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Great and Little Satan Free to Aggress

and Ethnically Cleanse-

Their Targets Have No Right of Self Defense

(or Any Other Right Questioned by the Satans)

 

http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2007-12/16herman.cfm

 

ZNet Commentary Great and Little Satan Free to Aggress and Ethnically Cleanse-Their Targets Have No Right of Self Defense (or Any Other Right Questioned by the Satans)

 

December 16, 2007

 

By Edward Herman

 

In the discussions about Iran among the leaders in the "international community," their expressed dire fears about Iran and its nuclear program never cause them to raise any questions about Israel's nuclear program, even though it is well known that Israel not only has a "program" but has several hundred nuclear weapons, built in secret but with U.S., French, and British aid, and of course done outside the authority of the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty (NPT) designed to prevent proliferation. Israel's acquisition of this arsenal is obviously disturbing to its Arab neighbors, who are placed at a great military disadvantage by this violation of NPT principles--and equity--accepted and even facilitated by Israel's Western allies. To see those Western allies greatly agitated over the possibility that Iran might have a nuclear program that at some future date would allow it to produce such weapons, while taking Israel's arsenal as a given not even worthy of mention, reflects a gross political double standard that is both racist and illustrative of that famous "clash of civilizations," with the clash coming from Western initiatives, actions and threats.

 

Gates and the Iranian Versus Israeli Threat

 

While this double standard is not even discussible in the Western mainstream it is considered a major issue and is debated in the Arab world. Thus, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates was confronted with the double standard at a conference in Bahrain organized by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, where Gates was urging the Arab states to press Iran to halt any nuclear activities. Gates was asked by Bahraini Minister of Labor Majeed al-Alawi whether Gates thought "the Zionist (Israeli) nuclear weapon is a threat to the region." Gates paused, and answered tersely: "No, I do not." A.P. reports that "Asked if U.S. acceptance of that was a double standard in light of Washington's pressure on Iran, Gates again said 'no,' and described the government in Jerusalem as more responsible than the one in Tehran. 'I think Israel is not training terrorists to subvert its neighbors. It has not shipped weapons into a place like Iraq to kill thousands of innocent civilians covertly,' said Gates. 'So I think that there are significant differences in terms of both the history and the behavior of the Iranian and Israeli governments.'" 1 This reportedly elicited a great deal of laughter among the Arab representatives present, but both the laughter and the issue at stake are outside the orbit of accepted thought in the West.

 

Gates's response is a mixture of ideology, lies, and evasion of information relevant to evaluating Israel's role and nuclear program. Even if Gates was correct in these claims he fails to address the fact that Israel's acquisition of nuclear weapons was a major violation of non-proliferation principles, and the inequality that it represents threatens other Arab states, apart from Iran. What is "responsible"? Is it responsible to invade one's neighbors in violation of the UN Charter, as Israel has done repeatedly in Lebanon? Was dropping a million cluster bombs on the Lebanon countryside in the last few days before the end of the 2006 war "responsible" behavior? Is systematically violating the Fourth Geneva Convention on the behavior of an occupying power and ignoring the International Court decision on the illegality of the apartheid wall responsible? 2 Is starving and denying medical aid to the civilian population of Gaza responsible? (The International Red Cross reports that "The Palestinian Territories face a deep human crisis, where millions of people are denied their human dignity. Not once in a while, but every day." 3 Isn't training an army to attack one's neighbors in violation of the UN Charter even worse than "training terrorists to subvert its neighbors?" Wasn't Israel's organization and support of a South Lebanese Army in Lebanon for many years a support of cross-border terrorism? Given the regular Israeli invasions of Lebanon, isn't any Iranian support of Hezbollah support of a resistance against aggression and state terrorism? Isn't the U.S. provision of arms to Israel support of both state terrorism and massive ethnic cleansing? Hasn't the United States shipped weapons to Iraq that have been used to kill far more civilians than can possibly be attributed to Iran? Did the United States or Iran destroy Falluja?

 

The point is that Gates is speaking for an aggressor nation that has attacked three countries in the last decade, not in self defense, but in acts of aggression clearly violating the UN Charter and constituting the "supreme international crime." Little Satan is the partner-in-crime of the Great Satan, who protects it from any constraint on its crimes and allows it to violate international law, ignore International Court and UN rulings, and ethnically cleanse Palestinians, with complete impunity. Gates's answer on Israel's "responsibility" is laughable nonsense but is not even discussible in the brainwashed and cowed West. The Satans rule and their leaders can get away with anything, because in Great Satan's sphere of influence it is taken as a premise by leaders and elites that the Satans are good and/or must be accommodated and that their targets are-or must be taken as--genuine threats. Great Satan may have lied egregiously in justifying his last major invasion (Iraq), and he may have killed a million civilians and destroyed that target, but as he pushes for attacking his next victim the international community rushes to Satan's aid, to prevent that target from exercising its rights under the NPT that Satan says it should not have! Satan's aggressions and interventions may have destabilized the Middle East, with the help and collaboration of Little Satan, but he can accuse Iran of destabilizing the area, and this becomes the working "truth" in the U.S. media and international community.

 

After the United States overthrew the democratic government of Iran by a coup in 1953 and installed the Shah of Iran, it then supported and helped refine a police state that was notorious for its torture chambers. But this regime was "responsible" enough for the United States to actually urge it to go nuclear, and the United States and its allies (and their private firms supplying nuclear materials) jumped in to help, never bothered by the Shah's 1974 claim that he would be producing nuclear weapons "without a doubt and sooner than the world thinks." 4 The successor Islamic-dominated state posed no threat to U.S. "national security," but it did displace a puppet regime that helped the United States police its Middle East sphere of influence. It was certainly not more repressive than the Shah's Iran, nor did it intervene beyond its borders more than did the Shah's regime. But it was not a U.S. client and it was not in U.S. service-hence it became by political definition "irresponsible," and the United States and the "responsible" Israel both encouraged and supported the (at-that-time) "responsible" Saddam Hussein to attack Iran in the 1980s in a bloody war of attrition.

 

The non-client Iran has been a U.S. target essentially since the 1979 ouster of the Shah and takeover by Ayatollah Khomeini and his associates, with "regime change" the oft-admitted objective. During the last half dozen years the Iran leadership has tried on several occasions to reach an accord with the United States, but each effort has been rejected, usually by a simple refusal to respond to Iranian overtures. 5 Iran did suspend its uranium enrichment program in an agreement with the EU-3 (Britain, France, and Germany) on October 21, 2003, and on December 18, 2003 signed an Additional Protocal with the IAEA allowing even more intensive inspections. What Iran received in return was their promise (not Washington's) to provide some unreported security assurances. But with the United States refusing to provide any such assurances or to make any concessions to Iran, putting ever more pressure on the IAEA to search for Iran violations, and threatening a military attack, Iran returned to its enrichment program in early 2006. At that point, the United States became "reasonable" and expressed a willingness to negotiate, but only on condition that Iran once again suspends enrichment. The United States insists on suspension first, talks later, at which Iran now balks given the unremitting U.S. hostility and the unreasonableness of asking Iran to abandon a major bargaining chip before the problematic bargaining.

 

It should be understood that under the NPT, Iran has the legal right to research and develop nuclear energy for peaceful (i.e., non-military) purposes. But the United States opposes this, allegedly on the grounds that it is a step toward nuclear weapons. I am not alone in believing that the United States is using this gambit, in which Iran would have to prove a negative, not out of any fear of an Iranian nuclear arsenal but to clear the ground for war. In order to get the international community to go along with its demand for action against Iran, and justification for a military attack, the United States has long claimed that Iran is definitely seeking nuclear arms. Although this is a claim by a country that has lied as a matter of course on such issues, and IAEA inspections have never uncovered any proof, the United States has been able to mobilize the IAEA and Security Council to focus on the Iran "threat" and impose sanctions on Iran. The fact that the United States played this same game, based on fabricated claims, in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, doesn't matter. It doesn't matter that Iran has submitted itself to numerous and uniquely intensive IAEA inspections that have never found any evidence of weapons intent. It doesn't matter that both the United States and Israel are threatening to attack Iran, itself a violation of the UN Charter, and that both have committed acts of aggression in the Middle East and continue massive law violations in Palestine as well as Iraq.

 

Israeli analyst Martin Van Creveld has said that, given that Israel and the United States both have nuclear weapons and both are threatening Iran, Iran's leaders would be "crazy" not to seek nuclear arms as a matter of self defense. Van Creveld doesn't understand. Only the Great Satan and his clients have a "security" problem and a right to take action to protect that security (including the right of preemptive attack on an alleged threatening adversary). The world is very conscious of the fact that a big concern at the recent Annapolis Conference was Israel's "security," but no mention was made there of Palestinian security. Similarly, Iran's threat to Israel is a widespread concern, mentioned recently by French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner and covered extensively in the Western mainstream media, but that the nuclear-armed Israel poses a threat to Iran and that Iran has a right to defend itself against such a threat is off the Western agenda. Once declared targets by the Great Satan or one of its clients, countries like Iran have no right of self-defense. In Iran's case, Satan has ruled, and the world's leaders and elites therefore genuflect and denounce the new target and victim.

