Peter Brown asks all the right questions about Kofi Annan and oil-for-food in his Orlando Sentinel column. (here, or here if you’re not yet registered) Some excerpts follow, concluding with the same question that’s on my mind: Why are MSM largely giving the UN a free pass on this one? His conclusion and mine are the same: The kumbayah concept of the UN is just to groovey for blue state elite media to attack.

If the United Nations were a democratic country under the rule of law, Secretary General Kofi Annan would have resigned in disgrace, and might well be under criminal investigation for, at the least, tolerating massive corruption.



If that idea surprises readers it is only because the mainstream U.S. news media have done an abysmal job reporting on what is undoubtedly the largest bribery and embezzlement scandal in world history. …



Whether Annan himself is culpable is unclear, but he is acting like the politician whose friends’ hands have been caught in the cookie jar and is worried he will be implicated, too. And there are allegations his son was on the take also.



Annan has done everything possible to impede serious efforts to get to the bottom of the scandal, which has implicated Benon Sevan, who was in charge of the U.N. Oil for Food program, the humanitarian effort at the scandal’s center. …



There are many reasons why Americans should be outraged, not the least of which is that U.S. taxpayers fund more than 20 percent of the U.N. budget. Remember, U.N. officials whose job was overseeing the Food for Oil program allegedly took payoffs from Saddam to look the other way. And, according to investigators, some of the money Saddam skimmed went to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.



Think of the $21.3 billion as more than two-thirds of the budget for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, or three times the annual spending by the Environmental Protection Agency — serious folding money, even in Washington, D.C.



Common sense requires one to question whether U.N. efforts to stop the U.S. intervention in Iraq were tied to its under-the-table relationship with Saddam. Also, among those who allegedly got payoffs from Saddam in the scandal were prominent officials and businessmen from France and Russia, nations that also sought to stop the American effort to oust Saddam. …



Why the American news media have given this story short shrift — it hardly makes the network evening-news shows and is buried inside most newspapers, including this one, when mentioned at all — is a worthwhile question.



The United Nations has long enjoyed a magical image in much of the United States. The idea of all nations getting together to solve problems is a warm and fuzzy one that makes many Americans tingle.



Giving the United Nations a free ride in the news media may well be a function of the red America/blue America divide. The elites along the coasts and in the major news media may see this as a minor issue. My guess, however, is that the resulting public outrage when this story gets its day in the sunshine will be as much a revelation to many of those same folks as Bush’s re-election.

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As noted below, today’s LA Times ran a glowing story about U.N. efforts to secure peace in Central Africa. Interesting, because yesterday’s U.N. Daily Briefing included this:

NO CONFIRMATION OF CLASHES ALONG DR CONGO BORDER WITH RWANDA: Asked about reports concerning possible strikes by the Rwandan Government against rebels based inside the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the Spokesman said that the UN Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUC) had heard rumors about incidents along the border, including of Rwandan infiltration into the DRC. He said that MONUC continues its reconnaissance patrols by road patrols and helicopters, and so far there has been no confirmation of any such activities. The Spokesman added that the Mission said on Wednesday that Rwanda’s threat to take military action in the DRC seriously threatens the transition process in that country and in the region.

The continuing lack of MSM coverage is becoming less excusable and less acceptable. The U.N. held a press briefing on Wednesday the 23rd, and has a news release on its Web site with a link to a videotape of the briefing.

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The story of the U.N. sex scandal in Congo is hanging on by a thread, evidence that the media is running from the story as eagerly as they ran to the Abu Grhaib story. The Washington Post and Christian Science Monitor both ran stories recently (summarized below) but this is a media drizzle, not a media storm.

First, though, big questions about the L.A. Times’ coverage:

Maggie Farley of the L.A. Times, who did a good job of breaking the Congo sex scandal story, did an equally good job of covering it up today. Her long pg. 3 piece on U.N. is an apologetic wonder, attempting to cobble together evidence that the U.N. presence in Central Africa is succeeding in holding together a shaky peace. She has a difficult time making its case, citing little in the way of hard evidence the U.N. is actually succeeding, and noting that the same forces that have ravaged the area are still there, and still building their strength.

The story makes no mention of the sex scandal in Congo. Can you imagine the reporter that broke the Abu Grhaib story ignoring any mention of it in a wrap-up story a couple days later? As a former reporter, I can’t; but then, I quit reporting because it was much too cynical a profession for me.

