Women who travel for sex: Sun, sea and gigolos
The men are young, gorgeous and up for it. No wonder Western women see a Third World holiday as the gateway to casual sex - sometimes in exchange for cash. But as a new film highlights female sex tourism, Liz Hoggard asks who really pays the price.
The Independent on Sunday, Published: 09 July 2006
An attractive woman sips a cocktail under a bamboo shade. The sand is dazzlingly white, the sea aquamarine. A handsome young man approaches her and showers her with compliments: she is the most beautiful woman he has ever seen, he says. For the first time in years, she truly believes she is desirable.
But this holiday romance is not all it seems. The woman is white, in her late 50s; the man, black, 18 - and paid for his attentions. The scene - from the controversial new French film, Heading South, which opened this weekend, starring Charlotte Rampling, makes us confront uncomfortable truths about sexuality in a globalised world, and the legacy of colonialism.
In the film, an intelligent, provocative take on sex tourism in the late-1970s, Rampling plays Ellen, an American professor, who spends every summer at a private resort in Haiti, where beautiful, muscled black boys are available to the female clientele, mostly affluent single women in their forties, who despair of finding mates through more conventional means. "More than sex, they are seeking a tenderness that the world is refusing them," the film's director, Laurence Cantet, explains.
Fast-forward 30 years, and the reality of sex tourism is anything but tender. Today beach resorts in developing countries such as Kuta in Bali, Negril in Jamaica and Boca Chica and Sosua in the Dominican Republic have become Third World pick-up spots for women tourists. Tour companies even market package deals as sex holidays for single and unaccompanied women. Forget Shirley Valentine, these women - who range from grandmothers to teens - don't want a long-term relationship. And there's plenty of live flesh on sale.
Take Jamaica, where 17 per cent of the population lives below the poverty line. Hustling on the beach is the only way that some young men can feed themselves and their families. No wonder they choose older women who pay better than younger ones. InNegril, the men can earn $100 (£60) for sex with a female tourist, £90 for oral sex, which Jamaican men usually regard as taboo. Many others are hired as a guide to the island and throw in sexual services, often just for as meal or a place to sleep.
The definition of a sex tourist is an adult who travels in order to have legal consensual sexual relations with another adult, often for the exchange of money or presents. We still assume that a sex tourist will be male - indeed many regard the relationship between beach boy and female tourist as harmless fun. The woman gets guilt-free sex while keeping a firm hold on the purse strings. Where's the harm?
Jane, 67, a divorcee, has spent the past 10 years holidaying in West Africa. She loves the climate and the people - and she especially loves the men. "They are so wonderfully flattering. They make you feel like a real women. I don't mind paying for their drinks and meals if they stay the night." Divorced, with two grown-up sons, she explains, "White men my own age are so set in their ways; they just want another wife."
For others, this is exploitation pure and simple. Even where no money is exchanged, this sort of behaviour destabilises local communities and families. Ignorance and lack of concern about the abject poverty and lack of choice that characterises the men's lives leads the women to romanticise their actions. It is true that women sex tourists are still outnumbered by the legions of men who travel to Thailand and the Philippines for sex with prostitutes. Charities such as Amnesty and Unicef have no official policy on female sex tourism, preferring to focus on protecting trafficked women and children. Chris Beddoe, director of Ecpat UK, the children's rights organisation that campaigns against child sex tourism, believes: "If both adult partners are open and honest about what they're getting out of it, that's one thing. But it's another thing to continue the fantasy when there's a denial of the power that money brings to that relationship that creates a culture of dependency and exploitation.'
Nirpal Dhaliwal, author of the recent novel, Tourism (which satirises older white women turned on by young brown flesh), takes a tougher view. "Women enjoy casual sex and prostitution, too, but with far more hypocrisy. They help themselves to men in the developing world, kidding themselves that it's a 'holiday romance' that has nothing to do with the money they spend. Go to any Jamaican beach and you'll find handsome 'rent-a-dreads', who get by servicing Western women - lots from Britain. I've seen similar things in Goa."
Next month a new play, Sugar Mummies, about the pleasures and perils of sex tourism opens at London's Royal Court Theatre. Set in the Jamaican beach resort of Negril, it centres on a group of British and American women, seeking sun sea, sand ... and uninhibited sex with a handsome stranger. Sexually frank and often very funny, the play doesn't pull its punches. The playwright, Tanika Gupta, travelled to Jamaica to research the subject first-hand, and says she was shocked to find how female tourists objectify the black male body. "A lot of women talk about how 'big' black men are and how they can go all night. It becomes such a myth that even the men now use it. There is this terrible mutual delusion going on. And you do find yourself thinking, 'We're not a million miles from slavery.'" The older female tourists even confided to Gupta that although Jamaica was lovely and laid-back, the Dominican Republic and Cuba were "dirt cheap". "You can go as young as you want in Cuba," one woman boasted.
