Media Follies, Part 3
U.N. official slams U.S. as 'stingy' over aid.'
... or not.
(U.N. Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland) ...referred to 'wealthy states' and 'donor states,' but at no time did he single out the United States. In fact, when a reporter asked Egeland to name the countries he believed to be "stingy," he pointedly declined to do so...
"It is beyond me why are we so stingy, really," the Norwegian-born U.N. official told reporters. "Christmastime should remind many Western countries at least, [of] how rich we have become."
And then there's the "UN" oil for food scandal!
Or, you know, there isn't.
But the simple and largely unreported fact is that there is no UN oil-for-food scandal. What we know from a number of sources, including an oft-cited GAO report [PDF], is that there was a Ba’ath Party oil-for-food swindle, in which Iraqi officials extracted ‘overcharges’ and kickbacks from big multinationals, then laundered the loot through a number of foreign banks. And then there’s a rumor that some UN officials were involved.
... or not.
(U.N. Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland) ...referred to 'wealthy states' and 'donor states,' but at no time did he single out the United States. In fact, when a reporter asked Egeland to name the countries he believed to be "stingy," he pointedly declined to do so...
"It is beyond me why are we so stingy, really," the Norwegian-born U.N. official told reporters. "Christmastime should remind many Western countries at least, [of] how rich we have become."
And then there's the "UN" oil for food scandal!
Or, you know, there isn't.
But the simple and largely unreported fact is that there is no UN oil-for-food scandal. What we know from a number of sources, including an oft-cited GAO report [PDF], is that there was a Ba’ath Party oil-for-food swindle, in which Iraqi officials extracted ‘overcharges’ and kickbacks from big multinationals, then laundered the loot through a number of foreign banks. And then there’s a rumor that some UN officials were involved.
posted by Management at 8:28 PM
3 Comments:
As jaded as I am, it's still surprising to catch an American newspaper--even an ideological rag like the Washington Times--blatantly fabricating a story out of whole cloth.
But that's just what Bill Sammon did in today's edition.
His headline reads: 'U.N. official slams U.S. as 'stingy' over aid.' But if you think somewhere in the piece there'd be a comment criticizing the U.S. for being, I dunno, 'stingy over aid,' you'd be wrong. Sammon couldn't pull a quote because the 'slam' simply never occured.
Here's the jist of the Times story:
U.N. Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland suggested that the United States and other Western nations were being "stingy" with relief funds, saying there would be more available if taxes were raised.
"It is beyond me why are we so stingy, really," the Norwegian-born U.N. official told reporters. "Christmastime should remind many Western countries at least, [of] how rich we have become."
Note how 'stingy' is in quotes in the first graph and 'the United States and other Western nations' is not. That's because Egeland referred to 'wealthy states' and 'donor states,' but at no time did he single out the United States. In fact, when a reporter asked Egeland to name the countries he believed to be "stingy," he pointedly declined to do so (you can stream the 48-minute press conference with RealPlayer and see for yourself).
As for Egeland's talk of taxes, that too was generic. He referred broadly to 'politicians,' specifying only a few sentences later that he had in mind leaders "in the United States, in Western Europe and even in Norway." That was the only time he mentioned the U.S.
Sammon finishes his fabrication by quoting White House spokesman Trent Duffy saying that the U.S. leads the world in humanitarian assistance, a statement which Sammon characterizes as a "response to Mr. Egeland's comments."
So how do you get from a Norwegian asking "why are we so stingy?" to a UN official 'slamming' the U.S.? You work for the Washington Times, the leading UN-basher and a publication that's not unduly burdened by those pesky facts. I've written elsewhere about the slant in their broad-brush reporting on the UN's oil-for-food scandal, and this is just more of the same.
Now, Bill Sammon is one of those hacks that churn out conspiracy theories for Regnery Publishing, the right-wing book mill that brought us such weighty tomes as the Swiftboaters' Unfit for Command.
But you can't dismiss him as some partisan nut who's just preaching to the choir because Sun Myung Moon's little newspaper infects the mainstream discourse disproportionately to its daily circulation of about 100,000.
