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August 1, 2006 International Republican Institute Grants Uncovered Reporters Without Borders and Washington's Coups By DIANA BARAHONA and JEB SPRAGUE British press baron Lord Northcliff said, "News is something that someone, somewhere wants to keep secret, everything else is advertising." If this is true, then U.S. government funding of Reporters Without Borders must be news, because the organization and its friends in Washington have gone to extraordinary lengths to cover it up. In spite of 14 months of stonewalling by the National Endowment for Democracy over a Freedom of Information Act request and a flat denial from RSF executive director Lucie Morillon, the NED has revealed that Reporters Without Borders received grants over at least three years from the International Republican Institute. The NED still refuses to provide the requested documents or even reveal the grant amounts, but they are identified by these numbers: IRI 2002-022/7270, IRI 2003-027/7470 and IRI 2004-035/7473. Investigative reporter Jeremy Bigwood asked Morillon on April 25 if her group was getting any money from the I.R.I., and she denied it, but the existence of the grants was confirmed by NED assistant to the president, Patrick Thomas. The discovery of the grants reveals a major deception by the group, which for years denied it was getting any Washington dollars until some relatively small grants from the NED and the Center for a Free Cuba were revealed (see Counterpunch: "Reporters Without Borders Unmasked"). When asked to account for its large income RSF has claimed the money came from the sale of books of photographs. But researcher Salim Lamrani has pointed out the improbability of this claim. Even taking into account that the books are published for free, it would have had to sell 170 200 books in 2004 and 188 400 books in 2005 to earn the more than $2 million the organization claims to make each year 516 books per day in 2005. The money clearly had to come from other sources, as it turns out it did. The I.R.I., an arm of the Republican Party, specializes in meddling in elections in foreign countries, as a look at NED annual reports and the I.R.I. website shows. It is one of the four core grantees of the NED, the organization founded by Congress under the Reagan administration in 1983 to replace the CIA's civil society covert action programs, which had been devastated by exposure by the Church committee in the mid-1970s (Ignatius, 1991). The other three pillars of the NED are the National Democratic Institute (the Democratic Party), the Solidarity Center (AFL-CIO) and the Center for International Private Enterprise (U.S. Chamber of Commerce). But of all the groups the I.R.I. is closest to the Bush administration, according to a recent piece in The New York Times exposing its role in the overthrow of Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide: "President Bush picked its president, Lorne W. Craner, to run his administration's democracy-building efforts. The institute, which works in more than 60 countries, has seen its federal financing nearly triple in three years, from $26 million in 2003 to $75 million in 2005. Last spring, at an I.R.I. fund-raiser, Mr. Bush called democracy-building 'a growth industry.'" (Bogdanich and Nordberg, 2006) More: http://www.counterpunch.org/barahona08012006.html~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Reporters Without Borders Unmasked May 27, 2005 By Diana Barahona When Robert Menard founded Reporters Without Borders twenty years ago, he gave his group a name which evokes another French organization respected worldwide for its humanitarian work and which maintains a strict neutrality in political conflicts Doctors Without Borders. But RSF (French acronym) has been anything but nonpartisan and objective in its approach to Latin America and to Cuba in particular. From the beginning, RSF has made Cuba its No. 1 target. Allegedly founded to advocate freedom of the press around the world and to help journalists under attack, the organization has called Cuba "the world's biggest prison for journalists." It even gives the country a lower ranking on its press freedom index than countries where journalists routinely have been killed, such as Colombia, Peru and Mexico. RSF has waged campaigns aimed at discouraging Europeans from vacationing in Cuba and the European Union from doing business there its only campaigns worldwide intended to damage a country's economy. The above is not a matter of chance because it turns out that RSF is on the payroll of the U.S. State Department and has close ties to Helms-Burton-funded Cuban exile groups. As a majority of members of Congress work toward normalizing trade and travel with Cuba, the extremist anti-Castro groups that have dictated U.S. Cuba policy for 40 years continue working tirelessly to maintain an economic stranglehold on the island. Their support for RSF is part of this overall strategy. Havana-based journalist Jean-Guy Allard wrote a book about RSF's leader (El expediente Robert Ménard: Por qué Reporteros sin Fronteras se ensaña con Cuba, Quebec: Lanctí´t, 2005) which lays out the