July 14, 2025 • 55 mins
With nothing but a dirty squat toilet in his concrete cell, Peter Greste had only his mind for entertainment. From using meal scraps as entertainment to hunger strikes and fortnightly family visits, the Australian journalist joins Gary Jubelin to share the highs and lows of a Cairo prison, why he’s still considered a convicted terrorist, and why he has no regrets.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
The public has had a long held fascination with detectives.
Detective see aside of life the average person is never
exposed to. I spent thirty four years as a cop.
For twenty five of those years I was catching killers.
That's what I did for a living. I was a
homicide detective. I'm no longer just interviewing bad guys. Instead,
I'm taking the public into the world in which I operated.
(00:23):
The guests I talk to each week have amazing stories
from all sides of the law. The interviews are raw
and honest, just like the people I talked to. Some
of the content and language might be confronting. That's because
no one who comes into contact with crime is left unchanged.
Join me now as I take you into this world.
(00:46):
This is part two of my chat with journalist Peter Gresta,
who was locked up in an Egyptian prison for terrorism offenses.
In part one, we talked about Peter's career reporting from
some of the most hostile locations in the world, and
how is it rested on trumped up charges in Egypt
for doing his job. In part two, Peter spoke to
us about his fight for freedom, the ongoing impact from
(01:09):
his time in prison and his passion for free speech
and the rights of journalists to do their job. Oh
one other thing. We also spoke to him about having
famous Australian actor Richard Roxborough play him in the feature film.
I came away from our chat inspired. Peter's a pretty
impressive person. Have a listen. Peter Gresser, Welcome back to
(01:31):
part two of I Catchkillers. I've just made some adjustments
to some of the questions I was going to ask
you do you shot me down? And it's probably the
most silliest question of asked on the podcast, what happened
in solitary confinement? To which you answered nothing? You've been
so clear. Can you expand on that? I joke and
(01:52):
we joke about about the time you have in prison.
But I think you've got to see the light in
the darkness, and a lot of people have sat in
your seat that have been through some difficult times. You've
got to find the human that keep you, keep you surviving.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
Yeah, you do. It's not always easy if you can
get into a very dark place. But I think I
found two that it was. The secret was not to
take it personally. If I took it personally, then I'd
get into a very dark, dark place of anger and resentment.
But it was about that. If I saw it as
(02:25):
as as an attack on not on anything that I'd done,
but on what I'd represented, then I could say it
is something that was that was it was a fight
worth worth taking.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
I understand what you're saying. In fact, I pulled the
looks like we're working in kohouts here that I pulled
out a quote that touches on that. Then I wanted
to talk about that, and you mentioned it in Part
one briefly, but just a quote, a quote from your
your book which in context was a turning point in
prison for you where you thought, Okay, this is what
(02:59):
it's about. Just the quote out and get you to
expand on that, if you're could please suddenly. I find
great comfort in our situation. The idea that we have
come to stand for something much larger than ourselves mean
we have to fight on behalf of that bigger thing.
It isn't just Peter Grest, Muhammad Fami and Baya Muhammad
who are in the cage. It is every journalist working
(03:20):
in Egypt. More broadly, it's every journalist working with any
within any regime that considers using these kind of tactics
to silent public debate and critical voices. Defending that cause
is not just a heavy responsibility, it's hugely empowering one. Now,
I think that is to the point that you're talking about.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
That's exactly it. That's exactly it. It suddenly becomes external,
It suddenly takes on significance and meaning that I hadn't
that that would otherwise have made the whole time in
prison time wasted. I spend four hundred days locked up.
That would have been four hundred day in my life
that I'd never get back. But in seeing it in
(04:02):
those terms, it meant that I it became a struggle
for that high principle. And I remember there's a there's
an extraordinary book that I was that I ended up
reading in prison once we were alloud, books called Man's
Search for Meaning by a guy called Victor Frankel. And
(04:23):
Frankel is an incredible character. He was a survivor of
the concentration camps in World War Two. He went in
as a Jewish neurologist, as a neuroscientist, and so I
had a particular interest in the way people's brains worked.
And he wrote the book as a way of trying
to understand the differences between those who survived and those
(04:47):
who didn't. And he said that he quoted nietzschee as saying,
he who has a why can bear anyhow. In other words,
as long as you have a reason that's externality you
for enduring the suffering that you're going through, you can
put up with pretty much anything. He was saying. It
(05:07):
can't be money, it can't be selfish, he said, God
sometimes is that provides that, but more often than not,
it's survival for a family. For a lot of the
concentration camp inmates, it was survival as a form of
resistance to the Nazis, to the genocide that they're experiencing.
(05:27):
For me, it became a fight for press freedom. Now
I know that sounds a little bit pious, a little
bit sort of arrogant, but that's the way I came
to see it, and that gave me a sense of
purpose and meaning and direction and a kind of vision
that helped they think, helped me get it get through.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
I can understand what you're saying, because it would easily,
it would be easy to turn it in on yourself
and wallow in the self pity and why has this
happened to me? You're thinking, Okay, there's a broader here,
and that can be very powerful to motivate you to
find the depth that you didn't think you had.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
Exactly.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
I just yeah, thinking thinking about it, I think all
the way you have to evolve and look deeply into
yourself to find find the answers to get through this.
But I just want to break down the whole period
of time when you're in prison, and I've got a
couple of areas I want to cover to get proper
(06:30):
legal representation. That was a nightmare in itself. Talk us
through that.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
Yeah, it was so Al Jazeera hired a lawyer and
they were there for a while until they rather spectacularly
resigned in the middle of the trial.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
They made it very public statement the way it was done.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
To extraordinary public statement, and it was very damaging. But
to be honest, Gary, I really I was in a
lot of stress around that. But I also realized that
actually our legal representation was beside the point a first
year law student could have defended us, that the evidence
against us was so paper thin, was not existent?
Speaker 1 (07:13):
Really what was it? Specific charges? Could break down of
the charges.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
So we've been accused of aiding and a betting a
terrorist organization, being members of a terrorist organization, advocating terrorist ideology,
broadcasting false news with intent to undermine national security, financing terrorism.
I mean, these were about as serious as you could
get short of actually pulling a pin on a grenade
(07:38):
in a crowded room, short of a physical terrorist attack.
We were basically agents of a terrorist.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
And the financing terrorism was they found some money that
you had that was your living expenses in an area
where the cash wasn't going to get you through, and
you've got some cash from your employer.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
Absolutely absolutely, I mean the narrative I think that as
far as I can tell, I never really got to
the bottom of it. But the narrative was that we
would occasionally buy footage freelance footage from camera up from
guys that were operating that were covering the demonstrations that
were either too dangerous for us to get to or
that we physically just couldn't didn't have time to cover
(08:20):
all of the protests. And the theory was that those
guys couldn't have covered particularly Muslim Brotherhood protests unless they
are members of the Brotherhood, and so by paying them
for the footage, we were somehow financing terrorism.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
It's creative thinking from law enforcement.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
It's quite a long bow. But you know, as far
as I can tell, that's how that charge came through.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
And did you get to access to your brief of evidence?
Speaker 2 (08:49):
No?
Speaker 1 (08:50):
No, because that's a pretty much a cornerstone of the
legal system here, that the prosecute that makes the allegations
and presents a brief of evidence and then you get
to who were so sect.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
So he's he's one of the things to give you
an idea of just how crazy it was to get
access to some of the to the images that they
had in there in the evidence. We had to pay
for it because there was apparently a processing fee, and
we said, look, we wanted we wanted to get all
of the images that they had, and the figure they
(09:23):
came up with was literally in the hundreds of thousands
of dollars. They couldn't understand it, like, what the how
the hell do you come up with with that kind
of number, until we realized that one second of video
footage it's like film, it is made up of frames
of twenty four frames, and so they were counting each
frame as an individual image, and so if you wanted
(09:47):
five minutes of footage that they had as supposedly as evidence,
we were going to have to pay for literally thousands
and thousands of images. Absolutely insane, and of course we
coldn't affortunately.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
I think you've been unfair there, you alos, so there's
foto copying costs. I'm with you on certain things, but
that's crazy, isn't it. So each each frame of the
role of film. Okay, so you didn't get access to
your brief The system I think you described as just
(10:22):
it wasn't rigid. It was just could swing anyway one
of them. It's almost like someone could get up. And
I think there was an example of a witness giving
evidence that it really just didn't stand up to any
the weakest cross examination, but it was just dismissed. Anyway.
I can't remember, but you said Peter was here six
months ago, when he's we can present evidence that you
(10:45):
weren't in the country six months ago, and that's just
dismissed with, oh, well, yeah, we all make mistakes, but yeah,
move on.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
That was it. We were we'd been accused of being
involved with the Rabber massacre, which had happened six months earlier,
and at that time I was in Sudan, in South Sudan,
and they had my passport that had all of the
entry and exit stamps both in Egypt and also the
entry and exit stamps into South Sudan. So it was
blinding the obvious, and we were prepared and We're hoping
(11:13):
to present evidence of the stories that I'd produced from
South Sudan at the time of that massacre.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
So I'm thinking from a prosecuting point of view, that
would take a hole in the brief a little bit
iry to.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
Knock the evidence out of court. But no, they simply
said no. He was questioned about why, about the contradiction.
He just he kept saying I don't remember.
Speaker 1 (11:33):
And describe the court saying for us, are you are
you in there in the dock?
Speaker 2 (11:38):
Are you yes? So the docs was actually a cage,
a pretty intimidating cage, and it was designed it It
was a really big court room. It was more like
a theater, sort of raked seating, really really tall, tall,
tall ceilings, more like a cathedral. I guess in a
(11:59):
way had that sense of presence, and I think it
was designed to give them a sense be intimidating, and
as I said, because we were in the cage, I
think it was designed to make us look like we
were dangerous, dangerous terrorists that were a physical threat, even
if we should be, you know, have the opportunity to
leap across the court room.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
Well, you know, you can't trust these terrorists, so spies,
you don't know what's going on. People that support your family, friends,
And how important was that when you're going through the
whole process, the prison, the battles through the court, How
important to you was the support that and were you
were aware how much support you've had?
Speaker 2 (12:38):
So they were their presence of physical presence in the courtroom.
My brothers were there throughout the trial. That was really
really important to know that they had my back, that
we had people outside in Cairo, outside the cell that
were working to make sure that they were doing everything
they could, whether it was diplomatically or legally or politically.
(13:03):
You asked, you mentioned about the broader campaign, and I
had a vague idea that there was a lot going on,
but honestly, I had no real understanding of the scale
of the campaign.
Speaker 1 (13:14):
You had some very heavy hitters in your corner, not
just your corner, the whole whole group of you that
got locked up at US. Even Obama was making comments
about it. And certainly you had the support from over here,
from the Foreign Affairs minister and everyone else.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
Yeah, we did. And again I didn't realize it even
just just how how engaged Obama was. I saw him afterwards.
I was at an event in Washington, the FIGE, the
White House Correspondence and Your Dinner, and I met Obama
before the dinner and I introduced myself and he said, ah,
(13:55):
he said, you're that guy. He said, yeah, you wrote
two letters from prison to describing what you were going
through as an attack on press freedom. He said, I
saw those letters. I read them. He said, they really
helped me and understand he said, from that point, he said,
I always raised your case whenever I spoke to President CC.
