[R-G] Media Manipulation and the United Nations

[Anthony Fenton]

Media Manipulation and the United Nations
UNESCO Severs Ties to Democracy Manipulators?

by Michael Barker

Global Research, March 23, 2008

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8420

On March 12, 2008, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and  
Cultural Organization (UNESCO) decided to withdraw their patronage of  
Reporters Without Borders second annual Online Free Expression Day.  
UNESCO’s press release, said that they had granted Reporters Without  
Borders (RSF) their patronage for the international day on February  
28, 2008, on the condition that UNESCO “could not ‘be associated with  
the activities envisaged for this occasion’ by RSF.” However, they add  
that:

“In its communications on the day, RSF published material concerning a  
number of UNESCO’s Member States, which UNESCO, had not been informed  
of and could not endorse. Furthermore, UNESCO’s logo was placed in  
such a way as to indicate the Organization’s support of the  
information presented.”

Reporters Without Borders hit back at UNESCO by saying that “UNESCO’s  
grovelling” was a result of “direct pressure” from several of the  
governments on their list of 15 `Internet Enemies', observing that  
UNESCO had “behaved with great cowardice”. Controversially, Reporters  
Without Borders concluded by pointing out that “it seems we have gone  
back 20 years, to the time when authoritarian regimes called the shots  
at UNESCO headquarters in Paris.”

Which ‘authoritarian’ regime Reporters Without Borders are referring  
to is not entirely clear, because just over 20 years ago (in January  
1985) it was the US government that “called the shots at UNESCO”.  
Indeed they successfully undermined UNESCO’s proposal for a  
progressive New World Information and Communication Order, by  
withdrawing from the agency at a time when they were providing a  
quarter of UNESCO’s funding. Of course needless to say, this  
progressive proposal was strongly opposed by the world’s dominant  
Western media corporations, because UNESCO’s proposals if met “even  
partially, would constitute a serious diminution in the influence of  
the existing transnational corporate information system.” Consequently  
the UK also withdrew from UNESCO, and as a result UNESCO suffered  
severe funding problems, which combined with the ongoing attacks on  
their legitimacy, in the US, British and French media, served to  
undermine the implementation of the New World Information and  
Communication Order. [1]

Returning to the present controversy, according to another article  
from a Cuban newspaper: “Diplomatic sources from UNESCO told Prensa  
Latina that the agency made the decision due to the repeated  
demonstration of a lack of ethics on the part of Reporters Without  
Borders in its goal of disqualifying a certain number of  
countries.” [2] This report then adds that “because of this and  
previous actions, UNESCO decided to completely end its relationship  
with RSF and rule out any type of future collaboration.” To date, this  
information has not been reported on the website of either RSF or  
UNESCO. Yet even if this report is true, it is wishful thinking to  
believe (as this article does) that UNESCO withdrew their support of  
RSF because of the latter’s intimate involvement with imperial  
democracy manipulators like the National Endowment for Democracy.

The truth of this observation becomes apparent upon examination of the  
list of press freedom groups “maintaining official relations with  
UNESCO”, as many of the organizations are linked in some way to the  
work of the global democracy manipulating establishment. These media  
‘freedom’ groups include Internews International, the Committee to  
Protect Journalists, the International Federation of Journalists, the  
World Press Freedom Committee (a group that “[o]riginally created to  
oppose proposals” for UNESCO’s New World Information and Communication  
Order), and the International Press Institute.

In recent years a number of authors have criticized the activities of  
Reporters Without Borders, and much attention has been paid to the  
fact that they have received funding from the National Endowment for  
Democracy.  However, to date, next to no attention has been paid to  
the work of similarly ‘democratic’ UNESCO-linked organizations, like  
the International Press Institute. Therefore, the rest of this article  
will provide the first critical enquiry into the work of the  
International Press Institute by primarily examining the ‘democratic’  
backgrounds of the recipients of their annual Free Media Pioneer Award.

The International Press Institute as Annual Democracy Manipulator

The International Press Institute (IPI) was founded in 1950 at  
Columbia University, and they describe themselves as a “global network  
of editors, media executives and leading journalists, is dedicated to  
the furtherance and safeguarding of press freedom, the protection of  
freedom of opinion and expression, the promotion of the free flow of  
news and information, and the improvement of the practices of  
journalism”. Most notably, the current president and chair of the IPI,  
Piotr Niemczycki, serves as the deputy president of the management  
board of Agora, and as the publisher of the Gazeta Wyborcza (Election  
Gazette). The IPI’s president was also involved in founding both  
Gazeta Wyborcza and Agora. Niemczycki’s links to these two  
organizations are important because Agora is a media company with  
tight connections to the democracy manipulating establishment.