For all the talk of romance, the language of sex tourism is pretty basic. In Jamaica the men are called "beach boys" or "Rastatutes". The women are called milk bottles by the men - partly because of their ultra-white skin, partly because they are seen as vessels waiting to be filled.
Another myth the play explodes is that sex tourism is only perpetrated by white women. In Jamaica, Gupta met many black American women hiring beach boys. "They might be going back to their roots, or feeling more powerful because they had money, but they were still buying the same services."
In Bali, South-east Asia, Beddoes encountered wealthy Japanese women paying local boys for sex. The boys themselves claimed they found it less degrading because they saw the Japanese women as smaller and more childlike.
Gupta was inspired to write Sugar Mummies after reading the research by UK sociologists, Jacqueline Sanchez Taylor and Julia O'Connell into female sex tourism in the Caribbean. They decided to carry out their own research when they found that the usual analysis of sex tourism does not consider women as buyers of sexual services, because prostitute-users is seen as, by definition, male.
They interviewed 240 women holidaying in Negril, and two similar resorts in the Dominican Republic. Almost a third said they had engaged in sexual relationships with local men. Though 60 per cent admitted to certain "economic elements" to their liaisons, they did not perceive their sexual encounters as a prostitute-client transaction. Instead they insisted they were helping the men, and the local economy, by giving them money and gifts. When asked to describe "boyfriends", most emphasised how for them black Jamaican men possessed bodies of great sexual value. One 42 year-old English woman who travelled at least three times a year to Boca Chica in the Dominican Republic said: "I'm not naïve. I've been around the block. I come for sex - of course the sun, but mostly the sex. I'm not coming to live and set up house with a guy. I just want some fun and good sex."
"Female sex tourism is much more informal," says Sanchez Taylor, a lecturer in sociology at Leeds University. "It takes place in bars. There's no way for women to go into a brothel and say, 'I want a blow job.'
"Women who feel rejected by men in the West for being fatter and older -you know, 35, but they look 40 - find that in Jamaica all this is reversed," says Sanchez Taylor.
"There's a poetic lyricism to the gigolo's chat-up lines," agrees Gupta. "You very quickly understand why the women are buying this. On the first day, this baby aged 18 came to chat me up. At first I thought, this will be good for my play. But then he got a bit fast, so I suggested he move on to some younger women, And he said, 'Me no want the kitten, me want the cat.'"
The problem comes, she says, when the women start believing the men they have hooked up with are in love with them. "They confuse what is actually a financial transaction with real love. If you have low self-esteem, if you've not had much luck, if you're older ... you are likely to be more susceptible," says Gupta.
Some women even marry their boyfriends and take them home to the UK, although few relationships survive the cultural difference. Jamica's most famous holiday romance has recently come crashing down. Female tourism boomed after Terry McMillan's hit novel, How Stella Got Her Groove Back was made into a Hollywood film. The novel, in which Stella, a divorced black woman in her forties, takes a holiday to Jamaica, where she meets and falls in love with Winston, a local man half her age - was a fictionalised account of McMillan's own marriage to Jeremy Plummer, 23 years her junior. This year, McMillan, 53, filed for divorce, claiming that the marriage was based on a "fraud'' because Plummer lied about his sexual orientation and married her only to gain US citizenship. He denies it.
It is a nasty twist that the countries where this sort of tourism is most rife are ex-slave colonies. Many are still dealing with the fallout of colonialism. All the hotels, restaurants, cars and glass-bottomed boats in Negril are owned by Americans. The urban economy doesn't even belong to the local people.
Yet the women who sleep with the beach boys insist they are helping race relations. They flatter themselves they have gone native. "In my play there's a scene where a white woman is taking about how she loves R&B and reggae and what she calls hip and hop," says Gupta.
It is the female tourist who books the flights and determines the length of time she will spend with their boyfriend, as well as making day-to-day decisions when they are together, such as when and where they eat. One 21-year-old migrant from Haiti who had been working in Sosua, told Sanchez Taylor that he even had to "snog" his tourist client despite a bad toothache and a swollen face. If he did not, he would not be able to afford the antibiotics to cure it.
