Edward S. Herman and David Peterson: Marlise Simons on the Yugoslavia Tribunal: A Study in Total Propaganda Service (2004)

This outstanding discussion of the Hague Tribunal and its operational principles, told as a tale of sycophantic journalism practiced by New York Times correspondent Marlise Simons, was penned by the late Professor Edward Herman and his research assistant and co-author David Peterson. We recommend to readers to listen to this brief audio clip from the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, broadcast on 23 April 2018 about the Karadžić appeal hearing held on that day, before reading Prof. Herman’s critique, and to listen to it again after they have read it. It is a superb illustration and eloquent confirmation of Prof. Herman’s analysis. Evidently, the Marlise Simons school of journalism lives on.

BBC R4 Today 230418 Karadžić appeal

While the concept of a “party line” is usually associated with totalitarian parties and their offshoots, controlled by a state that imposes a politically serviceable version of history on its underlings and agents, it is very common for something like a party line to emerge in the U.S. mainstream media as they deal with a demonized target accused of misbehavior. In such cases the media quickly jump onto a bandwagon that takes the official and politically convenient view as obvious truth, and they then devote their efforts to elaborating on that truth.

This was the case in the years 1981-1986, following the shooting of Pope John Paul II in Rome in May 1981 by the right-wing Turk, Mehmet Ali Agca. These were years in which the Reagan administration was attempting to portray the Soviet Union as an “evil empire,” and it welcomed anything helpful in Soviet denigration. It was soon charged in the Readers’ Digest, NBC News, and elsewhere that the Bulgarians and KGB were behind the shooting, and this theme was latched onto and became a de facto party line with great speed. There was virtually complete closure on questions of the validity of the charge, and the media devoted all their efforts to filling in details and obtaining speculations on why the KGB did this and its political ramifications. The charge was in fact untrue, as came out in a Rome trial against the Bulgarians that ended in 1986, in CIA officer disclosures in 1990, and in the absence of any supportive evidence from the newly opened secret service files of the now allied Bulgaria. (1) The mainstream media quietly crept away from the story in which their performance had been outlandish in terms of adherence to theoretical news values–with the New York Times among the most outlandish–but outstanding in terms of propaganda service to ongoing state policy. (2).

A very similar process can be seen in the media’s treatment of the Balkan conflicts in the years 1990-2004. Here also a party line that conformed to the political aims of the governing elite gradually emerged and eventually hardened into unchallengeable truth. In a broad sketch of the official line—also the standard media version –   there was a bad man, a Communist holdover and dictator, who used nationalist appeals to mobilize his people, who were “willing executioners.” This bad man strove for a “Greater Serbia” and in the process committed major crimes of ethnic cleansing and genocide that were initiated and mainly carried out by him and his forces. The West, led by the United States, belatedly entered this fray, eventually bombing the bad man’s proxy forces in Bosnia, forcing the Dayton Agreement on him, but with the West still eventually compelled to war against him to protect the Kosovo Albanians. The West organized a Tribunal in 1993 to deal with his and others’ crimes, and that Tribunal, though hampered by sluggish cooperation from the West and more serious obstruction by the Serbs, has done yeoman service in the cause of justice and reconciliation. (3)

This party line, which is contestable on every facet of its claims, (4) entered into the premises of journalists and editors at the New York Times, just as the line on the Bulgarian-KGB link to the Papal shooting gripped them for many years (followed by silence, without apology), with closure imposed in both cases. The Times reporter who was most familiar with Yugoslavia, but who failed to adhere to the party line, David Binder, was removed from the region in favor of less knowledgeable but more accommodating journalists, just as Raymond Bonner was removed from reporting on Central America in the 1980s for his failure to adhere to the party line evolving there. (5)

We will illustrate this party line treatment in the Balkans wars by examining the work of Marlise Simons in her coverage of  the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY, or simply Tribunal) for the New York Times. Simons has been the paper’s principal reporter on the Tribunal and one of the paper’s leading reporters on the Balkans in general, and as we would expect, and as we will show, she has been an undeviating adherent to the party line. Our analysis is based on the study of her entire output of 120 articles dealing with the Tribunal, extending from December 7, 1994 to December 14, 2003 (excluding only her articles with fewer than 200 words). (6)

Sourcing

 A party line commonly takes its cues and information from official sources. The accompanying table shows how much Marlise Simons has depended on Tribunal and NATO officials for her information and as a guide to what was relevant (rows 1-6). These account for almost half of her sources (48.6 percent); and if we include the human rights group officials cited by Simons, all of whom were entirely sympathetic with the Tribunal’s work, (7) and indictees who had agreed to plead guilty and cooperate with the Tribunal, we are over half (53.8 percent). If we remove the category “other,” most of whose members were supportive of Tribunal work, the ratio rises to 60.1 percent. Virtually all of the sources cited by Simons that contest the party line are indictees and defense counsel (lines 8B and 9). She cites only a single witness for the defense, as compared with 32 witnesses for the prosecution and four prosecution experts.

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TABLE 1

SOURCES USED BY MARLISE SIMONS IN REPORTING

                      ON THE TRIBUNAL  

 

SOURCES                            NUMBER OF        PERCENT OF       PERCENT OF

ARTICLES             ARTICLES         TOTAL LESS

“OTHER”

1. ICTY Personnel:                          125                          30.9                     34.9
2. Prosecution Witnesses:                32                            7.9                       8.9
3. Prosecution Experts:                     4                             1.0                       1.1
4. Indictments:                                11                              2.7                      3.1
5. ICTY Court Judgments:               7                              1.7                      2.0
6. NATO Country Officials:           19                              4.7                     5.3
7. Human Rights Group Officials:  14                              3.4                     3.9
8. Indictees:                                     41                            10.1                   11.5
9. A) Class A:                                 6                               1.4                     1.7
10. B) Class B:                               35                                8.6                    9.8

B-1 Milosevic alone:               26                                6.4                    7.3

9. Defense Counsel:                      37                                9.1                  10.3

10: Defense Witnesses:                    1                                 0.2                    0.3

11. Defense Experts:                        0                                    —                  —
12. Experts With Dissident Views   0                                   —                        —
13. Other:                                       49                                12.0                   13.7

 

Totals:                                               407                                  100-                     100-

Totals minus “other”                        358

 

Tabulations of interest:                                                                  Percentages of totals

 

A: 1-6                                           198                                  48.6                  55.3

4. 7 + 8A                                       20                                    4.9                    5.6
5. A +B – 8A                               218                                  53.6                   60.1
6. 8B + 9 and 10                           73                                  17.9                    20.4
7.  D – Milosevic                           47 11.5                   13.1

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These numbers understate the bias, because the prosecution is given more prominence, more space, and more friendly treatment. Indictee and defense counsel statements are briefer, more often paraphrased, come deeper in the articles, and often give the appearance of a token inclusion designed to provide a nominal balance. Their words are sometimes in satire-intended quote marks highlighting their implausibility; and they are embedded in articles in which Simons’ sympathy and identification with the prosecution is readily apparent (see Language and Tone, below).

The most telling evidence of Simons’ overwhelming bias in sourcing is the fact that in 120 articles she never cites a single independent expert who might have raised questions about the Tribunal’s purpose,  methods, or evidence.. Among the informed critics ignored were:   Charles Boyd, David Chandler, Phillip Corwin, Tiphaine Dickson, Fiona Fox, Robert Hayden, Jon Holbrook, Diana Johnstone, George Kenny,  Raymond Kent, Hans Koechler, John Laughland, Michael Mandel, General Lewis Mackenzie, General Satish Nambiar,  Jan Oberg,  Walter Rockler, Alfred Rubin, Kirsten Sellars and Cedric Thornberry. One of these excluded experts, Robert Hayden, actually gave lengthy testimony during the Tribunal hearings on the case of Dusko Tadic on September 10-11, 1996. Hayden was contesting the views of James Gow, a prosecution witness.  Simons cited Gow, but not Hayden. (8)

Framing

Framing and sourcing are closely linked, as the use of a particular source allows that source to define the issues and to fix the frames of reference, presumably those acceptable to or preferred by the journalist. Thus in the case of the Papal assassination attempt of 1981, the Italian government and prosecutors took as their frame the certainty that the KGB and Bulgarians had hired Agca to shoot the Pope—and after 17 months in an Italian prison, and numerous indications by his interrogators that they would be pleased to find a KGB-Bulgarian connection, along with a variety of inducements, Agca, while also periodically claiming to be Jesus Christ, had “confessed” to the connection. The U.S. media took this as a truth around which the story was framed. Similarly, in Moscow in 1936, the prosecutor’s claim that Leon Trotsky had organized a conspiracy to overthrow the Soviet government, supported by documents and confessions, was the frame used by the Soviet media as well as the prosecutor. In each of these cases there were alternative frames, but the media ignored them.

The frame within which the Tribunal worked was in effect a morality tale, with a clear-cut delineation of  good and bad players,  as described in the second paragraph above. As regards the Tribunal itself, in the Tribunal, NATO official, and establishment media frame (which are identical) the Tribunal was obviously good—independent, without political bias and simply seeking justice,  adhering to Western judicial standards, and working under difficult conditions because of imperfect cooperation from the West and more severe obstructionism from Yugoslavia. This was Marlise Simons’ frame and she never once departed from or questioned it. She repeatedly made contestable assertions about recent Balkan history as unarguable truths, such as that Milosevic was “the man whom the world has seen stoke a decade of war and bloodshed in the Balkans,” a claim that she usually offers in the form of  the charges by the prosecution—“chief architect,” “most responsible”—a simple-minded view that Lenard Cohen has described as the “paradise lost/loathsome leaders perspective.” (9) For Simons the Tribunal is the agent of justice in the morality tale, so that she accepts its self-appraisal as independent and virtuous and feels no obligation to ask any hard questions or probe into areas that might suggest doubts about its role or methods.