 

The NIE Blow to the Hawks

 

Satan's accusations and its buildup to a war with Iran have taken a surprising hit with the recent disclosure of an NIE report that claims that Iran has not had an operative nuclear weapons program since 2003. 6 The report asserts that Iran's nuclear weapons program was halted in the fall of 2003, and that its uranium conversion and enrichment activities were "voluntarily suspended" in October 2003. These activities were begun again in early 2006, but the NIE report states "with moderate confidence that Tehran has not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007," and "with high confidence that Iran will not be technically capable of producing and reprocessing enough plutonium for a weapon before about 2015." It even says that "This NIE does not assume that Iran intends to acquire nuclear weapons." As former CIA analyst Ray McGovern points out, "This, of course, pulls out the rug from under Cheney's claim of a 'fairly robust new nuclear program' in Iran, and President Bush's inaccurate assertion that Iranian leaders have even admitted they are developing nuclear weapons. Apparently, intelligence community analysts are no longer required to produce the faith-based intelligence that brought us the Oct. 1, 2002 NIE 'Iraq's Continuing Program for Weapons of Mass Destruction'-the worst in the history of U.S. intelligence." 7

 

The claim of an imminent threat has thus collapsed, and the hawks are given solace only by the NIE claim that Iran had an active nuclear weapons program prior to its suspension in 2003. This claim, vigorously denied by the Iranians, is apparently based on alleged intercepted Iranian phone messages and the testimony of an Iranian defector. 8 It calls for caution. Such evidence in the pre-Iraq war buildup turned out to be selective, forged, and in the case of defectors, fabricated (recall Curveball, the Iraq defector who brought the good news of Saddam's WMD); and it flies in the face of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's issuance of a religious ruling in 2003 (a Fatwah) stating that Islam forbids the building or stockpiling of nuclear weapons. Reese Erlich says that "Before dismissing such a ruling as propaganda, it's worth noting that similar religious reasoning stopped Iran from using chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq War, despite Saddam Hussein's numerous chemical assaults against Iranian troops and civilians." 9

 

Doesn't the fact that Iran's uranium conversion and enrichment program was carried out covertly in the earlier years make a weapons project likely? Not necessarily, because Iran knew that the United States would object strenuously even to a non-weapons oriented program, as it has been doing with Iran's program that has been out in the open for several years. How easy it is to make that covert action a sinister proof of a weapons program, that of course is not sinister if the United States, Israel or Pakistan do it!

 

The current NIE shocker can be explained by the fact that the intelligence community resents the extent to which the Bush administration has twisted arms and fixed evidence in the process of making it conformable to predetermined policy, with the intelligence community discredited for having allowed itself to be coerced into supporting disinformation on Iraq. The NIE authors are also bolstered by the fact that significant numbers of powerful military personnel are against going to war with Iran, including Admiral William Fallon, the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East. The authors have therefore put up a fight for minimal truth, and although their findings were evidently delayed many months by opposition from the Cheney-Bush war faction, they could not be stopped, partly because some of them were clearly prepared to go public even at the cost of job loss.

 

The rightwing and neocons are fighting back furiously , and are strongly supported by Israel, whose leaders have been trying as hard as they could to get the United States into a war with Iran. They and their political agents and allies, including Democrats like Jane Harman, 9 have been calling into question the NIE findings, some denouncing these as "guesswork," others claiming the NIE authors had fallen for clever Iranian disinformation, still others like John Bolton suggesting politicization and traitorous subversion of government policy-a "quasi-putsch"! Sixteen intelligence agencies in an anti-Bush conspiracy to misread evidence! Of course Bush and many other rightwingers have claimed that insofar as Iran has stopped its program, that is because of the U.S. pressure and threats, which need to be maintained or intensified to keep this sinister threat at bay. Regime change is still needed because this evil regime has the capacity to build a nuclear weapon, so that the dire threat can only be removed by replacing the existing government with some "responsible" one like the former Shah, or a Musharraf, or a Bush-Cheney look-alike.

 

The probability of an attack on Iran has definitely not fallen to zero. The Israelis want it badly and this feeds into the positions of the Democratic Party leadership, which grovels before the pro-Israel lobby, with the Democrat-supported Kyle-Lieberman resolution in the Senate virtually giving Bush a blank check to attack. Furthermore, the demonization process has been furious and, as usual, effective, with the alleged Iranian "support of terrorism," illicit intervention in the Iraq war, alleged threats to "wipe out Israel," and sinister foot-dragging in reference to its nuclear program, continuously thrust before the public, with a consequent increasing public willingness to stop the New Hitler. With France and Germany now more closely aligned with the United States on sanctions, that line of pressure and buildup to attack and further demonization is not unlikely.

 

Meanwhile, the Great Satan is free to escalate in Iraq, continue to threaten Iran, chide and bully China, Russia and Venezuela, and push ahead on its own nuclear weapons upgrading program; and little Satan can threaten to attack Iran, reinvade Gaza, and continue its ethnic cleansing in Palestine and East Jerusalem, its own nuclear arsenal safe from criticism by the international community. The rule stays in place: what the Great Satan wants is treated with deference, and what the Little Satan does is nobody else's business. The new NIE report is a real setback for the leaders of the two Satans, but they are still in charge and they have overcome serious obstacles before.

 

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Endnotes:

 

**It appears that the United States was first designated the "Great Satan" by Ayatollah Khomeini in early November 1979, shortly after the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. Usage of the phrase was based in large part on the U.S. role in overthrowing the democratic government of Mohammad Mossadeq in 1953 and installing and steadily supporting the Shah dictatorship from 1953 to the Shah's forced departure in early 1979, and then protecting him and giving him refuge in his flight. The first two certainly were nasty actions, and the U.S. record of ugly behavior is immense: in his latest Anti-Empire Report (Dec. 11, 2007) William Blum lists, among other U.S. efforts since World War II, (1) attempting to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, most of which were democratically elected; (2) attempting to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders, and (3) dropping bombs on the people of some 30 countries. Little Satan has also compiled an impressive record of international law and human rights violations in the course of running a racist state and engaging in relentless ethnic cleansing of non-Jews in Palestine. Satanic is defensible rhetoric in describing these partners.

 

1. "Remarks as Delivered by Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, Manama, Bahrain," U.S. Department of Defense, December 8, 2007 .

 

2. Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, International Court of Justice (Advisory Opinion), July 9, 2004 .

 

3. Dignity Denied in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, International Committee of the Red Cross, November, 2007 .

 

4. Quoted in Reese Erlich, The Iran Agenda.

 

5. For illustrations, see John Richardson, "The Secret History of Impending War," Esquire, Oct. 10, 2007.

 

6. Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities, U.S. National Intelligence Council, November, 2007 .

 

7: Ray McGovern, "No Nuke Iran," CounterPunch, December 4, 2007 .

 

8. See, e.g., Greg Miller, "CIA has recruited Iranians to defect," Los Angeles Times, December 9, 2007.

 

9. Erlich, op. cit.

 

10. Peter Hoekstra and Jane Harman, "The Limits of Intelligence," Wall Street Journal, Dec. 10, 2007 .

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More Nuggets from a Nut House

Greeting the Shah, Musharraf, and Ahmandinejad: Israeli Bombing of Syria "Fuels Debate"; Antisemitism; Democracy's Last Throes?

 

 

Z Magazine November 2007

 

Edward S. Herman

 

Greeting the Shah and Musharraf - and Ahmandinejed

 

It is amusing to contrast the September 24, 2007 treatment of Iran President Mahmoud Ahmandinejad by Columbia University President Lee Bollinger with Bollinger's September 16, 2005 treatment of Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf, and the treatment of the Shah of Iran back in 1955 by Columbia University President Grayson Kirk (and by the media). As we all know, after having invited Ahmandinejad to speak at Columbia, Bollinger proceeded to give the guest a nasty, pedantic and misinformed attack, calling him a "cruel dictator" with a "mind of evil." But back in 2005, Bollinger welcomed Pakistan President Musharraf with a warm accolade, as "a leader of global importance .whose contribution to Pakistan's economic turnaround and the international fight against terror remain remarkable - it is rare that we have a leader of his stature at campus." (Columbia University has standing ovation for President," Press Release, General Pervez Musharraf, President of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, September 16, 2005).

 

(Photo of Lee Bollinger, Pervez Musharraf, and two women I presume to be their respective wives, from a Columbia U. webpage, www.sipa.columbia.edu/institutes_centers/index.html.)

 

Back in February 1955, the Shah of Iran was a guest at Columbia receiving an honorary Doctor of Laws degree, and he, like Musharraf was greeted deferentially by Grayson Kirk, and gave a well-received speech featuring an accolade to the U.S. "policy of peace backed by strength." The New York Times also noted that the Shah was "impressed by the desire of Americans for a secure and enduring peace." ("Shah Praises U.S. For Peace Policy," NYT, Feb. 5, 1955, p. 2). This was, of course, just a few months after the United States had overthrown the elected government of Guatemala via a proxy army and had installed a regime of permanent terror.

 

In the reality world, both Musharraf and the Shah of Iran fit comfortably the category of "cruel dictator," whereas Ahmandinejad does not. Musharraf came to power in a coup and has ruled by decree ever since, in the interim carrying out quite a few massacres of his own people. The Shah was installed as ruler by the United States in a coup back in 1953 (only 18 months before his Doctor of Laws degree award-or reward-at Columbia University) and from the very beginning displayed his cruelty and intention to rule by dictatorial authority. Ahmandinejad won a contested election and has limited personal power.

 

The Shah's torture chambers were famous, modernized with the help of his CIA and Israeli advisers, and probably topped anything the Iranian regime has engaged in since the Shah's departure. The crucial difference between the winners of Columbia presidents' accolades and denunciation is obviously that the one denounced is a declared U.S. enemy and target, whereas the good guys served U.S. interests. As in so many cases of leaders who serve, any little defects like torture or dictatorial rule somehow fail to get noticed by the Presidents of Columbia (or by the mainstream media), whereas the lesser defects of the leader of the target state arouses furious indignation as the Columbia President displays his deep concern for human rights and democracy.

 

It is a little awkward for Bollinger that since Musharraf's 2005 visit to Columbia he has fallen out of complete favor and there is talk of ousting this "leader of stature" who has not shaped up adequately. But if Musharraf came to Columbia again, we can be sure that Bollinger would find the proper nuance for a leader who was of somewhat diminished stature but still a U.S. instrument.

 

The Shah was even encouraged to pursue nuclear energy, just as the target Iran of today is being threatened for trying to do what the Shah was allowed to do, by dictate of the ruler of the world. In short, the double standard is comprehensive and even funny in its crudity, but the United States and its propaganda system prevent large numbers from seeing this and laughing the responsible charlatans off the stage.