In Sugar Mummies, Gupta deliberately allows herself one relationship that might just work. "I'm not saying anything about mixed race relationships, I'm talking about these specific kinds of sex-tourist relationships where women go out there specifically to have sex. It will probably backfire and a whole load more women will go off to Jamaica."
'Sugar Mummies' opens at the Royal Court, London SW1 on 5 August (020-7565 5000)
No strings: 'I wanted to do sex like a man'
Lucy, a 23-year-old events organiser from London, visited St Lucia this year with a friend
The words "sex tourism" make me think of City boys who go to Thailand with their mates for seedy conquests to boast about. It's different for women. When they go abroad for sex, it's about wanting to feel special and escaping the boundaries at home.
My friend and I decided to treat ourselves to a stay in a luxury hotel in St Lucia for 10 days of pure pampering - and ideally a sexual encounter. This was the first time I'd gone on holiday explicitly with this intention. I was keen to find a St Lucian man as I'd heard they were very well endowed. I had my eye on Sandi from my first day. He was a local working in the cocktail bar, in his early thirties, and was very handsome, muscular and toned with the perfect six-pack. We spent several evenings drinking, chatting and flirting in the bar.
There are very strict rules at the hotel about staff and guests so I knew I had to make the first move. I told him I was going for a walk on the beach - and we spent our first night together. It was very romantic.
This was totally different from how I'd behave at home. In London, taking a man home with you, there's always the fear that friends might see you, not to mention potential dangers or the hassle of waking up in your flat with a stranger. But on holiday the boundaries shift and you can behave totally differently. You have a tan, you feel gorgeous, you're treated like royalty - and everything is available and easy.
Sandi and I had a great time. On his day off, he took us to a local street party. I paid for taxis, drinks and food. We needed his protection because St Lucian men had certain misconceptions about white women - although I probably wasn't helping.
When it came to leaving, I surprised myself by feeling quite gutted. I'd wanted to do sex without feelings, just like the men, but there was a definite trembling of the lips - for both of us. But as we flew home, my friend and I were very pleased with everything that had happened. I'm in a relationship at the moment but if I was single again I'd definitely go on that kind of holiday. Why not?
Around one in five British holidaymakers under the age of 25 is failing to practise safe sex while abroad, according to a study published this month by Trojan Condoms.
Friday, August 25, 2006
Bigots R Us!
I read about this on the BBC website --
The 20 “castaways” in the 13th season of CBS' Survivor will be divided according to their ethnicity. The contestants will be segregated into four “tribes” of blacks, whites, Asians and Latinos when the hit CBS programme returns on 14 September…
-- and people thought I've been out of my mind keeping this (and the previous) blog, that racism, racial strife, and ethnoxenophobia is still in FULL effect in Amerikkka.
CBS is completely reckless and socially irresponsible to sanction this kind of competition, because it's going to certainly justify certain racial/ethnic stereotypes about cunning, shrewdness, physical attributes and "get-along-ability." The contestants were smart, they'd work the white people off the Island first (I wonder what happens to the ratings when that happens... like the CBS/Survivor brass would allow that), then have the various ethnic groups go at it.
The 20 “castaways” in the 13th season of CBS' Survivor will be divided according to their ethnicity. The contestants will be segregated into four “tribes” of blacks, whites, Asians and Latinos when the hit CBS programme returns on 14 September…
-- and people thought I've been out of my mind keeping this (and the previous) blog, that racism, racial strife, and ethnoxenophobia is still in FULL effect in Amerikkka.
CBS is completely reckless and socially irresponsible to sanction this kind of competition, because it's going to certainly justify certain racial/ethnic stereotypes about cunning, shrewdness, physical attributes and "get-along-ability." The contestants were smart, they'd work the white people off the Island first (I wonder what happens to the ratings when that happens... like the CBS/Survivor brass would allow that), then have the various ethnic groups go at it.
War Writings, Part Deux
Ah... the LA Heatwave is still in effect. Nuthin' sucks worse than walkin by the on-ramp to the 405 and the cars zip by blastin you with a wave of hot air.
The heat makes you think, what's up with clean water? 'Cause you need so much to stay hydrated, and then more to be cool. Or maybe you just need to get to a ice cooler at the local 7-11, where a lot of beggars hang out.
Speaking of ice coolers, I was reading an article in Rolling Stone about the sectarian violence in Iraq, and the author was saying that Sunnis were killing Shi'ites (or maybe it was the other way around, I don't give a fuck, they's all the same to me) because they were using an ice machine.
