Edward Herman

[Edward S. Herman is a Professor Emeritus of Finance at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.  He has written extensively on economics, political economy, foreign policy, and media analysis.  Among his books are The Political Economy of Human Rights (2 vols, with Noam Chomsky, South End Press, 1979); Corporate Control, Corporate Power (Cambridge University Press, 1981);  The "Terrorism" Industry (with Gerry O'Sullivan, Pantheon, 1990);  The Myth of the Liberal Media: An Edward Herman Reader (Peter Lang, 1999); and Manufacturing Consent (with Noam Chomsky, Pantheon, 1988 and 2002).  In addition to his regular "Fog Watch" column in Z Magazine, he edits a web site, inkywatch.org, that monitors the Philadelphia Inquirer.]

Web: Edward Herman's ZSpace Page  globalresearch.ca

[2010 Dec] The Demolition of the Yugoslav Tribunal by Edward Herman

[2005] The Dismantling of Yugoslavia. A Study in Inhumanitarian Intervention (and a Western Liberal-Left Intellectual and Moral Collapse) by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson

[2010] Michael Mandel on "How America Gets Away with Murder"  by Edward S. Herman

[2008] Rejoinder To Christopher Hitchens By Edward S. Herman

[1998] Pol Pot's Death In The Propaganda System by Edward S. Herman

[1997] Pol Pot And Kissinger. On war criminality and impunity by Edward S. Herman

http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/15696

Books
[2009] The Politics of Genocide by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson

Quotes
[2009] Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo in the Propaganda System by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson The established narrative’s 800,000 or more largely Tutsi deaths resulting from a “preprogrammed genocide” committed by “Hutu Power” appears to have no basis in any facts, beyond the early claims by Kagame’s RPF and its politically motivated Western sponsors and propagandists....Washington gains a strong military presence in Central Africa, a diminution of its European rivals’ influence, proxy armies to serve its interests, and access to the raw material-rich Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC, known as Zaire into 1997); while the RPF renews Tutsi-minority control of Rwanda, and gains a free hand to kill any perceived internal rivals, along with a client state’s usual immunities, money, weapons, foreign investment, and a great deal of international prestige......Very big lies about Rwanda are now institutionalized and are part of the common (mis)understanding in the West. In reality, Rwanda’s Paul Kagame is one of the great mass murderers of our time, far surpassing Uganda’s former dictator Idi Amin. Yet, thanks to the remarkable myth structure that surrounds him, he enjoys immense popularity with his chief patron in Washington, his image of big-time killer transmuted into that of an honored savior, deserving strong Western support......what Kagame overthrew was a multiethnic, power-sharing, coalition government; what Kagame imposed was a Tutsi-dominated dictatorship; and what Kagame turned Rwanda and the whole of Central Africa into was a rolling genocide that is ongoing. But it is true that he is a shining “star” in the Western firmament and its propaganda system.
.......What the United States and its Western allies (Britain, Canada, and Belgium) really did was to sponsor the U.S.-trained Kagame; support his invasion of Rwanda from Uganda and the massive ethnic cleansing prior to April 1994; weaken the Rwandan state by forcing an economic recession and the RPF’s penetration of the government and throughout the country; and then press for the complete removal of UN troops. They did this because they didn’t want UN troops to stand in the way of Kagame’s conquest of the country, even though Rwanda’s Hutu authorities were urging the dispatch of more UN troops.
...... it also cleared the ground for Kagame and Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni—Kagame’s ally and the two staunchest U.S. clients in the region—to invade and occupy the DRC and beyond periodically, without opposition from the “international community.”
    The Pentagon has very actively supported these invasions of the DRC, even more heavily than it supported the RPF’s drive to take Kigali. This support led to the killing of many thousands of Hutu refugees in a series of mass slaughters (ca. 1994-1997), and also provided cover for a greater series of Kagame-Museveni assaults on the DRC that have destabilized life in this large country of perhaps sixty million people, with millions perishing in the process.

