JOURNALISM

Peter Greste’s new book reflects on the importance of bravery in journalism after the 9/11 attacks

Peter Greste opens up about spending more than a year in an Egyptian jail on false charges, and why fearless reporting from the front line is needed now more than ever

Almost every year since 2004, about 100 journalists and media workers worldwide have been killed doing their work. “That’s a shockingly high number,” says Peter Greste, the Australian foreign correspondent who spent more than a year in an Egyptian jail on false terrorism charges. “It shot up after 9/11 largely because of the impact of the war on terror.”

This year, though, Greste has noticed the annual toll is markedly lower. At face value it seems like a good thing, but it is an ominous sign, he says during an interview with TasWeekend in Hobart to launch his new book, The First Casualty.

“I don’t think it’s because the killers have realised the error of their ways,” Greste says. “It is because journalists have stopped reporting on those stories [that will get them killed]. They have stopped going.”

Truth is the casualty to which Greste refers in his book’s title. Subtitled “From the front lines of the global war on journalism”, the book plunges the reader not only into Greste’s own prison experience, but also Middle Eastern and North African war zones where battlegrounds are blurred and rhetoric and fake news are delivered as truth. His key message is that journalists are finding it extremely hard to produce fair, balanced and accurate reporting without being judged as unpatriotic or even treasonous by their own countries.

It is often a country’s own local journalists reporting on domestic matters who are in the most danger. “As a public, we are far less informed as a result,” Greste says.

“And as we progress down this route, people will start to understand the price we are paying, that we are less informed than we used to be, less informed than we need to be to have an effective, functioning democracy.

“I would like to think we would see some pushback on this. I would like to think we have these kinds of arguments and public debate. The reason I wrote the book is to make people think more about what is happening to the state of journalism.” Inspired to become a foreign correspondent after reading

One Crowded Hour about Tasmania’s “courageous and

dedicated” combat cameraman and photojournalist Neil Davis, Brisbane-raised Greste spent more than two decades reporting from global hot spots including Afghanistan, Kenya, Serbia, Somalia and South America.

Before arriving in Cairo in December 2013, he spent years working for the BBC, initially from London, before shifting to Al Jazeera, the Middle Eastern network based in Qatar, in 2011.

“The Al Jazeera English service was staffed by a lot of people like myself who had been through the BBC, CNN, Reuters, the ABC, some of the best news organisations in the world,” he says. “The BBC had a much more Anglocentric view of the world, and at Al Jazeera I was given the kind of freedom to tell the sort of stories across Africa I’d always wanted to do.”

The plan was for him to be in Cairo for a few weeks over Christmas covering for colleagues. By the time he arrived, the authorities had already accused Al Jazeera of undermining national security as it covered the complex power struggle in play after the Arab Spring, but Greste says he had no perception of heightened risk before he was arrested.

Charged with offences relating to terrorism, Greste and two colleagues were thrown in jail with little explanation. Their trial and subsequent retrial generated headlines around the world, as well as top-level international political pressure to release them. In February 2015, Greste was deported as suddenly as he had been arrested 400 days earlier, on the same day he had planned to start a hunger strike.

Though trim, tanned and relaxed on the southernmost leg of his book tour, Greste conveys a sense of urgency in his message. He presents a compelling argument that in the wake of 9/11 and the so-called global war on terror that ensued, the media has become part of the battlefield.

“Frontline journalism has always been a dodgy thing, has always carried risk,” he says. “It’s inevitable, when you are working in places with bits of metal flying around at supersonic speed that there’s a risk, but wars before 9/11 were about tangible things such as land. And in those kinds of conflicts, journalists were just observers. If you got hit, it was either collateral damage or you were uncovering something that some war lord or some drug lord wanted to stop you from investigating.

“What 9/11 did was change the nature of conflict over tangible things, to a war over intangible ideas. And the space where ideas are fought over – the media – has itself become part of the battlefield. No longer simply witnesses, journalists have become the means by which war is waged. Journalists have become targets; no longer observers, but agents for the conflict.