pieces of the puzzle regarding Menard's activities, associations and sources of funding in an attempt to explain what he calls Menard's "obsession" with Cuba. On April 27 this year the pieces began to come together: Thierry Meyssan, president of the Paris daily, Red Voltaire, published an article in which he claimed Menard had negotiated a contract with Otto Reich and the Center for a Free Cuba (CFC) in 2001. Reich was a trustee of the center, which receives the bulk of its funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development. The contract, according to Meyssan, was signed in 2002 around the time Reich was appointed Special Envoy to the Western Hemisphere for the Secretary of State. The initial payment for RSF's services was approximately 24,970 euros in 2002 ($25,000), which went up to 59,201 euros in 2003 ($50,000). Lucie Morillon, RSF's Washington representative, confirmed in an interview on April 29 that they are indeed receiving payments from the Center for a Free Cuba, and that the contract with Reich requires them to inform Europeans about the repression against journalists in Cuba and to support the families of journalists in prison. Morillon also said they received $50,000 from the CFC in 2004 and that this amount was consistent from year to year. But she denied that the anti-Cuba declarations on radio and television, full-page ads in Parisian dailies, posters, leafletting at airports and an April 2003 occupation of the Cuban tourism office in Paris were aimed at discouraging tourism to the island. More: http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/6182~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Reporters Without Borders ~snip~ Funding Sources Robert Menard, the Secretary General of RSF, was forced to confess that RSF's budget was primarily provided by "US organizations strictly linked with US foreign policy" (Thibodeau, La Presse). * NED (US$39,900 paid 14 Jan 2005) * Center for a Free Cuba (USAID and NED funded) $50,000 per year NED grant. Contract was signed by Otto Reich * European Union (1.2m Euro) -- currently contested in EU parliament * Rights & Democracy in 2004 supported Reporters Without Borders-Canada <1> "Grants from private foundations (Open Society Foundation, Center for a Free Cuba, Fondation de France, National Endowment for Democracy) were slightly up, due to the Africa project funded by the NED and payment by Center for a Free Cuba for a reprint of the banned magazine De Cuba." <2>
Principal focus of RSF activities
* Cuba
* Venezuela
* Haiti
~snip~
Otto Reich connection
"The man who links RSF to these activities is Otto Reich, who worked on the coups first as assistant secretary of state for Latin American affairs, and, after Nov. 2002, as a special envoy to Latin America on the National Security Council. Besides being a trustee of the government-funded Center for a Free Cuba, which gives RSF $50,000 a year, Reich has worked since the early 1980's with the IRI.'s senior vice president, Georges Fauriol, another member of the Center for a Free Cuba. But it is Reich's experience in propaganda that is especially relevant." <4>
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Reporters_Without_Borders
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
From DU poster donsu:
donsu
Tue Mar-22-05 01:45 PM
Original message
questions about Reporters Without Borders funding
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0319-25.htm
Government Funds Color Press Group’s Objectivity
Over the past year, U.S. news stories about press freedom increasingly have cited the work of a Paris-based organization, Reporters Without Borders (Reporters sans Frontières, or RSF). Indeed, despite its small size and lack of high-profile principals, Reporters Without Borders has achieved nearly the same name-recognition as the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, which can boast of having Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw on its board of directors.
-snip-
But RSF, unlike the CPJ, is heavily funded by government grants, raising questions about its objectivity. And a closer examination of the battles RSF wages—and those it ignores—strongly suggests a political agenda colored by its choice of patrons. Unfortunately, the organization appears unwilling to address such concerns: RSF’s New York representative, Tala Dowlatshahi, terminated a telephone interview when asked if the organization had applied last year for any U.S. government grants other than one received from the National Endowment for Democracy.
Most notable, perhaps, is the group’s obvious political bias in its reporting on Haiti. RSF expressed its support for the Feb. 29, 2004, Franco-American overthrow of Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide at the same time that it received 11% of its budget from the French government (€397,604, or approximately $465,200 in 2003). According to Haiti-based journalist and documentary film-maker Kevin Pina, the organization selectively documented attacks on opposition radio stations while ignoring other attacks on journalists and broadcasters to create the impression of state-sponsored violence against Aristide’s opponents.
