In South Sudan, Civilians Killed in UN Base in Akobo, In NY US Mission to the UN "Can't Speak Today," Others Tell ICP 10 am Consultations

By Matthew Russell Lee

UNITED NATIONS, December 19 -- Even amid a crisis like that in South Sudan, the UN Security Council can move too slowly, and be less than transparent. On the afternoon of December 19, after news of civilians killed INSIDE the UN Peacekeeping compound in Akobo, there was a peacekeeping seminar in the UN's Economic and Social Council chamber. 

  Outside, Inner City Press asked diplomats about South Sudan. Four told Inner City Press there would there would be Security Council consultations on South Sudan at 10 am on December 20. Several added this was at the request of the US, which "has the pen."

  A request for simple confirmation of this from the US was met with the response, "I don't think we're going to be able to speak today." If not today, when? The US Mission is engaged in tightly planned public relations, rather like 60 Minutes with Amazon, or the NSA last week.

Earlier today Inner City Press ran a story about US Ambassador Samantha Power's trip to Central African Republic, complete with analysis of Cameroon opposing Chadian involvement in MISCA. The US arranged for coverage of Power's trip. Who has asked: where is she, and the US Mission, on South Sudan? Norway has been more vocal this week.

  One watches the US State Department briefing, with Jen Psaki or Marie Harf taking question after question, for example about the arrest and strip searching of the Indian diplomat, and one thinks that the US State Department is a model of openness. That is not mirrored in Turtle Bay -- maybe there are reasons, such as that the press corps is different. But on South Sudan? Watch this site.

Footnote: In the Peacekeeping meeting, sitting in Sri Lanka's seat was military figure Shavendra Silva, on whose inclusion in the UN Senior Advisory Group on Peacekeeping Operation USUN's departing Joe Torsella worked. Joe's leaving; Shavendra's still here. This is the UN.

   

On Syria, UN Scribes Say Ban Ki-moon's Report Will Finger Assad, Ignoring Mandate, Gifts to Jarba and UK

By Matthew Russell Lee

UNITED NATIONS, September 11 -- On Syria, the scam is on, at least at the UN. On September 11 while reporters chased US Ambassador Samantha Power and her French and UK counterparts up to the Russian Mission, in-housescribes in suits pre-spun the UN's chemical weapons report.

The UN report, of course, is explicitly NOT supposed to assign responsibility for the use of chemical weapons. But a UN go-to pass-through breathlessly gushes that "UN Report Will Finger Assad Regime" -- on Monday. 

  The sourcing? An unnamed Western official.

  So how does a Western -- presumably then not "UN" -- official know on Wednesday what Ban Ki-moon will tell the Security Council in five days time? 

  Either this is an admission that Ban Ki-moon is a Western tool, either telling them in advance what he will say or being told what to say, or there is something wrong with this story. The fact that it cites Samantha Power's tweets is telling.

If the results are already known, why wait five days? Unless in this UN's Race for Relevance, that seems like the best timing, after tomorrow's Kerry and Lavrov meeting. But wasn't the UN process supposed to be scientific and not political?

  Responding to this outing, Ban Ki-moon should either release "his" report more quickly, or make sure it follows what he said his mandate was: simply to say if chemical weapons were used or not, not to say who used them. 

  If he is changing the claimed mandate, he has a duty to do the work he was initially charged with, investigating Khan al Asal.

  But as noted, Ban this week blithely gave a speech honoring Samantha Power. He pre-empted noon briefings for two andfive question press conferences, with all the questions leaning in one direction. 

  The first question in every instance given to the "UN Correspondents Association," which held a faux "UN briefing" with Saudi sponsored Syria rebel boss Ahmad al Jarba, publicized only to those who paid money. 

The officers of this same UNCA, along with the author of the "UN Report Will Finger Assad Regime" spin job, were thanked by the UK's outgoing Deputy Permanent Representative Parham for the gift of a tie. But the gifts (and spying) go both ways, as well as anonymous trolling against whoever dares question these scams. Watch this site.