Today's article is a good example. I read the story last night and then awoke this morning to C-Span's popular call-in show, "The Washington Journal," leading off with a generous excerpt from Sammon's libel. That prompted a good 45 minutes of xenophobic calls railing against the UN and the dirty foreigners who run it.
By afternoon, even "liberal" NPR had picked up on the theme and featured a panel debating the adequacy of our international generosity.
So, too, did CNN's "Tonight with Lou Dobbs" later in the day, even going so far as to do a TV poll asking viewers if they "agree with the UN's criticism of the U.S."
What's even more amazing is that the Times wasn't alone in using the tragedy of Sunday's tsunami to grind some axes. The Wall Street Journal's editors didn't invent a story, but they had the chutzpah to use the disaster to take a swipe [needs free registration] at the "feverish assertions" of the "world of environmental zealotry."
The Journal's editorial quotes Stephen Tindale, executive director of Greenpeace UK, and Friends of the Earth Director Tony Juniper making rather general comments on the rise of extreme weather events. Neither asserts a direct causal relationship between global warming and the weekend's tragedy; Juniper is quoted as saying only that we're seeing "events in the real world that are consistent with climate change predictions." But that doesn't stop the Journal from getting in a good smear:
People prone to hysteria often become further unhinged in the face of a great disaster, and that may explain these remarkable comments on the tsunami disaster. Still, these comments by the movement's leadership may serve as a case study of how such imaginings work their way into public discussion of the environment.
Then the editors--ever concerned with making the world safe for Republican economic policies- used some fancy footwork to link natural disasters with those wackos who support the Kyoto Protocols on climate change:
The wealthier countries around the Pacific Rim have an established early-warning system against tsunamis, while none currently exists in South Asia. Developing countries that have resisted the Kyoto climate-change protocols have done so from fear that it will suppress their economic growth. These countries deserve an answer from the proponents of those standards. How are they supposed to pay for such protection amid measures that are suppressing global economic growth?
Quite the reach. But, hey, a disaster of this scale only comes once in a generation-- you might as well make the most of it.
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If you don’t read the conservative press, you may not have heard of the UN oil-for-food scandal. ‘Oil-for-food’ was a United Nations-administered program that allowed Saddam Hussein to sell oil despite the sanctions against him. The proceeds of the sales were for humanitarian relief, but Hussein and his cronies also manipulated the system and skimmed off billions for their own purposes.
For conservatives, the story is all about the UN. That’s because the ‘scandal’ confirms the long-held belief that Turtle Bay is occupied by thoroughly corrupt and incompetent bureaucrats. And the affair doesn’t just sully the UN; if the sanctions program proves to have been deeply flawed, the argument to go to war takes on greater weight in hindsight.
But the simple and largely unreported fact is that there is no UN oil-for-food scandal. What we know from a number of sources, including an oft-cited GAO report [PDF], is that there was a Ba’ath Party oil-for-food swindle, in which Iraqi officials extracted ‘overcharges’ and kickbacks from big multinationals, then laundered the loot through a number of foreign banks. And then there’s a rumor that some UN officials were involved.
The media’s coverage of the affair has embraced the conservative view. The reporting has been awful, with factually tenuous claims widely covered and vital context largely ignored. The ironic result of such skewed reporting is that progressives, not wanting to pile onto the UN, have had no taste for getting to the bottom of this immense corporate scandal.
How bad has the reporting been? I used a Lexis-Nexis search of daily newspaper stories published in the U.S. over the past six months, and drew an (almost) random sample of 60 articles, which I read from beginning to end.
It was immediately clear that this story is the darling of the conservative media: despite drawing from thousands of publications, 35 of the 60 articles were from Sun Myung Moon’s Washington Times and Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post. Ten of the articles were written by fellows at conservative think-tanks. Often the stories were then syndicated into the mainstream press.
The editorial slant explains why 33 of the 38 people quoted in the sample were either Republican officials or, again, right-wing think-tankers. 17 members of Congress were quoted: 15 Republicans and 2 Democrats who agreed with them.
