The Georgian President made the first statement and it soon became apparent that this was a man on the edge. At times, it was too painful to watch. His powerful, raw emotion was laid out bare for all to see but, after a week of immense political pressure, sleep deprivation and finally being forced into signing a ceasefire agreement when he had nothing left to bargain with, he was unable to direct his emotions into a coherent speech. He floundered over words, made long and incoherent pauses and at times looked as if he might either burst into tears or pass out.
Joined: 09 Feb 2007 Posts: 630 Location: Manchester
Posted: Sun Aug 17, 2008 2:29 pm Post subject:
Cameron, a Man of the People
Quote:
The city [Tbilisi] has the trappings of a vibrant western economy. Billboards advertised designer products. The one-time Marxism-Leninism Institute is now a five-star hotel.
Russia’s elite value their ties to Europe - their shopping and their luxury weekends. We should look at the visa regime for Russian citizens. Russian armies can’t march into other countries while Russian shoppers carry on marching into Selfridges.
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Sun Aug 17, 2008 4:01 pm Post subject:
After all the Russians know the truth - far more so than the brainwashed western people. And 9/11 was aimed at Russia as a pretext to encircle them in Afghanistan. One of the 'Geostrategic Imperatives' of 'American primacy' spoken of in 'The Grand Chessboard'.
Does seem to me the Daily Mail has been the only paper (apart from the Morning Star where the anal idiots refuse to make their content available on the internet) to put the Russian point of view. I guess it is more proof of Western gangsters preparing for WWIII.
Ah - Just noticed this in the Independent. The NSA better crank up their operations if the British papers are to be dragged int another US bully-boy Zbig's conflicts.
Quote:
Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Why are we pretending we would fight for Georgia?
Messrs Miliband and Cameron want Georgia to join Nato. Such thinking is muddled, dangerous and defies the lessons of history
Sunday, 17 August 2008
Hard on the heels of Nicolas Sarkozy and Condoleezza Rice, and keen to share their limelight, David Cameron arrived in Tbilisi yesterday. His visit is a reward to the Leader of the Opposition for having expressed even more bellicose views on the Georgian crisis than the Americans, which should sound loud alarm bells for those of us who may quite soon be living under a Tory government.
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Sun Aug 17, 2008 11:40 pm Post subject:
Mikhail Gorbachev calls Georgian attack on Tskhinvali "A Barbaric Assault".
Mikhail Gorbachev is of course well known to Zbigniew Brzezinski through the Trilateral Commission.
"there was a plan to misinform people".
"there was a plan to attack Ossettia and also to misinform people"
"it is a kind of information war, I think that now they're showing this it is becoming clear, what happened"
Olympics were a 'good day to bury bad news' cover "a well prepared project."
The controversy over the Georgian surprise military attacks on South Ossetia and Abkhazia on 8.8.08 makes a closer look at the controversial Georgian President and his puppet masters important. An examination shows 41 year old Mikhail Saakashvili to be a ruthless and corrupt totalitarian who is tied to not only the US NATO establishment, but also to the Israeli military and intelligence establishment. The famous ‘Rose Revolution of November 2003 that forced the ageing Edouard Shevardnadze from power and swept the then 36 year old US university graduate into power was run and financed by the US State Department, the Soros Foundations, and agencies tied to the Pentagon and US intelligence community.
Mihkail Saakashvili was deliberately placed in power in one of the most sophisticated US regime change operations, using ostensibly private NGOs (Non Governmental Organizations) to create an atmosphere of popular protest against the existing regime of former Soviet Foreign Minister Edouard Shevardnadze, who was no longer useful to Washington when he began to make a deal with Moscow over energy pipelines and privatizations.
Saakashvili was brought to power in a US-engineered coup run on the ground by US-funded NGO’s, in an application of a new method of US destabilization of regimes it considered hostile to its foreign policy agenda. The November 24 2003 Wall Street Journal explicitly credited the toppling of Shevardnadze's regime to the operations of "a raft of non-governmental organizations . . . supported by American and other Western foundations." These NGOs, said the Journal, had "spawned a class of young, English-speaking intellectuals hungry for pro-Western reforms" who were instrumental laying the groundwork for a bloodless coup.
Coup by NGO
But there is more. The NGOs were coordinated by the US Ambassador to Georgia, Richard Miles, who had just arrived in Tbilisi fresh from success in orchestrating the CIA-backed toppling of Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade, using the same NGOs. Miles, who is believed to be an undercover intelligence specialist, supervised the Saakashvili coup.
It involved US billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Georgia Foundation. It involved the Washington-based Freedom House whose chairman was former CIA chief James Woolsey. It involved generous financing from the US Congress-financed National Endowment for Democracy, an agency created by Ronald Reagan in the 1980’s to “do privately what the CIA used to do,” namely coups against regimes the US Government finds unfriendly.
George Soros’ foundations have been forced to leave numerous eastern European countries including Russia as well as China after the 1989 student Tiananmen Square uprising. Soros is also the financier together with the US State Department of the Human Rights Watch, a US-based and run propaganda arm of the entire NGO apparatus of regime coups such as Georgia and Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution. Some analysts believe Soros is a high-level operative of the US State Department or intelligence services using his private foundations as cover.
The US State Department funded the Georgia Liberty Institute headed by Saakashvili, US approved candidate to succeed the no-longer cooperative Shevardnadze. The Liberty Institute in turn created “Kmara!” which translates “Enough!” According to a BBC report at the time, Kmara! Was organized in spring of 2003 when Saakashvili along with hand-picked Georgia student activists were paid by the Soros Foundation to go to Belgrade to learn from the US-financed Otpor activists that toppled Milosevic. They were trained in Gene Sharp’s “non-violence as a method of warfare” by the Belgrade Center for Nonviolent Resistance.
Saakashvili as mafioso President
Once he was in place in January 2004 as Georgia’s new President, Saakashvili proceeded to pack the regime with his cronies and kinsmen. The death of Zurab Zhvania, his prime minister in February, 2005, remains a mystery. The official version—poisoning by faulty gas heater—was adopted by American FBI investigators within two weeks of the killing. That has never seemed credible to those familiar with Georgia’s gangland slayings, crime, and other manifestations of social decay. Zhvania’s death was followed closely by a functionary of the Premier’s apparat, Georgi Khelashvili, who allegedly shot himself the day after his chief’s demise. The head of Zhvania’s research staff was later found dead as well.
Figures allied with Saakashvili reportedly had a hand in the premier’s death. Russian journalist Marina Perevozkina quoted Gia Khurashvili, a Georgian economist. Prior to the fatal incident, Mr. Khurashvili had published an article in Resonans newspaper opposing the privatization and sale of Georgia’s main gas pipeline. Ten days before the prime minister’s body was found, Khurashvili was attacked and his editor-in-chief—citing pressure from ‘security service’ figures he refused to name—issued him a warning.
The late premier’s position on the pipeline issue was believed the direct reason for the murder of Zhvania. Zhvania’s brother, Georgi, also told Perevozkina that not long before Zhvania’s death he received a warning that someone was preparing to kill his brother. Saakashvili was reportedly livid when the US State Department invited Zhvania to Washington to win a Freedom Medal from the US Government’s National Democratic Institute. Saakashvili tolerates no rivals for power it seems.
Saakashvili, who cleverly marketed himself as “anti-corruption,” appointed several of his family members to lucrative posts in government, giving one of his brothers a position as chief adviser on domestic issues to the Baku-Ceyhan Pipeline project, backed by British Petroleum and other oil multinationals.
Since coming to power in 2004 with US aid, Saakashvili has led a policy of mass-scale arrests, imprisonment, torture and deepened corruption. Saakashvili has presided over the creation of a de facto one-party state, with a dummy opposition occupying a tiny portion of seats in the parliament, and this public servant is building a Ceaucescu-style palace for himself on the outskirts of Tbilisi. According to the magazine, Civil Georgia (Mar. 22, 2004) until 2005, the salaries of Saakashvili and many of his ministers were reportedly paid by the NGO network of New York-based currency speculator Soros—along with the United Nations Development Program.
Israel US military train Georgian military
The current military assault on South Ossetia and Abkhazia, in violation of Saakashvili’s pledge to seek a diplomatic not military solution to the territorial disputes, is backed by US and Israeli military “advisers.” Israel’s Haaretz newspaper reported that on August 10, Georgian Minister of Reintegration, Temur Yakobshvili, “praised the Israel Defense Forces for its role in training Georgian troops and said Israel should be proud of its military might, in an interview with Army Radio. ‘Israel should be proud of its military which trained Georgian soldiers,’ Yakobashvili told Army Radio in Hebrew, referring to a private Israeli group Georgia had hired.”
