other of hoarding weapons.

Some units have lost 70% of their men through casualties and desertion, and ammunition in some cases is so low that soldiers go to battle with one magazine. Others, however, hold stockpiles of brand new RPGs, Austrian-made machine guns and hand grenades, part of a shipment that the fighters say was bought with private money from Syrian donors and delivered by Turkish military intelligence over the border.

There are more weapons and men in the countryside, but many commanders prefer to protect their villages than send their men and weapons to fight in the city.

French journalist Thierry Meyssan, with a controversial record, has sent the following dispatch from Damascus, in French, and below is a rough translation from a French friend of mine. One more piece of the exceedingly complex Syrian puzzle:

Damas, the volcano’s been extinguished

This is 23 July at 7 pm and we are standing on Mount Qassioum, the mountain above Damascus. The mountain is in an elongated shape, so is the city of Damascus. The city counts about 6 million inhabitants. Certainly a bit more now, as fighting in the surrounding towns have forced people to withdraw and find refuge in the capital.

But the capital has itself been under attack a few days ago by waves of Contras, most of them from Jordan but also from Lebanon, Iraq and Turkey. Each time they have rushed towards, and first taken the border check points, and then tried to progress towards the capital city.

Often in the desert, they have been stopped in their progression and plane raids to prevent them from getting here. But some have managed to get here and attack the capital, just as a coup beheaded the military command.

So how are things now regarding the battle of Damascus? Well, it’s in fact over. Right now only one fighting pocket remains, in the Jobar area which we can’t quite see here because it’s in this direction but very far away. You can’t see any sign of it from here because it’s street combat, no artillery is being used, except, every now and again, for the occasional mortar fired.

The rest of the city is absolutely calm right now. Right behind me you can see Umayyad Square, the largest square in Damascus, and on the slightly right inside of the square, stands the national television building, which is today the subject of total protection, because as you know NATO absolutely wants to destroy it. Yesterday, there was an important battle which ended with a Contras pocket formed in the orchards in Mazzeh. Mazzeh is the embassies district and these orchards are located right on its edge and stretch all the way to the Kafar Sousa district, like the Bois de Vincennes in Paris for example. They are mostly prickly pear tree orchards, but also lots of other trees, not only cacti. So there was an important battle there yesterday and the day before, which ended with the surrender or the death of the attackers who in this case were essentially Egyptian and Jordanian. Whereas in Jobar, those trapped there were mostly Somali and Sudanese. You can still see a bit of smoke because the orchards are still on fire. It’s impossible to extinguish fire amidst those giant cacti, those prickly pear trees. Note that there are no helicopters, no planes, nothing of the sort. All is back to normal in Damascus, the Syrian army can enjoy its victory, and the Syrian people can finally rest after a few terrible days imposed on them by foreign powers who send here their mercenaries.”

This Washington Post story is written with sadness. If only the CIA had any clue about the reality inside Syria, it implies, they could do what they do in many nations around the world and meddle in internal affairs:

Sixteen months into the uprising in Syria, the United States is struggling to develop a clear understanding of opposition forces inside the country, according to U.S. officials who said that intelligence gaps have impeded efforts to support the ouster of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

U.S. spy agencies have expanded their efforts to gather intelligence on rebel forces and Assad’s regime in recent months, but they are still largely confined to monitoring intercepted communications and observing the conflict from a distance, officials said.

Interviews with U.S. and foreign intelligence officials revealed that the CIA has been unable to establish a presence in Syria, in contrast with the agency’s prominent role gathering intelligence from inside Egypt and Libya during revolts in those countries.

With no CIA operatives on the ground in Syria and only a handful stationed at key border posts, the agency has been heavily dependent on its counterparts in Jordan and Turkey and on other regional allies.

The lack of intelligence has complicated the Obama administration’s ability to navigate a crisis that presents an opportunity to remove a longtime U.S. adversary but carries the risk of bolstering insurgents sympathetic to al-Qaeda or militant Islam.