There were alternative frames, however, among which we may distinguish: (1) the Tribunal as a planned and effective political and public relations arm of NATO; and (2)  the Tribunal as a “rogue court,” without legal standing, that has violated numerous  Western judicial principles in its eagerness to achieve its assigned political goals. These alternative frames have been employed by most of the 20 independent experts named above, so that their exclusion was obviously linked to the fact that the alternative frames were unwelcome to Simons and the New York Times.. The alternative frames were allowed only in statements by Slobodan Milosevic, who did denounce his incarceration and trial, and the work of the Tribunal in general, as strictly and unjustly political. This is a fine illustration of a standard ploy in propaganda service:  confine the unwanted line of argument to the mouth of  somebody who has little credibility, making it easy to dismiss without confronting serious argument and facts.

With the prosecution as her guide and almost exclusive source of information, Simons’ articles largely repeat prosecution charges, transmit the gist of evidence of the scores of witnesses produced by the prosecution, and, absent any critical and independent counter-evidence and analyses, confirm and reinforce the prosecution case and  public acceptance of the morality tale. This replicates the performance of  the New York Times in the case of the attempted Papal assassination, where the reporters’ tacit assumption of the truth of the Bulgarian-KGB involvement,  “news” featuring  confidently stated official claims and purported corroborating evidence — “we have the evidence that Agca worked in close collaboration with the Bulgarians”; “all the evidence suggests”—(10), and blacking out of inconvenient facts and dissident analysis, strengthened common belief in the “Bulgarian connection.” In her reporting on the Tribunal Simons repeats scores of times the numbers allegedly killed in Bosnia and at Srebrenica and charges of Milosevic’s and Serb responsibility, with conflicting evidence, context that brings in the shared NATO-power and Bosnian Muslim and Croatian responsibility for the violence, and alternative analyses, blacked out. (11) She reports in detail numerous witness accounts of alleged violence suffered at the hands of the Serb army and paramilitaries, extracting maximum emotional leverage from these testimonials. (12)

Apart from her uncritical treatment of these witness accounts, Simons never once suggests that this kind of mistreatment of civilians occurs in every civil conflict and war, and that the Serbs could produce a very large number of  civilian witnesses to similar abuses inflicted on them by Bosnian Muslims, Croats, and the U.S. Air Force. (13) Early in his trial Milosevic spent two days showing slides that gave graphic detail on numerous civilian victims of the U.S. bombing of Serbia, and he suggested that a formidable case could be built against the United States and NATO by a Tribunal that had different political ends. Simons mentioned his evidence briefly, (14) but she did not pause to reflect on his case or bring in an expert who might expand on it. When the issue of NATO culpability in its deliberate bombing of civilian facilities came up during and after the 78-day bombing, Simons and her paper evaded the issue and provided only NATO-Tribunal apologetics, as described below.

Language and Tone

Marlise Simons’ language and tone clearly reflected her belief that the Yugoslavia conflict was a simple case involving “loathsome leaders” and their victims, now seeking justice, with NATO and the Tribunal the forces for justice. In this frame, the Tribunal, its prosecutors and judges, and its NATO supporters were good; Milosevic and his associates and Bosnian Serb leaders were evil. With this “journalism of attachment” the use of neutral or positive language — “purr words”– in describing  the good people, and negative language—“snarl words”–in describing the villains comes easily and appears completely natural to the biased journalist. Good and evil seem entirely obvious and editors similarly biased will not complain.

The result can be childish and comical in the implausible manner in which the villains are regularly derogated and the heroes ennobled. Table 2 illustrates this with a comparison of  Simons’ language used to describe Milosevic, on the one hand, and the two prosecutors, Louise Arbour and Carla Del Ponte, and Judge Richard May, on the other hand. This tabulation is not  biased, as Simons uses no positive language for Milosevic and no negative language in reference to Arbour,  Del Ponte and May in any of the 120 sample articles. The negative language Simons used as regards Milosevic is far from exhausted with the items included in this table.

TABLE 2

MARLISE SIMONS’ WORD USAGE

Slobodan Milosevic                                    Prosecutors Louise Arbour and Carla

                                                                     Del Ponte; Judge Richard May

Infamous                                                    Forceful (Arbour)

Sniped                                                        Resolute (Arbour)

Scoffed                                                       New assertiveness (Arbour)

Smirk on his face                                       Very capable (Arbour)

Speechmaking                                            No-nonsense style (Arbour)

Badgers the simple conscripts                 Tough crime fighter (Del

Ponte)

Carping                                                      Unswerving prosecutor (Del

Ponte)

Blustery defense                                        Natural fighter (Del Ponte)

Loud and aggressive                                  Unrelenting hunter (Del

Ponte)

Notorious                                                   Finding the truth (Del Ponte)

Defiant                                                       Keeping tight control (May)

Reverted to sarcasm                               Patiently repeated questions

(May)

Contemptuous                                            Sober, polite and tough (May)

Outbursts                                                   Expert on evidence (May)

Face often distorted with anger                 Among the best suited (May)

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This differential usage cannot be explained on the grounds that Arbour, but not Milosevic, was “resolute” and “forceful,” and that May was only “sober, polite and tough” whereas Milosevic was “contemptuous” and “carping.” Milosevic was frequently as resolute and forceful as Arbour, but Simons reserves such positive language for people she approves and always finds Milosevic to be defiant, loud, aggressive, and blustering. The noted Toronto lawyer Edward L. Greenspan, attending the opening of the Milosevic trial, was immediately impressed with the fact that May “clearly reviles Milosevic” and that he “doesn’t even feign impartiality, or indeed, interest.” (15) But Simons would never call this attitude, so obvious to Greenspan, “contemptuous.” Numerous trial observers have noted how May continuously interferes with Milosevic’s cross-examinations in a manner that could reasonably be called “carping” or far worse, as we discuss below. But Simons reserves such a word for the bad man.

Simons several times describes Carla Del Ponte interacting with one of her allies in the court room at something Milosevic says — “Del Ponte…occasionally shot a smile at other prosecutors in apparent incredulity”– (16) a journalistic device reinforcing the overall tone of good and reasonable on the prosecution’s side and evil and foolishness on the side of the defendant. As we will also see below, “unrelenting hunter” Carla Del Ponte did somersaults of evasion to deny petitions to pursue war crimes by NATO—she has been “relentless” only in pursuing NATO-approved villains. But when Simons interviewed Del Ponte and described her as the “unrelenting hunter,” she failed to ask her about the NATO deflection—and in fact, in 120 articles Simons never asked any Tribunal official a challenging question or raised one for somebody else to answer. Simons has been on the Tribunal-NATO “team,” reflected in sourcing, framing, word usage and tone. The result has been deeply corrupt journalism that is de facto propaganda service.

The Neglected Political Model: The Tribunal as Pseudo-Judicial and Public Relations Arm of NATO

By avoiding the alternative frames Marlise Simons was able to bypass or deflect inconvenient facts that interfered with her morality tale and  that would put the Tribunal’s work in a less favorable light. Let us look at the alternative frames and see how Simons dealt  with some of  the facts that give those frames salience.

The first alternative frame—the Tribunal as pseudo-judicial and a public relations arm of NATO– rests on structural facts,  admissions by some of the principals, and most importantly, the Tribunal’s performance record. The Tribunal was a creation of the Security Council, with the United States, Britain and Germany playing lead roles, the United States most prominently and increasingly so. It is of interest that the United States has refused any cooperation with the International Criminal Court because of the alleged threat that charges might be leveled against U.S. citizens based on a “politically motivated” ICC agenda (17). The United States has never feared this of the ICTY because of  the crucial U.S. role in organizing the Tribunal, financing it (along with other close NATO allies), staffing it, vetting its judges and prosecutors, supplying it with its police force, providing it with information, and giving it political support. During the 78-day bombing war, when there were moves made by dissidents to get the ICTY to indict NATO leaders for war crimes, NATO public relations spokesman Jamie Shea answered a question on Tribunal jurisdiction over NATO as follows:

        “I believe that when Justice Arbour starts her investigation, she will because we will allow her to….NATO are the people who have been detaining indicted war criminals  for the Tribunal in Bosnia…NATO countries are those that have provided the finance to set up the Tribunal, we are amongst the majority financiers…we want to see war criminals brought to justice and I am certain that when Justice Arbour goes to Kosovo and looks at the facts she will be indicting people of Yugoslavia nationality and I don’t anticipate any others at this stage.” (18)

Neither Marlise Simons nor any other reporter on the New York Times  has ever quoted this Shea statement, which suggests NATO control of  the Tribunal—that “he who pays the piper calls the tune” (Kirsten Sellars)—and which Shea indicates will surely exempt any NATO officials from prosecution, as in fact it did. It should be noted that the Tribunal’s mandate does not limit its reach to Yugoslavs for prosecution for war crimes in Yugoslavia,  a point never discussed by Simons (or other Times reporters), an evasion helped along by ignoring statements like this one by Jamie Shea.