Two things might have happened here. First, Farley could have dropped the reference herself, either because she felt pressure from U.N. officials in Africa who were responsible for her safety, or because she is more sympathetic to the U.N. that she is to the girls who were raped. If the U.N. pressured her, then her editors in Los Angeles probably would not have added a reference, since they need to protect their overseas staff. (This is Reuter’s excuse for using bland terminology in stead of “terrorist.”) If this is the case, it speaks of U.N. cover-up and coercion, and should further the media’s desire to investigate the case, not quelch it.

If Farley voluntarily edited her copy, it’s simply evidence of pro-U.N. bias — but to an extreme level that is difficult to comprehend.

The other option is that Farley included a reference in her article, and her editors cut it out in order to protect the U.N. If this is the case, everyone involved in this outrageous breach of news judgment deserves to be fired.

As mentioned above, the story still is weak in the MSM, but hasn’t died. Here are the two recent stories:

The Washington Post (here) includes this new information:

The worst alleged violations occurred in the town of Bunia, where more than half of the U.N. mission is headquartered. The U.N. Office of Internal Oversight cited 68 allegations of sexual misconduct against U.N. military personnel and four against civilians in Bunia between May and September 2004.



A 13-year-old girl interviewed in Bunia by Zeid’s team said that she was raped by a U.N. worker. “One day, in May 2004, my grandmother had to attend a funeral and I was left alone at home to look after my brothers and sisters,” she told investigators. “That night, around 8 p.m., one of the [U.N. Congo mission's] soldiers came into the house. He raped me. My brothers and sisters were in the house at the time.”

An article in the Christian Science Monitor (here) points out that while the problem is pervasive, prosecution isn’t, because (as in this case) offenders are transferred home, where prosecution is rare:



This darker side of nation-building is explored at length in a new book, “Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures: A True Story from Hell on Earth.” The book has scandalized the UN – Miramax reportedly may turn it into a TV show or movie.



“We draw a distinction between wild behavior that’s consensual, and where officials have a duty of care they are abusing,” says Amnesty’s [Gita] Sahgal.



Sexual violations, says Sahgal, arise from a pervasive air of impunity. Violence against women is generally not prosecuted in the peacekeepers’ homeland, let alone in a chaotic war or post-conflict zone. The UN also has no right to conduct background checks on the personnel a country contributes to a mission. And most significantly, foreign troops often enjoy immunity agreements.

Victim advocates complain it’s rare for a commander to take accusations against underlings seriously, and even rarer to act against alleged perpetrators. “If a few men were prosecuted … I think they’d be much more on guard,” says Sahgal. “Yet I don’t see much evidence of that happening.”

The article also outlines previous sex scandals by U.N. troops:



Wherever the UN has established operations in recent years, various violations of women seem to follow:

• A prostitution ring in Bosnia involved peacekeepers, while Canadian troops there were accused of beatings, rape, and sexually abusing a handicapped girl.
• Local UN staff in West Africa reportedly withheld aid, such as bags of flour, from refugees in exchange for sexual favors.
• Jordanian peacekeepers in East Timor were accused of rape.
• Italian troops in Somalia and Bulgarian troops in Cambodia were accused of sexual abuses.
• In May, Moroccan and Uruguayan peacekeepers in Congo were accused of luring teenage girls into their camp with offers of food for sex. The girls then fed the banana and cake remuneration to their infants, whom media reported had been born as a result of multiple rapes by militiamen.

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The editors of the LA Times decided these are the stories you’d find most important and interesting:

• Need for More Government Regulation: “Planting Seeds of Wrath in ‘Steinbeck Country’” (library closures), “Sweat, Fear and Resignation Among All the Toys” (working conditions in Mattel factories in China)
• Bush-bashing: “Sizing Up Man Who Would be Atty. Gen.” (Scroll down two posts), “Ports Called ‘Enormous Targets’”
• Environmentalism/Animal Rights: “Plans for Seal Safaris Put Norway in a Dilemma”
• International: “Ukraine Court to Rule on Election”
• Feature: “Breaking, Entering Your PC” (spyware)

Not making the cut, on page one or anywhere else in todays LAT was this story on the discovery of a huge weapons cache in a Falloujah mosque. As the Washington Times reported:

The weapons cache, described by the U.S. military as the largest uncovered so far in Fallujah, was discovered Wednesday in the Saad Bin Abi Waqas Mosque, where fugitive rebel leader Abdullah al-Janabi often preached.

