“Mr Benenson founded and inspired Amnesty International in 1961 first as a one-year campaign for the release of six prisoners of conscience. But from there came a worldwide movement for human rights and in its midst an international organisation -- Amnesty International -- which has taken up the cases of many thousands of victims of human rights violations and inspired millions to human rights defence the world round.

"Peter Benenson’s life was a courageous testament to his visionary commitment to fight injustice around the world," said Irene Khan, Secretary General of Amnesty International.

"He brought light into the darkness of prisons, the horror of torture chambers and tragedy of death camps around the world. This was a man whose conscience shone in a cruel and terrifying world, who believed in the power of ordinary people to bring about extraordinary change and, by creating Amnesty International, he gave each of us the opportunity to make a difference."

"In 1961 his vision gave birth to human rights activism. In 2005 his legacy is a world wide movement for human rights which will never die."

The one-year Appeal for Amnesty was launched on 28 May 1961, in an article in the British newspaper, The Observer, called "The Forgotten Prisoners". That appeal attracted thousands of supporters, and started a worldwide human rights movement.

The catalyst for the original campaign was Mr Benenson's sense of outrage after reading an article about the arrest and imprisonment of two students in a café in Lisbon, Portugal, who had drunk a toast to liberty.

In the first few years of Amnesty International's existence, Mr Benenson supplied much of the funding for the movement, went on research missions and was involved in all aspects of the organisation's affairs.

Other activities that Mr Benenson was involved in during his lifetime included; adopting orphans from the Spanish Civil War, bringing Jews who had fled Hitler's Germany to Britain, observing trials as a member of the Society of Labour Lawyers, helping to set up the organisation "Justice" and establishing a society for people with coeliac disease.

At a ceremony to mark Amnesty International's 25th anniversary, Mr Benenson lit what has become the organisation's symbol -- a candle entwined in barbed wire -- with the words:

"The candle burns not for us, but for all those whom we failed to rescue from prison, who were shot on the way to prison, who were tortured, who were kidnapped, who ‘disappeared’. That is what the candle is for."

Today Amnesty International is into its 44th year. It has become the world’s largest independent human rights organisation, with more than 1.8 million members and committed supporters worldwide.”

HE prayers of those hoping that real television
news might take its cues from Jon Stewart were finally answered on Feb. 9, 2005.
A real newsman borrowed a technique from fake news to deliver real news about
fake news in prime time.

Let me explain. 

On "Countdown," a nightly news hour on MSNBC, the anchor, Keith Olbermann,
led off with a classic "Daily Show"-style bit: a rapid-fire montage of sharply
edited video bites illustrating the apparent idiocy of those in Washington. In
this case, the eight clips stretched over a year in the White House briefing
room - from February 2004 to late last month - and all featured a reporter named
"Jeff." In most of them, the White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, says
"Go ahead, Jeff," and "Jeff" responds with a softball question intended not to
elicit information but to boost President Bush and smear his political
opponents. In the last clip, "Jeff" is quizzing the president himself, in his
first post-inaugural press conference of Jan. 26. Referring to Harry Reid and
Hillary Clinton, "Jeff" asks, "How are you going to work with people who seem to
have divorced themselves from reality?"

If we did not live in a time when the news culture itself is divorced from
reality, the story might end there: "Jeff," you'd assume, was a lapdog reporter
from a legitimate, if right-wing, news organization like Fox, and you'd get some
predictable yuks from watching a compressed video anthology of his kissing up to
power. But as Mr. Olbermann explained, "Jeff Gannon," the star of the montage,
was a newsman no more real than a "Senior White House Correspondent" like
Stephen Colbert on "The Daily Show" and he worked for a news organization no
more real than The Onion. Yet the video broadcast by Mr. Olbermann was not fake.
"Jeff" was in the real White House, and he did have those exchanges with the
real Mr. McClellan and the real Mr. Bush.

"Jeff Gannon's" real name is James D. Guckert. His employer was a Web site
called Talon News, staffed mostly by volunteer Republican activists. Media
Matters for America, the liberal press monitor that has done the most exhaustive
research into the case, discovered that Talon's "news" often consists of
recycled Republican National Committee and White House press releases, and its
content frequently overlaps with another partisan site, GOPUSA, with which it
shares its owner, a Texas delegate to the 2000 Republican convention.
Nonetheless, for nearly two years the White House press office had credentialed
Mr. Guckert, even though, as Dana Milbank of The Washington Post explained on
Mr. Olbermann's show, he "was representing a phony media company that doesn't
really have any such thing as circulation or readership." 

How this happened is a mystery that has yet to be solved. "Jeff" has now quit
Talon News not because he and it have been exposed as fakes but because of other
embarrassing blogosphere revelations linking him to sites like
hotmilitarystud.com and to an apparently promising career as an X-rated
$200-per-hour "escort." If Mr. Guckert, the author of Talon News exclusives like
"Kerry Could Become First Gay President," is yet another link in the boundless
network of homophobic Republican closet cases, that's not without interest. But
it shouldn't distract from the real question - that is, the real news - of how
this fake newsman might be connected to a White House propaganda machine that
grows curiouser by the day. Though Mr. McClellan told Editor & Publisher
magazine that he didn't know until recently that Mr. Guckert was using an alias,
Bruce Bartlett, a White House veteran of the Reagan-Bush I era, wrote on the
nonpartisan journalism Web site Romenesko, that "if Gannon was using an alias,
the White House staff had to be involved in maintaining his cover." (Otherwise,
it would be a rather amazing post-9/11 security breach.) 

