Consider the events GlobalPost correspondents reported just this week:

In Indonesia, Peter Gelling provided authoritative coverage of the country’s elite counter-terrorism force killing Noordin Top, the leader of Indonesia’s answer to Al Qaeda.

In Somalia, six US attack helicopters swept over a convoy of the Al Qaeda-inspired Al Shabaab fighters and killed Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, a leader who has long been wanted by the US in connection with the 1998 attack two US embassies in East Africa. GlobalPost correspondent Tristan McConnell reported from Kenya on how the attacks reveal a dramatic shift in US policy to confront Al Qaeda in the failed state of Somalia.

In Yemen, GlobalPost’s Laura Kasinof reported on the air strikes that killed scores of civilians fleeing fighting in Northern Yemen where the government forces appear to be succumbing to American pressure to step up the fight against “an increasingly active branch of Al Qaeda in the country,” as she wrote.

The US intelligence community is buzzing about evidence emerging over the summer that Al Qaeda leaders are gathering in Somalia and Yemen and trying to establish a new nexus for operations after Pakistan’s military finally stepped up the pressure on Al Qaeda in the tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan.

CIA director Leon E. Panetta publicly revealed this in briefings over the summer.

An early warning about this came from Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who spoke at the Brookings Institute in the late spring, saying, “I am very worried about growing safe havens in both Somalia and Yemen, specifically because we have seen Al Qaeda leadership, some leaders, start to flow to Yemen.”

The concentration of violent jihadist campaigns in Yemen and Somalia illustrate that Al Qaeda is a movement not an organization, and the fact that they are scrambling to move base and being hit even as they do so is a sign that they are greatly weakened now eight years after the September 11th attacks.

It was there that he came of age as Joseph Ratzinger and served in Hitler Youth during the rise of the Third Reich.

Shining a light on that history offers a glimpse of the context underpinning the Vatican’s current crisis, which results from the pope’s decision last month to rescind the excommunication of a renegade, ultra-conservative bishop who actively denies the Holocaust.

The decision unleashed a firestorm of controversy, with the German government weighing in last week, Israel’s chief rabbinate severing ties with the Vatican, and Catholics and Jews worldwide feeling that decades of hard work and goodwill in improving relations between the two faiths had been undermined.

So can we draw a line from this oversight by the pope, this inability to see how much his decision would insult so many, back to his German past and a decision as a 14-year-old boy to join the Hitler Youth?

Most thoughtful Catholics and many Jewish historians I know would say, no, that is not a line that can be drawn, nor is it fair.

But one man who knows some of the hidden truths in the pope’s hometown of Traunstein is Father Rupert Berger, and his story deserves telling.

Berger, now 81, was ordained a Catholic priest alongside Joseph Ratzinger and his brother, Georg, in 1951 in the beautiful church in the center of the town where they all grew up together.
But there was something that set their two families apart.

Berger’s family sympathized with the Catholic resistance to Nazism in the town. Rupert was the same age as Joseph Ratzinger and at 14 years old he refused to join Hitler Youth. His family suffered as a result. He told me in an interview in 2005 that his father was sent to Dachau. He returned after the war and became the mayor.

Ratzinger’s father was a policeman. The family was never affiliated with the Nazi party. But the Ratzingers chose to go with the vast majority of Germany and acquiesce to the regulations requiring 14 year olds to join Hitler Youth. They wanted to survive and allow their two sons to focus on academics in the seminary. So Ratzinger and his brother joined at 14 and went through with the parades and the salutes to the Fuehrer. Ratzinger also served briefly with a German army anti-aircraft unit just before the end of the war.

When I interviewed Berger in April 2005, just after Ratzinger had been elevated to the papacy, he spoke well of Ratzinger’s intellect and discipline as a young man. But he said he couldn’t understand why Ratzinger had insisted for so long in so many public statements that no one had a choice but to join Hitler Youth.

”It was a hard time to live, and there were hard choices to make,” Berger said.

He was too modest or polite, or perhaps uncertain about what to tell a reporter who landed on his doorstep, to state his opinion about the new pope’s choices any more clearly.

But what I took away from the interview and my research in the town was that the pope’s repeated assertion that he had no choice but to join Hitler Youth was simply not true.

