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HONG KONG It didnt take long for the Chinese government to try to take control of the conversation about Mo Yan.

Days after the 57-year-old novelist thrilled his country by winning the Nobel Prize for literature, Chinas central censorship organ issued a directive to media companies instructing them to strictly police online discussion for anti-party chatter or mentions of two other Chinese-born Nobel winners.

China Digital Times has atranslationof the leaked directive:

To all websites nationwide: In light of Mo Yan winning the Nobel prize for literature, monitoring of microblogs, forums, blogs and similar key points must be strengthened. Be firm in removing all comments which disgrace the party and the government, defame cultural work, mention Nobel laureates Liu Xiaobo and Gao Xingjian and associated harmful material. Without exception, block users from posting for ten days if their writing contains malicious details.

Liu Xiaobo, a human rights activist and author, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, but he remains in prison in China. Gao Xingjian won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2000 after giving up his Chinese citizenship in 1996.

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Official media has also been trying to steer the public toward acceptable lines of thinking about Mo Yan. In the state-run Peoples Daily, an editorial urges people to adopt one of three mentalities about Mo Yan that can be considered correct.

These prescribed perspectives are: seeing his victory as a blessing for those in China who have long had the Nobel Prize complex; seeing it as a good thing that should not be over-interpreted; and rejecting those who criticize his work.

The last order presumably targets those in China who reacted to Mos victory with anger. While the overwhelming response was celebratory, a number of reform-minded Chinese knocked Mo Yan for having an apparently cozy relationship with authorities. Mo Yan remains a member of the Communist Party, and the vice chairman of the party-run Writers Association. He also contributed to a book of calligraphy in tribute to Mao Zedong.

Liao Yiwu, a celebrated author who was imprisoned for writing about the Tiananmen Square massacre, called the prize a woeful example of the West's fuzzy morals, in an interview with Der Spiegel in Germany, where he has lived since fleeing China in 2011.

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China scrambles to censor novelist Mo Yan's Nobel Prize

On Monday, a judge will oversee pretrial hearings for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other Guantanamo prisoners who are accused of plotting the 9/11 attacks. One of the key issues Army Col. James Pohl will decide on is whether or not there will be any public testimony by the prisoners regarding their torture and detention in CIA custody.

Guantanamo pretrial hearings this week weigh in on censorship versus state secrets. (Photo by The U.S. Army via Flickr) The defense lawyers are asking to abolish a "presumptive classification" process that treats any discussion of what happened to the defendants their time in secret CIA detention as a top national security secret. Mohammeds defense attorney, David Nevin, called the war court system a "rigged game, reports the Miami Herald. According to Nevin, attorneys and defendents "are forbidden to discuss between themselves anything from what Mohammed says the CIA did to him to his 'historical perspective on jihad.'"

The ACLU is at the hearings this week and will give a statement arguing that the censorship of torture is a constitutional challenge. In a press release, the ACLU cites the government's most recent filing (PDF):

The government has effectively claimed that it owns and controls the defendants memories, 'thoughts and experiences' of government torture. These chillingly Orwellian claims are legally untenable and morally abhorrent.

"The government has effectively claimed that it owns and controls the defendants memories, 'thoughts and experiences' of government torture."ACLU

The chief war crimes prosecutor, Army Brig. Gen. Mark Martins claims that the defendants' exposure to the CIAs detention and interrogation program is classified to safeguard genuine sources and methods of intelligence gathering that can protect against future attack." In addition to the "presumptive classification," the government is pushing for a related requested of a 40-second delay in the audio feed of the commission proceedings, for censorship purposes.

The ACLU filed their motion (PDF)in May in response to the protective order and proposed audio delay:

The eyes of the world are on this Military Commission, and the public has a substantial interest in and concern about the fairness and transparency of these proceedings. This Commission should rejectand not become complicit withthe governments improper proposals to suppress the defendants personal accounts of government misconduct.

The prisoners were in the custody of the CIA for up to four years before being brought to Guantanamo in 2006. After being captured in Pakistan in 2002-2003 their detention was concealed from the International Red Cross, whose mandate is to monitor treatment of prisoners around the globe. The CIA's own declassified documents disclose that Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in an attempt to get him to give up al Qaida's secrets.

Read this article:
As 9/11 Pretrial Begins, ACLU Calls Out "Orwellian" Censorship of CIA Torture

As the Internet connects more people to one another, religious tensions have become more sensitive than ever before. In some Muslim-majority countries, conservative governments have seized on online censorship as a way to restrict citizens access to global ideas and materials.

But Islam itself is not to blame for this phenomenon. Authors of a recent Freedom House study found that religion and censorship are not so closely linked -- instead, political and developmental differences may be to blame.