   

On Syria, Is "UN Would Take 2 Weeks to Report on Chemical Weapons" Channeled by Insiders To Justify Faster US Action?

By Matthew Russell Lee

UNITED NATIONS, August 30 -- Would US President Barack Obama wait two weeks before taking military action on what his administration repeatedly on Friday called clear and convincing evidence that Syria's Assad government used chemical weapons on August 21?  It seems unlikely.

  And so what to make of the flurry of spoon-fed UN insiders all parroting the same line on Friday afternoon, that the UN report will take two weeks according to a "UN diplomat"? Or that UN team chief Ake Sellstrom wanted four weeks? These "reports" and echoes have the effect of validating the US taking action sooner, casting the UN as too slow.

As Inner City Press separately reported after speaking, on the record, with Syria's Permanent Representative to the UN Bashar Ja'afari, Damascus' position is that the US has made itself the secret judge of secret evidence. This has echoes of the FISA courts, and also the NSA spying scandal. But few link these.

No, the fix is in, the players are playing their parts.

    Earlier in the week, much was made of the Syrian government's delay in granting the UN's request for its chemical weapons inspection team to visit al Ghouta.

Inner City Press asked UN spokesperson Farhan Haq at Tuesday's noon briefing when it was that the UN formally requested access to al Ghouta -- on Saturday, August 24 or before? Video here, from Minute 12. Video with captions, on Inner City Press YouTube channel, here and embedded below, with transcript.

Haq read out a press statement from August 22, in which Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said a request is being sent. Then, Haq said, Ban's High Representative on Disarmament Angela Kane "stepped forward with the request" -- on August 24, Saturday.

It was granted the next day.

Inner City Press asked again, was there any formal request by the UN other than Ban's press statement, before August 24? Haq called this "semantics." But when Inner City Press asked Ban's spokespeople to respond to widely circulated press releases about a request being made to Ban, the UN says the actual formal request had not been received yet, and so: no comment. Why should the UN say it must be different for Syria?

How could the UN be so sloppy? Or was it sloppy?

  While the delay to Sunday (or Monday, when the team got out and said, if this YouTube video on which Haq declined comment when Inner City Press asked 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, the UN didn't formally ASK until Saturday, in the person of Angela Kane

   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 UNagainst 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, was Judith 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.

In UN's Somalia Scam, Weeks After ICP Asked, Ladsous Admits UNMAS David Bax' DNA Sharing with US -- to Friendly Scribe

By Matthew Russell Lee

UNITED NATIONS, August 7 -- On June 22, Inner City Press published an exclusive story about UN Mine Action chief in Mogadishu David Bax sharing information with US intelligence, here.

On June 24, Inner City Press asked Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's Office of the Spokesperson for an answer from UN Peacekeeeping chief Herve Ladsous, Dmitry Titov and the head of UNMAS about

"a detailed complaint from an UNMAS whistleblower in Somalia that the head of UNMAS in Somalia provided genetic information from bombings to [United States] intelligence agencies and also moves around Mogadishu with armed guards from that group, Denel, that we were talking about.I also e-mailed several of them and asked for a comment; I haven’t received anything."
Answer: Well, we’ll have to check on that for you, Matthew, we’ll check with DPKO [Department of Peacekeeping Operations].

In the weeks that followed, Inner City Press put the question to UN envoy to Somalia Nicholas Kay -- who referred the question back "to New York" and to Ban's spokesperson Martin Nesirky. 

  Inner City Press got more information and published it. But no response from Ladsous or his lead spokesperson Kieran Dwyer, nor from Ban's spokesperson Martin Nesirky.

  After the Free UN Coalition for Access raised the question, the UN on June 26 told Inner City Press:

Subject: Your questions on Somalia.From: UN Spokesperson - Do Not Reply [at] un.orgDate: Wed, Jun 26, 2013 at 9:43 AMTo: Matthew Russell Lee [at] innercitypress.com
The Department of Peacekeeping Operations does not discuss internal communications or emails received with media correspondents.