Speaker 1 (14:12):
Yeah. Okay, so you had the support and also your colleagues.
I think your colleagues unified to make sure your story
wasn't forgotten.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
Yeah, journalists, journalist colleagues around the world. Yeah, and we
were very lucky. I mean, it was extraordinary the amount
of the amount of support that we had. And that was,
you know, partly because I think I and my colleagues family.
We'd worked across a large number of big international news organizations.
I'd worked for the BBC, of course, and for our
GAZEA and you know, I had a lot of colleagues.
I'd worked for Reuters, I had a lot of colleagues
(14:45):
here in Australia that knew my work. Family had worked
for CNN and others, And so there was a large
cohort of people around the world who knew us and
knew our work and the integrity of our work. But
it also recognized, as I did, that our case was
about them as well, that they needed to fight this
(15:05):
on for their own sake as much as.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
For ours, and that that support, the external support than
from people in powerful positions. Could that filter through to you?
Did you understand or have you only appreciate it? You release?
Speaker 2 (15:20):
I really only appreciate. I mean again, I was aware
of it, but not I didn't really fully understand it
until I was released and saw just how enormous that
campaign was and how many people were invested in.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
It, the scale of it. Disagreements with your calcus. And
when I say disagreements, if you put anyone in the
room long enough there's going to be disagreements, but there
was a couple of things about the strategy, So the
way that you should approached do you want to just
break that down and.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
So as you say, you when you're twenty three hours
inside a concrete box with somebody, then you're going to
find their edges. And that's how it was. For It
was very, very difficult to be stuck in that kind
of environment. We didn't know each other beforehand before I
arrived in Cairo, so you're still just getting to know
(16:09):
each other when you're in that environment. But Famy in
particular and I had very very different understandings of what
was taking place. Fami saw this as political. He saw
what was happening as the result of Egypt's suspicions about
Katari interference in Egypt. The Katar had been accused of
(16:33):
supporting the Brotherhood. Because we worked for a Katari organization,
we were therefore a part of that conspiracy, and Fami
felt that if that was the case, then the solution
was to distance ourselves from Qatar, from our Jazeera and
to align ourselves as with Egypt to make up to
(16:53):
portray ourselves as friends of Egypt. Fami felt that that
was to play the political game that was inevitably the
real reason why we were there. I didn't see that.
I saw this as an attack on press freedom. I
felt that if there was, if there was genuinely an
issue around Katari malfisans, and I was the last person
(17:14):
to come after to make that case. There are plenty
of other Al Jazeera journalists who had much deeper connections
with the Brotherhood. No, none of them sinister, but you
could easily, much more easily have made a case that
it had nothing really to do with the evidence or
to do with Katari interference. Again, if you wanted to
make that case, then an Australian journalist had only been
in the country for a few weeks was again not
the right person to make that case. And so I
(17:38):
felt that this was about press freedom. They came after
us because we were politically convenient, because they had that narrative.
But I felt that we needed to fight this on
as an attack on press freedom. And the problem is
that those two narratives were irreconcilable. You couldn't run those
defenses in parallel. You couldn't start down nine track and
(18:00):
you couldn't start down one track, and suddenly change course
and so, and the stakes were really really really high,
Like if we got this, got this, got this debate wrong,
if we got the strategy wrong, then we were going
to We're going to suffer for it. Fami, I thought
Famy was being really cynical in playing, in playing that
(18:23):
political game and dangerous. Family thought I was being hopelessly
naive and taking a very Western view of a fundamentally
Arabic Middle Eastern crisis. Yeah, it was we we we came.
We came almost to blows on a few occasions, very very.
Speaker 1 (18:42):
Tough after you were convicted, because the sequence of events
in the custody time you were in custody, You went
to trial, you were convicted of it, and then you
had an appeal coming up, or you had to lodge
for an appeal, waited a month or so to find
out whever that appeal would be allowed. And there was
(19:03):
some very heated discussions as I understand, about whether they
go on the hunger strike, and that not just one,
but many of the people that you were with thought
that would be the way to let's force this issue.
We're not staying here any longer. Well to talk us
through that, because that's a that's a heavy that was.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
That was another very very difficult period. So I spoke
I mentioned earlier Abdolfat, who was this incredible guy I
met at Lementorum, one of the earlier the first prison
that I was in, and he knew and understood about
hunger strikes, and a couple of the points that he
made was that if you're going to start a hunger strike,
(19:44):
you have to have the moral high ground, you have
to have all of the process on your side. You've
got to be demanding only things that the authorities have
the capacity to give you. You can't simply demand free because
they're not going to do that. They're never going to
do it. If they acquiesce and they give you your
(20:05):
freedom because you went on hunger strike, then every prisoner
was going to go.
Speaker 1 (20:08):
That makes sense. That makes sense.
Speaker 2 (20:10):
So you've got to be You've got to be demanding
things that are achievable and that are your rights to have.
The trouble was that the process, the trial and our
appeal dragged on for such a long time that a
lot of the other guys that were in our case
were wanting to go on a hunger strike. They felt
(20:32):
that all of our supporters. They said that all of
our supporters outside prison are fighting for us. We have
to fight inside. We have to be seen to be
doing something inside as well. We're demanding our freedom. And
I could see why they were frustrated, why they wanted
to do it. But I felt, I agreed with the
love that the timing was wrong. We were still within
(20:53):
the process. We were still within the time frames for
that process to play out. It was dragging out forever.
And even if we didn't consider that they were being serious,
that they were just stringing us along, it was too
early to start a hunger strike because we couldn't. They
were never going to give us what we were demanding.
It was. It was performative, and I didn't I disagreed
with it. But the trouble was that I also knew
(21:15):
that if I joined the hunger strike then it would
get huge amounts of potential the white guy, because I
was the white guy, I was the outsider. If they
went on the hunger strike without me, it would have
been a meaningless it would have it would have disappeared
into the footnote in the in the local newspapers.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
It was a hard position to be in for yourself.
I agree with your logic and one hundred percent agree
if you're going on the hunger strike, but they're simple responsible.
We're waiting to see if the appeal comes up or
they're not going to just open the prison doors.
Speaker 2 (21:46):
Exactly. You're being you're being petulant, you're being premature, you're
being ridiculous. You've got no rights to demand this.
Speaker 1 (21:51):
But your the strength that you had was in the unity.
And then if the others went on the hunger strike
and you didn't, yeah, I would make life very hard
for you. And if you spent spent the rest of
the time locked up with these people.
Speaker 2 (22:07):
And that's not to say I was afraid of the
hunger struck, and in fact, on the day that I
was released, I was. I decided that we have to
start a hunger strike because the type that moment had
come that there was an appropriate point in which they
were screwing. I was convinced I was screwing around it.
Speaker 1 (22:22):
That's when the appeals gone through and the conviction was upheld.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
That's right, Yeah, the conviction being overturned. Retral had been ordered, right, Sorry,
So to walk you through it that basically we'd been
a cute we'd been we'd been.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
Convicted, yep.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
We appealed the conviction. We won the appeal yep. Although
the Courtifussation agreed to hear the appeal. When they finally
heard it, they overturned the conviction on a technicality in
order to retrial. We weren't released. We're still in prison,
but they'd ordered a retrus starting again the courts exactly
the whole process again. The courts had thirty days to
(22:59):
name a new date for the start of the retrial,
and at day thirty one we've still heard nothing. And
that was the point at which I thought, right, this
is the moment we have to start the hunger strike
because they're screwing around with us. We're now in in
clear clear air that there's no process left for us.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
We have got a legitimate cause, We've got a legitimate
egible that you could criticize and say, this has been
done to us.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
This is why we're on strokes exactly, we demand our rights. Right.
But up to that point I didn't see that we
had we had that moral high ground, we had that
that that right, that opportunity to actually start the hunger strike.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
Well, you were taking it seriously. You even talked about,
and I didn't realize this. With a hunger strike, you're
better off preparing yourself before you start the strike, because
if it's just cut off you straight away, you're going
to do more damage than if you were Wean yourself
off food before you start the hunger strike.
Speaker 2 (23:54):
Yeah, absolutely, your body has to. You have to ease
your body into it. If you simply go cold turkey
on food because people seem to think that you've got
a sort of stock of energy, then it helps you.
Helps you run run into the into.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
A huge meal and they just stop eating.
Speaker 2 (24:09):
Doesn't work well.
Speaker 1 (24:10):
It learns your parents came to visit you. That must
have been hard for you. Had your your brother's support
and the other family members. But when your parents came there,
But how was that for you?
Speaker 2 (24:21):
That was really hard because and it was hard for
everybody really. They were only able to visit once every
two weeks, and even then only for about twenty minutes,
and you've got no time. It's always a stressful experience
and for them, I'm aging Granny and gra GRAMPI. Getting
(24:45):
around Carr to start with is tough, but also going
into prison, going through all of the security checks and
so on. Is really intimidating to get into tour, and
it's a it's a whole it's a whole day's mission.
They stand around and queues for hours and hours in
the blazing sun. You've got to be moved from from
the outer perimeter to the inner perimeters, and you're going
(25:07):
through countless searches and questions and papers and so on.
It's a very very intimidating process. And so by the
time you get in, they're stressed. I'm stressed because I'm
worried about them. They see my stress, and so what
you have is this really emotionally intense moment, and that's
(25:28):
the lasting impression that you've got. You've got nothing, no,
nothing to correct it, nothing to say, Look, they're actually
okay for the rest of the two weeks until you
get to see them again.
Speaker 1 (25:42):
I'm not nothing to aid here, because I can just
imagine what you go through with that. That must have
torn you apart inside. Soon your parents go through that.
So you talk of your release, let's complicate it in itself.
But you explained that the appeal that's gone past the
thirty days you were okay. I've got no legitimate argument
(26:04):
not to join this hunger strike now, So that was
your mindset and what changed and how did it change?
Speaker 2 (26:11):
I got no idea, so I decided. I woke up
that morning realized it was day thirty one. I've been
contemplating before. I felt, if we get to this point,
then we're going to have to start a hunger strike.
And my brother was due for a visit that day,
and so they opened up the cell door and I
was going to I was basically running in the corridor
(26:36):
for exercise, and as I was running, I was just
thinking through the conversation I was going to have to
have with my brother to let him know. When all
of a sudden, one of the guards weighs me down
and says, the boss needs to see you. The warden
needs to see you. I remember thinking, okay, I'm saying
to him, I'm going to have to change, because it
was part of the prison protocol that you don't go
(26:58):
and see the warden in this stinky running clothes. You
get changed into basic prison whites. But you know you've
got a basic show respect. And he said, no, no, no,
go now the boss he's outside in the courtyard. So
I went out and he said to me, he said,
I've got news for you. I said, what. He said,
(27:18):
I'm pack your things. You're you're you're going. I said,
what do you mean? He said, you're moving. I'm moving prisons.
So I've been in every damn prison in your system already.
And he said, no, no, no, no, no, you're going home.
The embassy is going to be here in half an hour.
Get going, Pack you pack your gear, yellow, get going.
