David Rose

David Rose is a writer and investigative journalist. His awards include the David Watt Memorial Prize and the One World award for human rights journalism. His work appears in The Observer and Vanity Fair.

Among his books are In the Name of the Law, a widely-praised examination of the British criminal justice system; A Climate of Fear, an investigation of the Broadwater Farm case and the conviction of Winston Silcott; and Guantanamo: America's War on Human Rights. (Rose is one of the few British journalists to have visited Guantanamo.)

He has also written books on mountaineering, including Regions of the Heart, a biography of Alison Hargreaves, the British climber who died in her attempt to conquer K2, and he is working on a book about the US death penalty centred on a miscarriage of justice in the town of Columbus, Georgia. Rose lives in Oxford with his family.

Media Lens says the following about Rose:

To be clear, there is much of merit in Flat Earth News – the book is well worth reading. Davies describes, for example, how all was not well in the Observer newsroom in the autumn of 2002. The newspaper's correspondent, Ed Vulliamy, had been talking with Mel Goodman, a former senior CIA analyst. Despite leaving the agency, Goodman retained his high security clearance and remained in communication with senior former colleagues. Goodman told Vulliamy that, in contradiction to everything the British and American governments were claiming, the CIA were reporting that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. Moreover, Goodman was willing to go on the record as a named source. It was an incredibly important scoop but the Observer refused to publish it.

Over the next four months, Vulliamy submitted seven versions of the story for publication – his editors rejected every one of them. (pp.329-331) In January 2003, the Observer's then editor, Roger Alton, told his staff: "We've got to stand shoulder to shoulder with the Americans." (p.350) In support of this stance, the Observer's David Rose echoed government propaganda on Iraq's alleged connections with al-Qaeda – a performance that ended with a humbling apology from Rose in 2004. He described how his trust in official sources had been "misplaced and naïve... I look back with shame and disbelief". (p.334)
Source: Flat Earth News – the inside view

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