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| Belgrade burns after illegal NATO aircraft and cruise missile bombing attacks on military and civilian area targets in the sovereign nation of Serbia. |
This article addresses what has come to be known by the vastly oversimplified description, "The Bosnian War", as well as the many mind-boggling and unreported events surrounding the military conflict, itself.
However, the primary focus here is on the atrocities and crimes against humanity in the form of Psychological Warfare and the collusion between numerous governments, their intelligence (disinformation & assassination) agencies, supranational and non-governmental entities and corporate mass media - who all conspired together to deliberately mislead the public and sell falsified "black level" propaganda to the masses in the form of grossly exagerrated and even fictional "atrocities", half-truths and outright lies about what happened; but even more importantly, what did NOT happen - before, during and after the actual military conflicts involved.
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| One of the greatest American thinkers of all time. Cool hair, too. lol |
"Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception."
- Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger, 1916
This article will set the record straight about many aspects of what was clearly one of the most blatant and evil mass media deceptions of our time, which has successfully managed to deceive the majority of the public, on a global scale.
The corporate mass media's willing complicity with certain governments (the first Bush and Clinton administrations, the Tony Blair and Helmut Kohl governments, to name just a few), their intelligence agencies (CIA, the British and German Intelligence services, etc.) and supranational governmental bodies such as NATO and the UN, was unprecedented in modern times, and has caused many alert people to recognize that these military, intelligence and mass media organizations are nothing more than the unelected, unaccountable, extremely dangerous (to all of our lives and freedoms) and evil forces of the elite ruling class.
The despicable, criminal conduct of the US, British, German, French and Saudi governments, among others, in their direct and covert intervention and financing of the Bosnian conflict in large part had nothing whatsoever to do with preventing "genocide" or "ethnic cleansing", as the world was told by the corporate mass media.
If the Western and NATO "intervention" had truly been done for such noble reasons as they claimed, the innocent human beings on ALL sides would have been forcefully defended, rather than demonizing one side only, and allowing thousands of innocent human beings (on one side only) to be slaughtered and driven from their ancestral homelands with impunity and without any substantial media attention or outrage, both during and after the war, while NATO and the UN (UNPROFOR, IFOR, SFOR and KFOR) troops turned a blind eye - and, in fact, were ordered to do exactly that, in most cases.
On the contrary, the actions taken by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) - on behalf of the globalist UN, at the behest of the ruling elite - literally provoked the beginnings of the conflict, and the roles played by the US, British and German governments(State Dept, CIA), British Intelligence, NATO and the UN were, in fact, directly responsible for escalating and intensifying the initially low-level military conflicts in ways that guaranteed the mass murder, ethnic cleansing and "internally displaced persons" (mass numbers of refugees in their own country) would occur on a scale that would never have happened without their "humanitarian assistance".
Indeed, the deliberate and strategic interference in the affairs of a sovereign nation - which was, of course, in direct violation of international law, not to mention the altogether useless NATO and UN charters - deliberately sought to create a humanitarian crisis into which they could insert themselves as the "heroes", which is precisely what happened.
Throughout the Bosnian conflict, Western governments (primarily the notoriously corrupt and shameless Clinton administration) and supranational governmental organizations acted with malice, complete defiance and in arrogant violation of the international laws that they claimed as the reasons for their intervention in the first place.
This is a key concept in understanding the bigger picture as it relates to the globalist desires of the ruling elite, in setting these precedents in which they can endlessly interfere in the affairs of sovereign nations, under the guise of "global democracy and liberation".
Nothing could be further from the truth.
In reality, their true intentions were concealing objectives that were in service to a much different agenda than what was claimed publicly, which ultimately seeks to create an all powerful, global government, superceding and replacing the national sovereignty of all individual countries.
The horrific injustices to the nation of Serbia and its people, and the tragedies in the lives of thousands of innocent people on all sides were but one more step on the path to 'The New World Order'.
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| The disgusting duo - Madeleine Albright and Bill Clinton. |
These tragic events were also an extremely convenient and well-timed media diversion from the deviant acts of former US President Bill Clinton, which led to his impeachment and very nearly to his removal from office, entirely.
The fact that Clinton and the numerous criminals within his administration were allowed to remain in office to do even further damage to the United States and the world is only one of the many great injustices in this story, but it is very significant to understanding this disgusting chapter in world history.
As we examine what actually did (and did not) happen in this horrible situation, I ask that you sincerely try to keep an open mind, because unless you have done some serious independent research of your own or been an eyewitness to events, I can assure you that almost everything you thought you knew about this subject (having heard it all from mass media, of course) is incomplete, at best - and is most likely absolutely false.
This was, without any doubt, the crime of the century in terms of journalistic fraud and negligence; absolutely corrupt and criminal in its double standards, outright fabrications (reporting unconfirmed events as facts, literally inventing and wildly exagerrating the numbers of dead, raped, etc.), lies of omission and extreme bias, in general.
There is no parallel in modern history that I am aware of in which every major media source was so thoroughly and completely wrong about nearly everything involved, and even worse, so brazen and unapologetic about being so wrong, repeatedly - continuously ignoring and violating their ethical and moral responsibilities, not only to report the unbiased truth in the first place, obviously, but also to quickly and openly correct their false, inaccurate and misleading stories once they had been made painfully aware of their numerous and severely destructive errors. This did not happen, and tragically, has still not happened to this day.