Ice Machines!?! A potential messiah for desert folk, but since ice machines weren't around when Mohammad was toolin around the use of one marks you as an infidel-defiler that needs to be bucked down -- with a 7.62mm bullet bursting out of a -- you guessed it! An AK-47! Like those were around during the time of Mohammed. I don't even think gunpowder was discovered yet, so the "time honored tradition" of celebrating by firing a AK-47 into the air is another reason why the Arabs just pervert Islam. Or maybe their culture is just backward-ass?
Ya think? See what Islam needs is a Reformation -- the same way that Christianity and Judeaism had, so the religions could go with the flow of increasingly modern times. I mean, where's the Arabic martin luther? Slain as a child, or given over to twisted jailers to torture and maim, so an example can be set -- Imams and Ayatollahs don't tolerate people who want to shake up the power structure!
The war zone that's kicking the US's ass in Iraq, should be allowed to enter Civil War status. Let them fools kill each other off to the point, that it can be a clean sweep for the US Troops to mop up the surviving militias and insurgents. Plus, all the money that's being spent over there could be being spent on a new energy sources, or at least to build out more solar energy collectors.
Well, more news from the front when I can get back to the library again.
I wonder if Arab snipers is mad 'cause G.I. Joe's cruise around Baghdad with iPods blasting out beats by Tupac? You know the thing about not having any money for such a long time, and then eventually going homeless is that you don't get to have these little consumer goods that seem cool, and get a lot of pub in the media -- like a Blackberry or an iPod or a GPS in your car. I'm goin to have one of those installed in my car next time I have a garage to park my vehicle in.
The heat makes you think, what's up with clean water? 'Cause you need so much to stay hydrated, and then more to be cool. Or maybe you just need to get to a ice cooler at the local 7-11, where a lot of beggars hang out.
Speaking of ice coolers, I was reading an article in Rolling Stone about the sectarian violence in Iraq, and the author was saying that Sunnis were killing Shi'ites (or maybe it was the other way around, I don't give a fuck, they's all the same to me) because they were using an ice machine.
Ice Machines!?! A potential messiah for desert folk, but since ice machines weren't around when Mohammad was toolin around the use of one marks you as an infidel-defiler that needs to be bucked down -- with a 7.62mm bullet bursting out of a -- you guessed it! An AK-47! Like those were around during the time of Mohammed. I don't even think gunpowder was discovered yet, so the "time honored tradition" of celebrating by firing a AK-47 into the air is another reason why the Arabs just pervert Islam. Or maybe their culture is just backward-ass?
Ya think? See what Islam needs is a Reformation -- the same way that Christianity and Judeaism had, so the religions could go with the flow of increasingly modern times. I mean, where's the Arabic martin luther? Slain as a child, or given over to twisted jailers to torture and maim, so an example can be set -- Imams and Ayatollahs don't tolerate people who want to shake up the power structure!
The war zone that's kicking the US's ass in Iraq, should be allowed to enter Civil War status. Let them fools kill each other off to the point, that it can be a clean sweep for the US Troops to mop up the surviving militias and insurgents. Plus, all the money that's being spent over there could be being spent on a new energy sources, or at least to build out more solar energy collectors.
Well, more news from the front when I can get back to the library again.
I wonder if Arab snipers is mad 'cause G.I. Joe's cruise around Baghdad with iPods blasting out beats by Tupac? You know the thing about not having any money for such a long time, and then eventually going homeless is that you don't get to have these little consumer goods that seem cool, and get a lot of pub in the media -- like a Blackberry or an iPod or a GPS in your car. I'm goin to have one of those installed in my car next time I have a garage to park my vehicle in.
Saturday, August 19, 2006
War Writings
So it's been forever (in the technosphere that is) since I've posted, and that's mainly because I've been homeless since April and it's finally getting to me. Living hand-to-mouth, and sleeping on couches or in my car, and showering at the gym (gotta love that cheap Bally's membership I acquired years back), and washing my clothes whenever I can collect enough soda cans to recycle and get some cash back (at least I'm doing my part for the environment -- recycling is the next best thing to getting the fuck off of fossil fuels).
To entertain myself, I've been reading a lot of TIME magazine, Rolling Stone and Business Week... and James Ellroy's AMERICAN TABLOID (jesus christ, what a twisted, engrossing, stylistically insane book but probably the most illuminating fiction on how white people in the late 50s and earlyl 60s viewed Blacks and Hispanics (in the form of Cubans).
TIME and Rolling Stone have been covering the Debacle In Iraq with some fascinating reportage -- case in point last week's TIME had this article called Baghdad Diary, and man was it fucking interesting. The opening info about just how you have to be part of the lunatic fringe just to enter the Iraqi capital by air will make you rethink whatever you previously thought about the country-wide conflagration.