One of the targets of Russian bombs near Tbilisi was, according to IsraelNN.com, “a Georgian military plant in which Israeli experts are upgrading jet fighters for the Georgian military… Russian fighter jets bombed runways inside the plant, located near Tbilisi, where Israeli security firm Elbit is in charge of upgrading Georgian SU-25 jets.”
Israeli Foreign Minister and candidate to succeed ousted Israeli Prime Minister, Olmert, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, proclaimed on August 10 that “Israel recognizes Georgia’s territorial integrity,” code for saying it backs Georgia’s attempt to take South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
The reported 1,000 Israeli military advisers in Georgia were not alone. On July 15, the Reuters news wire carried the following report: “VAZIANI, Georgia - One thousand U.S. troops began a military training exercise called “Immediate Response 2008,” in Georgia on Tuesday against a backdrop of growing friction between Georgia and neighboring Russia. The two-week exercise was taking place at the Vaziani military base near the capital Tbilisi, which was a Russian air force base until Russian forces withdrew at the start of this decade under a European arms reduction agreement... Georgia has a 2,000-strong contingent supporting the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq, and Washington provides training and equipment to the Georgian military. The United States is an ally of Georgia and has irritated Russia by backing Tbilisi’s bid to join the NATO military alliance... “The main purpose of these exercises is to increase the cooperation and partnership between U.S. and Georgian forces,” Brig. Gen. William B. Garrett, commander of the U.S. military’s Southern European Task Force, told reporters.”
With Russia openly backing and training the indigenous military in South Ossetia and Abkhazia to maintain Russian presence in the region, especially since the US-backed pro-NATO Saakashvili regime took power in 2004, the Caucasus is rapidly coming to resemble Spain in the Civil War from 1936-1939 where the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and others poured money and weapons and volunteers into Spain in a devastating war that was a precursor to the Second World War.
In a curious footnote to the actual launch of military fighting on the opening day of the Olympics when Putin, George W. Bush and many world leaders were in Beijing far away, is a report in IsraelNN.com by Gl Ronen, stating that “The Georgian move against South Ossetia was motivated by political considerations having to do with Israel and Iran, according to Nfc. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili decided to assert control over the breakaway region in order to force Israel to reconsider its decision to cut back its support for Georgia's military.”
Ronen added, “Russian and Georgian media reported several days ago that Israel decided to stop its support for Georgia after Moscow made it clear to Jerusalem and Washington that Russia would respond to continued aid for Georgia by selling advanced anti-aircraft systems to Syria and Iran.” Israel plans to get oil and gas from the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline from the Caspian.
Although as of this writing Russian President Medvedev has announced Russia is halting its military response against Georgian targets, the situation is anything but stable. The insistence of Washington in bringing Georgia into its geopolitical sphere and backing an unstable regime around Mikhail Saakashvili may well have been the straw which broke the Russian camel’s patience if not his back.
Whether oil pipeline disputes or Russian challenges to Israel are the proximate trigger for Saakashvili’s dangerous game, it is clear that the volatile Georgian and his puppet masters may have entered a game where no one will be able to control the outcome.
The following is Press TV's exclusive full-length interview with former US treasury official Paul Craig Roberts.
Press TV:Paul Craig Roberts, you served with the US government. Tell us a little bit about the National Endowment for Democracy. Because I understand that, you believe they had a lot to do with the relations between these two former Soviet states and the United States.
Roberts: The National Endowment for Democracy is a neoconservative organization funded by the United States government and its purpose is to buy and rig elections in the former constituent parts of the Soviet empire.
It is the tool of the neoconservatives for establishing American puppet states in Eastern Europe, in the Caucuses, and of course, its money and election rigging was instrumental in what they call 'the Rose Revolution' in Georgia.
And of course they interfere in the Ukraine and Eastern Europe. The neoconservatives who have controlled the Bush regime in Washington their plan is to bring Russia along with the entire Middle East and Iran under American hegemony so that whatever happens in the world is dictated from Washington.
And so these puppet states such as Georgia are part of the surrounding of Russia with American military bases and American missile systems such as the one they are going to put up in Poland. They hope the Czech Republic and Kosovo.
So this is all part of the expanding American empire, the neoconservatives say the American empire is much more powerful than the Roman one. So the American's have the power to dominate the entire world. That is what this is about.
The assault on South Ossetia by the American and the Israeli trained Georgian army, both trained and equipped by the Americans and the Israelis the purpose of that assault was to ethnically cleanse that province of Russians.
So that their would be an end to the separation movement the separatists would simply be driven out or killed. That was the main purpose of this whole exercise.
Press TV:What cards has the Bush administration got left to play with? You said every state in the world is tired of war and perhaps the United States is not. However, with the Bush administration facing economic problems at home, do you really think the Bush administration thinks it can outplay Russia in the Caucuses?
Roberts: Yes, the neoconservatives are insane. They certainly think they can outplay Russia and they certainly think they can outplay Iran. They have two more navel armadas steaming there.
People in the world need to understand that the regime in Washington is the most dangerous regime that has ever existed, it is capable of anything. Here we have a regime who has invaded two countries, a regime that has been bullying Iran and the President of the United States announcing that bullying and using intimidation are not acceptable ways to conduct foreign policy in the 21st century.
What has he been doing all these years? We had Condi Rice say the same stupid things and John McCain the Republican nominee for president say that in the 21st century nations do not invade other nations.
Well the United States has just invaded two nations and has oppressed them for six years and they talk this way. This has got to be insanity, this is disconnected from all reality. What they mean is that no one but the United States can invade other nations.
Press TV:What should we be expecting in the next couple of days with Condoleezza Rice going to Brussels? Paul Craig Roberts from your view if neocons in such power earlier we talked to Bill Christison a former senior CIA official who said there are placemen in all institutions after six years or more of the Bush presidency. What, is it going to go nuclear?
Roberts: Yes, I think there is a great danger. I did not say anything about the Republicans, I said the neoconservatives. They controlled the Clinton administration too. That is why you had all those bombings of Serbia.
I think your correspondent in New York is correct this is American foreign policy. It is not going to go away. I think it is most dangerous with Bush because he is essentially a moron. Cheney is too.
It is more dangerous in their hands but I agree its American foreign policy and yes, they are capable of going nuclear, because they are full of hubris.
Press TV:So you think they are ready to go for a war with Iran, with Russia. Some people are saying that Defense Secretary, Robert Gates does not answer to those neoconservatives that you were talking about.
Roberts: No he tries to resist it and I also know that many senior officers in the American military have put their foot down.
Nevertheless, there is a very powerful movement, the fact that they thought that Russia would sit there and do nothing while Russian citizens, people with Russian passports, were murdered, the capital destroyed and 30 or 40 thousand of them, which must be pretty close to half the population of South Ossetia, driven out into Russia and people thought Russia would do nothing.
How can you make such a miscalculation? Anyone who could make that miscalculation can make far more dangerous miscalculations. They are perfectly capable of attacking Iran.
The next point of trouble would be the Ukraine. The Americans would rush in there, stir all that up and cause another crisis.
Joined: 09 Feb 2007 Posts: 630 Location: Manchester
Posted: Mon Aug 18, 2008 2:25 pm Post subject:
November 2007 -- Imedi TV Shut Down by Georgian Special Forces
Imedi TV in Georgia Shut Down Amid Political Crisis
by Liane Hansen
Listen Now [3 min 55 sec]
Weekend Edition Sunday, November 11, 2007 -- Imedi TV in Tbilisi, Georgia was shut down by Special Forces this week during the state of emergency brought on by Georgia's current political crisis. Lewis Robertson, chief operating officer of the station, describes the situation.
Chief executive officer of Imedi TV, Louis Robertson blasts actions of Tbilisi police. Native of Atlanta, Georgia represents News Corporation in Tbilisi
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Mon Aug 18, 2008 10:13 pm Post subject:
CRISIS IN THE CAUCASUS. WHAT WERE THEY SMOKING IN THE WHITE HOUSE?
WASHINGTON DC- The Bush administration appears to have pulled off its latest military fiasco in the Caucasus. What was supposed to have been a swiftly and painless takeover of rebellious South Ossetia by America’s favourite new ally, Georgia, has turned into a disaster that left Georgia battered, Russia enraged, and NATO badly demoralized. Not bad for two days work.
