Human Rights Watch in Service to the War Party

[Judi Lynn]

Human Rights Watch in Service to the War Party
Including A Review of Weighing the Evidence: Lessons from the Slobodan Milosevic Trial (Human Rights Watch, December, 2006)

By Edward S. Herman, David Peterson, George Szamuely


Part 1: Introduction — The Role and Biases of Human Rights Watch

Human Rights Watch (HRW) came into existence in 1978 as the U.S. Helsinki Watch Committee. Early documents affirmed that its purpose was to "monitor domestic and international compliance with the human rights provisions of the Helsinki Final Act." <1> But though a private U.S.-based organization whose vice chairman once stated "You can't complain about other countries unless you put your own house in order," <2> its main focus was on Moscow. Thus its literature also affirmed that founding the Committee "was intended as a gesture of moral support for the activities of the beleaguered Helsinki monitors in the Soviet bloc," and its early work was well geared to advance the U.S. government's policy of weakening the Soviet Union and loosening its ties to Eastern Europe. <3> While the organization has broadened its horizons and grown enormously since its $400,000 seed money from the Ford Foundation, it has never sloughed off its close link to the Western establishment, as evidenced by its leadership's affiliations, <4> its funding, <5> and its role over the years. Because of its institutional commitment to human rights and its broad purview, however, HRW has done a great deal of valuable work, as for example in helping to document the character and effects of the Reagan era wars across Central America, where its Americas Watch reports on the U.S. support for the Nicaragua Contras, the Salvadoran army and death squads, and Guatemalan state terror were eye-opening and led to intense hostility on the part of the Reaganites and Wall Street Journal editors. <6>

But despite these and countless other constructive efforts, the organization has at critical times and in critical theaters thrown its support behind the U.S. government's agenda, sometimes even serving as a virtual public relations arm of the foreign policy establishment. Since the early 1990s this tendency has been especially marked in the organization's focus on and treatment of some of the major contests in which the U.S. government itself has been engaged — perhaps none more clearly than Iraq and the Balkans. Here, its deep bias is well-illustrated in a March 2002 op-ed by HRW's executive director, Kenneth Roth, published in the Wall Street Journal under the title "Indict Saddam." <7> The first thing to note about this commentary is its timing. It was published at a time when the United States and Britain were clearly planning an assault on Iraq with a "shock and awe" bombing campaign and ground invasion in violation of the UN Charter. But Roth doesn't warn against launching an unprovoked war — though wars of aggression had been judged by the Nuremberg Tribunal to be the "supreme international crime" that "contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole." <8> On the contrary, Roth's focus was on Saddam's crimes, and provided a valuable public relations gift to U.S. and British leaders, diverting attention from and putting an apologetic gloss on their prospective supreme international crime.

Three years earlier, when the NATO powers had begun the bombing of Yugoslavia on March 24, 1999, HRW said nothing critical about that action; as we shall see, it focused mainly on the crimes of the target country then under attack. In a 1998 commentary for the International Herald Tribune, Fred Abrahams, an HRW researcher whose major focus has been Kosovo, urged regime-change for Yugoslavia, either through President Slobodan Milosevic's indictment or a U.S. war to affect the same outcome. "At what point will the Clinton administration decide that they have seen enough?" Abrahams asked. "he international community's failure to punish Milosevic for crimes in Croatia and Bosnia sent the message that he would be allowed to get away with such crimes again. It is now obvious that the man who started these conflicts cannot be trusted to stop them." <9> This line also served the United States and other NATO powers well, and both cases show a clear adaptation of HRW definitions of human rights and choice of worthy victims to the needs of the Western powers and institutions that nurture the organization. (In Part 3, we deal with the mind-boggling misrepresentation of history in Abrahams' statement about Milosevic's unwillingness to stop these wars — in fact, Milosevic signed-on to every major peace proposal 1992-1995, whereas Abrahams' favorite state regularly sabotaged them.)

Roth's "Indict Saddam" starts as follows: "The Bush administration's frustration with a decade of porous sanctions against Iraq has led to active consideration of military action. Yet one alternative has yet to be seriously tried — indicting Saddam Hussein for his many atrocities, particularly the 1988 genocide against Iraqi Kurds." This clearly implies that the sanctions imposed on Iraq were ineffective ("porous") and that the administration's alleged frustration on that account was real and well grounded, establishment claims that were false and misleading and that an unbiased analyst might have had some doubts about at the time. We may note also the lack of concern with the "active consideration of military action."

More:
http://www.electricpolitics.com/2007/02/human_rights_watch_in_service.html

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This is for general background and focus on the group DU'ers were discussing a couple of weeks ago. Thought you might want to file it for future reference, as it's a long one to read in one sitting.

[magbana]

1. EXCELLENT, Judi!

Will file away for in-depth reading later this week. Appreciate it.

[EFerrari]

2. Thank you, Judi.

[Bacchus39]

3. thank you so much for showing that the US government doesn't always act in contradiction

to positions of human rights organizations like HRW. In fact, I believe that is what HRW wants is governments to act in accordance with human rights.

this sometimes means that capable countries act to counter agression by rogue states. Indicting Saddam for war crimes is certainly a reasonbable position for a human rights organization to take. I wonder if the entire report discusses HRW position on Darfur or Rwanda or Congo or if they would have criticized HRW for favoring outside intervention to halt those atrocities.

but lets be clear, the recent criticism of HRW by some posters is a simply of result of the organization's criticism of one particular government.

