We have already read in the mainstream media that NATOs supposed success in Kosovo was smoke and mirrors  our planes spent their time bombing decoys and museum pieces. Now it seems that the claims of genocide were based on flimsy or non-existent evidence, and that the Chinese embassy was most likely bombed deliberately and not by accident.

I am not a conspiracy theorist. I believe that human stupidity and greed and random chance can explain most of the evil in the world. I think that a lot of Americans thought they were doing the right thing in Serbia, instead of adding more paving stones to the road to a metaphoric Hell.

This war is still an issue in Europe. The bombing of Belgrade and Serbia unleashed environmental destruction on the entire eastern European area around the Danube, and the wreckage of bridges in the Danube threatens to cause flooding in the entire area. The United States is blocking any rebuilding of Serbia while Slobodan Milosevic is still in power, which is hindering the effort to clean up the Danube.

My head is still spinning from reading this newsletter. I have condensed it for length.

This is excepted from MeMail: Kosovo Crisis eMagazine http://www.memail.com. (subscription info at the end, although I dont know how many more issues there will be.)

October 25 1999

STRATFOR REPORTS ON FINDINGS OF INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL TRIBUNAL
---------------------------------------------

During its four-month war against Yugoslavia, NATO argued that Kosovo was a land wracked by mass murder; official estimates indicated that some 10,000 ethnic Albanians were killed in a Serb rampage of ethnic cleansing. Yet four months into an international investigation, bodies numbering only in the hundreds have been exhumed. The FBI has found fewer than 200.

Piecing together the evidence, it appears that the number of civilian ethnic Albanians killed is far less than was claimed. While new findings could invalidate this view, evidence of mass murder has not yet materialized on the scale used to justify the war. This could have serious foreign policy and political implications for NATO and alliance governments

http://www.stratfor.com/crisis/kosovo/genocide.htm


MISSING BODIES, OR ATROCITIES MANAGEMENT, PART 2
------------------------------------------------

Edward S. Herman

A Reuters news dispatch of October 13 bylined Pristina, Kosovo, is entitled " Absolutely No Bodies Found in Supposed Mine Shaft Mass Grave in Kosovo." This follows an earlier report by a Spanish forensic team that went into a part of Kosovo allegedly rich in killing fields, where instead of the predicted thousands the team found 187 bodies. In its examination of 30 mass grave sites the FBI has found a total of almost 200 bodies. In Ljubenic, a mass grave alleged to contain some 350 bodies, when fully exhumed contained only seven bodies. In town after town, alleged mass graves were found to be empty or contained only one or two bodies.

In an extensive review of the numerous reports, the research organization Stratfor concludes that "the numbers of dead so far are in the hundreds, not the thousands" ("Where Are Kosovo's Killing Fields?" Oct. 20, 1999). Stratfor acknowledges that huge new graves may be found, but as the ethnic Albanians were presumably eager to reveal the biggest sites, and the largest sites should have had the most witnesses and most visibility for investigative teams, much larger numbers are deemed unlikely. "The killing of ethnic Albanian civilians appears to be orders of magnitude below the claims of NATO, alliance governments and early media reports."

What makes this evidence important is that NATO's assault on Yugoslavia was built on the claim that the government was engaging in ethnic cleansing before March 24, and that thereafter, according to plan, it escalated its violence to the level of genocide. NATO eventually gravitated to the number of 10,000 ethnic Albanians butchered by the Serbian army and paramilitaries. In early August Bernard Kouchner, the UN administrator in Kosovo, claimed that 11,000 had been killed, based on figures allegedly supplied by the International Crimes Tribunal for the Former Republic of Yugoslavia (ICTY). But the ICTY quickly denied having supplied such a number, and it was ICTY investigators who found the mine shaft supposedly containing 700 Albanian bodies completely empty.