Equally important, Russia’s Vladimir Putin swiftly and decisively checkmated the Bush administration’s clumsy attempt last week to expand US influence into the Caucasus, and made the Americans and their Georgian satraps look like fools.
We are not facing a return to the Cold War - yet. But the current US-Russian crisis over Georgia, a tiny nation of only 4.6 million, and its linkage to a US anti-ballistic missile system in Eastern Europe, is deeply worrying and increasingly dangerous.
On 7 August, Georgia’s president, Mikheil Saakashvili, ordered his US and Israeli-advised and equipped army to invade the breakaway region of South Ossetia, which has been struggling for independence from Georgia since 1992. Most of its people were Russian citizens who wanted union with Russian North Ossetia.
If not directly behind Georgia’s invasion of South Ossetia, Washington had to have been at least fully aware of Saakashvili’s plans. The Georgian Army was trained and equipped by US and Israeli military advisors stationed with its troops down to battalion level. CIA and Israel’s Mossad operated important intelligence stations in Tbilisi and coordinated plans with the Saakashvili, whose political opponents have long accused him of being very close to CIA and the Pentagon.........
http://www.ericmargolis.com/archives/2008/08/crisis_in_the_c.php
also
Quote:
Georgian-Russian hostilities spill over to beach volleyball
By Tim Johnson | McClatchy Newspapers
BEIJING — In a bikini version of real-life conflict, the Georgian and Russian women's beach volleyball teams met in the sand Wednesday, and underdog Georgia squeaked out a victory in three sets — to the delight of the Chinese crowd.......
"They don't even know who the Georgian president is, how can you call them Georgians? They are Brazilians and that is who we played against today," Shiryaeva said. Her partner on the sand patch, Natalia Uryadova, echoed her feelings: "We're not actually playing against the Georgian team."
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/163/story/48005.html
Posted: Tue Aug 19, 2008 11:10 pm Post subject: Human Rights Watch: Part of the US'Georgian PSYOP?
Human Rights Watch: Part of the US/Georgian PSYOP?
The constant mention by Saakashvili and the MSM and BBC of Human Rights Watch and its playing-down of Ossetian casualties and the destruction of Tskhinvali triggered an alarm bell recalling something dodgy I had read about this organisation. In a fast scan using Dogpile (abandon hope all ye who enter Goolag!) I found this. (I have highlighted certain names and underscored some of the dodgier links that stood out on first perusal):
Given the Soros and National Endowment connection with Saakashvili it is no accident that both he and the western MSM have been so vocal in touting Human Rights Watch as an authority on current events in the Georgia Conflict.
Under President Clinton, Human Rights Watch was the most influential pro-intervention lobby: its 'anti-atrocity crusade' helped drive the wars in ex-Yugoslavia. Under George W. Bush it lost influence to the neoconservatives, who have their own crusades. But the 'two interventionisms' are not so different anyway: Human Rights Watch is founded on belief in the superiority of American values. It has close links to the US foreign policy elite, and to other interventionist and expansionist lobbies.
No US citizen, and no US organisation, has any right to impose US values on Europe. No concentration camps or mass graves can justify that imposition. But Human Rights Watch finds it self-evident, that the United States may legitimately restructure any society, where a mass grave is found. That is a dangerous belief for a superpower: European colonialism shows how easily a 'civilising mission' produces its own atrocities. The Belgian 'civilising mission' in the Congo, at the time promoted as a noble and unselfish enterprise, killed half the population. Sooner or later, more people will die in crusades to prevent a new Holocaust, than died in the Holocaust itself. And American soldiers will continue to kill, torture and rape, in order to prevent killings, torture and rape.
For a century there has been a strong interventionist belief in the United States - although it competes with widespread isolationism. In recent years attitudes hardened: human-rights interventionism became a consensus among the 'foreign policy elite' even before September 11. Human Rights Watch itself is part of that elite, which includes government departments, foundations, NGO's and academics. It is certainly not an association of 'concerned private citizens'. HRW board members include present and past government employees, and overlapping directorates link it to the major foreign policy lobbies in the US. Cynically summarised, Human Rights Watch arose as a joint venture of George Soros and the State Department. Nevertheless, it represents some fundamental characteristics of US-American culture.
The September 11 attacks confirmed the interventionism of the entire foreign policy elite - not just the highly visible neoconservatives. More important, the public response illustrated the almost absolute identification of Americans with their own value system. Without any apparent embarrassment, President Bush declared that a war between good and evil was in progress. Ironically, that mirrors the language of the Islamic fundamentalists. It implies a Crusader mentality, rather than the usual pseudo-neutrality of liberal-democratic political philosophy. A society which believes in its own absolute goodness, and the absolute and universal nature of its own values, is a fertile ground for interventionism.
Human rights are part of the American value system, but they are also especially useful as an 'ideology of justification' in wartime. Such an ideology should ideally meet some criteria. First, it should not be a simple appeal to self-interest. Simply stating "We own the world!" or "We are the master race, submit to us!" is not good propaganda. As a slogan, 'war on terrorism' is also inadequate, since it is too clearly an American war, against the enemies of America. For propaganda purposes, an appeal to higher values is preferable.
Second, these higher values should be universal. This is why Islamism would probably fail as an interventionist ideology: it is specific to Islam. A geopolitical claim to intervene in support of Islamic values can be answered simply by saying: "We are not Muslims here". The doctrine of universal human rights is, by definition, universal and cross-cultural.
Third, the ideology should appeal to the population of the super-power. In the United States, for historical reasons, 'rights doctrines' have become part of its political culture. It would be pointless for a US President to justify a war by appealing to Islam, or royal legitimacy, because very few Americans hold these beliefs. Most Americans do believe in rights theories - and very few know that these theories are disputed.
Fourth, if possible, the ideology should appeal to the 'enemy' population. It should ideally be part of their values. That is difficult, but the doctrine of human rights has succeeded in acquiring cross-cultural legitimacy. This does not mean it is inherently right - but simply that no non-western cultures have an answer to the doctrine. The government of China, for instance, fully accepts the concept of human rights, and claims to uphold them. So when it is accused of human rights violations, it can do nothing but deny, on this issue it is perpetually on the defensive. Acceptance of your values by the enemy population could be seen as the Holy Grail of war propaganda: if the enemy leadership is incapable of presenting an alternative value system, it will ultimately collapse.
Human rights are not the only ideology of intervention. The 'civilising mission', which justified 19-th century colonisation, is another example.The point is that human rights can serve a geopolitical purpose, which is unrelated to their moral content. It is not possible to show that 'human rights' exist, and most moral philosophers would not even try. It might not be a very important issue in ethics anyway - but it is important in politics and geopolitics. And geopolitics is what Human Rights Watch is about - not about ethics. HRW itself is an almost exclusively US-American organisation. Its version of human rights is the Anglo-American tradition. It is 'mono-ethical' - recognising no legitimate ethical values outside its own. However, the human-rights tradition is not, and can never be, a substitute for a general morality. Major ethical issues such as equality, distributive justice, and innovation, simply don't fit into rights-based ethics.
Ethical values are not, in themselves, culturally specific. However, this ethical tradition has become associated with the United States. It is dominant in the political culture, it has become associated with the flag and other national symbols, and it is capable of generating intense national emotion. It emphasises the universal rights set out in the American Declaration of Independence and its Constitution. In a sense the US was 'pre-programmed' as an interventionist power. Universal human rights, by their nature, tend to justify military intervention to enforce those rights. Expansionists, rather than isolationists, are closest to the spirit of the American Constitution, with its inherently interventionist values. In fact, most US-Americans believe in the universality and superiority of their ethical tradition. Interventionist human-rights organisations are, like the neoconservative warmongers, a logical result. Human Rights Watch is not formally an 'association for the promotion of the American Way of Life' - but it tends to behave like one.
Human Rights Watch operates a number of discriminatory exclusions, to maintain its American character, and that in turn reduces internal criticism of its limited perspective. Although it publishes material in foreign languages to promote its views, the organisation itself is English-only. More seriously, HRW discriminates on grounds of nationality. Non-Americans are systematically excluded at board level - unless they have emigrated to the United States. HRW also recruits its employees in the United States, in English. The backgrounds of the Committee members (below) indicate that HRW recruits it decision-makers from the upper class, and upper-middle class. Look at their professions: there are none from middle-income occupations, let alone any poor illegal immigrants, or Somali peasants.