By my count, "Jeff Gannon" is now at least the sixth "journalist" (four of
whom have been unmasked so far this year) to have been a propagandist on the
payroll of either the Bush administration or a barely arms-length ally like
Talon News while simultaneously appearing in print or broadcast forums that
purport to be real news. Of these six, two have been syndicated newspaper
columnists paid by the Department of Health and Human Services to promote the
administration's "marriage" initiatives. The other four have played real newsmen
on TV. Before Mr. Guckert and Armstrong Williams, the talking head paid $240,000
by the Department of Education, there were Karen Ryan and Alberto Garcia. Let us
not forget these pioneers - the Woodward and Bernstein of fake news. They
starred in bogus reports ("In Washington, I'm Karen Ryan reporting," went the
script) pretending to "sort through the details" of the administration's
Medicare prescription-drug plan in 2004. Such "reports," some of which found
their way into news packages distributed to local stations by CNN, appeared in
more than 50 news broadcasts around the country and have now been deemed illegal
"covert propaganda" by the Government Accountability Office. 

The money that paid for both the Ryan-Garcia news packages and the Armstrong
Williams contract was siphoned through the same huge public relations firm,
Ketchum Communications, which itself filtered the funds through subcontractors.
A new report by Congressional Democrats finds that Ketchum has received $97
million of the administration's total $250 million P.R. kitty, of which the
Williams and Ryan-Garcia scams would account for only a fraction. We have yet to
learn precisely where the rest of it ended up.

Even now, we know that the fake news generated by the six known shills is
only a small piece of the administration's overall propaganda effort. President
Bush wasn't entirely joking when he called the notoriously meek March 6, 2003,
White House press conference on the eve of the Iraq invasion "scripted" while it
was still going on. (And "Jeff Gannon" apparently wasn't even at that one).
Everything is scripted. 

The pre-fab "Ask President Bush" town hall-style meetings held during last
year's campaign (typical question: "Mr. President, as a child, how can I help
you get votes?") were carefully designed for television so that, as Kenneth R.
Bazinet wrote last summer in New York's Daily News, "unsuspecting viewers"
tuning in their local news might get the false impression they were "watching a
completely open forum." A Pentagon Office of Strategic Influence, intended to
provide propagandistic news items, some of them possibly false, to foreign news
media was shut down in 2002 when it became an embarrassing political liability.
But much more quietly, another Pentagon propaganda arm, the Pentagon Channel,
has recently been added as a free channel for American viewers of the Dish
Network. Can a Social Security Channel be far behind? 

It is a brilliant strategy. When the Bush administration isn't using
taxpayers' money to buy its own fake news, it does everything it can to shut out
and pillory real reporters who might tell Americans what is happening in what
is, at least in theory, their own government. Paul Farhi of The Washington Post
discovered that even at an inaugural ball he was assigned "minders" - attractive
women who wouldn't give him their full names - to let the revelers know that Big
Brother was watching should they be tempted to say anything remotely off
message.

The inability of real journalists to penetrate this White House is not all
the White House's fault. The errors of real news organizations have played
perfectly into the administration's insidious efforts to blur the boundaries
between the fake and the real and thereby demolish the whole notion that there
could possibly be an objective and accurate free press. Conservatives, who
supposedly deplore post-modernism, are now welcoming in a brave new world in
which it's a given that there can be no empirical reality in news, only the
reality you want to hear (or they want you to hear). The frequent fecklessness
of the Beltway gang does little to penetrate this Washington smokescreen. For a
case in point, you needed only switch to CNN on the day after Mr. Olbermann did
his fake-news-style story on the fake reporter in the White House press
corps.

"Jeff Gannon" had decided to give an exclusive TV interview to a sober
practitioner of by-the-book real news, Wolf Blitzer. Given this journalistic
opportunity, the anchor asked questions almost as soft as those "Jeff" himself
had asked in the White House. Mr. Blitzer didn't question Mr. Guckert's
outrageous assertion that he adopted a fake name because "Jeff Gannon is easier
to pronounce and easier to remember." (Is "Jeff" easier to pronounce than his
real first name, Jim?). Mr. Blitzer never questioned Gannon/Guckert's assertion
that Talon News "is a separate, independent news division" of GOPUSA. Only in a
brief follow-up interview a day later did he ask Gannon/Guckert to explain why
he was questioned by the F.B.I. in the case that may send legitimate reporters
to jail: Mr. Guckert has at times implied that he either saw or possessed a
classified memo identifying Valerie Plame as a C.I.A. operative. Might that memo
have come from the same officials who looked after "Jeff Gannon's" press
credentials? Did Mr. Guckert have any connection with CNN's own Robert Novak,
whose publication of Ms. Plame's name started this investigation in the first
place? The anchor didn't go there.

The "real" news from CNN was no news at all, but it's not as if any of its
competitors did much better. The "Jeff Gannon" story got less attention than
another media frenzy - that set off by the veteran news executive Eason Jordan,
who resigned from CNN after speaking recklessly at a panel discussion at Davos,
where he apparently implied, at least in passing, that American troops
deliberately targeted reporters. Is the banishment of a real newsman for
behaving foolishly at a bloviation conference in Switzerland a more pressing
story than that of a fake newsman gaining years of access to the White House
(and network TV cameras) under mysterious circumstances? With real news this
timid, the appointment of Jon Stewart to take over Dan Rather's chair at CBS
News could be just the jolt television journalism needs. As Mr. Olbermann
demonstrated when he borrowed a sharp "Daily Show" tool to puncture the "Jeff
Gannon" case, the only road back to reality may be to fight fake with fake.