Reporters Without Borders (aka Reporters Without Scruples) Head Bob Menard Resigns!

[magbana]

Comment prior to article is from a subscriber to the CubaNews list

Forward from mart
Please Distribute

'Reporters Sans Frontières' aka "Reporters
Without Scruples" Head, Robert Ménard Quits
Amid Anti-Cuban Embezzlement Investigation
----------------------------------------

Well imagine that! A bunch of U.S government
paid 'liars, thieves and murderers', stealing and
swindling from other U.S government paid 'liars,
thieves and murderers! Geeze?? Who'da' ever
thunk??? <Grin>. As for Robert Ménard and his
notorious C.I.A front group 'Reporters Sans
Frontières' ( better known as "Reporters Without
Scruples") getting caught in this mess with his
and it's hands in the till, couldn't have happened
to a more deserving person or organization! - mart

============================================
Granma (Havana Cuba)
http://www.granma.cu
October 17, 2008

http://www.granma.cu/ingles/2008/octubre/vier17/41menard-ing.html

Agent Ménard resigns from RSF

By Jean-Guy Allard

WHILE his organization Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF) finds
itself under the looking glass of the Government Accountability Office
(GAO) in Washington for being one of the principal beneficiaries of
the Center for a Free Cuba, currently implicated in a massive
embezzlement case, Robert Ménard has announced in Paris that he
is leaving his post as general secretary because he "wants to do
something else."

"I'm going to find another way of continuing the fight I have been
waging for human rights," states Ménard in an overindulgent cable
from AFP. The devoted collaborator with U.S. intelligence added
that he wanted to leave "once the campaign on China was over" -
a reference to the attacks on the Beijing Olympics on the part of the
Taiwanese government in the last few months.

Ménard is leaving his post just a few weeks after U.S. Congress
ordered the Agency for International Development (USAID) "to
freeze" the funds of the Center for a Free Cuba, a creation of
Freedom House and managed by CIA Agent Frank Calzón. This
situation will be maintained until an extensive audit has been made
on the operations of its Cuba Program.

This year, USAID has a budget of $45 million for engaging in its
propaganda and espionage work through a network of alleged
NGOs, all linked in one way or another to the anti-Cuba
mechanism of the U.S. special services.

Since the publication of the Bush Plan to Annex Cuba in 2004,
RSF -identified in the document - has had no option than to
acknowledge its collaboration with the State Department and its
hefty remuneration not just through Calzón's apparatus, but also
through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the
International Republican Institute (IRI).

It is worth noting that, during the last few years, Jean-François
Julliard, the new RSF chief appointed by Ménard himself, has
devoted himself to producing open letters and scandalous
statements denying such links between the Parisian group and
the U.S. governmental funds placed at the disposition of CIA
operations.

THE FRENCH PRESS DOESN'T MENTION THIS

The USAID embezzlement scandal provoked the resignation
of Mafioso Adolfo Franco, head of the organization for the
Latin American region, and also Felipe Sixto, right-hand man
to the chief of the Center for a Free Cuba, who confessed to
having diverted half a million dollars.

As it happens, not long ago Ménard also lost his right-hand man
of many years - Régis Bourgeat - who handled the RSF's
anti-Cuba operations in a very particular way, to the point of
accompanying his master in Miami during the course of a visit
to the ringleaders of the anti-Cuba mafia.

In the case of Calzón, the audit being carried undertaken by the
GAO and also by the very same auditors legally assigned to
USAID, could blow up into a major scandal, in which RSF
would have to reveal its secret funding, for which Ménard used
a number of accountants and a secret account in a bank in
Virginia, coincidentally just a few minutes away from CIA
headquarters.

If, in the end, Julliard and his boss should be forced to admit the
illegal deposits they received in 2006 from the U.S. state through
the Center for a Free Cuba and the IRI, they have not yet mentioned
their connection with Freedom House, another secret mechanism
for circulating economic aid to the empire's collaborators.

Freedom House is technically a private organization, although it
receives 75% of its budget from the State Department and just
25% from other contributions.

This organization announces in its reports that it distributes its
funds to "journalists, human rights activists and other
associations." RSF fits perfectly into that category.

[EFerrari]

1. It makes you wonder how many people are going to be thrown out into the job market

in January.

lol

[Judi Lynn]

2. I tried to write a response to your article earlier, late afternoon, and my machine INSTANTLY

crashed.

I left, just came back and saw the message I have recovered from a serious whatever.

Sometimes I really think someone has put one of those "keystroke" crappola spy things on me for the "right" wing.

