wsws.org

American cyclist Lance Armstrong’s account of his years using performance-enhancing drugs and his more than ten-year campaign to intimidate and discredit critics says a good deal about professional sports and the broader social atmosphere. Armstrong spoke to television talk show host Oprah Winfrey January 13 and the interview was aired in two parts last week.

Armstrong, born in 1971 in Plano, Texas, won the Tour de France cycling race a record seven years in a row from 1999 to 2005, along with many other competitions. He battled testicular cancer that had spread to his brain and lungs in 1996-97. Armstrong retired from cycling in 2005, but came back four years later before finally bowing out in 2011. At the time he was facing a US federal investigation into the doping allegations, although that did not lead to any charges being laid.

In October 2012, the US Anti-Doping Agency issued a lengthy report, accompanied by 1,000 pages of evidence, including statements from 11 former teammates, accusing Armstrong of doping. The USADA alleged that the cyclist had presided over “the most sophisticated, professionalized and successful doping program that sport has ever seen.”

Armstrong has been stripped of his Tour de France titles and all other titles from 1998 onward and been banned for life from all sports that follow the World Anti-Doping Agency code.

Throughout the late 1990s and 2000s, Armstrong attacked anyone who represented a threat to his position in cycling and his cover-up of illicit operations. After French cyclist Christophe Bassons raised the issue of doping in newspaper articles and comments, Armstrong rode alongside him during the 1999 Tour de France and told him, according to Bassons, that “it was a mistake to speak out that way, and he asked why I was doing it.” Bassons continued, “I told him that I’m thinking of the next generation of riders. Then he said ‘Why don’t you leave, then?’”

On French television news at the time, Armstrong repeated his claim that Bassons’ accusations weren’t good “for cycling, for his team, for me, for anybody.” Armstrong added, “If he thinks cycling works like that, he’s wrong and he would be better off going home.” The French rider’s allegations about doping in the sport essentially ended his career.

On numerous occasions, Armstrong went to court to silence accusers, including former friends and colleagues, as well as media outlets, winning millions of dollars in settlements in the process. When Winfrey asked him in the televised interview about masseuse Emma O’Reilly, who reported on Armstrong’s dirty tricks, he acknowledged, “We ran over her, we bullied her.” Did you sue O’Reilly, Armstrong was asked. “To be honest, Oprah, we sued so many people I don’t even [know]. I’m sure we did.”

His very public and strident years-long defense, it turns out, was nothing but a tissue of lies.

This is not a pretty picture, and there is no need to make it any prettier. There is often an instinctive tendency to come to the defense of anyone under assault by the venal American media. However, Armstrong is no Muhammad Ali, suspended from boxing in 1967 because he refused induction into the US Army during the Vietnam War, or track star John Carlos, victimized for his protest at the Mexico City Olympics in 1968. Or even baseball player Magglio Ordóñez and manager Ozzie Guillen, vilified by the media and the ultra-right for comments in support of Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro, respectively.

