-Caveat Lector-
<cont'd>
WHAT REALLY HAPPENED TO PANAMA IS A DIFFERENT STORY
According to a variety of non-mainstream but authoritative
sources, the U.S. invasion of Panama on December 20, 1989,
received inadequate and erroneous news coverage. It now appears
that the legal implications of the invasion, the Bush-Noriega
relationship and the actual post-invasion conditions in Panama
have all been misrepresented to the American people. But perhaps
the most fraudulent news coverage dealt with the true numbers of
civilian and combat fatalities.
Official accounts spoke of 202 dead Panamanian civilians,
314 dead Panamanian soliders, and 23 dead Americans.
The press was oddly silent two months after the invasion
when a Southern Command official acknowledged to the L.A. Times
that only 50 Panamanian soldiers died. And, American soldiers
reported that at least 60 to 70 Americans were killed, possibly
many more. Apparently some combat deaths were disguised as
accidental deaths unreleated to the invasion.
The new findings indicate that the U.S. lost more soldiers
than Panama.
Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) has challenged the
government figure of 202 dead civilians and former U.S. Attorney
General Ramsey Clark has put the figure at 3,000, using the
phrase "conspiracy of silence" to describe efforts to bury the
true civilian death toll. The official U.S. report was based on
unconfirmed battlefield observations and mortuary and hopital
statistics. PHR's investigation tallied burial sites, mortuaries,
hospital records, and interview with officials.
In addition to Stealth Bombers dropping 2000-pound bombs,
U.S. soldiers are reported to have directly fired upon civilian
homes with machine guns, rockets, and tanks in the barrio of El
Chorillo surrounding Noriega's headquarters. U.S. soldiers
evacuated apartments and summarily burned them to the ground.
Witnesses reported U.S. troops killing wounded civilians with
either gunshots or rifle-butts to the head.
CBS's 60 Minutes, in a September 1990 expose, reported the
existence of at least six yet-to-be-exhumed mass graves to
conclude that Panamanian civilian deaths could run as high as
4,000. The findings of many watch groups support the 60 Minutes
casualty report.
Peace and Justice in Panama, The Central American Human
Rights Commission, Panamanian National Human Rights Commission,
Panamanian Episcopal Commission and the National Lawyers Guild
all calculate the death toll to range from two to four thousand.
The actual death toll has been obscured through U.S. military
practices of incineration of corpses prior to identification,
burial of remains in common graves prior to indentification, and
U.S. military control of administrative offices of hospitals and
morgues, as well as the removal of hospital and morgue registries
from their original sites.
The U.S. retained direct and full control of Panamanian
media until mid-February. And U.S. journalists were sequestered
in military barracks for the first 36 hours of the invasion and
then saw only official authorized sites.
SOURCES: Panama Delegation Report, 3/1/90, Authored by the
Central American Human Rights Commission; SAN FRANCISCO BAY
GUARDIAN, 9/26/90, "The hidden body count" by Jonathan Franklin;
60 Minutes, 9/30/90, "Victims of Just Cause" by Mike Wallace;
WASHINGTON POST, 6/30/90, "How Many Died in Panama, letter
con't.," by Joanne Heisel; THE NATION, 6/18/90, "The Press and
the Panama Invasion" by Marc Cooper.
WHERE GEORGE WAS DURING IRAN-CONTRA
SOURCE: THE WASHINGTON POST, Outlook, 7/10/90, "Where George
Was" by Tom Blanton.
Although the events of the Iran-contra scandal have faded
from the minds of the American press, the unanswered and perhaps
the most intriguing question continues to be: "Where was George?"
Despite the vast experience that Bush acquired while serving
as U.S. ambassador to China, director of the CIA, and head of the
Reagan administration's task force on combating terrorism, his
assertion that he was "out of the loop" has yet to be challenged
or explored by the mainstream press.