Simons also has never discussed the U.S.-dominant staffing and vetting of  ICTY staff, and she has never mentioned the May 9, 1996 NATO-Tribunal “memo of understanding” that made NATO the Tribunal police force. She has acknowledged U.S. funding only in passing, without addressing its possible impact on Tribunal policy. Article 16 of the Tribunal’s charter states that the prosecutor shall act independently and shall not seek or receive instruction from any government. Can the prosecutor act independently if dependent on specific governments for funding, personnel, information, and police service? Simons never raises the question. Even within the establishment it is sometimes acknowledged that the ICTY was organized to serve NATO political aims: Michael Scharf, the man who wrote the Tribunal charter for Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, stated that the organization was “widely perceived within the government as little more than a public relations device and …useful policy tool….Indictments…would serve to isolate offending leaders diplomatically…and fortify the international political will to employ economic sanctions or use force.”(19)

There have been other statements by Western officials and official sources that imply that the Tribunal will do what they want it to do. Thus, the New York Times reported in July 1999 that “Washington has threatened Mr. Draskovic with indictment by the international war crimes tribunal in the Hague for the activities of his short-lived Serbian Guard, a paramilitary group, in Croatia in 1991.” (20). A U.S. government fact sheet stated that “We will make a decision on whether Yugoslav actions against ethnic Albanians constitute genocide…The ICTY will indict those responsible for crimes against humanity and genocide.” (21) British officials similarly made statements implying their power to bring the ICTY into action. (22)

Simons gets around the structural and other evidence of the  external control and associated political bias of the Tribunal by confining the discussion of this issue to ICTY prosecutors. Her complete exclusion of  dissident experts is important here—most of those experts have featured the Tribunal as “a politically driven tribunal…the judicial arm of NATO” (Kirsten Sellars), its politics flowing from the organization, funding and staffing of  the Tribunal.  Not surprisingly the ICTY prosecutors claim to be completely independent, with no agenda but pure justice, and they complain about how hard it is get cooperation from their organizers, funders, information- and staff-providers, and police agents in their unbiased search for justice. (23).  It never occurs to Simons that this claim of foot-dragging might be a  self-serving  and disingenuous effort to obscure the high degree of  Tribunal dependence and a de facto agency function, a claim and effort advantageous to both the ICTY and its principals. She has never discussed the difference between the  U.S.  treatment of the ICTY and International Criminal Court, which suggests an inordinate U.S. fear of judicial independence and would raise questions about ICTY independence that Simons steadily evades. For Simons and the New York Times, the official view is the truth and enters the “news” as such–in a helpful summary on “Tribunal: How It Works,” the paper says: “The Office of the Prosecutor operates independently of the Security council, of any state or international organization and of other organs of the tribunal.” (23A) That’s it—the ICTY truth.

Perhaps even more important,  Simons avoids mention or the slightest hint of critical analysis of  the many manifestations of  political service rendered to NATO by the Tribunal. NATO began planning for war in June 1998, and the Tribunal followed in its wake with an intensified focus on the Serbs and a steady stream of  press releases on Serb misbehavior. This propaganda barrage escalated immediately following the claim of  a Serb massacre at Racak in January 1999,  which Arbour immediately declared, on the basis of  unverified information supplied her by U.S. official William Walker, “a massacre of civilians” which “falls squarely within the mandate of the ICTY” (24),  and she generated considerable publicity by insisting on rushing to the scene. This massacre claim was welcomed by U.S. officials, providing them with the eagerly sought pretext for the bombing war. (25) Arbour’s performance here was in serious violation of  prosecutorial ethics, but it  was beautifully geared to NATO propaganda service.

The same was true two months later, when Arbour announced an indictment of  Serb paramilitary leader Zeljko Raznjatovic (Arkan), prepared in September 1997 but released  on March 31, 1999, one week after the beginning of the bombing war, and giving it a further propaganda boost. Her argument for releasing this information at this particular  time was that she wanted to put on notice anyone who “might retain his [Arkan’s] services or obey his orders” who “will be tainted by their association with an indicted war criminal.” (26)

Then in April, as described by Kirsten Sellars, “midway through the Kosovo conflict, Arbour made a whistle-stop tour of NATO capitals, collecting promises of  assistance wherever she went.” (27)  Her trip to London “seemed to be expressly designed to highlight the tribunal’s support for one side of the war. She joined Robin Cook and chief of staff General Sir Charles Guthrie at a press conference held at the Ministry of Defence, the department responsible for Britain’s attacks on Serbia.”  At this press conference Arbour was publicly promised a major release of British intelligence material featuring alleged Serb atrocities. “Answering a question put to her at the press conference, Louise Arbour stated that it was ‘inconceivable’ that the tribunal was ‘servicing a political agenda.’ Yet her presence at this publicity stunt, designed to add to the swelling tide of atrocity stories already doing the rounds in the British media, belied her words.” (28)  Marcus McGee, writing in the Toronto Globe and Mail, pointed out that “It is part of NATO’s war strategy to portray the leaders of Yugoslavia as war criminals who must be stopped. By accepting the documents, critics say, Judge Arbour risked becoming part of that strategy and losing her impartiality.” (29)

Arbour’s maximal performance as a NATO public relations agent took place in the midst of the bombing war, on May 22, 1999,  when NATO, in order to hasten a Yugoslav surrender, began to bomb Serb civilian facilities,  including bridges, factories, electric power and water facilities, and even schools and hospitals. This elicited growing criticism even in the NATO countries.  At that juncture Arbour rushed into action with an indictment of  Milosevic for war crimes, based once again on unverified information provided her by U.S. officials. U.S. Secretary of State Albright and  State Department public relations boss James Rubin quickly cited this indictment as justifying the bombing campaign, (30) an example of  ICTY propaganda service that was not only crude but was in defense of  NATO actions that were clearly war crimes!

At the same time Arbour explained that, while individuals are “entitled to the presumption of innocence until convicted,” the indictments “raise serious questions about their suitability to be guarantors of any deal, let alone a peace agreement.” In addition to contradicting herself by an action that presumed guilt,  based on information as yet unverified by the Tribunal, Arbour took on the role of “surrogate politician” (Koechler), announcing her own political determination that Milosevic was to be ruled out as a negotiator!  (31) On many other occasions, indictments were used by the Tribunal to criminalize and effectively remove individuals from the negotiating process. Milosevic had to depend on the Russians to negotiate on Yugoslavia’s behalf to end the bombing war, and Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadzic and  Ratko Mladic were also removed from any diplomatic process in Bosnia by indictments. Former Tribunal president Antonio Cassese acknowledged this purposeful exclusion by indictment with pride. (32) By this route, also, all were effectively demonized before trial and conviction, and any NATO violence was justified in the media and public consciousness by Tribunal indictments.

On the other hand, in earlier years, when Milosevic was deemed useful to NATO as a negotiator in Bosnia, neither he nor Croatian leader Tudjman were indicted by the Tribunal for any crimes, although Milosevic was already well demonized, and in the ongoing Milosevic trial his alleged responsibility for crimes in those earlier years are a key focus of the prosecution case. UN diplomat Cedric Thornberry noted this politically based exemption of Milosevic and Tudjman, “wooed diplomatically lest they pull the rug out from under the peace process,” and he objected that “no political offer should be made that would suggest that any leader, credibly implicated in grave criminal activity, be immune from judicial prosecution.” (33)  In effect, Thornberry was criticizing the Tribunal back in 1996 for serving as a political arm of NATO.

Another huge political act carried out by Arbour, and her successor Carla Del Ponte, was exempting  NATO  from any war crimes charges. NATO had conveniently excluded from the war crimes subject to Tribunal jurisdiction what the Nuremberg tribunal had declared to be the “supreme crime”–waging a war of aggression. NATO could therefore attack Yugoslavia in violation of the UN Charter without thereby automatically committing a crime subject to Tribunal authority. Nevertheless, Article 5 of the Tribunal’s charter did make illegal “crimes against humanity,” which includes “murder” and “other inhumane acts;” and Article 3 includes “employment of poisonous weapons or other weapons calculated to cause unnecessary suffering,” and “attack, or bombardment, by whatever means, of undefended towns, villages, dwellings, or buildings.” Articles 1 and 16 of the Tribunal’s governing statute oblige it to prosecute any such illegal actions. 

How Arbour and  Del Ponte wriggled out of even investigating NATO’s war crimes, and the contrast with their rapid service for NATO, is amusing in the grossness of the difference between the two. Canadian law professor Michael Mandel describes how in May 1999 he and a group of lawyers from North and South America filed a well-documented war crimes complaint against 68 NATO leaders, and traveled to the Hague to make the case to Arbour and then Del Ponte; and “like literally thousands around the world, we demanded that Arbour and Del Ponte enforce the law against NATO” (34). Mandel eventually gave up when it became clear that, in his words, “the tribunal was a hoax.”

It took Del Ponte more than a year to announce, on June 2, 2000, that NATO was guilty of no crimes, “and that (rather illogically) she was not opening an investigation into whether they had committed any” (35). At that point she released a pre-investigation report of her Office of the Prosecutor (OTP), openly based on the belief that “NATO and NATO countries’ press statements are generally reliable and that explanations have been honestly given” (36). However, the OTP did acknowledge that NATO sometimes refused to answer questions (“failed to address the specific incidents”); in which case, NATO not wanting an investigation, the OTP chose to not look any further and simply dropped the subject! How is that for an independent judicial assessment?

