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	Peru: The Legal Defense Institute Wins the 2012 Peace Prize an article by La Republica - Peru The Legal Defense Institute (IDL) has received the Peace Prize for 2012 that the Ministry of Women and Vulnerable Populations (MIMP) awards annually to individuals, institutions and organizations that stand out in their commitment to build a Culture Peace in the country. Glatzer Tuesta, director of IDL. Foto: Ideeleradio click on photo to enlarge IDL was awarded in the category "communication media" for its strategy of communication in Ideele Review and Ideeleradio, as well as its experience with television and digital media. Concerning the Ideele Review, it is noteworthy that it has over 20 years of uninterrupted publication and distribution and is especially dedicated to the analysis, research and criticism in their news reports. Also, for the past six years, the radio program "You don't have the right" , which is broadcast daily on Radio San Borja, decentralizes information byworking with a network of 100 correspondents and 180 radio stations across the country. Similarly, the IDL periodically produces digital bulletins of specialized journalism such as Briefing for Justice, IDL-Public Safety and Citizens Protecting Citizens. (Click here for a Spanish version of this article)		DISCUSSION Question(s) related to this article: Free flow of information, How is it important for a culture of peace? * * * * * Latest reader comment: Perhaps the simplest way to illustrate the essential importance of free flow of information for a culture of peace is to discuss the importance of the control of information for the culture of war. Here are excerpts from an Washington Post investigation two years ago entitled Top Secret America: A hidden world, growing beyond control.  To read the original, click here. "* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States. * An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances. * In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space. * Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks. * Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year - a volume so large that many are routinely ignored." . . . "Every day across the United States, 854,000 civil servants, military personnel and private contractors with top-secret security clearances are scanned into offices protected by electromagnetic locks, retinal cameras and fortified walls that eavesdropping equipment cannot penetrate. . . Much of the information about this mission is classified. That is the reason it is so difficult to gauge the success and identify the problems of Top Secret America, including whether money is being spent wisely. The U.S. intelligence budget is vast, publicly announced last year as $75 billion, 21/2 times the size it was on Sept. 10, 2001. But the figure doesn't include many military activities or domestic counterterrorism programs." As we said in the draft Declaration and Programme of Action on a Culture of Peace that we sent from UNESCO to the UN General Assembly in 1998: "98. It is vital to promote transparency in governance and economic decision-making and to look into the proliferation of secrecy justified in terms of 'national security', 'financial security', and 'economic competitiveness'. The question is to what extent this secrecy is compatible with the access to information necessary for democratic practice and social justice and whether, in some cases, instead of contributing to long-term security, it may conceal information about processes (ecological, financial, military, etc.) which are a potential threat to everyone and which need therefore to be addressed collectively."
This report was posted on September 20, 2012.