 

 

Israel Bombing Syria "Fuels Debate"

 

Almost daily the title and framing of news articles puts on clear display the internalized bias of propaganda system journalism. A nice illustration is the September 22, 2007 article in the New York Times by Mark Mazzetti and David E. Sanger, "Raid on Syria Fuels Debate on Weapons." The continuation page headline is "Israeli Raid Renews Debate on Nuclear Arms and Syria." Then in a box we see this thought: "Washington worries, Is Damascus trying to build or buy an arsenal?" Now if Syria had bombed Israel to knock out some of its threatening weaponry, it is obvious that the Times headline would be much larger and the focus would be on the bombing attack itself, not on any "debate" that might ensue about nuclear arms. This would be considered an act of war and very bad business and deserving of retaliatory action (which would surely ensue). There would be n! o box that says "Damascus worries, Is Israel trying to build an arsenal?" And there would be an indignant editorial denouncing Syrian aggression violating the UN charter!

 

What this reflects is New York Times journalistic principles: That is, Israel has a right to an arsenal, whereas any Syrian arsenal and any Syrian effort that might enable it to defend itself is highly debatable. Furthermore, Israel shares aggression rights with the United States, so that if it attacks Syria that is not in itself bad or even problematic, whereas if Syria or Iran or any non-ally bombs another country, aid dissident or resistance movements like Hezbollah, or intervene anywhere outside their own territory, this is very bad business. These principles are so well internalized that people like Mazzetti and Sanger probably don't even realize that they are pretty brazen propagandists.

 

An old favorite of mine that beautifully illustrates the New York Times's structured bias and normalization of Israeli state terrorism is the article by Joel Greenberg on "Israel Rethinks Interrogation of Arabs," NYT, Aug. 14, 1993). This was a period in which Israel's torture of Palestinians was running at 400-500 victims per month, a point mentioned rather matter-of-factly deep in Greenberg's article. But instead of the article featuring the torture itself-and it was alone in even mentioning the subject and giving the estimated number of victims--it is framed around Israeli thoughts on whether such "interrogation" procedures are helpful. The torture "fuels debate," it isn't worthy of an article on the torture regime itself. The Times has always steered clear of reporting on Israeli torture, and in a notorious case, when the London Times Insight team pr! oduced a lengthy study of Israeli torture back in 1977, the New York Times refused to pick up the story (also fended off by the Washington Post), and mentioned it first in an article featuring the Israeli rebuttal to the torture charges (which were not spelled out)...

 

 

Antisemitism as a Function of the Intensity of Israeli State Terrorism

 

The point was made years ago by Alexander Cockburn but retains its value as a virtual social science law: that the more ruthlesslessly Israel behaves toward its untermenschen the more furious the outcries of growing antisemitism. This law is easily explained: when Israel escalates its violence the "defenders of anything Israel chooses to do" realize that Israel's actions might provoke criticisms in the West among those elements of the population overly sensitive to enlightenment values, so the best defense is a good offense. That is, start proclaiming that antisemitism is once again on the march, picking out or even manufacturing illustrations, and continuing the long-standing effort to conflate hostility to Israeli actions to antisemitism. Of course the conflation is rendered plausible by the fact that the campaigners who are identifying critics of Isra! eli actions as anti-semites are usually Jewish and are usually linked to the well-financed Jewish lobby. So these Jewish campaigners are de facto supporters of Israeli state terror, making it not unreasonable to see a definite connection between the two, even if these campaigners don't represent Jews in general.

 

The purpose of these campaigns is not only to silence criticism of Israel, but beyond that to help mobilize the West for war against Israel's targets, now notably Iran. This program has been frighteningly successful. The U.S. senate and congress are now virtual appendages of the Israel Lobby and rush to denounce its enemies and clear the ground for war against Israel's targets. The political leaders compete for subservience honors and are afraid even to denounce the leaked suggestions that nuclear weapons might be used against Iran, let alone put a brake on a further U.S. aggression. The media not already in service have been beaten into submission and the Lobby has had notable successes in its McCarthyite campaigns against academics who don't meet their standards of political correctness on Middle East issues. A stream of quality academics have been attacked a! nd some of them damaged by Lobby campaigns-Juan Cole, Rashid Khaladi, Nadia Abu el-Haq, Joel Beinen, Joseph Massad, Norman Finkelstein (among others). People like Jimmy Carter, Stephen Walt and John Mersheimer have been under steady attack for expressing critical views on Israeli policy and Lobby influence. Speakers not satisfying the Lobby principles have been denounced and invitations withdrawn because of the systematic Lobby pressure. Publishers of books deemed overly critical, most recently Pluto Press, have been threatened. Although the efforts of Campus Watch, CAMERA, Israel on Campus Coalition, and the David Project are such a clear throwback to the McCarthy era efforts of Red Channels and other private thought-police operations, you would hardly be aware of the civil liberties threat if you read only the mainstream media.

 

 

Democracy in Its Last Throes?

 

The already weak (plutocratic) democracy is in deep trouble in the United States, and good arguments can be made that it is likely to be stripped of its façade in the very near future. Right now it is crystal clear that "the people" do not rule and that monied interests and powerful lobbies determine eligible candidates-it is power sovereignty, not popular sovereignty. We have had a telling illustration of this following the 2006 election, where a majority of the the public clearly rejected the Bush policies and Iraq war, verified by polls, but were unable to do anything about it through the political process.

 

The Bush-Cheney team has already done serious damage to the democratic structures of this country : the checks-and-balances system is badly impaired, executive power to ignore congressional legislation is now openly asserted and still in place, executive power to permit torture and ignore international law has been strengthened, the right to privacy and due process has been weakened and habeas corpus in jeopardy, and the executive's power to go to war and carry out assassinations and other covert and military operations abroad has also been strengthened. In a recent speech, Dan Ellsberg argues convincingly that a coup has already taken place with these legal-structural changes making for an all-powerful executive ("A Coup Has Occurred," Sept. 27, 2007. www.consortiumnews.com/2007/092607a.html). But he then goes on to point out that a war with Iran, with its more catastrophic effects, including an impact on energy prices and supply as well as wider warfare (possibly including the use of nuclear weapons), would almost surely produce a second coup and a police state. He argues that this may be just what Cheney, his chief-of-staff David Addington, and other elements of the Iran-war support network want, but it would be the end of a great U.S. experiment and would usher in a new dark age.

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Beyond Munich: The UN Security Council Helps Disarm a Prospective Further Victim of U.S. Aggression

 

http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2007-04/02herman-peterson.cfm

 

 

April 02, 2007

 

By Edward Herman and David Peterson

 

Imagine that when Hitler was threatening to invade Poland, after having swallowed Czechoslovakia-with the help of the Western European powers' appeasement of Hitler at Munich in September 1938-the League of Nations imposed an arms embargo on Poland, making it more difficult for the imminent victim to defend itself, and at the same time suggested that Poland was the villainous party. That didn't happen back in 1939, but in a regression from that notorious era of appeasement something quite analogous is happening now.

 

Here is the United States, still fighting a brutal war of conquest in Iraq, which it is now doing with UN Security Council approval, with open plans and threats to attack Iran and engage in "regime change," gathering aircraft carriers off the coast of Iran, already engaging in subversive and probing attacks on the prospective target, and the UN Security Council, instead of warning and threatening the aggressor warns, threatens and imposes sanctions on the prospective victim!

 

The way it works is that the United States stirs up a big fuss, proclaiming a serious threat to its own national security, and expressing its deep concern over another state's flouting of Security Council resolutions or dragging its feet on some point of order such as weapons inspections-we know how devoted the United States and its Israeli client are to the rule of law!

 

In the Iraq case, this noise was echoed and amplified in the media, often splashed across headlines and drummed up in editorial commentary. In turn, elite opinion in the United States and Britain coalesced around the beliefs (a) that a WMD-related crisis really existed in Baghdad and (b) that it required the Security Council's special attention. Straight through March 19-20 2003, Iraq, the prospective target of a full-scale attack, decried the absurdity of this U.S.-U.K. noise, and filed regular communiqués with the Security Council and Secretary-General documenting the U.S.-U.K. aerial strikes on its territory,1 including the "spikes of activity" period from September 2002 onward.2 The vast majority of the world's states and peoples also rejected the war propaganda-including the largely voiceless U.S. public, where in the weeks before the war, two-thirds of non-elite opinion stood firmly behind multilateral approaches to defuse the crisis, foremost of which was permitting the UN weapons inspections to take their course.3 But then, as now, pretty much the entire world recognized the U.S.-U.K. hijacking of the Security Council, and its strategic misdirection away from a defense of the actual target of the threats (Iraq) onto the execution of the policy of the states making those threats while playing the role of Iraq's potential victims (the U.S. and U.K.).

 

So the aggression planning proceeded then and does now with the cooperation of the UN and international community. In the Iraq case, the Security Council allowed itself to be bamboozled into restarting the weapons-inspection process, accepting this as the urgent matter, rather than the war-mobilization and threat of aggression by the United States and its British ally. Although the Security Council did not vote approval of the U.S.-British attack, it helped set it up by inflating the Iraq threat and failing to confront the real threat posed by the United States and Britain. Then, within two months after "shock and awe," the Security Council voted to give the aggressor the right to stay in Iraq and manage its affairs, thereby approving a gross violation of the UN Charter after the fact.

 

Now, four years later, the Security Council has outdone itself. Not only has it failed to condemn the U.S. and Israeli threat to attack Iran-the threat itself a violation of the UN Charter,4 and one made ever-more real by the U.S. invasions of neighboring Afghanistan and Iraq during this decade alone, now followed by a huge U.S. naval buildup near Iran's coast to levels not seen since the U.S. launched its war on Iraq four years ago in what the New York Times just called a "calculated show of force."5 But even worse, the Council has aided and abetted these potential aggressors by adopting three resolutions in the past eight months under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, each of which affirms that Iran's nuclear program is a threat to international peace and security, and reserves for the Council the right to take "further appropriate measures" should Iran fail to comply-that is, should Iran not cave-in to U.S. demands on exactly the terms demanded.6

 

Since July 31, the Council has demanded that Iran "suspend all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities, including research and development"7-despite the fact that Iran's right to engage in these activities is guaranteed under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.8 Since December 23, it has identified the existence of Iran's nuclear program with so-called "proliferation sensitive nuclear activities"9-despite the fact that the International Atomic Energy Agency has never shown Iran's program to be engaged in any kind of activities other than peaceful ones. Indeed, in the December 23 resolution, the Council used the phrase "proliferation sensitive nuclear activities" no fewer than eight different times to describe Iran's nuclear program, the clear-and perfectly false-allegation being that for Iran to do research on and develop its indigenous nuclear fuel capabilities places Iran in violation of its NPT commitments.