In fact, the statement is an insult to the memory and the lives of those who did resist Nazism and those who did refuse to join the organizations that were formed to perpetuate its power.
The pope’s poorly-thought-out edict to reinstate the Holocaust-denying bishop — from which the Vatican is now vigorously back peddling — was also an insult to those who resisted Nazism and to Jews and Catholics alike around the world.

At the end of the day, it shouldn’t surprise us that this pope overlooked — or failed to adequately investigate — the dangerous and virulent strains of anti-Semitism that ran through British Bishop Richard Williamson’s research that denied the Holocaust.

Nor should it surprise us that the pope failed to give careful enough consideration to what lies behind the traditionalist Society of St. Pius X, which refuses to adhere to the teaching of the Second Vatican Council, including an important theological rejection of the idea of collective guilt on the part of Jews for the crucifixion of Jesus.

Pope John Paul II had excommunicated Williamson and three other bishops from the Society of St. Pius X in 1988. On Jan. 21, Pope Benedict rescinded that excommunication and later claimed he was not aware of Williamson’s Holocaust denial.

It shouldn’t surprise us that this pope rescinded the excommunication without sufficient attention to how such an act would be received, because it fits in with a lack of transparency and communication that is turning out to be a hallmark of Benedict’s papacy.

Even Cardinal Christoph Schonborn of Vienna, who worked closely with Ratzinger and who was a very strong supporter of the conclave that elected Benedict, said: “There must be also a certain criticism of the Vatican’s staff practice, which obviously did not examine the matter carefully.”

John Allen, a columnist for National Catholic Reporter and the author of a biography of the pope, said that Schonborn’s statement was significant because “even papal loyalists are coming to see that the meltdown illustrates a twin failure in transparency: One within the Vatican itself, in the sense that the proper people were not consulted, and the other in communication with the outside world.”

To deny the Holocaust is a crime in Germany, and yesterday German Chancelor Angela Merkel discussed the issue with the pope directly.

After the German government demanded on Feb. 3 that the Vatican reconsider its position, the Vatican issued a statement Feb. 4 that Williamson must recant his denial of the Holocaust before he can be admitted into the Roman Catholic Church as a bishop. Williamson has refused to do that and now remains in limbo and leaves the Vatican in a moral twilight on the issue.

Jason Berry, an author of several books on the Catholic church and the producer of the acclaimed documentary Vows of Silence, believes it is unfair to think Ratzinger as a young boy could have resisted joining the Hitler Youth.

He believes the current crisis points more to a lack of leadership, saying, “Ratzinger is not being true to his position as a moral fundamentalist; he should have excommunicated Williamson when this news broke. Instead this lame response of asking him to retract is a day late and a dollar short.”

There’s wide agreement that this much is true.

But there is still the larger question as to whether this failure of judgment on some level mirrors the way in which this pope as a young man and his family found a way to shut out the enormity of the evil of Nazism and instead focus on his own internal world of intellectual intensity and the passion that he holds for the well being of his church.

When I interviewed Father Berger in 2005, it was just days after the white puff of smoke emanated from the Vatican and confirmed that Ratzinger had been elevated to the papacy.

When he came to the door, he was holding a broom. Father Berger stood in the doorway and occasionally dragged the broom back and forth while we stood there talking. He remembered much of the detail of those early teenage years when he and Joseph Ratzinger were confirmed as Catholics and when he rejected Hitler Youth and he saw his classmate accept membership.

When I asked him why he thought Ratzinger obeyed the rules and joined the Hitler Youth, Berger replied: ”You could ask the majority of Germans this question. There was such high pressure on everyone. He was too young to do a conscious resistance.”

That was certainly true then, but it is certainly not true now.

And for this German pope, a more clear act of “conscious resistance” to denying the Holocaust is now required. He should immediately excommunicate Williamson again and end the ambiguity.

This pope has a unique teaching moment in which he can openly discuss how he feels about his own moral failings as a young man in not challenging the enormity of evil that was Nazism. And he can speak out about the need to remember accurately just how evil Nazism and the Holocaust was, and remind us all of the need to reject anyone who wants to deny the historical record that documents that evil.