-snip-
Reporters Without Borders also has gone after Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez for allegedly threatening the private media. The conflict between the Chávez administration and the media goes back to before April, 2002, when Venezuela’s four private television stations actively aided and abetted a military coup against the government. On the night of the coup, following months of broadcasting anti-Chávez speeches and calling for a “transitional government,” media mogul Gustavo Cisneros’s station hosted meetings among the plotters—including would-be dictator Pedro Carmona.
-snip-
--------------------------------
follow the money, where it goes, where it comes from
http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:ERhvdaYaHioJ:www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php%3Faz%3Dview_all%26address%3D104x3322710+Reporters+Without+Borders+funding+United+States&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3&gl=us&client=firefox-a
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Criticisms
The impartiality of Reporters Without Borders is not universally accepted. A significant amount of funding (19% of total) comes from certain western governments and organisations.<2><3><4> However, RWB has openly criticized Western countries for their treatment of reporters (e.g. the United States' occupation of Iraq).
Some people sympathetic with Cuba are highly critical of an apparent RWB anti-Castro bias. Lucie Morillon, RWB's Washington representative, confirmed in an interview on 29 April 2005 that the organization receives money from the Washington-based Center for a Free Cuba ($50,000 in 2004), and that a contract with the US State Department's Special Envoy to the Western Hemisphere, Otto Reich, requires them to inform Europeans about repression against journalists in Cuba. However, the organisation has denied that its campaigning on the issue of Cuba - in declarations on radio and television, full-page ads in Parisian dailies, posters, leafletting at airports, and an April 2003 occupation of the Cuban tourism office in Paris - were related to the payments.<5> 1.3% of total funding come from this source.<2> In addition, RWB receives free publicity from Saatchi and Saatchi, a member of the world's fourth-largest marketing and public relations conglomerate, Publicis Groupe. It has been noted that a major Publicis client is Bacardi, which has been at the forefront of financing anti-Castro groups.<6> A judge stopped the organization from using a copyrighted image of Ernesto Che Guevara.<7> RWB has been described as an 'ultrareactionary' organization by the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party, Granma. // Castro is an Iberian word coming from Latin castrum, a fortification. ... April 29 is the 119th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (120th in leap years). ... 2005 (MMV) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Otto Reich Otto Juan Reich (b. ... Saatchi & Saatchi is an advertising agency founded by brothers Maurice (now Lord Saatchi) and art collector Charles, most famous for their campaign on behalf of the Conservative Party before the 1979 UK general election and for the adverts for British Airways and other state owned interests privatised by the Conservatives... The current version of the article or section reads like an advertisement. ... Che Guevara Ernesto Rafael Guevara de la Serna (May 14, 1928 – October 9, 1967), commonly known as Che Guevara, was an Argentine-born Marxist revolutionary and Cuban guerrilla leader. ... Granma is the ship that transported the fighters of the Cuban Revolution to Cuba in 1956. ...
Some critics find RWB's reporting of press freedom in Haiti during and after Jean-Bertrand Aristide presidency suspect, arguing that it is biased due funding from the United States.<8> This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ...
Reporters Without Borders have called on the US government to free two journalists it said were being unjustly held at a US prison in Iraq, and at the US military base in Guantanamo, Cuba.<9> However, some critics find it questionable that this was only mentioned in 2006. They also claim that RSF supported the invasion of Iraq, even celebrating the illegal bombing of the ministry of information, a civilian target, whitewashed the U.S. killing of Telecinco Cameraman Jose couso and Reuters Cameraman Taras Protsyuk, and have remained silent about about AP Journalist Bilal Hussein who has been imprisoned by occupation troops.<10> However, this is contradicted by statements made by the RSF.<11><12>
http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Reporters-Without-Borders
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Reporters without integrity
Lauren Carroll Harris
22 June 2007
Reporters Without Borders (RWB). The name, modelled on that of humanitarian organisation Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders), conjures the idea of an organisation that monitors global standards of press freedom, offers insightful and hard-hitting investigative reports on world conflict and defends the safety of courageous journalists in war-torn countries. One would imagine that such an organisation would lend its support to one of the few countries in the world that is taking major leaps in democratising the media by breaking the existing monopoly of corporate domination.