 

But perhaps most egregious of all, the March 24 resolution prohibits Iran from selling "any arms or related material" to other states or individuals (par. 5), and calls upon all states "to exercise vigilance and restraint" in the sale or transfer of a whole list of weapons systems to Iran, "in order to prevent a destabilizing accumulation of arms?" (par. 6).10 As the editorial voice of The Hindu immediately recognized, the first term is critical "not so much because the Islamic Republic is a major vendor of weapons even to Hamas or Hizbollah but because it gives the U.S. an excuse to intimidate or interdict all Iranian merchant shipping under the guise of 'enforcement'."11 Likewise with the second term, which, if history is any guide, Washington will interpret as a strict prohibition on weapons sales to Iran, thus depriving the potential victim, faced with attack by one or more nuclear powers, of the right to obtain even non-nuclear means of self defense. This of course has been a standard U.S. tactic over many years, even against puny victims-Guatemala in 1954 and Nicaragua in the 1980s, among other cases. But now the United States has succeeded in getting the Security Council to help it impede the self-defense of yet another target of aggression. In this truly Kafkaesque case, the state targeted for attack (Iran) has been declared a threat to the peace by the Security Council, at the behest of a serial aggressor openly mobilizing its forces to attack the "threat."12

 

It should be recognized that the treatment of Iran's nuclear program, and the Security Council's cooperation in this treatment, is the ultimate application of a global double standard, enforced by an aggressive superpower now able to get away with both hypocrisy and murder. Only the United States and its allies may possess nuclear weapons. They alone may threaten to use nukes. They alone may improve their nukes and delivery systems. Only client states such as Israel may remain outside the NPT indefinitely and without penalty. The United States may ignore its NPT obligation to work toward nuclear disarmament. It may even renege on its promise never to use nukes against nuke-free states that joined the NPT. But no matter. By sheer fiat-power, no other state may acquire nukes without U.S. consent. Nor as the case of Iran shows may a state engage in its "inalienable right" to use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes unless and until the United States approves.

 

We are in the midst of a crisis within the post-war international system, as a serial aggressor is now able to mobilize the Security Council, tasked with the maintenance of international peace and security, to declare the state that it threatens with war a menace to the peace and to help the aggressor disarm its target. This carries us beyond Munich.

 

---- Endnotes ----

 

• The authors would like it understood that a shorter, standard op-ed length version of this commentary was drafted and submitted very widely across the major U.S. print media-and found to be 100 percent unpublishable.

 

1. For an extensive list of documents filed at the United Nations by the Iraqi Government over the period August 29, 2001, through March 26, 2003, see David Peterson, "No Memo Required," ZNet, July 1, 2005, .

 

2. See David Peterson, "'Spikes of Activity'," ZNet, July 5, 2005, ; and David Peterson, "British Records of Prewar Bombing of Iraq," ZNet, July 6, 2005, .

 

3. See Steven Kull et al., Americans on Iraq and the UN Inspections, Program on International Policy Attitudes, January 21-26, 2003, http://65.109.167.118/pipa/p df/jan03/IraqUNInsp1%20Jan03%20rpt.pdf .

 

4. See, e.g., Chapter I, Article 2: "All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations" (par. 4), .

 

5. "USS John C. Stennis Now Operating in Persian Gulf," Navy Newsstand, Ma rch 27, 2007, ; "Russian intelligence sees U.S. military buildup on Iran border," RIA Novosti, March 27, 2007, ; and Michael R. Gordon, "U.S. Opens Naval Exercise in Persian Gulf," New York Times, March 28, 2007, .

 

6. See Chapter VII, & lt; http://www.un.org/aboutun/charter/chapter7.htm . -We believe it essential to understand that for the Security Council to adopt a resoluti on under Chapter VII of the UN Charter means above all that either a threat to the peace, a breach of the peace, or an act of outright aggression has occurred. Otherwise, there is no point to the Council's resort to its Chapter VII functions and powers. Regardless of what the Council's other members may believe about the import of the Iran resolutions, their assent to these resolutions grants an enormously powerful and dangerous tool of coercion to the United States.

 

7. Resolution 1696, July 31, 2006, par. 2, .

 

8. See the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, the Preamble, and Articles I, II, and IV, .

 

9. Resolution 1737, December 23, 2006, par. 2, .

 

10. Resolution 1747, March 24, 2007, par. 5, par. 6, .

 

11. "Stepping towards the precipice," Editorial, The Hindu, March 27, 2007, .

 

12. See Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, "Hegemony and Appeasement: Setting Up the Next U.S.-Israeli Target (Iran) For Another 'Supreme International Crime'," ZNet, January 27, 2007, .

 

 

Edward S. Herman is an economist and media analyst, co-author with Noam Chomsky of Manufacturing Consent; David Peterson is a Chicago-based researcher and journalist.

___________

 

 

 

 

Review - Travesty: The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic

 

 

By Edward Herman

 

Review of John Laughland, Travesty: The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic and the Corruption of International Justice (London/Ann Arbor: Pluto Press, 2007).

 

Z Magazine, forthcoming, April 2007

 

John Laughland's superb new book, Travesty: The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic and the Corruption of International Justice, is the fourth important critical study of the issues pertaining to the Balkans wars that I have reviewed in Z Magazine. The earlier three were Diana Johnstone's Fools' Crusade (2002), Michael Mandel's How America Gets Away With Murder (2004), and Peter Brock's Media Cleansing: Dirty Reporting (2005). It is an interesting and distressing fact that none of the three earlier books has been reviewed in any major U.S. paper or journal, nor, with the exception of Z Magazine (and Swans and Monthly Review, which later ran a fuller version of the Johnstone review), in any liberal or left journal in this country

(including The Nation, In These Times, The Progressive, or Mother Jones). This is testimony to the power of the established narrative on the recent history of the Balkans, according to which Clinton, Blair and NATO fought the good fight, though coming in late and reluctantly, to halt Serb ethnic cleansing and genocide managed by Milosevic, with the bad man properly brought before a legitimate court to be tried in the interest of justice.

 

This narrative was quickly institutionalized, with the help of an intense propaganda campaign carried out by the Croatian and Bosnian Muslim governments (assisted by U.S. PR firms), the U.S. and other NATO governments, the NATO-organized and NATO-servicing International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia's (ICTY, or Tribunal), and the Western media, which quickly became co-belligerents in this struggle. This informal collective focused on numerous stories and pictures of suffering victims, on one side only and devoid of context. In commenting on the parade of witness victims, Laughland notes that "Indictments by the ICTY are drawn up with little or no reference to the fact that the acts in question were committed in battle: one often has the surreal sensation one would have reading a description of one man beating another man unconscious which omitted to mention that the violence was being inflicted in the course of a boxing match." But this stream of witnesses, that the defense could duplicate in its turn if given the opportunity - and Milosevic did with a video presentation of badly abused Serbs for several hours toward the beginning of his trial--is effective in demonization and helped mass-produce true believers who viewed any contesting argument or evidence as "apologetics for Milosevic."

 

This consolidation of a party line has been reinforced by a virtual lobby of institutions and dedicated individuals ready to pounce on both the deviants who challenge the new orthodoxy as well as the media institutions that on rare occasion allow a questioning of the "truth." The refusal to review these dissenting books and to deal with the issues they raise is also testimony to the cowardice and self-imposed ignorance of the media, and especially the liberal-left media, unwilling to challenge a narrative that is false at every level, as is spelled out convincingly in the three books reviewed earlier and once again in Travesty.

 

Laughland's Travesty focuses on "The Corruption of International Justice" displayed in the ICTY's performance in the seizure and trial of Milosevic, but in the process the book covers most of the issues central to evaluating the Balkan wars and the role of the various participants. The institutionalized lies are dismantled one after the next. On the matter of "international justice," Laughland stresses the fact that the ICTY is a political court with explicit political objectives that run counter to the requirements of any lawful justice.

 

This political court was organized mainly by the United States and Britain, countries that now freely attack others, but seek the fiction that will give their aggressions a de jure as well as quasi-moral cover. For this reason the rules of the ICTY stood Nuremberg on its head. The Nuremberg Tribunal tried the Nazi leaders for their planning and carrying out the "supreme international crime" of aggression. But the ICTY Statute doesn't even mention crimes against peace (although with Kafkaesque hypocrisy it claims to be aiming at protecting the peace). Thus, Laughland notes, "instead of applying existing international law, the ICTY has effectively overturned it." The dominant powers now wanting to be able to intervene anywhere, the new principles to be applied were a throwback to the Nazis in disrespect for international borders. Laughland says that "the commitment to non-interference in the internal affairs of states, reaffirmed as part of the Nuremberg Principles in the United Nations Charter, is an attempt to institutionalize an anti-fascist theory of international relations. It is this theory which the allies destroyed in attacking Yugoslavia in 1999." And it is this anti-fascist theory that the ICTY and humanitarian interventionists have abandoned, opening the door to a more aggressive imperialism.

 

The ICTY was established not by passage of any law or signing of an international agreement (as in the case of the International Court of Justice) but by the decision of a few governments dominating the Security Council, and Laughland shows that this was beyond the authority of the Security Council (also shown in another outstanding but politically incorrect and neglected work, Hans Kochler's Global Justice or Global Revenge? Springer-Verlag Wien, 2003). It was also established with the open objective of using it to pursue one party in a conflict, presumed guilty in advance of any trial. The political objectives were allegedly to bring peace by punishing villains and thus serving as a deterrent, but also to serve the victims by what Laughland calls "the therapeutic power of obtaining convictions." But how can you deter without a bias against acquittal? Laughland also notes that "The heavy emphasis on the rights of victims implies that 'justice' is equivalent to a guilty verdict, and it comes perilously close to justifying precisely the vengeance which supporters of criminal law say they reject." "Meanwhile, the notion that such trials have a politically educational function is itself reminiscent of the 'agitation trials' conducted for the edification of the proletariat in early Soviet Russia."