Formed  “on the eve of the [Polish] parliamentary elections in 1989”,  
Agora’s website notes that Gazeta Wyborcza was the “first independent  
newspaper in Poland, while Agora grew into one of the largest and most  
renowned media companies in Central and Eastern Europe.” Gazeta  
Wyborcza “was established… as a daily representing the Solidarity  
opposition”, but their website neglects to mention that this political  
party, Solidarity, obtained vital support from the CIA, the National  
Endowment for Democracy, and the notorious democracy manipulator  
George Soros. Moreover, according to the Polish American Library, the  
National Endowment for Democracy “was the original funding source for  
Gazeta Wyborcza”.

George Soros was highly active in supporting the work of Solidarity,  
and in 1988 he created the Stefan Batory Foundation (an ostensibly  
“independent private Polish foundation”) to help direct his democracy  
manipulating efforts. Currently the Batory Foundation’s largest  
funder, aside from the Open Society Institute, is the Ford Foundation,  
but the Batory Foundation has also received funding from other  
‘democratic’ groups like the National Endowment for Democracy, Freedom  
House, and the Institute of International Education. Writing in 2004,  
Srdja Trifkovic notes that the:

“Hoi polloi are force-fed the daily fare of OSI [Open Society  
Institute] agitprop by ‘the Soros media’... from the Gazeta Wyborcza  
in Warsaw to Danas (Today) in Serbia, the Monitor in Montenegro, the  
Markiza TV channel in Bratislava, and Vreme weekly and the B-92  
electronic media conglomerate in Belgrade. They invariably parrot  
Soros’ views and ambitions, reflected by the agenda of the local Soros  
foundation at home and, in world affairs, by the International Crisis  
Group (ICG), largely financed by Soros and run by his  
appointees.” (For more information on some of these media groups see  
later)

Given the intimate relations that exist between George Soros and the  
National Endowment for Democracy it is little surprise that in 2000,  
Gazeta Wyborcza, “awarded him the title of the Man of Year for his  
“support of the development of democracy, education and civil society  
in the countries of the CEE [Central and Eastern Europe] region.”

Another of the IPI’s executive board members, Kavi Chongkittavorn,  
also has excellent democracy manipulating credentials, because in  
September 2007 she received the National Endowment for Democracy’s  
coveted Democracy Award. In addition to her IPI affiliation  
Chongkittavorn presently serves as the assistant group editor of  
Nation Media Group, is a member of the steering committee of the NED- 
created World Movement for Democracy, and serves as the chair of the  
Southeast Asian Press Alliance – a group that has received annual  
support from the NED for its work in Malaysia (since 1999).

Finally it is worth mentioning that the IPI’s ‘democratic’ roots can  
be traced to its founding in 1950, as from 1951 until 1954 their  
founding chair was Lester Markel. At the time of the founding of the  
IPI Markel was the Sunday editor of The New York Times, but it is most  
interesting to note that in 1947 he “initiated” the creation of the  
Council on Foreign Relations’ “Propaganda and Foreign Policy” group,  
which was soon renamed as the “Public Opinion and Foreign Policy”  
group. Given this knowledge, it is entirely consistent that Anthony  
Giffard (1989) should have classified the IPI as an organization that  
“played an active role in opposing” UNESCO’s proposal for a New World  
Information and Communication Order in the late 1970s and early 1980s.  
[3] Thus, having provided a little background on the ‘democratic’  
orientation of the IPI, this article now introduces the ‘democratic’  
recipients of their annual press freedom award.

Awarding ‘Democracy’

Established in 1996, the IPI’s annual Free Media Pioneer Award is  
awarded to “recognize individuals and organizations that have fought  
against great odds to ensure freer and more independent media in their  
countries.” This annual award is co-sponsored by Freedom Forum, a  
group that was founded in 1991 and describes itself as a “nonpartisan  
foundation dedicated to free press, free speech and free spirit for  
all people”. [4] Yet despite Freedom Forum’s benign sounding self- 
description, they, like the IPI, have solid democracy manipulating  
credentials. For example, Freedom Forum’s founder Allen H. Neuharth  
serves on the advisory committee of the aforementioned World Press  
Freedom Committee; another of their trustees, Wilma P. Mankiller,  
recently served as a trustee of the Ford Foundation; while a further  
Freedom Forum trustee, Bette Bao Lord, is chair emeritus of Freedom  
House. Thus both sponsors of the Free Media Pioneer Award are well  
connected to the democracy manipulating credentials establishment.  
Following is a demonstration of how this press ‘freedom’ award is used  
to legitimate the work of ‘democratic’ media groups all over the world.

