A new European journalists network launched a trifecta of stories last week investigating the pharmaceutical industry. The stories reveal how European pharmaceutical companies have put the lid on disquieting information about potential side effects from an array of commonly used medicines, the power of the pharmaceutical lobby in influencing European legislation, and the new policies which permit drug advertising. The series suggests that the pharmaceutical industry in Europe is wielding its influence in much the same ways as it has been revealed to be doing in the United States, through connections with university researchers and asserting confidentiality on basic medicinal information.
The stories represent the debut effort of the new network, IRENE—Investigative Reporters Network, Europe—which now has journalists working in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark. The authors of the jointly bylined stories are Brigitte Alfter, Joop Bouma, and Marleen Teugels, each of them award-winning journalists in their home countries of Denmark, Belgium and the Netherlands, respectively. The stories were published simultaneously in the Danish magazine Samvirke, the Dutch newspaper Trouw and the Belgian magazine KNACK. An English-language translation of the series appears here. The team also wrote an original English-language condensation of the series for the Brussels-based newspaper EU Observer. In that story, they explain their pioneering use of the EU freedom of information law, which enabled them to gain access to pharmaceutical industry and government documents from the EU capital in Brussels and from each of their three countries. The group works closely with the Belgian journalism foundation, Pascal deCroos Fund for Investigative Reporting, which promotes the use of the Europe’s freedom of information laws through a website called, simply, wobbing—a Flemish slang word adopted by European journalists and interpreted to mean: Getting documents out of the government which they’d rather not provide.
We will keep you posted on IRENE’’s latest revelations on The Muckraker blog.
An extraordinary series of short videos were launched onto the web last week revealing, side by side, glimpses into the life of Israelis and Palestinians living within twenty miles of one another. The series, Gaza: Sderot: Life In Spite of Everything features new films daily from the Palestinian territory of Gaza and the Israeli town of Sderot, just over the border. Each two-minute film in the series (in Hebrew and Arabic, with English subtitles) features profiles of residents who, despite being the target of bombings and rocket attacks, "never stop working, loving and dreaming," in the words of the filmmakers.
The show originated with ARTE television in France, and was produced in cooperation with Israeli and Palestinian filmmakers. The website encourages virtual interaction between Israelis and Palestinians as well as the general public. On October 25, the series was awarded the Prix Europa for Emerging Media.
The point of the series is to offer a glimpse to non-Middle Easterners of how the routine elements of life continue, even amidst the heavy stresses of conflict. But the audience is also those in the region: "We wanted to offer a chance for reflection and engagement between those who are the 'other' to each other," one of the producers, Alex Szalat, commented to the French website Journalisme.com. "We evoke a difficult situation, but also the reality of Israelis and Palestinians who never rub shoulders but who live almost side by side."
A recent video from Gaza:
And one from Sderot:
While the Bush administration has gone to extraordinary efforts to prevent grisly realities of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan from making it into the U.S. press, photographers have not stopped doing their work. People in other countries frequently view photographs from those wars that are far more explicit than those viewed by Americans.
On display this month in the French town of Bayeux is a powerful exhibit of photos as part of the annual Bayeux-Calvados Prize for photo-journalism. This year, special recognition is being paid to war correspondents, and to the Dutch photo agency, Noor, whose photographers—including Stanley Greene, Francesco Zizola, and others—have contributed photos from the conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, post-election Kenya, the Niger Delta, Somalia and other conflict zones. The photos are arrayed around the ancient town of Bayeux, the first French town liberated from the Nazis in 1944.
Key participants at the festival—including Anthony Lappe, author of the recently published graphic novel Shooting War, and photographer Catherine Wyatt, jury president for the Bayeux-Calvados Prize—discuss their work in interviews hosted by Journalisme.com, a French association attempting to promote a vigorous and independent press in France and elsewhere around the world.
It was interesting to read the New York Times report on Monday revealing the reasons behind the Swiss government's destruction of evidence pertaining to a family of three Swiss engineers linked to AQ Khan's global nuclear sales enterprise. The Tinner family—father Friedrich and his two sons Urs and Marco—were under investigation for helping orchestrate Khan's sale of sophisticated nuclear technology to Libya and Iran; they were Khan's key European intermediaries.
In their story, William Broad and David Sanger revealed the key reasons for the destruction: Pressure from the CIA to hide the role played by the Tinners in supplying them with information that ultimately led to the dismantling of Khan's network. Broad and Sanger delve deeply into the Tinner case as an example of the tensions between two conflicting goals: First, to block nuclear proliferation; and second, to bring the key proliferators to justice. This presents a direct challenge to intelligence agencies, which are often unwilling to share how they gathered evidence on such operations.
These are themes that we explored in our hour-long radio documentary, "Business of the Bomb", a collaboration with American RadioWorks, that aired on national public radio stations across the country last April and May.