Troops found small arms, artillery shells, heavy machine guns, and anti-tank mines inside the mosque, the U.S. military said. U.S. forces also uncovered what may have been a mobile bomb-making factory as well as mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, launchers, and parts of surface-to-air weapons systems elsewhere in the mosque compound, the military added.

At a press conference in Baghdad, National Security Adviser Qassem Dawoud said troops found the suspected chemical lab in the southwestern district of Fallujah, where pockets of insurgents are still holding out following the Nov. 8 U.S.-Iraqi assault.

“We also found in the laboratory manuals and instructions spelling out procedures for making explosives,” he said. “They also spoke about making anthrax.”

I guess the LAT’s editors thought it more important to know libraries are underfunded and (surprise!) spyware is a threat to our computers.

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In case you’re wondering, The LA Times, which yesterday ran a front page story harping about anti-gay prejudice in the LAPD, buried on page 42 the story about Matthew Shepard’s killers saying gay-bashing had nothing to do with the murder.

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By way of introduction, a Nexis search with the parameters “clinton AND confidant OR crony OR cronies AND cabinet” in November, 1996, when Clinton was putting together his second-term Cabinet, yield no hits in any English-language newspaper in the world. Not one.

By comparison, the same search results for Bush in this year yielded 283 hits, including mentions of Bush cronism in his Cabinet selections in the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, NPR, CNN and the Associated Press. Granted, I didn’t do a content analysis of these hits, but I believe the numbers speak for themselves, and show that the MSM wants you to believe that Clinton surrounded himself with the best and the brightest, while Bush surrounds himself with yes-men.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury in the case People of the United States vs. Media Bias, the prosecution presents as evidence today’s LA Times’ page one profile of Alberto Gonzales, the President’s nominee for Attorney General. (here)

First, the damning sentences: But Gonzales illustrates how Bush is turning to friends, cronies and associates in stocking his second-term Cabinet, and the relationship with Gonzales may be the closest of them all.



The article actually makes the point that Gonzales is a business-oriented near-moderate, not a crazy right-winger, but even so, the prejudice with which MSM are executing this story is evident. Reporter Richard B. Schmitt let it slip with this paragraph:

Now, with his presumed ascent to the top of the Justice Department, people are starting to wonder which Gonzales will show up for work: the relative moderate who emphasizes a low-key, fact-based approach to the law, or the ardent advocate who follows the marching orders of his president and friend and his expansive view of presidential power.

Schmitt starts with the assumption that the President is not a moderate, and is never low-key, fact-based, or concerned about what is lawful and what is not. And, to accomplish his Orwellian work, Bush needs people who follow his marching orders.

This is, of course, outrageous because the media have four years of Bush record to truth-check their wild allegations against. They will point to Abu Ghraib (and attempt to, with this sentence: Some suspect the [Guantanamo] opinion may have helped set the stage for the mistreatment of prisoners there and at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and plan to ask Gonzales about his level of involvement.), the Patriot Act and Halliburton, but what the record shows is a president who follows due process to implement as much of his agenda that the people’s representatives in Congress will allow him to.

Geneva Convention “Quaint” and “Obsolete”

Of course the Times article resurrects this famous Gonzales quote from a memo on the Geneva Convention. Let’s dispose of this once and (oh, how I wish!) for all. The Geneva Convention is exactly what Gonzales said it is. It was drafted at a time when countries raised uniformed armies and fought each other primarily through conventional warfare. It strived to to maintain that conventionality.

But war today is different. The injured terrorist/insurgent in the Falloujah mosque was not wearing the uniform of an enemy combatant, for example. So the rules are obsolete. The MSM never bother to point this out, prefering to let readers suppose that Gonzales wants to throw out the Convention, the baby and the bathwater.

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Remember when we chuckled at how the Soviets purged their history books of any mention of Stalin? How absurd! And how absurd we’ve become in America, trying to cover up the fact that our nation has a Christian heritage. (story here)

Teacher Steven Williams tried to show his fifth grade students at Stevens Creek Elementary School in the Bay Area that important historic documents of the United States reflect the religious belief of our nation and its founders. Among the documents he dared to show his students were the Declaration of Independence, “The Rights of the Colonists” by Samuel Adams and William Penn’s “The Frame of the Governmentof Pennsylvania.”

