August 1, 2006
International Republican Institute Grants Uncovered
Reporters Without Borders and Washington's Coups
By DIANA BARAHONA and JEB SPRAGUE
British press baron Lord Northcliff said, "News is something that someone, somewhere wants to keep secret, everything else is advertising." If this is true, then U.S. government funding of Reporters Without Borders must be news, because the organization and its friends in Washington have gone to extraordinary lengths to cover it up. In spite of 14 months of stonewalling by the National Endowment for Democracy over a Freedom of Information Act request and a flat denial from RSF executive director Lucie Morillon, the NED has revealed that Reporters Without Borders received grants over at least three years from the International Republican Institute.
The NED still refuses to provide the requested documents or even reveal the grant amounts, but they are identified by these numbers: IRI 2002-022/7270, IRI 2003-027/7470 and IRI 2004-035/7473. Investigative reporter Jeremy Bigwood asked Morillon on April 25 if her group was getting any money from the I.R.I., and she denied it, but the existence of the grants was confirmed by NED assistant to the president, Patrick Thomas.
The discovery of the grants reveals a major deception by the group, which for years denied it was getting any Washington dollars until some relatively small grants from the NED and the Center for a Free Cuba were revealed (see Counterpunch: "Reporters Without Borders Unmasked"). When asked to account for its large income RSF has claimed the money came from the sale of books of photographs. But researcher Salim Lamrani has pointed out the improbability of this claim. Even taking into account that the books are published for free, it would have had to sell 170 200 books in 2004 and 188 400 books in 2005 to earn the more than $2 million the organization claims to make each year 516 books per day in 2005. The money clearly had to come from other sources, as it turns out it did.
The I.R.I., an arm of the Republican Party, specializes in meddling in elections in foreign countries, as a look at NED annual reports and the I.R.I. website shows. It is one of the four core grantees of the NED, the organization founded by Congress under the Reagan administration in 1983 to replace the CIA's civil society covert action programs, which had been devastated by exposure by the Church committee in the mid-1970s (Ignatius, 1991). The other three pillars of the NED are the National Democratic Institute (the Democratic Party), the Solidarity Center (AFL-CIO) and the Center for International Private Enterprise (U.S. Chamber of Commerce). But of all the groups the I.R.I. is closest to the Bush administration, according to a recent piece in The New York Times exposing its role in the overthrow of Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide:
"President Bush picked its president, Lorne W. Craner, to run his administration's democracy-building efforts. The institute, which works in more than 60 countries, has seen its federal financing nearly triple in three years, from $26 million in 2003 to $75 million in 2005. Last spring, at an I.R.I. fund-raiser, Mr. Bush called democracy-building 'a growth industry.'" (Bogdanich and Nordberg, 2006)
Funding from the I.R.I. presents a major problem for RSF's credibility as a "press freedom" organization because the group manufactured propaganda against the popular democratic governments of Venezuela and Haiti at the same time that its patron, the I.R.I., was deeply involved in efforts to overthrow them. The I.R.I. funded the Venezuelan opposition to President Hugo Chavez (Barry, 2005) and actively organized Haitian opposition to Aristide in conjunction with the CIA (Bogdanich and Nordberg, 2006).
The man who links RSF to these activities is Otto Reich, who worked on the coups first as assistant secretary of state for Latin American affairs, and, after Nov. 2002, as a special envoy to Latin America on the National Security Council. Besides being a trustee of the government-funded Center for a Free Cuba, which gives RSF $50,000 a year, Reich has worked since the early 1980's with the I.R.I.'s senior vice president, Georges Fauriol, another member of the Center for a Free Cuba. But it is Reich's experience in propaganda that is especially relevant. In the 1980's he was caught up in investigations into the Reagan administration's illegal war on the Sandinistas. The comptroller general determined in 1987 that Reich's Office of Public Diplomacy had "engaged in prohibited covert propaganda activities." (Bogdanich and Nordberg, 2006). In early 2002, once George Bush had given him a recess appointment to the State Department, "Reich was soon tasked to orchestrate a massive international media defamation campaign against Chávez that has continued until this day" (Conkling and Goble, 2004).
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/barahona08012006.html~~~~~~~~Reporters Without Borders, Wikipedia
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Robert Ménard on the ethics of torture
In an interview with France Culture in 2007, whilst speaking about the case of the kidnapped journalist Daniel Pearl, RWB president Robert Ménard discussed the ethics of torture.<25> Menard told France Culture:"Where do we stop? Shall we accept this logic that consists of… since we could do it in some cases, ‘you kidnap, we kidnap; you mistreat, we mistreat; you torture, we torture …?
What justifies…? Perhaps in order to free somebody, can we go there? It is a real question.
That is real life, it is that, what François just said: we are no longer in ideas, it is war, we are no longer dealing with principles. I don’t what to think. Because this happens to Marianne Pearl, I’m not saying, I’m not saying that they made a mistake because she thought that it was appropriate to do it, that it was necessary to do that, that her husband had to be saved, she was pregnant… for the sake of the baby that was going to be born, everything was permitted.
