Time never used the word "theatre" to describe either of the two
Salvadoran
elections.
Manufacturing Consent - Chomsky
42-47; Noam Chomsky, Turning the Tide (Boston: South End Press, 1985), pp.
109ff.
42. Weakness and Deceit, p. 205.
43. The top leadership of the Social Democratic party had been murdered in
1980, and its remaining officials fled the country. Only a portion of this exiled leadership returned for the 1985 election.
44. The guerrilla position was that with the army having set up a national control system, military domination had been institutionalized and elections would have no meaning. See "Guerrillas' View of Elections: Army Will Hold Power Despite Polls," Latin America Weekry Report, October 25, 1985, p. II. 45? HRC, Report, p. 7.
46. Americas Watch, Civil Patrols in Guatemala (New York: AW, 1986), p. 2. 47. "EI Senor Presidente? " An interview of Cerezo by George Black in Octo- ber 1985, NACLA Report on the Americas (November-December 1985), p. 24. 48. "In a meeting several months ago with the ultra-rightist organization Amigos del Pais, which allegedly has strong death squad connections, PDCG deputies to the Constituent Assembly pledged that if the party came to power, they would ref~ain from agrarian and banking reforms, investigation into human rights abuses by the armed forces, and any interference in the coun- terinsurgency program" ("Guatemala Votes," Washington Report on the Hemi- sphere, Nov. 27, 1985). Stephen Kinzer also reports on a private meeting between Cerezo and right-wing landowners, in which "he said we all needed each other at this moment . . . " ("When a Landslide Is Not a Mandate," New York Times, Dec. 15, 1985).
49. Allen Nairn and Jean-Marie Simon, in their "The Bureaucracy of Death," New Republic, aune 30, 1986), describe the "tactical alliance" between Cerezo and the army, which protected them against any accountability for past ac- tions, in exchange for which the army would allow Cerezo to occupy office. 50. See "Cerezo Adapts to Counterinsurgency," Guatemala, Guatemala News and Information Bureau (May-June 1986).
51. American Watch, Human Rights in Guatemala during President Cerezo's First Year, February 1987. Cerezo argued for not prosecuting the military for old crimes on the ground that everyone wanted to start afresh. But Americas Watch points out that if terrible crimes of the past are exempt from the rule of law, it suggests that Cerezo doesn't have the power to stop further military crimes. "It is a sign that the rule of law has not been established in Guatemala, and that it cannot be established" (p. 4). This point is supported by Cerezo's inaction in the face of a hundred violent deaths a month-many of them political murders by the army-after he assumed office.
52. See Michael Parenti, "Is Nicaragua More Democratic Than the United
States? " Covert Action Information Bulletin 26 (Summer 1986), pp. 48-52. 53. Wayne S. Smith, "Lies About Nicaragua," Foreign Policy (Summer 1987), p. 93. Smith states that Cruz "now says that he regrets not taking part and that his failure to participate in the 1984 elections was one of his major political mistakes. "
54. See LASA, Report, pp. 24-25, 29-31. We discuss this point, and the likeli- hood that Cruz's withdrawal was part of a public-relations strategy, in our treatment below of the media's handling of the Nicaraguan election.
55. LASA, Report, p. 23?
56. Doherty's statement appears in U. S. Policy toward El Salvador, Hearings before the Subcommittee on Inter-American Affairs of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, 97th Cong. , 1st sess. , 1981, p. 290; Gomez's statement is in Presidential Certification ofEl Salvador, House Committee on Foreign Affairs, 97th Cong. , 2d sess. , 1982, vol. I, p. 330.
57. AW, Little Hope, p. 1.
58. IHRLG, Report, p. 4?
59. They were being murdered on a regular basis by U. S. -sponsored terrorists entering Nicaragua from Honduras and Costa Rica, however.
60. Rev. Daniel Long and seven other ecumenical group observers, "March 25, 1984, Elections in EI Salvador" (1984, mimeographed), p. 4?
61. Based on conversations with voters, the Long group states that "most people waited these long hours because of their desire to have their cedula stamped and their finger inked to avoid fines for not voting and/or possible reprisals from the government and military. . . . " They note that at many places voting officials stamped the cedulas of those unable to vote because of crowding just so they could leave (ibid. , p. 6).
62. In the July I, 1984, election for a constituent assembly, null and blank votes exceeded those of any party and were a staggering 26 percent of the total. 63. IHRLG, Report, p. 54.
64. This procedure was put into the rules at the request of several opposition parties (LASA, Report, p. 15).
65. The media generally suppressed the fact that the number of voting booths was sharply restricted in 1982, allegedly for security reasons but making for longer lines.
66. "Media Coverage ofEI Salvador's Election," Socialist Review (April 1983),
P? 29?
67. "Salvadorans Jam Polling Stations; Rebels Close Some," New York Times,
March 29, 1982.
68. See further, Herman and Brodhead, Demonstration Elections, pp. 164-67. 69. Warren Hoge did quote Garcia, but only to suggest an open election: "Without any lies, you can see here what it is that the people want . . . " ("Salvadorans Jam Polling Stations," New York Times, Mar. 29, 1982).
70. Eleven days before the 1982 election, four Dutch journalists were mur- dered by the Salvadoran security forces. The foreign press corps was trooped into the morgue to see the bodies, whose ripped genitals were exposed to media view. This episode-described in the 1984 documentary film In the Name of Democracy-was suppressed in the U. S. mass media, led to no large outcries and generalizations about the qualities of the Salvadoran government, and may have contributed to the remarkable silence of journalists in EI Salvador on the
300 NUTIiS TO PAGES 1011-IIS
NOTES TO PAGES IIS-II8 361
unfavorable media (as well as other) conditions in the incipient democracy. 71. "Salvador Vote: Uncertainty Remains," April 3, 1982.
72. The Times devoted an entire article to the Salvadoran chief of staff's promises that "his troops would provide adequate security for the election of March 25" (1984); Blandon is quoted as saying "I'm giving you the assurance that there will be secure elections for all of the country" (Lydia Chavez, "Salvadoran Promises Safe Election," New York Times, Mar. 14, 1984).
