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By Matthew Russell Lee, CJR Letter The Hill

UNITED NATIONS GATE, May 10 – Six days after banning Inner City Press for life from the UN, back  on 23 August 2018 UN Global Communicator Alison Smale held a faux press conference from which the Press was banned to announce the UN will spend the public's money in Salt Lake City. In the more than 300 days since banning Inner City Press from entering the UN, Smale never once held a hearing or allowed any appeal.

On May 3 Inner City Press exclusively published that Smale would be leaving the UN. And on May 9, at the noon briefing Smale was banning Inner City Press from for the 308th day in a row, it was confirmed with this spin: "Alison Smale will be leaving her role as Under‑Secretary‑General and Head of the Department of Global Communications as planned at the end of the summer.  The Secretary‑General is very grateful for Ms. Smale’s work and leadership over the past two years.  He especially appreciates her efforts at reforming and modernizing the operations of the Department as it communicates the work and ideas of the UN creatively and effectively."

This is laughable - a leader who can't even communicate, a modernizer who pushed UN News into old school propaganda - we'll have more on this, and on what must change as Smale goes, and well before the next UN General Assembly High Level Week, which Smale banned Inner City Press from for the first time in a decade and must be reversed, as a condition of whoever replaces her. Watch this site.
In March 2019 Smale has gone out to Utah where, beyond Smale's own self serving propaganda, a single article emerged on "Utah Policy," reporting that "Secretary Smale made her trip to Salt Lake to tour area facilities, visit with conference organizers and become familiar with the city prior to the United Nations event, scheduled for Aug. 26-28. The conference will be based at the Salt Palace Convention Center, but will be a boon for downtown hotels, restaurants and other attractions." But do they know that the UN is covering up for rapes by its peacekeepers, including of children, and refusing now to answer Press questions about the cases? Do they know that Smale, far from promoting transparency in the Organization, has yet to allow any hearing to, nor appeal by, the Press which reports on the UN bribery conviction of Patrick Ho and the China Energy Fund Committee, which has a financial link to her boss Antonio Guterres? Her deputy Maher Nasser, whose false testimony she used to justify her ghoulish lifetime banning order, has named "Maruxa Cardama, Secretary-General of the Partnership on Sustainable, Low Carbon Transport, as Chair of the sixty-eighth United Nations Civil Society Conference that will take place from 26 to 28 August in Salt Lake City, United States."  Swan song for a censor. Like Sidibe, Smale should leave before then - or at the very least, her legacy of censorship should be belatedly reversed.

Background: After having covered the UN since 2005 for Inner City Press, and pursued stories of UN under-performance from Sri Lanka to Darfur and Haiti to Yemen and Cameroon, at 4 pm on Friday August 17 I got a four page letter from Under Secretary General Alison Smale, formerly the New York Times' Berlin bureau chief. We've put the letter on Scribd here, Patreon download here. 

The letter informed me, without a single opportunity to be heard and offer rebuttal, that “your accreditation is hereby withdrawn pursuant to the Guidelines.” It cited what it called three previous warnings. But on further inspection there is no there, there. And Grand Inquisitor Alison Smale didn't even consider, or acknowledge, that Inner City Press had responded to the spurious complaints -- from the Morocco mission to the UN on 17 March 2017 and from DPI Deputy Maher Nasser, who blocks Inner City Press on Twitter, on 20 October 2017.

  We'll start with the latter, since a DPI official mis-using his position as Nasser did was the subject of Inner City Press timely request to Smale that she recuse herself (which she refused to do - she has functioned, after all, as Antonio Guterres Global Censor). After receiving via DPI's Tal Mekel at 6 pm on Friday 20 October 2017 a letter clearly drafted by Nasser, Inner City Press immediately published a story about it. The Free UN Coalition for Access, an actual press freedom advocacy group which DPI's Hua Jiang had threatened my accreditation for posting a sign for on my then office door, put out a press release and flier. And on Monday 23 March 17 before 11 am I sent the following to DPI including Smale (who has never responded to one of my more than a dozen e-mails, while openly laughing and socializing with corporate correspondents who are her friends) and to Guterres and his deputy Amina J. Mohammed: "From: Matthew R. Lee
Date: Mon, Oct 23, 2017 at 10:18 AM
Subject: Response to UN to threat to accreditation of Inner City Press, which is retaliatory, vague and contrary to freedom of the press
To: Tal Mekel , SGCentral , amina.mohammed [at] un.org, alison.smale [at] un.org
Cc: nasser [at] un.org, funca, The Free UN Coalition for Access