The administration is exploring ways to expand non-lethal support, officials said.

“But we’ve got to figure out who is over there first, and we don’t really know that,” said a U.S. official who expressed concern over persistent gaps and who, like others interviewed, spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was discussing intelligence matters. “It’s not like this is a new war. It’s been going on for 16 months.”

Medialens ask the questions most in the media aren’t:

When is an act of terrorism not terrorism? When the victims are officially sanctioned state enemies. This was clear from the political and media response to the assassinations of senior ministers of the Syrian ‘regime’.

On 18 July, a bomb attack on the national security headquarters in Damascus killed three top Syrian ministers: Defence Minister Daoud Rajiha, President Bashar al-Assad’s brother-in-law Assef Shawkat and General Hassan Turkomani.  Two days later, Syria’s national security chief, Hisham Ikhtiari, died from injuries he received in the attack.

Reuters reported U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta saying that the situation in Syria was ‘spinning out of control’. For good measure, he added that President Bashar al-Assad’s government would be held responsible if it failed to safeguard its alleged chemical weapons sites. The brazen echoes of the propaganda campaign against Iraq a decade ago could be heard reverberating around the world’s news media.

…

One of our messageboard visitors posted an extract from a New York Times article on the apparently increasingly effective use of improvised explosive devices by the Syrian ‘insurgency’:

‘Joseph Holliday, a former American Army intelligence officer who is now an analyst covering Syria for the Institute of the Study of War, in Washington, said the changes were not in the rate of attacks, but in a rapidly evolving prowess . . .

‘ . . . The exact means by which anti-Assad fighters have improved their manufacture and use of bombs, and who trained them, is not clear.

‘Mr. Holliday said the capability “comes in part from the expertise of Syrian insurgents who learned bomb-making while fighting U.S. troops in eastern Iraq“‘. 

The poster, Peter, then made the point that:

‘while they were “fighting U.S. troops in eastern Iraq”, we were told in no uncertain terms that they were evil, terrorist bad guys. Islamo-fascist, Al Qaeda linked, Saddam sympathisers who had to be mercilessly slaughtered.’

Now apparently similar forces in Syria using similar tactics to attack an ‘enemy regime’ are cast as ‘rebels’ or ‘freedom fighters’ helping to foment a ‘revolution’ as part of the latest stage of the ‘Arab Spring’.

Peter concludes of the bomb attack in Damascus:

‘the tenor of the coverage clearly has nothing to do with moral or logical consistency, and everything to do with the reported act’s utility to Western power.’

The horrors inside Syria are increasingly clear. This is both a civil war and a proxy war with various powers determined to oppose and isolate Iran.

Here’s a very powerful piece in today’s New York Times by Janine di Giovanni that highlights the chaos of Assad’s Syria:

What does it feel like when a war begins? When does life as you know it implode? How do you know when it is time to pack up your home and your family and leave your country? Or if you decide not to, why?

For ordinary people, war starts with a jolt: one day you are busy with dentist appointments or arranging ballet lessons for your daughter, and then the curtain drops. One moment the daily routine grinds on; A.T.M.’s work and cellphones function. Then, suddenly, everything stops.

Barricades go up. Soldiers are recruited and neighbors work to form their own defense. Ministers are assassinated and the country falls into chaos. Fathers disappear. The banks close and money and culture and life as people knew it vanishes. In Damascus, this moment has come.

I spent nearly two weeks in Syria earlier this month; I was privileged — and lucky — to get a visa because there is a near-total media blackout. The fear that rises with civil war was palpable. Car bombs exploded in the streets; there was a shootout in a television station. The week after I was in Damascus, the Red Cross declared the 17-month uprising a civil war, which means that international human rights law applies throughout the country. More essentially it means that Syrians can’t any longer deny, as some did, that their country is at war and that the life they’ve lived is rapidly coming to an end.