Armstrong was clearly part of the problem. He apparently operated a type of mini-Mafia in cycling, bringing to the sport the very worst of American predatory entrepreneurship. There is in his story—particularly his readiness to destroy the careers of other people—something sinister and disturbing. In the Winfrey interview, he referred to his “win at all costs” attitude.
There is, of course, a large dose of hypocrisy in the media assault on him now. Many of those doing the assaulting participated in building the cyclist into a demigod-like celebrity figure, with his heroic story of returning from near death to triumph at the Tour de France. Such a figure inevitably attracts a large crowd of apologists and bloodsuckers.
Major corporate interests were involved in Armstrong’s career, including Nike (which has removed from its web site the 2001 press release for Road to Paris, the documentary the company produced about Armstrong’s preparations for the Tour de France that year), Anheuser-Busch, Trek Bicycle, Giro protective gear, bicycle component makers SRAM and Shimano, AMD [semiconductors], Oakley sports equipment, RadioShack, 24 Hour Fitness, FRS and Honey Stinger (both energy products’ firms) and numerous others.
Investment banker Thomas Weisel, who founded Montgomery Securities, which sold for $1.3 billion in 1997, and later launched Thomas Weisel Partners, a “growth focused investment banking firm,” was a key backer of the company formed to manage the US Postal Service cycling team, which Armstrong joined in 1998.
The ultra-commercialization and degradation of sports created the social and economic context for Armstrong’s wrongdoings. The sums involved are huge. The cyclist told Winfrey that after his fall, various firms called to cancel their relations with him: “You could look at the day-and-a-half when people left. You asked me the cost. I don’t like thinking about it, but it was a $75 million day. All gone and probably never coming back.” For the companies and event organizers involved, of course, the stakes run considerably higher, into the hundreds of millions and billions of dollars.
Doping, by all accounts, was widespread, even quasi-universal, in cycling. Armstrong’s principal contribution seems to have been organization and audacity in its usage. Winfrey noted, “To keep on winning it meant you had to keep taking banned substances to do it? Are you saying that’s how common it was?” Armstrong responded, “Yes, and I’m not sure that this is an acceptable answer, but that’s like saying we have to have air in our tires or we have to have water in our bottles. That was, in my view, part of the job.”
Asked if he felt he had been cheating, Armstrong answered, “I went in and just looked up the definition of cheat and the definition of cheat is to gain an advantage on a rival or foe that they don’t have. I didn’t view it that way. I viewed it as a level playing field.”
In any event, the cycling champion’s ruthless outlook did not come out of the blue. Armstrong matured in the Reagan-Bush-Clinton years, when the “free market,” selfishness and greed were worshipped at every turn by the entire media and political establishment. “Force works,” declared the Wall Street Journal following the war on Iraq in 1990-91, and the notion that bullying and violence were the solution to each and every problem was communicated through the political system, popular culture and the sports industry.
One doesn’t want to exaggerate, but Armstrong, in his intimidation tactics, relentless, almost provocative, lying, and his apparent belief he could get away with anything, seems to have borrowed more than a little from official America’s relations with the rest of the globe over the past two decades.
Bound up with the money, corporate sponsorships and emergence of the “athlete as entrepreneur” has been the advent of the celebrity culture in America, which also swept Armstrong along in its wake. Indeed, his conversation with Oprah Winfrey, on national television, was one of that culture’s false and stage-managed operations. (No doubt all sorts of legal and financial calculations went into Armstrong’s appearance, including perhaps the first step in a process of publicly rehabilitating himself as part of an effort to get his lifetime sports ban lifted.)
One of the country’s richest individuals, Winfrey assiduously stayed away from any queries or comments that might have shown the sports-entertainment industry, of which she is a part, or American business operations in general in a bad light.
The questions remained at a low level, all directed toward making Armstrong accept personal responsibility for his actions, which he obediently did, according to the well-established rules of the American public confession genre. “All the fault and all the blame here falls on me,” the cyclist told the interviewer, who concluded her program helpfully with the Biblical maxim that “the truth will set you free.”
Armstrong succumbed to strong pressures in a generally demoralized and demoralizing climate. One can explain and understand his actions without for an instant endorsing them. By his reckless and criminal activity, he squandered his considerable skills and ruined his public standing forever. The generation now coming into active life—in sports, art, politics and elsewhere—will, we are convinced, produce from among its midst far more widely a different sort of human personality—one drawn to principles and able to resist the corrupting pressures of the sports-media-entertainment industry.

AlterNet [1] / By Alex Kane [2] Alternet

The world should work to end extreme wealth by 2025 and reduce the massive inequality has has skyrocketed over the past twenty years, the anti-poverty group Oxfam states in a new report [pdf]. [3]

While discourse on inequality has grown more prominent in recent years thanks to Occupy Wall Street and major institutions highlighting the problem of extreme inequality, the focus has largely been on only one-half of the problem: ending extreme poverty. Though Oxfam praises the efforts to eradicate extreme poverty, the group urges people to “demonstrate that we are also tackling inequality- and that means looking at not just the poorest but the richest.”

Oxfam also notes that massive inequality leads to environmental destruction. “Those in the 1% have been estimated to use as much as 10,000 times more carbon than the average US citizen,” the report states. “Increasing scarcity of resources like land and water mean that assets being monopolized by the few cannot continue if we are to have a sustainable future.” And lastly, Oxfam argues that inequality is unethical.