In the indictment of Milosevic, Arbour used evidence about events that took place only six weeks earlier from a war zone, provided by an interested party (NATO) and unverified by Tribunal personnel. But neither she nor Del Ponte could even “open an investigation” on NATO, after a year, with overwhelming evidence in the public domain on NATO actions that had killed many more than the numbers presented in the initial Milosevic indictment. That indictment and charge of “crimes against humanity” was based on an alleged 385 killings; but the OTP report found that 500 deaths attributable to NATO were too few to rate–“there is simply no evidence of the necessary crime base for charges of genocide or crimes against humanity”! (37)  (It should also be noted that the first chief prosecutor of the ICTY, the sainted Richard Goldstone, vigorously defended the Tribunal’s handling of  the NATO charges in a debate with John Laughland, saying that the Tribunal simply  “held that there was not sufficient evidence against individuals to warrant further investigation,” when as we have indicated there was no serious initial investigation and the 500 deaths conceded by the OTP exceeded the total charged to Milosevic.) (38)

In examining possible NATO war crimes, time after time the OTP would consider the evidence and then choose an interpretation favorable to NATO, as in the bombing of Serbian broadcasting facilities, or simply decide arbitarily that since “another interpretation is equally available” no investigation is needed (this in reference to NATO’s bombing of a train on a bridge at Grdelica Gorge). (39). Michael Mandel gives a number of illustrations of this mode of exoneration, which as he says “comes as close as possible to being an actual NATO press release that might have been issued by Jamie Shea or James Rubin.”

After Del Ponte took over from Arbour, she announced that “the primary focus of the Office of the Prosecutor must be” on the further investigation of Milosevic and other Serb leaders, (40) implicitly conceding that she didn’t have enough evidence, but once again making clear her NATO-service priorities (why “must” she focus on this project?). Despite the furious claims of  “genocide” in Kosovo by the NATO/Tribunal/media collective during the 78-day bombing war, the fewer than 5,000 bodies (from all causes and sides) found after a historically unique postwar forensic search  would hardly sustain a genocide charge against Milosevic. Therefore, after his seizure and transport to The Hague, Del Ponte announced that charges against him would be expanded to his command responsibility for deaths in Bosnia and Croatia. The search was then on for evidence of deaths and, especially, proof of  a Milosevic control and “master plan.” This was a common Tribunal formula: indict, flamboyantly publicize the charges, and then look for the evidence.

Another evidence of NATO service on the part of  the Tribunal has been the fact that, from the very first, the Serbs were the NATO target, hence that of the Tribunal. As early as 1991 German foreign minister Klaus Kinkel was accusing the Serbs of “genocide,” and in December 1992, just as the Tribunal was in process of formation, Acting U.S. Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleberger also publicly named four Serb leaders, Milosevic, Karadzic, Mladic and Arkan, as the targets of the Tribunal. (41) Tribunal president Gabrielle Kirk McDonald referred to Serbia as a “rogue state,” and another Tribunal president Antonio Cassese expressed gratification that “indictments” had made it impossible for Serb leaders to participate in negotiations.  (Cassese was not bothered by this abuse of indictments as a political instrument, and Kosovo war supporter Geoffrey Robertson has observed that Cassese’s “presumption of their guilt, and agitation for their arrest, would have disqualified him for bias in many domestic legal systems.”) (42)

The double standard in the Tribunal’s dealing with the Serbs and others has been blatant. Serb paramilitary leader Arkan’s indictment was made public in March 1999, but his Bosnian Muslim counterpart Naser Oric, who had bragged to the media about his killing of Serb civilians, (43) was not indicted until 2003, with modest charges levied and with a  timing suggesting an attempt to create the appearance of balance. (44) Serb leader Milan Martic was indicted in 1996 for launching a  rocket cluster-bomb attack on military targets in Zagreb in May 1995, on the ground that the rocket was “not designed to hit military targets but to terrorize the civilians of Zagreb.” In that case, the Tribunal went to some pains to investigate the nature, effects and  anti-civilian character of cluster bombs, concluding that their use was inherently criminal. (45) But the NATO cluster-bombing of Nis on May 7, 1999, which repeatedly hit a market and hospital far from any military target, killing  at least 15 civilians in the process, produced no indictments.

Stanislav Galic was found guilty by the Tribunal of “inflicting terror on a civilian population,” (46) but the numerous admissions by NATO leaders that their bombing of Serbia in April and May 1999 was to inflict pain on—that is, terrorize–that population and force surrender, carried out on a much larger scale than Galic’s operations around Sarajevo, was of no interest to the Tribunal. And the massive ethnic cleansing of Krajina by U.S.-advised Croatian forces in 1995, with many hundreds killed, led to no indictments until May 21, 2001, when Del Ponte, aggressively pursuing the new Yugoslav government to extradite Milosevic and other Serb indictees, and apparently feeling a need to demonstrate her even-handedness, belatedly indicted a Croatian military officer. (Prior to May 2001, only Serbs had been indicted for war crimes in the Krajina region.)

Only Serbian leaders have been charged with “genocide” and  top-down responsibility for the acts of subordinates. Numerous mass killings by Bosnian Muslims–including imported mujahedeen whose specialty was beheading civilian victims–and by the Croatian army and paramilitaries, never caused the Tribunal to use the word

genocide or to attribute responsibility  to  and indict Croatian president Tudjman or Bosnian leader Izetbegovic. (47). And during her pretended look at NATO crimes,  Del Ponte considered only the responsibility of  NATO pilots and their immediate commanders, not the NATO decision-makers who decided to target the civilian infrastructure and population. The double standard here is dramatic.

How did Marlise Simons treat these manifestations of  a Tribunal political agenda closely geared to U.S. and  NATO public relations needs? Simons did not report on the Racak incident, but she did have an article on Arbour’s March 31, 1999 announcement of the indictment of  Arkan. (48) She transmitted Arbour’s explanation for the belated release of the indictment—to warn those who might “retain his services or obey his orders” and be “tainted by their association with an indicted war criminal.” But Simons did not question this explanation, which is not compelling, and which makes an indicted but not yet convicted person a “criminal,” nor did she  mention that  the action was a public relations gift to NATO. Simons failed to call attention to the absence of any indictment of  Naser Oric, Arkan’s paramilitary counterpart serving the Bosnian Muslims, and in fact she never mentioned Oric’s name in any of her 120 articles.

This convenient naivete was even more dramatically evident in Simons’ treatment of the May 22, 1999 indictment of Milosevic (49). Here again Simons gives Arbour’s explanation of the rush to indict—the fear that “we might miss out” on getting him as a result of a peace deal—which she passes along  without raising any question. Simons does not mention the Tribunal failure to indict in 1994-1995 when, as Thornberry noted, Milosevic was seen as a useful partner in a “peace deal.”  This allows her to suggest that “only now do…American and European politicians…use the tribunal as a political weapon, threatening to hold perpetrators of atrocities accountable in The Hague,” which also makes it sound as if the Tribunal is an autonomous body being used by alien parties! The injudicial quality of  rushing to indict with a presumption of guilt even before the evidence is in doesn’t strike Simons.

Simons quotes Arbour acknowledging that NATO’s aims here meshed with her own (“a coincidence of interests”),  and this aura of  independence is maintained and never challenged by Simons. She says that “The indictment is now seen as a tribute to the tribunal’s firmness,” without telling us who it is that has this vision and offers this tribute. Simons never hints that the timing of the  indictment might be regarded as public relations service to NATO, although she mentions that U.S. and NATO officials welcomed this Arbour action. This  was just a coincidence, as Arbour explained to her. As with the Racak public relations service, the Arbour appearance with Robin Cook in a London press conference, the Arkan indictment, here the May 22 indictment, Simons treats each as an isolated event, because connecting the dots or even any kind of serious analysis would be incompatible with peddling the official line.

Simons  never deals with the Tribunal’s exemption of  NATO, and her colleagues at the New York Times treated that exemption with extreme brevity, featuring U.S. “impatience” with this challenge, which never even reached the investigatory state. The Times reporters ignored the charges themselves and never referred to the comical Del Ponte and OTP basis for rejecting even an investigation of  NATO war crimes. (50) Only once does Simons approach the substance of  the charges of NATO war crimes, when she says that NATO bombing “hit the Chinese Embassy, a few bridges, a train full of civilian passengers, and a tv station.” (51) No mention of  the electrical and water facilities, nine hospitals and over 300 schools damaged or destroyed, innumerable factories producing civilian goods, museums, religious buildings, including early Christian and medieval churches, or the 500-3000 civilians killed in the bombing. Simons’ bias displayed in this aborted listing is dramatic, but her editors clearly didn’t object.

Simons several times reported Tribunal developments that could be interpreted as showing that the Tribunal was not a political arm of NATO, (52) but she never once allowed this interpretation to be challenged or the first alternative frame to be expounded except in a few phrases by Slobodan Milosevic.

Alternative Model of the Tribunal  as a Rogue Court

The ICTY was established by the Security Council  under Security Council Resolution 827 on May 25, 1993, under the claimed authority of Chapter VII of the UN Charter. But the Charter and Chapter VII give the Security council authority only on matters of security, and the argument that violations of  humanitarian law “constitute a threat to international peace and security” fails to provide a legally defensible basis for taking on a judicial function. (53) Ironically, Chapter VII requires all countries to cooperate with any ruling made under it, although it was only voted on by the Security Council. Meanwhile, the U.S. Congress, explaining why it was refusing to cooperate with the International Criminal Court, asserted that “it is a fundamental principle of international law that a treaty is binding upon its parties only and that it does not create obligations for nonparties without their consent to be bound. The United States is not a party to the Rome statute and will not be bound by any of its terms.” (54) But no problem in binding countries to aiding the (illegally constituted) ICTY because it was under U.S. control and it was others who were coerced to cooperate without their assent.  Marlise Simons and the New York Times have never addressed these issues.