But new material from North's diaries, which has yet to be
widely examined or disseminated by the mainstream media, combines
with previous evidence to paint a different picture of Bush's
role. The new evidence was obtained through a Freedom of
Information Act lawsuit filed by the National Security Archive
and Public Citizen.
The diaries provide additional evidence that Bush played a
major role in Iran-contra from the beginning. He passed up
repeated opportunities to cut the transactions short or at least
make President Reagan think twice. While the secretaries of state
and defense were both cut out of the arms-for-hostages deals
after objecting to it, Bush attended almost every key meeting.
While publicly stating that, "It never became clear to me, the
arms for hostages thing, until it was fully debriefed,
investigated and debriefed by (the Senate Intelligence Committee
on December 20, 1986)," White House logs show that Bush attended
the first key Iran-contra meeting on August 6, 1985. It was at
this meeting that Reagan, Bush, Schultz, Weinberger, and Chief of
Staff Donald Regan heard National Security Advisor Robert
McFarlane present the first deal--a swap of 100 TOW anti-tank
missiles to Iran in exchange for the release of four American
hostages in Lebanon.
Neither the Tower Commission nor the congressional
committees elicited from any of the participants in the Aug. 6
meeting any memory of Bush's position on the issue. Bush's staff
has said he was not present, citing their own records in conflict
with the White House logs.
Additionally, the combination of the North diaries, the
congressional committee's report, and White House logs place Bush
at key meetings on January 6, 7, and 17; May 29; July 1 and 29;
August 6; and October 3rd of 1986.
While mounting evidence continues to thoroughly contradict
the President's disclaimers, The White House sticks by its stock
response: "The vice president's role in the Iran-contra affair
was completely examined in the congressional inquiry, and we have
nothing to add."
Evidently, the mainstream press doesn't either.
______________________________________________
Top Ten Censored Stories of 1989
The following article appeared in the San Francisco Bay
Guardian, May 30, 1990, and is reprinted here with permission of
the newspaper.
THE NEWS WE DIDN'T HEAR
A panel of journalism experts
names the year's ten most important censored stories
in the 14th annual Project Censored report
By Jean Tepperman and Emma Torres
SOME OF THE most important news of 1989 scarcely made the
headlines. From corporate thought control to toxic waste in your
gas tank, the major news media failed to report numerous big
stories--and Project Censored has identified them. In the United
States, says Project Censored's founder, Sonoma State University
Journalism Professor Carl Jensen, stories are censored, not by
outright government repression, but by "the media's penchant for
self-censorship and desire to avoid sensitive issues, coupled
with the Bush administration, which is even more secretive than
the Reagan era, [depriving] the public of information about
issues it should know about."
For the 14th year a panel of distinguished journalists and
journalism experts, under the auspices of Project Censored, has
selected the top ten censored stories of the year.
This year the panel's selection for the number one
under-reported story focuses on the very issue that inspired
Project Censored: the increasing monopoly of a few giant media
corporations, which control more and more of the world's means of
exchanging ideas and information.
[The growing threat of a handful of monopolistic global
media lords to the international marketplace of ideas was named
the top under-reported issue in the 14th annual media research
effort title "Project Censored".
Ben Bagdikian, professor at the graduate school of
journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, warned that
mammoth private organizations, driven by the profit motive,
already dominate the world's mass media and threaten the freedom
of information which is the basis of all liberty.]
THE TOP TEN CENSORED STORIED OF 1989 ARE:
CORPORATE THOUGHT CONTROL
Sources: The Nation, 6/12/89, "Lords of the Global Village"
by Ben Bagdikian.
News media have given us some glimpses of the high-stakes
game of corporate mergers, but they have been almost silent about
the growth of the small number of international companies that
now dominate their own industry. In an article in "The Nation,"
June 12, 1989, media scholar Ben Bagdikian describes the power of
five international giants, Time Warner, Inc., Bertelsmann AG,
News Corporation Ltd. (Rupert Murdoch), Hachette SA and Capital
Cities/ABC--together with a second string of huge media
organizations like Gannett--to control the information, ideas and
entertainment that shape people's consciousness.