In 1996, the first Free Media Pioneer Award was given to the Russian  
commercial TV station, NTV – which is owned by media oligarch Vladimir  
Gusinsky – for its objective reporting on the Chechnya conflict. Yet  
while NTV’s coverage may have been a thorn in the side of President  
Boris Yeltsin, this didn’t stop the president of NTV, Igor Malashenko,  
from working as Yeltsin’s chief media advisor for his re-election  
campaign in April 1996. Indeed, as in other “electoral interventions”,  
the global democracy manipulators had selected their favored candidate  
(Yeltsin in this case) and, despite NTV’s critical reporting on  
Chechnya, it appears that they could be relied upon not to rock the  
boat too much. Thus NTV won the IPI’s first Free Media Pioneer Award  
just as the struggling independent media in Russia “were falling into  
the hands of two rival oligarchs, Boris Berezovsky (TV-6) and Vladimir  
Gusinsky (NTV)”. As Edward Herman observed a few years later: “Boris  
Yeltsin is a ‘reformer,’ in the contemporary post-Orwellian usage of  
the word: that is, one who is carrying out policies approved by  
dominant Western interests.” [5]

The second Pioneer Award was distributed to the Indonesian-based  
Alliance of Independent Journalists, a group that was critical of the  
Western-backed Suharto dictatorship. The timing of this award may have  
to do with a change of heart of western governments’ ‘democratic’  
plans for Indonesia, as, at around this time, they were beginning to  
start thinking about withdrawing their support for Suharto (the PR  
disaster), and sure enough in 1998 he was eventually removed from  
power. In addition, the Alliance of Independent Journalists is one of  
five members of the aforementioned NED-funded Southeast Asian Press  
Alliance, and in 1998 their founder, Goenawan Mohamad, was awarded the  
International Press Freedom Award by the Committee to Protect  
Journalists.

In 1998, Serbian-based Radio B-92 was honored with the Pioneer Award  
for its unrelenting commitment to democracy, of which one important  
part was the role it played in the creation (in 1993) of the  
Association of Independent Electronic Media (ANEM). There can be no  
question that ANEM successfully protected media broadcasters from  
state repression in Serbia, but there is also no doubt that this would  
have been impossible without the financial and diplomatic support that  
they received from Western governments. [6] In fact, the democracy  
manipulating establishment had been extremely busy in the former  
Yugoslavia throughout the early 1990s, providing between US$7-10  
million for media development during this time; while after 1995 the  
US gave a further US$23 million and the European Union augmented this  
with another 17 million Euros for supporting ‘independent’ media groups.

More specifically, Radio B-92 received a grant from the NED the year  
before they obtained the IPI’s Pioneer Award, which was used – in the  
NED’s words – to help “break the stranglehold of government-dominated  
media in Serbia by strengthening an independent source of news and  
opinion and will ensure the free flow of unbiased information  
throughout the country”. In 1998, Radio B-92 then received a grant  
from the Westminster Foundation for Democracy (the British version of  
the NED to enable them “to conduct a systematic and critical analysis  
of the coverage of the war in Kosovo presented by Serbian state  
television.” (NED grants were also given to Radio Television B-92 in  
2001 and 2005.) Finally ANEM themselves received their first NED grant  
in 1998, and subsequently went on to obtain indirect NED support in  
2004 and 2005, when NED grants were channeled to them via the  
intermediary media group Medienhilfe. As in other ‘democratic’  
interventions, it seems that the main reason the democracy  
manipulating community supported the development of ‘independent’  
media outlets like Radio B-92 and ANEM was to ensure a ‘favorable’  
change of government, that is, to facilitate the ouster of President  
Milosevic.