In "Business of the Bomb," ARW correspondent Michael Montgomery and I visited the South African end of Khan's global operation, Tradefin Engineering, a factory outside of Johanessberg where a Swiss, a German and a South African trio of businessmen created key components for the Libyan enrichment facility purchased from Khan by Libya. Investigators found a videotape on the premises used by AQ Khan to advertise his capacity to build, on demand, nuclear enrichment and bomb-making facilities. (We obtained exclusive access to that tape, and present an audio excerpt here; you'll hear the voice of AQ Khan himself pitching to others his success at building Pakistan's nuclear arsenal).
In the Tradefin case, the US Department of Energy refused to cooperate with South African authorities in a public trial due to their concerns about revealing intelligence sources and methods. The result? South Africa's ultimately unsuccessful effort to keep the trial secret established an important principle of openness in that country, and, some in South Africa suspect, led to lighter sentences for the principle players, none of whom ultimately had to serve time in prison. "I'd rather not discuss that," said the DoE's head of non-proliferation James Tobey, deputy undersecretary for nuclear non-proliferation at the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration when we asked him about the case.
Back in March, up to the last minute before recording our narration, we were trying to confirm the Swiss destruction of evidence in the Tinner case, which I'd learned from an anonymous tip. The tip was confirmed by Margrit Meyer, chief assistant to Swiss Federal Magistrate, who said that the evidence had been destroyed as the case was transferred from the Swiss Attorney General's office to that of the Federal Magistrate for further investigation "Some evidence is not there anymore," she told me in a March telephone interview from her office in the Swiss capital of Berne. Meyer refused to identify the nature of the evidence or how or why it was destroyed.
I was astounded to see that his U.S. address was that of the CIA in Washington DC. His given phone number was the CIA switchboard in Langley, Virginia. His title was "Agent."Two months later, in May, Switzerland's President, Pascal Couchepin, announced to the world that the Tinner files, including nuclear bomb designs, had been destroyed. Now Broad and Sanger have added considerable rich detail suggesting it was the United States which requested the file's destruction "less to thwart terrorists than to hide evidence of a clandestine relationship between the Tinners and the CIA." The three men, they report, received at least $1 million in payments from the agency for their inside tips on Khan's operation.
One other point of interest to a story that no doubt will continue to unfold: When we were conducting our final reporting back in March, I researched Urs Tinner—the one of the three considered most deeply involved in Khan's illicit enterprise—through the electronic database Accurint. I was astounded at the time to see that his U.S. address was that of the Central Intelligence Agency in Washington DC. His given phone number was the CIA switchboard in Langley, Virginia. His title was "Agent." This seemed so outlandishly brazen at the time that I didn't trust it, that such a secret could be hidden in such full sight (with the help of a subscription to Accurint). Congratulations to Broad and Sanger for confirming the long and extraordinary story behind that address.
As the news media has gone global, legal principles of libel and
journalistic protections have not followed suit. In this article, which
recently appeared in the London Times, a British attorney argues for a more
harmonized set of global libel standards—to prevent plaintiffs from taking
advantage of Britain's weak journalistic protections.
While investigative reporting is often associated with "American" journalism—from Upton Sinclair and Ida Tarbell to I.F. Stone and Seymour Hersh—the methodology has been spreading rapidly around the world. Money and power move globally. Journalists on every (inhabited) continent are unearthing the hidden interests behind the politicians and business leaders whose decisions can have devastating impacts on the environment, civil liberties, human rights and the functioning of democracy. From unearthing corporate abuses of power to government corruption, human rights abuses and environmental devastation, top-notch reporting is coming from outside the United States. Some twenty years ago, I helped organize a transnational network of investigative journalists between (then-Western) Europe and the United States. Those were in the days before the Internet; much time was spent cursing fax machines. I never imagined then the extraordinary boom in top notch investigative reporting that we're now seeing across the globe.
To bring this work to greater public attention, CIR will be highlighting international investigations on our new blog: The Investigative Report: International. Sometimes they'll have an American angle, sometimes not. But our aim is to highlight the work of great journalists working around the world—sometimes in conditions far more difficult than those in the United States. We'll be keeping our eyes open, but hope you will send us ideas when you see or participated in a story worthy of broader attention.
We launch this new project with "Tobacco Roads," the result of a team investigation by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project at the Center for Investigative Reporting in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina (CIN). A team of reporters spent months unearthing the links of big tobacco to political figures and the illicit smuggling schemes used to dominate national markets in five countries: Bulgaria, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, Romania and Ukraine.
The team of reporters and editors at CIN in Sarajevo is itself reflective of the phenomenon of investigative reporting' s global rise: Started as a training center in the nineties, the CIN has evolved into a working journalistic force, often engaging in trans-national investigative collaborations which they market to local print, television and radio press, and feature on their web site. Their Organised Crime and Corruption Project is a joint project with the Romanian Centre for Investigative Journalism and involves a network of journalists in Bulgaria, the Ukraine, Moldova and Russia. Down the line, we'll be featuring interviews with reporters from CIN as well as investigative journalists from all international, commercial and non-commercial, media.
>> Read "Tobacco Roads" online.
>> Visit the homepage of THE INVESTIGATIVE REPORT: INTERNATIONAL to learn more about this project.