I'll be back later, to see what I can find on this guy. I thought he'd be there until he passed on. He is eternally connected to this filthy organization. What an incredible ass####.

Thank you, magbana. This is a great bit of news, unless we find they've found someone even more pathetic than this guy to take his place.

[Judi Lynn]

3. Reporters Without Borders Unmasked: Its Secret Deal with Otto Reich to Wreck Cuba's Economy

May 17, 2005

Its Secret Deal with Otto Reich to Wreck Cuba's Economy
Reporters Without Borders Unmasked
By DIANA BARAHONA

When Robert Menard founded Reporters Without Borders twenty years ago, he gave his group a name which evokes another French organization respected worldwide for its humanitarian work and which maintains a strict neutrality in political conflicts ­ Doctors Without Borders. But RSF (French acronym) has been anything but nonpartisan and objective in its approach to Latin America and to Cuba in particular.

From the beginning, RSF has made Cuba its No. 1 target. Allegedly founded to advocate freedom of the press around the world and to help journalists under attack, the organization has called Cuba "the world's biggest prison for journalists." It even gives the country a lower ranking on its press freedom index than countries where journalists routinely have been killed, such as Colombia, Peru and Mexico. RSF has waged campaigns aimed at discouraging Europeans from vacationing in Cuba and the European Union from doing business there ­ its only campaigns worldwide intended to damage a country's economy.

The above is not a matter of chance because it turns out that RSF is on the payroll of the U.S. State Department and has close ties to Helms-Burton-funded Cuban exile groups.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/barahona05172005.html

~~~~~~~~~~
Funding Sources Robert Menard, the Secretary General of RSF, was forced to confess that RSF's budget was primarily provided by "US organizations strictly linked with US foreign policy" (Thibodeau, La Presse).

• NED (US$39,900 paid 14 Jan 2005)
  
• Center for a Free Cuba (USAID and NED funded) $50,000 per year NED grant. Contract was signed by Otto Reich
  European Union (1.2m Euro) -- currently contested in EU parliament
  
• Rights & Democracy in 2004 supported Reporters Without Borders-Canada <1>
  
• "Grants from private foundations (Open Society Foundation, Center for a Free Cuba, Fondation de France, National Endowment for Democracy) were slightly up, due to the Africa project funded by the NED and payment by Center for a Free Cuba for a reprint of the banned magazine De Cuba." <2>

Principal focus of RSF activities

• Cuba
  
• Venezuela
  
• Haiti

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Reporters_Without_Borders

~~~~~~~~~~
Wednesday, May 18, 2005
'REPORTERS WITHOUT HONOUR' - RSF

~snip~
Bush himself has succeeded in killing most of the freedom of the press in the United States, and tries to do the same in all countries which are dependent on the US and it's neocon government's despicable mainstream media?

Read what Molly Bingham - a very well known and respected US journalist/photographer writes at present, about how afraid she even has to be for her own government because she has been trying to do 'solid journalism' writing about the illegal war in Iraq! - Article: ''Home from Iraq - Journalist urges Americans to search for truth, freedom' - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/b34pt

I have - based on more than forty years of experience as an independent reporter - a very bad feeling about the course RSF has taken the past years, and it is my conviction that RSF - through infiltration and via other sources and means - has become a mouthpiece for certain US/Israeli groups which commit crimes against humanity.

To take just one example: in the whole of the Netherlands not a single independent newspaper is left: they're all in foreign multinational hands.