It seems highly likely that the 10,000 or 11,000 figure is a propaganda fabrication, and that the true number may be in the high hundreds or as many as one or two thousand. This lesser figure is of course horrendous, but it falls far short of a "genocide" standard, and is considerably smaller than the Indonesian army- militia killings in East Timor even BEFORE the August 30 referendum, that elicited no response whatever from Clinton, Blair and company.

Where did the 10,000 figure come from? Such a round number suggests a straightforward propaganda concoction, but the numbers were of course built up by refugee claims, and Stratfor notes that "both governments and outside observers relied on sources controlled by the KLA, both before and during the war.....the sophisticated public relations machine of the KLA and the fog of war may have generated a perception that is now proving dubious."

But atrocities management and the patriotic gullibility factor must be considered crucial in this process of inflating claims of enemy villainy. Government lying on enemy atrocities is standard operating procedure in building support for war. What is more interesting, however, is that the gullible transmission of official propaganda is standard operating procedure for the U.S. mainstream media. As soon as a war starts, the mainstream media get "on the team," suspend critical analysis, and allow themselves to be led by the nose by official opinion. There is a patriotic bandwagon effect that causes virtually all reporters to toe the official line, at threat of ostracization and removal (a la Raymond Bonner in the Central American wars). Even straight reporting from enemy lines (like Bonner's) becomes
traitorous--one should stick to official handouts and energetic attempts to confirm official claims. It becomes a journalistic postulate that while enemy sources lie, our official sources tell the truth. As this assumption about our officials is confuted by a steady stream of evidence, past and present, it reflects a clear and straightforward abandonment of honest journalism.

(snip).

Atrocities management played an important role in the institutionalization of NATO lies and the initiation of bombing. There was a series of alleged massacres, some real and some concocted, but all of them attracting intense and indignant coverage. Some, like the one at Racak on January 15, 1999, were extremely well timed to forward the program of NATO proponents of a policy of force. And an excellent case can be made that the Racak incident was provoked, its victim numbers and character inflated and distorted, and the atrocity exploited and managed for political ends (see Renaud Girard, in the French daily Le Figaro, January 20, 1999). During the bombing war, the media spent a great deal of reportorial effort passing along NATO estimates of Serb mass killings and trying to collect confirming data on Serb atrocities from Albanian refugees.

(snip)

FAIR ACTION ALERT: U.S. Media Overlook Expose on Chinese Embassy Bombing
------------------------------------------------------------------

October 22, 1999

A detailed investigative article in the October 17 London Observer reported that NATO deliberately bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade last May, after discovering that the embassy was relaying Yugoslav military radio signals.

The report contradicted the public assurances of NATO leaders that the missile attack had been an accident. The Observer's sources included "a flight controller operating in Naples, an intelligence officer monitoring Yugoslav radio traffic from Macedonia and a senior [NATO] headquarters officer in Brussels."

(snip)

Even before the Observer's expose, there was no lack of evidence that China's suspicions were correct. A few days after the bombing, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder took the highly unusual step of publicly questioning NATO's explanation of the attack. "The explanation given by NATO on the tragic incident so far is far from enough and the Chinese government has every reason to demand a comprehensive, thorough, and in-depth investigation into the incident and affix the responsibility for it," Schroeder said in Beijing (AFP, 5/12/99).

The London Daily Telegraph reported in June (6/27/99) that NATO's precision-guided missiles "carefully singled out the most sensitive section of the embassy complex for attack"--the intelligence directorate. "That's exactly why they don't buy our explanation," a Pentagon official was quoted as saying.

In July, CIA director George Tenet testified in Congress that out of the 900 targets struck by NATO during the three-month bombing campaign, only one was developed by the CIA: the Chinese Embassy (AP, 7/22/99).

(snip)

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-- kermit (colourmegreen@hotmail.com), October 29, 1999

Answers

confirmation

-- lurker (here@now.not), October 29, 1999.

Why would ANYONE want to bomb his campaign supporters/contributors?

-- Mad Monk (madmonk@hawaiian.net), October 29, 1999.