During my time in Syria, daily life unfolded as it does everywhere in the world. I attended operas at one of the best opera houses in the Middle East, Dionysian pool parties on Thursday afternoons, weddings, in which couples married in elaborate Sunni and Shia ceremonies, and, watched makeup artists do their magic on actresses’ faces for a magazine photo shoot: all of these activities are part of a life that somehow continued as war crept up Syria’s doorstep but is about to fade away, except as memory.

Not far beneath the surface of the festivities, there was a current of tension, a tangible dread that the 17-month conflict would soon spill onto the streets of Damascus.

People had begun to leave Damascus when I arrived. There were going-away parties, and embassies were shutting down. The neighborhoods of Barzah and al-Midan, where I walked the streets two weeks ago after Friday Prayer, are now no-go areas, opposition strongholds. Then it was tense to talk in the street after Friday Prayer, or to try to talk to rebel supporters. Now it will be bloodier. And I wonder how many of the people I saw two weeks ago are now fleeing Syria, crossing over the border to Lebanon.

I know about the velocity of war. In all of the wars I have covered — including in Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Chechnya, Kosovo — the moments in which everything changes from normal to extremely abnormal share a similar quality. One evening in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, in 2002, for example, I went to bed after dinner at a lavish French restaurant. When I woke up, there was no telephone service and no radio broadcast in the capital; “rebels” occupied the television station and flares shot through the sky. In my garden I could smell both the scent of mango trees and the smell of burning homes. My neighborhood was on fire. The 24-hour gap between peace and wartime gave me enough time to gather my passport, computer and favorite photos and flee to a hotel in the center of the city. I never returned to my beloved house with the mango trees.

In early April of 1992, a friend in Sarajevo was walking, in a miniskirt and heels, to her job in a bank when she saw a tank rolling down the street. Shots were fired. My friend crouched, trembling, behind a garbage can, her life forever altered. In a few weeks, she was sending her baby to safety on a bus in the arms of a stranger to another country. She would not see him for years.

I was invited this year to give the 2012 Sydney PEN “Free Voices” lecture on free speech, censorship and war. It was delivered at the Sydney Writer’s Festival in May and in Melbourne in June. ABC published an extract recently.

Film footage of the Sydney event is now available. May you be provoked:

Via Foreign Policy:

The lobbying firm that brought you a Vogue story featuring the Syrian first lady was still trying to help the Syrian regime improve its image abroad two months after the notoriously ill-timed article was published and then scrubbed, as the country descended into violence, according to a document revealed by Wikileaks.

The international firm Brown Lloyd James (BLJ) was officially employed by the Office of the First Lady of the Syrian Arab Republic Asma al-Assad in Nov. 2010 for $5,000 per month to help arrange and execute the article, which appeared in the March 2011 edition of Vogue. The fawning piece, entitled, “Rose of the Desert,” was actually scrubbed from the Vogue website out of embarrassment when Assad began a brutal crackdown on non-violent protests that month. But you can still read it here.

BLJ’s contract with the Assad regime, signed by BLJ partner Mike Holtzman and Syrian government official Fares Kallas, expired in March of last year, according to documents posted on the Foreign Agents Registration Act website. The firm had claimed its work on behalf of the Assads ended in Dec. 2010.

But in May 2011, BLJ sent another memo to Kallas and the Syrian government, giving them advice on how to improve their image and institute a more effective public relations strategy amid the exploding violence in Syria. The memo was published by the Wikileaks website in their dump of 2.4 million Syrian documents this week.

“It is clear from US government pronouncements since the beginning of the public demonstrations in Syria that the Obama Administration wants the leadership in Syria to survive,” begins the May 19, 2011, memo. “Unlike its response to demonstrations in some other countries in the region, there have been no US demands for regime change in Syria nor any calls for military intervention, criticism has been relatively muted and punitive sanctions — by not being aimed directly at President Assad — have been intended more as a caution than as an instrument to hurt the leadership.”