And surely, an organisation that claims to laud truthful press coverage would denounce the actions of a television station — Venezuela’s Radio Caracas Television (RCTV) — that participates in a coup against a democratically elected government. In April 2002, a US-backed military coup was launched against the government of President Hugo Chavez. RCTV broadcast opposition calls to overthrow the Chavez government; encouraged viewers to participate in a demonstration that was part of the coup strategy; banned pro-Chavez coverage during the period of the coup; falsified footage of government forces firing on demonstrators (which was used as a justification for the coup); and refused to report Chavez’s April 13 return to power on the back of a mass uprising led by the poor, instead running soap operas and films.
Instead, RWB is at the forefront of the right-wing media war against Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution. Indeed, the political lines of the US government, the US-backed Venezuelan opposition and RWB coincide exactly.
RWB is purportedly non-partisan and independent. However, it receives funding from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the International Republican Institute, both of which are financed by the US Congress. Last year, information obtained under the US Freedom of Information Act revealed that RWB had received funds over at least three years from the IRI, linked to US President George Bush’s Republican Party.
In April 2005, RWB secretary general Robert Menard admitted: “We indeed receive money from the NED. And that hasn’t posed any problem.”
More:
http://www.greenleft.org.au/2007/715/37122
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Wikipedia:
~snip~
Funding
~snip~
Some of its funding (19% of total) comes from North American and European governmental organisations, among them the American National Endowment for Democracy (NED).<7><8> According to RWB president Robert Ménard, the donations from the French government account for 4,8% of RWB's budget; the total amount of governmental aid being 11% of its budget (including money from the French government, the OSCE, UNESCO and the Organisation internationale de la francophonie).<9>
Both the NED and the Centre for a Free Cuba are funded by the US Government. However, Daniel Junqua, the vice-president of the French section of RWB (and also vice-president of the NGO Les Amis du Monde diplomatique), claims that the NED's funding, which reachs an amount of €35,000 <4>, does not compromise RWB's impartiality.<9>
~snip~
Controversy and campaigns
~snip~
Relationship with Otto Reich
Lucie Morillon, RWB's Washington representative, confirmed in an interview on 29 April 2005 that the organization has a contract with US State Department's Special Envoy to the Western Hemisphere, Otto Reich, who signed it in his capacity as a trustee for the Center for a Free Cuba, to inform Europeans about the repression of journalists in Cuba.<14>
The Otto Reich link has been controversial: when Reich headed the Reagan administration's Office of Public Diplomacy in the 1980s, the body partook in what its officials termed “White Propaganda” – covert dissemination of information to influence domestic opinion regarding US backing for military campaigns against Left-wing governments in Latin America.<15> An investigation into the Office’s activities by the US Comptroller-General found that under Otto Reich it was engaged in "prohibited, covert propaganda activities ... beyond the range of acceptable agency public information activities".<16>
In 2002, Reich was appointed to the visiting board of the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation,<17> which was formerly known as the School for the Americas, and described in 2004 by the LA Weekly as a “torture-teaching institution”.<18> According to Amnesty International, the School in the past has produced training manuals which advocated torture, blackmail, beatings and executions.<19>
Reacting to Otto Reich’s appointment to the visiting board, School of the Americas Watch said, “Reich on a board charged with monitoring the human rights integrity of an institution as notorious as this one is like the fox guarding the henhouse. His appointment to this position exposes the rubber-stamp character and hypocritical function of such a board…The underlying objective of both the school and Mr. Reich is to continue to control the economic and political systems of Latin America by training and arming Latin American militaries.”<20>
According to critics, Reich has a “Stalinist-type contempt for press freedom”.<21> In the 1980s it is alleged that he conducted sex smears against journalists critical of the Contra rebel group in Nicaragua.<21> Reich himself has joked about his attitude to criticism - in 2002 in mock indignation he joked that opponents had "said that I can't make rational decisions because of my ideology. Well, they are not saying that anymore, because I had them all arrested this morning."<22>
Under the contract signed with Reich, Reporters Without Borders received $50,000 in 2004 from the Center for Free Cuba.<23>
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