Afghanistan’s intelligence service has announced a ban on live media coverage of insurgent attacks, saying that such broadcasts bolster the cause of militants.
The ban came three days after Taliban militants struck at hotels in the heart of Kabul with suicide attackers and a car bomb, killing 16 people — half of them foreigners — in an assault that showed the militants remain a potent force.
The National Directorate of Security told representatives of news organizations about the ban during individual meetings on Monday at its heavily secured compound. It cited Article 7 of Afghanistan’s national security law.
Saeed Ansari, a spokesman for the directorate, did not disclose specific details about how the ban would be imposed, but said there would be punitive measures taken against journalists who did not comply. He did not elaborate on what steps the directorate would take against news organizations if they violated the ban.
During the meeting, reporters argued that the ban would make it difficult to provide the public with up-to-date information about insurgent attacks in Afghanistan.
“We believe broad, pre-emptive bans on coverage are inconsistent with a democratic society,” John Daniszewski, AP senior managing editor for international news, said in New York. “Experience shows there are many ways to cover important breaking stories without interfering with police or security operations.”
Ansari said there had been cases during the Friday attack when television footage from the scene provided insurgents with tactical information about the counterattack launched by Afghan security forces.
Ansari said it was appropriate to wait for the end of an incident and a preliminary investigation before reporting anything at all.
Last year, the Afghan government issued a similar directive, instructing journalists not to broadcast “any incidence of violence” during the hours of polling in the Aug. 20 presidential election and directing journalists to stay away from the scene of attacks until investigators could collect evidence.
The orders were not strictly enforced.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RSS