His efforts to accurately teach our history were shut down when one parent complained. Now his principal demands to see his study plans in advance and nixes any effort to present the Christian roots of our nation for what they are: True and historic.

Stevens has sued, represented by the Alliance Defense Fund. But Berkley prof Daniel Farber says, “I think his claim that he has a constitutional right to use these materials in a classroom is an uphill battle.” What have we come to?

Hopefully some of our friends in the media — Hugh Hewitt, Dennis Prager, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh come to mind — will give Mr. Williams’ case the coverage it deserves. Let’s give The Smart Guys a crack at this, Hugh!

Oh, and Happy Thanksgiving. Praise God for all the blessings He has bestowed on our country.

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Associated Press moved a story on the UN sex abuse case in Congo but it’s still not being picked up by MSM — or anyone else for that matter. A Nexis search yields fewer hits than a search for “Nixon AND greatness” would — 16 hits worldwide in English-language pubs. Not all those are directly on subject, and none are in leading papers like the New York Times.

A reader suggests that it’s just the continuing lack of interest in Africa by our media. But the media has shown it can cover Africa when it suits their agenda. It covered the continent when it helped knock down the diseased system of Apartheid in South Africa and its coverage encouraged Clinton’s withdrawl from Somalia. Sudan? No, that’s another story.

The same reader excused Annan’s temerity in attacking us for the Abu Ghreib scandal even as he knew his troops were raping 12 year olds. Sorry, you’ve missed the point. There is such a massive difference on the scale of evil between sexually assaulting a 12 year old girl and making a grown man strip for a photo. Of course Abu Ghraib was inexcusable, but it wasn’t torture. It was cruel prank that hurt our standing in a very sensitive situation. Annan could have helped the U.S. by putting some necessary perspective on vicious Arab media coverage of the event, but he chose to feed the flames, no doubt relieved that his incomparably worse scandal was being swept under the rugs.

It’s Come Down to This has an excellent critique of this subject, employing a 1-5 scale from “mean” to “abhorent” for rating these incidents.

The media is ignoring this story, there is no doubt about it. In Congo, 150 young girls are carrying the psychological and physical scars of their abuse at then hands of the U.N. staff and soldiers. Knowledge of this kind of reprehensible behavior by U.N. troops is so common in the international community that some countries refuse U.N. troops that haven’t had an AIDs test.

The media covers AIDs endlessly, but apparently not when it’s caused by U.N. troops. It covers every rare incident where a single U.S. soldier rapes a girl overseas, but is ignoring a story of systematic child abuse by the soldiers in Baby Blue. And it’s trying to make a new Abu Ghraib out of the possibly wrong, but certainly forgivable, mosque shooting … but protecting the U.N.

The U.N., because of its opposition to the war in Iraq and all things Bush, has earned “don’t touch” status in the Liberal media, joining gay activists, environmentalists, the ACLU, separation-of-church-and-state fanatics and pro-abortionists. They now enjoy full protection from criticism by media. If you need further proof, just consider how oil-for-food remains a mere shadow of Halliburton in MSM coverage.

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Today’s LA Times details a new UN report that attempts to get the organization restabilized. It apparently acknowledges the UN has an obligaion to uphold “the international community’s duty to intervene in any state where the government is unable or unwilling to protect its people,” yet finds a way to continue to dismiss Saddam’s Iraq as a legitimate target for such intervention.

Interestingly, it proposes to expand the Security Council, adding (probably) Japan, Germany, Brazil and India as permanent members and two more rotating members. Alternatively, six non-permanent members would be added, based on their financial and military support for the UN. No word on whether nations like Sudan would be able to continue to chair the UN’s human rights committee.

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Iran, Syria, Turkey, Kuwait, Jordan and Saudi Arabi rebuffed pleas from France to support a deadline for U.S. troop withdrawl from Iraq, and instead gave strong backing to the interim Iraqi government, its battle against insurgents, and its efforts to hold a free and democratic election. They also said the timetable for the US troop withdrawal is the business of the Iraqi government, not the international or Arab community. Important stuff. You’ll find it buried on page four.

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