[R-G] Ed Herman on Marlise Simons & the NYT

[Anthony Fenton]

Poor Marlise: Her Old Allies Are Now Attacking the Tribunal and Even  
Portraying the Serbs as Victims

October 30, 2008 By Edward S. Herman


Edward S. Herman's
http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/19263


Marlise Simons, the New York Times's main  reporter on the Milosevic  
trial and International Criminal Trial for the Former Yugoslavia  
(ICTY), has had a difficult year. Perhaps most painful was the  
disclosure that in 1999 the Kosovo Albanian KLA sent as many as 300  
captive Serbs to Albanian to be killed and their internal organs  
"harvested" for sale abroad, a matter barely mentioned in the New York  
Times (see below). I was sorely tempted to write to Marlise Simons and  
offer her my sympathies: "Marlise, if only the villains in this case  
were Serbs, what a fine front page article you could have had here!"



She and her paper did have a windfall with the arrest of former  
Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and his transfer to the Hague for  
trial in  July (18-21), which was exploited to a maximum with nine  
bylined Simons articles, multi-day front page coverage, a stream of  
pictures of  grieving (or capture-celebrating)  victim family members,  
and the usual complete absence of  any critical context on either  
Bosnian history or the nature and record of the ICTY. (For an analysis  
of Simons' sorry record and background on the issues at stake, see  
Herman and Peterson, " Marlise Simons on the Yugoslavia Tribunal: A  
Case Study in Total Propaganda Service," ZNet, March, 2004; for  good  
reviews of the role of the ICTY,  John Laughland, Travesty [Pluto:  
2007].and Michael Mandel, How America Gets Away With Murder [Pluto:  
2004]; for a broader analysis of the issues, Herman and Peterson, "The  
Dismantling of Yugoslavia: A Study in inhumanitarian intervention—and  
a Western liberal left intellectual and moral collapse," Monthly  
Review, Oct. 2007).



Simons and the Times have adhered closely to the establishment  
narrative on the issues involved in the wars and dismantlement of  
Yugoslavia, including the good-evil dichotomy, steady demonization of  
the evil (Serbs), gullibility, suppression of inconvenient facts, and  
high praise for the work of the ICTY. Simons had a very flattering  
article on the ICTY prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte back in 2002 ("The  
Saturday Profile: On War Criminals' Trail, an Unflagging Hunter," New  
York Times, February 9, 2002), and throughout the Milosevic trial  
Simons reported Del Ponte's claims (and those of her PR associate  
Florence Hartmann), on an almost daily basis and without the slightest  
trace of skepticism. (This was helped along by simply ignoring some  
of  Del Ponte's more egregious acts and statements, such as her  
appeals for public support of the ICTY by making  strong public claims  
of the guilt of  people on trial, and her statement that she would not  
pursue alleged NATO war crimes in bombing Serbia because she takes  
NATO's word for it that they didn't do anything illegal---she was  
"very satisfied that there was no deliberate targeting  of civilians  
or unlawful military targets by NATO during the bombing campaign"; any  
that happened were "genuine mistakes.").



But Simons' old friend Del Ponte has written a book, thus far  
published only in Italy, entitled La Caccia: Io e i criminali di  
guerra (i.e., "The Hunt: Me and the War Criminals"), co-authored with  
Chuck Sudetic, which makes several dramatic claims that would be  
highly newsworthy for a non-party-line and minimally honest Newspaper  
of  Record. For one thing, it claims that U.S. pressure  steered the  
ICTY away from Croatian, Muslim and Kosovo war criminals, and that  
NATO non-cooperation and the ICTY's dependence on NATO for "the rest  
of the Tribunal's work" (i.e., pursuing Serbs)  made any investigation  
and indictment of  NATO officials politically impossible. Her  
hypocrisy and self-deception here are massive, but it is still  
interesting to see her now admit the political basis of  the ICTY's  
allowable work. Simons and the Times have never explored this crucial  
subject, and of course never reviewed John Laughland's and Michael  
Mandel's books that discuss the issues involved here in detail.  
(Laughland's Travesty, fully demonstrates the ICTY's corruption of   
judicial procedure; Mandel in How America Gets Away With Murder shows  
compellingly that the ICTY was a political arm of NATO and was  
designed to facilitate war, not peace--or justice).



More spectacular than her admission of  politicization,  Del Ponte  
reports in her book the point noted earlier--that the Kosovo Albanian  
KLA was involved in a program of  sending Serbs, mostly seized  
civilians, to an Albanian location where "doctors extracted the  
captives' internal organs," which were sent off for sale. She  
estimates that  300 kidnapped Serbs were so treated. (For a partial  
non-authorized translation of Del Ponte's account, Harry de  
Quetteville, "Serb prisoners were stripped of their organs in Kosovo  
war," Daily Telegraph, April 11, 2008). This was done at the very time  
UN and NATO forces were deploying to Kosovo as the "humanitarian  
intervention" war was ending in 1999.  Human Rights Watch has found  
"serious and credible allegations" on the organ-extraction and sale  
issue in a series of reports, but Del Ponte claims that here again, as  
with NATO's possible war crimes, it was difficult to get a serious  
investigation and process underway on the matter. The New York Times  
has mentioned this charge only once, in a single sentence deep in an  
article on another subject, in which the charge is dismissed with  
contempt by KLA terrorist and high-ranking  Kosovo Albanian official  
Ramush Haradinaj (Dan Bilefsky, "Ex-Soldier May Go From The Hague's  
Docket to Kosovo's Ballot," New York Times, July 12, 2008).



The dismissal by the ICTY of the case against Haradinaj, as well as  
one against Bosnian Muslim leader Naser Oric, also presented a problem  
for defenders of  the ICTY as an independent and genuinely judicial  
enterprise, with the result that these cases were kept virtually out  
of sight during the same period in which the Karadzic case got  
enormous publicity. Haradinaj had been indicted and brought to the  
Hague in 2005, but was allowed to return to Kosovo to campaign for  
high office although an indicted war criminal! This was in the same  
time frame in which the very sick Milosevic was refused permission to  
go to Moscow for medical treatment, with a Russian guarantee of  
return. (He died in prison two weeks after this ICTY denial of medical  
attention.). Both Haradinaj and Oric were not only leaders of   
organizations that killed large number of  Serb civilians, in contrast  
with Karadzic and Milosevic they were both hands-on killers—which  
added to the likelihood that an unbiased court would have given them  
long prison sentences.



Haradinaj was the leader of the Black Eagles, which kidnapped and  
killed hundreds of  Serbs and Kosovo Albanians who cooperated with  
Serbia, but he was found not guilty on any count—Bilefsky mentions  
that  "lawyers and judges on the court complained that witness  
intimidation had been widespread," but he fails to mention that  a  
number of  potential witnesses against Haradinaj were murdered, and he  
doesn't point out that the ICTY judges  failed once again to find  
guilt based on a "joint criminal enterprise" in  a trial of a non- 
Serb. That ICTY-originated concept is apparently confined to usage  
against the ICTY-NATO target population.



The Oric case is even more interesting because he openly bragged about  
his participation in the massacre of  Srebrenica-area Serbs to  
Canadian Toronto Star reporter Bill Schiller and Washington Post  
reporter John Pomfret, and showed both of them videos of  some of his  
Serb victims. (Schiller, "Fearsome Muslim Warlord Eludes Bosnian Serb  
Forces," Toronto Star, July 16, 1995;  Pomfret, "Weapons, Cash and  
Chaos Lend Clout to Srebrenica's Tough Guy," Washington Post, Feb. 16,  
1994.) Although there was this kind of evidence,  and  although Oric  
openly claimed to Schiller that he had participated in the killing of  
114 Serbs in a single episode, it took the ICTY till 2003 to indict  
him, and he was then indicted for only six killings carried out  
between September 1992 and March 1993, not by him but by his  
subordinates. The implication that he was not responsible for mass  
killings after March 1993, with Srebrenica declared a "safe area" in  
April 1993,  is contrary to well established facts.



