- An organization calling itself Reporters Without Borders
(RWB; French: Reporters sans frontières, or RSF) has just named
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, China's President Hu Jintao, Iran's
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Kazakhstan's Nursultan Nazarbayev and Belarus President
Aleksandr Lukashenko to their list of Forty Worst Predators of Press Freedom
for 2010. Most significant about their list of 'bad guys' is the geopolitical
relation of those leaders and those countries to the current 'enemies list'
of the US State Department. That is no accident, as becomes clear when
we look more closely at who funds RWB.
-
- In their declaration RWB states, "Since these predators
have faces, we must know them to better denounce them. Reporters without
Borders has decided to draw their portraits." Their colourful language
is no accident. The term predator conjures up images of horror in most
people.
-
- In their latest 'Evil Guys' list just released they remark
about Russia's Putin: "As well as manipulating groups and institutions,
Putin has promoted a climate of pumped-up national pride that encourages
the persecution of dissidents and freethinkers and fosters a level of impunity
that is steadily undermining the rule of law." RWB said that Putin,
"the former KGB officer," has exerted so much control over all
aspects of life in Russia that "the national TV stations now speak
with a single voice." Interestingly enough, the citation and a report
of the naming of Putin appeared in an article in the Russian state-owned
media, RIA Novosti.
-
- With respect to China, RWB states: "In honour of
the Shanghai World Expo, the biggest display of Chinese might (sic) since
the 2008 Olympic Games, Reporters Without Borders has for the past week
been inviting Internet users to visit a specially created page on its website
dedicated to the freedoms that are flouted in China."
-
- Perhaps just as important as the list of bad guys from
RWB are the names that are not on it. One might ask why names of such world-class
enemies of free speech and press freedom as Georgia's dictator, President
Mikhail Saakashvili, or the former Ukraine President Viktor Yushchenko,
or the recently deposed dictator of Kyrgyzstan, Bakiyev are absent. All
three came to power in Washington-backed coups, also termed Color Revolutions.
Notably, all the persons just named by RWB as "predators" have
been targets of Washington-financed destabilization attempts in recent
years.
-
- Who stands behind RWB?
-
- The slick media image that RWB presents to the world,
such as using the term "predators," is no accident. It is the
product of RWB's ad agency. Announcing the list of forty on May 3 on their
website, RWB states, "The list of Predators of Press Freedom is released
today, backed by a campaign ad produced by the Saatchi & Saatchi agencyThere
are 40 names on this year's list of predatorsthat cannot stand the press,
treat it as an enemy and directly attack journalists. They are powerful,
dangerous, violent and above the law."
-
- Saatchi & Saatchi is one of the world's most influential
"hidden persuaders" or PR firms. They are credited with the campaign
that brought Margaret Thatcher to power and are the ad firm for Gordon
Brown's Labour Party. Clients have included Citigroup, Hewlett-Packard,
DuPont, Proctor & Gamble. One might ask where RWB gets the finances
to hire such elite advisors?
-
- NED hiding behind RWB
-
- The most interesting question is not the deeds of Hu
Jintao or Putin or Ahmadinejad in the last year in relation to their national
press, but rather who is judging these leaders. We might well ask, "Who
judges the judges?" The answer is, Washington.
-
- Reporters Without Borders is an international Non-Governmental
Organization (NGO). According to its website it is headquartered in Paris,
France. Paris is a curious home base for an organization that, as it turns
out, is financed by the US Congress and by agencies tied to the US government.
-
- If we go to the RWB website to find who stands behind
these self-anointed judges of world press freedom, we find nothing. Not
even their board of directors are named, let alone their financial backers.
Their annual published Income and Expenditure statements give no clue who
stands behind them financially.
-
- Millions of dollars of their annual income are disclosed
as being from "sale of publications." It does not name the publications
or to whom they were sold. As one researcher noted, "Even taking into
account that the books are published for free, it would have had to sell
170 200 books in 2004 and 188 400 books in 2005 to earn the more than $2
million the organization claims to make each year - 516 books per day in
2005. The money clearly had to come from other sources, as it turns out
it did." An attempt to go on the RWB website to order any of their
publications found no link to any purchasing information nor any price
listings or book summary. Very curious indeed.
-
- In their official financial statements and income accounts
published in September 2009, they state: "The organisation's finances
in 2008 were marked by the end of the campaign (begun in 2001) over the
2008 Beijing Olympic Games which significantly affected income and expenditure."
That means RWB spent eight years and undisclosed amounts of money campaigning
against the Government of China in the run-up to the Beijing 2008 Olympics.
For what purpose? Notably, the RWB names China's President Hu Jintao as
this year's 'predator' for his actions in cracking down on unrest in Tibet
in March 2010 and Xinjiang in July 2009, both of which were the covert
work of a US-financed NGO called National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
Hmmm.
-
- After years of trying to hide it, Robert Menard, Paris-based
Secretary-General of Reporters Sans Frontieres or RWB, confessed that the
RWB budget was primarily funded by "US organizations strictly linked
to US foreign policy." Those US organizations behind RWB include the
Open Society Foundation of billionaire speculator, George Soros, the US
Agency for International Development (USAID) and the US Congress' National
Endowment for Democracy (NED). Also included is the Center for Free Cuba,
whose trustee, Otto Reich, was forced to resign from the George W. Bush
Administration after exposure of his role in a CIA-backed coup attempt
against Venezuela's democratically elected President Hugo Chavez.
-
- As one researcher found after months of trying to get
a reply from NED about their funding of Reporters Without Borders, which
included a flat denial from RSF executive director Lucie Morillon, the
NED revealed that Reporters Without Borders received grants over at least
three years from the International Republican Institute. The IRI is one
of four subsidiaries of NED.
-
- The NED, as I detail in my book, Full Spectrum Dominance:Totalitarian
Democracy in the New World Order, was created by the US Congress during
the Reagan administration on the initiative of then-CIA Director Bill Casey
to replace the CIA's civil society covert action programs, which had been
exposed by the Church committee in the mid-1970s. As Allen Weinstein, the
man who drafted the legislation creating the NED admitted years later,
"A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA."
-
- Perhaps an organization sitting as judge of world press
freedom ought itself to practice a little more openness and transparency
about where its backing originates. Otherwise we might think they have
something to hide.
-
-
- F. William Engdahl is also author of the book, Gods of
Money: Wall Street and the Death of the American Century, available at
end of May 2010. He may be reached via his website at www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net
-
-
-
- Endnotes
-
-
- RIA Novosti, RSF names Putin, Kadyrov freedom "predators,"
RIA Novisti, Moscow, May 4, 2010, accessed in http://en.rian.ru/world/20100504/158862330.html
-
- Reporters Without Borders website, Reporters without
Borders works on all fronts, May 3, 2010, accessed in http://en.rsf.org/reporters-sans-frontieres-sur-tous-03-05-2010,37337.html
-
- Ibid.
-
- Diana Barahona, Reporters Without Borders and Washington's
Coups, ZNet, August 2, 2006, accessed in http://www.zcommunications.org/reporters-without
-borders-and-washingtons-coups-by-diana-barahona
-
- Reporters Without Borders, Income and Expenditures to
end December 2008, published September 7, 2009, accessed in http://en.rsf.org/income-and-expenditure-07-09-2009,34401
-
- Source Watch, Reporters Without Borders, accessed in http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Reporters_Without_Borders
-
- Ibid.
-
- Diana Barahona, op.cit.
-
- Allen Weinstein, quoted in David Ignatius, Openness
is the Secret to Democracy, Washington Post National Weekly Edition, 30
September 1991, pp. 24-25.
|
