FAIR MEDIA ADVISORY: Washington Post a "Useful Tool" for NATO?

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For Immediate Release, January 28, 2000
Contact: Rachel Coen, (212) 633-6700 x318

When a group of prominent international legal scholars filed a war crimes complaint against NATO for its actions in Yugoslavia, the Washington Post's coverage (1/20/00) was dismissive-- demonstrating a poor grasp of international law and the war in Yugoslavia, and relying on an "expert" with a blatant and unmentioned conflict of interest.

The Post article, by Paris correspondent Charles Trueheart, curtly dismissed the legal case against NATO: "Most legal scholars say the professors have a pretty weak case, noting that accidental civilian deaths caused by NATO bombs fail to meet the commonly accepted standard for war crimes."

Yet only one such "legal scholar" or member of the "human rights community" is quoted by Trueheart: Professor Paul Williams of American University, who is identified simply as a "war crimes expert." Nowhere in the article is it disclosed that Williams, a former State Department lawyer, is currently a paid lobbyist for the "provisional government of Kosovo" in Washington.

There's no evidence in Trueheart's article that he made a genuine effort to determine whether, in fact, other jurists or human rights experts support Mandel's view that NATO violated international law during its Kosovo campaign. Since the Tribunal handed down its indictment of Slobodan Milosevic last May, the Post has used the phrase "indicted war criminal" to describe Milosevic an average of about once a month. Yet the Post has made no serious attempt to evaluate whether our own government violated the laws of war in its air campaign last year.

When the Tribunal was first established, American policymakers hoped that just such a double standard would prevail in media coverage. As the State Department envoy who first dealt with the Tribunal, wrote in the Washington Post (10/3/99), Richard Holbrooke has acknowledged that "the tribunal was widely perceived within the government as little more than a public relations device and as a potentially useful policy tool."

It's bad enough that the international war crimes tribunal-- much of whose funding comes directly from the U.S., in violation of the tribunal's own statutes (New York Press, 1/26/00)-- can be described as a "useful tool" of Washington's foreign policy. The Washington Post should not serve the same function.