As we pass through the season of toy recalls into the heyday season of Christmas consumerism, few of the presidential candidates on either side of the aisle have yet to seriously focus on an issue that would send a powerful signal of commitment to protecting Americans. The question of ensuring American's security from the hazards to their health contained in hundreds of consumer products hangs like a ripe fruit for any candidate willing to pick it. Who is out there protecting Americans from these hidden hazards? The answer: practically nobody.
We now know what happens when illegal substances like lead are integrated into toys and shipped to the United States from China: They slip into the country past the eviscerated Consumer Product Safety Commission, whose sole toy inspector spends most of his time making sure toys don't break in children's hands, rather than assessing the toxic substances that enter into their body. In fact, the CPSC's budget has dropped almost in parallel with the rising reliance of U.S. toy manufacturers on production in China.
Hillary Clinton may have called for greater vigilance of our imports from China, but its not just illegal substances like lead that are being integrated into an array of consumer products. A host of substances suspected of causing cancer, mutating genes and disrupting the reproductive system are permitted in this country, while much of the world--our economic peers in Europe, Japan and even in emerging economies like Korea--are banning them from use. U.S. influence has been slipping globally, diminished by a bellicose foreign policy, the rapidly dropping clout of the dollar and the quicksand of Iraq. But nowhere are Americans feeling this shrinking global presence than in the realm of their health.
Once, thirty years ago, the United States was the leader on environmental protection. What we did in America--creating the EPA, passing laws regulating chemicals--was followed by the rest of the world. Our law, the Toxic Substances Control Act, was the first in the world to address the potential health dangers from chemicals. But it included a massive loophole: Any chemical already on the market as of 1981 did not have to undergo any testing for their effects on human health or the environment. The result: Some thirty years later, ninety percent of the chemicals on the market today--some 65,000 substances--have never been assessed for their toxicity.
Over the intervening twenty-six years, our laws have not kept up with the exponential increase in scientific knowledge of chemicals' effects on the human body. But the rest of the world is moving ahead. Those moves are being led by the European Union, which now includes 480 million people spread across twenty-seven countries, constituting an integrated market far larger than that of the United States. The Europeans are looking at the billions of dollars in costs to public health triggered by exposure to toxic chemicals, and are opting to act while the United States remains complacent with the status quo.
Take toys, for example: the Europeans responded to a growing body of evidence suggesting that a plastic additive called phthalates may contribute to decreased production of testosterone in infant boys by banning the substance from use in products aimed at children under the age of three. Much of the evidence used by the Europeans to make that decision came from American scientists, some of whom have been supported in their research by our own EPA. But there has been no one in the US government willing to listen. The result: toys are manufactured in China without phthalates for export to the European Union, and with phthalates for export to the United States. European manufacturers have found far less toxic alternatives and European kids have as many plastic animals and other goofy playthings as their American counterparts.
Another example, cosmetics: There is no independent body anywhere in the United States that independently assesses the safety of ingredients used in cosmetics. Who knew how many carcinogenic, mutagenic and reproductive system inhibitors are included in cosmetics? Now we know, because the Europeans have published a 'negative' list banning such substances from cosmetics now sold in Europe. And not just Europe: increasing numbers of emerging economies, like Korea and Brazil, are beginning to look to Brussels, capitol of the EU, and not Washington for guidance in how to address such potential hazards.
Altogether, America's bluff is being called: The world's other major economy is showing that safety and financial success are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, at a time of rising environmental sensitivity in the marketplace, many of these 'greener' businesses are now posing a competitive challenge to U.S. producers. The first candidate to realize that this issue strikes directly at American's sense of safety and security will reap the benefits.
Mark Schapiro is the editorial director of CIR, and author of Exposed: The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products and What's at Stake for American Power.
Congratulations to CIR correspondents Marina Walker Guevara and Sara Shipley Hiles for receiving the In-Depth Reporting Award from the InterAmerican Press Association. Their story exposing the abysmal health conditions in towns surrounding lead smelters in Peru and the United States, "Lead Astray: What Happens When an American Company Offshores Pollution?,” appeared in the November-December 2006 issue of Mother Jones.
The two journalists traveled to La Oroya, deep in the Andes, to report on astronomical rates of childhood lead poisonings, and to Herculaneum, Missouri where the development of behavioral problems and neurological disorders among children prompted the EPA and Missouri Department of Natural Resources to pressure the company to clean up its operations. Rather than clean up, the U.S.-based Doe Run company shifted the bulk of its lead smelting to Peru. CIR provided funding and assistance to Walker Guevara, an Argentine journalist who covered La Oroya for the Spanish-language press, and Shipley Hiles, who covered the situation in Herculaneum, Missouri, as environment correspondent for the St. Louis Post Dispatch. Judges of the IAPA, representing leading media in the U.S. and Latin America, announced: “The story combines in-depth reporting, journalistic rigor and a novel approach to describe the environmental problems caused by a U.S.-based lead company running simultaneous operations in the state of Missouri and in La Oroya, Peru.” Today, Sara Shipley Hiles works as a freelance writer in Bowling Green, Kentucky; Marina Walker Guevara is a reporter with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists at the Center for Public Integrity in Washington, DC.
Photo by Marina Walker Guevara