I found Bacchus39's post of a mostly untranslated South American article, claiming that Jimmy Carter supports the Colombia 'free' trade deal, and had promised to tout it to the Democrats in Congress, suspicious and untrustworthy, because it doesn't quote Carter, and also because Carter--who has devoted his life to human rights advocacy--would not likely ignore Colombia's dreadful human rights violations. Also, he doesn't work that way (advocating specific bills to Congress). I was willing to give Carter the benefit of the doubt, because he sometimes dives into intractable situations, and tries to get something started that will improve human rights in the long run, and he has been brilliant and courageous in doing so. I foolishly accepted this article as truthful. But I was wondering what Carter really said...
So I did a little research and immediately found this--a Huffington Post article that quotes the Carter Center--basically, this was all Uribe disinformaton promulgated by the Corpo media. The article couldn't quote Carter because
Carter didn't say anything!
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"Colombian President Uribe Misleads Press About Carter's Intentions - Jimmy Carter NOT In Favor of FTA"Posted August 27, 2008
"Though it has received scant press here, the Colombian media recently and enthusiastically reported that Jimmy Carter, after allegedly "resolving his anxieties" about the labor situation in Colombia, would champion Colombian President Alvaro Uribe's bid for the Colombian Free Trade Agreement (FTA) - an agreement which Democrats have forcefully opposed and which Barack Obama himself is against. This news followed Carter's recent sit-down visit with President Uribe in Georgia and was based on President Uribe's representations thereafter that Carter would assist him in urging Congressional Democrats to pass the FTA.
"Surprised by this information, I contacted the Carter Center and received the following reply by e-mail:
"'PC (President Carter) has not yet adopted a public position. Uribe met with him during his recent visit to Atlanta. The media made its own interpretation. The Carter Center information office issued a clarification but it has not (had) the same impact.'
"Indeed, it was not the fault of the media for getting this information wrong. Rather, it was the fault of President Uribe who misled the press on this issue, just as his administration attempted to mislead the U.S. Congress in the spring of 2007 in another failed attempt to obtain passage of the FTA. At that time, a delegation of the Colombian government falsely claimed to Congress that the former director of the DAS (the Colombia's FBI) was innocent of the charge of passing a list of unionists to the paramilitaries to kill. In fact, as Gerardo Reyes of the Miami Herald later reported, Colombia's own office of the Fiscalia (Prosecutor) had concluded months prior to this false claim that the DAS director had in fact passed this hit list to the paramilitaries.
"It would be quite surprising indeed if President Carter, who is known as the "human rights president" and who has certainly committed his post-presidential years to the promotion of human rights, would in fact align himself with such unworthy causes as President Uribe and the Colombia FTA. In fact, this would mark a dramatic reversal from the Carter Center's position on this issue up till now.
"As one spokesman for the Americas Program of the Carter Center, Associate Director Marcelo Varela-Erasheva, explained at a panel discussion which he and I jointly chaired at Emory Law School this past February, the FTA will only aggravate the horrendous humanitarian crisis in that country."(MORE)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-kovalik/colombian-president-uribe_b_121871.html--------------
Here is Bacchus39's post:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=405x7153I think DUers should be aware of the posting of disinformation from an unreliable source, and the posting of self-serving statements and lies from a rightwing politician, without any effort to analyze or vet the source, or verify the information.
Is this Bushville or what? Is DU going to permit such lying headlines to be run on this site?
I am normally tolerant of a wide spectrum of opinion and information, but I am not tolerant of LIES, and I do my best to analyze the big ones and the subtler ones, in Corpo 'news' posts on subjects that I know something about. And I think it should be a topic of discussion here, what to do about a DU poster posting something like this, as if it were the truth--without research into what the truth is, without even a caveat (for instance, pointing out that Carter was not quoted in the article), and leaving most of it in Spanish, so many readers would have trouble grasping the context and the reliability of its other assertions. This lying article serves the Bushite/Uribe agenda, which we have seen Bacchus39 advocate in other posts and comments. Is there any way to protect DU from becoming a Bushite propaganda site, without curtailing the generally beneficial, wide-open discussion that occurs here?
Probably there is not. But I am raising the question, because this headline has been sitting here for more than a week, unchallenged--until I took a look at it, and bothered to find out the truth. It has received 50 views! 50 people have been disinformed--and some may know it, and some may not, and some may be simply confused. I guess the only remedy is vigilance. But I am concerned about the many visitors who come here looking for the facts that they are not getting from the Corpo media, and finding crap like this.