That was it was. It was completely discombobulating and emotionally
(27:41):
really really difficult because I Gary, I think of it
a little bit like Christmas, right, You know, if you're
a kid, you're heading up to Christmas, you think about it,
you get excited by it, you kind of think about it,
your fantasize, your imagine one's going to be like you
wake up but you can barely sleep the night before,
you wake up at six in the morning and leap
(28:02):
up and dive into the presence and you have a
great time. But imagine if all of a sudden you
wake up and there are these things at the end
of your bed and you're.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
Just looking around, Look at what the hell's going on?
Speaker 2 (28:13):
Are these really for me? Am I going to get
into trouble? If I if I, if I touch these things?
Is this some kind of sick joke? What's what's going
on here? It was a bit like that. It took
me a while, It took me a long time, like
days before I realized that actually, this is this is real,
this is true, This is this, this, this ordeal is over.
Speaker 1 (28:36):
I can imagine when when you were told or when
you're informed of that they asked you not to tell
your fellow inmates that you're going, just that I'm going
to another prison. You made the decision to tell.
Speaker 2 (28:48):
I had to tell. I can't.
Speaker 1 (28:51):
As I was reading your book, I'm thinking you're a
low life if you don't tell them. But I think
their reaction speaks a lot to the of people that
you're in there with.
Speaker 2 (29:01):
Well, I was. I was really really emotionally torn up
because I felt so guilty, so guilty about leaving them
behind because I was again and you mentioned this earlier,
but I was. I was released because I was the
white guy, because my name was Peter and not Muhammad,
and I carried that, I really did. I didn't feel
it was right for me to be leaving in those
(29:23):
guys still to be stuck and stuck inside but we'd
also we had talked about it about the possibility. We
knew it was always there was always a chance that
would happen. And we realized that any of them guys
left behind, the last thing they would want is for
the person not to leave. You couldn't refuse to leave,
You couldn't sort of leave your fingernails in the doors
(29:44):
in the c in the door of the prison cell.
But nonetheless it was it was still a difficult thing.
But they they, they all were so overjoyed. I was
so overjoyed. But the thing we also agreed in the
previous discuss was that if someone was released and they
would become the most vocal advocate, that's a spokesman for
(30:07):
those for the rest of us who have been left behind.
And that's that's what I decided.
Speaker 1 (30:10):
To do, because I could imagine, you've been through so
much together of the highs and lowers and basically survived,
and then you're walking away in that sense of survivor guilt,
I suppose to a degree, out of the prison. When
are you're taken virtually from there straight to the airport,
straight to the airport, What year, at what date was
it that you came back to Australia.
Speaker 2 (30:32):
So I was released on February first of two thousand
and fifteen, and you're back in Australia I think it was.
It was about three days later, it was about the
fourth I think.
Speaker 1 (30:44):
And explained to me, you're deported, but you were meant
to continue your sentence over here in Australia. But there
was a brief of effidence to start with.
Speaker 2 (30:56):
Yeah, exactly, I mean, that's that would have been confusing,
but it was. It was part of the fiction of
the way that my release had been negotiated. The President
CC had passed a decree giving himself the power to
deport any foreign national who was in that prison system
to complete the judicial process in their country of origin.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
Okay, so that's the basis of which that's.
Speaker 2 (31:17):
The basis on which he kicked me out. Now, of
course that in terms of international law, that's meaningless extradition treaties.
You can only move a prisoner from one country to
another with an extradition treaty, and those are really complicated
legal agreements, international agreements. They take years and years to negotiate.
(31:38):
But in this case, my lawyers apparently drafted a document
that basically said that I was being released to complete
the judicial process as far as the Egyptians were concerned.
It was to complete the trial and then sentence, presumably
in Australia, as far as the Australians were concerned. And
you'd understand this, there was no brief of evidence, There
(32:00):
was no file that as far as the Federal police
were concerned, I was. There was no evidence that I was.
Speaker 1 (32:08):
Enty you in the court system here.
Speaker 2 (32:10):
Nothing not even no no, even no reason to pull
me in for an interview, and so there was no
judicial process to complete.
Speaker 1 (32:19):
Okay, so you're a free man, but also still a
convicted men. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:25):
Yeah, because after the retrial, the retrial was announced a
couple of days after I was released, the cold accused,
you have the co accused in Egypt, and when the
trial began, I was named still as a defendant in Absandia.
At the end of that retrial, we were all reconvicted,
given fresh sentences. We maintained I maintained the campaign to
(32:49):
release my colleagues and they were eventually pardoned and released
about three weeks after they got that conviction. But the
pardon didn't extend to me. So I'm still technically convin
to terrorists.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
How said the impact on your travels, It's made it tough.
You'd have to tiptoe treaties with Egypt.
Speaker 2 (33:09):
Any country that has an extradition treating and there's one
treaty that covers the whole of the African Union from
Cairo to Cape Town, which made it almost impossible, not
almost made it impossible to do my whole job.
Speaker 1 (33:21):
As a common sense would say, it wouldn't be invoked,
but you would not dare play with it would.
Speaker 2 (33:26):
And even if it wouldn't be invoked, I knew that
I'd be in a position of thinking, well, do I
do the story about the missing millions from the President's
office or do I do a story about the elephant translocation. Yeah,
and you know, I'd like to think I'd have the
balls to do the story about the corruption, but that
(33:48):
extradition to Egypt would always be hanging over my head
and I'm not sure that I'd do it. So, yeah,
it was always going to compromise my work.
Speaker 1 (33:55):
And but for yourself, like as a foreign correspondent that, yeah, journalists.
Speaker 2 (34:00):
That I need. I have to have that ability to
travel freely, and terrorism conviction just messes with that.
Speaker 1 (34:10):
Yeah, I can imagine how difficult would we try to
explain that one way I can explain recording a conversation
on the telephone when your cower cubes were released? How
are you informed? And how you this is fun?
Speaker 2 (34:25):
Yeah, you kind of You've done your research. You know
the story. So I've been invited on and this is
going to sound like a really weird kind of way
into the story, but I promise you it's true. I've
been invited onto the Chass media circus as a as
a as a kind of guest, as a guest to
that thing, and it was a it was a great show.
(34:46):
I really enjoyed it. At the end of the show,
we're all gathered around, they had this sort of pun session,
and it was the show ended, the applause died down,
and all of a sudden, one of the producers walks
up with are still on camera the studio and still there,
and he hands me that a phone and I look
(35:11):
at the phone and it's a tweet, a single tweet
that says that Muhammed Fami has been released, has been
pardoned and released. And I'm standing there in front of
this wondering is this some kind of joke I've got
the audience there, I've got all of the other all
of the other people that were on the show standing
(35:31):
around me looking at this thing. I'm speechless because it's
you know, as a journalist, you don't go with just
one source, and certainly not some random tweet. I don't
know if it was true. I didn't know any of
this stuff, and all of a sudden, one of the
other guys sort of filled the void as I'm trying
to think what do I do? What do I say?
(35:51):
And reads out the tweet and I simply have to say, well,
if this is true, and god, I hope it's true,
then this is this is what we've been fighting for
all of this time, and the whole, the whole audience
just erupts in cheers.
Speaker 1 (36:05):
That I'm sure that that put the final or not
the final piece, because you're going to carry it for forever.
But that must have made you feel like you've really
got your freedom when your cacus were out, I would
imagine it would have been hard everything joy that you're
taking in life, thinking if they're still.
Speaker 2 (36:24):
In that yeah, yeah, And that was that was the
moment that I realized, and it eventually it became clear
that it wasn't just fa me, it was both both
of them had been had been released. It was an
extraordinary moment.
Speaker 1 (36:36):
Were you surprised by the interest when you got back
to Australia because I think you was Cypress You went
to for a couple of days to decompress.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
Yeah, I went to Cyprus. That was part of the
advice from from some people who knew and understood how
these things go and advise, just to just to collect
my thoughts, just to speak to our Jazira, just to
kind of have a moment on my own. And so
I figured it was about a couple of days, three
(37:06):
days by the time between the moment I've been released
the moment I got back to Australia and I figured, well,
it's old news. They've reported that I'm out. I was
due to fly back. I was arriving back in Brisbane
on a Wednesday morning, I think at two am. I thought,
(37:27):
nobody's going to show up at the airport, and then
maybe a couple of insomniac photographers who might show up
just to try and get a photograph, but that a bit.
Maybe some of the morning TV news programs might send
a crew, but nobody else, and it was just mind blowing.
It was insane. There were hundreds of well wishes, of
camera crews, of photographers, of journalists. It was just nuts,
(37:52):
this huge, huge welcoming party.
Speaker 1 (37:56):
And what did you do when you came out of
the gates.
Speaker 2 (37:59):
I just remember but punching the air and I saw
some friends in the crowd who hadn't seen for years
and years and years. I went and embraced And you know,
I said then that because at that point my colleagues
were still in prison. And the one thing I said
was that if if it's right for me to be free,
then it's also right for my colleagues to.
Speaker 1 (38:18):
Be amazing, amazing story lessons lessons learnt from it from
yourself before we go going to that media being locked up,
and I saw you had figures at the end of
the film, the correspondent figures about foreign correspondence journalists locked up.
(38:42):
And I think that it was in excess of four
hundred and forty seven countries or something like that.
Speaker 2 (38:46):
Well forty It was record numbers in prisons in countries
all over the world. That the numbers of journalists have
been murdered for their work is at record highs. The
numbers of journalists behind bar are also at record highs,
and this has since the CpG, the Committee to Protect
Journalists to be tracking the numbers, and they started in
(39:08):
nineteen ninety two, I think it was, and so yeah,
it's the highest that it's ever been. And curiously, the
CPJ calculates or assesses the charges that the journalists are facing,
and they reckon that around three quarters of them, two
thirds to three quarters are there on what they loosely
describe as as anti state charges. So that's things like
(39:31):
sedition trees and terrorism threats to national security, which circles
back to what I was saying to you earlier in
the first part of the podcast, where we were talking
about the ways in which governments have used national security
to come after uncomfortable journalism.
Speaker 1 (39:50):
And that's a big umbrella to pull over is security
that could cover so many different.
Speaker 2 (39:56):
Things, so many, so many things, and see secrecy provisions exactly.
Speaker 1 (40:02):
Now.
Speaker 2 (40:02):
I'm not saying, and again you'd understand this well too,
I'm not saying that it's there aren't times that journalists
violate national security and really place national security at risk.
I'm not saying that journals should have the right to
publish whatever they want. But governments have been using security
legislation to silence uncomfortable journalism, to accuse journalists of being
(40:23):
involved in acts of terrorism or treason or espionage, and
using that national security rhetoric as a way of shutting
down journalism. And I think that is a really dangerous
trend that we've really seen takeoffs since nine to eleven.
Speaker 1 (40:39):
And how we can how can we prevent that law?
What can be done?
Speaker 2 (40:43):
Well, A part of it is being aware of it
and pushing governments to push back. In Australia we have
we've got those problems as well.
Speaker 1 (40:50):
Yeah, talk through that because again the war on terror
and metadata that people can get access to, and my
take on it is that they can attack the journalist's
source with the metadata, find out who if you broke
a story and I'm in the police or security and
(41:10):
we want to find out who you've been speaking to,
where the leak came from, the metadata would track it
back for us.