  Now Dwyer has provided an answer -- to Colum Lynch of "Turtle Bay," Foreign Policy and the for-now Jeff Bezos / Amazon owned Washington Post. (Is he not a "media correspondent?) This without any notice to Inner City Press, either by DPKO or Ban's Spokesperson's office.

  Dwyer claimed, on camera, that he and his office do answer Inner City Press questions. Video here. Dwyer acknowledged that Ladsous refuses to answer Inner City Press questions (apparently in response to Inner City Press asking him about his public and leaked statements as France's Deputy Permanent Representative at the UN during the Rwanda genocide, arguing for the escape of genocidaires into Eastern Congo, or Inner City Press' coverage of Ladsous' drones).

  But this is false. Inner City Press asked this question on June 24, in public, transcript here. And Ban's Spokesperson's office said they would ask DPKO. Then, weeks later, DPKO gave a canned answer to Colum Lynch. 

 This has happened before. As simply one example, Inner City Press pursued the murder of a UN Security officer in Afghanistan, Louis Maxwell, in a series of either stories, quoting his relatives that the UN was engaged in a cover up

 Then the UN decided to respond to the scandal, not by answering Inner City Press' question, but by calling up their go-to Turtle. 

 Later, Lynch commiserated with Louis Charbonneau of Reuters, how unfair Inner City Press was. Charbonneau would go on, at least three times now, to try to get Inner City Press thrown out of the UN -- including by leaking internal anti-Press UNCA document to the UN's top accreditation official three minutes after promising not to do so. Story here, audio here,document here.

 Inner City Press exposed this, with documents obtained under FOIA fromVoice of America. It was covered by, among others, the Guardian UK -- but not by Lynch. He explains:

"Why haven’t I written about your disputes with UNCA and the UN administration, of which there have been many. I have thought about weighing in on it. But given the complexities of your relationship with UNCA and the administration I’ve resisted the temptation of writing a hasty story. I simply have not been able to justify the commitment in labor – which in my view would require a major investment of reporting time, including reviews of thousands of your blog posts—to writing a lengthier piece. There are a lot of more impactful stories I don’t write because I can’t devote the time to it."

   So Lynch never reported for example that the head of UN Peacekeeping openly refuses to answer Inner City Press questions. He benefits from this.

  We have more to say about all this -- including a rebuttal of the attempt to rehabilitate Bax. For example:

  It's reported that "Bax established a relationship with the FBI to provide the Somalis with expertise on maintaining the integrity of the chain of evidence when handling bomb material" and then that "a senior official at U.N. headquarters insisted that the United Nations does not directly share evidence with the United States or other governments." This must be explained - in public.

The rehabilitation of Bax's corrupt running of the camp is laughable. Source: "he put everyone lives at direct risk for that."

On all levels, this is unacceptable. Watch this site - and this video

   

As UK Sees Out UNSC Month Atop Turtle Bay, Doubts on Syria, Reform Proposal Born of Ladsous

By Matthew Russell Lee

UNITED NATIONS, June 27 -- For the United Kingdom's June presidency of the Security Council, the UK came in with class and went out that way as well, in a reception on a penthouse terrace over Turtle Bay with all and sundry invited.

  In the middle of the month there was a fall off, for example when foreign secretary William Hague came to the Council ostensibly on sexual violence and conflict, and then only took questions about Syria.

  But UK Ambassador Mark Lyall Grant, to his credit, held 14 media stakeouts during the month, including rare two-a-days on June 7, 13, 18 and 25. Inner City Press raised this as a standard to September's president; we'll see. It's not like you have to answer every question that is asked. But why not take them?

  Usually the UK reception are held at the Deputy Permanent Representative's Park Avenue abode. This one was chez Consul General, even closer to the UN, with a CitiBike rack just outside no less. Even so Ban Ki-moon came in his $100,000 armor Lexus Equus, a gift from South Korea, with a big black SUV behind it. Security, you know. 

  The S-G is so high profile that he was not invited to the more recent G-8 meeting, by the UK no less.

(On that, while Inner City Press accurately reported the UK's appreciated answer to its belated question regarding if Ban had been invited, it understands that another media was told that the non-invite was because David Cameron had met with Ban in May. Whatever. Prime Ministers come and go - just ask Australia.)