The memo was sent only days after Syrian military forces stormed the town of Baniyas andmoved into the cities of Hama and Homs, where civilian massacres soon followed. Three days before the memo was sent, 20 bodies of murdered civilians were discovered in a shallow grave in the city of Daraa.  President Barack Obama called for Assad to step down that August. 

The memo goes on to warn the Assad regime that the mood in Washington is turning against the regime, as evidenced by tougher statements coming from Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) and increasingly critical stories in the U.S. media. BLJ warns the Assads that if they don’t get smart about public relations quick, the U.S. system might just turn against them.

“[Increasing bad PR] not only reinforces the Administration’s change of tone, it is emboldening critics — who maintain that Syria’s reform efforts are not sincere–and building up pressure on the US government to take further, more drastic steps against the country,” the memo states.

BLJ then goes into an extensive set of recommendations for how the Assad regime can put a better spin on the largely government-led violence.

“[S]oft power is needed to reassure the Syrian people and outside audiences that reform is proceeding apace, legitimate grievances are being addressed and taken seriously, and that Syria’s actions are ultimately aimed at creating an environment in which change and progress can take place,” BLJ explains.

The Assad regime should appoint one figure to “own” the reform agenda to convince Syrians and the outside world the reform effort is “sincere,” BLJ advised.

“Refocusing the perception of outsiders and Syrians on reform will provide political cover to the generally sympathetic US Government, and will delegitimize critics at home and abroad,” the memo reads.

BLJ even recommends that First Lady Asma al-Assad should “get in the game,” do a “listening tour” with the president, and start doing press interviews to create an “echo chamber” in the media that reinforces the idea that Assad is reform-minded.

“The absence of a public figure as popular, capable, and attuned to the hopes of the people as Her Excellency at such a critical moment is conspicuous. The key is to show strength and sympathy at once,” BLJ writes.

BLJ also recommends that the Assad regime get more serious about containing negative media stories and the voices of the Syrian opposition around the world, which the memo calls “the daily torrent of criticism and lies.” BJR told the Assads they should institute 24-hour media monitoring in the United States and challenge and then remove any websites that are “false.”

Overall, the memo recommends that the Assad regime get smart on messaging and start trying to convince the world that the Syrian government is benevolent, that all killings by the military were not officially sanctioned, and that the crisis is not as bad as the international community believes.

Here’s the direct Wikileaks link to the PR letter.

The idea that repression only happens “over there” is a myth that needs to be constantly challenged (my recent PEN lecture tackled this).

Take this (via Pro Publica):

But ProPublica discovered that there’s one person cell phone companies will not share your location information with: You.

The latest Wikileaks “Syria Files” reveal Western firms are more than happy to assist a repressive state to make a dollar. And they’re largely protected legally in the West as the state is happy to utilise the same technology to monitor its own citizens. Here’s some details via Ars Technica:

As the US and Europe leveled increasingly severe sanctions on Syria, Western tech companies were still working eagerly with the Assad regime and Syrian government-owned entities. This is according to e-mails obtained by Wikileaks, dating from 2006 up until March of 2012. The e-mails are now being published in waves by Wikileaks, both through its own website and through a collection of news organizations.

The first wave of released documents—25 out of more than two million e-mails obtained by Wikileaks—focuses on Italian networking and systems integration vendor SELEX (a subsidiary of Finmeccanica—which, coincidentally, also owns Agusta, the helicopter manufacturer tied to the development of the Chinese Z-10 attack helicopter) and Greek network integrator Intracom. E-mails between representatives of the two companies published by Wikileaks show how they worked around the ever-tightening political noose of trade sanctions to bring a joint project in Syria to completion. That project? A secure software-defined radio network for the Syrian government based on SELEX’s TETRA trunked radio network hardware.

