In my career as a journalist, there has never been a war on terror but a war of terror. John Pilger. 1 "In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible….This political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombed from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck…this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraselogy is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them." George Orwell, 'Politics and the English Language'. (1946). RenditionArguably the finest example of investigative journalism during the 'war on terror' has been the exposure of the Central Intelligence Agency's 'extraordinary rendition' programme. Probing journalists, whose researches were encapsulated by British journalist Stephen Grey's book Ghost Plane in 2006, have painstakingly identified over 1000 CIA 'ghost flights' criss-crossing the globe since 2001. 2 Many of these flights were for 'extraordinary rendition' where terror suspects were secretly, without the suspect's agreement, taken by force from one country to another and in some cases kidnapped.Rendition is exactly the kind of practice that journalists exist to expose as it is extrajudicial and involves nation states abusing fundamental human rights. These states seek to avoid the trial process. Rendition flights have not been used to move suspects from a war zones like Afghanistan or Iraq to the United States where these 'terrorists' could be charged and tried. The receiving nation was not the U.S. but a third

Abstract:Since the 1990s, the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and the Security Service (MI5) have developed formal links with most major UK news organizations in an effort to improve the agencies' media presentation. This paper discusses the impact and inherent problems of these relationships, including whether the news media can have official, formal but nonattributable links with these agencies without compromising their role as the fourth estate.Utilizing epistemologies for crime reporting and news sources, this paper proposes an initial framework to analyze these institutional relationships. It also takes as a case study the controversy over whether the MI5 deliberately played down their prior knowledge of 7/7 suicide bomber Mohammed Sidique Khan. The author was one of the journalists briefed by MI5 on Khan and has here take the Khan controversy as a case study to investigate the Security Services' information flow and whether the agency misled, and indeed intended to mislead, the media and the public.

I was struck both by how much the style of the photographs changed over 25 years with a semi-formal portrait style becomes austere and functional. Hidden meanings and implications of guilt Example One This is a Sun newspaper article featuring a picture of Robert Murat, once a suspect in the Madeline McCann case. ii At its simplest, it is a photograph of a person. We can immediately recognise that it is a police photograph, or as they are more colloquially known, a mugshot, as key institutional signs are there: the deadpan expression of the subject, a vertical measurement stick for showing height, the neutral background and, in this case, a watermark that tells us the picture belongs to the Portuguese police.

This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Paul Lashmar, University of Sussex Permanent AbstractThe Anglo-American intelligence agencies' use of journalists as spies or propagandists and the practice of providing intelligence agents in the field with journalistic cover have been a source of controversy for many decades. This paper examines the extent to which these covert practices have taken place and whether they have put journalists' lives in danger. This paper, drawing on various methodologies, examines a number of cases where the arrest, murder or kidnap of journalists was justified on the grounds that the journalist was a 'spy'. This has been followed through with research using a range of sources that shows there have been many occasions when the distinction between spies and journalists has been opaque. The paper concludes that widespread use of journalistic cover by spies has put lives in danger but the extent is unquantifiable.

This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Permanent repository link: