-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." DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! 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