“We cannot afford to have a world where inequality continues to grow in the majority of countries. In a world of increasingly scarce resources, reducing inequality is more important than ever. It needs to be reduced and quickly,” says Oxfam.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
See more stories tagged with:
inequality [4],
oxfam [5]
Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/global-inequality-skyrockets-report-says-top-1-have-increased-wealth-60-over-last
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/alex-kane
[3] http://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/cost-of-inequality-oxfam-mb180113.pdf
[4] http://www.alternet.org/tags/inequality
[5] http://www.alternet.org/tags/oxfam
[6] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

By Nicholas Mercer
MATERIAL SUGGESTED BY SENIOR EDITOR PAUL CARLINE
CROSSPOSTED WITH BELLA CALEDONIA

DUBIOUS HONOR, BUT ALSO A SLAP ON THE WRIST. Following a court martial, only Corporal Donald Payne, of The Queen’s Lancashire Regiment (now renamed Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment), was convicted of inhumane treatment of a prisoner. However, The Observer has learnt that Payne has now been released from prison and is living with his family in the north of England after setting up his own business. Legal sources said he is furious with his treatment by the army and feels he was made a ‘scapegoat’.

In 2006, Corporal Donald Payne was the first British soldier to be convicted of a war crime in this country under the International Criminal Court Act 2001. His crime was the inhuman and degrading treatment of prisoners held by British Forces in Southern Iraq in September 2003. He received a year in jail and was dismissed from the British Army for his crime. However, whereas a foot soldier who is complicit in torture is sent to jail – as the book reveals, for those higher up the social spectrum a CBE, knighthood or peerage await. Such is the hypocrisy in the British history of torture.

If that sounds like an unlikely or extreme thing to say, I can only respond by saying read Cruel Britannia by Ian Cobain.

His book is a remarkable narrative and will come as something of a shock to most readers who are taken in by Britain’s image of fair play and decency abroad. This is a myth, as Cobain explosively demonstrates. When the publishers sent me the manuscript I wrote to them that it was like hand grenade rolled into the heart of the British Establishment. Here is why.

Firstly, the book is explosive because it reveals direct participation by the United Kingdom in torture since 1944. This probably will come as a great surprise to many readers but the official line that “the British do not participate in torture”, is revealed as just part of a deliberate and well-practised line of deceit. The book charts the use of torture from “the Cage” in London used to interrogate leading Nazi’s at the end of the Second World War, through the colonial campaigns of Kenya, Cyprus and Aden and then makes the link to Northern Ireland, Iraq and Afghanistan with the repeated and wilful use of “the five techniques”. It exposes the exceptional brutality of the British in the treatment of the Mau Mau in Kenya – as is just beginning to emerge in the case of Nzili, Nyingi and Mara, currently being heard in the High Court.

Evidence reveals that one British policeman at the time described the conditions in the camps as “far worse than anything I experienced in my four and a half years as a prisoner of the Japanese”. To hear the British described as being more brutal than the Japanese will come as a great shock but, should there be any doubt as to the depravity of British Forces, the description in the book is unequivocal:

Men were whipped, clubbed, subjected to electric shocks, mauled by dogs and chained to vehicles before being dragged around. Some were castrated. The same instruments used to crush testicles were used to remove fingers. It was far from un-common for men to be beaten to death.

If this still does not convince any reader then, if they can get to London, I suggest they go to the High Court to hear it for themselves.

This savagery by the British continues throughout the colonial period and Cobain details the campaigns in Cyprus against EOKA and in the Aden Emergency where yet more torture was perpetrated on those we captured. The book then makes interesting references to the refinement of torture techniques which were developed in between 1950-1970 known as an “assault on the mind” whereby far subtler techniques capable of causing “irreparable psychological damage” were developed. The scientists found that a combination of five things: sensory deprivation through hooding, together with enforced stress positions, white noise, sleep prevention and very little food together produced “stress that was almost unbearable for most subjects”.