73. Time, July 16, 1984. "Moderation" is a favorite media word in descriptions of demonstration elections. Newsweek's article of May 7, 1984, on Duarte and the Salvadoran election of May 1984 is entitled "EI Salvador: A Miracle of Moderation. " For a discussion of some of the ways in which the media use the word "moderate," see Noam Chomsky, The Culture of Terrorism, (Boston: South End Press, 1988), chapter 2. 8.
74. The Guatemalan extreme right-wing leader, Mario Sandoval Alarcon, often described as the godfather of the death squads in Central America, was present at Reagan's first inauguration, met with his defense and foreign-policy advisers, and claimed that "verbal agreements" were entered into at that time to cut back on criticism of Guatemalan human-rights abuses and to renew military aid. See Marlise Simons, "Guatemala: The Coming Danger," Foreign Policy (Summer 1981), p. 101; Scott Anderson and John Lee Anderson, Inside the League: The Shocking Expose of How Terrorists, Nazis, and Latin American Death Squads Have Infiltrated the Anti-Communist League (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1986), p. 175; and Alan Nairn, "Controversial Reagan Campaign Links with Guatemalan Government and Private Sector Leaders," Research Memo for Council on Hemispheric Affairs, October 30, 1980, p. II.
75. The Polish election of January 1947 was so designated by the U. S. mass media, although Polish state terrorism was much less severe than that of Guatemala in 1984-85. See Herman and Brodhead, Demonstration Elections, PP? 173-80.
76. Council on Hemispheric Affairs, News and Analysis, February 6, 1987. 77. We may be quite certain that Time will not assert that "Much of the killing in Afghanistan is linked to General Zakov's success against the insurgents. " 78. For evidence of the complete servility and dishonesty of Time in its cover- age of the elections in the Dominican Republic and Vietnam in the 1960s, see Herman and Brodhead, Demonstration Elections, pp. 45, 46, 51-52, 83-86. 79. A summary of this document was given in Enfoprensa News Agency, "Information on Guatemala," June 22, 1984. This excellent weekly bulletin of news on Guatemala reports a continuing flow of seemingly newsworthy items-regrettably, however, on unworthy victims, and therefore not of inter- est to the mass media.
80. This statement, dated October 1985, is reproduced in IHRLG, Report. 8! . The two stories that follow were discussed in Enfoprensa, "Information on Guatemala. "
82. "A New Chance in Guatemala," December 12, 1985. The Times never found that the Sandinistas had "honored" a promise in 1984, but then neither did the Reagan administration. Nor did the editorial consider the meaning of the fact that the ruling generals had declared an amnesty-for themselves- before allowing the electoral "project" to proceed.
83. The Times's editorial of December 12, 1985, congratulates Cerezo for
pledging to "take charge without vengeance against the military for its murder- ous rule. " Translated from the propaganda format, this means Cerezo is too weak to promise minimal justice for terrible crimes, which raises serious doubts about whether he has any real power. The newspaper of record makes this exoneration of mass murderers a virtue, and pretends that it is just an act of mercy on Cerezo's part! The Times also does not speculate on what would happen to President Cerezo if he chose to wreak "vengeance against the military," or how exactly he might proceed with this mission under conditions of effective military rule.
84. Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit (New York: Double- day, 1982).
85. Of course, there was an even deeper hypocrisy in failing to call attention to the administration's devotion to a free election in Nicaragua but not in Chile, Indonesia, Namibia, or South Korea, among many others, and its pre- tense that the elections in the terror states of EI Salvador and Guatemala are free and have anything to do with democracy.
86. The New York Times had an article on the numerous observers in Nicara- gua, but before the election ("Election Draws Many U. S. Observers," Nov. 4, 1984). The thrust of the article was to suggest observer bias favorable to the Sandinistas, a subject the Times never addresses in regard to official observers. In later discussion of the elections, the 450 observers, including even the professional society of Latin American scholars, were entirely ignored by the Times. An excellent study by Lucinda Broadbent, "Nicaragua's Elections: A Cruz Around the Issues; Comparative Analysis of Media Coverage of the 1984 Elections," as yet unpublished, parallels our findings in detail, based on an analysis of a wide sample, including U. S. network TV and the British as well as U. S. press. Broadbent points out that in her sample, the opposition to the Nicaraguan government is given more than twice the space accorded the government, "an unusual priority for media usually so wedded to 'official sources' in whichever country they find themselves" (p. 77). Broadbent stresses, as we do, the domination of the Reaganite frame, even in Britain and in the liberal press, and the massive distortion of reality that resulted from this biased framing. She notes also that the media never addressed the programs of the contesting parties in Nicaragua, which allowed Reaganite cliches about Sandinista intentions and policies to prevail. The media portrayals were "roughly the opposite of what was witnessed by international observers of the election" (p. 99), which is why, in our view, these observers had to be ignored. 87. For further details, see Noam Chomsky, "Introduction," in Morris Morley and James Petras, The Reagan Administration and Nicaragua, Institute for Media Analysis, Monograph I (New York: 1987), note 32, which also discusses the distortion of the Dutch observers' report by Robert Leiken in the New York Review ofBooks, December 5, 1985. Leiken dismisses the LASA report without comment as pro-Sandinista, i. e. , as coming to the wrong conclusions.
88. LASA, Report, p. 2.
89. This was partially true, as the Sandinistas were trying to alter their image. But the same was true in EI Salvador, with the added problem that the election was held in an environment of ongoing state terror.
Time never used the word "theatre" to describe either of the two Salvadoran elections.
90. As in 1982, the FMLN carried out no military operations directed at the
362 NOTES TO PAGES 118-126
NOTES TO PAGES 126-139 363
election-day process, and made no threats against Salvadoran voters. But as in 1982, this has no impact on Time reporting. The real threats, broadcast to voters in Nicaragua by contra radio, and the several contra killings of poll watchers, were never reported by Time.
