Acclaimed journalist and artist Molly Crabapple has drawn and reported on stories from Guantanamo Bay, Syria, the West Bank, Iraqi Kurdistan and across the United States. With her powerful illustrations she has pushed the boundaries of visual reportage – and established an important place for art in hard news.

On the release of her memoir Drawing Blood, which intersperses testimony of her own artistic and journalistic engagement with full-colour illustrations, we welcome Molly Crabapple to the Frontline Club to reflect on recent projects and to share her personal insight into the use of art as a tool for better understanding and documenting current events. With US presidential primaries now firmly underway, she will discuss her ongoing work on topical home turf issues including policing and the justice system, as well as her experiences covering the effects of conflict across the Middle East.

Molly Crabapple is an artist, journalist, and author of the memoir, Drawing Blood. Called “an emblem of the way art can break out of the gilded gallery” by the New Republic, she has drawn in and reported from Guantanamo Bay, Abu Dhabi’s migrant labor camps, and in Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, the West Bank, and Iraqi Kurdistan. Crabapple is a contributing editor for VICE, and has written for publications including The New York Times, Paris Review, and Vanity Fair. She is the winner of a 2015 Front Page Award for her drawings of Aleppo for Vanity Fair, and was shortlisted for a Frontline Award in 2013. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

This event will be chaired by Natasha Lennard, a British-born, New York-based writer of news and political analysis, focusing on justice, power, biopolitics and dissent. She writes regularly for the Intercept, Fusion and Al Jazeera America, and has written for VICE News, The New York Times, Salon, The Nation and Politico, among others. She is editor-at-large at The New Inquiry journal.

Illustration: Molly Crabapple for VICE: ‘What Life is Like Inside the Besieged, War-Torn Syrian City of Aleppo’

Following the latest revelations from whistleblower Edward Snowden, the Frontline Club’s First Wednesday panel on 6 November gathered to discuss Has NSA spying “reached too far”?

L-R: Owen Bennett-Jones, Julian Borger, James P. Rubin, Steven Erlanger. Photo: Sally Ashley-Cound

Chair Owen Bennett-Jones, a freelance journalist and a host of Newshour on the BBC World Service started off by asking if anyone really knows how much data has been collected?

Steven Erlanger, London bureau chief for The New York Times said:

“I’m not sure we know the answer to the question to be honest. Because these things have been kept secret and they remain secret.”

Julian Borger, The Guardian’s diplomatic editor, continued:

“There is an awful lot of material and it’s a very lengthy process figuring out what in it is of public interest…it’s the process of discussing with the government agencies involved about what it means and the balance between public interest and national security.”

James Rubin, a visiting scholar at Oxford University’s Rothermere American Institute and former chief spokesperson for the US State Department, added:

“I don’t think Snowden knows. He’s got 50,000 documents from the NSA. I took one of these documents and I actually know something about this stuff …it’s hard to understand even for those who know the code words.”

Nigel Inkster, director of transnational threats and political risk at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), who served in the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) from 1975 to 2006, had some praise for the NSA and GCHQ:

“We’ve got this huge explosion of communications. . . . They were confronted with this new reality which they had to make sense of and I have to say, in the circumstances I think they’ve done a rather remarkable job.”

An audience member asked if “the threats justify the methods”?

Inkster replied:

“We elect a government and this is one of the responsibilities that they are assigned. It is for the government of the day to judge on the basis of the best information it can, what the security environment it faces.”

The panel were asked if the release of these documents has changed anything – has damage been done?

https://twitter.com/caro_schmitt/statuses/398172032355270656

Rubin:

“We’ll never know what changed people’s behaviours. People’s behaviours are going to change.”

Inkster:

“We will never know how different would the course of WWII been if Bletchley park had not broken and read the material that was being transmitted over Enigma. How can we judge? You can never do a counter factual assessment.”

Erlanger:

“There’s another level of damage which is to trust, to international relationships; the United States has a big problem with its allies.”

US goodwill was exhausted by Bush and Obama needs to deposit more goodwill. Remark @frontlineclub debate Why #nsa hit US reputation so hard.

— Karen Melchior (ex-verif) (@karmel80) November 6, 2013

Christoph Scheuermann, London bureau chief for German weekly Der Spiegel, seemed surprised at the panel for thinking that anything had changed:

“I thought this was really naive, we don’t live in an age where terrorists…have to read The Guardian or Der Spiegel or the New York Times to know what intelligence agencies are capable of.”