More:
http://internetsamizdat.blogspot.com/2005/05/reporters-without-honour-rsf.html

~~~~~~~~~~
Reporters without Borders Keeps silence about journalist tortured in Guantánamo
by Salim Lamrani*

The silence kept by the «freedom-of-the-press» Reporters without border (RSF) organization about Sudanese journalist Sami al Hajj raises many questions on the impartiality of that association headed by Robert Menard. RSF, which is always willing to stigmatize- usually arbitrarily- those countries targeted by Washington such as Cuba, Venezuela and China, has fully ignored the torture suffered by Al Hajj, a journalist with Qatar’s Al Jazeera TV chain <3>.

Once handed over to Afghanistan-based US authorities, Al Hajj would experience a true nightmare at the Bagram air force base. «those were the worst of my life», he said. Hajj revealed that he faced sexual abuse and rape threats US soldiers; he was fiercely tortured for months and he mistreated in countless occasions. He was forced to kneels down on the floor for hours. Dogs would constantly hound and attack him. The Sudanese journalist was also jailed in a cage located in a hangar facing glacial wind. He explained how his torturers pulled his hair out of his head and his beard, one by one. The guards would regularly beat him and prohibited him to take a bath for one hundred days although his body was covered with lice. <5>.

On June 13, 2002, Sami al Hajj was sent to Guantánamo. During the flight, he was chained and gagged with a bag that covered his head. Every time he fell asleep the guards would violently wake him up by beating him on the head. Before facing the first interrogation session, he was held without sleep during more than two days. «For more than three years, most interrogations I faced pursued the objective of having me say that there was a relationship between Al Jazeera and Al Qaeda», Hajj told his lawyer <6>.

In the military base located on the US illegally occupied Cuban territory of Guantanamo, the Sudanese journalist received no medical assistance although he had suffered from throat cancer in 1998 and he is currently suffering from rheumatism. They would beat him on the soles of his feet and scare him with threatening dogs. He was the victim of racist humiliations and they never allowed him to take walks due to his skin colour. He witnessed the profanation of the Koran in 2003 and, along the rest of inmates he waged hunger strikes. The US troops reacted violently to the protest: they beat him and threw him down the stairs, which caused serious wounds in his head. Later, he was isolated before being transferred to Camp V, the worst of all detention centres in Guantanamo, where he was included in the fourth security level, meaning the worst brutal treatment <7>.

This testimony, so overwhelming to the Bush administration which still refuses to approve the status of prisoners of war for all Guantanamo detainees, joins other similar accusing declarations revealed by another two victims to Amnesty International <8>. However, they only constitute the visible part of the iceberg. In Guantanamo, crime has two faces: The United States inflicts the most inhumane barbarities on persons held without formal proofs, and forcibly occupies a part of sovereign Cuba.

The conspiracy between RSF and Washington has already been evidenced in the case of Spanish cameraman José Couso, who was murdered by coalition troops. In its report the Parisian organization exonerated the US armed forces from all responsibility despite strong proofs. RSF and the US State Department acted in such a collusion that the relatives of the journalist denounced the report and urged Menard to withdraw from the issue. The conspiracy is also evident in the case of Cuba, where RSF makes US paid agents appear as «independent journalists», although information on this particular issue is fully available and irrefutable <9>.

More:
http://www.voltairenet.org/article135300.html

~~~~~~~~~~
International Republican Institute Grants Uncovered
Reporters Without Borders and Washington’s Coups
by Diana Barahona, Jeb Sprague*

British press baron Lord Northcliff said, "News is something that someone, somewhere wants to keep secret, everything else is advertising." If this is true, then U.S. government funding of Reporters Without Borders must be news, because the organization and its friends in Washington have gone to extraordinary lengths to cover it up.

In spite of 14 months of stonewalling by the National Endowment for Democracy over a Freedom of Information Act request and a flat denial from RSF executive director Lucie Morillon, the NED has revealed that Reporters Without Borders received grants over at least three years from the International Republican Institute.

The NED still refuses to provide the requested documents or even reveal the grant amounts, but they are identified by these numbers: IRI 2002-022/7270, IRI 2003-027/7470 and IRI 2004-035/7473. Investigative reporter Jeremy Bigwood asked Morillon on April 25 if her group was getting any money from the I.R.I., and she denied it, but the existence of the grants was confirmed by NED assistant to the president, Patrick Thomas.

The discovery of the grants reveals a major deception by the group, which for years denied it was getting any Washington dollars until some relatively small grants from the NED and the Center for a Free Cuba were revealed (see Counterpunch: "Reporters Without Borders Unmasked"). When asked to account for its large income RSF has claimed the money came from the sale of books of photographs. But researcher Salim Lamrani has pointed out the improbability of this claim. Even taking into account that the books are published for free, it would have had to sell 170 200 books in 2004 and 188 400 books in 2005 to earn the more than $2 million the organization claims to make each year 516 books per day in 2005. The money clearly had to come from other sources, as it turns out it did.

The I.R.I., an arm of the Republican Party, specializes in meddling in elections in foreign countries, as a look at NED annual reports and the I.R.I. website shows. It is one of the four core grantees of the NED, the organization founded by Congress under the Reagan administration in 1983 to replace the CIA’s civil society covert action programs, which had been devastated by exposure by the Church committee in the mid-1970s (Ignatius, 1991). The other three pillars of the NED are the National Democratic Institute (the Democratic Party), the Solidarity Center (AFL-CIO) and the Center for International Private Enterprise (U.S. Chamber of Commerce). But of all the groups the I.R.I. is closest to the Bush administration, according to a recent piece in The New York Times exposing its role in the overthrow of Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide:

More:
http://www.voltairenet.org/article142922.html