Name David Rose | Role Author | |
Nominations CWA Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction Books The Big Eddy Club, Guantanamo: America's War on H, Learning to Write/reading to Learn, Guildford Through Time, Regions of the Heart | ||
David Rose (born 21 July 1959) is a British author and investigative journalist. He is a contributing editor with Vanity Fair and a special investigations writer for The Mail on Sunday. His interests include human rights, miscarriages of justice, the death penalty, racism, the war on terror, politics, energy policy and climate change. His first novel, Taking Morgan, a thriller set in Washington, Oxford, Tel Aviv and Gaza, was published by Quartet in 2014.
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Early life
Rose was born in London on 21 July 1959. He read history at Magdalen College, Oxford, and took a first class honours degree in 1981. He is married and lives in Oxford. He has four children. His long-standing interests include mountaineering, rock-climbing and caving. He has taken part in numerous expeditions with Oxford University Cave Club, which have explored the very deep caves of the Picos de Europa mountains in northern Spain, including the Pozu del Xitu, 1264 metres deep. These explorations were the subject of his first book, Beneath the Mountains.
Career
Rose's first job was as a reporter with the London magazine Time Out, 1981–4. He then worked successively on the staffs on The Guardian, The Observer and BBC current affairs TV. In 2000 he left to become a freelance writer. In 2002 he became a Vanity Fair contributing editor, and in 2008 a special investigations writer for the Mail on Sunday. He is a winner of the Royal Institute of International Affairs David Watt Memorial Prize In 2013, a poll of investigative reporters by the UK Press Gazette named him among the top ten practitioners of his trade.
Miscarriages of justice
Investigating wrongful convictions has been a frequent theme of David Rose's career. After the trial of the three men convicted of murdering PC Keith Blakelock in the Broadwater Farm riot in 1987, he wrote many articles challenging their convictions and life sentences, working closely with their lawyers. This bore fruit with their successful appeals in 1991, and became the subject of his 1992 book A Climate of Fear. Unusually among journalists, he has repeatedly drawn attention to the dangers of wrongful convictions for historic sex abuse, starting with a 2000 BBC Panorama programme which he reported and wrote, In the Name of the Children. His longest-running campaign is that on behalf of Georgia death row prisoner Carlton Gary, convicted as the Columbus "stocking strangler", supposedly the African-American who raped and murdered seven white women 1977-8. His 2007 book, The Big Eddy Club, focuses on this case and its direct links with the era of lynching and Jim Crow racism. In 2014, after DNA tests appeared to exonerate Gary, who by this time had spent 28 years on death row, Rose testified about some of his investigations at an evidentiary hearing on an extraordinary motion for a new trial. Rose's interest in campaigning against wrongful convictions continues.
The War on Terror
Within a few weeks of the September 11 attacks, David Rose was investigating claims that Sudanese intelligence had repeatedly offered high-grade information about Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda to the United States, stemming from the period 1991-6 when bin Laden lived in Khartoum. However, these offers were rebuffed. Rose's January 2002 article on the subject has never been challenged. Simultaneously, however, he was also reporting spurious claims of connections between the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein and the Islamic terrorist group. In addition to investigative pieces linking the Iraqi dictator to the 2001 anthrax attacks, Rose conducted interviews with alleged defectors, presented to him by the Iraqi National Congress, who described how Saddam's elite commandos had trained the hijackers at a top secret Salman Pak facility south of Baghdad. Rose later wrote that he had been duped, and expressed his bitter regret, in an interview with John Pilger for Pilger's documentary The War You Don't See (2010). Rose assisted author Aram Roston with his biography of Ahmad Chalabi with a detailed account of the successful INC propaganda operation which, he admitted, led him astray. Roston wrote, "Of all the journalists who joined the energetic and loyal circle around Ahmad Chalabi after the September 11 attacks, none was drawn in more quickly and more closely than David Rose." Later Rose became an energetic critic of many of the policies pursued by the West in the wake of 9/11, notably the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay. His 2004 book Guantanamo: America's War on Human Rights was one of the first on the subject. Rose got the first interviews with many of the British detainees released from Guantanamo, including the Tipton Three. Later he exposed the role of the UK in the torture and rendition of British resident Binyam Mohamed, and successfully challenged Foreign Secretary David Miliband's attempts to keep secret court documents setting out details of his treatment. Anticipating by six years the December 2014 Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Report that concluded that so-called enhanced interrogation techniques had not thwarted any major terrorist attacks, his 2008 article Tortured Reasoning quoted, among others, then-FBI director Robert Mueller and Scotland Yard counter-terrorism chief Peter Clarke saying the same thing: that CIA-sponsored torture had been ineffective. Rose also exposed the covert programme by America that led to the Hamas takeover of the Gaza strip in a blockbuster investigation for Vanity Fair – still one of the most-cited investigative articles on the Middle East of recent years.
Climate change and energy policy
Rose has authored several pieces for The Mail on Sunday contending that temperatures have risen more slowly than computer models predicted, that global warming has, for the time being, stopped, and that the world may headed into a mini ice age caused by declining solar output.
He has also been critical of subsidies for renewable energy, arguing that they are not effective in reducing global emissions, while adding hugely to consumers' bills., Rose has also written critically of the financial interests derived by some advocates of green energy. and the burning of wood pellets imported from the US to Britain in place of coal as a supposed 'green' or zero-carbon fuel.
His journalism on climate has been criticised by environmentalists for an over-reliance on unsound and unscientific sources. Rose has also been criticised repeatedly by the United Kingdom's national weather service, the Met Office. Rose defended his position in an article for the Mail on Sunday in which he stated that he accepted the scientific evidence of global warming, complaining that he had been unfairly vilified as a "climate change denier" and threatened. In May 2015 he authored a major article for The Guardian on climate change, energy policy, coal and solar energy in India.