The VS-3000 and AS-3000 mobile TETRA transceivers, delivered under the contract—for what was advertised as a “public safety” network for emergency and disaster response—provide mobile voice and data for ground vehicles, coastal patrol craft, and aircraft. They link to a nationwide grid of ground stations connected by a fiber-optic network. But starting in May of last year, the project was expanded from its original 40 million euro price tag by more than 25 percent. A February invoice for the project totaled over 66 million euros. Those expansions came as the Syrian government requested TEA3 encryption for the radio system and started rolling it out to police.

Work by the two companies continued throughout the violent suppression of dissidents in Syria through February of this year. This included a trip to Damascus by SELEX engineers to assist in the installation of radios and accessories (some of which were delivered personally by the engineers). And throughout the project, SELEX continued to come up with alternative ways to source the components for the project as successive sanctions began to create problems with the company’s supply chain.

SELEX’s gear fell into the grey area of the September 2011 restrictions set by the EU—the sanctions allowed for telecommunications services, but banned the export of hardware and software that had specific military applications. But the contract, officially issued by the Syrian Wireless Organization, was signed by Imad Abdul-Ghani Sabbouni (Syria’s Minister of Communications). Sabbouni was individually named in EU sanctions in February 2012 for being involved in the censorship and monitoring of Syrian citizens’ Internet access. While not technically in violation of EU sanctions (at least up until February), there were some problems getting the gear exported.

The company also had to work around US bans on technology shipments to Syria, since many of the connectors for the fiber-optic gear Syria ordered from SELEX were manufactured in the US. In an e-mail thread from October 2011, SELEX Program Manager Simone Bonechi and Intracom Syria TETRA Project Manager Mohammad Shoorbajee discussed a delay in delivery of fiber-optic backbone gear because of those prohibitions—specifically, coupling cables for optical “choppers” used to modulate light being transmitted over a fiber-optic backbone. Shoorbajee wrote, “The customer is becoming very suspicious of us for not sending the cable. Do you recommend I say anything to them?”

Bonechi responded that there had been a delay because “we have to manage an unexpected problem with some connectors, part of the goods under shipment, which are manufactured in USA.” SELEX scrambled to find an alternative supplier for the connectors, as Shoorbajee reported that SWO’s representatives were “getting worried each day” that embargoes would block completion of the project.

Wonderful find via Mondoweiss. Speaks for itself:

 VICTORIA NULAND, spokesperson for State Department:

Listen, before we leave Syria, I just want to take the opportunity, if you didn’t see it, to draw your attention to the Human Rights Watch report that was released today that identifies some 27 detention centers that Human Rights Watch says Syrian Government intelligence agencies have been using since the Assad crackdown on pro-democracy protestors. The report found that tens of thousands of Syrians are in detention by regime security and intelligence agencies and that the regime is carrying out inexplicable, horrific acts of torture, including – well, I’m not going to repeat them here, but I’ll leave it to you to read the report. And in many cases, the Human Rights Watch asserts that even children have been subject to torture by the Assad regime.

MATT LEE: Do you see that report as credible and solid, and you’re putting – you’re endorsing it? I mean, you’re saying –

MS. NULAND: We have no reason to believe that it is not credible. It’s based on eyewitness accounts, and they’re reporting from a broad cross-section of human rights figures inside Syria.

QUESTION: So the next time Human Rights Watch comes out with a report that’s critical of Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians, I’ll assume that you’re going to be saying the same thing, correct; that you think that the report is credible, it’s based on eyewitness accounts?

MS. NULAND: As –

QUESTION: And you’re not going to say that it’s politically motivated and should be dismissed?

MS. NULAND: Matt, as you have made clear again and again in this room, we are not always consistent.

Goyal.

QUESTION: So, in other words, anything that Human Rights Watch says that is critical of someone you don’t like, that’s okay; but once they criticize someone that you do like, then it’s not worth the paper it’s printed on?

MS. NULAND: Matt, I’m not going to get into colloquy on this one.

Goyal.

RAGHUBIR GOYAL (India Globe): India.

MS. NULAND: Yeah.

