By Matthew Russell Lee
UNITED NATIONS, August 16 -- The UN confirmed that its Jeffrey Feltman is going to Egypt, when Inner City Press asked it at Friday's noon briefing.
But Thursday night after the UN Security Council meeting, and after Inner City Press had exclusively reported that Feltman would go, the UN Spokesperson's Office called this just a rumor.
That the UN Spokesperson's Office might not have had the information, from the Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's other offices, on Thursday night is one thing. But on Friday at 11:57 am, Reuters' UN bureau ran a two paragraph "report" that
"U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs Jeffrey Feltman plans to visit Egypt next week to hear views on the crisis and the way forward, the United Nations said on Friday. 'The schedule is still being worked out. However, it goes without saying that Mr. Feltman intends to meet with a range of interlocutors, inside and outside the government, including the Muslim Brotherhood,' the United Nations said."
At the noon briefing, Inner City Press asked Ban's outgoing deputy spokesperson Eduardo Del Buey how this information had been released.
Who is this "United Nations" that speaks to Reuters? If it is some sort of faux whistleblower in the Department of Political Affairs, that's one thing. But other alternatives are less palatable or acceptable.
It has been demonstrated that Reuters' UN bureau chief Louis Charbonneau, as first vice president of the UN Correspondents Association, gave an internal anti-PressUNCA document to UN official Stephane Dujarric, three minutes after saying that he wouldn't. Charbonneau wrote, "You didn't get this from me."
Now Reuters is spoon-fed information that the UN Spokesperson's office had told others was mere "rumor" after Inner City Press reported it, along with uploaded audio of Egypt's Permanent Representative Mootaz Ahmadein Khalil said that "we have been contacted by the Secretariat" of the UN, "Mr. Feltman expressed his interest to go." He said, through Egypt's Mission to the UN, Feltman asked "to set up a number of high level meetings and we have done so." Inner City Press audio online here.
How does this UN work? We'll have more on this. Watch this site.