[AlphaCentauri]

4. Don't miss the sponsor list

HRW Donors
Taken from an older version of the HRW website, this 1995 list is apparently the only information available. In the United States, HRW is not legally obliged to disclose who donates money. About half its funds come from foundations, and half from individual donors, in total about $20 million.
In its Annual Reports, HRW always claims that it "accepts no government funds, directly or indirectly." However, that was a lie according to the 1995 list, and it is still a lie. The Dutch Novib - now part of the Oxfam group - is a government-funded aid organisation, and in turn it funded the activities of Human Rights Watch Africa in the Great Lakes region and Angola. Oxfam itself is primarily funded by the British government and the European Union, see their annual report. It is also funded by the United States Agency for International Development, USAID. Oxfam in turn partly funds Novib, so some of that money finds it way to HRW. Both Oxfam and Novib funded the HRW report on the Rwanda genocide. So, if it is as accurate as HRW's claim not to accept any indirect government funding, look elsewhere for the truth.


DONORS OF $100,000 OR MORE
Dorothy and Lewis Cullman
The Aaron Diamond Foundation
Irene Diamond
The Ford Foundation
The Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett Fund
Estate of Anne Johnson
The J. M. Kaplan Fund
The Fanny and Leo Koerner Charitable Trust
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
The John Merck Fund
The Joyce Mertz-Gilmore Foundation
Novib, The Dutch Organization for Development Corporation,
The Overbrook Foundation
Oxfam
Donald Pels
The Ruben and Elisabeth Rausing Trust
The Rockefeller Foundation
Marion and Herbert Sandler, The Sandler Family Supporting Foundation
Susan and George Soros
Shelby White and Leon Levy


DONORS OF $25,000 - $99,999

The Arca Foundation
Helen and Robert Bernstein
Mr. and Mrs. Edgar Bronfman, Jr.
Nikki and David Brown
Carnegie Corporation of New York
Compton Foundation, Inc.
Mr. and Mrs. Marvin Davis
The Dr. Seuss Foundation
Fiona and Stanley Druckenmiller
Jack Edelman
Epstein Philanthropies
Federation Internationale des Ligues des Droits de L'Homme
Barbara Finberg
General Service Foundation
Abby Gilmore and Arthur Freierman
Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund
Katherine Graham, The Washington Post Company
Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation
Hudson News
Independence Foundation
The Isenberg Family Charitable Trust
The Henry M. Jackson Foundation
Robert and Ardis James
Jesuit Refugee Service
Nancy and Jerome Kohlberg
Lyn and Norman Lear
Joshua Mailman
Medico International
Moriah Fund, Inc.
Ruth Mott Fund
Kathleen Peratis and Richard Frank
Phillips-Van Heusen Corporation
Ploughshares Fund
Public Welfare Foundation, Inc.
Anita and Gordon Roddick
Edna and Richard Salomon
Lorraine and Sid Sheinberg
Margaret R. Spanel
Time Warner Inc.
U.S. Jesuit Conference
Warner Brothers, Inc.
Edie and Lew Wasserman
Maureen White and Steven Rattner
Malcolm Wiener and Carolyn Seely Wiener
The Winston Foundation for World Peace

http://web.inter.nl.net/users/Paul.Treanor/HRW.html

[Judi Lynn]

5. The Washington Post appears on this other list. No surprise at all now why

they appear on BOTH lists. It's really a shame. From The Origins of the Overclass by Steve Kangas:

~~~~~~~~~~
~snip~
MOCKINGBIRD was extraordinarily successful. In no time, the agency had recruited at least 25 media organizations to disseminate CIA propaganda. At least 400 journalists would eventually join the CIA payroll, according to the CIA’s testimony before a stunned Church Committee in 1975. (The committee felt the true number was considerably higher.) The names of those recruited reads like a Who's Who of journalism:

• Philip and Katharine Graham (Publishers, Washington Post)
  
  
• William Paley (President, CBS)
  
  
• Henry Luce (Publisher, Time and Life magazine)
  
  
• Arthur Hays Sulzberger (Publisher, N.Y. Times)
  
  
• Jerry O'Leary (Washington Star)
  
  
• Hal Hendrix (Pulitzer Prize winner, Miami News)
  
  
• Barry Bingham Sr., (Louisville Courier-Journal)
  
  
• James Copley (Copley News Services)
  
  
• Joseph Harrison (Editor, Christian Science Monitor)
  
  
• C.D. Jackson (Fortune)
  
  
• Walter Pincus (Reporter, Washington Post)
  
  
• ABC
  
  
• NBC
  
  
• Associated Press
  
  
• United Press International
  
  
• Reuters
  
  
• Hearst Newspapers
  
  
• Scripps-Howard
  
  
• Newsweek magazine
  
  
• Mutual Broadcasting System
  
  
• Miami Herald
  
  
• Old Saturday Evening Post
  
  
• New York Herald-Tribune

Perhaps no newspaper is more important to the CIA than the Washington Post, one of the nation’s most right-wing dailies. Its location in the nation’s capitol enables the paper to maintain valuable personal contacts with leading intelligence, political and business figures. Unlike other newspapers, the Post operates its own bureaus around the world, rather than relying on AP wire services. Owner Philip Graham was a military intelligence officer in World War II, and later became close friends with CIA figures like Frank Wisner, Allen Dulles, Desmond FitzGerald and Richard Helms. He inherited the Post by marrying Katherine Graham, whose father owned it.

After Philip’s suicide in 1963, Katharine Graham took over the Post. Seduced by her husband’s world of government and espionage, she expanded her newspaper’s relationship with the CIA. In a 1988 speech before CIA officials at Langley, Virginia, she stated:

We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things that the general public does not need to know and shouldn’t. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows.

This quote has since become a classic among CIA critics for its belittlement of democracy and its admission that there is a political agenda behind the Post’s headlines.

More:
http://www.aliveness.com/kangaroo/L-overclass.html