Yet more confirmation that Wikileaks remains an essential news organisation. Today they did this:

Today, Thursday 5 July 2012, WikiLeaks began publishing the Syria Files – more than two million emails from Syrian political figures, ministries and associated companies, dating from August 2006 to March 2012.

This extraordinary data set derives from 680 Syria-related entities or domain names, including those of the Ministries of Presidential Affairs, Foreign Affairs, Finance, Information, Transport and Culture.

Over the next two months, ground-breaking stories derived from the files will appear in WikiLeaks (global), Al Akhbar (Lebanon), Al Masry Al Youm (Egypt), ARD (Germany), Associated Press (US), L’Espresso (Italy), Owni (France) and Publico.es (Spain). Other publications will announce themselves closer to their publishing date.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said: “The material is embarrassing to Syria, but it is also embarrassing to Syria’s opponents. It helps us not merely to criticise one group or another, but to understand their interests, actions and thoughts. It is only through understanding this conflict that we can hope to resolve it.”

At this time Syria is undergoing a violent internal conflict that has killed between 6,000 and 15,000 people in the last 18 months. The Syria Files shine a light on the inner workings of the Syrian government and economy, but they also reveal how the West and Western companies say one thing and do another.

The range of information extends from the intimate correspondence of the most senior Baath party figures to records of financial transfers sent from Syrian ministries to other nations.

The database comprises 2,434,899 emails from the 680 domains. There are 678,752 different email addresses that have sent emails and 1,082,447 different recipients. There are a number of different languages in the set, including around 400,000 emails in Arabic and 68,000 emails in Russian. The data is more than eight times the size of ’Cablegate’ in terms of number of documents, and more than 100 times the size in terms of data. Around 42,000 emails were infected with viruses or trojans. To solve these complexities, WikiLeaks built a general-purpose, multi-language political data-mining system which can handle massive data sets like those represented by the Syria Files.

In such a large collection of information, it is not possible to verify every single email at once; however, WikiLeaks and its co-publishers have done so for all initial stories to be published. We are statistically confident that the vast majority of the data are what they purport to be.

Here’s the press conference at London’s Frontline Club.

With much of the mainstream media out to slander Julian Assange and Wikileaks, watch how these vultures spend the next weeks and months feeding off these latest files.

One of the first releases is here.

Columbia Journalism Review has the shocking facts:

 With 72 journalists killed so far this year, 2012 is on pace to be the deadliest on record, the International Press Institute (IPI) announcedhere on Sunday.

The media freedom organization’s executive director, Alison Bethel McKenzie, choked up and struggled to speak as she addressed the group’s annual conference.

“From Somalia to Syria, the Philippines to Mexico, and Iraq to Pakistan, reporters are being brutally targeted for death in unparalleled numbers,” she said.

The most lethal year so far in the 15 that IPI has been keeping records was 2009, when 110 journalists died. Last year was the second worst, with 102 deaths.

Syria, where peaceful protests have turned into a violent civil war, has been the most dangerous country in 2012, with 20 professional and citizen reporters, both local and foreign, killed so far, according to McKenzie.

“It is deeply disturbing that in a year still massively impacted by the once unimaginable—the overthrow of brutal Arab regimes through people and media power—journalists are dying on the job in record numbers,” she said.

Unlike the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), which also monitors casualties, IPI counts accidental deaths, such as those of five Indonesian journalists killed when a plane crashed during a demonstration flight in May. Still, the two groups are in rough accord on the violent pace of 2012. According to CPJ, 46 journalists have died so far this year, on track to match or surpass the 97 lost lives it recorded in 2009, the highest number in the 20 years the group has kept statistics.

CPJ figures also finger Syria as the deadliest country for journalists in 2012. As recently as Wednesday, gunmen attacked a pro-government TV station near Damascus, killing three journalists and four others, according to the Associated Press.

The following is published today as the lead piece by ABC’s The Drum:

The two-hour drive from Islamabad to Peshawar is along a surprisingly smooth road. Mud-brick homes sit amongst lush, green fields. Police checkpoints are set up routinely to stop unwanted visitors.