One person you would expect to hear from about the largest humanitarian relief program in the world is Dennis Halliday, the former UN Undersecretary for humanitarian aid. But not one of the 60 articles I read quoted him. That might be because he went on CNN and said bluntly:
“This is a very minor issue, and the fact is, the scandal, if there is one, lies with the member states, not the secretary. It's the member states who setup Oil For Food. They setup the conditions. They monitored. They ran the 661 committee [which oversaw and had veto power over every sale]. They knew every damned contract.”French Ambassador Jean-David Levitte noted in the LA Times that the full contracts were only circulated to the United States and Britain, which had expressly asked to review them. But the Security Council’s oversight was mentioned in only 5 of the 60 articles sampled.
Ignoring that kind of context is a disservice to readers. Yet few articles mentioned that the UN’s alleged complicity in the scandal is based on a charge made by Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress (INC). The exile group reportedly uncovered documents in the Iraqi oil ministry that implicated a number of players. But, as Joshua Marshall noted, Chalabi “apparently deemed [them] too important to let anyone outside his circle see.” It is unclear what the status of the documents is today.
The timing of the allegation is also suspect. The story emerged during a power play between Chalabi and UN Envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, who was trying to push the returned exiles out of the interim government and replace them with “mainly technocrats.”
38 articles in the sample devoted at least two paragraphs to background, but just 5 of those gave the reader any sense of the story’s history and context. And I was very generous in my evaluation, crediting for example William Safire for writing: “Speaking power to truth, [the media covers] dark suspicions…that the scandal was ‘drummed up’ by the doves' Iraqi villain, Ahmad Chalabi.”
Safire’s gripe aside, basic standards of journalism dictate that a source as dubious as the INC be identified. But most papers simply attributed the story’s break to an “Iraqi newspaper.”
There was similarly shoddy reporting of the charge that Benon Sevan, the director of the oil-for-food program, accepted a bribe. While 33 articles reported the allegation, just 14 of those mentioned Sevan’s immediate and unequivocal denial.Almost a quarter of the stories advanced the frankly laughable proposition that opposition to the war in Iraq, especially by France and Russia, was based on their fear of losing a cash cow. But using a frequently cited estimate by The Times of London, sales under the program would represent something like six tenths of one percent of Russian exports and one quarter of one percent of French exports. Contrast that with exports to the United States--6.1 percent and 7.8 percent respectively--and the charge becomes too ludicrous for a credible journalist to repeat.
Many stories echoed a NY Daily News editorial line: “Unquestioned is that very little of this relief ever ended up in the bellies of Iraq's hungry children….” But that’s ‘unquestionably’ incorrect; the record of oil-for-food's humanitarian success is not in dispute:
"“[T]he programme provided a basic food ration for all 27 million Iraqis. From 1996 to 2001, the average Iraqi's daily food intake increased from 1,200 to 2,200 calories per day. Malnutrition among Iraqi children was cut by half during the life of the programme...”According to the GAO, just over 93% percent of the oil-for-food money went where it was supposed to go. But the fact that the program saved lives was mentioned in only 3 of the 60 articles sampled. Not a single article mentioned the half million children under the age of five who died under rigid sanctions before the relief program began.
I could continue. But the point is that this kind of slanted reporting has consequences. Seeing a right-wing smear campaign against the UN, Congressional Democrats have shown little appetite to investigate the oil-for-food program. The unfortunate result is that there are two congressional investigations led by Christopher Shays (R-CT) and Henry Hyde (R-IL), and Shays has already suggested that his committee will focus primarily on the UN’s ‘systemic’ problems, not on the corporations that paid kickbacks and dubious ‘surcharges’ to the Iraqi regime.
But Democrats should seek a full and complete investigation into the real oil-for-food scandal: a scam linking greasy oil barons, multinational corporate raiders, money-laundering bankers and one of the most brutal dictators of recent memory.
We should find out why, despite the howling from many conservatives, the Bush administration has itself been accused of obstructing the investigation. We should ask: ‘what information don’t they want to come out?’ It’s speculation, but perhaps it has to do with the $23.8 million dollars in contracts that Halliburton subsidiaries submitted to the oil-for-food program in 1998 and 1999 during Vice President Cheney’s leadership.
But we’ll never know the answers if Democrats don’t ask the hard questions. If they don’t, the investigations will drag on, lead to nothing and eventually die. Then, only conservatives’ “proof” of the UN’s duplicity will remain.
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