See the thing about this war -- what makes it most odd, fucked-up and out of control is that we live in a world where information, documentation, and transmission travels Gigahertz speeds, and yet the truth at the center of this conflict seems to be escaping just about every goddamn person on the planet. Why is Shi'a really fighting against Sunni, and how in the hell did Saddam -- a Sunni -- get to run rampant over the overwhelming Shi'a majority. How weak are those people? You have to be the worst cunt-laping faggot not to be able to express your differences without resorting unapologetic mass murder.
Otherwise a solution could be proffered -- whether it's Sectarian violence or al-Qaeda still trippin' or the "time-to-settle-old-score" fuckers, the violence in tha part of the world is never ending. I think they would have been better off, if Hussein was still in power or if he was assassinated. Full-scale invasion for reigme change just doesn't seem to work. When it happened in Germany, the country was split in two - Japan survived any kind of obscene breakdown of civil order because the country is so homogenous. Israel invade Lebanon in 82 and the Palestinian terrorities earlier and what in God's name transpired there? The entire world is fed shit on a stick, because of that continued conflict.
With all the IEDs and sniping and milita murder marches Iraq seems to be doing okay in Kurdistan. Yeah, that little corner in the North that the US had no-fly zones since the end of the first Gulf War. The Kurds have got their shit together, and they're dealing with the BOOLSHIT to the South as best as they can. I don't know if the Kurds are Muslim Arabs or even Arabs, but I don't think have the same inexplicable cultural issues as the rest of Muslim world. Why is the Shi'a vs Sunni debate still such an issue that has to express itself with such violence after multiple centuries. It's like if the Protestants and the Catholics were still waging unspeakable crimes against each other four CENTURIES after Martin Luther! [if you don't know -- and I don't know all the details or facts -- the issue between Sunni and Shi'a has something to do with who is the true inheritor of Muhammud's legacy. Who really gives two-tugs on a dead dogs dick?]
I don't think Arabs are interpreting Islam correctly at all! I really don't. And I don't give a fuck if is "their religion" -- it's supposed to be a system of tolerance and forgiveness.
Arabs trip me the fuck out, 'cause the guy in the TIME article was saying that pumping rounds into the stratosphere from an AK-47 is a time-honored Arab traditional sign of celebration... uh, the AK has only been around for sixty some years -- if you can pick up such and absurd-ass tradition, then you can figure the fuck out what's the deal with the Shi'a/Sunni clash.
It was written somewhere the the Debacle in Iraq is and will be the worst possible foreign policy mistake that United States will ever make -- short of using a nuclear weapon in Mexico to keep immigrants from coming across the Rio Grande!
I bet in five years the fighting is still going on. I bet in five years there would have been some sort of awful civil war in Iraq that tears the country into four or five punk-ass little city-states in the Babylonian desert. I bet in five years, American troops will still be dying for the sand-niggers who don't want them there in the first place. I bet in five years the Western world will have achieve a strong level of Green energy sourcing and other alternatives to fossil fuel that the supreme fuck-shit those goes on with these bitch-meat Arabs, that the Middle East won't mean shit to world energy prices. I bet in five years, Arab terrorist will destroy a few more US airplanes. I bet in five years Osama bin Laden will still be issuing video tapes (eventhough everyone else will have switched over to completely non-moving parts image acquisition) in caves in Tora Bora, and be thumbing his nose at the US.
I bet in five years, this blog will still exist. Only I won't be writing it!
To entertain myself, I've been reading a lot of TIME magazine, Rolling Stone and Business Week... and James Ellroy's AMERICAN TABLOID (jesus christ, what a twisted, engrossing, stylistically insane book but probably the most illuminating fiction on how white people in the late 50s and earlyl 60s viewed Blacks and Hispanics (in the form of Cubans).
TIME and Rolling Stone have been covering the Debacle In Iraq with some fascinating reportage -- case in point last week's TIME had this article called Baghdad Diary, and man was it fucking interesting. The opening info about just how you have to be part of the lunatic fringe just to enter the Iraqi capital by air will make you rethink whatever you previously thought about the country-wide conflagration.
See the thing about this war -- what makes it most odd, fucked-up and out of control is that we live in a world where information, documentation, and transmission travels Gigahertz speeds, and yet the truth at the center of this conflict seems to be escaping just about every goddamn person on the planet. Why is Shi'a really fighting against Sunni, and how in the hell did Saddam -- a Sunni -- get to run rampant over the overwhelming Shi'a majority. How weak are those people? You have to be the worst cunt-laping faggot not to be able to express your differences without resorting unapologetic mass murder.