Speaker 2 (41:16):
And maybe I should explain what metadata is metadata. George Brandish,
when he was introducing the Data Attention legislation, famously just
and rather cavalierly described it as the outside of the envelope.
In other words, it's not the contents of communication, but
it's all of the details around it. It's who you
emailed or texted or called when you sent those emails,
(41:39):
where you were at the time, all of that kind
of data. The websites that you're browsing history, and even
though they don't know, the authorities don't know, can't investigate
the contents. It's very easy to cross reference. As you said,
if there is a leak from the government, you don't
(42:01):
have to dig too far to find who has been
the Jones break down.
Speaker 1 (42:06):
If you're reporting on a police story and I'm still
in the police and they want to know where the
sources and they look at your phone records and you've
been on the phone to me or texting me, so yeah.
Speaker 2 (42:17):
Yeah, exactly. Or if you if you make a phone
call to a medical clinic, to a doctor, you have
a Google search for sexually transmitted diseases, and then you've
got a visit to a chemist. It's pretty clear what's
going on. You know, you don't have to be.
Speaker 1 (42:33):
You don't have to bring that example up.
Speaker 2 (42:34):
And yeah, it's very easy to cross reference those bits
ab and so again we're saying not that the journalist
relationship to sources is really crucial to allowing journalists to
do their jobs in holding governments and officials to account.
(42:59):
I think best known example, and perhaps the most egregious
example in Australia is the case of David McBride. The
Australian Federal Police raided the officers of the ABC looking
for evidence of the sources to the story that became
known as the Afghan Files. This was evidence that the
ABC published of war crimes by Australian special forces in Afghanistan,
(43:23):
murders of civilians. If the ABC is publishing allegations of
that our soldiers have committed war crimes are murdered civilians
in our name, that is crucially in the public interest. Right.
What we saw was the Federal Police going after the
source of that of that story. Now, I think there's
(43:47):
something fundamentally messed up in that world where yes, the
ABC did rely on classified information and that's a crime
revealing classified information, but there is equally there is a
public and so there's a public interest in prosecuting that leak.
But there is equally a public interest in the story
that the ABC published. And the ABC was never going
(44:09):
to be able to get that story without without that
that classified information. And so I'd say, you've got to
create a mechanism to weigh up these competing public interests.
And sometimes the public interest in publishing information is going
to outweigh the public interest in prosecuting Aleika.
Speaker 1 (44:28):
And quite often on that aspect of publishing, we're talking
public servants to say it to serve the public. I'm
a big believer in that. I can only talk on
my area that I understand in policing, like some of
the things that were shut down because I didn't see
this as public interest. It was going to be critical
of the police and shut down. And the three pillars
(44:51):
of journalism about the truth, accountability, and objectivity is that
the I saw in policing Crewer. So I'm talking at
this level, not national security, in policing, and I've seen
it now working in journalism. There's some journalists that carry
favor of the police and get stories given to them
because they don't criticize the police. And I don't like that.
(45:14):
I think, yeah, transparency is important.
Speaker 2 (45:18):
And you'd understand as a cop too, it's really hard
when you've got journalists set on your back but it's
also really important in keeping the system honest.
Speaker 1 (45:27):
Well, I think we're seeing with podcasts and different things,
a reference like Teacher's Pet, where the police weren't going
to talk about talk about that case, but when the
public started talking about Headley Thomas started broadcasting about it, Okay,
people start to become accountable and things get done. I
do see the importance of it. And you're talking at
(45:49):
such as scale countries go the war because of misinformation.
Reference back to what you were saying in earlier on
you had a sense of responsibility in Afghanistan because there's
only a few of you reporting what was happening.
Speaker 2 (46:01):
So yeah, and this is why I believe in the
work that the journalists do and why I believe that
it should be protected. Now, I recognize and you mentioned
journalists that curry favor with the cops to keep those
lines of communication open. I recognize that not all journalists
work with integrity. I completely understand that, and the industry
(46:22):
has a lot of work to do to recover public trust.
But fundamentally we need it to keep our system on us,
to keep the system of accountability going, to keep vigorous,
well informed public debates happening. Imagine a world where we
don't have good journalism, where we depend on our understanding
(46:44):
of the government, of what takes place in government, on
the tweets and social media posts of our politicians and
public servants. That that that's not a world in which
I feel I had a great deal of confidence you know,
I'm with you, and so fundamentally we need to protect it.
Australia doesn't have any constitutional protection for press freedom.
Speaker 1 (47:04):
I picked that up in preparing for this that Australia
is almost unique in that situation that we don't have that.
What are you suggesting that would be something?
Speaker 2 (47:15):
I'm suggesting a Media Freedom Act. We're not going to
get constitutional reform. We're not going to get press freedom
written into the constitution. It's very so difficult in Australia.
But an Act of Parliament can do that job. Doesn't
have to be massively complicated. The Human Rights Acts in Queensland,
the Act and Victoria say three very simple things. They
(47:35):
say Parliament has to always consider human rights when they're
passing new legislation. In other words, they've got to always
factor it in as much as possible. Protected that the
courts have to interpret existing legislation in ways that are
consistent with human rights. Even if there's no explicit thing
that says that the cops can't beat up a ten
year old, you still can't beat up a ten year
(47:55):
old to break it all then, and thirdly, the public
servants have to act in ways that support human rights. Now,
I think if you simply replace the words human rights
with media freedom, then you're in the ball park of
where we need to be. That you have to the
Parliament and the courts have an obligation to consider the
importance of media freedom when they're dealing with that, when
(48:18):
they're either creating legislation or interpreting and implying it. That's
the key. Doesn't always have to privilege everything else. But
you've got to have an opportunity to recognize that public
interest in the work that journalists do and weigh that
against the more established public interest in prosecutions.
Speaker 1 (48:35):
And now I'm with you one hundred percent on that.
And I always said when the doors are closed to
the court and the media are excluded, there's usually no
good that's going on in there. Times need to be
have the media excuse and matters can't be reported on
a non publication, but invariably public would be outraged and
(48:56):
shocked if they knew what was going on when those
doors are closed. Yeah, there's a lot, a lot to
be done. Well, I'm glad you've had your rest for
four hundred days in your prison, sitting there meditating and
playing bang gabon and everything else that you're doing. What
are you doing with yourself now?
Speaker 2 (49:14):
So I'm an academic and the media freedom a I'm
a professor of journalism at mcquarie University, and I also
run a not for profit organization, an advocacy group called
the Alliance for Journalists Freedom. And in fact, that idea
of a Media Freedom Act is something that's right at
the very top of our agenda.
Speaker 1 (49:31):
Where would people find find that.
Speaker 2 (49:33):
Our website Journalists Journalists Freedom don't come. They've We've dripped,
We've drafted the act. We're also setting up a professional
association for journalism. We think that if we're going to
give journalists rights in law, then we also they also
need to take on responsibilities through a more rigorous system
(49:55):
for self regulation. And we think that helps everybody. It
makes journalism more trustworthy. It means people have more confidence
in journalism. They can identify good journalism, journalism that's produced
in line with a code of conduct, a set of
ethics and standards. But we also think it's important to
(50:15):
have that enshrined in law to make sure that the
kind of erosion that we're seeing taking place is stopped.
Speaker 1 (50:23):
Well, I'm sure your students are getting a lot of
inspiration from having you speak to them. Are you enjoying
training future?
Speaker 2 (50:31):
J I miss I miss my old life terribly, right,
I miss being a foreign correspondent. That identity was really
deeply embedded in my own DNA. But this is a
pretty good plan.
Speaker 1 (50:43):
Be Yeah, I'm happy for you that you've found that
you've said that you've missed your former occupation as a
foreign correspondent. Do you have regrets that you ever took
up that offer for the three weeks?
Speaker 2 (50:56):
No time, No, no regrets at all. I mean I could.
To have to have a regret implies that I might
have made a different decision under the same circumstances. And
I would never have done that, you know I would.
I would never have gone. I wouldn't wish prison on
my worst enemy. But at the same time, to say
(51:16):
I have regrets would suggest I did something wrong. And
I didn't.
Speaker 1 (51:20):
And so no, okay, I'm not going to let you
go until we talk about your your movie and Richard
Roxburgh playing playing you? Was he your first choice?
Speaker 2 (51:29):
And how do you two get I don't tell Rocks,
but my first choice was was Chris Hamsworth. But okay,
hysterical laughter wasn't the response.
Speaker 1 (51:43):
I can see where you're coming.
Speaker 2 (51:44):
You can't see you can't see it, Hamsworth sitting here.
Speaker 1 (51:47):
The likeness is when you got out of prison, but
clearly workouts that you were doing.
Speaker 2 (51:52):
But no, I didn't look as I think you might
have mentioned earlier. I couldn't. I couldn't really get Cleaver Green,
the character from Rake, out of my head when I
knew that Richard Richard was being considered for the role.
But he is an extraordinary character actor. He's one of
Australia's finest. And the more I got to know him
(52:17):
and see his performance, the more I realized that, actually
I think he had it nailed. As he said, he
wasn't trying to do his version of Peter Grestor, he
wasn't trying to impersonate me. And when he said that,
I remember thinking that feeling a huge weight off my
(52:37):
shoulders because it meant I didn't have to see some
weird quirk of myself was being portrayed accurately on screen,
but it was more of a feel alike rather than
a look alike. And I think he got that feeling
really nailed.
Speaker 1 (52:54):
Ye, well, it would have been an interesting, interesting experience
for you.
Speaker 2 (52:57):
It was. It was fascinating, but it was also again,
just to quote kriv Standards the director who said, look
that they weren't trying to I struggled a lot with
the idea of seeing myself on screen on the big
screen until I realized that it's not me up there.
It's this guy that has my name that's going through
that story. But it's an artistic interpretation of my story,
(53:20):
and it's been through countless hand layers of artistry. The scriptwriter,
the director, the actors, the crew, the set designers, the editors.
All of those guys have had their own artistic interpretation.
So what you see on screen is is that there's
a result of nomination of that work. As Crip said,
it's not a photograph, it's a painting, and so I
(53:45):
think it's a pretty it's a pretty damn good painting.
Speaker 1 (53:47):
Okay, But it's another good way of getting the message out,
another medium forgetting getting If.
Speaker 2 (53:52):
It makes people think and talk about the first and
foremost I think I hope you agree it's a damn
good drama very much, but I think it also has
that it provokes conversations around the importance of media freedom
and what's been happening to journalists.
Speaker 1 (54:05):
Yeah, well, I think it's time to time to wrap up.
I've enjoyed this chat obviously, and just keep up the
good work. I think it's amazing the career that you've had.
I'm a bit jealous, like if someone said to me,
what would I would like to be in all honesty,
and I think I was obsessed with George Nigas when
he was a foreign correspondent. I wanted to be on
(54:26):
a jeep with a scarf round and traveling through a
war zone a foreign correspondent. But what a fascinating career
you've had and experiences you had in the way that
you've come out of it. Also, full credit to you,
and I've enjoyed having you on I Catch Killers and
that exclusive group that you've got. Now not only you
all working at Macquarie University, you've been locked up overseas.