Human Rights Watch can therefore claim no ethical superiority. It is itself involved in practices it condemns elsewhere, such as discrimination in employment, and exclusion from social structures. It can also claim no neutrality. An organisation which will not allow a Serb or Somali to be a board member, can give no neutral assessment of a Serbian or Somali state. It would probably be impossible for this all-American, English-only, elite organisation, to be anything else but paternalistic and arrogant. To the people who run HRW, the non-western world consists of a list of atrocities, and via the media they communicate that attitude to the American public. It can only dehumanise African, Asians, Arabs and eastern Europeans. Combined with a tendency to see the rest of the world as an enemy, that will contribute to new abuses and continuing civilian deaths, during America's crusades.
Who runs the HRW Europe Committee?
Human Rights Watch is organised approximately by continent. The Europe section was established in 1978, originally named 'Helsinki Steering Committee' or 'Helsinki Watch'. It is the core of the later Human Rights Watch organisation. In the late 1970's, human rights had become the main issue in Cold War propaganda, after Soviet concessions at the Helsinki summit (1975), allowing human rights monitoring. Western governments encouraged 'private' organisations to use this concession - not out of moral concern, but as a means of pressuring the Soviet Union. HRW was one of these 'private' organisations: in other words, it began as a Cold War propaganda instrument.
The committee is now called the Europe and Central Asia Advisory Committee. It is still affiliated with the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, which co-ordinates the "Helsinki committees". The membership now includes fewer ex-diplomats than in the 1990's, more academics, and a few HRW donors. This web page and other similar publicity, has probably influenced the change in style. (By appointing his tax lawyer to the HRW Board, Soros exposed himself to ridicule and charges of cronyism).
The list of committee members below is as of March 2004.
Peter Osnos, chair
George Soros' publisher. He is Chief Executive of Public Affairs publishers.
Alice Henkin, Vice Chair
Human Rights lawyer, Director of the Justice and Society Program at the Aspen Institute. Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the most influential elite foreign-policy lobby. The President and CEO of the Aspen Institute is Walter Issacson, who is also Chairman and CEO of CNN News.
Henri Barkey
Professor of International Relations at Lehigh University, advised the State Department on Turkish and Kurdish issues. Married to Ellen Laipson, former Special Assistant to Madeleine Albright, when Albright was UN Ambassador. Considered anti-Turkish by some Turkish media. See: Columnist on US Plans for Cyprus, 1999.
Jonathan Fanton, ex-member
Chair of the HRW International Committee until 2003, and still a member. President of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, itself a HRW donor. Former Vice President of the University of Chicago, in 1982 appointed as President of the New School for Social Research, now the New School University. He is active in building US academic contacts with eastern Europe, directed at the new pro-western elites, see the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies (TCDS) page.
Morton Abramowitz, ex-member
A link to the foreign policy establishment, one of several at HRW. Abramowitz was U.S. Ambassador to Turkey (1989-91) and Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research (1985-89), among other posts: see his personal details at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he is a Fellow. The CFR is the heart of interventionist US policy since 1921 (and hated by the isolationist right).
He directed the CFR Balkan Economic Task Force, which published a report on "Reconstructing the Balkans".
Stephen Del Rosso
Ex-diplomat, also member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Works for the Carnegie Corporation as 'Senior Program Officer' International Peace and Security, and before that for the Pew Trust. See his biography at the Carnegie website - a typical international affairs career.
Barbara Finberg
A donor of HRW, see the list below. A retired vice president with the Carnegie Corporation of New York, who donated $1 million to Stanford University.
Felice Gaer
Human rights specialist at the American Jewish Committee, and Chairperson of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, which is primarily active against Islamic countries and China. According to this JTA report, Gaer praised Madeleine Albright for her "outstanding human rights record", apparently meaning that she would not allow any criticism of Israel's housing policy in Jerusalem. Gaer was also chair of the Steering Committee for the 50th anniversary of the UN Human Rights Declaration, see this biography:
"Ms.Gaer is Director of the Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights. Author, speaker, and activist, she is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Board of Directors of the Andrei Sakharov Foundation, a member of the International Human Rights Council at the Carter Center, ...Vice President of the International League for Human Rights."
In 1999, Felice Gaer was a non-governmental member of the United States delegation to a United Nations Human Rights Commission meeting in Geneva, where (according to the Voice of America) she denounced Sudan, saying the the U.S. "cannot accept those who invoke Islam or other religions as justification for atrocious human rights abuses." More interesting (with hindsight) is this speech at the Geneva meeting, where she suggested the UN should no longer investigate prison rapes in the US: "we would urge the Special Rapporteurs to focus their attention on countries where the situation is the most dire and the abuses the most severe."
The disclosures about abuse of prisoners in Iraq illustrate the ethical problem here. One thing you can't say, is that 'America doesn't treat its own prisoners like that'. Americans do treat their fellow citizens like that - in American jails, which have a consistently bad record on prisoner abuse. But Felice Gaer suggested that it somehow isn't as bad, if the US authorities do such things. The United States, she said, was committed to human rights and... "When violations occur, we have the mechanisms and protections in place to prosecute."
In reality, US authorities responded as at Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo Bay: they obstructed outside investigators. The Report of the mission to the United States of America on the issue of violence against women in state and federal prisons says:
"...on the eve of her visit to Michigan, the Special Rapporteur received a letter dated 12 June 1998 from the Governor of Michigan informing her that she would not be allowed to ... visit any of the women's prisons... The Special Rapporteur found this refusal particularly disturbing since she had received very serious allegations of sexual misconduct occurring at Florence Crane Women's Facility and Camp Branch Facility for Women in Coldwater, Michigan, as well as at Scott Correctional Facility for Women in Plymouth, Michigan."
Virginia and California also obstructed the Special Rapporteur. Felice Gaer knew that, because the report had already been published. She was lying when she told the UN that "we welcome outside investigations". Instead of condemning the obstruction, she diverted attention to abuses in Nigeria, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and China. The United States, she explained, is an open, democratic society.
That sounds like Donald Rumsfeld speaking about Abu Ghraib. It is dangerous attitude: it implies that America can ultimately do no wrong, since its open society is a perfect defence against abuse of power. Human Rights Watch does promote that attitude - that 'human rights abuse' is essentially something done by foreigners, and that American institutions are somehow immunised against it. Now, the US soldiers who abused and killed prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan don't see themselves as comparable to the previous regimes: they see themselves as the good guys, defenders of a system which is infinitely better. Certainly under wartime conditions, that attitude inevitably leads to abuses.
So Human Rights Watch itself must accept some of the blame, for what happened to the prisoners. HRW divides humanity in two: on the one side are the supporters of American values. On the other, worthless criminal barbarian rapists and torturers. In this logic 'human rights' does not imply that Iraqi prisoners should be treated with respect, but rather the opposite. From "our torture is different" it's a small step to "our torture is acceptable because it is anti-torturer" and then another small step to "human rights means torturing torturers". Or their friends, or their family, or the subversives who want to appease them...
Michael Erwin Gellert
Vice Chairman of the Board at Fanton's New School for Social Research. Partner in the private investment company Windcrest Partners, and Chairman of the Board of the Carnegie Institute. Gellert is or was a director of Premier Parks Inc., owner of the Six Flags and Walibi theme park chains.
Paul Goble
Director of Communications and political commentator at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the Cold War propaganda transmitters that survived the end of the Cold War. From their website
"Free Europe, Inc., was established in 1949 as non-profit, private corporations to broadcast news and current affairs programs to Eastern European countries behind the Iron Curtain. The Radio Liberty Committee, Inc., was created two years later along the same lines to broadcast to the nations inside the Soviet Union. Both were funded principally by the U.S. Congress, through the Central Intelligence Agency, but they also received some private donations as well. The two corporations were merged into a single RFE/RL, Inc. in 1975."
It is still funded by the US Government, through Congressional appropriation.
Bill Green, ex-member
Former Republican member of Congress, a trustee of the New School for Social Research (where Fanton is President), with many other public and business posts: see the biography at the American Assembly, an academic/political think-tank.
Stanley Hoffman
A pro-interventionist theorist (of course that means US intervention, not a Taliban invasion of the US). Professor at Harvard, see his biography. Note that his colleagues include Daniel Goldhagen, who openly advocated occupation of Serbia, to impose a US-style democracy: see A New Serbia.
