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Recent
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June
6, 2003
David
Krieger
The Big Lie
Ramzy
Baroud
Sharon and the Myth of the Peacemakers
Anthony
Gancarski
Sharansky: "Crucifixion is a Privilege"
Sam
Hamod
His Own Little Country
Sean Carter
Why Indict Martha Stewart and Not Ken Lay?
David
Lindorff
Cracks in the Consensus
Stew Albert
Ari's Great Set
Elaine
Cassel
Ashcroft the Insatiable
June
5, 2003
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Pools of Fire: The Looming Nuclear
Nightmare in the Woods of North Carolina
Imraan
Siddiqi
Ann Coulter's Foul Mouth
Michael
Leon
Clinton, Reno & Waco: Remember What They've Done
Robert
Jensen
Texas Pledge Law Undermines Democracy
Ann Harrison
Rosenthal is Free, But the Fight isn't Over
Paul
Dean
How You Can Be Deliriously Happy in the Age of Bush
Gary Leupp
When Spooks Speak Out
Website
of the Day
Evidence in Black and White?
June
4, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Federal Judge Blinks; Rosenthal
Walks
Lisa
Walsh Thomas
The Isaiah Crowd: The Threat of Neo-Christianity
Jason
Leopold
Manufacturing the Iraq War
John Chuckman
Blackmail as Policy
Mazin
Qumsiyeh
Summit: Peace or Pretense?
Issam Nashashibi
Sharon's Sword of Damocles
Steve
Perry
Wolfowitz of Arabia: the VF interview transcript
June
3, 2003
Chris
Floyd
Copycat Killers: Bush, Jakarta and
the Slaughter in Aceh
Jason
Leopold
Wolfowitz Tells All
Elaine
Cassel
We Interrupt Your Normal Show to Bring You an Important Message
from Michael Powell: "Go to Hell, Americans!"
Tom
Crumpacker
The Politics of US Cuba Policy
William
S. Lind
Fourth Generation Warfare in Iraq
Sam
Hamod
The Final Brick in the Wall
Uri
Avnery
The Altalena Affair
Hammond
Guthrie
Stepping into Some Deep DARPA
Steve
Perry
The WashTimes'
al-Qaeda nuke "exclusive"
June
2, 2003
Arundhati
Roy
Day of the Jackals
Norman
Madarasz
Behind the Neo-Con Curtain: Plato,
Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom
Alain
Frachon and Daniel Vernet
The Strategist and the Philosopher: Strauss and Wohlstetter
Anthony
Gancarski
Anti-Imperialism, Then & Now
Standard
Schaefer
Wasted at the Pentagon
Jason
Leopold
Rocky's Advice to the Dems
Guthrie
& Albert
HUAC 58 Years Letter
Steve
Perry
The Politics of Terror Alerts
May
31, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
A Whiner Called Horowitz
Gary Leupp
The Frauds of War
Dave
Lindorff
Clinton, Bush, Lies and Impeachment
Tom Stephens
Does It Matter that the Bush Administration Lied?
Sasan
Fayazmanesh
Who Is Next?
Joanne
Mariner
Trivializing Terrorism
Wayne
Madsen
Ayatollah Ashcroft's Busy Week
Larry Magnuson
Is a Television a Radio or a Billboard?
Elaine
Cassel
Wake Up, America!
Gila Svirsky
Waiting for the Lament to End
Susan
Davis
Kitchen Dreams
Chris Clarke
Barbra Streisand: Environmental Hypocrite
Chris
Floyd
Bush Locates Source of World Evil: God
Adam Engel
Gravity's End Zone
Poets'
Basement
Reiss, Guthrie, Orloski, Albert
May
30, 2003
Ben
Tripp
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Agenda
Neve
Gordon
The Bad Fence
Todd
Steiner
Endangered Ocean
Robert
Freeman
Bush's Tax Cuts: a Form of National Insanity
Sean
Carter
Utah Gets Fired Up for Executions
Daniel
Bacher
How Bush's War Violated International Laws
Tariq
Ali
Re-Colonizing Iraq
Steve
Perry
Bush Wars
Web Log
May
29, 2003
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Jason
Leopold
Despite Thin Intelligence Reports,
US Plans Overthrow of Iran Regime
Ron
Jacobs
Popular Uprising, Inc.