Dear Mr. Mekel, and those UN officials copied below (SG Guterres, DSG Mohammed, USG Smale, etc) --

The UN threat letter sent to me after 5 pm on Friday, attached, coming as it does as Inner City Press pursues stories not only of UN corruption but, most pressingly, inaction amid mass killings in Cameroon and elsewhere is troubling.

It has the obvious effect of discouraging reporting. For example, while it flatly states that I “breached” a rule during a photo op on the 38th floor, it does not say how, or even what day or which photo op.

The effect is to discourage me from covering any of these photo ops / meetings on the 38th floor, since I have no way of knowing when I will be charged with a violation under which you “may” review my accreditation.

This vagueness is contrary to, for example, the US First Amendment, but also numerous UN-claimed principles of freedom of the press and due process.

As to Mr Nasser's misuse of the DPI / MALU threat process to try to win an argument he escalated on Twitter on October 19, saying I should be less negative about the UN when I noted how many clicks it takes to find sexual abuse and exploitation information on the new DPKO site he promoted - before he blocked me on October 20 -- great outreach there, now communications are broken off -- the audio linked to in the article is from the stakeout area by the Secretariat lobby elevators. It did not violate even this rule that the DPI and DSS mis-negotiated, not with the press corps but a subset of the UN Correspondents Association, whose members by the way do not obtain or even seek prior consent for recording, and membership in which is not and cannot be required to be a resident correspondent.

But to Inner City Press, the UN writes in fine Kafka-esque style: “we would like to remind you that filming and recording on the 38th floor are limited to official photo opportunities, and recording conversations of others in the room is not permitted. It has been brought to our attention that you breached that rule recently. Please kindly take note that any further violation of the guidelines and established journalistic standards could lead to a review of your accreditation status.” When was the breach? If a UN official says or does something embarrassing during a photo op, can the UN review Inner City Press' accreditation?

Your letter unless and until retracted means that publications which even link to audio that one participant in which is embarrassed of can have their accreditations reviewed: for example, if a UN official participating in a meeting on the 38th floor recorded it and, being disgusted by the UN's actions or inaction leaked it to the press, the press could be reviewed for publishing their audio recorded “without consent.”

This is, again, obviously contrary to, for example, the US First Amendment, but also numerous UN-claimed principles of freedom of the press and due process.

The outstanding request, to MALU, USG Smale, SG Guterres and DSG Mohammed, that Inner City Press resident corresponent access and work space S-303 which was wrongful taken without hearing or appeal 20 months ago as I pursued the Ng Lap Seng UN bribery scandal which resulted this summer in six guilty verdicts, is below and incorporated herein by reference and I insist on a response to my two letters to then-new USG Smale in September. I was told there is an awareness of the need to show Inner City Press the “courtesy” of a response, but there has still been none, until the October 20 accreditation threat was the response.

The UN should care about, and not seek to hinder, reporting on for example the killings in Cameroon and even UN corruption. Threats of censorship are not the way to accomplish this. Inner City Press should be restored to its resident correspondent accreditation and shared workspace S-303, both of which were taken 20 months ago in retaliation for covering UN corruption in connection with Ng Lap Seng and, if there is some problem in your view with reporting and broadcasting what UN officials say, rules should be proposed that do not so blatantly violate the very principles of freedom of the press that the UN preaches to others. Inner City Press is more than willing to work in this regard."  So where is that, in Smale's hit job lifetime ban letter? To simply recite complaints, by your own deputy, while ignored the detailed responses that were filed at the time shows bad faith. Smale's letter must be reversed - and more. Watch this site. Inner City Press had informed Smale, and Secretary General Antonio Guterres who is ultimately responsible for this, that Smale must recuse herself.

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