This resulted in what became known as the “five techniques” which were subsequently employed against the IRA during interment in 1971 and later banned in the case of Ireland v UK in the European Court of Human Rights in 1978. Yet, despite the assurances of the British Government that such practices would never again be repeated in any circumstances, Cobain makes the very alarming claim that the five techniques were in fact retained by the UK which is, perhaps, why they re-emerged in Iraq in 2003 and why the doctrine cited by the Intelligence Branch during the second Iraq War miraculously went missing when it came to the Baha Mousa trial in 2006 and the Inquiry two years later.

The second reason why the book is explosive is because it exposes the institutional cover up that has been perpetrated throughout the post war years. At the time of writing this article there is a sense of national outrage at what appears to be an institutional cover up over Hillsborough and connivance by numerous institutions in the Savile affair. Indeed, it seems to be a national trait that there are so many institutions and individuals who are prepared to participate, passively or actively, in a cover up of scandals for something as prosaic as enhancing their own career prospects or reward from the State.

The ‘Establishment’ is shown to be remarkably adept at not establishing the truth using methods every bit as subtle as those developed by the interrogators in the 1950’s – 70. At the same time, the book reveals the courage of a few men and women who stand against torture. Men such as Colonel Arthur Young who repeatedly complained to Sir Evelyn Baring about the “unjustified or abhorrent crimes by British Forces” in Kenya but who resigned when he realised that Baring and others were not interested in his complaints. Or Lord Gardiner, who spelt out the legal position that the five techniques were a flagrant breach of International and domestic law but who was similarly ignored lest it get in the way of an interrogator’s war. At the same time, the few good men who do speak out know what fate will befall them. Craig Murray was drummed out of the Foreign Office for revealing Foreign Office connivance with torture evidence and Ben Griffin, the former SAS Trooper who spoke out against the UK treatment of prisoners in Afghanistan, is now living under a Government injunction which prevents him from speaking any further. If he breaks the terms of the injunction he will go to jail. In Cruel Britannia you can lose your job or go to jail for revealing UK complicity in torture and rendition. Those who are complicit meanwhile remain untouched and untroubled. The only tap on the shoulder is the sword used to knight them.

Finally, the most explosive part of the book is the fact that complicity in torture and rendition are potentially war crimes and are required to be outlawed in our domestic criminal law. The UN Convention against torture (UNCAT) states:

Each State Party shall ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law. The same shall apply to an attempt to commit torture and to an act by any person which constitutes complicity or participation in torture.

If such acts are committed during armed conflict then they constitute a war crime or, in the case of rendition, a crime against humanity. However, to date despite increasingly weighty evidence no one has been prosecuted. As the Tory MP David Davis recently stated in the case of R v Ahmed and others:

Although the combined circumstantial evidence of complicity in all these cases is overwhelming, it has not so far been possible — because of the government’s improper use of state secrecy to cover up the evidence — to establish absolutely clear sequences of cause and effect.

And here lies the rub. As the weight of evidence mounts up, so the State becomes increasingly desperate to cover up. Miliband (David) pirouettes in the High Court, Straws denies any involvement in rendition before his assurances are contradicted by the discovery of documents in Tripoli. Then up pops the so called “Justice and Security Bill” – currently making its way through Parliament – in a desperate, blanket attempt to cover up all UK complicity in torture and rendition. However, the more attempts there are to cover it up the more the issue is exposed and it must be the supreme irony that as details of torture are finally being exposed from Kenya, the Government is embarking on yet another cover up.

This is why Cobain’s allegations in Cruel Britannia are like a hand grenade in the heart of the establishment. The truth has had the pin pulled out of it by this book and is likely to go off at any moment. When it does, it will not only be the foot soldiers who end up being caught in the explosive consequences.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The Reverend Nicholas Mercer (formerly Lieutenant-Colonel Nicholas Mercer) was the Liberty Human Rights Lawyer of the Year 2011-2012 for integrity and courage in the face of dissembling and denial of human rights abuses by British forces in Iraq. This article was first published by Open Democracy  under a Creative Commons licence.

Paul Craig Roberts

[“It does not] occur to conservative Republicans that it is far better to institutionalize compassion than to institutionalize tyranny.”

Republicans and conservative Americans are still fighting Big Government in its welfare state form. Apparently, they have never heard of the militarized police state form of Big Government, or, if they have, they are comfortable with it and have no objection.

