After
ACLU Legal Action, UN's 2017 Propaganda Plan Leaves UN
Officials Silent, The A in CYA
By Matthew
Russell Lee
UNITED NATIONS,
January 29 – Hours after the
American Civil Liberties Union
legal
action and injunction,
what explains the near-total
silence from UN
officials? Some say a
desire to avoid UN funding
cuts; others more realistically
see personal desire not to
lose well-paid jobs.
But where is the
UN communications guidance (or
2017 propaganda plan by
Under Secretary General
Cristina Gallach) in all this?
Nowhere.
Intentionally so.
The
communications chief of the
UN, already named by the UN Office
of Internal Oversight Services
as having done no due
diligence on Ng Lap Seng, the
defendant
in the first of two UN
bribery cases,
promulgated a self-serving
rah-rah trying to promote
herself, not the Organization.
Her CYA made an A of the UN.
Long after the
injunction, the UN response
was three mid-level (ASG,
Special Adviser and holdover
spokesman) re-tweets, coy like
the self-serving Gallach (UNless
going
Dutch).
While in some place the UN is
doing good work, the worst of
the organization is
exemplified in its Department
of Public Information,
particularly as regards
planning to mislead the public
in 2017 about such issues has
peacekeepers' rapes and
bringing deadly cholera to
Haiti.
See UN
Plan, exclusively put
online here.
UN
Peacekeeping needs radical
reform, and UN DPI under
Cristina Gallach needs to be
disbanded.
Gallach
produced a propaganda plan for
2017, which multiple outraged
UN sources leaked to Inner
City Press. Gallach's "2017
Communications Guidance"
has a paragraph on cholera in
Haiti which does not mention
that the UN brought the
disease to the island. Page 9.
While
barely a million dollars,
nearly all of it blood money
from Ban Ki-moon's South
Korea, has been raised,
Gallach tells her propaganda
troops to "promote the UN's
efforts to combat the disease
harnessing.. social media
tools."
This is
propaganda.
Likewise on
sexual exploitation and abuse
by peacekeepers, Gallach's
rah-rah implies that the
corner has been turned. Page
5. While the UN's billion
dollar DR Congo mission is a
mere footnote, the UN's failed
envoy on Yemen is portrayed as
successful on Page 6. The
section on the Middle East ,
and pages 10 and 14-15, are
designed to trigger budget
cuts.
UN's
"2017 Communications Guidance,"
Here, Is Propaganda Plan of Cristina
Gallach, Who Should Be Fired by
Matthew
Russell Lee on Scribd
It is
Gallach who should be fired.
As the UN
remains unreformed after Ban
Ki-moon's ten years ended with
corruption, long asked about
by the Press, exposed, budget
cuts are coming.
In
Washington executive orders
are being prepared to cut up
to 40% of the US'
contributions to the UN, and
to fully cut funding to
entities blamed for violation
of human rights.
Inner City
Press has put that draft
EO online here.
One
obvious question is whether
the total denial of due
process for whistleblowers -
already part of US law - and
investigative press which covers
UN corruption
constitutes such a violation.
For
example, the UN Department of
Public Information under
Cristina Gallach in early 2016
threw
Inner City Press out of the
UN, dumping its
investigative files onto First
Avenue, without a single
hearing or opportunity to be
heard, and no
appeal since.
All this for
seeking to cover an event in
the UN Press Briefing Room
which was nowhere listed as
closed, and leaving as soon as
a single UN Security officer
said the Spokesman, Stephane
Dujarric, wanted Inner City
Press out.
Gallach had a
conflict of interest, having
been asked
by Inner City Press about her
own links with
Macau-based businessman Ng Lap
Seng, facing trial (like Ban
Ki-moon's nephew and brother)
on bribery charges.
There are no
rules, only the one-person
fiat rule of an official
dumped on Ban's UN by Spain,
where she had previously
managed, at most, seven people
as spokesperson to Javier
Solana. Nothing has been done;
eleven months later Gallach
still requires Inner City
Press to have "minders"
to cover the UN Security
Council.
The cuts,
and a new US Ambassador, are
coming. Six days after a
confirmation hearing in which
she called for accountability
at the UN, including for
peacekeepers' abuses, Nikki
Haley on January 24 was
confirmed to replace Samantha
Power as US Ambassador to the
UN.
This came
after at least two business
days of no
photos replacing those
of President Barack Obama and
Vice President Joe Biden at
the US Mission to the UN.
On January
24, Inner City Press asked
former UN official, now
Swedish foreign minister
Margot Wallstrom about Haley's
call to defund countries whose
peacekeepers abuse. Tweeted
video here. There are
reforms needed at the UN.
Back on
January 18 before Haley spoke
as nominee for US Ambassador
to the UN, Senator Bob Corker
said he sometimes wondered if
just-left Secretary General
Ban Ki-moon had a pulse.
In fact,
Ban was quite active in
helping his own relatives at
the UN, promoting his son in
law to the top UN job in
Kenya, his brother mining in
Myanmar with a "UN
delegation," indicted nephew
using Ban's name to sell real
estate.
When Haley
began, she said the UN has a
"checkered history." That's
being diplomatic. Consider a
head of Peacekeeping who has
linked rapes to R&R, video
here.
Consider a
head of the UN "Department of
Public Information" who did no
due diligence over indicted UN
briber Ng Lap Seng - then
evicted and still restricts
the Press which asked here
about it. Audit
here, Para 37-40, 20b; NYT
here.
In
response to questions, Haley
praised the UN peacekeeping
mission in Sierra Leone,
questioned the one in South
Sudan and that country's
government. She noted that
countries make money off their
peacekeepers. The case in
point, we note, is Burundi, here.
***
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