[2009] Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo in the Propaganda System by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson In 1999, former RPF military officer Christophe Hakizimana submitted a letter to the UN Commission of Inquiry into the Actions of the United Nations during the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda (S/1999/1257). In his letter, which detailed the RPF’s military strategy from 1990 on, Hakizimana claimed that the RPF was responsible for killing as many as two million Hutu in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and he informed the Commission that by indicting Hutu, the ICTR was focusing on the wrong side in the conflict. We base this on personal communications with the international criminal lawyer Christopher Black of Toronto, who, since 2000, has served as defense counsel before the ICTR on behalf of the Hutu General Augustin Nindiliyimana, a former Chief of Staff of the Rwanda Gendarmerie (or National Police).

[2009] Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo in the Propaganda System by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Unvanquished: A U.S.-U.N. Saga (New York: Random House, 1999), 129-41; here 138, 135. According to Robin Philpot, Boutros-Ghali told him on the record that “The genocide in Rwanda was 100 percent the responsibility of the Americans!” See the Introduction to Philpot, Rwanda 1994.

[2009] Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo in the Propaganda System by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson To accept the standard model of “The Genocide,” one must ignore the large-scale killing and ethnic cleansing of Hutus by the RPF long before the April-July 1994 period, which began when Ugandan forces invaded Rwanda under President (and dictator) Yoweri Museveni on October 1, 1990. At its inception, the RPF was a wing of the Ugandan army, the RPF’s leader, Paul Kagame, having served as director of Ugandan military intelligence in the 1980s. The Ugandan invasion and resultant combat were not a “civil war,” but rather a clear case of aggression. However, the invasion led to no reprimand or cessation of support by the United States or Britain—and, in contrast to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait just two months before, which was countered in the Security Council by a same-day demand that Iraq withdraw its forces immediately—the Council took no action on the Ugandan invasion of Rwanda until March 1993. It did not even authorize an observer mission (UNOMUR) until late June 1993, the RPF by then having occupied much of northern Rwanda and driven out several hundred thousand Hutu farmers

[2009] Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo in the Propaganda System by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson It is clear that Museveni and the RPF were perceived as serving U.S. interests, and that the government of President Habyarimana was targeted for ouster. UN Security Council inaction flowed from this political bias. In his assessment of the years he spent representing U.S. interests in Africa, former Assistant Secretary of State Herman Cohen raised the question of why, as of October 1, 1990, the “first day of the crisis,” as he calls it, “did [the United States] automatically exclude the policy option of informing Ugandan President Museveni that the invasion of Rwanda by uniformed members of the Ugandan army was totally unacceptable, and that the continuation of good relations between the United States and Uganda would depend on his getting the RPF back across the border?” This question is naïve but revealing—the answer, like that to the question of why the United States lobbied for the withdrawal of UN forces from Rwanda as “The Genocide” was getting under way in April 1994, is that the Ugandan army and RPF were doing what the United States wanted done in Rwanda.

[2009] Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo in the Propaganda System by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson Paul Kagame and the RPF were creatures of U.S. power from their origins in Uganda in the 1980s. Allan Stam, a Rwanda scholar who once served with the U.S. Army Special Forces, notes that Kagame “had spent some time at Fort Leavenworth…not too far before the 1994 genocide.” Fort Leavenworth is the U.S. Army’s “commander general staff college…where rising stars of the U.S. military and other places go to get training as they are on track to become generals. The training that they get there is on planning large scale operations. It’s not planning small-scale logistic things. It’s not tactics. It’s about how do you plan an invasion. And apparently [Kagame] did very well.”
    By 1994, Kagame’s RPF possessed, in addition to the necessary manpower and material, a sophisticated plan for seizing power in Rwanda that, in its final execution, Stam says, “looks staggeringly like the United States’ invasion of Iraq in 1991.” Stam adds that the RPF launched its final assault on the Rwandan government almost immediately after the assassination of Habyarimana, within 60 to 120 minutes of the shooting-down of his jet, with “50,000 [RPF] soldiers mov[ing] into action on two fronts, in a coordinated fashion”—clearly “a plan that was not worked out on the back of an envelope.”