(54:48):
You've also also appeared on My Catch Killers, and.
Speaker 2 (54:51):
This is probably the defining moment for all of us.
Then the herd could die him in
The public has had a long held fascination with detectives.
Detective see aside of life the average person is never
exposed to. I spent thirty four years as a cop.
For twenty five of those years I was catching killers.
That's what I did for a living. I was a
homicide detective. I'm no longer just interviewing bad guys. Instead,
I'm taking the public into the world in which I operated.
(00:23):
The guests I talk to each week have amazing stories
from all sides of the law. The interviews are raw
and honest, just like the people I talked to. Some
of the content and language might be confronting. That's because
no one who comes into contact with crime is left unchanged.
Join me now as I take you into this world.
(00:46):
This is part two of my chat with journalist Peter Gresta,
who was locked up in an Egyptian prison for terrorism offenses.
In part one, we talked about Peter's career reporting from
some of the most hostile locations in the world, and
how is it rested on trumped up charges in Egypt
for doing his job. In part two, Peter spoke to
us about his fight for freedom, the ongoing impact from
(01:09):
his time in prison and his passion for free speech
and the rights of journalists to do their job. Oh
one other thing. We also spoke to him about having
famous Australian actor Richard Roxborough play him in the feature film.
I came away from our chat inspired. Peter's a pretty
impressive person. Have a listen. Peter Gresser, Welcome back to
(01:31):
part two of I Catchkillers. I've just made some adjustments
to some of the questions I was going to ask
you do you shot me down? And it's probably the
most silliest question of asked on the podcast, what happened
in solitary confinement? To which you answered nothing? You've been
so clear. Can you expand on that? I joke and
(01:52):
we joke about about the time you have in prison.
But I think you've got to see the light in
the darkness, and a lot of people have sat in
your seat that have been through some difficult times. You've
got to find the human that keep you, keep you surviving.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
Yeah, you do. It's not always easy if you can
get into a very dark place. But I think I
found two that it was. The secret was not to
take it personally. If I took it personally, then I'd
get into a very dark, dark place of anger and resentment.
But it was about that. If I saw it as
(02:25):
as as an attack on not on anything that I'd done,
but on what I'd represented, then I could say it
is something that was that was it was a fight
worth worth taking.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
I understand what you're saying. In fact, I pulled the
looks like we're working in kohouts here that I pulled
out a quote that touches on that. Then I wanted
to talk about that, and you mentioned it in Part
one briefly, but just a quote, a quote from your
your book which in context was a turning point in
prison for you where you thought, Okay, this is what
(02:59):
it's about. Just the quote out and get you to
expand on that, if you're could please suddenly. I find
great comfort in our situation. The idea that we have
come to stand for something much larger than ourselves mean
we have to fight on behalf of that bigger thing.
It isn't just Peter Grest, Muhammad Fami and Baya Muhammad
who are in the cage. It is every journalist working
(03:20):
in Egypt. More broadly, it's every journalist working with any
within any regime that considers using these kind of tactics
to silent public debate and critical voices. Defending that cause
is not just a heavy responsibility, it's hugely empowering one. Now,
I think that is to the point that you're talking about.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
That's exactly it. That's exactly it. It suddenly becomes external,
It suddenly takes on significance and meaning that I hadn't
that that would otherwise have made the whole time in
prison time wasted. I spend four hundred days locked up.
That would have been four hundred day in my life
that I'd never get back. But in seeing it in
(04:02):
those terms, it meant that I it became a struggle
for that high principle. And I remember there's a there's
an extraordinary book that I was that I ended up
reading in prison once we were alloud, books called Man's
Search for Meaning by a guy called Victor Frankel. And
(04:23):
Frankel is an incredible character. He was a survivor of
the concentration camps in World War Two. He went in
as a Jewish neurologist, as a neuroscientist, and so I
had a particular interest in the way people's brains worked.
And he wrote the book as a way of trying
to understand the differences between those who survived and those
(04:47):
who didn't. And he said that he quoted nietzschee as saying,
he who has a why can bear anyhow. In other words,
as long as you have a reason that's externality you
for enduring the suffering that you're going through, you can
put up with pretty much anything. He was saying. It
(05:07):
can't be money, it can't be selfish, he said, God
sometimes is that provides that, but more often than not,
it's survival for a family. For a lot of the
concentration camp inmates, it was survival as a form of
resistance to the Nazis, to the genocide that they're experiencing.
(05:27):
For me, it became a fight for press freedom. Now
I know that sounds a little bit pious, a little
bit sort of arrogant, but that's the way I came
to see it, and that gave me a sense of
purpose and meaning and direction and a kind of vision
that helped they think, helped me get it get through.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
I can understand what you're saying, because it would easily,
it would be easy to turn it in on yourself
and wallow in the self pity and why has this
happened to me? You're thinking, Okay, there's a broader here,
and that can be very powerful to motivate you to
find the depth that you didn't think you had.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
Exactly.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
I just yeah, thinking thinking about it, I think all
the way you have to evolve and look deeply into
yourself to find find the answers to get through this.
But I just want to break down the whole period
of time when you're in prison, and I've got a
couple of areas I want to cover to get proper
(06:30):
legal representation. That was a nightmare in itself. Talk us
through that.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
Yeah, it was so Al Jazeera hired a lawyer and
they were there for a while until they rather spectacularly
resigned in the middle of the trial.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
They made it very public statement the way it was done.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
To extraordinary public statement, and it was very damaging. But
to be honest, Gary, I really I was in a
lot of stress around that. But I also realized that
actually our legal representation was beside the point a first
year law student could have defended us, that the evidence
against us was so paper thin, was not existent?
Speaker 1 (07:13):
Really what was it? Specific charges? Could break down of
the charges.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
So we've been accused of aiding and a betting a
terrorist organization, being members of a terrorist organization, advocating terrorist ideology,
broadcasting false news with intent to undermine national security, financing terrorism.
I mean, these were about as serious as you could
get short of actually pulling a pin on a grenade
(07:38):
in a crowded room, short of a physical terrorist attack.
We were basically agents of a terrorist.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
And the financing terrorism was they found some money that
you had that was your living expenses in an area
where the cash wasn't going to get you through, and
you've got some cash from your employer.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
Absolutely absolutely, I mean the narrative I think that as
far as I can tell, I never really got to
the bottom of it. But the narrative was that we
would occasionally buy footage freelance footage from camera up from
guys that were operating that were covering the demonstrations that
were either too dangerous for us to get to or
that we physically just couldn't didn't have time to cover
(08:20):
all of the protests. And the theory was that those
guys couldn't have covered particularly Muslim Brotherhood protests unless they
are members of the Brotherhood, and so by paying them
for the footage, we were somehow financing terrorism.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
It's creative thinking from law enforcement.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
It's quite a long bow. But you know, as far
as I can tell, that's how that charge came through.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
And did you get to access to your brief of evidence?
Speaker 2 (08:49):
No?
Speaker 1 (08:50):
No, because that's a pretty much a cornerstone of the
legal system here, that the prosecute that makes the allegations
and presents a brief of evidence and then you get
to who were so sect.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
So he's he's one of the things to give you
an idea of just how crazy it was to get
access to some of the to the images that they
had in there in the evidence. We had to pay
for it because there was apparently a processing fee, and
we said, look, we wanted we wanted to get all
of the images that they had, and the figure they
(09:23):
came up with was literally in the hundreds of thousands
of dollars. They couldn't understand it, like, what the how
the hell do you come up with with that kind
of number, until we realized that one second of video
footage it's like film, it is made up of frames
of twenty four frames, and so they were counting each
frame as an individual image, and so if you wanted
(09:47):
five minutes of footage that they had as supposedly as evidence,
we were going to have to pay for literally thousands
and thousands of images. Absolutely insane, and of course we
coldn't affortunately.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
I think you've been unfair there, you alos, so there's
foto copying costs. I'm with you on certain things, but
that's crazy, isn't it. So each each frame of the
role of film. Okay, so you didn't get access to
your brief The system I think you described as just
(10:22):
it wasn't rigid. It was just could swing anyway one
of them. It's almost like someone could get up. And
I think there was an example of a witness giving
evidence that it really just didn't stand up to any
the weakest cross examination, but it was just dismissed. Anyway.
I can't remember, but you said Peter was here six
months ago, when he's we can present evidence that you
(10:45):
weren't in the country six months ago, and that's just
dismissed with, oh, well, yeah, we all make mistakes, but yeah,
move on.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
That was it. We were we'd been accused of being
involved with the Rabber massacre, which had happened six months earlier,
and at that time I was in Sudan, in South Sudan,
and they had my passport that had all of the
entry and exit stamps both in Egypt and also the
entry and exit stamps into South Sudan. So it was
blinding the obvious, and we were prepared and We're hoping
(11:13):
to present evidence of the stories that I'd produced from
South Sudan at the time of that massacre.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
So I'm thinking from a prosecuting point of view, that
would take a hole in the brief a little bit
iry to.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
Knock the evidence out of court. But no, they simply
said no. He was questioned about why, about the contradiction.
He just he kept saying I don't remember.
Speaker 1 (11:33):
And describe the court saying for us, are you are
you in there in the dock?
Speaker 2 (11:38):
Are you yes? So the docs was actually a cage,
a pretty intimidating cage, and it was designed it It
was a really big court room. It was more like
a theater, sort of raked seating, really really tall, tall,
tall ceilings, more like a cathedral. I guess in a
(11:59):
way had that sense of presence, and I think it
was designed to give them a sense be intimidating, and
as I said, because we were in the cage, I
think it was designed to make us look like we
were dangerous, dangerous terrorists that were a physical threat, even
if we should be, you know, have the opportunity to
leap across the court room.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
Well, you know, you can't trust these terrorists, so spies,
you don't know what's going on. People that support your family, friends,
And how important was that when you're going through the
whole process, the prison, the battles through the court, How
important to you was the support that and were you
were aware how much support you've had?
Speaker 2 (12:38):
So they were their presence of physical presence in the courtroom.
My brothers were there throughout the trial. That was really
really important to know that they had my back, that
we had people outside in Cairo, outside the cell that
were working to make sure that they were doing everything
they could, whether it was diplomatically or legally or politically.
(13:03):
You asked, you mentioned about the broader campaign, and I
had a vague idea that there was a lot going on,
but honestly, I had no real understanding of the scale
of the campaign.
Speaker 1 (13:14):
You had some very heavy hitters in your corner, not
just your corner, the whole whole group of you that
got locked up at US. Even Obama was making comments
about it. And certainly you had the support from over here,
from the Foreign Affairs minister and everyone else.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
Yeah, we did. And again I didn't realize it even
just just how how engaged Obama was. I saw him afterwards.
I was at an event in Washington, the FIGE, the
White House Correspondence and Your Dinner, and I met Obama
before the dinner and I introduced myself and he said, ah,
(13:55):
he said, you're that guy. He said, yeah, you wrote
two letters from prison to describing what you were going
through as an attack on press freedom. He said, I
saw those letters. I read them. He said, they really
helped me and understand he said, from that point, he said,
I always raised your case whenever I spoke to President CC.
Speaker 1 (14:12):
Yeah. Okay, so you had the support and also your colleagues.