Borger added:

“We share all of GCHQ material, names of everyone who works there, addresses, what they like to do at the weekend, with 850,000 Americans. Half of those people are private contractors. So the odds of that getting out are very high.”

After all this effort, disruption and political chaos, what were the benefits of the NSA gathering all the information?

Inkster:

“Knowing who’s in touch with who can be as – if not more important than – knowing what they’re saying to each other. This is a business that the bad guys are trying to hide the fact that they’re in communication.

“[Secondly] you can use analysis of big data to ascertain patterns of correlation, which are simply not discernable with lesser data sets. This has applications in all sorts of areas, in retail, public health…you can identify all sorts of things.”

One point the panel agreed on was that the world has completely changed from the days of phone bugging and code-breaking:

Watch the event:

https://soundcloud.com/frontlineclub/first-wednesday-has-nsa-spying

In 2010 U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning committed the largest security breach in US history, handing the classified Afghan War Diary, Iraq War Logs, and 250,000 State Department cables to Wikileaks. Imagery like that of an American helicopter team gunning down citizens and journalists on a Baghdad street in 2007 has been lodged in the global consciousness.

With Manning standing trial before a military court in June, the Frontline Club engaged an expert panel on Monday 15 May to ask what lies ahead for the whistleblower, along with what his experience might mean to governments and the media.

(L-R): Naomi Colvin, Chase Madar, Richard Gizbert and David Leigh. Photo credit: Jim Treadway

Naomi Colvin, a writer, activist and founder of UK Friends of Bradley Manning, declared him a “touchstone for people involved in social justice movements.”

“2011 is one of those years that will go down in history, like 1989, or 1968, or 1848,” she said.  “Political action was on a worldwide scale. . . . That spark of enthusiasm started in the Middle East, and the [documents that Manning released] are at least a contributing factor to that.”

Chase Madar, a New York attorney who has written a book detailing Manning’s experience, agreed:

“The State Department cables [were] just a very brutal and candid assessment of corruption in the Ben Ali government . . . Tunisian intellectuals I’ve spoken with have said you really can’t tell the story of the uprising there without at least mentioning Bradley Manning and his leaks.”

The panel rang of frustration with the American media’s failure to cover the Manning story in fairness or depth. Americans “know very little” about his case, Madar observed.

“The New York Times fails to send a journalist to cover the first public hearing with Manning,” lamented Richard Gizbert, Presenter for al Jazeera’s Listening Post, “which even the Times’ own ombudsman said was ridiculous.”

“I got adopted by the staff of a fish restaurant in Glasgow [recently],” Madar recounted. “The bartender and the waiter knew all about [Manning’s case], and it’s because The Guardian’s coverage [has been] much better than anything in the United States.”

David Leigh, the Guardian‘s investigations editor until 2013 and co-author of a book on Julian Assange and Wikileaks, reduced Manning’s trial to “a piece of theatre by the American military to expose, dramatise, penalise and terrorise whistleblowers.”

Even still, Madar harbored optimism for what Manning will ultimately represent:

“He delivered a 35-page statement of intent in court a couple of months ago…  it was very impressive… poised, very self-possessed, very thoughtful and reflective, as opposed to the way he’d been demonised as some naricissistic little punk… The more people hear from Bradley Manning in his own words and in his own voice – because someone smuggled a recorder into the courtroom, you can hear him with his own voice – the more they’re going to realise that Bradley Manning is the responsible, ethical citizen; that it’s his detractors in government and the media who are the narcissistic, little, punks.”

You can watch a recording of the event or listen to the audio podcast below:

https://soundcloud.com/frontlineclub/the-case-of-the-us-vs-bradley

David Carr has been writing about the media and its relationship with business, culture and governments for 25 years and has watched the print landscape change dramatically. Now a media and cultural columnist at the New York Times he writes the Media Equation column for the Monday Business section.

He will be joining us in conversation with Richard Gizbert, presenter of Al Jazeera English’s The Listening Post, a weekly show that looks at news coverage by the world’s media. Gizbert has also spent 25 years working in the media world as a foreign correspondent, covering stories around the world.

Drawing on their experiences working with two very different global media players, Carr and Gizbert will be discussing the future of the news industry.

From the future of newspapers like the New York Times and whether they can adapt quickly enough to survive to the emergence of new business models offering alternative sources of funding. They will be addressing some of the big questions that are exercising many minds within the media.

A remarkable opportunity to debate the future of the news industry with two of its key players.