Otherwise a solution could be proffered -- whether it's Sectarian violence or al-Qaeda still trippin' or the "time-to-settle-old-score" fuckers, the violence in tha part of the world is never ending. I think they would have been better off, if Hussein was still in power or if he was assassinated. Full-scale invasion for reigme change just doesn't seem to work. When it happened in Germany, the country was split in two - Japan survived any kind of obscene breakdown of civil order because the country is so homogenous. Israel invade Lebanon in 82 and the Palestinian terrorities earlier and what in God's name transpired there? The entire world is fed shit on a stick, because of that continued conflict.
With all the IEDs and sniping and milita murder marches Iraq seems to be doing okay in Kurdistan. Yeah, that little corner in the North that the US had no-fly zones since the end of the first Gulf War. The Kurds have got their shit together, and they're dealing with the BOOLSHIT to the South as best as they can. I don't know if the Kurds are Muslim Arabs or even Arabs, but I don't think have the same inexplicable cultural issues as the rest of Muslim world. Why is the Shi'a vs Sunni debate still such an issue that has to express itself with such violence after multiple centuries. It's like if the Protestants and the Catholics were still waging unspeakable crimes against each other four CENTURIES after Martin Luther! [if you don't know -- and I don't know all the details or facts -- the issue between Sunni and Shi'a has something to do with who is the true inheritor of Muhammud's legacy. Who really gives two-tugs on a dead dogs dick?]
I don't think Arabs are interpreting Islam correctly at all! I really don't. And I don't give a fuck if is "their religion" -- it's supposed to be a system of tolerance and forgiveness.
Arabs trip me the fuck out, 'cause the guy in the TIME article was saying that pumping rounds into the stratosphere from an AK-47 is a time-honored Arab traditional sign of celebration... uh, the AK has only been around for sixty some years -- if you can pick up such and absurd-ass tradition, then you can figure the fuck out what's the deal with the Shi'a/Sunni clash.
It was written somewhere the the Debacle in Iraq is and will be the worst possible foreign policy mistake that United States will ever make -- short of using a nuclear weapon in Mexico to keep immigrants from coming across the Rio Grande!
I bet in five years the fighting is still going on. I bet in five years there would have been some sort of awful civil war in Iraq that tears the country into four or five punk-ass little city-states in the Babylonian desert. I bet in five years, American troops will still be dying for the sand-niggers who don't want them there in the first place. I bet in five years the Western world will have achieve a strong level of Green energy sourcing and other alternatives to fossil fuel that the supreme fuck-shit those goes on with these bitch-meat Arabs, that the Middle East won't mean shit to world energy prices. I bet in five years, Arab terrorist will destroy a few more US airplanes. I bet in five years Osama bin Laden will still be issuing video tapes (eventhough everyone else will have switched over to completely non-moving parts image acquisition) in caves in Tora Bora, and be thumbing his nose at the US.
I bet in five years, this blog will still exist. Only I won't be writing it!
Thursday, August 03, 2006
F-- A Confidential Source
In today's NYTimes there is an article (reprinted below) about how Federal Prosecutors have won the right to inspect the telephone records to two NYTimes reporters to suss out their confidential sources.
This is just another reason why the GOP were depicted on the cover of TIME a few weeks back as an elephant showing its ASS! 'Cause these people want to be crusaders in the "name" of Patriotism but at the EXPENSE of so-called American Ideals.
Buncha bitches! As Gza from The Wu-Tang Clan has often said, most notably in the Dave Chappelle skit "Wu-Tang Financial"
Have you ever listened to this group called ANTIBALAS, they're a New York City-based Afrobeat group, and they're always talking about WWIV -- and how CNN and Fox News chose not to cover this war, as it took place on the Dark Continent.
U.S. Wins Access to Reporter Phone Records
By ADAM LIPTAK
Published: August 2, 2006
A federal prosecutor may inspect the telephone records of two New York Times reporters in an effort to identify their confidential sources, a federal appeals court in New York ruled yesterday.
The 2-to-1 decision, from a court historically sympathetic to claims that journalists should be entitled to protect their sources, reversed a lower court and dealt a further setback to news organizations, which have lately been on a losing streak in the federal courts.
The dissenting judge said that the government had failed to demonstrate it truly needed the records and that efforts to obtain reporters’ phone records could alter the way news gathering was conducted.