  More recently, the Bosnian Muslim  Ibran Mustafic, who had been a  
member of the Bosnia-Herzegovina Parliament and was president of the  
Executive Board of the Srebrenica Municipal Assembly, published a  
book, Planirani haos (Planned Chaos), which gives a great deal of  
evidence in support of the claim that Oric "is a war criminal without  
a par" (in Mustafic's words).  Mustafic was scheduled to give  
testimony in the Oric trial, but after he argued with the prosecution  
that it failed to charge Oric with his real crimes, in the end the  
judges decided not to let him testify. Neither Schiller nor Pomfret  
were called as witnesses to testify before the ICTY on the Oric case,  
and their articles were not entered into the evidence. French General  
and former UN military commander in Bosnia, Philippe Morillon, who had  
been a prosecution witness in the Milosevic trial, had stated there  
that the Srebrenica killings of  July 1995 were a "direct reaction" to  
the Oric massacres of earlier years, was not called as a witness  
during the Oric trial.



Oric was then found guilty, not of killing anybody but having failed  
to control his subordinates, and was freed with only a two year  
sentence, having spent three years at the Hague. This was followed by  
a further ICTY court decision that threw out his conviction and two- 
year sentence on ground of  inadequate proof  of Oric's knowledge of  
what his subordinates were doing. The double standard on proof of   
command responsibility and  the laughably limited scope of  the  
original indictment of this major war criminal fully confirm the  
ICTY's role as a political instrument and its process as  a  "travesty."



  Just as Marlise Simons had ignored Naser Oric in earlier years, so  
with these trials of exoneration, the Times's coverage was confined to  
a short July 4, 2008 blurb taken from Agence France Presse, " Bosnia:  
Ex-Commander Is Cleared."  Ibran Mustafic's book and testimony has of  
course never been mentioned in the paper.



Another development that Marlise Simons has had to dodge is the 2007  
publication of a book by Florence Hartmann, Peace and Punishment,  
which, like Del Ponte's book, accuses the Western powers of  having  
politicized the work of the ICTY, specifically in having blocked the  
capture and trial of  Radovan Karadzic—a claim consistent with  
Karadzic's allegation of  a deal with Richard Holbrooke. Even more  
interesting is Hartmann's claim that when Del Ponte was prosecutor of  
the Rwanda Tribunal (ICTR), which she was assigned to along with her  
service at the ICTY, the United States ordered her to  drop any  
investigations and charges against the Tutsi army and Paul Kagame, a  
U.S. client. She refused and was fired. Earlier, when Louise Arbour  
was ICTR prosecutor, her staff had found strong evidence that Kagame  
and associates had organized the shooting down of the Hutu president's  
plane on April 6, 1994, the act which initiated the escalated killings  
in Rwanda. Arbour had followed U.S. orders and closed down the  
investigation. Del Ponte refused to do that and was removed.



This was never disclosed in the New York Times when it happened, and  
Marlise Simons and company are not about to give Hartmann's  
confirmation of this highly important story  any publicity today. It  
does not fit the established bias. As I have discussed elsewhere and  
often, when a strong party line forms within the U.S. establishment,  
as is true as regards both the dismantling of Yugoslavia and the  
Rwanda killings, the New York Times regularly cooperates, with the  
result that it performs as a propaganda agency of the state in a  
fashion similar to Pravda's service to the Soviet authorities. This  
was the case as regards, e.g., the non-existent 1981 Bulgarian-KGB  
plot to murder the Pope, the U.S. sponsorship of  Pakistan's dictators  
and help to Bin Laden and the anti-Soviet Afghan resistance in the  
1980s,  Saddam's  threatening (but non-existent) "weapons of mass  
destruction" in 2003, Iran's nuclear menace today (devoid of nuclear  
weapons) , as well as NATO's  phony "humanitarian intervention" to  
deal with a non-existent Serb "genocide" in Bosnia and Kosovo. It is a  
great Paper of Record, helping manufacture consent to the policies of  
the imperial state whose  record it keeps with meticulous care and  
dependable selectivity.