It is an even more spectacular irony that the Tribunal was established in 1993 just after Eagleberger’s public naming of  Serb leaders to be brought to trial and during a period in which the United States had begun “the destruction of every single chance of peace, from the Vance-Owen in Bosnia to the farce of Rambouillet, to the bombing campaign itself.” (55)  That is, the role of the Tribunal was to help the United States and its allies employ a purported “bringing justice” as part of  the propaganda apparatus to  fend off peace, help dismantle Yugoslavia,  and put  Serbia in its place by war. Most of the deaths in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo occurred after the decisions were made to pursue “justice” instead of  peace.  Recognition of the Tribunal’s role in a policy relying ultimately on force was implicit in the statement of former Tribunal president Antonio Cassese,  that “The political and diplomatic response [to the Balkans conflict] takes into account the exigencies and the tempo of the international community. The military response will come at the appropriate time.” (56).  As Robert Hayden stated back in 2000,  “Instead of being victor’s justice after the conflict, it [the Tribunal] is a tool meant to ensure victory during it.” (57) In fact, in the postwar phase, the Tribunal is serving to provide victors’ justice—and a final apologetic for the war–as well.

Marlise Simons has never mentioned the Eagleberger statement of 1993, and of course she has never hinted at the possibility that the Tribunal’s role was to facilitate war in the name of “justice,” although she repeatedly transmits the prosecution and other prosecution-friendly statements about the importance of justice to the victims. She fails to cite the evidence that the alleged “justice” objective is not high on the priority lists of the populations in question, in contrast with the U.S.,  NATO, Tribunal, and media  establishment. (58) And she consistently fails to address the matter of  justice to victims outside the orbit of NATO interests, such as the ethnically-cleansed  Krajina and Western Bosnian Serbs, the ethnically-cleansed Serbs and Roma from NATO-controlled Kosovo, and the refugees and  beggared population of  Serbia itself.

Most of the Tribunal  prosecutors and judges have been drawn from the NATO countries, and all the important ones have been vetted by U.S. officials. (59)  As the NATO powers are parties to the conflict, and even committed chargeable war crimes as well as engaging in the “supreme crime” in the 78-day bombing war, there is a major conflict of interest built-in to the judicial structure of the Tribunal. As Hans Koechler stated, “If the ‘Tribunal’ would have taken general legal standards of impartiality seriously, it would have been obliged to determine that there is a conflict of interest for ’judges’ from countries waging an undeclared war against Yugoslavia to sit on such a panel initiating ‘judicial’ action against the Head of State of the country under attack.” (60)  Marlise Simons has never considered this an issue or problem.

We have already mentioned the funding bias problem, and likelihood that ICTY activity will be directed toward areas politically serviceable to the United States and other NATO powers. But another feature of  funding bias is that the prosecution is likely to be given ample resources and political support while the defense is scanted. As Sellars points out, “The defence is very much the poor relation at The Hague…the prosecution has been set up with a coordinating office and budget, the defence does not enjoy equivalent resources. It does not get much support from governments either.” (61)

As regards the judicial process more narrowly conceived, the Tribunal  has violated Western judicial standards on a massive scale, as it has been free to create its own rules as it went along—its 1994 Yearbook says that “The tribunal does not need to shackle itself with restrictive rules which have developed out of the ancient trial-by-jury system,” and for Louise Arbour, “The law, to me, should be creative and used to make things tight.” [62] Yes, due process and other “ancient” protections are inconvenient to aggressive prosecutors. John Laughland notes that “the Tribunal dips into a potpourri of different legal systems from around the world. In one case, the tribunal defended itself against charges that it had illegally seized documents from the Bosnian government by saying that its procedures were compatible with the law in Paraguay.” (63)

Before examining some of its abuses, and Marlise Simons’ (non)-treatment of them, in more detail, let us enumerate  Laughland’s non-exhaustive list of “rogue court” procedures: (1) no right to bail or speedy trial; (2) defendants may be tried twice for the same crime [Article 25 of the Tribunal’s statute]; (3) no right to a jury trial; (4) no independent appeal body; (5) admission of hearsay evidence; (6) confessions to be presumed free and voluntary unless the contrary is established by the prisoner [Article 92]; and (7) no definition of the burden of proof needed for a conviction, such as “beyond reasonable doubt.”(64) Nowhere in her 120 articles does Marlise Simons mention, let alone challenge, these procedures that are in violation of the long-established principles of Western jurisprudence.

Another very important feature of Tribunal practice has been the use of the indictment as a political tool. In the “ancient trial-by-jury” and due process systems of the West an indicted person is not by that fact a criminal but rather one for whom the evidence seems to justify a trial to determine guilt or innocence. For the Tribunal the indictment has been used to criminalize without trial, to remove the indictee from effective authority, and to discredit and demonize. As noted, Arbour used this weapon regularly as a political and propaganda tool, while piously claiming a belief that indictees are innocent till proven guilty.  NATO war supporter Geoffrey Robertson stated that “War required Milosevic’s  criminalization, so The Hague prosecutor, Louise Arbour, was summoned to London to be handed by UK Foreign Secretary Robin Cook some NSA/GCHQ intercepts she had long requested.” (65) Milosevic was indicted shortly thereafter. Back in 1995, Arbour’s predecessor, Richard Goldstone, admitted to purposefully indicting Karadzic and Mladic to exclude them from the imminent Dayton talks, (66) but not Milosevic, now under indictment as the alleged “architect” of  the events for which Karadzic and Mladic were indicted. Marlise Simons has never acknowledged the ICTY’s politicization of  indictments, nor has she expressed the slightest concern over their use for advance criminalization.

The Tribunal’s prosecutors have been very media oriented, with the criminalizing indictments central to their effort to mobilize the media in support of the Tribunal. Among other incidents, in June 2001 Del Ponte announced that Milosevic would soon be indicted for further crimes, (67) an action that had no function except to keep Tribunal business in the public eye and create a public and moral environment biased against the defendant. Cassese openly employed the same tactic of going to the public about the “indicted criminals” in order to force political action. (68)  Similarly, Richard Goldstone frankly acknowledged  that journalists “responded to my calls for positive and supportive coverage” of the Tribunal. (69) Again, the violations of  judicial principles in this call and mobilization were notorious, but entirely consistent with  Tribunal processes. Marlise Simons almost certainly didn’t need Goldstone’s call to follow the Tribunal party line, and she has never noticed any anomalies or departures from honorable judicial practice in publicity mongering or courtroom procedures.

The first case tried by the Tribunal, involving the Bosnian Serb Dusko Tadic, affords us an excellent illustration of  both the Tribunal’s unjudicial practice and Marlise Simons extreme bias. Only one witness testified to having seen Tadic commit an atrocity, an anonymous Bosnian Serb sent to the Tribunal by the Bosnian Muslims. The defense was able to show that the witness lied, at which point he confessed that he had been forced to lie, and was trained on his testimony, by his Bosnian Muslim captors. The prosecutor withdrew the witness’s testimony, but the Trial Chamber never asked why the prosecutor had failed to discover the basic facts about the witness, and Robert Hayden, who was an expert witness in this case, claims that “some parts of the witness’s story seem to indicate the Prosecutors’s office might also have been involved in training him to give false testimony.” (70)  The Tribunal then denied the witness’s appeal for refuge and sent him back to the Bosnian Muslim government, where he was given a ten-year sentence for “genocide” based on a confession he says was extracted by torture.

The Tadic case involved charges under Article 2 of the ICTY statute, which applies only to persons “caught up in an international armed conflict.” In a preliminary hearing the ICTY Appeals Chamber found the Bosnian conflict to be both internal and external, and argued that if it was found to be solely “international” an “absurd” conclusion would follow: that only Bosnian Muslims, not Bosnian Serbs, could be “protected persons” under the statute. The Trial Chamber, following the International Court of Justice decision in the U.S.-Nicaragua case, found that the Bosnian Serbs were not de facto organs or agents of  Yugoslavia. The prosecutor appealed the decision, and won, with the Appeals Chamber now accepting precisely the conclusion that it had earlier found “absurd,” and arguing that mere “participation” in planning and supervising military operations constitutes “overall control.” It justified this position on the grounds of the need to protect civilians and “realism…which disregards legal formalities.” Apart from the brazenness of this self-contradiction and rewriting of legal rules, as Hayden has noted “The ICTY Appeals Chamber has thus clearly indicated that fairness of the proceedings for defendants is not high in its concerns.” (71)

Hayden also points out that this ICTY ruling and disregard of “legal formalities” would not only make the United States responsible for all the crimes of the Nicaraguan contras, it would also make it responsible for its “de facto agents” in the Croatian army’s assault on the Krajina Serbs in 1995, carried out with the approval and participation of  U.S. officials and closely affiliated “private” firms. (72) Naturally, the Tribunal, which couldn’t even open an investigation into NATO’s direct war crimes, would never make this connection involving mere de facto agents killing the wrong victims.

In her reports on the Tadic trial, Simons spent a great deal of  space summarizing the prosecution’s charges  and description of  the Omarska prison camp as a “concentration camp.” (73) Reading Simons one would never be aware of the fact that Tadic was sentenced to 20 years, although acquitted of personal responsibility for any murders. There is no mention of the fact that the one witness who claimed to see Tadic kill was eventually withdrawn by the prosecution after having been found to be fabricating evidence, and after confessing to having been coerced and trained on what to say. Reporting this would throw unfavorable light on  Tribunal processes,  and Simons regularly ignores such negatives.

