From MATHRICH%UMCVMB.bitnet@DARTCMS1.DARTMOUTH.EDU Sun Feb 3 17:10:49 1991 Received: from dartvax.dartmouth.edu by cabot.dartmouth.edu (5.61a+YP/4.1) id AA12126; Sun, 3 Feb 91 17:10:42 -0500 Received: from d0.dartmouth.edu by dartvax.dartmouth.edu (5.65+D1/4.4HUB) id AA05858; Sun, 3 Feb 91 17:11:14 -0500 Message-Id: <9102032211.AA05858@dartvax.dartmouth.edu> Received: by D0.DARTMOUTH.EDU id <74860>; 3 Feb 91 17:11:34 Return-Path: <@DARTCMS1.DARTMOUTH.EDU:ACTIV-L@UMCVMB.BITNET> Received: by mac.Dartmouth.EDU via SMTP; id <3065950>; 03 Feb 91 17:11:26 Received: from DARTCMS1.DARTMOUTH.EDU by DARTCMS1.DARTMOUTH.EDU (IBM VM SMTP V2R1) with BSMTP id 0223; Sun, 03 Feb 91 17:09:17 EST Received: from BUACCA.BU.EDU by DARTCMS1.DARTMOUTH.EDU (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 0193; Sun, 03 Feb 91 11:31:20 EST Received: from BUACCA.BITNET by BUACCA.BU.EDU (Mailer R2.05) with BSMTP id 6518; Sun, 03 Feb 91 01:11:31 EST Date: Sun, 3 Feb 91 00:03:12 CST Reply-To: Rich Winkel UMC Math Department Sender: Activists Mailing List From: Rich Winkel UMC Math Department Subject: Lies Of Our Times: NYT on Ireland To: Multiple recipients of list ACTIV-L Status: RO /** gen.media: 77.0 **/ ** Topic: "Lies of Our Times" on Ireland ** ** Written 7:23 am Feb 2, 1991 by emcelroy in cdp:gen.media ** HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES: MAJOR OFFENDER IGNORED by Laura Flanders from the October 1990 issue of Lies of Our Times. Identify this island. Censured repeatedly by international and national organizations for violating basic civil, religous, and human rights, its gopvernment rules with the help of permanent "emergency" legislation which it defends on the basis of national security. This special legislation permits trials without juries before single judges. Suspects may be held for extended periods of time before being formally charged or given access to a lawyer, and once convcted, defendants can face excessively long sentences on reletively minor charges. Police procedures have repeatedly been shown to betray political partiality, and recent history includes many cases of unjust imprisonment. Charges are mounting that government security forces are responsible for more than two dozen murders, death squad style, motivated by political conncerns. One last hint. In the spring of 1990, the government respponsible for the island declared that U.S. television broadcasts into its country constituted a "grievous threat" to the nation. A news station airing a U.S. report was investigated for infringement of the country's strict censorship laws. Given the clues and their papers's consistent concerns, New York Times readers have jumped to one obvious conclusion. But the island in question is not Cuba, it is Northern Ireland. "When British Justice Failed", read the title of a recent Sunday Magazine special (New York Times, February 25, 1990, page 34) on the case of four people wrongly accused of IRA bombings and released in October 1989 after serving 15 years behind bars. "The Guildford 'lie' (falsification of evidence by police) did not confine itself to a few junior policemen," wrote the Times special correspondent. "Like a virus it grew and grew until its corruption tainted the entire British legal system." YEARS OF ABUSES IGNORED Had Times coverage been more diligent, readers could have known that the British legal system needed no new virus to taint it. For more than a decade, Amnesty International has charged that the not so Great British govenment contravenes both the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights, to both of which treaties that government is a signatory. But while Times editors are famously keen on English history (past features include a Sheila Rule "London Journal" piece on the ravens of the Tower of London [April 5, 1989. page A4] and a 'news' story by Rule on recall therapy as practiced by elderly survivors of WW II [June 8, 1989, page A5], the paper's writer appear suddenly to lose their nostalgia when it comes to this particular tradition. The article about the Guildford defendants was typical in its omission of any contextualizing reference to the British reccord. BRITAIN IS THE CHAMPION HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATOR The fact is that Britain has been judged in violation of the European Convention on Human Rights 21 times- ten more times than any other nation. Yet even though such condemnations come from Britian's own Standing Advisory Commission on Human Rights, Amnesty International, and the European Court, the Times routinely refers to those who challenge Britian on human rights as unnamed "critics". In "Britain Says IRA Appears to be Stepping Up Its Attacks Outside Ulster" (New York Times, June 3, 1990, p. 3) Stephen Prokesch wrote that the IRA's "main purpose" for bombings is "to combat what it says is a British attempt to 'normalize' or 'pacify' Northern Ireland." But there was no reference to what that normalization would entail: according to Amnesty International, a 'very grave' systematic denial of fundamental rights. Margaret Thatcher has been dubbed "the democratic leader of the decade" by George Will (Newsweek, June 22, 1987, p. 84), and the Times seems disinclined to challenge that reputation with facts. Neither "Riot in London: Angered and Alienated Youths Find Target in a Hated Tax" (April 4, 1990, p. 3) nor "Resentment of New Thatcher Tax Feeds the Bonfire of Britain's Anarchists" (April 29, 1990. p.3), two major Sheila Rule Timmes stories on the mounting discontent with Thatcher, made any reference to the Prime Minister's reputation on Northern Irelannd. Like Mrs. Thatcher herself, the Times prefers to divorce British government practices in Ireland from policies "at home." But a recent report from the Helsinki Federation Report points out "the situation in Northern Ireland has also had an increasingly negative efefct on the situation in Great Britain itself." BRITAIN CENSORS U.S. TELEVISION When Britain's new Sky News cable television channel found itself subject to an investigation by the country's Cable Authority this August for airing an American NBC Nightly News Program those connections were very concrete. Sky News faced removal from the air because its live transmission from the U.S. featured an interviewwith the publicity director of Sinn Fein, a legal political party in Northern Ireland whose representitives are banned on British television under a 1988 law. Thus British censorship has a direct imact on U.S. braodcasting. FALLING THROUGH THE CRACKS Still, Irish rights appear to fall through the cracks, perhaps crushed in the file between Iraq and Israel. The launch of the International Helsinnki Ferderation's report "Irish Terrorism or British Colonialism? The Violation of Human Rights in Ireland", preceeded by one day a major conference on the future of British rule in Ireland, held August 9 to 13 in Belfast. Neither one recieved any Times attention. The conference attracted more than 400 delegates from 14 countries and 100 organizations who demanded that the "British government cease and desist from its violation of human rights of Irish people." Had the organizers only held their meeting in Havana, say. or Prague, perhaps they could have got a mention. ---- LOOT's statement of purpose reads as follows: Lies of Our Times is a magazine of media criticism. "Our Times" are the times we live in but also the words of the New York Times, the most cited news medium in the U.S., our paper of record. Our "Lies" are more than literal falsehoods; they encompass subjects that have been ignored, hypocrisies, misleading emphases, and hidden premises, the biases which systematically shape reporting. We can address only a sampling of the universe of media lies and distortions. But, we hope, LOOT will go a long way toward correcting the record. LOOT is available by subscription. $24 for 12 issues. Send to: LOOT Sheridan Square Press 145 West 4th St New York, NY 10012 Laura Flanders is a producer and co-host of Undercurrents, an investigative news program syndicated out of New York by radio station WBAI, 99.5 FM. ** End of text from cdp:gen.media **