Jeri Laber
Longtime HRW staff member, since the Helsinki Watch period. Now an advisor, without executive tasks,
Kati Marton, ex-member
President of the Committee to Protect Journalists. However this 'protection' did not extend to journalists killed by NATO bombing of the Belgrade TV studios: she declined to condemn it. This may, perhaps, have something to do with not embarrassing her husband: Richard C. Holbrooke, former Special Envoy to Yugoslavia, and US Ambassador to the United Nations. For an idea of the social world behind Human Rights Watch, and a glimpse of of how US foreign policy is made, see this article about their cocktail parties...
Dick Holbrooke, who's been U.N. ambassador since August, has a different idea of what sort of people the suite should be filled with. Tonight, he's hosting a dinner for General Wesley Clark, the granite-faced, soft-spoken nato chief, who is leaving his post in April. .... Dressed in a formal pin-striped suit, crisp white shirt, and red tie, Holbrooke still manages to look comfortably rumpled -- his unruly hair is the secret to this effect -- as he banters his way around the room. Introducing Clark to billionaire financier George Soros and Canadian press lord Conrad Black, Holbrooke teasingly calls the general, whose formal title is supreme Allied commander for Europe, "The Supreme,"...
Holbrooke's wife, the author Kati Marton, is equally adept at the art of the cocktail party. Dressed in an elegant white pantsuit, she ushers guests into the dining room, where four tables are set for a meal of crab cakes and sautéed duck. Marton and Holbrooke, who have been giving twice-a-week diplomatic dinners, have a carefully choreographed act. "I give the opening toast, which is unorthodox in the U.N. village," she explains. "Richard and I are making the point we're doing this together."
Ambassador A-List, from the January 3, 2000 issue of New York Magazine.
As 'journalist protector', Kati Marton lobbied for the Soros-funded B92 radio in Belgrade, which played a central role in the opposition under Milosevic, at least until his last year in power. The campaign for B92 is illustrative of the symbiotic relationship of interventionist lobbies and interventionist governments. Marton was lobbying to protect an 'independent' radio station which was already part-funded by the US government (National Endowment for Democracy). Partly as a result, it got even more western funding.
Immediately after the station was banned, Ivor Roberts, the British ambassador, showed his support by visiting its offices on the fifth floor of a run-down socialist-style building in downtown Belgrade. Carl Bildt, then the international High Representative in charge of the civilian side of the Dayton peace agreement in Bosnia, the US State Department, and Kati Marton of the Committee to Protect Journalists also made protests on behalf of the station.
Internet technology and international pressure proved to be effective weapons against Milosevic. After two days he withdrew his edict forbidding B-92 to broadcast. It seems likely that he was convinced that lifting the ban would win Western praise and deflect international attention from his electoral fraud. Immediately afterward, B-92 was able - through funds provided equally by the BBC, the British Foreign Office, USAID, the European Union, and George Soros's Open Society Foundation-to gain access to a satellite that linked twenty-eight independent local radio stations, covering 70 percent of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which is now made up of Serbia and Montenegro.
1997 article from the New York Review of Books
Prema Mathai-Davis, ex-member
A token non-westerner, an Indian immigrant. She was, however, also CEO of the YWCA (Young Womens Christian Association), which is as American as can be.
Jack Matlock, ex-member
US Ambassador to the Soviet Union during its collapse, 1987-1991. Author of Autopsy On An Empire: The American Ambassador's Account of the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Random House, 1995).
Member of the large Board of Directors of the Atlantic Council. The Atlantic Council is more than a pro-NATO fan club: it supports an expansionist US foreign policy in general. Note their recent paper (in pdf format) Beyond Kosovo, a redesign of the Balkans within the framework of the proposed Stability Pact.
The Atlantic Council list of sponsors is a delight for corporate-conspiracy theorists. Yes, it is all paid for by the Rockefeller foundation, the Soros foundation, the Nuclear Energy Institute, Boeing, Lockheed, Northrop, Exxon, British Nuclear Fuels, the US Army and the European Union. And, no surprise to conspiracy fans, Matlock attended the 1996 Bilderberg Conference.
Walter Link
Chairman of the Global Academy Institute for Globalization, Human Rights, and Leadership - obviously not a man to limit the scope of his activities. Promoter of the Blue Planet Run, a global foot-race starting in San Francisco, which will improve the global water supply. That's what it says at the website anyway. The Academy is associated with the futurist John Naisbitt.
Michael McFaul
Hoover Institution Fellow at Stanford University. See his biography. A lobbyist for the 'democratisation' of Russia, and relatively hostile to the Putin government. Note, that there is no lobby in Russia, that seeks to decide the form of government of the United States.
Sarah E. Mendelson
Senior Fellow at the Center For Strategic and International Studies. Member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Chechnya specialist. See her CV.
Karl Meyer
Editor of World Policy Journal, published by the World Policy Institute. The WPI supports an expansionist and interventionist American foreign policy: it is part of Jonathan Fanton's New School University.
Joel Motley
Also on the main HRW Board. Managing Director, Carmona Motley, Inc. Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, where he was a member of their Task Force on Non-Lethal Technologies. This is what Mr. Motley wants to do the poor, to improve their human rights:
- jamming or destruction of communications, together with the ability to transmit television and radio programs of ones choice, potentially useful for reducing inflammatory, sometimes genocidal, messages or separating murderous rulers from army and populace;
- slickums and stickums to impede vehicle or foot traffic;
- highly obnoxious sounds and smells, capable of inducing immediate flight or temporary digestive distress.
That would have helped in Somalia, concludes the CFR Task Force. Needless to say there was no Somali on the Task Force either. Motley is also on the Advisory Board of LEAP, an educational charity, where they develop courses in, among other things, conflict resolution. Their website doesn't say whether the children are trained to use digestive distress agents.
Herbert Okun
Career diplomat, former Special Advisor on Yugoslavia to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, Deputy Co-Chairman of the International Conference on the former Yugoslavia. Member of the Board of the Lawyers Alliance for World Security (LAWS) and its affiliate the Committee for National Security (CNS) which gives this biography:
Ambassador Herbert Okun is the U.S. member and Vice-President of the International Narcotics Control Board, and Visiting Lecturer on International Law at Yale Law School. Previously, he was the Deputy Chairman on the U.S. delegation at the SALT II negotiations and led the U.S. delegation in the trilateral U.S.-U.K.-USSR Talks on the CTBT. From 1991 to 1993 Ambassador Okun was Special Advisor on Yugoslavia to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, Personal Envoy of the U.N. Secretary General, and Deputy Co-Chairman of the International Conference on the former Yugoslavia. He also served as Deputy Permanent Representative of the United States to the UN from 1985 to 1989 serving on the General Assembly, the Disarmament Committee and the Committee on Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. Amb. Okun was also U.S. Ambassador to the former German Democratic Republic.
He was from 1990-97 Executive Director of the Financial Services Volunteer Corps, "a non-profit organization providing voluntary assistance to help establish free-market financial systems in former communist countries", see his biography at International Security Studies at Yale University, where he is also a board member. This Corps is a de facto agency of USAID, see how it is listed country-by-country in their report. Although it is not relevant to Human Rights Watch, this curriculum vitae gives a good impression of the kind of international elite created by such programs.
Okun is also a member emeritus of the board of the European Institute in Washington, an Atlanticist lobby. It organises the European-American Policy Forum, the European-American Congressional Forum, and the Transatlantic Joint Security Policies Project. Okun is a special advisor to the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict funded by the Carnegie Corporation. (It links pro-western international elite figures advocating a formal structure for control of states by the "international community").
Okun was a member of a Task Force (including Bianca Jagger and George Soros) on war criminals: see their report . Although it also demands "UN Sanctions Against States Harboring Indicted War Criminals" it is unlikely that the Task Force members meant the man quoted at the start of their report, President Clinton.
A curiosity: this human rights supporter is accused of an attempt to destroy the right to free speech, in his post at the International Narcotics Control Board: see A Duty to Censor: U.N. Officials Want to Crack Down on Drug War Protesters in the libertarian Reason Magazine.