  Amid the commotion of France's Gerard Araud, General Assembly President Vuk Jeremic, ECOSOC president Nestor Osorio and others, what Inner City Press found most interesting was the increasing skepticism from other Ambassadors at the Gulf and Western strategy on Syria.

  You see how many more countries abstained last time in the GA, an Ambassador pointed out to Inner City Press. And if they call another vote, they'll get even fewer in favor.

  The proposal floated, there over Turtle Bay, was to make war itself a crime, rather than to use the concept of war crimes as a political tool against presidents the West ends up not liking.

  The example of Laurent Gbagbo was given. Susan Rice denounced him, twice or three times in her final stake out. But as another African ambassador emphasized to Inner City Press, he had and has a lot of supporters in his country. Should he really be in the Hague?

  This was in part a product of France controlling the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations, for four time in a row now.

  So Inner City Press has a proposal: just as it's said that the Secretary General cannot come from a Permanent Five member of the Security Council, why not make it that none of the main UN departments -- DPKO, OCHA, DPA, for example -- can go to the P5? At least make them choose a client -- who might in turn go rogue. Just asking, as they say. Next up in the US. Watch this site.

  

Targeting Press, UNCA Stokes Sri Lanka Extremists Now as in 2012, Its Turtle Slow and Exposed

By Matthew Russell Lee

UNITED NATIONS, March 30 -- In 2012 Inner City Press received death threats from extremist supporters of Sri Lanka's Rajapaksa government, triggered by a United Nations Correspondents Association proceeding against it that was likened to a kangaroo court.

The UNCA president at the time threatened to sue Inner City Press for reporting on it, so see this summary from the UK based Sri Lanka Campaign.

As detailed below, still now in 2013, UNCA is playing to the same audience. After UNCA's “new” president Pamela Falk of CBS took photographs while Inner City Press' office was raided by the UN on March 18, trolls not only from UNCA but from Sri Lanka have re-emerged: anonymous as always.

After the UN raid, which not only Falk but apparently other UNCA “leaders” photographed, a BuzzFeed article of March 22 contained photos that the UN will not explain. The UN's Stephane Dujarric has said the photos are not “ours,” leaving it unclear if this means only the UN Department of Public Information or other DPI allowed in on March 18.

Among the anonymous commenters on the BuzzFeed article, beyond some obviously with UNCA, there are at least two with a Sri Lanka focus.

There is a “David Knutsen,” which makes allegations echoing those of Margaret Besheer of Voice of America about long ago college attendance. But this David Knutsen has commented elsewhere twice trying to link Inner City Press to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, merely because it reported on war crimes in Sri Lanka.

Where did Knutsen make these comments? On the “Turtle Bay” blog, which tellingly never reported on the March 18 raid on a journalist's office in the UN, nor for example on UN Peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous openly refusing questions from Inner City Press in May and October 2012 press conferences, stakeouts on November 27, December 7 and December 18, and now on March 24. Turtles are slow, apparently.

There, Knutsen linked to a blog about the International Monetary Fund reporting of Inner City Press, with a comment from one “Arash,” that “Matthew Russell Lee is [a MF] who deserves to be tried for being a sponsor of terror.”

On the same blog, an “Al Paul” opines the Inner City Press “deserves to be invesitgated [sic] and brought to justice in Sri Lankan courts for supporting terrorists.”

And now, on BuzzFeed, an “ArashPaul” rants that “I just checked out some of his blogs and his incessant attack on the UN spreading cholera in Haiti... We hear of some illegal outfits funding his one man crusade to damage people's reputation.”

Apparently those source are dead people in Haiti. But this is who UNCA was playing to in 2012, and is playing to now. 

  In 2012, when Inner City Press got death threats, UNCA vice president Sylviane Zehil said, "I have nothing to do with this." Denis Fitzgerald of Saudi Press Agency demanded, who funds you? Louis Charbonneau of Reuters smirked and said, "Tell NYPD." This is UNCA. Watch this site.