The case arose from a Chicago grand jury’s investigation into who told the two reporters, Judith Miller and Philip Shenon, about actions the government was planning to take against two Islamic charities, Holy Land Foundation in Texas and Global Relief Foundation in Illinois. Though the government contended that calls from the reporters tipped off the charities to impending raids and asset seizures, the investigation appears to be focused on identifying the reporters’ sources. No testimony has been sought from the reporters, and there has been no indication that their actions are a subject of the investigation.
“No grand jury can make an informed decision to pursue the investigation further, much less to indict or not indict, without the reporters’ evidence,” Judge Ralph K. Winter Jr. wrote for majority, in an opinion joined by Judge Amalya Lyle Kearse. “We see no danger to a free press in so holding. Learning of imminent law enforcement asset freezes/searches and informing targets of them is not an activity essential, or even common, to journalism.”
George Freeman, vice president and assistant general counsel of The New York Times Company, disputed the majority’s characterization. Ms. Miller and Mr. Shenon, he said, “were conducting their journalistic duties by getting reaction to an ongoing story.”
Mr. Freeman added: “The move against the charities was not a surprise. No one has ever alleged that any federal agent was hindered or hurt or didn’t succeed.”
Mr. Freeman said The Times had not decided whether to pursue an appeal, either to the full appeals court, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, or to the United States Supreme Court.
Ms. Miller, who retired from The Times last year, said she was very disappointed. “That this was 2-to-1 showed how close these issues are and the need for a federal shield law to protect journalists, their telephone numbers and hence their sources,” she said.
In an unrelated case last year, a federal appeals court in Washington ordered Ms. Miller and Matthew Cooper, then of Time magazine, to testify before a grand jury about conversations with their sources. They did so after receiving their sources’ permission, though not before Ms. Miller spent 85 days in jail.
Patrick J. Fitzgerald was the prosecutor in both cases, though he acted as United States attorney in Chicago in the charities case and as special counsel in the Washington case. His spokesman, Randall Samborn, declined to comment yesterday.
While yesterday’s decision represented a clear loss for The Times, the majority ruled for the paper on several subsidiary points and left open the possibility that it would protect reporters’ sources in cases involving other kinds of reporting.
The majority said, for instance, that the paper had been entitled to bring a civil suit in New York to challenge a grand jury subpoena in Chicago. It also said that whatever protections the reporters had against being called to testify about their sources also extended to their phone records. And it said that “courts can easily find appropriate means of protecting the journalists involved and their sources” where “government corruption or misconduct” is involved.
But the court rejected The Times’s central argument, saying that neither the United States Supreme Court’s 1972 decision in Branzburg v. Hayes, which considered the scope of the protections offered by the First Amendment, nor later developments in other areas of the law provided the paper with the ability to protect the phone records at issue in the case.
The majority ruled that the government could overcome any privilege that even a broad reading of the Branzburg decision allowed. It also declined to adopt a so-called common-law evidentiary privilege based on the shield laws almost all states have adopted, saying the government could similarly defeat any plausible version of such a privilege.
In seeming to acknowledge the existence of privilege, though one subject to a balancing test, the decision differed from the one issued by the federal appeals court in Washington last year that sent Ms. Miller to jail.
“There is a lot more to be heard from the courts before this issue is resolved one way or the other,” said Floyd Abrams, who represented The Times in both cases.
In his dissent, Judge Robert D. Sack said the government had not shown that the phone records contained important information that could not be obtained elsewhere. Judge Sack added a cautionary note about the consequences of unfettered access to reporters’ phone records.
“Reporters might find themselves,” he said, “as a matter of practical necessity, contacting sources the way I understand drug dealers to reach theirs — by use of clandestine cellphones and meeting in darkened doorways. Ordinary use of the telephone could become a threat to journalist and source alike. It is difficult to see in whose best interests such a regime would operate.”
Judge Winter was appointed by President Ronald Reagan, Judge Kearse by President Jimmy Carter and Judge Sack by President Bill Clinton.
This is just another reason why the GOP were depicted on the cover of TIME a few weeks back as an elephant showing its ASS! 'Cause these people want to be crusaders in the "name" of Patriotism but at the EXPENSE of so-called American Ideals.
Buncha bitches! As Gza from The Wu-Tang Clan has often said, most notably in the Dave Chappelle skit "Wu-Tang Financial"
Have you ever listened to this group called ANTIBALAS, they're a New York City-based Afrobeat group, and they're always talking about WWIV -- and how CNN and Fox News chose not to cover this war, as it took place on the Dark Continent.