On the issue of whether Tadic would be subject to Article 2 charges based on the finding of  the conflict in Bosnia as internal or external,  Simons does not evaluate the arguments on the difference between “control” and “participation” nor does she discuss the facts about  the relation between the Yugoslav and Bosnian armed forces.  The struggles between Milosevic and the Bosnian Serbs and their conflicting interests in the peace efforts in the years 1992-1995, described in Lord David Owen’s Balkan Odyssey, are of no interest to Simons. She doesn’t  mention the arguments given by the Tribunal judges who at first disputed the control claim, and there is no evidence that she ever bothered to hear or read them or the testimony of Robert Hayden. She just takes it for granted that the NATO-friendly position is correct:  She says that “most Western governments” would claim that the Bosnian Serb warfare was “orchestrated from Belgrade.” So any contrary finding by the Tribunal court was ipso facto wrong and perverse.

And in a remarkable and stupid ad hominem attack, she smears the dissident judges as tools of Milosevic, claiming that their finding of  only participation rather than control was a Milosevic “stratagem” and “victory”: “Mr. Milosevic has now by some accounts hoodwinked two of the tribunal’s judges.” For these “some accounts” she seems to be relying on “diplomats” and an unnamed “international lawyer.” The heroine in her morality tale here is Judge Gabrielle Kirk McDonald, the Clinton State Department’s contribution to international justice, and former (and post-Tribunal) director and counsel of the notorious human rights violator Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc., who stood by the NATO position in this voting. Simons also quotes Gow, who is NATO-friendly, but completely ignores Hayden’s extensive arguments supporting the position of the “hoodwinked” judges.

We might also note that the argument accepted by McDonald and Simons, that the participation of  the  Yugoslav government with the Bosnian Serbs in the form of  funding support and occasional joint operations was proof of  Yugoslav control, would point to U.S. and NATO-power control of the Tribunal itself. It is unlikely that McDonald or Simons will ever point to this analogy and draw this inference!

In one of the most remarkable moments in the trial of  Milosevic, the prosecution brought on as a witness Radomir Markovic, the former head of State Security of Yugoslavia, who came to the Hague after having been held for 17 months in a Serb jail. On cross-examination he completely repudiated the testimony  he had made to his jailers, contending that Milosevic had not only had nothing to do with any crimes committed in Kosovo but had tried to curb them and punish any violators. Most interesting, he testified that he had been threatened with criminal prosecution unless he agreed to testify against Milosevic, and was offered bribes for cooperation. Marlise Simons mentions that Markovic was a prosecution witness in her first article on his testimony, but when in cross-examination he exonerated Milosevic from criminal activity and described the bribe-threat combination that he had faced, Simons’s follow-up article is very short and evasive. (74) She no longer mentions that he was a prosecution witness, and she completely suppresses his bribe-threat claims. He is now portrayed  as a friend of Milosevic who “has sided with his boss.” In both articles dealing with Markovic Simons gets in sentences on “shocking details about atrocities against  ethnic Albanians” that have no connection with the main topics of the articles.

In many cases the bribe-threat combination that Markovic describes and Simons can not acknowledge in his case has been effective. The threat was increasingly effective as targets became aware of the fact that the deck was stacked against them—that Tribunal rules were flexible, that traditional rules against hearsay, double-jeopardy and rights of appeal were inoperative, that NATO-agent judges and prosecutors were free to pursue and punish Serbs without constraint as “the fix was on.” (75) Under these conditions, and with the post-Milosevic Serbian government now both cooperative and under intense pressure to cooperate without limit, resistance to the blandishments of  “confessions” and “plea-bargaining” weakened. A major problem, however, has been whether the confessions might be false and the newly-minted claims of  the (almost invariably) Serb villain were true or whether he was saying what he felt would diminish his sentence. In the Bulgarian Connection case, Agca confessed to Bulgarian and KGB guilt, after many months of interrogations and disclosure of the desired line of confession. It is now clear that he was lying, but the New York Times and its colleagues lapped up the lies with uncritical zeal.

And now, with a new problematic on confessions, it is notable how similarly uncritical Simons is on plea-bargaining. Not once in 120 articles does she suggest the possibility of coaching and systematic false witness based on the plea-bargaining process. She treats it as a purely innocent and excellent thing designed to speed things up a bit, and she asserts that the new cooperation on the part of the indictees is based on the new sense that the Tribunal is fair! (76) Any other possible explanation is unmentioned.

The issue was posed once again in the case of Bosnian Serb intelligence officer Momir Nikolic, who confessed to Serb crimes at Srebrenica in exactly the form desired by the prosecution: “with cool precision” quoting directives that “the life of the enemy must be made unbearable,” and describing the actions taken  in preparation for mass executions, although it turns out that Nikolic didn’t witness any executions. (77) He and a colleague helped organize digging mass graves, and later digging up bodies and reburying them in secret sites (no explanation of why they didn’t bury them in secret sites in the first place, or how a site is made “secret” ).

A problem arose in Nikolic’s testimony when on cross-examination it was demonstrated, and he acknowledged, that he had lied in claiming  presence at a particular massacre. Simons mentions this very briefly near the end of a long article, paraphrasing him saying that “he accepted more guilt, fearing that the plea agreement might fall through.” (78)  This might suggest the possibility that his other claims could have been untrue and dictated by the demands of those offering him a plea bargain. This, and the possibility of  coaching, are not discussed by Simons, as she hastened on to more important matters.

Prosecution witness protection was one of the specialties of  Milosevic trial judge Richard May. From the beginning, instead of  leaning over backward to help the unrepresented accused, he not only displayed open hostility to him, he limited and interfered with his cross-examination, while giving great freedom and protection to the prosecution and its witnesses. The experienced Canadian trial lawyer Edward Greenspan was outraged at the fact that May violated “the well-known principle that no judge can arbitrarily set a time limit on, or interfere with, a cross examination.” Within an hour and a half of the beginning of  Milosevic’s first cross-examination,  “May impatiently asks: ‘How much longer do you think you’re going to be with this witness’?…The first witness of what is to be a lengthy trial, and the judge is putting time limits on the accused. May doesn’t even feign impartiality, or, indeed, interest.” (79) Greenspan is also shocked at May’s admonition to Milosevic not to cross-examine “as a way of harassing or intimidating witnesses.” Brutality is “calculated to unnerve, confuse, but ultimately to expose. Cross-examination is a duel between counsel and the witness. The only weapon the defendant has is the right to ask questions.” (80)

One observer of  Judge May’s methods in the first week of June 2002, the British paralegal Ian Johnson, noted that “at no time during this process did the judge…stipulate a time limit on the prosecution. Yet when it was the turn of Mr. Milosevic to cross-examine the witness, Judge May would instruct that a time limit be put on the proceedings.” (81) Johnson reports that when the prosecution witness Mr. Buyo, a KLA commander in the Racak area, was put under pressure by Milosevic, who caught him in a contradiction and with the witness clearly in trouble, Judge May instructed: “Move on Mr Milosevic, you have laboured this point enough.” As Johnson points out, “Mr Buyo was off the hook.” In the cross-examination of another claimed eyewitness to a massacre of civilians, who said that the Serb forces had separated the women and children from the men and then proceeded to execute all of them, Milosevic asked him why they bothered to do the separation if they were going to kill them all. But Judge May interjected: “I don’t think you can expect the witness to know that,” when of course Milosevic was probing possible false testimony. This probe was terminated by the judge.

With another witness, who claimed to have overheard threatening conversations by Serb commanders from his position hidden in an attic, Milosevic got him into difficulties based on noise and distance, in the midst of which Judge May says: “Move on Mr. Milosevic, the witness has told you his position,” protecting the witness from serious embarrassment and from being discredited. (82)

In another case, where the witness claimed her town had been hit by Yugoslavia airplanes, and displayed a knowledge of  technical names of  weaponry that was  implausible and suggested coaching, when Milosevic tried to press this point, May simply cut him off: “She has answered your question [about who told her to say what she did]. She said nobody did and that is what she saw, and that’s her evidence. No point arguing about it.” (83)

Even more dramatic was Judge May’s handling of the testimony of  William Walker on June 11-12, 2002. Although  Walker ranged far and wide, even covering his estimate of Milosevic’s “general attitude,” May never interrupted him once in nearly two hours of testimony. Although the “Racak massacre” claim was the basis of  45 charges of murder against Milosevic, and although Walker’s credibility as the main driver of that claim was  important and relevant, May announced in advance a limit of three hours to cross-examination, and then proceeded to interrupt Milosevic’s questions over  70 times.  His deference to “Ambassador” Walker was striking, and May actively prevented a serious cross-examination that might have challenged credibility and exposed lies. If Walker simply dodged a question with “I don’t recall,” May protected him from any further questions. May refused to allow Milosevic to contrast Walker’s quick finding of a massacre at Racak with his foot-dragging in the case of murders in El Salvador: “Your attempt to discredit this witness with events so long ago the Trial Chamber has ruled as irrelevant.” (84) In short, this episode of  witness protection  and judicial abuse would by itself provide very strong grounds for throwing out the trial as unfair in a court system of integrity.