Jane Olson
Represents HRW Southern California on the main HRW Board, see her biography. One of the few who are simply human rights activists, although her views are clearly 100% acceptable to the US Government. She was appointed a member of the U.S. delegation to the 1991 Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) in Moscow. The biography notes that she "...participated in many investigation delegations to the former USSR, Yugoslavia, the Caucasus, Cuba, Vietnam and Cambodia". There is even a photo gallery: Jane with helmet in front of an armoured car in Bosnia, Jane at Tianmen Square, Jane in Red Square, Jane celebrates Ukrainian independence, Jane in Cambodia with Queen Noor of Jordan.
Again note, that US citizens consider it normal to travel to Europe, to decide on Europe's 'Security and Cooperation'. However, there is absolutely no equivalent "Conference on North American Security and Cooperation", where Europeans arrive, to tell Americans what to do. And no Bosnians are allowed to drive armoured vehicles around the United States.
Hannah Pakula
Author, member of the Freedom to Write Committee at PEN, the international writers organisation. Widow of film director Alan Pakula. Co-organiser of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival.
Kathleen Peratis
Also Chair of the HRW Women's Rights Advisory Committee. Lawyer in New York, see the biography. She is a member of the Advisory Committee of Brit Tzedek v'Shalom - Jewish Alliance for Justice and Peace, which campaigns for a dual-state solution in Israel. Also a Board Member at B'nai Jeshurun, "a Zionist congregation"
"Collectively and individually, BJ members love and support the State of Israel. The continuing violence in Israel deepens our commitment as it saddens our hearts. We pray together for peace. At the same time, we assume our obligation as sacred communities to take action that will both encourage ongoing dialogue about the situation and explore the myriad ways that we - collectively and individually - can support Israel fulfill the vision put forth in its Declaration of Independence."
Peratis bought her way onto the Committee, she is listed in the 1995 donor's list.
Barnett Rubin
Academic and Soros-institutes advisor. Director of the "Center for Preventive Action" at the Council on Foreign Relations.The center is funded by the US Government through USIP, and by the Carnegie Corporation as part of their program Preventing Deadly Conflict. "Preventive Action" means intervention.
He is a member of the centers South Balkans Working Group, and edited a 1996 Council on Foreign Relations study Towards Comprehensive Peace in Southeast Europe: Conflict Prevention in the South Balkans. Rubin is an Afghanistan specialist, also on the Board of the Asia division of HRW. He authored and edited several works on Afghanistan. Rubin apparently had a curious attitude to the Taliban, he saw them as a bulwark against Islamic radicalism. No doubt he changed his attitude after 11 September 2001. See this letter to NPR, entitled Afghanistan Whitewash:
While the Lyden-Rubin conversation made no mention of US support for the Taliban, they referred several times to US "pressure" on the Taliban to now respect human rights. This is a total white wash which distorts the historical record beyond recognition.
Rubin is on the Advisory Board of the Soros Foundation Central Eurasia Project. He is an advisor of the Forced Migration Project of Soros' Open Society Institute, and he is also on the Board of the Soros Humanitarian Fund for Tajikistan. Perhaps most interesting is that the U.S. Institute of Peace (a de facto government agency) gave him a grant to research "formation of a new state system in Central Eurasia".
Barnett Rubin articles on Central Asia
This may be repetitive, but note once again that there are absolutely no Foundations or Institutes in Central Asia, which pay people to design "new state systems" in North America. For people like Rubin "human rights" mean simply that the US designs the world. See this article at the Soros Central Asia site, The Political Economy of War and Peace in Afghanistan, advocating a de facto colonial government in Afghanistan financed by oil revenues. He wasn't talking about the present Karzai government, which meets the description, but about the Taliban regime. Although they might prefer to forget this now, western foreign policy circles did consider recognising the Taliban, in a sort of oil-for-sharia swop.
Rubin is also a member of the US State Department Advisory Committee on Religious Freedom Abroad. The Final Report of this Committee also sums up what the United States can do, when it finds religious freedom has been infringed. The list begins at "friendly, persuasive: open an embassy" and ends with "act of war".
Rubin was also involved in the 1997 New York meeting, where the United States attempted to create a unified Yugoslav opposition, with among others Vuk Draskovic. The effort failed at the time: the opposition never united until Milosevic fell.
Colette Shulman
Womens' rights specialist. Works for the US 'National Council for Research on Women', where she is editor of 'Women's Dialogue', a Russian-language magazine for Russian women. Does the Russian Federation have a national research council which publishes English-language magazines for American women? I doubt it: it is the American obsession to redesign the rest of the world, in detail.
Leon Sigal, also known as Lee Sigal
Director of the Northeast Asia Cooperative Security Project at the Social Science Research Council, specialist on North Korea, author of 'Disarming Strangers: Nuclear Diplomacy with North Korea'. It is not clear why he is on the Europe Advisory Committee, instead of the Asia committee. See his biography:
...member of the editorial board of The New York Times from 1989 until 1995. In 1979 he served as International Affairs Fellow in the Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs at the Department of State and in 1980 as Special Assistant to the Director. He was a Rockefeller Younger Scholar in Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution from 1972-1974 and a guest scholar there in 1981-1984. From 1974 to 1989 he taught international politics at Wesleyan University as a professor of government. He was an adjunct professor at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs from 1985 to 1989 and from 1996 to 2000, and visiting lecturer at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School in 1988 and 2000.
Sigal is a member of the Board of Advisors at Globalbeat Syndicate, part of the New York University Dept of Journalism.
Malcolm Smith
Senior Consultant, former President, at General American Investors Company, Inc.
George Soros
In some ways the 'Osama bin Laden' of the human rights movement - a rich man using his wealth, to spread his values across the world. See this overview of his role in Eastern Europe: George Soros: New Statesman Profile (Neil Clark, June 2003). The Public Affairs site gives this short biography of George Soros, chief financier of HRW and of numerous organisations in eastern Europe with pro-American, pro-market policies.
George Soros was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1930. In 1947 he emigrated to England, where he graduated from the London School of Economics. While a student in London, Mr. Soros became familiar with the work of the philosopher Karl Popper, who had a profound influence on his thinking and later on his philanthropic activities. In 1956 he moved to the United States, where he began to accumulate a large fortune through an international investment fund he founded and managed.
Mr. Soros currently serves as chairman of Soros Fund Management L.L.C., a private investment management firm that serves as principal investment advisor to the Quantum Group of Funds. The Quantum Fund N.V., the oldest and largest fund within the Quantum Group, is generally recognized as having the best performance record of any investment fund in the world in its twenty-nine-year history.
Mr. Soros established his first foundation, the Open Society Fund, in New York in 1979 and his first Eastern European foundation in Hungary in 1984. He now funds a network of foundations that operate in thirty-one countries throughout Central and Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union, as well as southern Africa, Haiti, Guatemala, Mongolia and the United States. These foundations are dedicated to building and maintaining the infrastructure and institutions of an open society. Mr. Soros has also founded other major institutions, such as the Central European University and the International Science Foundation. In 1994, the foundations in the network spent a total of approximately $300 million; in 1995, $350 million; in 1996, $362 million; and in 1997, $428 million. Giving for 1998 is expected to be maintained at that level.
Soros Foundations Network
Open Society Institute Staff Directory
Privatization Project
Open Society Institute Budapest
Marco Stoffel
Founder and director of the Third Millennium Foundation. Although it sounds harmless, the Foundation promotes a pseudo-ethical theory aimed at children, in which morality is reduced to 'empathy'. It also funds some human rights research.
Ruti Teitel
Professor of Constitutional Law at the New York Law School, see his biography. In the last few years he has specialised in the Constitutions of eastern European countries, and advised on the new Ukrainian constitution.
Mark von Hagen
Director of the Harriman Institute - an International Relations institute of Columbia University in New York. A Soviet and post-Soviet specialist, with a long list of publications, see his profile at the institute website.
Patricia M. Wald
US Judge, appointed to the Yugoslavia Tribunal (ICTY) in The Hague, until 2001. See this interview. Incidentally, the Soros Foundation also paid for the equipment of the Tribunal - so much for its judicial impartiality.
Mark Walton
This is apparently a British specialist in human rights and mental health, but I can not link him definitively to HRW.
William D. Zabel
George Soros legal advisor, on foundation and charity law. A estate and family financial lawyer for the rich at Schulte, Roth, and Zabel. His biography lists his involvement with these Soros Foundations: "Newly Independent States and the Baltic Republics, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Central European University and Open Society Fund". See this biographical article originally from the National Law Journal:
When fate knocks, rich ring for Zabel
He is a trustee of Fanton's New School of Social Research, and member of the Advisory Board of the World Policy Institute at the New School.