As we have noted, the stress on superficialities like long lines is part of the propaganda agenda for a demonstration election. So is blacking out the fact that the length of the lines might be a function of the restricted number of voting booths, as was the case in El Salvador. Time provides both the emphasis on long lines and the suppression of relevant evidence on why the lines were so long. See Herman and Brodhead, Demonstration Elections, pp. 126-27.
91. Cruz was mentioned by Kinzer in eleven, and quoted, usually at some length, in five, of the fourteen articles he wrote on the Nicaraguan election; disruption and harassment are mentioned or featured in seven of the articles. 92. See particularly his "Sandinista Is Favored but Runs Hard" (Oct. 30, 1984), "Going Through the Motions in Nicaragua" (Nov. 4), and "Sandinistas Hold Their First Elections" (Nov. 5).
93. We will see below that Time even tries to make out a coercive threat that produced the vote in Nicaragua.
94. See the quotation from Warren Hoge given above, on p. 108.
95. These points were discussed in the LASA report, as we note below, but for Kinzer and the rest of the mass media, they were off the agenda.
96. Note that the exact opposite is true in the United States, reflecting the recognition on the part of the general public in both societies of who stands to gain through the electoral process.
97. The rate was, in fact, far higher than in the 1984 U. S. presidential election, in which just over half the electorate participated.
98. "Sandinistas Hold Their First Election," New York Times, November 5, 1984.
99. Duarte is quoted to this effect by Edward Schumacher in the New York Times, February 21, 1981.
100. On April 23, 1985, the Wall Street Journal revealed that Cruz was on the CIA payroll. Oliver North then took over his financing, hoping that this might divert attention from the fact that Cruz had been funded by the CIA during the period when the U. S. government was trying to discredit the Nicaraguan elections. See Stephen Engelberg, New York Times, July 15, 1987.
101. Stephen Kinzer, "Ex-Contra Looks Back Finding Much to Regret," New York Times, January 8, 1988. Cruz now expresses the belief that the anti- Sandinista coalition (the Coordinadora) that nominated him "was dominated by people who never intended to go through with an election campaign," and "sought to embarrass the Sandinistas by withdrawing. "
102. See note 91, above, and tables 3-2 and 3-3, below.
103. Philip Taubman, "U. S. Role in Nicaragua Vote Disputed," New York Times, October 21, 1984. Robert McCartney, in the Washington Post of June 30, 1984, stated that "Opposition leaders admitted in interviews that they never seriously considered running in the Nov. 4 election but debated only whether to campaign for two months and then withdraw from the race on grounds that the Sandinistas had stacked the electoral deck against them. "
104. Lord Chitnis, a veteran British election observer who attended the Sal- vadoran election on behalf of the British Parliamentary Human Rights Group,
noted that "First, and crucial to the whole standing of the exercise, was the fact that no politicians to the left of the Christian Democrats [PDC], and not all of them, were free to contest the election. . . . [Exclusion of the FDR made the election] a contest of vague promises and inferences by two candidates who already bore a heavy responsibility for the situation in which El Salvador finds itself today. " The 1984 elections in El Salvador, he continued, were held in an "atmosphere of terror and despair, of macabre rumour and grisly reality" (Pratap C. Chitnis, "Observing El Salvador: The 1984 Elections," Third World Quarterly [October 1984], pp. 971-73). Chitnis was never cited as a source anywhere in the U. S. mass media.
105. Stephen Kinzer, "Ortega: Can He Be Trusted? " New York Times Maga- zine, January 10, 1988; Kinzer, "Ex-Contra Looks Back" New York Times, January 8, 1988. On the realities of the peace accords, and the media contribu- tion to effacing them in serving the government's agenda, see Chomsky, Cul- ture ofTerrorism, and articles updating the record in Z magazine (January 1988, March 1988).
106. There is also an elaborate media pretense that La Prensa is the journal that courageously opposed Somoza, and whose editor was a victim of this U. S. -backed gangster. But the media are surely well aware that the relation of the two journals is barely more than that of a shared name. The editor left in 1980, after a conflict with the owners, to form the new journal El Nuevo Diario, and was joined by 80 percent of the staff. It is this journal, if any, that can fairly claim to be the descendant of the old La Prensa (Council on Hemispheric Affairs, Washington Report on the Hemisphere, July 23, 1986). 107. The leading church opponent of the state in El Salvador, Archbishop Oscar Romero, was murdered, and his murderers have never been ap- prehended. In Nicaragua, the leading church opponent of the state, Cardinal Obando, continues to live and speak out without fear. This difference is never pointed out in the free press.
108. For a more detailed discussion of the Times's articles on these subjects, see Edward S. Herman, " 'Objective' News as Systematic Propaganda: The New York Times on the 1984 Salvadoran and Nicaraguan Elections," Covert Action Information Bulletin 21 (Spring, 1984).
109? In a larger framework, too, Nicaragua is playing the dangerous game of trying to defend itself against external attack, resisting the demands of the godfather. The absurdity of the claim that Nicaragua would become a military "threat" to its neighbors with added MIGs, when the Reagan administration has been looking for an excuse to attack Nicaragua and would welcome any such Nicaraguan move as an opportunity to intervene directly, never strikes the U. S. mass media. The possibility that the administration wants to constrain Nicaraguan arms imports to reduce its capacity to defend itself against ongoing aggression against it also never arises for the press. Note that unlike guerrilla forces, the contras can survive only with regular airdrops, reaching the level of thirty to forty a month by mid-1987, and two or three times that amount after August, as the U. S. sought to undermine the Guatemala accords. Hence Nicaragua would have good reason to obtain vintage 1950S jet planes to defend itself from the U. S. proxy army.
110. For an account of the performance of U. S. official and semi-official ob- servers in the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, El Salvador, and Zimbabwe, see
Herman and Brodhead, Demonstration Elections. Appendix I provides a sum- mary of the views of an official U. S. observer team to Guatemala in July 1984. All of these fully confirm the statement made in the text.