I am asked why I want to see the troubled Pakistani town near the border with Afghanistan. I say I’m a reporter, flash my International Federation of Journalists press card, which I’m sure the officer can’t read, and am quickly waved through.

Islamabad is a relatively liberal city in one of the most volatile nations on earth. Peshawar is geographically close but a world away. Women, if they’re seen at all in public, walk in shapeless burkas and men have thick beards and wear the traditional salwar kameez. Suicide bombers regularly attack government buildings, police and army in a continuing war against the Pakistani state and its Western backers. I arrive feeling uneasy.

A once stable town has been torn apart in the last decade as militants seek to overthrow both a corrupt central government and expel a Washington-led campaign against the resistance that is seen as illegitimate and lacking public support.

When I visit in March this year, I am surprised by the vibrancy of the Pakistani media. Multiple outlets joust for dominance, routinely publishing scandalous information about politicians and celebrities. But as I have seen first-hand in Iran, Palestine, Syria, Cuba and Egypt and a range of other countries, magical “red lines” exist that must not be crossed. If they are, journalists can pay an extremely high price.

I meet independent journalist Hayat in Peshawar. He’s 35 with a wife and two young children. He wears a pink-striped shirt and grey suit. Pockmarked face. His office is on the third floor of a non-descript building. His knowledge about the FATA (Federal Administered Tribal Areas) is immense, having spent time in the various regions. He talks about the different Taliban groups, how they relate to each other and the government.

Peshawar is on the edge of this abyss, the entry point to a tribal land that remains impossible for Westerners and most Pakistanis to visit. Since 9/11, it has been occupied by the Pakistani army and militants and often remains lawless.

It is where US president Obama, far more than his predecessor George W Bush, has unleashed an unprecedented number of drone strikes, killing hundreds of civilians since 2009, according to a recent study by The Bureau of Investigative Journalism. These men, women and children are rarely given names by the Western media. Instead our media class are happy to simply repeat official Pakistani and American government claims of killing “terrorists”.

We degrade our profession by mindlessly rehashing White House press releases with no evidence to support the thesis. Sadly it has become a regular occurrence in both the tabloid and so-called quality press, including the ABC, Fairfax and News Limited. “10 militants killed”; “7 Al-Qaeda terrorists killed”. No evidence. Rarely any photographs or video. This isn’t journalism; it’s stenography.

Hayat’s voice is invisible in the West, despite speaking fluent English. Here’s a man with unique access to one of the most challenging areas on the planet and yet most Western news outlets seemingly prefer to rely on familiar faces and voices. When was the last time you read an article about Iraq or Afghanistan by an Afghan or Iraqi actually based in their respective countries?

During research for my book, The Blogging Revolution, on the internet in repressive regimes, a work that took me to Cuba, Egypt, Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia and China, it became clear that many in the Western media are reluctant to hear voices that don’t conform to their idea of what a foreigner should sound like or think. It is the only explanation for the near-complete exclusion of indigenous voices from conflict zones in our mainstream press.

Their freedom of speech is ignored because of the inherent, Western-centric nature of our leading journalists and media practitioners. Let me be blunt; our white-skin dominated media often doesn’t trust brown, yellow or black skin. The result is a wilful myopia that ignores both the nuance of a nation and the reasons post 9/11 that so little is understood about the reality of the rapacious “war on terror” and its reach in dozens of countries worldwide.

Why do “they” hate us? Because we occupy and kill “them”.

A recent story by independent journalist Matthieu Aikins in the Columbia Journalism Review should be a wake-up call to anybody who believes that advocating free speech in a globalised world hasn’t changed in the last decade. It has, hugely. Aikins details a recent story by a filmmaker from Britain’s Channel 4 who worked with Syrian dissidents in the capital Damascus. The Syrian was providing secure communications expertise to the resistance and the Western filmmaker interviewed him about his work. But the dissident worried that the documentarian wasn’t taking appropriate security precautions to protect his identity and work. For example, he was using a mobile phone and SMS without protections.