Michelle
Ciaccorra
Bush's Nuclear Policy: Do As I Say, Not As I Do
Yves Engler
The Economics of Health Care in
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Kimberly
Blaker
Vouchers for Jesus
Harry
Browne
Stakeknife: Britain's Army Spy at
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Stew
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Cops of the World
Steve Perry
Greens 04: In or Out?
Hot Stories
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
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Elaine
Cassel
Civil Liberties
Watch
Michel
Guerrin
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Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
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Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
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June
7, 2003
The New Yorker's Congo
Distortions
An Open Letter
to Philip Gourevitch
By ROBIN PHILPOT
Your recent article about central Africa in the
May 30 edition of The New Yorker, The Congo Test
is the latest in a long stream of successful disinformation about
central Africa. This time it is about the Ituri province of
the Congo, before it was about Rwanda, but it has always been
reliable for those who want to disinform.
In the purest pre-colonial style, you
describe the Ituri province as "the most infernal hell"
of hells in the "most hellish country" in the world.
Knowing you, that is probably the message you want to leave readers
with. Moreover, it's better that way since the tale you are now
trying to tell contradicts everything you wrote previously about
Rwanda, Uganda, the Congo and their respective leaders.
It is time to admit that you operated
as a flack for Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and the
Clinton Administration during the 1990s. That was when they set
out to remodel Central Africa using the proxy army from Uganda,
under Yoweri Museveni, and a break-off from that same army called
the Rwandan Patriotic Front led by Paul Kagame, who took over
in Rwanda in July 1994.
Your service to them was best illustrated
in your May 1998 New Yorker article entitled The Genocide
Fax. You wisely published it the same week the House Committee
on International Relations held hearings and wanted to question
the Clinton Administration in public hearings about its inaction
during the Rwandan tragedy of 1994. These hearings followed on
the heels of hearings in France and Belgium that pointedly attacked
both Clinton and Albright. Since neither State nor Defense deigned
to appear at those hearings a diversion was required.
Your fax machine just happened to ring
at that key moment.
You told us in The New Yorker
that "somebody with access to UN files disagreed with Eckhard",
who you quote complaining about the UN getting a bum rap on Rwanda,
and "one day (your) fax machine rang and a copy of the missing
response to Dallaire spun into (your) office". The spin
you gave to that fortuitous fax was pretty sharp: 'We in Washington
are not guilty of having supported a murderous invading army
that has spread death and destruction throughout central Africa,
nor are we responsible for preventing the UN from sending forces
in to protect civilians. The guilty ones are those incompetent
UN bureaucrats and especially that Secretary General Boutros
Boutros-Ghali'. Most importantly, Philip, you successfully kept
the heat off of Madeleine and Bill. Congratulations!
Until now nobody has asked who sent you
that fax, and of course you have not volunteered the information.
Why don't you come out and admit that it came from your brother-in-law,
Jamie Rubin, Madeleine Albright's senior press attaché
and right-hand man, who had also been in charge of ousting Boutros-Ghali
from the UN? People now know how good your are because you made
so much mileage with that "genocide fax", that you
dubbed the first documentary evidence of a comprehensive plan
to commit genocide. That was particularly skilful work since
you and I know very well Dallaire's fax and the UN reply are
more like "that idiotic bordereau" that Zola described
in Dreyfus Affair whose "so-called secrets were of no value".
Moreover, they have not stood up in court at the ICTR in Arusha.