III. LASA, Report, p. 5.
Chapter 4: The KGB-Bulgarian Plot to Kill the Pope
I. Some qualification is required by the fact that the three principal sources hired by and/or relied upon by the private media-Claire Sterling, Paul Henze, and Michael Ledeen-all had long-standing relations with the govern- ment, and that various Italian government organizations such as the intelli- gence agency SISMI played a role in the genesis and propagandizing of the charges, as described in the text below.
2. The limited exceptions to these generalizations will be noted below.
3. See further, Edward S. Herman and Frank Brodhead, The Rise and Fall of the Bulgarian Connection (New York: Sheridan Square Publications, 1986), pp. 66-71; also Philip Paull, "International Terrorism: The Propaganda War" (M. A. thesis in international relations, San Francisco State University, June 1982).
4. The reasons why this was important to Begin are discussed in the works cited in the previous footnote.
5. Tying the assassination attempt to the Soviet Union and KGB was espe- cially helpful in discrediting the Soviet leadership in 1982 and early 1983, as Yuri Andropov, who had just succeeded Brezhnev as head of state, was at one time head of the KGB. The Bulgarian, Sergei Antonov, was arrested in Italy within three weeks of Andropov's assuming power.
6. See Herman and Brodhead, Bulgarian Conn~ction, pp. 102-3, 206-7.
7. For an analysis of these NBC-TV programs, see Edward S. Herman and Frank Brodhead, "The KGB Plot to Assassinate the Pope: A Case Study in Free World Disinformation," Covert Action Information Bulletin 19 (Spring- Summer 1983), pp. 13-24.
8. Both Sterling and Henze asserted this many times, without providing any evidence and without attempting to explain how destabilization would serve Soviet interests, given the likelihood-eventually realized, in fact-that insta- bility and internal disorder in Turkey would bring into power a military regime even more closely aligned with the United States. Sterling and Henze were fortunate that they were never called upon to explain these things to Western audiences.
9. Marvin Kalb expounded this precise sequence, without the benefit of a single piece of evidence beyond the fact that Agca had had a brief stay in Bulgaria-among twelve countries-asserting that "it seems safe to conclude that he had been drawn into the clandestine network of the Bulgarian secret police and, by extension, the KGB-perhaps without his even being aware of their po~sibleplans for him" (transcript of the Sept. 21, 1982, show, pp. 44-45)? 10. See how Sterling handles the problem of Agca's gun, in the text below.
II. SHK regularly assume that the Soviet leadership is wild, and regularly engages in "Dr. No"-type plots, and the mass media do not challenge this image. On the conservative reality, see George Kennan, The Nuclear Delusion: Soviet-Amen'can Relations in the Nuclear Age (New York: Pantheon, 1982); John Lowenhardt, Decision-Making in Soviet Politics (New York: St. Martin's, 1981); and Jerry Hough and Merle Fainsod, How the Soviet Union Is Governed (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1979).
12. NBC-TV stressed an alleged note sent by the pope to Brezhnev threatening that in case of a Soviet invasion, the pope would give up his papal crown and return to Poland to lead the Polish resistance. Thus the assassination attempt was to get the pope out of the way to clear the ground for a prospective invasion. This note has never been produced, and the Vatican has denied its authenticity. See page 162. For a further discussion of these issues, see Herman and Brodhead, Bulgarian Connection, pp. 14-15, 200.
13? Papa, Mafya, Agca (Istanbul: Tekin Yayinevi, 1984), pp. 213-20. Mumcu also wrote a substantial volume on Agca and his record, Agca Dosyasi (Ankara: Tekin Yayinevi, 1984).
14? After Agca decided to "confess," he explained to the Italian magistrates that he was a killer for hire by anyone who wanted a reliable "international terrorist. " He sounded just as Claire Sterling said he ought to sound. This was taken quite seriously by the Italian judiciary and Western press. See Herman and Brodhead, Bulgarian Connection, pp. 113-14.
IS? For a full analysis of this theory, see Herman and Brodhead, Bulgarian Connection~ pp. 138-4? .
16. Michael Dobbs, "Child of Turkish Slums . . . ," Washington Post, October
14, 1984. Agca's shooting of the pope may have been motivated in part by his quest for notoriety.
17? For a full account of this strategy and the other matters dealt with in this paragraph, see Herman and Brodhead, Bulgarian Connection, pp. 71--98.
18. Criminal Court of Rome, Judgment in the Matter ofFrancesco Pazienza, et al. ~ July 29, 1985, signed by Francesco Amato, president of the court.
19? Diana Johnstone, "Latest Scandal Leads to Reagan Administration," In These Times, December 5-11, 1984.
20. Tana de Zulueta and Peter Godwin, "Face to Face with the Colonel Accused of Plotting to Kill the Pope," Sunday Times~ May 26, 1983, p. 50. 21. "Behind the Scenes of the 'Agca Investigation,''' Milliyet, November 1984.
This excellent two-part series by Milliyet's correspondent in West Germany describes the Italian investigation then in process as an extremely biased and incompetently managed exercise. Its many inconvenient but highly relevant facts may also have contributed to it being entirely ignored in the Western press.
22. For a discussion of the various suspicious aspects of this photo identifica- tion, see Herman and Brodhead, Bulgan'an Connection, pp. 110-II.
23? De Zulueta and Godwin, "Face to Face with the Colonel . . . ," p. 50. Even during the investigative phase of the case, it was disclosed that Agca's sensa- tional knowledge of the telephone numbers of the Bulgarian embassy in Rome was slightly compromised by the disclosure that he had "inadvertently" been left alone with a copy of the Rome phone directory. For other illustrations, see Herman and Brodhead, Bulgarian Connection, pp. 112, 118-19.
366 NOTES TO P AGES 155-159
NOTES TO P AGES 159-161 367
24. The first significant departure in the mass media from the SHK model, even though no alternative was offered, did not occur till May 12, 1983, on ABC-TV's "20120. " On the pattern of deviations here and later, see note 26 below.
25. Late in this long article, Newsweek does state in passing that "It is difficult to believe that the Soviets would expect the murder of the pope to solve their Polish problem. To some, it seems odd that the Soviets would put their fate in the hands of Bulgarians and Turks, depriving themselves of the control that is so essential to a ticklish intelligence operation.