U.S. Wins Access to Reporter Phone Records
By ADAM LIPTAK
Published: August 2, 2006
A federal prosecutor may inspect the telephone records of two New York Times reporters in an effort to identify their confidential sources, a federal appeals court in New York ruled yesterday.
The 2-to-1 decision, from a court historically sympathetic to claims that journalists should be entitled to protect their sources, reversed a lower court and dealt a further setback to news organizations, which have lately been on a losing streak in the federal courts.
The dissenting judge said that the government had failed to demonstrate it truly needed the records and that efforts to obtain reporters’ phone records could alter the way news gathering was conducted.
The case arose from a Chicago grand jury’s investigation into who told the two reporters, Judith Miller and Philip Shenon, about actions the government was planning to take against two Islamic charities, Holy Land Foundation in Texas and Global Relief Foundation in Illinois. Though the government contended that calls from the reporters tipped off the charities to impending raids and asset seizures, the investigation appears to be focused on identifying the reporters’ sources. No testimony has been sought from the reporters, and there has been no indication that their actions are a subject of the investigation.
“No grand jury can make an informed decision to pursue the investigation further, much less to indict or not indict, without the reporters’ evidence,” Judge Ralph K. Winter Jr. wrote for majority, in an opinion joined by Judge Amalya Lyle Kearse. “We see no danger to a free press in so holding. Learning of imminent law enforcement asset freezes/searches and informing targets of them is not an activity essential, or even common, to journalism.”
George Freeman, vice president and assistant general counsel of The New York Times Company, disputed the majority’s characterization. Ms. Miller and Mr. Shenon, he said, “were conducting their journalistic duties by getting reaction to an ongoing story.”
Mr. Freeman added: “The move against the charities was not a surprise. No one has ever alleged that any federal agent was hindered or hurt or didn’t succeed.”
Mr. Freeman said The Times had not decided whether to pursue an appeal, either to the full appeals court, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, or to the United States Supreme Court.
Ms. Miller, who retired from The Times last year, said she was very disappointed. “That this was 2-to-1 showed how close these issues are and the need for a federal shield law to protect journalists, their telephone numbers and hence their sources,” she said.
In an unrelated case last year, a federal appeals court in Washington ordered Ms. Miller and Matthew Cooper, then of Time magazine, to testify before a grand jury about conversations with their sources. They did so after receiving their sources’ permission, though not before Ms. Miller spent 85 days in jail.
Patrick J. Fitzgerald was the prosecutor in both cases, though he acted as United States attorney in Chicago in the charities case and as special counsel in the Washington case. His spokesman, Randall Samborn, declined to comment yesterday.
While yesterday’s decision represented a clear loss for The Times, the majority ruled for the paper on several subsidiary points and left open the possibility that it would protect reporters’ sources in cases involving other kinds of reporting.
The majority said, for instance, that the paper had been entitled to bring a civil suit in New York to challenge a grand jury subpoena in Chicago. It also said that whatever protections the reporters had against being called to testify about their sources also extended to their phone records. And it said that “courts can easily find appropriate means of protecting the journalists involved and their sources” where “government corruption or misconduct” is involved.
But the court rejected The Times’s central argument, saying that neither the United States Supreme Court’s 1972 decision in Branzburg v. Hayes, which considered the scope of the protections offered by the First Amendment, nor later developments in other areas of the law provided the paper with the ability to protect the phone records at issue in the case.
The majority ruled that the government could overcome any privilege that even a broad reading of the Branzburg decision allowed. It also declined to adopt a so-called common-law evidentiary privilege based on the shield laws almost all states have adopted, saying the government could similarly defeat any plausible version of such a privilege.
In seeming to acknowledge the existence of privilege, though one subject to a balancing test, the decision differed from the one issued by the federal appeals court in Washington last year that sent Ms. Miller to jail.
“There is a lot more to be heard from the courts before this issue is resolved one way or the other,” said Floyd Abrams, who represented The Times in both cases.
In his dissent, Judge Robert D. Sack said the government had not shown that the phone records contained important information that could not be obtained elsewhere. Judge Sack added a cautionary note about the consequences of unfettered access to reporters’ phone records.
“Reporters might find themselves,” he said, “as a matter of practical necessity, contacting sources the way I understand drug dealers to reach theirs — by use of clandestine cellphones and meeting in darkened doorways. Ordinary use of the telephone could become a threat to journalist and source alike. It is difficult to see in whose best interests such a regime would operate.”
Judge Winter was appointed by President Ronald Reagan, Judge Kearse by President Jimmy Carter and Judge Sack by President Bill Clinton.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