Zabel is a director of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights. The Lawyers Committee for Human Rights is one of the partners in the "Apparel Industry Partnership", a group set up by the Clinton administration and the US clothing and footwear industries to defuse criticism of conditions in their factories. The (not particularly radical) US trade union federation refuses to co-operate with it.
Zabel is also on the Board of Doctors of the World, the USA branch of Médecins du Monde, founded by Bernard Kouchner in 1980. Kouchner was later appointed the UN Representative ( the "governor") in Kosovo - and he has been suggested as a possible 'UN Governor' in Iraq. Despite the name, Médecins du Monde is a purely western organisation, see the affiliate list.
Warren Zimmermann
US Ambassador to Yugoslavia during its break-up, author of Origins of Catastrophe: Yugoslavia and Its Destroyers. A Cold-War career diplomat, long active in US human rights campaigns against eastern Europe. See this site for an extreme pro-Bosniac assessment of his book by Branka Magas, alleging he appeased Milosevic: "In the event, by pursuing Yugoslavia's unity rather than supporting Slovenia and Croatia in their demands for either the country's confederal transformation or its peaceful dissolution, the United States helped ensure its violent break-up". (I think it is logically consistent with US values and interests, that the US supported one policy around 1990 and another in Kosovo. The real problem is that so many people in Europe expect the US to design their states and write their Constitutions. It is because of this attitude, that people like Zimmermann, and organisations like HRW, can flourish) Zimmermann is now a professor of Diplomacy at Columbia University. If you think the 'amoral diplomat' is a stereotype, look at how his 1997 Contemporary Diplomacy course taught future diplomats:
Imagine that you are a member of Secretary Albright's Policy Planning Staff. She has asked you to write a strategy paper for one of the following diplomatic challenges:
- Dealing with NATO expansion and with the countries affected;
- Crafting a more energetic and assertive US approach to the
Israeli-PLO deadlock;
-Raising the American profile in sub-Saharan Africa;
- Developing a US initiative to improve relations with Cuba;
- Forging an American approach to Central Asia and its energy wealth;
- Making better use of the UN and other multilateral organizations like OSCE;
- Weighing the relative priorities between pursuing human rights and keeping open lucrative economic opportunities;
- Increasing interest in, and support for, US foreign policy among the American people.
With Barnett Rubin, Zimmermann is a member of the Advisory Board of the Forced Migration Project at Soros Open Society Institute.
With Felice Gaer, Zimmermann is also on the Board of the quasi-commercial International Dispute Resolution Associates. (Peacemaking has become big business, but IDR is also funded by the US Government through the USIP).
He is a Trustee of the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs
BBC Video Proves Georgia to Blame for Hostilities
admin
Prison Planet
August 17, 2008
Kurt Nimmo
[1] Infowars
Sunday, Aug 17, 2008
The BBC video here was aired two days before Russia intervened to stop Georgia’s ethnic cleansing operation in South Ossetia. It needs to be viewed by Bush, Condi, Robert Kagan, Charles Krauthammer, little Billy Kristol and all the neocons and their associated slavering bloggers and newspaper columnists calling for war against Russia, a nation bristling with thermonuclear weapons and an increasing desire to use the tactical variety of nukes against the United States, or rather its servile little clients such as Poland that are installing U.S. missile “defense systems” on Russia’s borders.
Forget neocon platitudes about the poor Georgians and their supposedly besieged “democracy” (i.e., their NED and CIA installed tinhorn dictatorship). As the video here demonstrates, the neocons support ethnic cleansers, butchers, snipers, child killers, and assorted psychopaths.
(Article continues below)
It really is quite amazing the BBC ran this report as it later put in extra duty to turn the entire event on its head and blame the Russians. So obvious are the outright lies and twisting of facts, the neocon propaganda outfit Sky News — owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, sort of a UK version of Faux News — “used the footage of Tskhinvali, which was literally ruined as a result of Georgia’s attacks, to make reports about the situation in the town of Gori, which the Russian aviation supposedly bombed,” according to [2] Pravda. “The footage aired by the British TV channel was preceded with a picture of a road sign displaying the name of the town – Gori – written in Georgian and English languages. The report also said that a Sky News correspondent was reporting from the Georgian town.” Disgusting, although we can of course expect no less, as the point is to demonize Russia no matter the cost or the affront to reality.
Time Magazine, an integral part of the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird, attempted to portray the Serbs as Nazi monsters. As it turns out, the man pictured with protruding ribs, Bosnian Fikret Alic, was “disturbed about the use of his image” to sell the U.S. and NATO mass murder campaign against Serbia.
All of this brings to mind the Trnopolje concentration camp hoax used to demonize the Serbs and pave the way to later bomb them with depleted uranium and laser guided munitions. Recall this hoax consisted of a photograph shot by Penny Marshall of ITN of a Bosnian Muslim “prisoner” interned behind barbed wire. As it turns out, the so-called prisoner was outside the supposed internment camp. “What became the picture that Mike Jeremy of ITN pegged ‘one of the key images of the war in the former Yugoslavia,’ (qtd. in Deichmann, p. 170) was, in fact, presented as to the Western world as something it was not, a concentration camp. The focus was on Fikret Alic, who’s protruding rib cage behind a fence conjured up images of Nazi death camps. This ‘death camp’ was a crude, sick lie and Fikret Alic, who survived the war, was disturbed about the use of his image” (see the Balkan Repository Project, [3] The Criminal Race: The Demonization, Dehumanization and Criminalization of the Serbian People, Erin S. LaPorte, December 22, 1999).
The corporate media tried to perpetuated a Trnopolje trick in regard to South Ossetia and Gori, but this crude effort has fallen flat on its face, thanks to the Russian media, far more sophisticated then its Serb equivalent (not that the Serbs had a chance — NATO sent a cruise missile into Belgrade’s main TV station on 23 April 1999, killing 16 civilians and shutting down any possibility of media coverage able to counter the corporate propaganda onslaught).
It would seem a large number of people, at least Russians on the internet, no longer accept unquestioningly the corporate media’s spin and increasingly transparent fabrications. In regard to a poll posted on CNN’s website, the [4] Media Channel writes:
Surprisingly, 92% of readers thought that the Russians were justified. Taking into account CNN’s boneheaded and overwhelmingly pro-Georgian coverage, the poll didn’t make any sense. Were sheepish CNN viewers actually using their brain? It didn’t seem likely. Well, the poll no longer appears on the site. It was taken down after charges of manipulation started surfacing. Apparently, Russian bloggers circulated the poll and called on Russians to let their voice be heard. And if there’s one thing CNN doesn’t like doing, it’s hearing what those damn Russkies have to say. CNN had no idea that this seemingly innocuous poll would demonstrate the huge rift in opinion between the West and Russia and underline the importance that information warfare has played in this conflict, not to mention show whom CNN was really rooting for.
Thanks to alternative news websites and bloggers, the corporate media no longer enjoys a monopoly in the information war. It is particularly sweet that the BBC’s own video may be posted on the internet, revealing that indeed the ethnic cleansers and thugs of the brutal little CIA created client state are responsible for the current situation, not Russia as the corporate media insists contrary to the facts.
________________________________________
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Wed Aug 20, 2008 12:33 pm Post subject: GEORGIA: Russian broadcasters blocked
Quote:
RTVi News Service Director Georgy Tsikhiseli told CPJ that on Monday, Cable TV Union of Georgia informed an RTVi representative in London that Georgia will cease to broadcast on September 1 because of Russian aggression against the country. However, RTVi has been blocked in Georgia since Monday.
And this little s**t, wants a fight.
More of our soldiers dead for what?
New York, August 19, 2008—The Committee to Protect Journalists today urged the Georgian government to stop blocking Russian broadcasts and Web sites.
According to the Moscow-based radio Ekho Moskvy, Russian Television International (RTVi) broadcasting was cut after it aired Ekho Moskvy’s interview with Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on the conflict in South Ossetia and the future of the relationship between Russia and Georgia. In the interview, Lavrov supported the Russian incursion into Georgia, and called for Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili to step down.
RTVi is a New York-based independent Russian-language broadcaster that broadcasts via satellite; their programs in Georgia are transmitted by local cable companies. The station was accessible in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, and in the cities of Poti, Batumi, and Telavi.