Last October the filmmaker was arrested in Syria, held for days in prison and had has laptop, mobile phone, camera and footage taken by the regime. As soon as he discovered this, the dissident fled Damascus, stayed with relatives in another town and then escaped to Lebanon. The dissident and his colleagues were scared that Syrian intelligence now had access to names, faces and information about opponents of president Assad.

Aikins rightly says that it’s easy to condemn the filmmaker for not taking adequate digital precautions of his material but it’s really systematic of a wider problem.

We are all failing to encrypt our work when reporting from conflict zones and nations where intelligence services are ubiquitous. I have been guilty of this myself. When off-the-shelf surveillance equipment is now so easily available - WikiLeaks’ Spy Files revealed the vast number of Western security firms selling technology to repressive and democratic states, making the monitoring of email, Skype and mobile phone calls – it is the responsibility of journalists, human rights activists and NGOs to learn how to protect information that could mean the difference between life and death for the people we claim to represent and protect.

But we are foolish to believe these threats only exist in the non-Western world. The Obama administration has accelerated the development of a surveillance state apparatus that now listens and records every phone call and email every day in the US. Some estimate up to 20 trillion calls and emails have been stored in the last years. Salon’s Glenn Greenwald has written extensively about Obama’s unprecedented war on whistle-blowers.

In Pakistan and Afghanistan recently, working on a book and film about disaster capitalism, I heard countless reporters talking about self-censorship, a daily need to assess what to write and what to avoid.

During a recent episode of Julian Assange’s The World Tomorrow – an outstanding weekly TV program that interviews some of the key thinkers and players in our world, individuals largely ignored by the corporate media – he spoke to Alaa Abd El-Fattah from Egypt and Nabeel Rajab from Bahrain. Both men have been imprisoned, tortured, held without charge. Both men remain outspoken. Both men refuse to be silenced and curtail their own free speech. Both men should be heard in our media on a regular basis but they are not. I believe it is because they are ferociously opposed to US-backed repression. They are unapologetic. Passionate. Necessarily unbalanced in their views towards Washington’s love of reliable autocrats. And yet their biggest recent audience is on the WikiLeaks founder’s current affairs show.

An inquisitive media would be intrigued with a book such as Poetry of the Taliban, a just-released tome that outlines without romanticising the love, adventure and fears of a group both pre and post September 11 that has beaten the world’s greatest super-power.

Supporting freedom of speech in its entirety, not merely claiming to appreciate all views but actually meaning it, as far too many liberals only endorse points of view with which they agree, means hearing the positions of groups or individuals with whom you may vehemently oppose. Truly free speech should make us uncomfortable, confronted and offended.

The internet has brought knowledge and information to more people than at any time in history. There are close to one billion Facebook accounts. Countless people use YouTube and Google every day.

But none of these tools provide human rights protections or ensure free speech. They merely give officials more opportunities to monitor and document a user’s online footprint. Although they allow activists much easier access to friends and colleagues around the world – and using online proxies to communicate and surf freely are essential in both repressive and democratic states – the reach of Western security companies is far greater than most people realise. It is no longer paranoid to presume that we are being watched and monitored by the state.

Wired magazine recently revealed that the National Security Agency in the US is building a $2 billion centre that aims to:

“intercept, decipher, analyse, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks… Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital ‘pocket litter.’”

The threat to freedom of speech globally isn’t just in the obvious places – Afghanistan, Iraq, Mexico or China – but in our own backyard, instituted by our democratically elected leaders.

We have been warned.

This is an extract from the 2012 PEN Free Voices lecture, first delivered at the Sydney Writers Festival in May.

Antony Loewenstein is an independent journalist and author, co-editor with Jeff Sparrow, of the just released Left Turn, the upcoming After Zionism and a 2013 book and film about disaster capitalism. Follow him on Twitter. View his full profile here.