Invitation to an Ambush
From the book Media Cleansing: Dirty Reporting
by Peter
 Brock.
P.58

That’s why I was summoned to Washington. After I spoke out about the negligence and the omissions—and the bias. I was “invited” to explain my observations to some of my outraged fellow journalists on a panel, entitled “The War in the Former Yugoslavia: Are the Western Media Combatants?” I wasn’t exactly asked to appear; my invitation was more like a summons from Foreign Policy Editor Bill Maynes. He was taking plenty of heat in Washington and showed me samples of angry, demanding letters that went to his boss, Carnegie board president Morton Abramowitz. It was no secret among Carnegie insiders that Abramowitz, who took his own public position on the Yugoslav issue, wanted to fire Maynes for publishing my article about biased war reporting.

Abramowitz, a former U.S. ambassador to Turkey during the Bush Administration, was aligned in his Balkan sentiments since 1992 with billionaire and currency speculator George Soros. Abramowitz, who was also a former ambassador to Thailand, was one of the main organizers behind the Action Council for Peace in the Balkans that was bankrolled by Soros in 1993. Soros’ mysterious agenda in the Yugoslav wars was supposedly inspired by philanthropic motives involving scores of millions of dollars in humanitarian aid programs, such as construction of a water-purification and pumping facility in Sarajevo. However, once in operation, the plant became a public relations tool and was shut down whenever the whims of the Sarajevo government wanted to draw world attention to the city’s bouts with thirst caused by supposed Serb bombardments. Often the water lines were turned off without any shelling.

Soros, immune from any serious or timely scrutiny by the Western media throughout the Yugoslav upheavals, wanted to enlist a Washington cadre of influence brokers to quietly exert pressure on the White House and hesitant members of Congress. “Abramowitz played a considerable role in making contacts and shaping strategy.” But the strategy of discreet lobbying was later jettisoned as public outbursts spewed from so-called “peace” advocates for air strikes in Bosnia and even against Belgrade.

My positions were already in print, regarding the question posed by the title of the panel gathering. Carnegie’s “Face-to-Face” was “a forum facilitating dialogue among governmental and non-governmental participants on major international issues.” Even as a career journalist, I never considered myself an authority about major international issues. But then, there wasn’t much dialog provoked by my own or any other public critique of the media in the Yugoslav wars. Few cared. Most waited to be told what to believe. The “forum,” despite its high-brow format, could be an interesting discussion about media coverage in Yugoslavia. Instead, I smelled an ambush.
My main adversary was Charles Lane, an angry, petulant journalist and self-appointed champion of U.S. intervention in Yugoslavia who was at Newsweek and later at The New Republic. Lane was the bloodhound for Newsday’s Roy Gutman and led the charge in early December 1993 to undermine my critique in Foreign Policy. But a few weeks before the Carnegie forum, I learned that Lane was investigating my personal background, beginning with my college days in the 1970s on up to my recent visits to Yugoslavia when he was trying to find “proof” that I was boarded and fed in hotels on the tab of the Belgrade regime.

There wasn’t any proof because it never happened, and Lane couldn’t find anybody in Belgrade to make such a claim. I wondered what kind of management at Lane’s magazine would shoulder the expense of time and international travel to smear the reputation of another journalist. And, what was he “researching” about me in Berlin?!
Peter Brock — George Soros — Charles Lane