Bill Clinton: “Again, on this issue, I can't comment on the specifics of, because I don't know. I'm aware that the photographer was…”

“Again, on this issue, I can't comment on the specifics of, because I don't know. I'm aware that the photographer was killed, and I know a lot of your reporters have been threatened and that the problem from your point of view must be the question of whether this can be stopped in specific cases. But what I said to President Menem yesterday was that, again, this is something that--Argentina is building a civil society, and it has to be built brick by brick. And the fact that the press is free is a good thing. The fact that some people feel free to at least threaten and perhaps harm members of the press is a bad thing. So to get beyond that you have to build even more bricks in the house of civil society. What I suggested was that the OSCE, the Organization on Security and Cooperation in Europe, actually has a press ombudsman, which has become quite important because we have all these countries converting from communism to free societies--again, coming to grips with this from a different background, but it's the same sort of issue. And most of our people who deal with it think this has been quite a good thing. So I suggested that perhaps he and other leaders here might support an initiative to do the same thing within the OAS, so that we could help every country where this is an issue, through an ombudsman who could say, not only this particular case has to be dealt with, but here are institutional changes that could be made in this, that, or the other country, that would make it better. That was my precise suggestion.”