 

Laughland features the many-leveled lawlessness of the ICTY. It was not created by law and there is no higher body that reviews its decisions and to whom appeals can be made. The judges, often political appointees and without judicial experience, judge themselves. Laughland points out that the judges have changed their rules scores of times, but none of these changes have ever been challenged by any higher authority. And their rules are made "flexible," to give efficient results; the judges proudly noting that the ICTY "disregards legal formalities" and that it does not need "to shackle itself to restrictive rules which have developed out of the ancient trial-by-jury system." The rule changes have steadily reduced defendants' rights, but from the beginning those rights were shriveled: Laughland quotes a U.S. lawyer who helped draft the rules of evidence of the ICTY, who acknowledges that they were "to minimize the possibility of a charge being dismissed for lack of evidence."

 

Laughland notes that the ICTY is a "prosecutorial organization" whose "whole philosophy and structure is accusatory." This is why its judges gradually accepted a stream of rulings damaging to the defense and to the possibility of a fair trial--including the acceptance of hearsay evidence, secret witnesses, and closed sessions (the latter two categories applicable in the case of 40 percent of the witnesses in the Milosevic trial). ICTY rules even allow an appeal and retrial of an acquitted defendant--"in other words, the ICTY can imprison a person whom it has just found innocent."

 

Laughland's devastating analysis of the Milosevic indictment and trial is a study in abuse of power in a politically-motivated show trial, incompetence, and faux-judiciary malpractice. The first indictment, issued in the midst of the NATO bombing war, on May 27, 1999, was put up in close coordination between the ICTY and U.S. and British officials, and its immediate political role was crystal clear--to eliminate the possibility of a negotiated settlement of the war and to deflect attention from NATO's turn to bombing civilian infrastructure (a legal war crime, adding to the "supreme international crime," both here protected by this body supposedly connected to "law" and protecting the peace!). The later kidnapping and transfer of Milosevic to the Hague was a violation of Yugoslav law and rulings of its courts. The ICTY's NATO service and contempt for the rule of law was manifest.

 

The original indictment of Milosevic dealt only with his responsibility for alleged war crimes in Kosovo. But as Laughland points out, the wild claims of mass killing and genocide in Kosovo were not sustainable by evidence, and NATO bombing may have killed as many Kosovo civilians as the Yugoslav army. This accentuated the problem that if the Milosevic indictment was limited to Kosovo it would be hard to justify trying him for Kosovo crimes but not NATO leaders, a point even acknowledged by the ICTY prosecutor. So two years after the first indictment, but after Milosevic's kidnapping and transfer to The Hague, the indictment was extended to cover Bosnia and Croatia. A bit awkward, given that back in 1995 when Mladic and Karadzic were indicted for crimes in Bosnia, Milosevic was exempted. There was also the problem that the Bosnian and Croatian Serbs were not under Serb and Milosevic authority after the declared independence of Bosnia and Croatia, and Milosevic fought with them continuously in an effort to get them to accept various peace plans 1992-1995 (documented in Sir David Owen's Balkan Odyssey, another important book neglected perhaps because of its contra-party line evidence).

 

So the prosecution sought to make the case for "genocide" by belatedly making Milosevic the boss in a "joint criminal enterprise" (JCE) to get rid of Croats and Muslims in a "Greater Serbia." The initial indictments that confined his alleged crimes to Kosovo never mentioned any participation in a JCE or drive for a "Greater Serbia." So the prosecution had to start over in collecting evidence for the crimes, JCE, and Greater Serbia aims in Bosnia and Croatia and tying them to Milosevic. Guilt decision first, then go for the evidence, was the rule for this political court. The trial moved ahead while the "evidence" was still being assembled. Most of it was the testimony of scores of alleged witnesses to alleged crimes, a large majority with hearsay evidence, and almost none of it bearing on Milosevic's decision-making or differentiating it from what could have been brought against Izetbegovic, Tudjman or Bill Clinton. Laughland shows very persuasively that the inordinate length of the trial was in no way related to Milosevic's performance--a lie beloved by Marlise Simons and the mainstream media in general--it was based on the fact that this was a political trial that inherently demanded massive evidence, and the prosecution, unprepared and struggling to make a concocted charge plausible, poured it on, trying to make up for lack of any documentation of their charges of a Milosevic-based plan and orders with sheer volume of irrelevant witnesses to civil warfare and Kosovo-war crimes and pain.

 

A key element in the prosecution case was the belated charge that Milosevic was involved in a "joint criminal enterprise" with Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia to get rid of non-Serbs by violence, looking toward that Greater Serbia. The concept of a JCE is not to be found in prior law or even in the ICTY Statute. It was improvised to allow the finding of guilt anywhere and anytime. You are part of a JCE if you are doing something bad along with somebody else, or are attacking the same parties with somebody who does something bad. With that common end you don't even have to know about what that somebody else is doing to be part of a JCE. Laughland has a devastating analysis of this wonderfully expansive and opportunistic doctrine, and his chapter dealing with it is entitled "Just convict everyone," based on a quote from a lawyer-supporter of the ICTY who finds the JCE a bit much. Milosevic probably would have been convicted based on this catch-all, or catch anyone, doctrine. Of course it fits much better the joint and purposeful Clinton, Blair, NATO attack on Yugoslavia, or the Croats U.S.-supported ethnic cleansing of Serbs from Croatian Krajina in August 1995, but there is nobody to enforce the JCE against them, whereas we have the ICTY to take care of U.S. and NATO targets!

 

Laughland has a fine chapter on Greater Serbia, which shows that Milosevic didn't start the breakup wars (even quoting prosecutor Nice admitting this), that he was no extreme nationalist and that accusations about his speeches of 1987 and 1989 are false, that his support of the Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia was fitful and largely defensive, and that he was not working toward a Greater Serbia but at most trying to enable Serbs in a disintegrating Yugoslavia to stay together. During Milosevic's trial defense, Serb Nationalist Party leader Vojislav Seselj claimed that only his party sought a "Greater Serbia," as the Croats and Bosnian Muslims were really Serbs with a different religion and his party fought to bring them all within Serbia - Milosevic only wanted the Serbs stranded in the breakaway states to be able to join Serbia. At that point the prosecutor Geoffrey Nice acknowledged that Milosevic was not aiming for a Greater Serbia, but, in Nice's words, only had the "pragmatic" goal of "ensuring that all the Serbs who had lived in the former Yugoslavia should be allowed...to live in the same unit." This caused some consternation among the trial judges, as Milosevic's aggressive drive for a Greater Serbia was at the heart of the ICTY case. You never heard about this? Understandably, as the New York Times and mainstream media never reported it, just as they never tried to reconcile Milosevic's support of serial peace moves with his alleged role as the aggressor seeking that Greater Serbia.

 

There is much more of value in Travesty and I can't do it justice even on the issues discussed here. This is a wonderful book that should be on the reading list of everyone looking for enlightenment on the confused and confusing issues involving the Balkan wars and "humanitarian intervention." It helps shred the notion that the NATO attacks were based on a morality that justified over-riding sovereignty and international law, and it shows decisively that the ICTY is a completely politicized rogue court that is a "corruption of international justice."

 

As Laughland emphasizes (and Johnstone and Mandel do as well), the NATO war and the work of the ICTY in running interference for that war, were very helpful in setting the stage for George Bush's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and possibly also, Iran. It was treated then, and remains treated today, as a "good war," a "humanitarian intervention." So those who swallowed the standard narrative, built on lies, at best failed to see the continuity between Clinton and Bush, and the service of the former and the publicists of the "good war" in removing the protection of the "anti-fascist theory of international relations" that protected small countries from Great Power aggression and unleashing the rule of the jungle.

___________

 

 

 

 

Marlise Simons and the New York Times on the International Court of Justice Decision on Serbia and Genocide in Bosnia: A Further Study in Total Propaganda Service

 

 

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=21&ItemID=12321

 

 

by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson

 

March 12, 2007

 

On many issues the New York Times serves as a propaganda organ of the state, latching onto a position that meets an ongoing state interest and then adhering undeviatingly to the party line that ensues. This was true on a stream of Cold War issues, including decades of inflated claims about the Soviet military threat, with the vastly greater U.S. military spending framed as if the U.S. were merely responding to a Soviet challenge;1 the Times editors also swallowed whole and steadily propagandized the false claim of Soviet involvement in the shooting of Pope John II in 1981.2 More recently, as is well known and even acknowledged by the Times editors, the paper played an important role in disseminating disinformation on Saddam's non-existent weapons of mass destruction (WMD), helping to set the stage for the U.S. invasion-occupation of Iraq.3

 

For years now, the New York Times has been riding a similar propaganda bandwagon on the wars and dismantlement of the former Yugoslavia—but in contrast to its performance over Iraq's non-existent WMDs, once the Times climbed aboard this bandwagon, in the early 1990s, it never climbed back down again. Like the rest of the establishment media in this country and elsewhere, the dominant frame to which the Times subscribed was helpful to longstanding elite interest in a NATO bloc expansion into Central and Eastern Europe that was activated by the collapse of the Soviet bloc. Accordingly, the Yugoslavia party line holds that some combination of Slobodan Milosevic and the clique around him in Belgrade, or even the ethno-national group of Serbs as a whole, were the cause of the Yugoslavia wars, and required both foreign intervention and the bypassing of the UN Charter and international law to set things right.4 The Times's obituary following the death of Milosevic in March 2006 repeated this version of history for what must have been the thousandth time: "Milosevic rose and then clung to power by resurrecting old nationalist grudges and inciting dreams of a Greater Serbia, and became the prime engineer of wars that pitted his fellow Serbs against the Slovenes, the Croats, the Bosnians, the Albanians of Kosovo and ultimately the combined forces of the entire NATO alliance….The Croats reacted by turning to their own nationalist, Franjo Tudjman, and so the stage was set for a deadly showdown between Yugoslavia's two largest ethnic groups, whose leaders manipulated centuries of historical differences…into a brutal civil war that spread from Croatia into Bosnia-Herzegovina. There, the Muslim plurality led by Alija Izetbegovic proved powerless to enlist sufficient international support to prevent Mr. Milosevic and Mr. Tudjman from trying to dismember his state. Three and a half years of war ravaged Bosnia, leading to some 200,000 deaths and the eviction of millions from homes in a practice that became known globally as ethnic cleansing."5