I think your colleagues unified to make sure your story
wasn't forgotten.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
Yeah, journalists, journalist colleagues around the world. Yeah, and we
were very lucky. I mean, it was extraordinary the amount
of the amount of support that we had. And that was,
you know, partly because I think I and my colleagues family.
We'd worked across a large number of big international news organizations.
I'd worked for the BBC, of course, and for our
GAZEA and you know, I had a lot of colleagues.
I'd worked for Reuters, I had a lot of colleagues
(14:45):
here in Australia that knew my work. Family had worked
for CNN and others, And so there was a large
cohort of people around the world who knew us and
knew our work and the integrity of our work. But
it also recognized, as I did, that our case was
about them as well, that they needed to fight this
(15:05):
on for their own sake as much as.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
For ours, and that that support, the external support than
from people in powerful positions. Could that filter through to you?
Did you understand or have you only appreciate it? You release?
Speaker 2 (15:20):
I really only appreciate. I mean again, I was aware
of it, but not I didn't really fully understand it
until I was released and saw just how enormous that
campaign was and how many people were invested in.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
It, the scale of it. Disagreements with your calcus. And
when I say disagreements, if you put anyone in the
room long enough there's going to be disagreements, but there
was a couple of things about the strategy, So the
way that you should approached do you want to just
break that down and.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
So as you say, you when you're twenty three hours
inside a concrete box with somebody, then you're going to
find their edges. And that's how it was. For It
was very, very difficult to be stuck in that kind
of environment. We didn't know each other beforehand before I
arrived in Cairo, so you're still just getting to know
(16:09):
each other when you're in that environment. But Famy in
particular and I had very very different understandings of what
was taking place. Fami saw this as political. He saw
what was happening as the result of Egypt's suspicions about
Katari interference in Egypt. The Katar had been accused of
(16:33):
supporting the Brotherhood. Because we worked for a Katari organization,
we were therefore a part of that conspiracy, and Fami
felt that if that was the case, then the solution
was to distance ourselves from Qatar, from our Jazeera and
to align ourselves as with Egypt to make up to
(16:53):
portray ourselves as friends of Egypt. Fami felt that that
was to play the political game that was inevitably the
real reason why we were there. I didn't see that.
I saw this as an attack on press freedom. I
felt that if there was, if there was genuinely an
issue around Katari malfisans, and I was the last person
(17:14):
to come after to make that case. There are plenty
of other Al Jazeera journalists who had much deeper connections
with the Brotherhood. No, none of them sinister, but you
could easily, much more easily have made a case that
it had nothing really to do with the evidence or
to do with Katari interference. Again, if you wanted to
make that case, then an Australian journalist had only been
in the country for a few weeks was again not
the right person to make that case. And so I
(17:38):
felt that this was about press freedom. They came after
us because we were politically convenient, because they had that narrative.
But I felt that we needed to fight this on
as an attack on press freedom. And the problem is
that those two narratives were irreconcilable. You couldn't run those
defenses in parallel. You couldn't start down nine track and
(18:00):
you couldn't start down one track, and suddenly change course
and so, and the stakes were really really really high,
Like if we got this, got this, got this debate wrong,
if we got the strategy wrong, then we were going
to We're going to suffer for it. Fami, I thought
Famy was being really cynical in playing, in playing that
(18:23):
political game and dangerous. Family thought I was being hopelessly
naive and taking a very Western view of a fundamentally
Arabic Middle Eastern crisis. Yeah, it was we we we came.
We came almost to blows on a few occasions, very very.
Speaker 1 (18:42):
Tough after you were convicted, because the sequence of events
in the custody time you were in custody, You went
to trial, you were convicted of it, and then you
had an appeal coming up, or you had to lodge
for an appeal, waited a month or so to find
out whever that appeal would be allowed. And there was
(19:03):
some very heated discussions as I understand, about whether they
go on the hunger strike, and that not just one,
but many of the people that you were with thought
that would be the way to let's force this issue.
We're not staying here any longer. Well to talk us
through that, because that's a that's a heavy that was.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
That was another very very difficult period. So I spoke
I mentioned earlier Abdolfat, who was this incredible guy I
met at Lementorum, one of the earlier the first prison
that I was in, and he knew and understood about
hunger strikes, and a couple of the points that he
made was that if you're going to start a hunger strike,
(19:44):
you have to have the moral high ground, you have
to have all of the process on your side. You've
got to be demanding only things that the authorities have
the capacity to give you. You can't simply demand free because
they're not going to do that. They're never going to
do it. If they acquiesce and they give you your
(20:05):
freedom because you went on hunger strike, then every prisoner
was going to go.
Speaker 1 (20:08):
That makes sense. That makes sense.
Speaker 2 (20:10):
So you've got to be You've got to be demanding
things that are achievable and that are your rights to have.
The trouble was that the process, the trial and our
appeal dragged on for such a long time that a
lot of the other guys that were in our case
were wanting to go on a hunger strike. They felt
(20:32):
that all of our supporters. They said that all of
our supporters outside prison are fighting for us. We have
to fight inside. We have to be seen to be
doing something inside as well. We're demanding our freedom. And
I could see why they were frustrated, why they wanted
to do it. But I felt, I agreed with the
love that the timing was wrong. We were still within
(20:53):
the process. We were still within the time frames for
that process to play out. It was dragging out forever.
And even if we didn't consider that they were being serious,
that they were just stringing us along, it was too
early to start a hunger strike because we couldn't. They
were never going to give us what we were demanding.
It was. It was performative, and I didn't I disagreed
with it. But the trouble was that I also knew
(21:15):
that if I joined the hunger strike then it would
get huge amounts of potential the white guy, because I
was the white guy, I was the outsider. If they
went on the hunger strike without me, it would have
been a meaningless it would have it would have disappeared
into the footnote in the in the local newspapers.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
It was a hard position to be in for yourself.
I agree with your logic and one hundred percent agree
if you're going on the hunger strike, but they're simple responsible.
We're waiting to see if the appeal comes up or
they're not going to just open the prison doors.
Speaker 2 (21:46):
Exactly. You're being you're being petulant, you're being premature, you're
being ridiculous. You've got no rights to demand this.
Speaker 1 (21:51):
But your the strength that you had was in the unity.
And then if the others went on the hunger strike
and you didn't, yeah, I would make life very hard
for you. And if you spent spent the rest of
the time locked up with these people.
Speaker 2 (22:07):
And that's not to say I was afraid of the
hunger struck, and in fact, on the day that I
was released, I was. I decided that we have to
start a hunger strike because the type that moment had
come that there was an appropriate point in which they
were screwing. I was convinced I was screwing around it.
Speaker 1 (22:22):
That's when the appeals gone through and the conviction was upheld.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
That's right, Yeah, the conviction being overturned. Retral had been ordered, right, Sorry,
So to walk you through it that basically we'd been
a cute we'd been we'd been.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
Convicted, yep.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
We appealed the conviction. We won the appeal yep. Although
the Courtifussation agreed to hear the appeal. When they finally
heard it, they overturned the conviction on a technicality in
order to retrial. We weren't released. We're still in prison,
but they'd ordered a retrus starting again the courts exactly
the whole process again. The courts had thirty days to
(22:59):
name a new date for the start of the retrial,
and at day thirty one we've still heard nothing. And
that was the point at which I thought, right, this
is the moment we have to start the hunger strike
because they're screwing around with us. We're now in in
clear clear air that there's no process left for us.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
We have got a legitimate cause, We've got a legitimate
egible that you could criticize and say, this has been
done to us.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
This is why we're on strokes exactly, we demand our rights. Right.
But up to that point I didn't see that we
had we had that moral high ground, we had that
that that right, that opportunity to actually start the hunger strike.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
Well, you were taking it seriously. You even talked about,
and I didn't realize this. With a hunger strike, you're
better off preparing yourself before you start the strike, because
if it's just cut off you straight away, you're going
to do more damage than if you were Wean yourself
off food before you start the hunger strike.
Speaker 2 (23:54):
Yeah, absolutely, your body has to. You have to ease
your body into it. If you simply go cold turkey
on food because people seem to think that you've got
a sort of stock of energy, then it helps you.
Helps you run run into the into.
Speaker 1 (24:06):
A huge meal and they just stop eating.
Speaker 2 (24:09):
Doesn't work well.
Speaker 1 (24:10):
It learns your parents came to visit you. That must
have been hard for you. Had your your brother's support
and the other family members. But when your parents came there,
But how was that for you?
Speaker 2 (24:21):
That was really hard because and it was hard for
everybody really. They were only able to visit once every
two weeks, and even then only for about twenty minutes,
and you've got no time. It's always a stressful experience
and for them, I'm aging Granny and gra GRAMPI. Getting
(24:45):
around Carr to start with is tough, but also going
into prison, going through all of the security checks and
so on. Is really intimidating to get into tour, and
it's a it's a whole it's a whole day's mission.
They stand around and queues for hours and hours in
the blazing sun. You've got to be moved from from
the outer perimeter to the inner perimeters, and you're going
(25:07):
through countless searches and questions and papers and so on.
It's a very very intimidating process. And so by the
time you get in, they're stressed. I'm stressed because I'm
worried about them. They see my stress, and so what
you have is this really emotionally intense moment, and that's
(25:28):
the lasting impression that you've got. You've got nothing, no,
nothing to correct it, nothing to say, Look, they're actually
okay for the rest of the two weeks until you
get to see them again.
Speaker 1 (25:42):
I'm not nothing to aid here, because I can just
imagine what you go through with that. That must have
torn you apart inside. Soon your parents go through that.
So you talk of your release, let's complicate it in itself.
But you explained that the appeal that's gone past the
thirty days you were okay. I've got no legitimate argument
(26:04):
not to join this hunger strike now, So that was
your mindset and what changed and how did it change?
Speaker 2 (26:11):
I got no idea, so I decided. I woke up
that morning realized it was day thirty one. I've been
contemplating before. I felt, if we get to this point,
then we're going to have to start a hunger strike.
And my brother was due for a visit that day,
and so they opened up the cell door and I
was going to I was basically running in the corridor
(26:36):
for exercise, and as I was running, I was just
thinking through the conversation I was going to have to
have with my brother to let him know. When all
of a sudden, one of the guards weighs me down
and says, the boss needs to see you. The warden
needs to see you. I remember thinking, okay, I'm saying
to him, I'm going to have to change, because it
was part of the prison protocol that you don't go
(26:58):
and see the warden in this stinky running clothes. You
get changed into basic prison whites. But you know you've
got a basic show respect. And he said, no, no, no,
go now the boss he's outside in the courtyard. So
I went out and he said to me, he said,
I've got news for you. I said, what. He said,
(27:18):
I'm pack your things. You're you're you're going. I said,
what do you mean? He said, you're moving. I'm moving prisons.
So I've been in every damn prison in your system already.
And he said, no, no, no, no, no, you're going home.
The embassy is going to be here in half an hour.
Get going, Pack you pack your gear, yellow, get going.