Vertical monopolies multiply media power: If one firm owns
magazines, newspapers, movie studios and theaters, TV stations
and record companies, it can create hits or celebrities that
suddenly seem to be showing up everywhere. And media monopolies
extend beyond TV and movies to the traditionally more sober areas
of book publishing and even scholarly journals.
Bagdikian warns that the size and global audience of these
firms give them a stake in reducing communication to all-purpose,
acceptable content. Book publishers, for example, are steered
toward "blockbuster" books with huge sales. Controversial
publications that might not sell in some part of the world market
(Salmon Rushdie's "Satanic Verses," for example) are seen as
commercial failures.
Corporate links to the industries that make news--banking,
for example, or tobacco companies--give these media monopolies
incentives to stifle dissenting voices. At the same time, giant
media firms have make-or-break power over politicians and many of
their programs.
Bagdikian warns that, as many countries are moving toward
more democracy and civil liberties, these international media
monopolies pose a new threat to freedom of communication. He
proposes an updated United Nations declaration on freedom of
information that would establish antitrust principles and assure
diversity and access in the media, to combat the "new mutation of
that familiar scourge of the free spirit, centrally controlled
information."
DUMPING ON AFRICA
Source: In These Times, 11/8/89, "Western developmental
overdose makes Africa chemically dependent" by Diana Johnstone
As industrialized countries fill up their capacity for
disposing of toxic waste--or companies get tired of paying high
prices for toxic-waste disposal in the U.S. and Europe--some have
searched for populations so desperately poor they will accept
other countries' toxic wastes in exchange for badly needed cash.
They have found some takers, not surprisingly, in sub-Saharan
Africa, already suffering from poverty, drought and famine.
In the Nov. 8th-14th issue of In These Times, Diana
Johnstone describes several instances of toxic-waste dumping on
Africa, including: a 1987 deal by the government of Guinea-Bissau
to accept toxic waste for $40 a ton; a private arrangement by an
individual in Nigeria to allow an international toxics-disposal
firm to dump PCBs in his backyard; an agreement by the government
of Benin to take up to five million tons a year of toxic waste
for money to help pay its $700 million foreign debt.
European environmentalists persuaded the European Parliament
to condemn this practice and demand cancellation of toxic-waste
contracts in May 1989. The Organization of African Unity has also
condemned it, fearing that African governments' need for foreign
exchange will push them to specialize in toxic-waste disposal, a
pattern one Congolese diplomat called "attempted murder of
African people." But the poverty and large expanses of sparsely
populated land in many sub-Saharan countries make regulations
against toxic-waste dumping hard to enforce.
BAY GUARDIAN STORY NOTED:
|ELEVENTH in the Project Censored panel's pick of the top 25
censored stories of 1989 was a Bay Guardian report by Craig
McLaughlin that revealed the reasons behind the failures of the
Federal Emergency Management Agency during the Oct. 17th
earthquake.
The story traced FEMA's internal political history,
demonstrating that its priority has increasingly been nuclear-war
preparedness.
Under the leadership of right-wing ideologues assigned to
the agency by the Reagan administration, planning for nuclear-war
survival has so dominated the agency's agenda that it has failed
to prepare for or provide help in real-life emergencies.]
Hidden holocaust
Sources: 20/20, 3/2/90, "Children of Terror" and "Against
All Odds" by Janice Tomlin and Tom Jarriel; Renamo Watch, 2/90,
"Renamo's U.S. Support"; Utne Reader, Nov/Dec 1989, "The Hidden
War in Mozambique" by Kalamu ya Salaam.
Last year, as U.S. news media celebrated the overthrow of
repressive Communist regimes, they all but ignored an ongoing,
massive campaign of almost unbelievable cruelty being waged
against the government and people of Mozambique by right-wing
terrorists -- with material and political support from private
individuals and groups in the United States and Europe.