 

This basic narrative was drafted early in the wars, and was instilled through constant repetition as well as through the selection of stories, portrayal of characters, and the development of themes; alternative accounts were not only ignored, but their authors were frequently the targets of aggressive defamation campaigns. David Binder, the Times's fine reporter on the former Yugoslavia for many years, had been largely removed from this assignment by the end of 1993, quite obviously because he did not toe this party line but had continued to file reports that overstepped it, writing more complex analyses that did not focus simply on Serb villainy.6

 

By contrast, John F. Burns, whom the Times assigned to the former Yugoslavia at the start of 1992, was famous for his close relationship with Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic, and even won a Pulitzer Prize in 1993 based on his detailed reporting of the confessions of Bosnian Serb, Borislav Herak, then in the custody of Bosnian Muslim forces.7 While Herak's allegations about his "odyssey of brutality" (Burns) were extremely dubious from the start, and betrayed every sign of the syndrome of false memory under extreme duress, Herak's claims were very sexy, and, more important, they conformed to the already-established narrative of vicious, sadistic, genocidal Serbs driving the breakup of Yugoslavia. At his trial before a Sarajevo court in March 1993, Herak offered emotional testimony about "his part in, or his knowledge of, the deaths of at least 220 Muslims, including 12 women" (Burns).8 Eventually, however, a retraction by Herak along with other telling evidence demonstrated that Burns's star witness had provided false testimony based on threats by his Bosnian Muslim captors.9 But Burns suffered no ill-consequences—his Pulitzer was not withdrawn, nor did Burns surrender it. Instead, he remains a New York Times stalwart, and has filed hundreds of reports from Baghdad since the fall of 2002.

 

 

Enter Marlise Simons

 

After 1993, Burns's place as the Times's most frequently published byline on the Balkans was filled by a number of reporters. One was Marlise Simons, who, beginning in 1996, with the start of trials before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), reported regularly on the workings of the Tribunal, later becoming the Times's principal reporter on the Milosevic trial, and she still carries on that beat. Simons' record in dealing with Balkans issues has been one of undeviating accommodation to the establishment narrative, with an essentially perfect record of failing to ask critical questions or to report developments that do not conform to it. In a separate analysis of 120 Marlise Simons-bylined articles on the ICTY that the New York Times published through December 31, 2003, we showed that Simons' bias was both systematic and comprehensive.10 From how Simons framed a story (always adhering to that of the Western establishment), to her sourcing (excluding all serious critics of the ICTY), to her word usage and tone (see the table below), all the way to selectivity in her choice of evidence (she uses the “preferential method”)—we found it "hard to believe that the Soviet media at the time of the Moscow show trials in 1936 could have done a better job on behalf of the Soviet prosecutor than Simons has done for the ICTY's prosecutors."11

 

We reproduce here a Table on Simons's word-usage from our earlier work, a dramatic and almost comic illustration of this Times reporter's bias.12

---

 

MARLISE SIMONS’ WORD USAGE

 

Slobodan Milosevic Prosecutors Louise Arbour and Carla Del Ponte; Judge Richard May

 

Infamous Forceful (Arbour)

 

Sniped Resolute (Arbour)

 

Scoffed New assertiveness (Arbour)

 

Smirk on his face Very capable (Arbour)

 

Speechmaking No-nonsense style (Arbour)

 

Badgers the simple conscripts Tough crime fighter (Del Ponte)

 

Carping Unswerving prosecutor (Del Ponte)

 

Blustery defense Natural fighter (Del Ponte)

 

Loud and aggressive Unrelenting hunter (Del Ponte)

 

Notorious Finding the truth (Del Ponte)

 

Defiant Keeping tight control (May)

 

Reverted to sarcasm Patiently repeated questions (May)

 

Contemptuous Sober, polite and tough (May)

 

Outbursts Expert on evidence (May)

 

Face often distorted with anger Among the best suited (May)

---

 

 

This differential word usage cannot be explained on the grounds that the ICTY's former Chief Prosecutor Louise Arbour, but not Milosevic, was “resolute” and “forceful,” and that Richard May, the former Presiding Judge at the trial, was only “sober, polite and tough,” whereas Milosevic was “contemptuous” and “carping.” John Laughland writes that May was “stubborn and aggressive" and "behaved rudely towards Milosevic throughout the trial,” while “exceedingly indulgent to the prosecutor.”13 The noted Toronto lawyer Edward L. Greenspan, commenting on the opening days of the Milosevic trial, was immediately impressed with the fact that May “clearly reviles Milosevic” and “doesn’t even feign impartiality, or indeed, interest.”14 But Simons would never call this attitude, so obvious to Laughland and Greenspan, “contemptuous.” Numerous trial observers have noted how May continuously interfered with Milosevic's cross-examinations in a manner that could reasonably be called “carping” and far worse. But not Simons—she reserves such words strictly for the bad man. During the Prosecution testimony by former NATO General Wesley Clark, May interrupted Milosevic’s cross-examination at least 60 times, but didn’t bother Clark once, even as Clark spent many minutes discoursing on matters that had no bearing on the trial charges.15 Simons never mentioned this, nor did she note that during his period as witness Clark was allowed to telephone Bill Clinton to get from him a faxed statement, contrary to previously firm courtroom procedures as enforced by May.

 

During the course of her reporting on the Milosevic trial, Simons often referred to Milosevic's and the Serbs' quest for a “Greater Serbia” as a central charge of the prosecution.16 But during the defense phase of the Milosevic trial, when the Serbian Radical Party leader and fellow ICTY indictee Vojislav Seselj was called to the witness stand, an exchange took place on the fourth and final day of his testimony in which prosecutor Geoffrey Nice acknowledged that Milosevic himself never advocated a "Greater Serbia," and didn’t even believe in the concept, as Seselj did. What Milosevic really wanted, Nice explained, was "first of all that the former Yugoslavia shouldn't be broken up because he argued, well, then, if they [i.e., Serbs] all live in the same place one where they can do it in is the former Yugoslavia."17 But this startling admission in court by the chief prosecutor in the Milosevic trial, that the defendant accused of being the fountainhead of Yugoslavia's breakup wanted instead to preserve the common state, was never reported by Simons or any of her colleagues at the Times.18

 

 

Simons and the Times on the International Criminal Court Decision

 

More recently, Marlise Simons has written two articles on the judgment by another tribunal, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Case Concerning the Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (better known as Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro, or simply Bosnia v. Serbia).19 Both of these articles, as well as a Times editorial covering the same ground, which Simons may have authored or co-authored, will be the focus of the balance of this article.20

 

First initiated in 1993 by the Muslim government of Bosnia and Herzegovina against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the case was finally argued before the ICJ in 2006. On February 26 of this year, the ICJ published a Judgment exonerating Serbia of any direct responsibility for the crimes committed against the male population of the Srebrenica "safe area" following its evacuation in July 1995, but also finding that Serbia "failed to take all measures within its power to prevent" the commission of these crimes.21

 

The New York Times and Marlise Simons headlined her initial article “Court Declares Bosnia Killings Were Genocide,” adding the subhead “Serbia is Faulted but Cleared of the Crime” (February 27). Simons' lead sentence affirmed that "The International Court of Justice…for the first time called the massacre of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica in 1995 an act of genocide…." The Times editorial later repeated the line that "The World Court…concluded that genocide did take place…" (March 5). And in her first follow-up article, Simons again repeated the line that "The judges ruled that Bosnian Serb troops committed genocide against Muslims in 1995 in Srebrenica" (March 6). Similar assertions about what the ICJ declared or determined or ruled or found (etc.) comprise the main frame describing the Judgment, and its ubiquity is fairly close to total.22

 

But this framing of the decision is dishonest for many reasons. One is that this case was about Serbia’s responsibility for the Srebrenica killings, which the ICJ denied but the Times did not feature. A second reason is that the “declaration” of the ICJ that this was a case of "genocide" was not based on any independent investigation by the ICJ itself, but was derivative—in fact, the ICJ imported from the ICTY's rulings in its Krstic and Blagojevic cases, as well as the UN Secretary-General's 1999 report The Fall of Srebrenica, an already-existing determination to this effect,23 and undertook no investigative effort to confirm or disconfirm it. This resulted in large measure from the fact that, by the date the oral pleadings were heard by the ICJ in 2006, Serbia's defense strategy was to bypass all questions related to the fate of the Srebrenica "safe area" population, which are complex and would have required a major research effort, and to focus on the narrower question of Serbia's responsibility for whatever actions the Bosnian Serbs themselves may have taken. Since Serbia addressed only the so-called "evidence of attribution" produced against it by Bosnia, the ICJ avoided the more fundamental matter before it, and merely quoted the ICTY's findings of "genocide," employing them contextually in an ex cathedra fashion without itself opening this critical question. Although this was the only case ever to be argued before the ICJ under the Genocide Convention, and though the Judgment is replete with mentions of "genocide,"24 the 15 voting-judges at the ICJ produced no finding on whether the Srebrenica-related killings constituted genocide—as anyone who checks paragraph 471 of the Judgment can plainly see.

 

The ICJ's exoneration of Serbia from responsibility for the events at Srebrenica was especially important because the entire case against Milosevic that had been before the other court, on which Simons and the Times lavished such great attention, turned on his alleged master-minding and control of the indigenous Serb forces in Croatia and Bosnia. As John Laughland immediately pointed out, “Slobodan Milosevic was posthumously exonerated… when the international court of justice ruled that Serbia was not responsible for the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica.”25 Even former ICTY President Antonio Cassese—clearly unhappy with the Judgment—understood what it meant: "Serbia was not responsible under international law," he wrote; "Nor was Serbia guilty of complicity." Most important of all, Cassese added that "if former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic were alive, he would be absolved of the charge of genocide."26 Equally clear—though even more openly hostile toward the outcome—was Ruth Wedgwood, Johns Hopkins University international law professor and career-apologist for U.S. lawlessness, including acts of aggression, torture, the abandonment of habeas corpus and probable cause protections, and anything else required to serve the immediate needs of the imperial state.27 "The court's judgment has broad implications," Wedgwood noted in a long and bitter commentary that visually dominated the Times's op-ed page. "It amounts to a posthumous acquittal of Mr. Milosevic for genocide in Bosnia."28 But in the Simons-Times treatment of this subject, there is not a hint of the connection or parallel that exists between the ICJ's exoneration of Serbia, on the one hand, and the status of the same category of charges brought against Milosevic in his serial indictments at the ICTY, on the other. This strategic silence continues the pattern of suppression of inconvenient facts and lines of thought noted earlier as regards Simons' failure to report the collapse of the "Greater Serbia" charge during the Seselj phase of the Milosevic defense.