That was it was. It was completely discombobulating and emotionally
(27:41):
really really difficult because I Gary, I think of it
a little bit like Christmas, right, You know, if you're
a kid, you're heading up to Christmas, you think about it,
you get excited by it, you kind of think about it,
your fantasize, your imagine one's going to be like you
wake up but you can barely sleep the night before,
you wake up at six in the morning and leap
(28:02):
up and dive into the presence and you have a
great time. But imagine if all of a sudden you
wake up and there are these things at the end
of your bed and you're.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
Just looking around, Look at what the hell's going on?
Speaker 2 (28:13):
Are these really for me? Am I going to get
into trouble? If I if I, if I touch these things?
Is this some kind of sick joke? What's what's going
on here? It was a bit like that. It took
me a while, It took me a long time, like
days before I realized that actually, this is this is real,
this is true, This is this, this, this ordeal is over.
Speaker 1 (28:36):
I can imagine when when you were told or when
you're informed of that they asked you not to tell
your fellow inmates that you're going, just that I'm going
to another prison. You made the decision to tell.
Speaker 2 (28:48):
I had to tell. I can't.
Speaker 1 (28:51):
As I was reading your book, I'm thinking you're a
low life if you don't tell them. But I think
their reaction speaks a lot to the of people that
you're in there with.
Speaker 2 (29:01):
Well, I was. I was really really emotionally torn up
because I felt so guilty, so guilty about leaving them
behind because I was again and you mentioned this earlier,
but I was. I was released because I was the
white guy, because my name was Peter and not Muhammad,
and I carried that, I really did. I didn't feel
it was right for me to be leaving in those
(29:23):
guys still to be stuck and stuck inside but we'd
also we had talked about it about the possibility. We
knew it was always there was always a chance that
would happen. And we realized that any of them guys
left behind, the last thing they would want is for
the person not to leave. You couldn't refuse to leave,
You couldn't sort of leave your fingernails in the doors
(29:44):
in the c in the door of the prison cell.
But nonetheless it was it was still a difficult thing.
But they they, they all were so overjoyed. I was
so overjoyed. But the thing we also agreed in the
previous discuss was that if someone was released and they
would become the most vocal advocate, that's a spokesman for
(30:07):
those for the rest of us who have been left behind.
And that's that's what I decided.
Speaker 1 (30:10):
To do, because I could imagine, you've been through so
much together of the highs and lowers and basically survived,
and then you're walking away in that sense of survivor guilt,
I suppose to a degree, out of the prison. When
are you're taken virtually from there straight to the airport,
straight to the airport, What year, at what date was
it that you came back to Australia.
Speaker 2 (30:32):
So I was released on February first of two thousand
and fifteen, and you're back in Australia I think it was.
It was about three days later, it was about the
fourth I think.
Speaker 1 (30:44):
And explained to me, you're deported, but you were meant
to continue your sentence over here in Australia. But there
was a brief of effidence to start with.
Speaker 2 (30:56):
Yeah, exactly, I mean, that's that would have been confusing,
but it was. It was part of the fiction of
the way that my release had been negotiated. The President
CC had passed a decree giving himself the power to
deport any foreign national who was in that prison system
to complete the judicial process in their country of origin.
Speaker 1 (31:14):
Okay, so that's the basis of which that's.
Speaker 2 (31:17):
The basis on which he kicked me out. Now, of
course that in terms of international law, that's meaningless extradition treaties.
You can only move a prisoner from one country to
another with an extradition treaty, and those are really complicated
legal agreements, international agreements. They take years and years to negotiate.
(31:38):
But in this case, my lawyers apparently drafted a document
that basically said that I was being released to complete
the judicial process as far as the Egyptians were concerned.
It was to complete the trial and then sentence, presumably
in Australia, as far as the Australians were concerned. And
you'd understand this, there was no brief of evidence, There
(32:00):
was no file that as far as the Federal police
were concerned, I was. There was no evidence that I was.
Speaker 1 (32:08):
Enty you in the court system here.
Speaker 2 (32:10):
Nothing not even no no, even no reason to pull
me in for an interview, and so there was no
judicial process to complete.
Speaker 1 (32:19):
Okay, so you're a free man, but also still a
convicted men. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (32:25):
Yeah, because after the retrial, the retrial was announced a
couple of days after I was released, the cold accused,
you have the co accused in Egypt, and when the
trial began, I was named still as a defendant in Absandia.
At the end of that retrial, we were all reconvicted,
given fresh sentences. We maintained I maintained the campaign to
(32:49):
release my colleagues and they were eventually pardoned and released
about three weeks after they got that conviction. But the
pardon didn't extend to me. So I'm still technically convin
to terrorists.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
How said the impact on your travels, It's made it tough.
You'd have to tiptoe treaties with Egypt.
Speaker 2 (33:09):
Any country that has an extradition treating and there's one
treaty that covers the whole of the African Union from
Cairo to Cape Town, which made it almost impossible, not
almost made it impossible to do my whole job.
Speaker 1 (33:21):
As a common sense would say, it wouldn't be invoked,
but you would not dare play with it would.
Speaker 2 (33:26):
And even if it wouldn't be invoked, I knew that
I'd be in a position of thinking, well, do I
do the story about the missing millions from the President's
office or do I do a story about the elephant translocation. Yeah,
and you know, I'd like to think I'd have the
balls to do the story about the corruption, but that
(33:48):
extradition to Egypt would always be hanging over my head
and I'm not sure that I'd do it. So, yeah,
it was always going to compromise my work.
Speaker 1 (33:55):
And but for yourself, like as a foreign correspondent that, yeah, journalists.
Speaker 2 (34:00):
That I need. I have to have that ability to
travel freely, and terrorism conviction just messes with that.
Speaker 1 (34:10):
Yeah, I can imagine how difficult would we try to
explain that one way I can explain recording a conversation
on the telephone when your cower cubes were released? How
are you informed? And how you this is fun?
Speaker 2 (34:25):
Yeah, you kind of You've done your research. You know
the story. So I've been invited on and this is
going to sound like a really weird kind of way
into the story, but I promise you it's true. I've
been invited onto the Chass media circus as a as
a as a kind of guest, as a guest to
that thing, and it was a it was a great show.
(34:46):
I really enjoyed it. At the end of the show,
we're all gathered around, they had this sort of pun session,
and it was the show ended, the applause died down,
and all of a sudden, one of the producers walks
up with are still on camera the studio and still there,
and he hands me that a phone and I look
(35:11):
at the phone and it's a tweet, a single tweet
that says that Muhammed Fami has been released, has been
pardoned and released. And I'm standing there in front of
this wondering is this some kind of joke I've got
the audience there, I've got all of the other all
of the other people that were on the show standing
(35:31):
around me looking at this thing. I'm speechless because it's
you know, as a journalist, you don't go with just
one source, and certainly not some random tweet. I don't
know if it was true. I didn't know any of
this stuff, and all of a sudden, one of the
other guys sort of filled the void as I'm trying
to think what do I do? What do I say?
(35:51):
And reads out the tweet and I simply have to say, well,
if this is true, and god, I hope it's true,
then this is this is what we've been fighting for
all of this time, and the whole, the whole audience
just erupts in cheers.
Speaker 1 (36:05):
That I'm sure that that put the final or not
the final piece, because you're going to carry it for forever.
But that must have made you feel like you've really
got your freedom when your cacus were out, I would
imagine it would have been hard everything joy that you're
taking in life, thinking if they're still.
Speaker 2 (36:24):
In that yeah, yeah, And that was that was the
moment that I realized, and it eventually it became clear
that it wasn't just fa me, it was both both
of them had been had been released. It was an
extraordinary moment.
Speaker 1 (36:36):
Were you surprised by the interest when you got back
to Australia because I think you was Cypress You went
to for a couple of days to decompress.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
Yeah, I went to Cyprus. That was part of the
advice from from some people who knew and understood how
these things go and advise, just to just to collect
my thoughts, just to speak to our Jazira, just to
kind of have a moment on my own. And so
I figured it was about a couple of days, three
(37:06):
days by the time between the moment I've been released
the moment I got back to Australia and I figured, well,
it's old news. They've reported that I'm out. I was
due to fly back. I was arriving back in Brisbane
on a Wednesday morning, I think at two am. I thought,
(37:27):
nobody's going to show up at the airport, and then
maybe a couple of insomniac photographers who might show up
just to try and get a photograph, but that a bit.
Maybe some of the morning TV news programs might send
a crew, but nobody else, and it was just mind blowing.
It was insane. There were hundreds of well wishes, of
camera crews, of photographers, of journalists. It was just nuts,
(37:52):
this huge, huge welcoming party.
Speaker 1 (37:56):
And what did you do when you came out of
the gates.
Speaker 2 (37:59):
I just remember but punching the air and I saw
some friends in the crowd who hadn't seen for years
and years and years. I went and embraced And you know,
I said then that because at that point my colleagues
were still in prison. And the one thing I said
was that if if it's right for me to be free,
then it's also right for my colleagues to.
Speaker 1 (38:18):
Be amazing, amazing story lessons lessons learnt from it from
yourself before we go going to that media being locked up,
and I saw you had figures at the end of
the film, the correspondent figures about foreign correspondence journalists locked up.
(38:42):
And I think that it was in excess of four
hundred and forty seven countries or something like that.
Speaker 2 (38:46):
Well forty It was record numbers in prisons in countries
all over the world. That the numbers of journalists have
been murdered for their work is at record highs. The
numbers of journalists behind bar are also at record highs,
and this has since the CpG, the Committee to Protect
Journalists to be tracking the numbers, and they started in
(39:08):
nineteen ninety two, I think it was, and so yeah,
it's the highest that it's ever been. And curiously, the
CPJ calculates or assesses the charges that the journalists are facing,
and they reckon that around three quarters of them, two
thirds to three quarters are there on what they loosely
describe as as anti state charges. So that's things like
(39:31):
sedition trees and terrorism threats to national security, which circles
back to what I was saying to you earlier in
the first part of the podcast, where we were talking
about the ways in which governments have used national security
to come after uncomfortable journalism.
Speaker 1 (39:50):
And that's a big umbrella to pull over is security
that could cover so many different.
Speaker 2 (39:56):
Things, so many, so many things, and see secrecy provisions exactly.
Speaker 1 (40:02):
Now.
Speaker 2 (40:02):
I'm not saying, and again you'd understand this well too,
I'm not saying that it's there aren't times that journalists
violate national security and really place national security at risk.
I'm not saying that journals should have the right to
publish whatever they want. But governments have been using security
legislation to silence uncomfortable journalism, to accuse journalists of being
(40:23):
involved in acts of terrorism or treason or espionage, and
using that national security rhetoric as a way of shutting
down journalism. And I think that is a really dangerous
trend that we've really seen takeoffs since nine to eleven.
Speaker 1 (40:39):
And how we can how can we prevent that law?
What can be done?
Speaker 2 (40:43):
Well, A part of it is being aware of it
and pushing governments to push back. In Australia we have
we've got those problems as well.
Speaker 1 (40:50):
Yeah, talk through that because again the war on terror
and metadata that people can get access to, and my
take on it is that they can attack the journalist's
source with the metadata, find out who if you broke
a story and I'm in the police or security and
(41:10):
we want to find out who you've been speaking to,
where the leak came from, the metadata would track it
back for us.