42. Weakness and Deceit, p. 205.
43. The top leadership of the Social Democratic party had been murdered in
1980, and its remaining officials fled the country. Only a portion of this exiled leadership returned for the 1985 election.
44. The guerrilla position was that with the army having set up a national control system, military domination had been institutionalized and elections would have no meaning. See "Guerrillas' View of Elections: Army Will Hold Power Despite Polls," Latin America Weekry Report, October 25, 1985, p. II. 45? HRC, Report, p. 7.
46. Americas Watch, Civil Patrols in Guatemala (New York: AW, 1986), p. 2. 47. "EI Senor Presidente? " An interview of Cerezo by George Black in Octo- ber 1985, NACLA Report on the Americas (November-December 1985), p. 24. 48. "In a meeting several months ago with the ultra-rightist organization Amigos del Pais, which allegedly has strong death squad connections, PDCG deputies to the Constituent Assembly pledged that if the party came to power, they would ref~ain from agrarian and banking reforms, investigation into human rights abuses by the armed forces, and any interference in the coun- terinsurgency program" ("Guatemala Votes," Washington Report on the Hemi- sphere, Nov. 27, 1985). Stephen Kinzer also reports on a private meeting between Cerezo and right-wing landowners, in which "he said we all needed each other at this moment . . . " ("When a Landslide Is Not a Mandate," New York Times, Dec. 15, 1985).
49. Allen Nairn and Jean-Marie Simon, in their "The Bureaucracy of Death," New Republic, aune 30, 1986), describe the "tactical alliance" between Cerezo and the army, which protected them against any accountability for past ac- tions, in exchange for which the army would allow Cerezo to occupy office. 50. See "Cerezo Adapts to Counterinsurgency," Guatemala, Guatemala News and Information Bureau (May-June 1986).
51. American Watch, Human Rights in Guatemala during President Cerezo's First Year, February 1987. Cerezo argued for not prosecuting the military for old crimes on the ground that everyone wanted to start afresh. But Americas Watch points out that if terrible crimes of the past are exempt from the rule of law, it suggests that Cerezo doesn't have the power to stop further military crimes. "It is a sign that the rule of law has not been established in Guatemala, and that it cannot be established" (p. 4). This point is supported by Cerezo's inaction in the face of a hundred violent deaths a month-many of them political murders by the army-after he assumed office.
52. See Michael Parenti, "Is Nicaragua More Democratic Than the United
States? " Covert Action Information Bulletin 26 (Summer 1986), pp. 48-52. 53. Wayne S. Smith, "Lies About Nicaragua," Foreign Policy (Summer 1987), p. 93. Smith states that Cruz "now says that he regrets not taking part and that his failure to participate in the 1984 elections was one of his major political mistakes. "
54. See LASA, Report, pp. 24-25, 29-31. We discuss this point, and the likeli- hood that Cruz's withdrawal was part of a public-relations strategy, in our treatment below of the media's handling of the Nicaraguan election.
55. LASA, Report, p. 23?
56. Doherty's statement appears in U. S. Policy toward El Salvador, Hearings before the Subcommittee on Inter-American Affairs of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, 97th Cong. , 1st sess. , 1981, p. 290; Gomez's statement is in Presidential Certification ofEl Salvador, House Committee on Foreign Affairs, 97th Cong. , 2d sess. , 1982, vol. I, p. 330.
57. AW, Little Hope, p. 1.
58. IHRLG, Report, p. 4?
59. They were being murdered on a regular basis by U. S. -sponsored terrorists entering Nicaragua from Honduras and Costa Rica, however.
60. Rev. Daniel Long and seven other ecumenical group observers, "March 25, 1984, Elections in EI Salvador" (1984, mimeographed), p. 4?
61. Based on conversations with voters, the Long group states that "most people waited these long hours because of their desire to have their cedula stamped and their finger inked to avoid fines for not voting and/or possible reprisals from the government and military. . . . " They note that at many places voting officials stamped the cedulas of those unable to vote because of crowding just so they could leave (ibid. , p. 6).
62. In the July I, 1984, election for a constituent assembly, null and blank votes exceeded those of any party and were a staggering 26 percent of the total. 63. IHRLG, Report, p. 54.
64. This procedure was put into the rules at the request of several opposition parties (LASA, Report, p. 15).
65. The media generally suppressed the fact that the number of voting booths was sharply restricted in 1982, allegedly for security reasons but making for longer lines.
66. "Media Coverage ofEI Salvador's Election," Socialist Review (April 1983),
P? 29?
67. "Salvadorans Jam Polling Stations; Rebels Close Some," New York Times,
March 29, 1982.
68. See further, Herman and Brodhead, Demonstration Elections, pp. 164-67. 69. Warren Hoge did quote Garcia, but only to suggest an open election: "Without any lies, you can see here what it is that the people want . . . " ("Salvadorans Jam Polling Stations," New York Times, Mar. 29, 1982).
70. Eleven days before the 1982 election, four Dutch journalists were mur- dered by the Salvadoran security forces. The foreign press corps was trooped into the morgue to see the bodies, whose ripped genitals were exposed to media view. This episode-described in the 1984 documentary film In the Name of Democracy-was suppressed in the U. S. mass media, led to no large outcries and generalizations about the qualities of the Salvadoran government, and may have contributed to the remarkable silence of journalists in EI Salvador on the
300 NUTIiS TO PAGES 1011-IIS
NOTES TO PAGES IIS-II8 361
unfavorable media (as well as other) conditions in the incipient democracy. 71. "Salvador Vote: Uncertainty Remains," April 3, 1982.
72. The Times devoted an entire article to the Salvadoran chief of staff's promises that "his troops would provide adequate security for the election of March 25" (1984); Blandon is quoted as saying "I'm giving you the assurance that there will be secure elections for all of the country" (Lydia Chavez, "Salvadoran Promises Safe Election," New York Times, Mar. 14, 1984).