May frequently allowed prosecution witnesses to testify at length about personal experiences, and to attack Milosevic, usually without supportive and verifiable evidence, and even to recite hearsay experiences. In Mahmut Bakali’s testimony on February 18, 2002, the witness cited what a local Serb official claimed to have heard that Milosevic might have said about Kosovo—twice-removed hearsay—without judicial interference. (85). By contrast, Judge May would not allow Milosevic to cite articles from Le Monde and Le Figaro on Racak in his cross-examination of  William Walker—our meticulous judge insisted that the reporters themselves would have to be brought to testify. Because of  the absence of  any ban on hearsay, and judicial bias, it has been estimated that “over ninety percent” of the evidence cited in the Tribunal proceedings is from hearsay sources. (86) The Tribunal has also decided that in cases of rape or sex crimes “no corroboration of  the victim’s testimony shall be required.” (87)

We should also mention that  Judge May repeatedly told witnesses that they should not communicate with others during the period when they were testifying, as in the hearing on  November 13, 2003: “Lieutenant Colonel, could I remind you, please, as we remind all witnesses, not to speak to anybody about your evidence until it’s over.” But with General Wesley Clark, he allowed the U.S. government to force a closed session and to redact the testimony before release, and Clark was permitted to speak to others during the course of his testimony. Clark could even phone Bill Clinton in the midst of his testimony, get him to send a fax letter, and read that letter in court. As noted, May would not allow Milosevic to introduce articles from Le Monde and Le Figaro, requiring from him the physical presence of the reporters. In response to one simple question by Milosevic on a statement about Clark by his superior Henry Shelton, Clark launched into a  ten minute monologue of self adulation, without any interruption by Judge May. May would also not allow Milosevic to ask questions about the UN intervention or whether the attack on Yugoslavia was legal, or whether it was a war. He could not ask questions directed to challenging Clark’s credibility, or anything not directly responsive to Clark verbal claims. Again, as with the Walker testimony, this would be the basis for declaration of  an unfair trial in an honest judicial system. But Marlise Simons and her colleague Elaine Sciolini never noticed,  (88) and never sought comment from anybody who would challenge this almost humorous travesty of the judicial process. (89)

Marlise Simons’ treatment of  Judge May and his courtroom practice was entirely favorable and without a single note of criticism. Sober, polite, patient, giving Milosevic more time than the prosecution. Simons found that “a consensus is growing that Mr., Milosevic is being treated fairly in the courtroom,” although she provides no source or evidence for this consensus. (90)  The idea that, as Edward Greenspan indicated, it was outrageous to arbitrarily limit cross-examination time, never struck Simons, nor did she ever mention the failure of May to interrupt Walker once while doing it incessantly with Milosevic. She never once found his protection of witnesses or acceptance of hearsay from them, but much harsher treatment of Milosevic, problematic. Milosevic, on the other hand, is repeatedly criticized by Simons for “filibustering,” “stalling,” “playing to an audience,” “often trying to bend the rules” and even for “demanding as much time to question a witness as the prosecution” (a display of profound ignorance about the judicial process). (91) Given the facts, even in the summary form presented here,  this apologetic for May, along with steady carping at Milosevic’s courtroom performance, reflects deep bias.

Concluding Note

In February 2004 it was reported that the United States and other  NATO powers were now pressing the Tribunal to remove the authority to initiate prosecutions  from prosecutor Carla Del Ponte and transfer it to the  Tribunal judges, and in the interim the judges were not giving approval to Del Ponte’s requests to commence further prosecutions. It was alleged that Del Ponte had been too aggressive in seeking indictees, whereas the United States was eager to scale down Tribunal operations and would be satisfied to just dispose of Mladic and Karadzic and close the Tribunal down. (92) Does this mini-struggle and need to constrain Del Ponte demonstrate Tribunal autonomy? No, it does not. Puppets frequently get an inflated view of their importance and have to be slapped down by their principals, (93) and here it is clear that the principals are well on their way to revamping the decision-making structure of the Tribunal to meet their new priorities.

Anybody reading Not Guilty: Report of the Commission of Inquiry Into the Charges Made Against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials (1938), written by a group chaired by John Dewey, can only be struck by the frequent parallels between Soviet and ICTY principles and  court procedure. The commission stressed the political and  public relations function of the Moscow trials (393) and the “prearranged scheme” and plan to prove that a single bad man (Trotsky) was guilty (19, 388). The commission argued that there was no real effort to establish truth, but merely to prove guilt (xxi, 21). It stressed the self-interest of the accusers (25).

We have tried to show that the Tribunal has been a thorough-going servant of  NATO, and that the political model of  the ICTY  fits  its history and record very closely. We have also tried to show that its judicial practice has continuously violated traditional Western standards almost across the board, even apart from its selective and politicized (and hyper-publicized) indictments and  trials.

Marlise Simons, however, has made the Tribunal into a marvel of  Western justice, by denying or (mainly) evading the evidence of  its political role and judicial malpractice.

We find it hard to believe that the Soviet media in 1936 could  have done a better job on behalf of  the Soviet prosecutor than Simons has done for the ICTY prosecutors. She probably has done the better job, because she does quote Milosevic, even if briefly and with derisive comments, and while hugely biased she  is not frenzied and hysterical in her abuse of  the villains. There is even a very small trickle of  inconvenient facts within the overwhelming barrage of  Tribunal-supportive propaganda. This is effective propaganda, not propaganda that ordinary people will see through easily. As evidence gradually  breaks through the “coercive consensus” that now prevails, and upsets claims of  the Tribunal that have been conduited by Simons, we believe that, as with the Bulgarian Connection, Simons and the New York Times will not rush to straighten out their brain-washed readers.

Footnotes:

1. For details, see  Edward  Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent (New York: Pantheon, 1988 and 2002), Chapter 4 and Introduction to 2002 revised edition.
2. Ibid.
3.   Stacy Sullivan, “Milosevic’s Willing Executioners,” New Republic, May 10, 1999; The Prosecutor of the Tribunal Against Slobodan Milosevic, Indictment [for Bosnia-Herzegovina], Case No. IT-01-51-I, November 22, 2001, pars. 5-9,  http://www.un.org/icty/indictment/english/mil-ii011122e.htm >; Tony Blair, “A New Generation Draws the Line,” Newsweek, April 19, 1999; S/RES/827, May 25, 1993, < http://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/peace/docs/scres827.html >; [STILL NEED ONE MORE EMPHASIZING “PEACE AND RECONCILIATION”]
4. Useful contesting sources are: Johnstone; Mandel forthcoming; Woodward; Sellars; Morality’s Avenging Angels; Chandler chapter in Degraded Capability
5. Raymond Bonner, Weakness and Deceit (Times Books, 1984), chap. 16; Edward Herman and Peter Rothberg, “Media Thugs Slug It Out,” Lies of Our Times, June 1993, 3-4.
6. Several of Simons articles were co-authored, and we will refer occasionally to articles by other Times reporters, to show that on points which they deal with that Simons scanted almost without exception they also adhere to the party line.
7. On the role of human rights organizations, most notable Human Rights Watch, and their moral and campaigning support of the Tribunal and NATO military intervention, see Kirsten Sellars, The Rise and Rise of Human Rights (Sutton, 2002), chapter 9..
8.   We discuss below Simons hugely biased discussion of the issue involved here.
9.    Lenard Cohen, Serpent in the Bosom: The Rise and Fall of Slobodan Milosevic (Westview: 2001), p. 380. Among other establishment truths that Simons repeats frequently and uncritically is the claim that what drove Milosevic was the desire for a “Greater Serbia,”  even a non-Serb-free Serbia. That he was being pressed by stranded Serb minorities to help them stay with Serbia in a “Shrinking Yugoslavia,” would never occur to Simons. See Johnstone, op. cit.,  pp. 32ff
10. For illustrations of these confident assertions that “we have the evidence,” which they did not have, see Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, pp. 154-157.
11. Cedric Thornberry, a UN official with long experience in Bosnia, wrote in 1996 that the consensus evolving “in parts of the international liberal media” that the Serbs were “the only villains…did not correspond to the perceptions of successive senior U.N personnel in touch with daily events throughout the area.” “Saving the war crimes tribunal,” Foreign Policy, Sept. 1996. Among many other documents making the same point, with evidence, Raymond K. Kent, “Contextualizing Hate: The Hague Tribunal, the Clinton Administration and the Serbs,” http://beograd.com.nato/texts/english/c/contextualizing_hate.html
12. E.g., Simons writes that Milosevic “faces a succession of witnesses, many of them humble villagers, who have traveled from Kosovo to The Hague to confront him and accuse him of destroying their lives.” (“Revising Memories Of Yet Another Evil,” NYT, Sept. 22, 2002.)

13  Just considering here Bosnia and Croatia, on May 24, 1993, the Yugoslav government  submitted a Letter to the UN on “War Crimes and Crimes and Genocide in Eastern Bosnia…Committed Against the Serb Population from April 1992 to April 1993 .” This document describes the “almost complete ethnic cleansing of Serbs” from Srebrenica before the autumn of 1992, and lists 12 settlements  and 39 villages  destroyed and burnt down by Bosnian Muslim forces, with about 1,200 killed and between 2,800 and 3,200 injured. The almost complete ethnic cleansing of Serbs from Srebrenica described in this document is supported  by UNHCR monthly reports, which also show that all the so-called “safe zones” were substantially cleansed of Serbs before July 1995.  Half of the Serb population of the overall area had been driven out by then. This report includes scores of affidavits from Serb victims, who were often able to name the Bosnian Muslims who attacked them.

An even more extensive document was produced by the Serbian Council Information Center on “Persecution of Serbs and Ethnic Cleansing in Croatia 1991-1998,” with massive data on killings, destruction of homes, and enforced flight, similar in character to the data put forward by the Tribunal in its focus on  the persecution of Bosnian Muslims. These documents have never been mentioned in the New York Times, and the perpetrators of these crimes have never been indicted by the Tribunal.