Clamping Down

All across the Middle East, the Internet in general and the World Wide Web in particular have recently caused massive changes in a few divergent ways.

In 2010 and 2011, it helped young activists spread information and build bridges between networks, eventually spurring the Arab Spring revolutions that overturned oppressive governments in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Yemen.

In terms of expanding global freedoms, this was a positive outcome -- but it had some detrimental effects. Some governments that were not overthrown, like those of Bahrain and Pakistan, clamped down on Internet freedoms in an effort to prevent further dissent.

Things took a turn for the worse in September, when a YouTube clip produced in the U.S. was dubbed in Arabic and went viral. The video, called "Innocence of Muslims," portrayed Islam's Prophet Muhammad as a buffoon and sexual deviant. Demonstrations erupted in countries as diverse as Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan. Dozens died as a result of the protests.

Several Muslim-majority countries banned the film on YouTube, including Egypt, Iran, Libya, and Saudi Arabia. Some governments cited a wish to prevent further violence; others objected to the productions blasphemous nature.

The episode cast fresh doubts on the potential of the Internet to bridge cultures across borders -- especially in conservative Muslim states in the Middle East.

Measuring Up

Excerpt from:
The Surprising Truth About Internet Censorship In The Middle East

October 11, 2012, 5:30 AM PDT

Takeaway: Attempts to shut us up in walled gardens and curb our online freedoms are impossible to implement and police. The nature of the internet sees to it that they are doomed to fail.

The quandary for governments is that because the web is ubiquitous and transparent it is hard to police and harder to censor. Photo: Shutterstock

John Gilmore, an internet activist who was also one of the co-founders of both the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the first free software company, Cygnus Solutions, once wrote that the net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.

The internet was designed to enable military communications to find their way around points of failure in the event of a nuclear war. If one node fails or drops certain messages because it doesnt like their subject the messages find their way past that node anyway by some other route, according to Gilmore.

Censorship is practised for all kinds of political, social and commercial reasons, and all societies have limits on acceptable behaviour, but the point of the web is that there are no walled gardens and no limits to what we can access. If information wants to get out there, it will.

The idea that the internet is a universal resource that should be accessible to all is enshrined in the Declaration of Principles of the UN-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) of December 2003, which says, Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; that this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Such declarations were relatively meaningless before the emergence of the world wide web, which has transformed the possibilities for information exchange and the dissemination of ideas, and how we respond to them.

Beyond the possibilities of static media, the internet can be seen as a democratising force. It has allowed us to interact with our peers across the cultural, racial, political and religious boundaries of the physical world, precisely because there are few barriers to what we say and how we say it, other than the approval or approbation of our peers.

What makes the internet different is that, unlike newspapers or television, it is interactive. We can determine what we read and how we read it. We are the editors and the filters. We can speak and share our vision with our fellow citizens on the opposite side of the globe without the interference of spokesmen or intermediaries.

More:
Internet censorship: Let it rot in walled gardens

Local artists, theatre-goers and theatrical producers are displeased by the fact that the Censorship Repealing Bill is set to be relegated once again to make room for discussions about the IVF Bill, the Cohabitation Bill, and the Car Park Privatisation Bill.

Unifaun Theatre Company Director Adrian Buckle told di-ve.com that while he understands the importance of the other bills, he is very disappointed that the impending issue is not being given more precedence.

I have a feeling at this point that we will have to wait for a new legislature for this bill to be approved, he said, before claiming that Minister for Tourism, Culture and the Environment Mario De Marco seems to be the only voice in our favour in this affair.

When asked whether he thinks that should the Labour Party (PL) be elected in government, things would change, Mr Buckle revealed that he was personally promised by Dr Owen Bonnici that PL, if in Government, would pass the bill.

I will be holding PL to this promise. If the party is elected to power in the upcoming elections, I will be producing Stitching and then we will see if PL is as good as its promises to fight censorship, he maintained.

The play "Stitching" was banned from being staged last year by the Film and Stage Classification Board. Penned by Scottish writer Anthony Nielson, "Stitching" addresses themes such as abortion and death.

An appeal to the Courts decision was made by the producers of the play in an effort to send out the message that the very banning of the play represented a denial of freedom of expression.

Mr Buckle told di-ve.com that board member Teresa Friggieri admitted to influencing the other members in reaching a decision to her liking by giving them notes on what to look for in the text. He also said that Joe Camilleri, another member on the board, admitted that he had no idea how the play ended, even though he had reread it a week earlier. Dione Mifsud, yet another member, said in court that his theatre experience was limited to his daughters school concerts and a couple of pantomimes.

Despite the Arts Councils determination to formulate an anti-censorship bill and make the public aware of it, this bill has been shrugged off by Parliament, which is choosing to focus on other issues.

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Censorship Bill pushed aside by Parliament