By Matthew Russell Lee
UNITED NATIONS, August 27 -- Amid the drums of war and the UN Secretariat's wan accompanying music, a few connections are worth noting, a few more questions asked. (Here's video of some from August 26.)
For August 27: when did the UN ask to visit the site at Ghouta?
While the delay from Wednesday to Sunday (or Monday, when the team got out and said, if this YouTube video is not false, that they are not even looking at what type of munition was used in part because they didn't want to put it in their white UN 4 by 4) is now an element in the case for missile strikes, Syria says the UN didn't even ASK until Saturday.
Is that true? Even if the UK, for example, asked earlier, it is a UN team. So when did the UN make the request?
Saturday August 24 is when UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's High Representative on Disarmament Angela Kane re-arrived in Damascus.
Inner City Press covered Kane when she was head of Ban's Department of Management, including an investigation by the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services for favoritism in the UN's so-called UMOJA computer management system.
When Japan's Yukio Takasu returned after a pause from being his country's Ambassador to the UN to take over Kane's job, Kane's native Germany lobbied for her to get another top UN job. She was offered one in Lebanon, as Inner City Press reported, but did not want it. So she "got" Disarmament.
This connection must be noted: it was Germany which got Kane this job, in the same way that France installed Herve Ladsous as the fourth French head of UN Peacekeeping in a row, and the US picked Jeffrey Feltman, formerly the State Department's chief on the Middle East to replace B. Lynn Pascoe as Ban's political chief.
So the fact that Germany has expressed a willingness to join a coalition to strike Syria, without UN Security Council approval, and the Germany's Angela Kane's role in the "UN's" chemical weapons inspection team should be noted.
But by most media covering the UN, it is not. When Inner City Press even mentions Ladsous' and UN Peacekeeping's French connection, Ladsous refuses to answer questions, and some media, including the French wire service Agence France Presse on one of whose management boards Ladsous served, have even filed complaints with the UN against Inner City Press.
This is dysfunction, and is now being countered by the Free UN Coalition for Access, @FUNCA_info.
Another major wire service, Reuters, joined in the second of AFP's complaints. On August 26 Reuters based a piece essentially selling or planning for the legality of military strikes on Syria without Security Council or even General Assembly approval around, as lead, a comment by the Council on Foreign Relations' Richard Haass.
But on that CFR call, as noted by Inner City Press, wasJudith Miller. Given her role during the lead up to the US intervention in Iraq, one might think this would have been included in an overly-long rehash story. But no.
Notably, Reuters' UN bureau has been shown to have spied for the UN, handing over an internal anti-Press document of the UN Correspondents Association (which under 2013 president Pamela Falk of CBS hosted Syrian rebel Jarba for what it called a "UN briefing") to UN official Stephane Dujarric. Story here, audio here, document here.
This beat just goes on. Watch this site.