 

The Times's editorial states that the ICJ “established the official complicity of the former Serbian government.” This is an egregious misrepresentation—in fact, the ICJ's Judgment even uses the word complicity in stating the opposite from what the Times claims: namely, "that Serbia has not been complicit in genocide" (Par. 471, Part (4), emphasis added). The ICJ claimed that the Serb government should have taken active steps to prevent the Srebrenica killings, but “complicity” implies control or some form of participation. Furthermore, as the ICJ contends that the Srebrenica killings were not preplanned, but driven more or less by on-the-spot decisions and actions, it is not even clear that the Serbian government could have done anything about the killings. It is also not clear why the ICJ singled out the Serbian government for failure to act, rather than the UN Protection Force (UNPROFOR) and the NATO governments that were physically present within Bosnia at the time and therefore arguably in a better position to know and to act than the Serbian government.

 

As regards Serbia's "breaching it obligation of prevention," the ICJ argued that "it does not need to be proved that the State concerned definitely had the power to prevent genocide; it is sufficient that it had the means to do so and that it manifestly refrained from using them."29 But any court taking this argument seriously would have no choice but to find the United States in breach of the same obligation—it had the means and obviously failed to use them. The ICJ also stated that "The FRY leadership, and President Milosevic above all, were fully aware of the climate of deep-seated hatred which reigned between the Bosnian Serbs and the Muslims in the Srebrenica region."30 But so was everyone else. Moreover, the Serbian government's armed forces had been withdrawn from Bosnia, but UNPROFOR was still in place, as was NATO's newly created Rapid Reaction Force, and these forces exercised complete control of the skies. Neither the Simons articles nor the editorial mention these considerations.

 

Simons quotes the ICJ on “deep-seated hatred,” but neither here nor in the earlier sample of her 120-bylined articles that we studied does she discuss the roots of this hatred—most notably Naser Oric's frequent rampages against local Serbs from his armed camp in Srebrenica, from which Oric made videos of beheaded Serbs that he proudly showed to Western correspondents, reported elsewhere, but never by the New York Times.31 In her article here Simons mentions that during the 1992-1995 wars in Bosnia, Srebrenica was declared a “haven and the UN promised to protect it.” And she adds that, in July l995, “Serb forces…seized control of the enclave and killed almost every Bosnian Muslim man and boy captured there.” But neither here nor in her 120 earlier articles does Simons mention that the UN also promised to disarm these "safe areas,"32 but failed to do so, allowing them to be used as protected bases for Bosnian Muslim attacks in eastern Bosnia that killed several thousand Serb civilians. This might give meaning to the “deep-seated hatred” that Simons and the Times mention but fail to explain.

 

Simons states that “International organizations say more than 100,000 people died between 1992 and 1995, two-thirds of them Bosnian Muslims.” Not “international organizations,” but researchers sponsored by the ICTY itself and by NATO governments.33 “More than 100,000” is also misleading in that both study projects gave the figure of just about 100,000. This slight inflation by Simons is a small residue of the long-standing inflation of Bosnian Muslim fatalities that up to very recently held that 200,000 to 300,000 had been killed; Simons herself stood by this figure, produced by Bosnian Muslim officials, up to very recent times, and as quoted above, the Times's obituary notice on Milosevic was still using the 200,000 figure as late as March 2006, long after the two research groups had provided the 100,000 figure. It was awkward that all this enormous attention to Bosnia and an alleged “genocide” should be based on a figure shrunken by one-half to two-thirds below the conventional untruth, and Simons does this reluctantly. Note also her mention that two-thirds were Bosnian Muslims—a fact that gets the number of Bosnian Muslim deaths down to 66,000. But Simons fails to mention that this includes soldiers, approximately half the total, a fact which in turn would get the grand total of Bosnian Muslim civilians killed down to 33,000. Nor can Simons bring herself to mention the figure of 16,000 Serb civilians estimated to have been killed in this fighting.34

 

Simons gives the figure of 8,000 “men and boys” killed at Srebrenica (Simons has never noted that many and perhaps most “boys“ were among the women and children bussed to safety by the Serbs in July 1995). The killings there were declared by the ICTY to constitute genocide.35 Of course Simons and the Times have never challenged the legitimacy or independence and integrity of the ICTY, an institution which was organized, funded, staffed and de facto controlled by the United States and Britain, and which served U.S. and NATO aims from beginning to end.36 John Laughland’s excellent book Travesty, dealing with the ICTY and trial of Milosevic, may be a study in “The Corruption of International Justice,” as his subtitle affirms, but no trace of such a critical thought can be found anywhere in Simons or the Times. Nor can Simons and the Times even be bothered with reporting accurately the ICTY’s decision as regards numbers—in the Krstic Judgment (August, 2001), the ICTY faced the problem that considerably fewer than 3,000 bodies had been found in the Srebrenica area and an untold number of them were killed in fighting during the Bosnian Muslim retreat from Srebrenica. The ICTY judges in the end simply guessed that a majority of the "well in excess of 7,000 people" alleged missing had been executed, which would make their judgment about that genocide based on an uncertain figure possibly far short of 8,000.37 But Simons and the Times prefer the larger number, just as for years they stood by the 200,000 - 250,000 figures for overall deaths in Bosnia.

 

Simons and the Times have never uttered a critical word on the ICTY's designation of the Srebrenica massacre as “genocide.” It fits their biases—just as allegations about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction once did, and allegations about Milosevic's quest for a "Greater Serbia" still do. In these circumstances, their investigative zeal—even their willingness to think critically in any fashion—completely shuts down. Can it be genocide where the perpetrator takes the trouble to ensure that all the women and children are bussed to safety? When the killings in fighting are hard to disentangle from executions, and only some 2,028 bodies are recovered in the area after six years of searching?38 When even on the ICTY’s judgment, which was not based on hard evidence and is therefore speculation, only possibly 4,001 executions took place? When, as the ICJ concludes, any decisions to execute large numbers were taken by local commanders, and may have been based on a vengeance motive that is local in nature? And when there is not the slightest evidence of any larger plan to exterminate the Bosnian Muslims? Can we have genocide in one small town, as the ICTY would have it? Isn’t this a degradation of the word genocide? A denial of the event for which the word was coined, along with the Convention bearing its name? And an insult to the memory of the victims?

 

No such thoughts ever make it into the New York Times.

 

We believe that the ICJ’s adoption of the ICTY's conclusion about "genocide" was a serious error, and one that will exact negative consequences for a long time to come. Even a cursory examination of the ICTY's judgments in the Krstic and Blagojevic cases show them to be based on extremely thin evidence, illogical and poorly argued as law, highly emotional pleadings, and an untenable misuse of a much abused word. For the ICJ to reiterate this very problematic claim by a nominally judicial, but de facto political, organ shows that in the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Yugoslavia, the ICJ elected to treat the contentious issues before it within the safe framework of established, NATO-friendly truths. In so doing, the ICJ, for the second time in less than a decade, helped to advance the anti-Serb campaign of the NATO-ICTY bloc.39

 

Nowhere does the ICJ more clearly give this shape than in its ruling that by failing to transfer to the ICTY any persons indicted by it for genocide, Serbia has violated its obligations under the Genocide Convention, and must immediately comply, "in particular in respect of General Ratko Mladic."40 This ruling helps the NATO-ICTY political program in the former Yugoslavia, and Simons is keenly aware of the fact. Her March 6 article assembled "several legal experts" to show how the ruling creates new political leverage over the Republic of Serbia and the Bosnian Serbs. Former ICTY President Antonio Cassese warned of the "great moral weight attached" to the judgment, which "creates new pressures" and "all sorts of obstacles for Belgrade…." Simons' other sources included the ICTY's Chief Prosecutor Carla Del Ponte; onetime Clinton envoy to the ICTY and point-man in keeping the crime of aggression out of the International Criminal Court's jurisdiction, David Scheffer; and Phon van den Biesen, a "Dutch lawyer and a leader of the Bosnian legal team," who conducted several of the plaintiff's oral pleadings before the ICJ.

 

In other words, Simons used her follow-up article as a platform for sources who have devoted major parts of their careers to advocating against Serbia. And she marshaled each of these figures to issue warnings to Serbia: Until it arrests and transfers to the ICTY the five indictees still at large, "this is bound to have an adverse effect on decisions around Europe" (van den Biesen). Missing was so much as a single legal expert who did not feed Simons similar threats about the "international repercussions" Serbia risks by not doing what the ICTY demands (Scheffer). "The ruling," she writes, "associates Serbia's present government with the scourge of genocide, even if it happened under the past government of Slobodan Milosevic." This is a misleading half-truth, of course: As we've noted, the ruling exonerates Serbia of any responsibility for Srebrenica-related killings, and posthumously does the same for Milosevic. But Simons' real point here is political, not factual: The "scourge of genocide" is an epithet, a smear to be spread across the collective, much as "Milosevic's willing executioners" used to be.41

 

Simons and the New York Times display unconditional respect for the work of the ICJ in this case. This contrasts sharply with their reaction to the ICJ decisions in the case of Nicaragua v. United States (1986) and the case concerning the Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (2004). In Bosnia v. Serbia, the ICJ decision is somewhat favorable to the side that the Times supports, and as we have indicated, Simons and the editors twist, misinterpret, and inflate its weak and inconsistent finding that Serbia breached its "obligation to prevent genocide" to yield a more favorable result than the decision itself merits. In the Nicaragua case, however, the ICJ concluded quite forcefully that the United States had breached its obligations "not to use force against another state," "not to violate the sovereignty of another state," and "not to intervene in the affairs of another state"—and unlike Serbia, was ordered to make reparations to Nicaragua.42 The Times responded to this judgment by calling the ICJ a “hostile forum” and “tendentious,” and in a blatant illustration of their willingness to disregard international law when it works against their own country's policies, they raised no objection when the Reagan administration rejected the ruling, and terminated the U.S. acceptance of the ICJ's compulsory jurisdiction that had dated back to 1946.43 Similarly, in the case of Israel's apartheid wall, though the ICJ ruled on an advisory basis that its construction is "contrary to international law" as it applies to an occupying military power, and noting that Israel is obligated to "dismantle forthwith the structure" and "make reparations for all damage caused by its construction,"44 the Times warned that the "Palestinians will fashion the nonbinding ruling from The Hague into a political battering ram," but otherwise soft-peddled the issue, and urged no steps to be taken by Israel or the international community to stop construction.45 Nor was there any editorial follow-up as construction of the barrier has continued.