In 1992 and again in 1993, the NED gave grants to support independent  
journalism in Ethiopia. The 1992 grant is most notable here as the NED  
noted that it was to be used to “lay the foundation for an indigenous  
and self-sustainable training center for journalists and publishers in  
Ethiopia.” In 1999, the Ethiopian Free Press Journalists’ Association  
received the fourth Pioneer Award. Although it seems that this  
association has no direct links to democracy manipulating bodies it is  
worth noting that this Association was formed in 1993 shortly after  
the aforementioned NED grants.

The next recipient of the Pioneer Award was the Instituto De Prensa Y  
Sociedad (or the Peruvian Press and Society Institute) – a group that  
was founded in 1993, and has exemplary ‘democratic’ credentials that I  
have outlined in full elsewhere. Two years before receiving the 2000  
Pioneer Award, the Peruvian Press and Society Institute received their  
first NED grant to help “develop a national network to protect  
journalists”; they then received renewed NED support in both 2000 and  
2001. Like the IPI’s Kavi Chongkittavorn, the Peruvian Press and  
Society Institute were rewarded with the NED’s annual Democracy Award  
in 2007.

The 2001 winner of the IPI’s Press Award was the Malaysian website  
Malaysiakini.com, a site that was launched in 1999 by the Southeast  
Asian Press Alliance (SEAPA). With the assistance of the World Press  
Freedom Committee, Freedom Forum, and the Committee to Protect  
Journalists, SEAPA were formed by IPI executive board member Kavi  
Chongittavorn (n 1989) to campaign for press freedom in Southeast  
Asia. Since 1999, SEAPA have received annual grants from the NED to  
support their work in Malaysia, which focuses on the “development and  
protection of journalistic independence and professionalism”. Here it  
is important to note that out of all of SEAPA’s annual NED grants the  
only grant that specifies “support for online media” was given to them  
in 1999.

In 2002, the Serbian newspaper, Danas, received the Pioneer Award, and  
like previous award winners, they too received prior aid from the NED.  
Thus, the year after Danas was launched (in 1997), they received a NED  
grant to “open a news bureau in… Prishtina” to help “improve the  
paper’s ability to gather up-to-date information on developments in  
Kosovo.” In 2000, they received another NED grant channelled to them  
via the regular NED aid recipient the BETA News Agency. [7]

The Media Council of Tanzania won the Pioneer Award in 2003, and -  
although they have not obtained any funding from the NED - they have  
received aid from other prominent international democracy  
manipulators. For example, the Swedish International Development  
Cooperation Agency gave the Media Council a three year grant of SEK  
4,000,000 in 2001, while the Netherlands-based Communication  
Assistance Foundation awarded them NLG 364, 522 for the same period.

In 2004, the Baku-based Central Asian and Southern Caucasian Freedom  
of Expression Network (CASCFEN) received the Pioneer Award. This group  
most likely played a significant role in two NED-backed revolutions in  
both Georgia (2003) and in Kyrgyzstan (2005). In both cases the  
‘independent’ media played a crucial role in the success of the  
revolutions.



The founder of CASCFEN, Azer Hasret, formerly served as the president  
of the Journalists' Trade Union – the group that helped launch CASCFEN  
in August 2001 along with five other groups which included the  
Azerbaijan National Committee of International Press Institute, the  
Independent Association of Georgian Journalists, Public Association  
“Journalists”, the Union of Independent Journalists of Uzbekistan, and  
the National Association of Independent Mass Media of Tajikistan. [8]  
Interestingly while only the latter group went on to receive NED aid  
(in both 2003 and 2005), in 2003, Zviad Pochkhua, the president of the  
Independent Association of Georgian Journalists critiqued another  
Georgian-based NGO – the Liberty Institute – for receiving funding  
from US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Soros  
Foundation. [9] So it is ironic that even CASCFEN’s work has received  
support from George Soros’ Open Society Institute-Assistance  
Foundation Azerbaijan. Finally, between 2004 and 2005, the Azerbaijan- 
based Journalists' Trade Union worked on the Election Monitoring  
Center’s media programme, which is significant because in 2005 this  
Center received a grant from the NED to “inform the public about the  
electoral process and the political platforms of different parties and  
candidates by producing newspaper inserts, radio programs, and  
televised debates.”

