Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [265]
Jean Donovan asked Ambassador Robert White, “What do you do when even to help the poor, to take care of the orphans, is considered an act of subversion by the government?” (quoted in Allman, p. 3). Helping orphans in the Salvadoran countryside was also regarded as an act of subversion by officials of the Reagan administration.
54. The New York Time’s version, shown on table 2–2, gives a succinct and inaccurate version of the use of the underwear.
55. “Statement by Revolutionary Governing Junta,” December 8, 1980. The statement also notes that “the Revolutionary Government repudiates and condemns violence and the irrational crimes it generates”!
56. Juan de Onis, December 24. The question does not arise for the Times of why the security forces would want to conceal the bodies if they were uninvolved in the murders.
57. We discussed this myth in “Archbishop Oscar Romero” (p. 44).
58. Juan de Onis, “Rightist Terror Stirs Argentina,” New York Times, August 29, 1976.
59. See below, note 67.
60. John Dinges, “Evidence Indicates Military Planned Missionaries’ Deaths,” National Catholic Reporter, July 17, 1981.
61. Stephen Kinzer, “Ex-Aide in Salvador Accuses Colleagues on Death Squads,” March 3, 1984. Note the “soft” headline. An option forgone by the Times was a headline like: “Duarte and Defense Minister Casanova Accused of Cover-up of Murder of Four American Women.” Santivánez was paid $50,000 to give his evidence, a sum he requested on the ground of the risk he was taking and the probability that he would be incomeshort in the future as a result of his confession. This payment was given unusual publicity as suggesting a compromising quality to his testimony, and the New York Times squelched a second installment of his evidence on this principled ground—which they never apply to Soviet defectors, who are less in need of protection. The revelation that the “leading democrats” who were formed into a civilian front for the contras by the CIA have been receiving over $80,000, tax-free, annually from the CIA for years has never compromised their integrity as media sources. Nicaraguan defector Miranda got $800,000 for his services without being discredited.
62. Excellent accounts were produced by Michael Posner and the Lawyers’ Committee for International Human Rights in a series of investigatory reports, dated September 1981, July 20, 1982, and February 1, 1983, which contain detailed and crushing evidence of a completely broken-down judicial process and an official cover-up. Once again, as with the Dinges report, these documents were essentially ignored in the U.S. mass media and their facts and leads suppressed. News coverage of the lawyers’ committee documents was negligible. Michael Posner and Scott Greathead did succeed in placing an Op-Ed article in the Times on December 6, 1983, entitled “3 Years after Killings, No Justice in Salvador.”
63. Both Time and Newsweek had articles featuring stonewalling in February 1981—Time’s article was entitled “Stonewalling” (Feb. 23)—but although the stonewalling continued for years, this was the end of the news magazines’ interest in the matter.
64. Lawyers’ Committee for International Human Rights, Update: Justice in El Salvador: A Case Study, February 1, 1983, p. 17.
65. Bonner, Weakness and Deceit, p. 80.
66. Larry Rohter, “Salvador Defense Lawyer Charges Cover-Up in Slaying of U.S. Nuns,” New York Times, May 6, 1985.
67. In the same month that Hinton was asserting with assurance that the low-level guardsmen were acting on their own, internal State Department memos were stating that “Reading the documents provoked several questions