73. Time, July 16, 1984. "Moderation" is a favorite media word in descriptions of demonstration elections. Newsweek's article of May 7, 1984, on Duarte and the Salvadoran election of May 1984 is entitled "EI Salvador: A Miracle of Moderation. " For a discussion of some of the ways in which the media use the word "moderate," see Noam Chomsky, The Culture of Terrorism, (Boston: South End Press, 1988), chapter 2. 8.
74. The Guatemalan extreme right-wing leader, Mario Sandoval Alarcon, often described as the godfather of the death squads in Central America, was present at Reagan's first inauguration, met with his defense and foreign-policy advisers, and claimed that "verbal agreements" were entered into at that time to cut back on criticism of Guatemalan human-rights abuses and to renew military aid. See Marlise Simons, "Guatemala: The Coming Danger," Foreign Policy (Summer 1981), p. 101; Scott Anderson and John Lee Anderson, Inside the League: The Shocking Expose of How Terrorists, Nazis, and Latin American Death Squads Have Infiltrated the Anti-Communist League (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1986), p. 175; and Alan Nairn, "Controversial Reagan Campaign Links with Guatemalan Government and Private Sector Leaders," Research Memo for Council on Hemispheric Affairs, October 30, 1980, p. II.
75. The Polish election of January 1947 was so designated by the U. S. mass media, although Polish state terrorism was much less severe than that of Guatemala in 1984-85. See Herman and Brodhead, Demonstration Elections, PP? 173-80.
76. Council on Hemispheric Affairs, News and Analysis, February 6, 1987. 77. We may be quite certain that Time will not assert that "Much of the killing in Afghanistan is linked to General Zakov's success against the insurgents. " 78. For evidence of the complete servility and dishonesty of Time in its cover- age of the elections in the Dominican Republic and Vietnam in the 1960s, see Herman and Brodhead, Demonstration Elections, pp. 45, 46, 51-52, 83-86. 79. A summary of this document was given in Enfoprensa News Agency, "Information on Guatemala," June 22, 1984. This excellent weekly bulletin of news on Guatemala reports a continuing flow of seemingly newsworthy items-regrettably, however, on unworthy victims, and therefore not of inter- est to the mass media.
80. This statement, dated October 1985, is reproduced in IHRLG, Report. 8! . The two stories that follow were discussed in Enfoprensa, "Information on Guatemala. "
82. "A New Chance in Guatemala," December 12, 1985. The Times never found that the Sandinistas had "honored" a promise in 1984, but then neither did the Reagan administration. Nor did the editorial consider the meaning of the fact that the ruling generals had declared an amnesty-for themselves- before allowing the electoral "project" to proceed.
83. The Times's editorial of December 12, 1985, congratulates Cerezo for
pledging to "take charge without vengeance against the military for its murder- ous rule. " Translated from the propaganda format, this means Cerezo is too weak to promise minimal justice for terrible crimes, which raises serious doubts about whether he has any real power. The newspaper of record makes this exoneration of mass murderers a virtue, and pretends that it is just an act of mercy on Cerezo's part! The Times also does not speculate on what would happen to President Cerezo if he chose to wreak "vengeance against the military," or how exactly he might proceed with this mission under conditions of effective military rule.
84. Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit (New York: Double- day, 1982).
85. Of course, there was an even deeper hypocrisy in failing to call attention to the administration's devotion to a free election in Nicaragua but not in Chile, Indonesia, Namibia, or South Korea, among many others, and its pre- tense that the elections in the terror states of EI Salvador and Guatemala are free and have anything to do with democracy.
86. The New York Times had an article on the numerous observers in Nicara- gua, but before the election ("Election Draws Many U. S. Observers," Nov. 4, 1984). The thrust of the article was to suggest observer bias favorable to the Sandinistas, a subject the Times never addresses in regard to official observers. In later discussion of the elections, the 450 observers, including even the professional society of Latin American scholars, were entirely ignored by the Times. An excellent study by Lucinda Broadbent, "Nicaragua's Elections: A Cruz Around the Issues; Comparative Analysis of Media Coverage of the 1984 Elections," as yet unpublished, parallels our findings in detail, based on an analysis of a wide sample, including U. S. network TV and the British as well as U. S. press. Broadbent points out that in her sample, the opposition to the Nicaraguan government is given more than twice the space accorded the government, "an unusual priority for media usually so wedded to 'official sources' in whichever country they find themselves" (p. 77). Broadbent stresses, as we do, the domination of the Reaganite frame, even in Britain and in the liberal press, and the massive distortion of reality that resulted from this biased framing. She notes also that the media never addressed the programs of the contesting parties in Nicaragua, which allowed Reaganite cliches about Sandinista intentions and policies to prevail. The media portrayals were "roughly the opposite of what was witnessed by international observers of the election" (p. 99), which is why, in our view, these observers had to be ignored. 87. For further details, see Noam Chomsky, "Introduction," in Morris Morley and James Petras, The Reagan Administration and Nicaragua, Institute for Media Analysis, Monograph I (New York: 1987), note 32, which also discusses the distortion of the Dutch observers' report by Robert Leiken in the New York Review ofBooks, December 5, 1985. Leiken dismisses the LASA report without comment as pro-Sandinista, i. e. , as coming to the wrong conclusions.
88. LASA, Report, p. 2.
89. This was partially true, as the Sandinistas were trying to alter their image. But the same was true in EI Salvador, with the added problem that the election was held in an environment of ongoing state terror.
Time never used the word "theatre" to describe either of the two Salvadoran elections.
90. As in 1982, the FMLN carried out no military operations directed at the
362 NOTES TO PAGES 118-126
NOTES TO PAGES 126-139 363
election-day process, and made no threats against Salvadoran voters. But as in 1982, this has no impact on Time reporting. The real threats, broadcast to voters in Nicaragua by contra radio, and the several contra killings of poll watchers, were never reported by Time.