And it was absolutely necessary to save him and if it was necessary to attack a certain number of people, they had to attack a certain number of people, physically attack them, you understand, threatening them and torturing them, even though we might have to kill some.
I don’t know, I am lost. Because sometimes I don’t know where you have to stop, where you have to put on the brakes. What is acceptable and what is unacceptable? And at the same time, for the families of those that were kidnapped, because many times they are the people we talk to first, in Reporters without Borders; legitimately, I, if my daughter were kidnapped there would be no limit, I tell you, I tell you, there would be no limit to torture.<25>"Mr. Robert Ménard, secretary general of the RSF for twenty years, has confessed to receiving financing from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), an organization that has been accused of using American taxpayer dollars to subvert democracy abroad. <26>
Western intelligence agencies
An article by John Cherian in the leftist Indian magazine Frontline alleged that RWB "is reputed to have strong links with Western intelligence agencies" and "Cuba has accused Robert Meynard the head of the group, of having CIA links".<27> The organization has denied the allegation made by Cuba.<28>
Otto Reich
Lucie Morillon, RWB's Washington representative, confirmed in an interview on 29 April 2005 that the organization has a contract with US State Department's Special Envoy to the Western Hemisphere, Otto Reich, who signed it in his capacity as a trustee for the Center for a Free Cuba, to inform Europeans about the repression of journalists in Cuba.<29>
Critics of RWB, such as CounterPunch, have cited Reich's involvement with the group as a source of controversy: when Reich headed the Reagan administration's Office of Public Diplomacy in the 1980s, the body partook in what its officials termed "White Propaganda" – covert dissemination of information to influence domestic opinion regarding US backing for military campaigns against Left-wing governments in Latin America.<30><31> An investigation into the Office’s activities by the US Comptroller-General found that under Otto Reich it was engaged in "prohibited, covert propaganda activities ... beyond the range of acceptable agency public information activities".<32>
In 2002, Reich was appointed to the visiting board of the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation,<33> which was formerly known as the School for the Americas, and described in 2004 by the LA Weekly as a “torture-teaching institution”.<34> According to Amnesty International, the School in the past has produced training manuals which advocated torture, blackmail, beatings and executions.<35>
Reacting to Otto Reich’s appointment to the visiting board, School of the Americas Watch said, “Reich on a board charged with monitoring the human rights integrity of an institution as notorious as this one is like the fox guarding the henhouse. His appointment to this position exposes the rubber-stamp character and hypocritical function of such a board…The underlying objective of both the school and Mr. Reich is to continue to control the economic and political systems of Latin America by training and arming Latin American militaries.”<36>
According to critics, Reich has a “Stalinist-type contempt for press freedom”.<37> In the 1980s it is alleged that he conducted sex smears against journalists critical of the Contra rebel group in Nicaragua.<37> Reich himself has joked about his attitude to criticism – in 2002 in mock indignation he joked that opponents had "said that I can't make rational decisions because of my ideology. Well, they are not saying that anymore, because I had them all arrested this morning."<38>
Cuba
RWB has been highly critical of press freedom in Cuba, describing the Cuban government as "totalitarian" and engages in direct campaigning against it.<39> RWB's campaign includes declarations on radio and television, full-page ads in Parisian dailies, posters, leafletting at airports, and an April 2003 occupation of the Cuban tourism office in Paris.<40> A Paris court (tribunal de grande instance) ordered RWB to pay 6,000 Euros to the daughter and heir of Alberto Korda for non-compliance with a court order of 9 July 2003 banning it from using Korda’s famous (and copyrighted) photograph of Ernesto "Che" Guevara in a beret, taken at the funeral of La Coubre victims. RWB said it was "relieved" it was not given a harsher sentence.<39><41> The face had been superimposed by RSF with that of a May 1968 CRS anti-riot police agent, and the postcard handed out at Orly Airport in Paris to tourists boarding on flights for Cuba. Korda's daughter declared to Granma that "Reporters Without Borders should call themselves Reporters Without Principles."<42> Led by Robert Ménard, RWB also burst into the Cuban Tourism Office in Paris on 4 April, 2003, obstructing the running of the office for nearly four hours.<43><44> On April 24, 2003, RWB organized a demonstration outside the Cuban embassy in Paris.<43>
RWB in turn has been described as an "ultra-reactionary" organization by the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party, Granma.<39> Tensions between Cuban authorities and RWB are high, particularly after the imprisonment in 2003 of 75 dissidents (27 journalists) by the Cuban Government, including Raúl Rivero and Oscar Elías Biscet.
RWB has denied that its campaigning on Cuba are related to payments it has received from anti-Castro organisations. In 2004, it received $50,000 from the Miami based exile group, the Center for a Free Cuba, which was personally signed by the US State Department's Special Envoy to the Western Hemisphere, Otto Reich.<30> RWB has also received extensive funding from other institutions long critical of Fidel Castro's government, including the International Republican Institute<45>
Salim Lamrani, a pro-Castro journalist, has accused Reporters Without Borders with making unsupported and contradictory statements regarding Internet connectivity in Cuba.<46>
More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reporters_Without_Borders
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