“It is not out of any choices we [journalists] have made. It’s that both sides come to see you as threatening. George W. Bush really set the boundaries for this when he told the joint session of Congress, ‘with this war, you are either with us or you are with the terrorists’. He made it a binary choice.

“So to do our job, to speak to all the parties involved in the conflict, you inevitably had to cross the line, but as far as the Americans and their allies were concerned, all of a sudden you were giving voice to the extremists, you were advocating for terrorism, and you became the enemy. That was the crucial moment at which we became targets. And that’s the essence of why I wrote the book – there is a vital need to protect the media’s oversight role.”

In Australia today, he says new counter-terrorism laws threaten the media’s watchdog role in holding those in power to account.

“Australia’s Foreign Fighter Legislation [the CounterTerrorism Amendment Bill of 2014] makes it a criminal offence to advocate for terrorism, to broadcast or publish terrorist ideology,” Greste says. “So if you or I think it is important for us, as a community, to understand the psychology of those young men and women who go abroad to fight with Islamic State and we find someone in that position to speak about how it is they have come to that conclusion, if we then publish that interview we could find ourselves, as the law is drafted, on charges of promoting terrorist ideology.”

Greste is also troubled by the potential misuse of national security metadata legislation, introduced as the Data Retention Bill to intercept terrorist communications with the goal of disrupting plans and plots. Greste describes the drafting of the law as “vulnerable to massive privacy intrusions”, with extra ramifications for journalists and especially their sources.

Smuggled letters and notes Greste wrote on toilet paper in jail helped the writer with his recollections for the book. He sets his own experience within a broader historical framework, alternating chapters on his prison days and broader themes relating to the assault on media freedom and murders of journalists including friends and colleagues Daniel Pearl, James Foley, Kate Peyton, Maria Grazia Cutuli and Steven Sotloff.

Greste did not fear for his life in prison, but he did fear at times for his mental health.

“The psychology of prison can eat you up,” he says. “The whole point is to mess with your head.

“Once you have your physical safety and health sorted, as long as you have nutrition, water and shelter, and so long as you are not being physically abused or tortured, your physical survival and wellbeing is OK.

“You don’t need to worry about that. The only thing that will get you through is your mental health. There were a few periods when that started to slip.

“There was a period when I was genuinely starting to wonder whether karma or God or the universe had somehow conspired to put me in prison where I belonged for all the sins of the past, but I learnt I had to make peace with myself.

“That was such a powerful moment for me, to say: whatever I’ve done has nothing to do with why I’m here in prison now. The only reason I am in prison is because of what those bastards have done to me and my colleagues, not because of anything I’ve done, but because of the message they want to send to other journalists.

“Once I understood, I was able to let go of that personal angst and externalise it.”

Meditation and mindfulness, which he had previously practised “mechanically”, were crucial to understanding and recognising what was taking place inside his head.

“There was a time when I was so bitterly angry with the arseholes who had put us in there,” he says.

“But I [came to] recognise that the guys I was angry at for depriving me didn’t feel it. They were absolutely blissfully unaware of my anger and the only person being harmed by it was me. Recognising it all for what it was stopped me getting trapped inside that cycle.”

Despite the immense emptiness of the days and the terrible sense of uncertainty about his future, Greste says he feels grateful for the experience. He has grown from it.

“I am a lot more measured now,” he says. “It’s not like I’ve had a massive revelation, but I think I take a lot more pleasure in the small things than I used to, even if it’s just a nice cup of tea or the chance to walk on the beach.”

Living in Sydney, he has been busy writing, public speaking and making an ABC documentary on World War I commander Sir John Monash, which is due out next year.

Life is good, but that doesn’t mean he will stay put indefinitely. He still feels drawn to report from conflict zones.

“I can’t go back to Egypt, though,” he says. “I’ll wind up back in prison if I do. I am still a convicted terrorist with an outstanding prison sentence to serve there. I can’t go back to the Middle East for the same reason. “But I believe in what we do.” He cites a quote in his book from US journalist James Foley, who was beheaded by Islamic State in Syria in 2014.

“Foley said you can have physical courage, but that’s nothing compared to moral courage. And without moral courage we don’t have journalism.”

The First Casualty is published by Viking, $35