U.N. Enablers of "Aggressive War"

Another one-time thorn in the side of the U.S. "unipolar power" was the IAEA when it was under the control of Director General Mohamed ElBaradei, an Egyptian. The IAEA challenged the Bush administration's claims about Iraq having a nuclear program, when one really didn't exist.

However, being right is no protection when U.S. officials want to bring an agency into line with U.S. policy and propaganda. So, early in the Obama administration -- as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was pushing for a hardline on Iran over its nascent nuclear program -- the U.S. government engineered the insertion of a pliable Japanese diplomat, Yukiya Amano, into the IAEA's top job.

Before his appointment, Amano had portrayed himself as an independent-minded fellow who was resisting U.S.-Israeli propaganda about the Iranian nuclear program. Yet behind the scenes, he was meeting with U.S. and Israeli officials to coordinate on how to serve their interests (even though Israel is an actual rogue nuclear state, not a hypothetical or fictional one).

Amano's professed doubts about an Iranian nuclear-bomb project, which even the U.S. intelligence community agreed no longer existed, was just a theatrical device to intensify the later impact if he were to declare that Iran indeed was building a secret nuke, thus justifying the desire of Israeli leaders and American neoconservatives to "bomb-bomb-bomb" Iran.

But this U.S. ploy was spoiled by Pvt. Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning's leaking of hundreds of thousands of pages of U.S. diplomatic cables. Among them were reports on Amano's hidden collaboration with U.S. and Israeli officials; his agreement with U.S. emissaries on who to fire and who to retain among IAEA officials; and even Amano's request for additional U.S. financial contributions.

The U.S. embassy cables revealing the truth about Amano were published by the U.K. Guardian in 2011 (although ignored by The New York Times, The Washington Post and other mainstream U.S. news outlets). Despite the silence of the major U.S. news media, Internet outlets, such as Consortiumnews.com, highlighted the Amano cables, meaning that enough Americans knew the facts not to be fooled again. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com's "Did Manning Help Avert War with Iran?"]

A Collective Collapse

So, over the years, there has been a collective collapse of the independence at U.N.-related agencies. An international bureaucrat who gets on the wrong side of the United States or Israel can expect to be fired and humiliated, while those who play ball can be assured of a comfortable life as a "respected" diplomat.

But this reality is little known to most Americans so they are still inclined to be influenced when a "U.N. investigation" reaches some conclusion condemning some country that already is on the receiving end of negative U.S. propaganda.

The New York Times, CNN and other major U.S. news outlets are sure to trumpet these "findings" with great seriousness and respect and to treat any remaining doubters as outside the mainstream. Of course, there's an entirely different response on the rare occasion when some brave or foolhardy human rights bureaucrat criticizes Israel's treatment of the Palestinians. Then, the U.N. finding is just a sign of anti-Israeli bias and should be discounted.

In the far more frequent cases when a U.N. report is in line with U.S. propaganda, American journalists almost never turn a critical eye toward the quality of the evidence or the leaps of logic. We saw that happen this week with a thinly sourced and highly dubious U.N. report blaming the Syrian government for an alleged sarin incident on April 4. A major contradiction in the evidence -- testimony given to OPCW investigators undercutting the conclusion that a Syrian warplane could have dropped a sarin bomb -- was brushed aside by the U.N. human rights investigators and was ignored by the Times and other major U.S. news outlets.

But what is perhaps most troubling is that these biased U.N. reports are now used to justify continued wars of aggression by stronger countries against weaker ones. So, instead of acting as a bulwark to protect the powerless from the powerful as the U.N. Charter intended, the U.N. bureaucracy has turned the original noble purpose of the institution on its head by becoming an enabler of the "supreme international crime," wars of aggression.

[For more on this topic, see Consortiumnews.com's "How US Pressure Bends UN Agencies."]

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