Republicans, including those in the House and Senate, are content for big government to initiate wars without a declaration of war or even Congress’ assent, and to murder with drones citizens of countries with which Washington is not at war. Republicans do not mind that federal “security” agencies spy on American citizens without warrants and record every email, Internet site visited, Facebook posting, cell phone call, and credit card purchase. Republicans in Congress even voted to fund the massive structure in Utah in which this information is stored.

But heaven forbid that big government should do anything for a poor person.

Republicans have been fighting Social Security ever since President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed it into law in the 1930s, and they have been fighting Medicare ever since President Lyndon Johnson signed it into law in 1965 as part of the Great Society initiatives.

Conservatives accuse liberals of the “institutionalization of compassion.” Writing in the February, 2013, issue of Chronicles, John C. Seiler, Jr., damns Johnson’s Great Society as “a major force in turning a country that still enjoyed a modicum of republican liberty into the centralized, bureaucratized, degenerate, and bankrupt state we endure today.”

It doesn’t occur to conservatives that in Europe democracy, liberty, welfare, rich people, and national health services all coexist, but that somehow American liberty is so fragile that it is overturned by a limited health program only available to the elderly.

Neither does it occur to conservative Republicans that it is far better to institutionalize compassion than to institutionalize tyranny.

The institutionalization of tyranny is the achievement of the Bush/Obama regimes of the 21st century. This, and not the Great Society, is the decisive break from the American tradition. The Bush Republicans demolished almost all of the constitutional protections of liberty erected by the Founding Fathers. The Obama Democrats codified Bush’s dismantling of the Constitution and removed the protection afforded to citizens from being murdered by the government without due process. One decade was time enough for two presidents to make Americans the least free people of any developed country, indeed, perhaps of any country. In what other country or countries does the chief executive officer have the right to murder citizens without due process?

It turns one’s stomach to listen to conservatives bemoan the destruction of liberty by compassion while they institutionalize torture, indefinite detention in violation of habeas corpus, murder of citizens on suspicion and unproven accusation alone, complete and total violation of privacy, interference with the right to travel by unaccountable “no-fly” lists and highway check points, the brutalization of citizens and those exercising their right to protest by police, frame-ups of critics, and narrow the bounds of free speech.

In Amerika today only the executive branch of the federal government has any privacy. The privacy is institutional, not personal–witness the fate of CIA director Petraeus. While the executive branch destroys the privacy of every one else, it insists on its own privilege of privacy. National security is invoked to shield the executive branch from its criminal actions. Federal prosecutors actually conduct trials in which the evidence against defendants is classified and withheld from defendants’ attorneys. Attorneys such as Lynne Stewart have been imprisoned for not following orders from federal prosecutors to violate the attorney-client privilege.

Conservatives accept the monstrous police state that has been erected, because they think it makes them safe from “Muslim terrorism.” They haven’t the wits to see that they are now open to terrorism by the government.

Consider, for example, the case of Bradley Manning. He is accused of leaking confidential information that reveals US government war crimes despite the fact that it is the responsibility of every soldier to reveal war crimes. Virtually every one of Manning’s constitutional rights has been violated by the US government. He has been tortured. In an effort to coerce Manning into admitting trumped-up charges and implicating WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange, Manning had his right to a speedy trial violated by nearly three years of pre-trial custody and repeated trial delays by government prosecutors. And now the judge, Col. Denise Lind, who comes across as a member of the prosecution rather than an impartial judge, has ruled that Manning cannot use as evidence the government’s own reports that the leaked information did not harm national security. Lind has also thrown out the legal principle of mens rea by ruling that Manning’s motive for leaking information about US war crimes cannot be presented as evidence in his trial. http://www.armytimes.com/news/2013/01/ap-judge-limits-motive-evidence-wikileaks-case-bradely-manning-011613/

Mens rea says that a crime requires criminal intent. By discarding this legal principle, Lind has prevented Manning from showing that his motive was to do his duty under the military code and reveal evidence of war crimes. This allows prosecutors to turn a dutiful act into the crime of aiding the enemy by revealing classified information.

Of course, nothing that Manning allegedly revealed helped the enemy in any way as the enemy, having suffered the war crimes, was already aware of them.