He signed the executive order to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center within a year and shut down secret overseas CIA prisons, a roll back on a national disgrace that had subjected prisoners to years in detention without charge and subjected them to interrogations that human rights groups say is tantamount to torture.

In making that his first official act as president, he told the world that the United States is going to confront the struggle against terrorism “in a manner that is consistent with our values and our ideals.”

And he vowed to prosecute the struggle “vigilantly” and “effectively.”

For Obama, we are in a ”struggle” against terrorism: not a “war on terror,” as Bush has consistently called it. This represents a small shift in terminology, but one that speaks volumes about the approach.

If you try to fight terrorism in a “war” with tanks and troops, you lose. When you define the struggle in purely conventional military terms, it’s over.

It has to be a battle of ideas and street smarts and dogged investigative work and the skill it takes to build up a network of confidential informants. Sometimes a conventional military approach is necessary, but the real struggle for terrorism is a quiet, stealth operation that includes more wire tapping than missile firing.

Obama gets this, Bush didn’t.

Just ask the French or the British who both saw the failures of the conventional approach and saw what happens when they abandoned their own ideals in the struggle. So many Israeli counter-terrorism officials I know would agree, but that does not mean that their elected government officials have always seen it the same way. Certainly, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert doesn’t given the brutal offensive just undertaken in Gaza. What did it accomplish? Did it serve the purpose of destroying Hamas and undercutting its capability to launch rockets into southern Israeli? Time will tell.
But most experts in the region don’t think so.

I have covered terrorism for more than 16 years since the first bombing of the World Trade Center in New York in 1993.

And in every capital where I have covered terrorism from Belfast to Madrid to London to Jerusalem to Cairo to Paris and beyond there is an understanding that when a country abandons its ideals in the struggle it loses to the terrorists. It loses because it reduces its own moral standing. It falls into the trap of asymmetrical warfare.

The United Kingdom learned this in its struggle against the IRA and applied its lessons in its very sophisticated investigations and prosecutions in the London underground bombings of July 7, 2005.
Spain learned this in its long fight against the Basque separatist group ETA and also applied its lessons against those who carried out the Madrid train bombings on March 11, 2004.

Did the United States learn this in Iraq – or is it perhaps in the process of the lesson? It is hard to tell right now, but for sure it seems there is now a sharper student of history in the Oval Office.

Our correspondents are closer relations in the family. And we decided to brand our correspondents’ blogs as “Reporter’s Notebook” because we believe they are a chance to glimpse inside the daily scribblings of a journalist who is well trained and talented and edited and living in a far-off corner of the world where they want to share what they know.

So please be sure to check out Jason Overdorf in India and Patrick Winn in Thailand and Royal Ford in his world auto beat called “Wheels” and Seth Kugel in Brazil. Each of these correspondents has been great at contributing to their Notebooks and offering the kind of writing and GroundTruth that you won’t see anywhere else. You can always get to a “Reporter’s Notebook” by clicking on the correspondents name or picture which will take you to their bio page where their Notebook resides. You can also call up any correspondent’s bio through the navigation bar. Let them know what you think. Start the conversation.

We are a work in progress and there are definitely going to be places where we can improve. We value your input and feedback. Please let me know how you think the site is working and what we can do better.

Our goal at GlobalPost is to tell great stories from all over the world.













And in the lead up to the Jan. 20th inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States, we are organizing our storytelling around a single question: What does the idea of America mean to the world? The special project is called “For Which It Stands.”

We wanted to find stories in every corner of the globe at a time when new leadership is setting out — at least in the resonant speeches of the campaign — to redefine or “reboot,” as Obama put it, America’s relationship with the world. We do not believe in partisan journalism and we vow to be as tough and fair in our reporting on this president as any other. But we do believe this is a moment in our country that transcends party politics and offers an opportunity for America to engage with the world in a new way. We very much want to be a news organization that taps into that new energy in this new administration.

So please go to the guide to our series For Which It Stands to navigate all of the great stories and multimedia that make up the series. There are more than 50 stories reported by more than 40 reporters as well as a handful of photographers, videographers and multi-media producers.