The difference in coverage, observed the November/December
1989 "Utne Reader" seems obviously related to the fact that "the
government of Mozambique is predominately black and socialist and
its chief enemy is the white-ruled anti-communist regime in South
Africa."
South Africa initially armed and supported the Mozambique
National Resistance, whose methods include not only extensive
economic sabotage like blowing up bridges and burning
villages--causing widespread famine in this poorest country in
the world--but also cruelty aimed at terrorizing people.
Its special targets are children, who are forced to watch
the torture and murder of family members, drafted into the army
at ages as young as eight, forced to kill other children and
villagers, raped and mutilated and separated by the tens of
thousands from families and native villages.
60% of Mozambican children die before age five.
Senator Jesse Helms, who calls RENAMO "freedom fighters,"
television evangelist Pat Robertson and the Washington-based
Heritage Foundation are among the U.S. citizens giving political
or financial support to RENAMO.
Roy Stacy, U.S. State Department deputy assistant secretary
for African affairs is quoted in the "Utne Reader" article
calling the RENAMO campaign "one of the most brutal holocausts
against ordinary human beings since World War II." The United
Nations and the World Bank have both recently issued reports on
the war in Mozambique. But a March 2, 1990 report on ABC's
"20/20" and a few stories on National Public Radio have been
almost the only U.S. mainstream press coverage of RENAMO's
devastation of Mozambique.
OLLIE NORTH & CO.
Source: Extra! Oct/Nov 1989, "Censored News: Oliver North &
Co. Banned from Costa Rica"
Although the Kerry Commission's findings on the U.S.-Contra
drug-trafficking link caused little outrage in the U.S. Congress,
a Costa Rican congressional committee concluded that the
contra-resupply network, operating in Costa Rica and coordinated
by North from the White House, doubled as a drug smuggling
operation. That finding prompted Oscar Arias Sanchez to bar North
and his gang--Poindexter, Secord, Joseph Fernandez and former
U.S. Ambassador to Costa Rica, Lewis Tambs--from ever again
setting foot in Costa Rica.
The Associated Press reported this action in a lengthy press
wire (7/22/90), but according to "Extra" (the Fairness and
Accuracy In Reporting newsletter), the "New York Times" and all
three national networks--perhaps following Congress's example of
complacency--failed to carry the story.
CBS - WALL STREET JOURNAL COVERUP
Sources: Columbia Journalism Review, Jan/Feb 1990, "Mission
Afghanistan" by Mary Williams Walsh; Defense Media Review,
3/31/90, "Wall Street Journal and CBS: Case of Professional
Courtesy?" by Sean Naylor; The Progressive, 5/90, "Afghanistan:
Holes in the coverage of a holy war" by Erwin Knoll.
Mary Williams Walsh, a respected journalist covering the
Afghan war for the "Wall Street Journal", came face to face with
media self-censorship when she wrote a story reporting that "CBS
News" was broadcasting biased coverage of the Afghanistan war. In
a well-documented article submitted to her editors at the
Journal, Walsh presented evidence that the CBS reporter-producer
based in Peshawar was not an objective journalist, but a
mujahideen partisan who favored one guerrilla commander and in
effect "served as his publicist." She also reported that the
CBS correspondent tried to set up an arms deal between the
guerrilla leader and a New Jersey arms manufacturer.
Walsh went on to show that the correspondent influenced
other journalists' reporting of the war by feeding them
disinformation. In a May l990 interview with "The Progressive",
Walsh tells of secret meetings between editors at the "Wall
Street Journal" and, Walsh believes, communications with "CBS
News" which finally led to the Journal's decision to kill the
story and her own decision to resign from the paper. The
"Columbia Journalism Review" offered to publish her story and
Walsh accepted.
But the article that finally appeared, according to Walsh,
changed the central point of her story: "That 'CBS News'...
failed to provide truthful and comprehensive coverage of the
Afghan war."
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