Zimbabwe’s SW Radio Africa won the Pioneer Award in 2005, making it  
the first externally broadcast media group to receive the award – due  
to government repression they are based in London (UK). SW Radio  
Africa first started operating in December 2001, and according to  
diplomatic sources they are funded by the USAID’s Office of Transition  
Initiatives. [10] Furthermore, from 2005 to 2006 Violet Gonda a  
“producer and presenter for the news section of SW Radio Africa”  
served as a fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development and the  
Rule of Law (CDDRL) at Stanford University. This is particularly  
noteworthy because the Director of the CDDRL is Michael McFaul, an  
individual who happens to be a director of the National Endowment for  
Democracy’s International Forum for Democratic Studies, and is a  
trustee of both Freedom House and the Eurasia Foundation.

The 2006 recipient of the Pioneer Award was the Yemen Times, a  
newspaper that only exhibits tenuous links to the NED, as from 2006 to  
2007, one of their reporters, Hafez Al-Bukari, served as a Reagan  
Fascell Democracy Fellow at the NED. [11] In addition, it is more than  
coincidental that another former Yemen Times reporter, Hatem Bamehriz,  
previously served as the Deputy Country Director of the Yemen field  
office of the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs  
(which is one of the NED’s core grantees). [12]

The winner of the 2007 Free Media Pioneer Award was the Mizzima News  
Agency, an Agency that was formed in 1998 by a group of exiled Burmese  
journalists based in both India and Thailand. According to Reuters,  
“Mizzima is one of several outlets, like the Oslo-based Democratic  
Voice of Burma (DVB), that have become major source of information on  
the country.” Consequently it is highly significant that since 1999  
the Agency has received support from George Soros’ Open Society  
Institute, and in 2006 (at least) they obtained financial support from  
the NED (and two other NED-supported groups: Internews and the  
Southeast Asian Press Alliance). Given that the impetus for this  
article was UNESCO’s controversial relationship with Reporters Without  
Borders it is appropriate that Mizzima is also linked to this  
notorious press ‘freedom’ watchdog. This connection comes through the  
presence of Maung Maung Myint on Mizzima’s advisory board, as he is  
also currently the president of NED-sponsored Burma Media Association,  
and serves on international jury for Reporters Without Borders  
Fondation de France Prize.

Democratizing the United Nations?

This article has demonstrated that the ostensibly progressive  
International Press Institute is a key member of the global democracy  
manipulating establishment. This information is problematic on a  
number of levels, not least of which is that UNESCO maintains cordial  
relations with the International Press Institute and many other NED- 
linked media groups.  Moreover, this is not the first time that the  
United Nations has compromised its integrity through ties with the  
NED. Indeed, as I illustrated in a recent article, the recently formed  
UN Democracy Fund works extremely closely with the NED and their  
global cadres; furthermore, my limited critiques of the United Nations  
are amplified by many other authors whose work can be found on the  
Center for Research on Globalization’s website.

In January 2007, Ban Ki-Moon succeeded Kofi Annan as the new Secretary- 
General of the United Nations, but it is highly questionable as to  
whether he is he going to be able (or willing) to reform the United  
Nations. Indeed, as Professor Rodrigue Tremblay writes, so far the  
“only reforms the new Secretary-General has espoused have been minor  
administrative arrangements—and even those were contested”. He adds:

“What the United Nations needs is more than simply shuffling the  
chairs on the deck of the Titanic. It needs a fundamental structural  
reorganization if it is to play the role it was assigned originally in  
1945, that is to say to promote international cooperation and to  
maintain international peace and security.”

Yet, perhaps the United Nations cannot be reformed after all, as the  
job that it was initially set up to fulfill – as intended by the  
Council on Foreign Relations War and Peace Studies Group – was to  
legitimate America’s imperial ventures. [13]

As Edward Herman observes, we are already in the “midst of a crisis  
within the post-war international system, as a serial aggressor [the  
United States] is now able to mobilize the [United Nations] Security  
Council… to declare the state that it threatens with war a menace to  
the peace and to help the aggressor disarm its target.” The United  
Nations has gone far beyond simply legitimating US domination; it now  
acts as a critical armament of imperialism, both in its soft form - as  
exemplified by its work with the NED - and in justifying harder  
militaristic forms of imperialism. So the question remains, ‘is the  
United Nations the type of institution that should be reformed in the  
first place?’ If not, then we need to think hard about the type of  
institution that should replace it, because what is urgently need is  
an international organization that can help reign in aggressor states  
not encourage them, and promote popular democracy not elite ‘democracy’.

Michael Barker is a doctoral candidate at Griffith University,  
Australia. He can be reached at Michael. J. Barker [at]  
griffith.edu.au. Most of his other articles can be found here.