According to the Moscow Times, Georgian authorities have been blocking Russian news channels Rossiya, Channel One, and NTV, as well as Web sites ending in “.ru” since August 9. Zviad Pochkhua, editor-in-chief of the Tbilisi-based English-language newspaper The Financial, told CPJ that Russian news sites are accessible only via proxy servers, and that Russian news channels have been blocked since last week due to “biased reporting and propaganda.”
In a democracy such as Georgia the public has a right to hear a broad range of opinion and news, especially at this critical juncture in its history,” said CPJ Deputy Director Rob Mahoney. “We urge the authorities to allow RTVi to resume transmission and to unblock other Russian-language broadcasts and Web sites.”
RTVi News Service Director Georgy Tsikhiseli told CPJ that on Monday, Cable TV Union of Georgia informed an RTVi representative in London that Georgia will cease to broadcast on September 1 because of Russian aggression against the country. However, RTVi has been blocked in Georgia since Monday. Tsikhiseli said it was shocking news for the company because it believes it supported Georgian authorities and condemned Russia’s decision to begin military actions in Georgia.
http://www.infowars.com/?p=3994 _________________ 'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.
A recent report suggests that the US and Israel had plans to use Georgia as a launchpad for aerial strikes on Iranian nuclear sites.
Columnist Ian Brockwell says the US is interested in Georgia because it borders Russia, has a pipeline that is intended to transfer oil to Israel, and most importantly is a country that can be used in an attack against Iran.
According to the article, the Bush administration has been looking for an excuse to attack the Islamic Republic so that it can take possession of the country's oil and give Israel a share in Iranian crude by transferring it through Georgia.
The article adds that Israeli weapons used in the recent attack against South Ossetia have been entering Georgia for many years as part of an Israeli plan to establish close military relations with the country.
Close military ties can be beneficial to Israel as its warplanes are able to carry out strikes against Iran from Georgia without having to refuel, explains Brockwell.
He adds, however, that Russia's response to the Georgian attack on South Ossetia has upset the plans drawn up by Israel and the US because numerous Georgian military bases were destroyed in the conflict.
Brockwell has also drawn attention to the fact that a number of Georgian government officials similar to many American politicians, who are pushing for a war against Iran, hold Israeli citizenships.
US and Western media outlets portray Georgia as the victim of the conflict and Russia as the aggressor.
By planning an attack against Iran, says Brockwell, Washington and Tel Aviv hope to force a regime change and take out the one remaining country in the Middle East that has the potential to stop their ambitions. _________________ Simon - http://www.patriotsquestion911.com/
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Thu Aug 28, 2008 8:05 pm Post subject:
The Eurasian Corridor: Pipeline Geopolitics and the New Cold War
The ongoing crisis in the Caucasus is intimately related to the strategic control over energy pipeline and transportation corridors.
There is evidence that the Georgian attack on South Ossetia on August 7 was carefully planned. High level consultations were held with US and NATO officials in the months preceding the attacks.
The attacks on South Ossetia were carried out one week after the completion of extensive US - Georgia war games (July 15-31st, 2008). They were also preceded by high level Summit meetings held under the auspices of GUAM, a US-NATO sponsored regional military alliance.
War in Georgia Time Line
July 1-2, 2008 GUAM Summit in Batumi, Georgia...................
and............
Quote:
Pushing Russia Into the Cold
Patrick Buchanan — 27.08.2008
http://www.kp.ru/daily/24153/369003/
A year after taking power, in June 1934, Adolf Hitler made his first visit abroad -- to his idol Benito Mussolini in Venice.
Babbling on incessantly about "Mein Kampf "and the Negroid strain in Mediterranean peoples, the Fuhrer made a dismal impression.
"What a clown this Hitler is," Mussolini told an aide.
Two weeks later, Hitler executed the Roehm purge and murdered scores of old Stormtrooper comrades. In late July, Austrian Nazis, attempting a coup, assassinated Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, a friend of Mussolini whose wife and child were then his guests.
Il Duce ordered four divisions to the Brenner Pass and flew to Vienna to vent his rage and disgust with Hitler. He called a summit at Stresa with Britain and France to agree on military action should Hitler make any new move in violation of Versailles.........
David Miliband's posturing yesterday in Kiev about building a "coalition against Russian aggression" merely looked foolish.
what is clear is that America's unipolar moment has passed - and the new world order heralded by Bush's father in the dying days of the Soviet Union in 1991 is no more.
Now, pumped up with petrodollars, Russia has called a halt to this relentless expansion and demonstrated that the US writ doesn't run in every backyard. And although it has been a regional, not a global, challenge, this object lesson in the new limits of American power has already been absorbed from central Asia to Latin America.
As Kishore Mahbubani, Singapore's former UN ambassador, observed in the Financial Times a few days ago, "most of the world is bemused by western moralising on Georgia". While the western view is that the world "should support the underdog, Georgia, against Russia ... most support Russia against the bullying west. The gap between the western narrative and the rest of the world could not be clearer."
The [NWO’s] real gripe is... their strategic challenge and economic rivalry. For the rest of us, a new assertiveness by Russia and other rising powers doesn't just offer some restraint on the unbridled exercise of global imperial power, it should also increase the pressure for a revival of a rules-based system of international relations.
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Fri Aug 29, 2008 1:38 am Post subject:
Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov
......The head of the Russian Foreign Ministry said that Miliband’s appeals to democracy in Russia were ridiculous.
“We know what Saakashvili’s regime is about, and how his Western patrons forgive him everything including provocations against peacemakers, the suppression of opposition, the banning of all Russian TV channels in Georgia,” the minister said.
Lavrov added that he disagreed with David Miliband, who described NATO as an anchor of stability, democracy and the economic development.
“I’ve never heard of NATO’s activities to spread democracy, but things have apparently changed,” Sergei Lavrov said.
“I will leave this without any comments, nor will I comment on his statement claiming that this is the price of the division of Europe. It is the unjustifiable and the unfounded expansion of NATO that leads to such a division,” the minister said.
Lavrov paid attention to several factual mistakes in Miliband’s statements, who said that Russia had blocked ports, tunnels and other objects of the Georgian infrastructure.
“Only God knows where he took that information from. Journalists, international representatives and civilians can prove the opposite. When they say that they do not want to find out who started the conflict first, we believe that hypocrisy and modesty do not suit here towards those who were attacked in the middle of the night, he said......
http://english.pravda.ru/russia/kremlin/106229-1/ _________________ www.lawyerscommitteefor9-11inquiry.org www.rethink911.org www.patriotsquestion911.com www.actorsandartistsfor911truth.org www.mediafor911truth.org www.pilotsfor911truth.org www.mp911truth.org www.ae911truth.org www.rl911truth.org www.stj911.org www.v911t.org www.thisweek.org.uk www.abolishwar.org.uk www.elementary.org.uk www.radio4all.net/index.php/contributor/2149 http://utangente.free.fr/2003/media2003.pdf
"The maintenance of secrets acts like a psychic poison which alienates the possessor from the community" Carl Jung
https://37.220.108.147/members/www.bilderberg.org/phpBB2/
Joined: 09 Feb 2007 Posts: 630 Location: Manchester
Posted: Mon Sep 01, 2008 9:26 pm Post subject:
Mao Zedong:
“In appearance it is very powerful but in reality it is nothing to be afraid of; it is a paper tiger. Outwardly a tiger, it is made of paper, unable to withstand the wind and the rain. I believe the United States is nothing but a paper tiger.”
Americans were in the forefront of closing down Britains mines. This policy was then extended to the EU. As a result energy independence became energy dependence. Unable to source the energy needs on the world market at competitive prices France-Germany-Italy the core of the European states that still have manufacturing ended up getting it from Russia.
So after 20 years of 'free market' politics what do we have in a nutshell?
The replacement of a British Scargill with a Russian one.
Lenin must be laughing in his grave
Some good old new world order propaganda from the Guardian once more about ethnic cleansing russians...
......Beginning with Abkhazia and Georgia, Georgia was a signatory of the Constitution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and was bound under this Constitution to respect all its clauses. One of these was the voluntary dissolution of the Union and the clause which states that minority groups (South Ossetia and Abkhazia) in other Republics (Georgia) had the statutory and constitutional right to a referendum to decide as to the degree of independence/autonomy/self-government that their people chose in a free and fair electoral process.
Georgia, as so often, broke the law by not holding these referenda, so just this fact makes a valid case for these two republics to decide for themselves whether they are a part of Georgia or not. It is after all their right and Georgia was bound by it.............
http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/29-08-2008/106253-ossetiia internatlaw-0 _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
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