Today, you will see a lyrical and poignant photo essay accompanied by a strong piece of writing by a friend and colleague, Seamus Murphy. It is titled Seeing America: From Kennedy to Obama and I invite you to see and read his work. He is an extraordinary storyteller. I also hope you have time to read Matt McAllester’s piece on Guantanamo about the former guard and former prisoner who are coming together to try to find some common ground in their anger over what happened there. Matt is also a friend and colleague and an incredibly talented and principled reporter. And there is HDS Greenway comparing Obama to Wilson; Joshua Hammer in Berlin on Kennedy, Reagan and Obama and the historic speeches they made there; Royal Ford introducing his new column Wheels or Jack Farrell on foreign policy in Washington. There are also guest writers including NPR’s acclaimed reporter Deb Amos and the brilliant Israeli author Gershom Gorenberg. The list is just too long. But the guide will serve you well in finding out what’s there, so please use it.

One of the more engaging multimedia stories that I hope you will see has a back story that involves Johnny Cash and I think captures the spirit of GlobalPost. You see, we at GlobalPost want to be the Johnny Cash of international news.

I was joking with a few friends back in the summer about that. Off the cuff, I said how we wanted to be like The Man in Black telling stories in the world that are honest and true and that come from the street and have an ear for the music of America.

But what I didn’t realize then was that there was a great story teller out there named Greg Warner who was playing Johnny Cash on his accordion in Afghanistan. Someone sent me a YouTube video of his performance of “Ring of Fire” in Mazar-e-Sharif and it was a good laugh. But then I heard one of his reports from the Congo on NPR and I immediately called him and now he is doing a few multimedia columns for us. He is on his way to Kenya now.

One of his columns is about his “Accordion Journey” as he calls it through Afghanistan. It’s the kind of story telling we want to do at GlobalPost. And since today is the 50th Anniversary of the release of the Folsom Prison Blues single and the 40th anniversary of his concert inside the prison. I thought it was fitting to do a shout out and invite you to watch the video which has a great tribute to Johnny at the end. It even had a public viewing tonight at the “Cash Bash” at the Milky Way Lounge in Jamaica Plain, Boston in a night celebrating “the Man in Black.”

Seven days until we launch GlobalPost! Wildly exciting and incredibly busy at our offices in Boston, but I am going to do my best to keep you updated daily and even hourly about the countdown until the site goes live on January 12.

Today, we got the Field Manual for Correspondents out to all 65 of our correspondents in some 45 countries. In the spirit of full transparency, we thought we’d share this statement of our principles and journalistic standards with you over the next week. I am going to post here the Introduction and the first of seven short rules of great foreign reporting. (If some of the first chapter seems familiar, that is because the idea originated here in an earlier blog post I did on GroundTruth.) In the coming days and weeks, I will keep posting chapters and eventually I will also post some incredible essays written by foreign correspondents connected to GlobalPost, including Sebastian Junger, Matt McAllester, Jane Arraf, Simon Wilson, HDS Greenway and others who will be sharing advice and insights about working in the field.

Here’s the introduction and chapter one on “being there.”

GLOBALPOST’S FIELD GUIDE FOR CORRESPONDENTS

BY CHARLES M. SENNOTT

GlobalPost is setting out to redefine international reporting in the digital age, but we are old school when it comes to journalistic standards.

GroundTruth: A Field Guide for International Correspondents is dedicated to putting some of these standards in writing and sharing policies and practical information with our reporters, columnists and contributors in the field.

This is a working document, the same way your dispatches from the field are a rough draft of history. There is a revolution going on in media right now. And we are in its tumult and we love being there. It’s truly an exciting time. So we believe it smart and necessary to keep our eyes wide open to new and perhaps better ways of carrying out the craft of reporting and the art of story telling.

We want to create a community of correspondents – decorated veterans, mid-career professionals and younger reporters looking for their first shot at a foreign posting – who share their insights and stories and learn from each other in this changing environment for journalism.

To that end, we have collected essays from veteran correspondents connected to GlobalPost. In this collection, GlobalPost columnist HDS Greenway weighs in on nearly 50 years of work in foreign news; GlobalPost editor-at-large Sebastian Junger writes of the practical advice that keeps you alive covering conflict; GlobalPost Senior Editor Andrew Meldrum reflects on covering and living the story of Zimbabwe for 23 years; the BBC’s Simon Wilson shares what he learned from the Gaza kidnapping of a colleague; GlobalPost’s Jane Arraf provides a woman’s perspective on covering the war in Iraq; and GlobalPost’s Matt McAllester takes a self-effacing look back on his reporting from Fallujah.