As we have noted, the stress on superficialities like long lines is part of the propaganda agenda for a demonstration election. So is blacking out the fact that the length of the lines might be a function of the restricted number of voting booths, as was the case in El Salvador. Time provides both the emphasis on long lines and the suppression of relevant evidence on why the lines were so long. See Herman and Brodhead, Demonstration Elections, pp. 126-27.
91. Cruz was mentioned by Kinzer in eleven, and quoted, usually at some length, in five, of the fourteen articles he wrote on the Nicaraguan election; disruption and harassment are mentioned or featured in seven of the articles. 92. See particularly his "Sandinista Is Favored but Runs Hard" (Oct. 30, 1984), "Going Through the Motions in Nicaragua" (Nov. 4), and "Sandinistas Hold Their First Elections" (Nov. 5).
93. We will see below that Time even tries to make out a coercive threat that produced the vote in Nicaragua.
94. See the quotation from Warren Hoge given above, on p. 108.
95. These points were discussed in the LASA report, as we note below, but for Kinzer and the rest of the mass media, they were off the agenda.
96. Note that the exact opposite is true in the United States, reflecting the recognition on the part of the general public in both societies of who stands to gain through the electoral process.
97. The rate was, in fact, far higher than in the 1984 U. S. presidential election, in which just over half the electorate participated.
98. "Sandinistas Hold Their First Election," New York Times, November 5, 1984.
99. Duarte is quoted to this effect by Edward Schumacher in the New York Times, February 21, 1981.
100. On April 23, 1985, the Wall Street Journal revealed that Cruz was on the CIA payroll. Oliver North then took over his financing, hoping that this might divert attention from the fact that Cruz had been funded by the CIA during the period when the U. S. government was trying to discredit the Nicaraguan elections. See Stephen Engelberg, New York Times, July 15, 1987.
101. Stephen Kinzer, "Ex-Contra Looks Back Finding Much to Regret," New York Times, January 8, 1988. Cruz now expresses the belief that the anti- Sandinista coalition (the Coordinadora) that nominated him "was dominated by people who never intended to go through with an election campaign," and "sought to embarrass the Sandinistas by withdrawing. "
102. See note 91, above, and tables 3-2 and 3-3, below.
103. Philip Taubman, "U. S. Role in Nicaragua Vote Disputed," New York Times, October 21, 1984. Robert McCartney, in the Washington Post of June 30, 1984, stated that "Opposition leaders admitted in interviews that they never seriously considered running in the Nov. 4 election but debated only whether to campaign for two months and then withdraw from the race on grounds that the Sandinistas had stacked the electoral deck against them. "
104. Lord Chitnis, a veteran British election observer who attended the Sal- vadoran election on behalf of the British Parliamentary Human Rights Group,
noted that "First, and crucial to the whole standing of the exercise, was the fact that no politicians to the left of the Christian Democrats [PDC], and not all of them, were free to contest the election. . . . [Exclusion of the FDR made the election] a contest of vague promises and inferences by two candidates who already bore a heavy responsibility for the situation in which El Salvador finds itself today. " The 1984 elections in El Salvador, he continued, were held in an "atmosphere of terror and despair, of macabre rumour and grisly reality" (Pratap C. Chitnis, "Observing El Salvador: The 1984 Elections," Third World Quarterly [October 1984], pp. 971-73). Chitnis was never cited as a source anywhere in the U. S. mass media.
105. Stephen Kinzer, "Ortega: Can He Be Trusted? " New York Times Maga- zine, January 10, 1988; Kinzer, "Ex-Contra Looks Back" New York Times, January 8, 1988. On the realities of the peace accords, and the media contribu- tion to effacing them in serving the government's agenda, see Chomsky, Cul- ture ofTerrorism, and articles updating the record in Z magazine (January 1988, March 1988).
106. There is also an elaborate media pretense that La Prensa is the journal that courageously opposed Somoza, and whose editor was a victim of this U. S. -backed gangster. But the media are surely well aware that the relation of the two journals is barely more than that of a shared name. The editor left in 1980, after a conflict with the owners, to form the new journal El Nuevo Diario, and was joined by 80 percent of the staff. It is this journal, if any, that can fairly claim to be the descendant of the old La Prensa (Council on Hemispheric Affairs, Washington Report on the Hemisphere, July 23, 1986). 107. The leading church opponent of the state in El Salvador, Archbishop Oscar Romero, was murdered, and his murderers have never been ap- prehended. In Nicaragua, the leading church opponent of the state, Cardinal Obando, continues to live and speak out without fear. This difference is never pointed out in the free press.
108. For a more detailed discussion of the Times's articles on these subjects, see Edward S. Herman, " 'Objective' News as Systematic Propaganda: The New York Times on the 1984 Salvadoran and Nicaraguan Elections," Covert Action Information Bulletin 21 (Spring, 1984).
109? In a larger framework, too, Nicaragua is playing the dangerous game of trying to defend itself against external attack, resisting the demands of the godfather. The absurdity of the claim that Nicaragua would become a military "threat" to its neighbors with added MIGs, when the Reagan administration has been looking for an excuse to attack Nicaragua and would welcome any such Nicaraguan move as an opportunity to intervene directly, never strikes the U. S. mass media. The possibility that the administration wants to constrain Nicaraguan arms imports to reduce its capacity to defend itself against ongoing aggression against it also never arises for the press. Note that unlike guerrilla forces, the contras can survive only with regular airdrops, reaching the level of thirty to forty a month by mid-1987, and two or three times that amount after August, as the U. S. sought to undermine the Guatemala accords. Hence Nicaragua would have good reason to obtain vintage 1950S jet planes to defend itself from the U. S. proxy army.
110. For an account of the performance of U. S. official and semi-official ob- servers in the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, El Salvador, and Zimbabwe, see
Herman and Brodhead, Demonstration Elections. Appendix I provides a sum- mary of the views of an official U. S. observer team to Guatemala in July 1984. All of these fully confirm the statement made in the text.
III. LASA, Report, p. 5.
Chapter 4: The KGB-Bulgarian Plot to Kill the Pope
I. Some qualification is required by the fact that the three principal sources hired by and/or relied upon by the private media-Claire Sterling, Paul Henze, and Michael Ledeen-all had long-standing relations with the govern- ment, and that various Italian government organizations such as the intelli- gence agency SISMI played a role in the genesis and propagandizing of the charges, as described in the text below.