14. Ian Fisher and Marlise Simons, “Defiant, Milosevic Begins His Defense By Assailing NATO,” NYT, Feb. 15, 2002.
15. Edward Greenspan, “This is a lynching,” National Post, March 13, 2002.
16. Simons, “Defiant Milosevic Begins His Defense,” NYT, Feb. 15, 2002.
17. David Sheffer, “Developments at Rome Treaty Conference,,” Testimony before Senate Foreign Relations Committee, July 23, 1998, p. ???
18. Nato press conference, May 16, 1999: www.nato.int/kosovo/press/p990515b.htm
19. Michael Scharf, “Indicted For War Crimes, Then What?,” Washington Post, Oct. 3, 1999.
20. Quoted in Robert Hayden, “Biased Justice,” …
21. Quoted in Skoco and Woodger, “The Military and the Media,” in Degraded Capability, p. 35.
22. Ibid.
23. Arbour’s complaints are aired by Simons in “Proud but Concerned, Tribunal Prosecutor Leaves,” NYT, Sept. 15, 1999.

23A. “Tribunal: How It Works,” NYT, Feb. 12, 2002. :

24. ICTY Press Release, January 16, 1999.
25. cite for Albright on “spring has come early this year”
26. Simons, “Militia Leader Arkan Is Indicted For War Crimes,” NYT, April 1, 1999.
27. Kristin Sellars, op. cit., p. ….
28. Ibid., p….
29. Marcus Gee, “Doubts Raised Over Impartiality of Prosecutor,” Globe and Mail, April 21, 1999.
30. As U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright explained the significance of the indictment of Milosevic for Kosovo at a news conference on May 27, 1999: “[T]his is an important step forward and it will, one, make very clear to the world and the publics in our countries that this is justified because of the crimes committed, and I think also will enable us to keep moving all these processes forward, as I have said now, the idea of continuing with the air campaign, dealing with the humanitarian situation and also following through on various diplomatic ideas.” (“Madeleine Albright Holds Media Availability with Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs Axworthy,” FDCH Political Transcripts, May 27, 1999.)
31. “By her statement, the ‘chief prosecutor’ has tried to act as a surrogate politician and  to influence political events in the interest of the NATO countries presently waging war against Yugoslavia.” Hans Koechler, president of the NGO, International Progress Organization, which has worked with the UN for many years, [date, cite?]
32. “The indictment means that these gentlemen will not be able to participate in peace negotiations…The politicians may not give a damn, but I’m relying on the pressure of public opinion.” (Cassese, quoted in “Karadzic A Pariah, Says War Crimes Tribunal Chief,” ANP English News Bulletin, July 27, 1995.)
33. Thornberry, op cit., p….
34. Michael Mandel, “Politics And Human Rights In The International Criminal Tribunal For The Former Yugoslavia: Our Case Against NATO And The Lessons To Be Learned From It,” Fordham International Law Journal 25: 95-128 [2001]
35. Ibid.
36. Final Report to the Prosecutor by the Committee Established to Review the NATO Bombing Campaign…, U.N Doc. PR/P.I.S./510-E [2000], available at http://www.un.org/icty/pressreal/nato061300.htm [hereafter OTP].
37. Ibid., #53
38. BBC Newsnight, Feb. 12, 2002.
39. OTP, # 59-61.
40. ICTY Press Release, Sept. 29, 1999 (emphasis added).
41. See Johnstone, Fools’ Crusade, pp. ….
42. Quoted in Sellars, op. cit., p…..
43. Cite Pomfret and????
44. Bosnian Muslim military figure Naser Oric was not indicted by the ICTY until March 28, 2003, and then only on charges related to “violations of the laws and customs of war,” the least grave among the hierarchy of violations for which the ICTY can bring charges—but not “crimes against humanity,” and certainly not “genocide.”  See The Prosecutor of the Tribunal Against Naser Oric, Amended Indictment, Case No. IT-03-68-PT, July 16, 2003, < http://www.un.org/icty/indictment/english/ori-ii030328e.htm >.
45.   The Prosecutor of the Tribunal Against Milan Martic, Initial Indictment, Case No. it-95-11, pars. 15-18, July 25, 1995, <  http://www.un.org/icty/indictment/english/mar-ii950725e.htm >; Robert M. Hayden,  “Biased Justice,” p….
46. Simons, “General Gets 20 Years for Sarajevo Atrocities,” NYT, Dec. 6, 2003.
47. On the presence of the mujahedin in Bosnia, see… ; on the failure of the Tribunal to bring indictments against Tudjman (d. 1999) or Izetbegovic (d. 2003),  see…
48. Simons, ‘Militia Leader Arkan Is Indicted for War Crimes,” NYT April 1, 1999.
49. Simons had no article on the subject at the time of the May 22 indictment, but the matter is covered in a retrospective and goodbye to Arbour, “Proud But Concerned, Tribunal Prosecutor Leaves,” NYT Sept. 15, 1999.
50. Stephen Lee Myers, “Kosovo Inquiry Confirms U.S. Fears of War Crimes Court,” NYT, Jan. 3, 2000.
51. Simons, “General Clark to Testify for the Prosecution at Milosevic Trial,” NYT, Dec. 14, 2003.
52. Simons, “An Unexpected Reversal Of War Times Convictions: U.N. Panel Shows It’s Not a Rubber Stamp,” NYT, Oct. 29, 2001.
53. See the analysis in Koechler, op. cit.
54. Quoted in George Szamuely, “US Hypocrisy on Those IKCs—You Guessed It, International Kangaroo Courts,” http://www.counterpunch.com.szamuely0924.html
55. Michael Mandel, “Milosevic Has a Point,’ Globe and Mail,,……
56. Statement by Cassese to the Secretary General of the UN on January 21, 1994, quoted in Christopher Black, “An Impartial Tribunal? Really?,”

http://emperors-clothes.com/analysis/Impartial.htm

57. Hayden, “Biased Justice,” p…..
58. “When asked by U.S. Information Agency pollsters what they feel are the most urgent issues facing their country, Croats, Muslims, and Serbs have consistently ranked bringing war criminals to justice near the bottom. No more than six percent of the members of any faction regarded the issue as important.” Charles Boyd, “Making Bosnia Work,” Foreign Affairs, Jan. 1998, p. …. (Boyd is a retired U.S. Air Force General with experience in the Balkans.)
59. Mandel, forthcoming book, chap. 4; Carol Off, The Lion, the Fox and the Eagle, pp….
60. Koechler, op. cit.
61. Sellars, op. cit., p. …

62.. Quoted in Black, op. cit.

63. John Laughland, “The Anomalies of the International Criminal Tribunal Are Legion,” The Times [London], June 17, 1999.
64. Ibid.
65. Quoted in Jon Holbrook, “’World court’ is a creature of politics rather than justice,” Times [London], Sept. 26, 2000.
66. goldstone admission—cite to come
67. Simons, “War Crimes Tribunal Expands Milosevic Indictment,” NYT, June 30, 2001.
68. Cassese—to come
69. Quoted in Skoco and Woodger, p. 37.

70  Hayden, “Biased Justice,” p….

71. Ibid., p….
72. Ibid., p….
73. Simons, “Far From Former Yugoslavia, First War Crimes Trial Opens,” NYT, May 8, 1996.
74. Simons, “War Crimes Trial Seeks to Define the Balkan Conflict,” NYT,  May12, 1996.
75. Cedric Thornberry, wondering at the overwhelming and selective focus on Serb crimes, says that “a kindly soul at U.N. headquarters in New York, ear to the diplomatic grapevine, warned me in the spring of 1993, ‘Take cover—the fix is on.” Op. cit., p…..
76. Simons, “Plea Deals Being Used to Clear Balkan War Tribunal’s Docket,” NYT,  Nov. 18, 2003.
77. Simons, “Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate,” NYT, Oct. 12, 2003.
78. Ibid.
79. Edward Greenspan, “This is a lynching,” National Post, March 13, 2002.
80. Ibid.
81. Ian Johnson, “The Judge As Prosecutor: Two Days At The ‘Trial’ of Slobodan Milosevic,” June 19, 2002: http://www.icdsm.org/more/days-i.htm
82. Ibid
83. Ibid.
84. May on Walker, to come
85. ICTY, Milosevic Transcript, February 18, 2002, p. 523, < http://www.un.org/icty/transe54/020218IT.htm >.
86. Michael Scharf, quoted in Sellars,. op.cit, p…..
87. Rules of procedure and evidence: www.un.org/icty/basic/rpe/IT32_rev19.htm#Rule96
88. simons and Sciolini on Clark
89. Tiphaine Dickson etc

90..  Simons, “Judges at War Crimes Trial Rein in Milosevic,” NYT, Sept. 22, 2003.

91. Simons, “Milosevic Trial Settles Into Slow But Judicious Routine,” NYT, March 3, 2003.
92. Ian Traynor, “War Crimes Suspects May Avoid Trial,” Guardian, Feb. 11, 2004.
93. It was notorious during the Vietnam war that the successive rulers of South Vietnam, from Ngo Dinh Diem in 1954 to Nugen Van Thieu in 1974, who were imposed (and removed) by U.S. officials, who regularly acknowledged that they could not yet compete with the Communists on a purely political basis, and were wholly dependent on U.S. support, nevertheless were quite annoyed that U.S. officials failed to treat them with the respect due independent rulers, although the U.S. media came close to doing that.

Source: ZNet