Obama Democrats are no more disturbed than conservative Republicans that a dutiful American soldier is being prosecuted because he has a moral conscience. In Manning’s trial, the government’s definition of victory has nothing whatsoever to do with justice prevailing. For Washington, victory means stamping out moral conscience and protecting a corrupt government from public exposure of its war crimes.

About Dr. Paul Craig Roberts
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following.

Ben Affleck in Argo: ‘At the Golden Globes, there were gongs for a heroically bearded CIA spook saving hostages and American face in Iran.’ Photograph: Allstar/WARNER BROS. PICTURES/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar

The moral ambiguity of Homeland or Argo is a fitting tribute to the reality of US Middle East policy

Rachel Shabi
The Guardian, Monday 14 January 2013

America’s Middle East policy has been enthusiastically endorsed. Not at the UN or Arab League, however, but by the powerbrokers of Hollywood. At the Golden Globes, there were gongs for a heroically bearded CIA spook saving hostages and American face in Iran (the film Argo); a heroically struggling agent tracking down Bin Laden (Zero Dark Thirty) and heroically flawed CIA operatives protecting America from mindless, perpetual terror (TV series Homeland).

The three winners have all been sold as complex, nuanced productions that don’t shy away from hard truths about US foreign policy. And liberal audiences can’t get enough of them. Perhaps it’s because, alongside the odd bit of self-criticism, they are all so reassuringly insistent that, in an increasingly complicated world, America just keeps on doing the right thing. And even when it does the wrong thing – such as, I don’t know, torture and drone strikes and deadly invasions – it is to combat far greater evil, and therefore OK.

When I saw Argo in London with a Turkish friend, we were the only ones not clapping at the end. Instead, we were wondering why every Iranian in this horribly superior film was so angry and shouty. It was a tense, meticulously styled depiction of America’s giant, perpetual, wailing question mark over the Middle East: “Why do they hate us?” Iranians are so irked by the historically flimsy retelling of the hostage crisis that their government has commissioned its own version in response.

Zero Dark Thirty, another blanked-out, glossed-up portrayal of US policy, seems to imply that America’s use of torture – sorry, “enhanced interrogation” – is legitimate because it led to the capture of Osama bin Laden (something that John McCain and others have pointed out is not even true). Adding insult to moral bankruptcy, the movie has been cast as a feminist film, because it has a smart female lead. This is cinematic fraud: a device used to extort our approval.

Homeland was no better. It is the story of an American marine taken captive by a top al-Qaida terrorist who turns out, wouldn’t you know, to be Palestinian. Tortured while detained (though I’m guessing this would be bad torture, not the good kind used in Zero Dark Thirty), the marine turns to Islam and, coincidentally, to terror. Meanwhile, all the Arab and Muslim characters in Homeland – however successful, integrated, clever, whatever – are all somehow signed up to the global terror network. As Laila Al-Arian, a journalist and co-author of Collateral Damage: America’s War against Iraqi Civilians, puts it: “Viewers are left to believe that Muslims/Arabs participate in terrorist networks like Americans send holiday cards.” She describes this celebrated Golden Globe winner as “TV’s most Islamophobic show”.

When challenged, the creators of these travesties respond with pat dismissal: the director Kathryn Bigelow pointed out that Zero Dark Thirty is “just a movie”. Ben Affleck has spoken touchingly of his concern that Argo might be politicised.

But why would these renditions of US policy be seen in the Middle East as anything other than attempts to seize the moral high ground? It’s all supposed to be a massive stride forward in the portrayal of complexity, made to challenge American audience preconceptions – and a far cry from the bad old days depicted in Reel Bad Arabs, a documentary that shows how Hollywood caricatures Arabs as “belly dancers, billionaire sheikhs and bombers”, according to one reviewer.

But such slick, award-winning cinema isn’t about nuance, it’s just self-serving moral ambiguity – and in this sense it is a fitting cultural reflection of actual US policy in the Middle East.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rachel Shabi has written extensively on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Middle East. Her award-winning book, Not the Enemy: Israel’s Jews from Arab Lands, was published in 2009. She received the Anna Lindh Journalism Award for reporting across cultures in 2011 and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize the same year. She tweets @rachshabi