Speaker 2 (41:16):
And maybe I should explain what metadata is metadata. George Brandish,
when he was introducing the Data Attention legislation, famously just
and rather cavalierly described it as the outside of the envelope.
In other words, it's not the contents of communication, but
it's all of the details around it. It's who you
emailed or texted or called when you sent those emails,
(41:39):
where you were at the time, all of that kind
of data. The websites that you're browsing history, and even
though they don't know, the authorities don't know, can't investigate
the contents. It's very easy to cross reference. As you said,
if there is a leak from the government, you don't
(42:01):
have to dig too far to find who has been
the Jones break down.
Speaker 1 (42:06):
If you're reporting on a police story and I'm still
in the police and they want to know where the
sources and they look at your phone records and you've
been on the phone to me or texting me, so yeah.
Speaker 2 (42:17):
Yeah, exactly. Or if you if you make a phone
call to a medical clinic, to a doctor, you have
a Google search for sexually transmitted diseases, and then you've
got a visit to a chemist. It's pretty clear what's
going on. You know, you don't have to be.
Speaker 1 (42:33):
You don't have to bring that example up.
Speaker 2 (42:34):
And yeah, it's very easy to cross reference those bits
ab and so again we're saying not that the journalist
relationship to sources is really crucial to allowing journalists to
do their jobs in holding governments and officials to account.
(42:59):
I think best known example, and perhaps the most egregious
example in Australia is the case of David McBride. The
Australian Federal Police raided the officers of the ABC looking
for evidence of the sources to the story that became
known as the Afghan Files. This was evidence that the
ABC published of war crimes by Australian special forces in Afghanistan,
(43:23):
murders of civilians. If the ABC is publishing allegations of
that our soldiers have committed war crimes are murdered civilians
in our name, that is crucially in the public interest. Right.
What we saw was the Federal Police going after the
source of that of that story. Now, I think there's
(43:47):
something fundamentally messed up in that world where yes, the
ABC did rely on classified information and that's a crime
revealing classified information, but there is equally there is a
public and so there's a public interest in prosecuting that leak.
But there is equally a public interest in the story
that the ABC published. And the ABC was never going
(44:09):
to be able to get that story without without that
that classified information. And so I'd say, you've got to
create a mechanism to weigh up these competing public interests.
And sometimes the public interest in publishing information is going
to outweigh the public interest in prosecuting Aleika.
Speaker 1 (44:28):
And quite often on that aspect of publishing, we're talking
public servants to say it to serve the public. I'm
a big believer in that. I can only talk on
my area that I understand in policing, like some of
the things that were shut down because I didn't see
this as public interest. It was going to be critical
of the police and shut down. And the three pillars
(44:51):
of journalism about the truth, accountability, and objectivity is that
the I saw in policing Crewer. So I'm talking at
this level, not national security, in policing, and I've seen
it now working in journalism. There's some journalists that carry
favor of the police and get stories given to them
because they don't criticize the police. And I don't like that.
(45:14):
I think, yeah, transparency is important.
Speaker 2 (45:18):
And you'd understand as a cop too, it's really hard
when you've got journalists set on your back but it's
also really important in keeping the system honest.
Speaker 1 (45:27):
Well, I think we're seeing with podcasts and different things,
a reference like Teacher's Pet, where the police weren't going
to talk about talk about that case, but when the
public started talking about Headley Thomas started broadcasting about it, Okay,
people start to become accountable and things get done. I
do see the importance of it. And you're talking at
(45:49):
such as scale countries go the war because of misinformation.
Reference back to what you were saying in earlier on
you had a sense of responsibility in Afghanistan because there's
only a few of you reporting what was happening.
Speaker 2 (46:01):
So yeah, and this is why I believe in the
work that the journalists do and why I believe that
it should be protected. Now, I recognize and you mentioned
journalists that curry favor with the cops to keep those
lines of communication open. I recognize that not all journalists
work with integrity. I completely understand that, and the industry
(46:22):
has a lot of work to do to recover public trust.
But fundamentally we need it to keep our system on us,
to keep the system of accountability going, to keep vigorous,
well informed public debates happening. Imagine a world where we
don't have good journalism, where we depend on our understanding
(46:44):
of the government, of what takes place in government, on
the tweets and social media posts of our politicians and
public servants. That that that's not a world in which
I feel I had a great deal of confidence you know,
I'm with you, and so fundamentally we need to protect it.
Australia doesn't have any constitutional protection for press freedom.
Speaker 1 (47:04):
I picked that up in preparing for this that Australia
is almost unique in that situation that we don't have that.
What are you suggesting that would be something?
Speaker 2 (47:15):
I'm suggesting a Media Freedom Act. We're not going to
get constitutional reform. We're not going to get press freedom
written into the constitution. It's very so difficult in Australia.
But an Act of Parliament can do that job. Doesn't
have to be massively complicated. The Human Rights Acts in Queensland,
the Act and Victoria say three very simple things. They
(47:35):
say Parliament has to always consider human rights when they're
passing new legislation. In other words, they've got to always
factor it in as much as possible. Protected that the
courts have to interpret existing legislation in ways that are
consistent with human rights. Even if there's no explicit thing
that says that the cops can't beat up a ten
year old, you still can't beat up a ten year
(47:55):
old to break it all then, and thirdly, the public
servants have to act in ways that support human rights. Now,
I think if you simply replace the words human rights
with media freedom, then you're in the ball park of
where we need to be. That you have to the
Parliament and the courts have an obligation to consider the
importance of media freedom when they're dealing with that, when
(48:18):
they're either creating legislation or interpreting and implying it. That's
the key. Doesn't always have to privilege everything else. But
you've got to have an opportunity to recognize that public
interest in the work that journalists do and weigh that
against the more established public interest in prosecutions.
Speaker 1 (48:35):
And now I'm with you one hundred percent on that.
And I always said when the doors are closed to
the court and the media are excluded, there's usually no
good that's going on in there. Times need to be
have the media excuse and matters can't be reported on
a non publication, but invariably public would be outraged and
(48:56):
shocked if they knew what was going on when those
doors are closed. Yeah, there's a lot, a lot to
be done. Well, I'm glad you've had your rest for
four hundred days in your prison, sitting there meditating and
playing bang gabon and everything else that you're doing. What
are you doing with yourself now?
Speaker 2 (49:14):
So I'm an academic and the media freedom a I'm
a professor of journalism at mcquarie University, and I also
run a not for profit organization, an advocacy group called
the Alliance for Journalists Freedom. And in fact, that idea
of a Media Freedom Act is something that's right at
the very top of our agenda.
Speaker 1 (49:31):
Where would people find find that.
Speaker 2 (49:33):
Our website Journalists Journalists Freedom don't come. They've We've dripped,
We've drafted the act. We're also setting up a professional
association for journalism. We think that if we're going to
give journalists rights in law, then we also they also
need to take on responsibilities through a more rigorous system
(49:55):
for self regulation. And we think that helps everybody. It
makes journalism more trustworthy. It means people have more confidence
in journalism. They can identify good journalism, journalism that's produced
in line with a code of conduct, a set of
ethics and standards. But we also think it's important to
(50:15):
have that enshrined in law to make sure that the
kind of erosion that we're seeing taking place is stopped.
Speaker 1 (50:23):
Well, I'm sure your students are getting a lot of
inspiration from having you speak to them. Are you enjoying
training future?
Speaker 2 (50:31):
J I miss I miss my old life terribly, right,
I miss being a foreign correspondent. That identity was really
deeply embedded in my own DNA. But this is a
pretty good plan.
Speaker 1 (50:43):
Be Yeah, I'm happy for you that you've found that
you've said that you've missed your former occupation as a
foreign correspondent. Do you have regrets that you ever took
up that offer for the three weeks?
Speaker 2 (50:56):
No time, No, no regrets at all. I mean I could.
To have to have a regret implies that I might
have made a different decision under the same circumstances. And
I would never have done that, you know I would.
I would never have gone. I wouldn't wish prison on
my worst enemy. But at the same time, to say
(51:16):
I have regrets would suggest I did something wrong. And
I didn't.
Speaker 1 (51:20):
And so no, okay, I'm not going to let you
go until we talk about your your movie and Richard
Roxburgh playing playing you? Was he your first choice?
Speaker 2 (51:29):
And how do you two get I don't tell Rocks,
but my first choice was was Chris Hamsworth. But okay,
hysterical laughter wasn't the response.
Speaker 1 (51:43):
I can see where you're coming.
Speaker 2 (51:44):
You can't see you can't see it, Hamsworth sitting here.
Speaker 1 (51:47):
The likeness is when you got out of prison, but
clearly workouts that you were doing.
Speaker 2 (51:52):
But no, I didn't look as I think you might
have mentioned earlier. I couldn't. I couldn't really get Cleaver Green,
the character from Rake, out of my head when I
knew that Richard Richard was being considered for the role.
But he is an extraordinary character actor. He's one of
Australia's finest. And the more I got to know him
(52:17):
and see his performance, the more I realized that, actually
I think he had it nailed. As he said, he
wasn't trying to do his version of Peter Grestor, he
wasn't trying to impersonate me. And when he said that,
I remember thinking that feeling a huge weight off my
(52:37):
shoulders because it meant I didn't have to see some
weird quirk of myself was being portrayed accurately on screen,
but it was more of a feel alike rather than
a look alike. And I think he got that feeling
really nailed.
Speaker 1 (52:54):
Ye, well, it would have been an interesting, interesting experience
for you.
Speaker 2 (52:57):
It was. It was fascinating, but it was also again,
just to quote kriv Standards the director who said, look
that they weren't trying to I struggled a lot with
the idea of seeing myself on screen on the big
screen until I realized that it's not me up there.
It's this guy that has my name that's going through
that story. But it's an artistic interpretation of my story,
(53:20):
and it's been through countless hand layers of artistry. The scriptwriter,
the director, the actors, the crew, the set designers, the editors.
All of those guys have had their own artistic interpretation.
So what you see on screen is is that there's
a result of nomination of that work. As Crip said,
it's not a photograph, it's a painting, and so I
(53:45):
think it's a pretty it's a pretty damn good painting.
Speaker 1 (53:47):
Okay, But it's another good way of getting the message out,
another medium forgetting getting If.
Speaker 2 (53:52):
It makes people think and talk about the first and
foremost I think I hope you agree it's a damn
good drama very much, but I think it also has
that it provokes conversations around the importance of media freedom
and what's been happening to journalists.
Speaker 1 (54:05):
Yeah, well, I think it's time to time to wrap up.
I've enjoyed this chat obviously, and just keep up the
good work. I think it's amazing the career that you've had.
I'm a bit jealous, like if someone said to me,
what would I would like to be in all honesty,
and I think I was obsessed with George Nigas when
he was a foreign correspondent. I wanted to be on
(54:26):
a jeep with a scarf round and traveling through a
war zone a foreign correspondent. But what a fascinating career
you've had and experiences you had in the way that
you've come out of it. Also, full credit to you,
and I've enjoyed having you on I Catch Killers and
that exclusive group that you've got. Now not only you
all working at Macquarie University, you've been locked up overseas.
(54:48):
You've also also appeared on My Catch Killers, and.
Speaker 2 (54:51):
This is probably the defining moment for all of us.
Then the herd could die him in
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