Endnotes

[1] William Preston, Jr., Edward S. Herman, and Herbert I. Schiller,  
Hope and Folly: the United States and UNESCO, 1945-1985 (New York:  
Institute for Media Analysis, 1989) , p. 297, pp. 203-81.

[2] Incidentally Cuba was on Reporters Without Borders ‘Internet  
Enemy’ list.

[3] Anthony C. Giffard, UNESCO and the Media (New York: Longman,  
1989), p.28.

[4] Freedom Forum is “supported by income from an endowment now worth  
more than $1 billion in diversified assets” and in 1997 they  
distributed over $48 million in grants. See JoEllen Gorg, U.S.  
Foundations: A Review of International Funding Priorities 2002,  
Prepared for the USAID/ANE Bureau, May 2002.

[5] Edward Herman notes: “The Russian election was badly compromised  
by Western intervention, some of it contrary to Russian law, all of it  
in violation of nominal Western principles of fairness. Western  
leaders gathered in Moscow during the campaign to proclaim their  
opposition to ‘terrorism’ (in the midst of Yeltsin's terrorist attacks  
on Chechnya) and to give a boost to the ‘reformer.’ German president  
Helmut Kohl traveled to Moscow, as did U.S. Secretary of State Warren  
Christopher, for photo appearances with our man. The IMF made a $10.2  
billion loan to Russia in the midst of the campaign, despite the fact  
that Russia was in violation of IMF loan conditions and was dispensing  
large sums of public money for election purposes. A trio of Republican  
advisers joined the Yeltsin election campaign, although such foreign  
participation in an election violates Russian law. U.S. ambassador  
Thomas Pickering urged candidate Grigory Yavlinsky to drop out of the  
election in order to help Yeltsin.”

[6] Spasa Bosnjak, Fight the Power: The Role of the Serbian  
Independent Electronic Media in the Democratization of Serbia (Simon  
Fraser University: Unpublished MA thesis, 2005), p.71.

[7] The BETA News Agency received NED grants annually from 1997 to 2005.

[8] In 2003 Azer Hasret was also the Secretary General of the  
Azerbaijan Journalists Confederation.

[9] Although not noted in Zviad Pochkhua’s article, the Georgian-based  
Liberty Institute received NED funding in 1999, 2001, and 2004. It is  
also interesting that the vice president of the Independent  
Association of Georgian Journalists, Geno Jokhidze, has also been the  
editor-in-chief of Echo newspaper since 2002. This is because from  
2003 to 2004 the deputy editor-in-chief of the daily Echo served as a  
NED Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow.

[10] A Radio Netherland Media Network report notes that SW Radio  
Africa “receive millions of dollars from a department of the US  
International Development Agency, known as the Office of Transition  
Initiatives (OTI), although according to the station its funding comes  
from unspecified ‘human rights and media freedom groups’”.

[11] Hafez Al-Bukari was also “a member of the informal advisory board  
of the [neoconservative] American Enterprise Institute’s Arab Reform  
program and coordinator of the International Federation of  
Journalists’ Project in Yemen.”

[12] Hatem Bamehriz is now currently working for the National  
Democratic Institute for International Affairs in Somalia. Although I  
have demonstrated that the Yemen Times can be linked to the NED, they  
appear to utilize reporters from a variety of political persuasions,  
as according to the US Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor  
(2002): “In May the PSO [Political Security Organization] detained  
journalist Hassan al-Zaidi and held him incommunicado for 16 days, at  
times in solitary confinement, in the detention center under the PSO  
headquarters in Sana'a. Authorities never formally charged al-Zaidi  
with any crime, but told him that he had ‘exceeded the red lines.’ In  
addition to being a reporter for the Yemen Times, al-Zaidi is a member  
of the Islamist opposition party Union of Popular Forces (UPF) and  
belongs to the al-Zaidi tribe, which has been responsible for  
kidnappings of foreigners and other destabilizing activity.”

[13] Laurence Shoup and William Minter (1980) noted that Council on  
Foreign Relations member, Isaiah Bowman, observed in a Council meeting  
in May 1942 that: “[T]he United States had to exercise the strength  
need to assure ‘security,’ and at the same time ‘avoid conventional  
forms of imperialism.’ The way to do this, he argued, was to make the  
exercise of that power international in character through a United  
Nations body.”

  Global Research Articles by Michael Barker