2. The limited exceptions to these generalizations will be noted below.
3. See further, Edward S. Herman and Frank Brodhead, The Rise and Fall of the Bulgarian Connection (New York: Sheridan Square Publications, 1986), pp. 66-71; also Philip Paull, "International Terrorism: The Propaganda War" (M. A. thesis in international relations, San Francisco State University, June 1982).
4. The reasons why this was important to Begin are discussed in the works cited in the previous footnote.
5. Tying the assassination attempt to the Soviet Union and KGB was espe- cially helpful in discrediting the Soviet leadership in 1982 and early 1983, as Yuri Andropov, who had just succeeded Brezhnev as head of state, was at one time head of the KGB. The Bulgarian, Sergei Antonov, was arrested in Italy within three weeks of Andropov's assuming power.
6. See Herman and Brodhead, Bulgarian Conn~ction, pp. 102-3, 206-7.
7. For an analysis of these NBC-TV programs, see Edward S. Herman and Frank Brodhead, "The KGB Plot to Assassinate the Pope: A Case Study in Free World Disinformation," Covert Action Information Bulletin 19 (Spring- Summer 1983), pp. 13-24.
8. Both Sterling and Henze asserted this many times, without providing any evidence and without attempting to explain how destabilization would serve Soviet interests, given the likelihood-eventually realized, in fact-that insta- bility and internal disorder in Turkey would bring into power a military regime even more closely aligned with the United States. Sterling and Henze were fortunate that they were never called upon to explain these things to Western audiences.
9. Marvin Kalb expounded this precise sequence, without the benefit of a single piece of evidence beyond the fact that Agca had had a brief stay in Bulgaria-among twelve countries-asserting that "it seems safe to conclude that he had been drawn into the clandestine network of the Bulgarian secret police and, by extension, the KGB-perhaps without his even being aware of their po~sibleplans for him" (transcript of the Sept. 21, 1982, show, pp. 44-45)? 10. See how Sterling handles the problem of Agca's gun, in the text below.
II. SHK regularly assume that the Soviet leadership is wild, and regularly engages in "Dr. No"-type plots, and the mass media do not challenge this image. On the conservative reality, see George Kennan, The Nuclear Delusion: Soviet-Amen'can Relations in the Nuclear Age (New York: Pantheon, 1982); John Lowenhardt, Decision-Making in Soviet Politics (New York: St. Martin's, 1981); and Jerry Hough and Merle Fainsod, How the Soviet Union Is Governed (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1979).
12. NBC-TV stressed an alleged note sent by the pope to Brezhnev threatening that in case of a Soviet invasion, the pope would give up his papal crown and return to Poland to lead the Polish resistance. Thus the assassination attempt was to get the pope out of the way to clear the ground for a prospective invasion. This note has never been produced, and the Vatican has denied its authenticity. See page 162. For a further discussion of these issues, see Herman and Brodhead, Bulgarian Connection, pp. 14-15, 200.
13? Papa, Mafya, Agca (Istanbul: Tekin Yayinevi, 1984), pp. 213-20. Mumcu also wrote a substantial volume on Agca and his record, Agca Dosyasi (Ankara: Tekin Yayinevi, 1984).
14? After Agca decided to "confess," he explained to the Italian magistrates that he was a killer for hire by anyone who wanted a reliable "international terrorist. " He sounded just as Claire Sterling said he ought to sound. This was taken quite seriously by the Italian judiciary and Western press. See Herman and Brodhead, Bulgarian Connection, pp. 113-14.
IS? For a full analysis of this theory, see Herman and Brodhead, Bulgarian Connection~ pp. 138-4? .
16. Michael Dobbs, "Child of Turkish Slums . . . ," Washington Post, October
14, 1984. Agca's shooting of the pope may have been motivated in part by his quest for notoriety.
17? For a full account of this strategy and the other matters dealt with in this paragraph, see Herman and Brodhead, Bulgarian Connection, pp. 71--98.
18. Criminal Court of Rome, Judgment in the Matter ofFrancesco Pazienza, et al. ~ July 29, 1985, signed by Francesco Amato, president of the court.
19? Diana Johnstone, "Latest Scandal Leads to Reagan Administration," In These Times, December 5-11, 1984.
20. Tana de Zulueta and Peter Godwin, "Face to Face with the Colonel Accused of Plotting to Kill the Pope," Sunday Times~ May 26, 1983, p. 50. 21. "Behind the Scenes of the 'Agca Investigation,''' Milliyet, November 1984.
This excellent two-part series by Milliyet's correspondent in West Germany describes the Italian investigation then in process as an extremely biased and incompetently managed exercise. Its many inconvenient but highly relevant facts may also have contributed to it being entirely ignored in the Western press.
22. For a discussion of the various suspicious aspects of this photo identifica- tion, see Herman and Brodhead, Bulgan'an Connection, pp. 110-II.
23? De Zulueta and Godwin, "Face to Face with the Colonel . . . ," p. 50. Even during the investigative phase of the case, it was disclosed that Agca's sensa- tional knowledge of the telephone numbers of the Bulgarian embassy in Rome was slightly compromised by the disclosure that he had "inadvertently" been left alone with a copy of the Rome phone directory. For other illustrations, see Herman and Brodhead, Bulgarian Connection, pp. 112, 118-19.
366 NOTES TO P AGES 155-159
NOTES TO P AGES 159-161 367
24. The first significant departure in the mass media from the SHK model, even though no alternative was offered, did not occur till May 12, 1983, on ABC-TV's "20120. " On the pattern of deviations here and later, see note 26 below.
25. Late in this long article, Newsweek does state in passing that "It is difficult to believe that the Soviets would expect the murder of the pope to solve their Polish problem. To some, it seems odd that the Soviets would put their fate in the hands of Bulgarians and Turks, depriving themselves of the control that is so essential to a ticklish intelligence operation.
