New York Times Damage Control for US-Run State-Terror

Horhey · Aug 18, 2012

[video=youtube_share;V4adRQX9Fio]http://youtu.be/V4adRQX9Fio[/video]

This isnt a major example but I came across it while researching something else and it's noteworthy, so here it is. Interesting talk by Chomsky in the video anyways.

Once again, it's the New York Times and JAMES LeMOYNE, who was described as "one of our best" by the Executive Editor.

JAMES LeMOYNE investigated the July 1984 massacre in Los Lanitos El Salvador carried out by the US-backed Atlacatl battalion, who killed 68 civilians according to Tutela Legal and Americas Watch. The Governmental Human Rights Commission later admited that the battalion killed 80 civilians. However, according LeMOYNE's report:

The New York Times: SALVADORAN VILLAGERS REPORT ARMY MASSACRE

The villagers' account has not been confirmed, and it may be colored by their sympathies for the guerrillas.
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Noam Chomsky comments:

Turning the Tide: U.S. Intervention in Central American and the Struggle for Peace

What would count as "confirmation " he does not say, and it is, of course, the norm for reports of atrocities to come from the victims, who are not likely to be sympathetic to the murderers of their families and friends. But to raise doubts on this score is permissible only in the case of atrocities conducted by US client states, atrocities that are generally ignored or described with much skepticism and with the US role pointedly omitted, as in this case. The need for care is regulary emphasized by analysts concerned with facts, and regularly disregarded, often with reckless abandon, when there are ideological points to be scored. In the case of El Salvador, the record compiled by human rights groups and journalists is so extensive, detailed and consistant that, exercising all the care that is deemed appropriate in the case of our own state or its clients, no rational person can doubt that we are implicated in terrible crimes. No one who serveys the record can reasonbly doubt the conclusion of Aryeh Neier of Americas Watch and Helsinki Watch:
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Americas Watch: As bad as ever: a report on human rights in El Salvador, January 31, 1984

gross abuses of human rights are not incidental to the way the armed forces of El Salvador conduct their war against the guerrillas. In our view, the principal reason that those abuses continue at such a high rate at a point when — one would guess — the armed forces should have run out of politically suspect persons to murder is that the murders instill terror. Terror is the means whereby the armed forces maintain their authority.
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Moreover, the State Department invented a new category for the laws of war in an attempt to legitimize the war against the population.

Aryeh Neier, the executive director of Americas Watch observes:

The State Department was arguing for the legitimacy of a widely used counterinsurgency strategy that has been responsible for much of the slaughter in internal armed conflicts in the post World War II era. Turning around Mao's dictum that guerrillas are like fish who swim in the sea of a civilian population, this strategy aims to drain the sea to get at the fish. The laws of war, we said, recognize only two categories: combatants, who may be attacked; and noncombatants, who may not be attacked. The third category was invented by the State Department to legitimize attacks on noncombatants by reason of their presumed sympathies or their residence.
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New York Times Damage Control for US-Run State-Terror

Horhey Well-Known Member

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New York Times Damage Control for US-Run State-Terror

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