 

On these two gravely important issues—"genocide" and the "supreme international crime" or aggression—the ICJ has shown a troubling proclivity to run in parallel with the ICTY. For its part, the ICTY does not concern itself with the "supreme international crime," the Nuremberg-class crime that the ICTY's sponsors committed when they attacked Yugoslavia in 1999 (and, later, Afghanistan and Iraq as well);46 but it is very aggressive in pursuing lesser crimes, as it has done on a selective basis in the case of Yugoslavia. Similarly, Yugoslavia in 1999 failed to persuade the ICJ to hear its case against NATO without first securing the consent of the military alliance then attacking it; needless to say, none was forthcoming. But several years later, this time cast in the defendant's role, Yugoslavia was brought before the same ICJ, and a verdict rendered. What this plainly shows is that the international system, even at the highest level embodied by the International Court of Justice, the "principal judicial organ of the United Nations," systematically fails to address crimes against the peace when committed by supreme international criminals, but somehow or other makes itself available to pursue lesser criminals, even those whose crimes occur as they resist the perpetrators of the “supreme international crime.”

 

It is remarkable that with all the mass killings of the post-war period, the ICJ and the world media featured Bosnia - Herzegovina, and Srebrenica in particular, as the first test-case in which the application of the Genocide Convention to armed conflict was adjudicated. In the case of Bosnia, the grand total of civilian deaths in the years 1992-1995 was on the order of 66,000; and in the case of Srebrenica, the ICTY's "likely" total was a “majority” of 7,000 - 8,000 (i.e., some indeterminate value over 3,500), mainly or entirely military-aged men. So this still counts as “genocide,” and worthy of concentrated attention. But the 200,000 mainly civilian deaths in East Timor, a million deaths from the “sanctions of mass destruction” in Iraq, the possibly half-million Iraqi deaths in the wake of the U.S.-British invasion-occupation of 2003-2007, the several million killed during the U.S. aggression against Vietnam and all of Southeast Asia, 1962-1975—each of these fail to qualify for adjudication and punishment for “genocide.”

 

This harks back to the wise aphorism that “The greater the crime, the smaller the penalty.” But that, in turn, rests on a simple rule—that the powerful define whom the terrorists and genocidists are, and exempt themselves and their allies. This is why, in John Laughland’s words, contemporary adjudications are a “travesty” and “corruption of international justice.”

 

 

---- Endnotes ----

 

1. See Tom Gervasi, The Myth of Soviet Military Supremacy (Harper and Row, 1986), pp. 119-126. Also see Edward S. Herman, "All the News Fit To Print, Part II: Covering the Cold War," Z Magazine, May, 1998.

 

2. See Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (Pantheon, 2nd Ed., 2001), Introduction, pp. xxvii-xxix; and Ch. 4, "The KGB - Bulgarian Plot to Kill the Pope: Free-Market Disinformation as 'News'," pp. 143-167.

 

3. Although the New York Times's famous mea culpa was at best partial and confined, we nevertheless regard it as the classic case because we do not believe that the Times as an institution has ever acknowledge this degree of culpability about its erroneous coverage of a story of this magnitude over as long a period of time. See "The Times and Iraq," New York Times, May 26, 2004. Also see Michael Massing, Now They Tell Us: The American Press and Iraq (New York Review Books, 2004); and Eric Boehlert, Lapdogs: How the Press Roller Over for Bush (Free Press, 2006).

 

4. For a superb analysis of this party line, see David Chandler, The 'Butcher of the Balkans'? The Crime of 'Joint Criminal Enterprise' and the Miloševic Indictments at the International Criminal Tribunal at The Hague, University of Westminster, U.K., 2006.

 

5. Marlise Simons, "Slobodan Milosevic, 64, Former Yugoslav Leader Accused of War Crimes, Dies," New York Times, March 12, 200

 

6. We estimate that since the New York Times published David Binder's interview with Milovan Djilas in his Belgrade apartment on December 23, 1993, the Times has published no more than 19 articles under the Binder byline that touched on some aspect of the former Yugoslavia, including the paper's obituaries for Franjo Tudjman (December 11, 1999) and Alija Izetbegovic (October 20, 2003). Subsequent to 1993, Binder had to resort to alternative media to challenge the standard line; e.g., David Binder, "Bosnia's Bombers," The Nation, October 2, 1995.

 

7. John F. Burns, "A Killer's Tale. A Serbian Fighter's Path of Brutality," New York Times, November 27, 1992.

 

8. John F. Burns, "Bosnia War Crime Trial Hears Serb's Confession," New York Times, March 14, 1993.

 

9. It turns out that reporters from Burns's own paper have helped to discredit his Pulitzer Prize-winning work: See Kit R. Roane, "Symbol of Inhumanity in Bosnia Now Says 'Not Me'," New York Times, January 31, 1996; Chris Hedges, "Jailed Serb's 'Victims' Found Alive, Embarrassing Bosnia," New York Times, March 1, 1997; and Jonathan Randal, "Serb Convicted of Murders Demanding Retrial After 2 'Victims' Found Alive," Washington Post, March 15, 1997.

 

10. See Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, "Marlise Simons on the Yugoslavia Tribunal: A Study in Total Propaganda Service," ZNet, 2004.

 

11. Ibid.

 

12. Ibid. Each of the descriptive terms reproduced in Table 2 derive from a sample of 120 Marlise Simons-bylined reports published in the New York Times through December 31, 2003.

 

13. John Laughland, Travesty: The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic and the Corruption of International Justice (Pluto Press, 2007), p. 69, p. 157.

 

14. Edward L. Greenspan, "This is a lynching," National Post, March 13, 2002. Greenspan's observations were formed on the basis of his reading transcripts of the trial.

 

15. Michael Mandel, How America Gets Away With Murder: Illegal Wars, Collateral Damage, and Crimes Against Humanity (Pluto Press, 2004), pp. 169-170.

 

16. As early as February 16, 1990, Marlise Simons reported for the Times from the Croatian capital of Zagreb that "Politicians from some smaller republics like Slovenia fear the rise of Serbian nationalism, saying it reflects aspirations to return to the era and borders of what was once known as Greater Serbia" ("Serbian-Albanian Conflict Reverberating Across Yugoslavia"). Eleven years later, she wrote that "Carla Del Ponte had argued that the conflicts and charges of war crimes in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo all belonged in one trial because they were part of the same strategy by Mr. Milosevic to create what he saw as an ethnically pure Greater Serbia" ("Yugoslavia: Milosevic Prosecutor Wants One Trial," December 20, 2001).

 

17. Milosevic Trial Transcript, August 25, 2005, pp. 43226 - 43228. In this remarkable exchange, the South Korean Judge O-Gon Kwon asked Prosecutor Geoffrey Nice "how you understand the difference of the Greater Serbia idea and the idea of one -- all Serbs living in one state. How do you understand?" Nice replied: "It may be that the accused's aim was for that which could qualify as a de facto Greater Serbia, yes. Did he -- did he find the source of his position, for I don't wish to identify it as an ideology or a platform. Did he find the source of his position at least overtly in historical concept of Greater Serbia; no, he didn't. His was perhaps to borrow His Honour Judge Robinson's term or was stated to be the pragmatic one of ensuring that all the Serbs who had lived in the former Yugoslavia should be allowed for either constitutional or other reasons to live in the same unit. That meant as we know historically from his perspective first of all that the former Yugoslavia shouldn't be broken up because he argued, well, then, if they all live in the same place one where they can do it in the former Yugoslavia" (p. 43227).—As best we can tell, no major English-language news source—and certainly no print source—has ever reported this remarkable admission by Nice.

 

18. As noted earlier, as late as the obituary on Milosevic that she drafted for the New York Times in March 2006, Marlise Simons repeated the line that "he rose and then clung to power by resurrecting old nationalist grudges and inciting dreams of a Greater Serbia." See note 5, above.

 

19. See Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (or Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro), International Court of Justice, February 26, 2007.

 

20. See Marlise Simons, “Court Declares Bosnia Killings Were Genocide: Serbia Is Faulted but Cleared of the Crime,” New York Times, February 27, 2007; “Taking Genocide to Court,” Editorial, New York Times, March 5, 2007; and Marlise Simons, "Mixed Ruling on Genocide Still Puts Pressure on Serbia," New York Times, March 6, 2007.—Note that the cutoff date for the present analysis is March 6, 2007.

 

21. See Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro, par. 471. Here we emphasize the inconsistency between the ICJ's findings in parts (2), (3), (4), and (9), on the one hand, and parts (5) and (7), on the other. In the first set of findings, the ICJ clearly exonerates Serbia of any role in Srebrenica-related crimes; but in the second, the ICJ finds Serbia in violation of its obligations to have taken steps to prevent the very same Srebrenica-related crimes for which the ICJ exonerates Serbia of responsibility!

 

22. Examples of this framing of the ICJ's Judgment abound. "The ICJ has ruled that genocide did occur" (Richard Dicker, Human Rights Watch). "The court ruled that the mass murder of almost 8,000 Bosnian Muslim males at Srebrenica …was indeed an act of genocide" (Ian Traynor, The Guardia