These essays each tell a story from the field that offers a teaching moment. In the coming weeks, they will be posted on my blog which you can link to from GlobalPost.com. Eventually, the manual and the essays will be bound together as a hard copy and sent to you.

Later this year, we will also be creating an intranet site, a sort-of virtual water cooler where you, our correspondents, can communicate directly with each other. On the GlobalPost intranet, we hope you will share practical advice about everything from how you managed to get a great story to low rates on a hotel in London to tips on obtaining health insurance as a freelancer. It will be a place to track inside information about journalism grants and fellowships or the latest technology and new opportunities for freelance work.

We recognize that GlobalPost correspondents are freelancers and we want to encourage and foster a sense of community, a feeling of camaraderie that is too often missing from the wonderfully independent but sometimes isolating life of a freelancer.

We want to invite you to write essays from the field on this intranet site and then we plan to republish them every year into this Field Guide. So as we go along, please let us know if you have ideas.

We want to hear from those of you in the field about how we can work together to create a new voice in international news, a voice that is consciously attentive to an American audience. We do not mean that we will be in any way jingoistic or nationalistic. Nor do we want to imply that our stories will only focus on issues that affect America or involve American interests. The world is much bigger than that.

We are looking for reporters who can tell the kinds of stories that resonate with an American audience. We want writing, photography and videography that has a good ear for the music of America – an ear that ranges in its appreciation from Miles Davis to Johnny Cash to Yoyo Ma. A sense of writing about the world that seeks to emulate great American truth tellers, including Mark Twain, Langston Hughes and Edward R. Murrow. We want stories that ultimately enlighten all of us about the world in which we live. But we are particularly attentive to an American audience because we believe America, despites its tremendous exertion of military and economic power in the world that is dramatically under-served in international news. We believe the paucity of American venues for international news is a dangerous blind spot for America, and one that often has a wider impact on the world. We need look no further than the war in Iraq for proof of that.

We are consciously setting out to try our best to fill the void left by so many American mainstream newspapers, magazines and television networks who’ve chosen to cut back and in many cases abandon the mission to cover international news.

While we consider this Field Guide a work in progress and we are eager to gain new insights from those of you in the field, we also want to be clear about the simple, time-tested values in which we believe and which we expect to see carried out by our correspondents.

That is, we believe in fairness. We believe in accuracy. We believe the best reporting comes from good old-fashioned shoe leather. We believe in listening and allowing yourself to be convinced by a point of view you may not have considered before. We believe good reporters do more than merely present two sides of an issue, they unearth facts and then consider all sides in a way that helps create a new understanding of the kinds of complex issues that we face globally.

We believe in giving voice to the voiceless. We believe in respect for different faiths and cultures and ways of seeing the world. We believe humor is a good way to get at truth, but we have less time for laughs at someone else’s expense. We believe in connecting the dots and saying something important without resorting to the kind of rabidly opinionated reporting that is cluttering too much of the airwaves and the internet.
In the end of the day, we have faith in you, our team in the field to embrace these standards and to go out and find the great stories that make for great journalism.

ONE:

Be there.

It’s all about being there.

There is no value that GlobalPost holds higher than having correspondents who live in the place about which they write, who know its language and its culture.

Many of you are native speakers or fluent already. And for those of you who are not, we eagerly encourage you to study the language of the places in which you are reporting. We believe foreign reporting requires you to be a first-hand observer of the events unfolding in the country you cover. We believe that the strength of GlobalPost will be having a breadth of coverage by reporters with an ear to the ground. We are looking for the kind of authoritative reporting that can only come from a reporter who is living the story. We call this ground truth. It’s an important idea at GlobalPost and “GroundTruth” is the name of my weekly column and regular blog that will highlight your daily reporting from the field.

So what does “GroundTruth” mean?