As flack though you did a good job for
Washington's allies. You saw that both Uganda's Museveni and
Rwanda's Kagame got good press among the right-thinking people
in the United States. You waxed hagiographic about both in your
very touching book We wish to inform you that tomorrow we
will be killed with our families. You made Museveni into
the "éminence grise of the new leadership
in central Africa", with a "frontiersman's inventiveness",
who is "lucid, blunt and low on bombast". You had him
conveniently attacking corruption and bad governance in Africa.
To make it very clear, you compared him to George Washington
because of his revolutionary approach to Africa.
As for Kagame, you purred on about him
being "always so soothingly sane a man of rare scope-a man
of action with an acute human and political intelligence".
He became "intensely private a neat dresser, married, a
father of two". You found him so good that you could not
help thinking as you wrote your book of another "tall skinny
civil warrior, Abraham Lincoln!".
Since you felt so good about Kagame and
Museveni, in your Stories from Rwanda, you heaped praise
on them for invading the Congo in 1996 and bombing refugee camps,
because of the noble and just pursuit of "génocidaires".
You knew that story would go over well because you knew your
brother-in-law, Jamie Rubin at State, had arranged for his on
his future wife, CNN's Christiane Amanpour, to tell the same
story already when she was reporting for CNN at the Rwanda/Zaire
border in November 1996.
You also praised Kagame for the Kibeho
refugee camp massacres in Rwanda in April 1995. You carefully
made those massacres into regrettable incidents like those that
occurred as General Sherman led the Union army to defeat the
Confederates or during the liberation of France and Italy from
the Nazis: small errors that don't tarnish the noble cause. You
described that cause as a new "decolonization" process.
Very good Philip! With a term like that you dignified Washington's
allies, even though they committed terrible crimes at Kibeho
and in the Congo, and you trivialized the real decolonization
of Africa that was led by people Washington wants out.
But what on earth has happened? In your latest article in The
New Yorker, you've called your erstwhile heroes "occupying
armies" and "arsonists masquerading as firemen".
But Philip, who has been paying the arsonists and who has taken
advantage of the fire sale? You know that your friends at State-Assistant
Secretary of State E. Korkblum to be exact-warned the French
journalist Jean Daniel in Washington in November 1996 that France
had everything wrong in Africa and that the "strong man
in Africa was now in Kampala and not in Kinshasa". That
was exactly when Rwanda and Uganda were invading the Congo and
starting the war that has not finished yet.
You also know about US troops covertly
accompanying the Rwandan and Ugandan armies as they did their
dirty work in Eastern Congo. The French press has reported widely
on it. But I guess you know you don't have to worry since nobody
believes or trusts the French any more.
The fact is that the picture is muddy,
and that may be your one consolation after having to contradict
yourself so completely.
Don't worry though, you've done your work deftly, despite the
glaring contradictions. You've faithfully kept to the tradition
established by Rudyard Kipling, Rider Haggard, and many others.
You've portrayed Africans as slaughtering each other almost by
choice with no external political, economic, institutional causes.
You've described Africa as one of those "vexed areas of
the world that holds no compelling strategic or economic interest"
for anyone. And you've depicted the United States as the "reluctant
empire" just as Seeley described the British empire as "an
empire acquired in a fit of absence of mind" in 1883, just
before the Berlin Conference and the scramble for Africa.
So when the United States starts scrambling
for Africa, you will still be the authority, you will continue
to get grants, you will still be quoted by everybody and invited
to all the major talk shows, and you will win prizes and see
your name in the paper. And if you have your way, we will all
think that the recolonization is a good thing because it will
protect the Africans from themselves.
Yours,
Robin Philpot
Today's
Features
David
Krieger
The Big Lie
Ramzy
Baroud
Sharon and the Myth of the Peacemakers
Anthony
Gancarski
Sharansky: "Crucifixion is a Privilege"
Sam
Hamod
His Own Little Country
Sean Carter
Why Indict Martha Stewart and Not Ken Lay?
David
Lindorff
Cracks in the Consensus
Stew Albert
Ari's Great Set
Elaine
Cassel
Ashcroft the Insatiable
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