28304: Holmstead (news): Granma: RSF DENOUNCED (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

FROM:  John Holmstead


Havana. April 18, 2006

RSF DENOUNCED IN FRANCE
Ménard resorts to threats

BY JEAN-GUY ALLARD ?Special for Granma International?

ROBERT Ménard, the permanent secretary of Reporters
sans frontières (RSF), which feigns to defend press
freedoms, cannot listen to a few home truths. He has
just publicly threatened to sue French investigator
and writer Maxime Vivas for having exposed him in the
Paris Metro daily as an accomplice to the U.S.
Department of State.

In its April 6 edition, the paper published a long
interview with Vivas, titled "Le Sud, front de refus"
(The South, the front of resistance) in which he
stated, among other things, that RSF receives
significant funding from CIA front organizations. The
following day, apparently traumatized by the
divulgation of such a truth in the French press, which
he attempts to control, Ménard demanded that the same
daily publish a text in which he feverishly denounced
Vivas and later threatened to take him to court.

By formulating this ultimatum, Ménard?s
multimillion-dollar machine evidently attempted to
silence the writer who, in addition, is demanding
records from the European Union regarding its
subsidies to RSF. But Vivas answered RSF with an open
letter in which he detailed a long list of strongly
documented arguments.

Regarding Bush administration money, the investigator
first reminded Ménard and his troupe that, in a Guild
Reporter article dated March 11, 2005, Californian
Diana Barahona revealed how RSF received U.S.
government funds through the National Endowment for
Democracy (NED). "The Human Rights Lawyer Eva Golinger
has discovered that more than $20 million have been
handed over by the NED and USAID to opposition groups
and private media in Venezuela, many of whom
participated in the coup. The NED granted RSF nearly
$40,000 in January, 2005," wrote Barahona.

Vivas next cited former CIA agent Philip Agee, who
stated in an interview with journalist Jonah Gindin
(March 25, 2005) that the NED works with the CIA. In
Nicaragua, for example, "the CIA and the NED have
created a civic front called Vía Cívica" (Civic Way).

Later he noted how since 2002, the Center for a Free
Cuba, created specifically to topple the Cuban
Revolution using public funds and directed by Frank
Calzón, whose history is well known, also grants money
to RSF.

The investigator indicated that a text dated July 8,
2005 on RSF?s own website read: "?the only subsidies
that we receive from the United States are those from
the Center for a Free Cuba and the National Endowment
for Democracy (NED). "

However Vivas noted that on the same site, included in
small print in the list of sponsors, is the George
Soros Open Society Institute.

"Why is RSF hiding these sponsors from Metro readers?"
he concluded.

THE RSF DOSSIER KEEPS EXPANDING

Meanwhile, information demonstrating Robert Ménard?s
complicity with U.S. intelligence agencies continues
to accumulate. By mentioning the Center for a Free
Cuba and the NED as his only source of U.S. funding,
Ménard is lying by omission ? and he knows it.

The last RSF financial report in the United States
revealed that his attempts to obtain private donations
from charities failed abysmally, as it received barely
$75,000, of which $40,000 came from the Working Assets
telephone company. All the money from the State
Department comes directly to France and the funds to
pay personnel and for the RSF offices in the United
States are later sent to Paris.

The sum of the disclosed funds from the Center for a
Free Cuba and the NED since 2002 is only $215,000,
which is NOT sufficient to pay the costs of
maintaining RSF?s representation in the United States.
Therefore, other financing must exist.

The U.S. financial report on the RSF is prepared by a
prestigious firm in Alexandria, Virginia, only a
15-minute drive from CIA headquarters. A bit strange
for an organization that claims to be nongovernmental
and has its office in New York.

An expert on the subject consulted by Granma
International had a significant comment: "The costs of
operating RSF are incredibly high for an organization
with this level of income?"

Contacted a few days ago by this weekly, Diana
Barahona, without doubt the most knowledgeable U.S.
investigator regarding RSF, recalled that in 2002 Otto
Reich was utilized once again by the U.S. State
Department to coordinate the coup against Chávez (in
Venezuela) and the overthrow of Aristide (in Haiti).

Reich is a "Cuban exile with a long criminal record, a
trustee of the Center for a Free Cuba and was the
person who arranged with Robert Ménard for State
Department money to go to Reporters sans frontières,"
she emphasized.

The continually strengthening ties between RSF and
U.S. agencies dedicated to the destabilization of
countries that do not subordinate themselves to
Washington?s interests explains Robert Ménard?s
distress over the denouncement published in the Paris
Metro. And, there is much more still to be told.

Meanwhile, Maxime Vivas continues waiting for a reply
to his request to the EU mediator for an investigation
into the case of RSF, an organization to which the EU
has so far paid more than 1.2 million euros. According
to Ménard himself, RSF handles an annual budget of
more than 5 million euros.

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