It has a pretty obvious and intuitive meaning. You may have heard it in a military context. But its origin, as best we can tell, is a precise phrase used in digital technology that was coined by NASA. This is how NASA defines it on its website:

“Ground truth (n) … one part of the calibration process. This is where a person on the ground makes a measurement of the same thing a satellite is trying to measure at the same time the satellite is measuring it. The two answers are then compared to help evaluate how well the satellite instrument is performing. Usually we believe the ground truth more than the satellite.”

In other words, Ground Truth is a scientific belief that the greatest calibration of what is happening in a far-off place is best achieved by being there on the ground to witness it and record it.

As a web-based news organization, we recognize that even in the digital age when we have access to information from all over the world at our fingertips and satellite transmissions that can focus on images thousands of miles away, the most trusted reading is still made by those human beings who are there witnessing the events and measuring history live.

It sounds like a simple idea. But it’s not so easy when the ground you are on is a shifting, complex story that requires knowledge about and a deep background on the forces shaping the news. We have reporters who do this in the places where there is ongoing conflict like Iraq and Afghanistan; in places where there is a contradictory mix of poverty and opportunity like India and Brazil; where there are ancient cultures to understand in a modern context from China to the Andes. Our correspondents will be there on the ground equipped with the knowledge that is needed to interpret the events in a way that allow you to truly see and understand what is happening, why it is happening, and what it means to viewers of our site.

This is not a new idea by any means. It’s just good old fashioned reporting.

But these days we believe there is too much distant analysis — not only at news organizations but also at international businesses and even in military and national security organizations — by those who are too far removed from the ground.

Those who analyze from on high are only one part of the calibration process in understanding a complex world. They are like the satellite viewing the image from afar, and we want to be that optic on the ground telling you what it really looks like.

NASA states in its own definition, “we believe the ground truth more than the satellite.”

So do we.

I will use this blog to highlight the work of GlobalPost’s far-flung team of 70 correspondents in some 50 countries around the world.

They are a stellar team of great reporters and skilled storytellers who every day are there on the ground reporting and writing about the places where they live.

They will offer you the kind of news, insight and knowledge you can only get from “being there.”

When GlobalPost.com launches on January 12, these correspondents will be our GroundTruth. And we hope they will become yours as well.

So what does “GroundTruth” mean?

It has a pretty obvious and intuitive meaning. You may have heard it in a military context. But its origin, as best we can tell, is a precise phrase used in digital technology that was coined by NASA. This is how they define it on their website:

“Ground truth (n) … one part of the calibration process. This is where a person on the ground makes a measurement of the same thing a satellite is trying to measure at the same time the satellite is measuring it. The two answers are then compared to help evaluate how well the satellite instrument is performing. Usually we believe the ground truth more than the satellite.”

In other words, Ground Truth is a scientific belief that the greatest calibration of what is happening in a far-off place is best achieved by being there on the ground to witness it and record it.

GroundTruth is all about being there.

At GlobalPost, there is nothing we hold in greater value.

The best international reporting is achieved by those who live and work in the places about which they report and write. Our team of correspondents will all be practicing GroundTruth. As a web-based news organization, we recognize that even in the digital age when we have access to information from all over the world at our fingertips and satellite transmissions that can focus on images thousands of miles away, the most trusted reading is still made by those human beings who are there witnessing the events and measuring history live.

It sounds like a simple idea. But it’s not so easy when the ground you are on is a shifting, complex story that requires knowledge of the local language and a deep background on the forces shaping the news. We have reporters who do this in the places where there is ongoing conflict like Iraq and Afghanistan; in places where there is a contradictory mix of poverty and opportunity like India and Brazil; where there are ancient cultures to understand in a modern context like China and Iran. Our correspondents will be there on the ground equipped with the knowledge that is needed to interpret the events in a way that allow you to truly see and understand what is happening, why it is happening, and what it means to you.

This is not a new idea by any means. It’s just good old fashioned reporting. But it is an idea we want to revitalize at a time when too many news organizations are cutting back on or abandoning their mission to cover the world.

We believe there is too much distant analysis — not only at news organizations but also at international businesses and even in military and national security organizations — by those who are too far removed from the ground.

Those who analyze from on high are only one part of the calibration process in understanding a complex world. They are like the satellite viewing the image from afar, and we are the guy on the ground telling you what it really looks like.

NASA states in its own definition, “we believe the ground truth more than the satellite.”

So do we.