These journalistic atrocities and crimes against any semblance of responsible reporting, let alone actual truth, have quite simply been ignored and swept under the rug. But some of us remember and know all too well what really happened, and are not about to let it be forgotten without being challenged.
This article will stand as one such challenge to the many lies told by the ruling elite and their criminal conspirator puppets in corporate mass media about the reasons for this war, the events that did and did not occur and about the nation and people of Serbia, in general.
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| Scott Taylor, former Canadian soldier and one of very few journalists with integrity. |
The mass media's crimes against truth, and therefore the good of humanity, in this war have been corrected only by a few authors who have written some excellent books and articles on this subject, which have obviously not had anywhere near the circulation and exposure to the masses that the lies and distortions sold by the mass media (print and electronic) have enjoyed.
In any event, I would like to sincerely thank these authors who have done their best to expose the truth of this situation - people like Scott Taylor, Peter Brock and Michael Parenti - who have all been extremely valuable and inspirational to my research and the writing of this article. I will quote their work here, because it is truly the best and most accurate journalism that exists on this subject. But, of course, these brave and resourceful individuals are not the people who received large paychecks and Pulitzer prizes for their work.
I encourage everyone reading this to take a look at Scott Taylor's excellent articles on this subject at his blog.
The liars and frauds within the corporate mass media (like Roy Gutman) got those "prizes" for their outstanding contributions to the ruling elite's disinformation and propaganda campaigns - and you probably don't have to wonder too much about why that is the case, considering who owns and runs the mass media, Pulitzer committees, etc. We'll get into all of that in more detail later.
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| The Sarajevo Holiday Inn - the only "war zone" that many of the journalists ever saw in the Bosnian conflict. |
The complete bias and "pack mentality" of the mass media as a whole (many of whom never left the comfort and safety of the bar at the Sarajevo Holiday Inn, by the way) in the Bosnian war and the events surrounding it was in many ways more appalling and frightening than the physically violent atrocities of the war itself.
That is to say, of course, the atrocities that actually did happen, not to be confused with the many events reported (and invented) by the mass media, which were later clearly proven not to have happened at all - perhaps other than in the minds of the "journalists", themselves, or in the imaginations of the people working for the high-dollar American PR firms hired by the terrorist Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA/UCK), as well as the Bosnian and Croatian governments.
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| A KLA/UCK terrorist, ready to fire his rocket-propelled grenade. |
Have you ever heard of a war involving allegedly "impoverished and oppressed freedom fighters" (the Islamic terrorist KLA/UCK), that could somehow afford to hire an expensive American public relations firm (Ruder Finn) to handle their media relations (Psychological Warfare) strategies for them?
Well, they actually could not have afforded such services had it not been for their direct involvement with Albanian organized crime (heroin, weapons and human sex slave trafficking) and the generous donations that were funneled to them via the CIA and German Militärischer Abschirmdienst (Military Security Service, or MAD) from their wealthy supporters in the Saudi Arabian and Kuwaiti royal families, which financed their highly successful (in terms of deception) PR campaigns and much more, including the importation of hundreds of battle-hardened, ruthless and psychotic "mujahideen fighters" from Afghanistan and other places into the Balkans - including Osama Bin Laden, himself.
These jihadist lunatics were responsible for the most brutal and horrific atrocities of the entire conflict, not only against opposing military forces (torture, cutting out eyes, ears, noses and other unthinkable mutilation of human beings), but also against entire villages of innocent civilians, simply because they were not radical muslims.
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| Mujahideen terrorists imported by the Bosnian Muslim army committed the worst atrocites of the war, like the one you see above. |
Very few of these well documented and meticulously photographed atrocites that were commited by KLA/UCK terrorists, the Croatian and Bosnian Muslim armies and their paramilitary (militia) forces against Serbian civilians were ever mentioned in the corporate mass media at all.
Any reasonable person has to really wonder why that is so, considering the main rule of all news media - "If it bleeds, it leads."
Well, not in this war - at least not if the innocent victims happened to be Serbian.
WARNING: THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS EXTREMELY GRAPHIC AND DISTURBING PHOTO EVIDENCE OF WAR CRIMES AND IS NOT RECOMMENDED FOR CHILDREN.
ADULTS WHO CANNOT BEAR TO SEE THE HARSH REALITIES OF THE CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY THAT WERE COMMITTED BY ALL SIDES IN THIS WAR, INCLUDING NATO FORCES, ARE STRONGLY ADVISED TO GIVE SERIOUS CONSIDERATION TO WHETHER OR NOT THEY WISH TO READ ANY FURTHER.
Operation Storm: The Worst Ethnic Cleansing of the Entire War - Virtually Ignored by the Global Mass Media
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| More than 200,000 innocent civilians were forced out of their homes, permanently, by Croatian and Bosnian Muslim military forces during Operation Storm, simply because they were the "wrong" ethnic group - Serbian. |
But Operation Storm was not done by Serbs, but rather against hundreds of thousands of innocent Serbian civilians in the Krajina region, by the Croatian, Bosnian Muslim and NATO military forces.
And please keep in mind that this event occurred long before the horrific and gruesome events allegedly perpetrated by the Yugoslavian Army, Serbian police and paramilitary groups (some were all too real and some were clearly manipulated and false, as you will see later), that were chosen to be immediately, widely and so hysterically propagated by the corporate mass media in their blatant propaganda efforts on behalf of the UN, NATO, the Clinton administration and all of their masters - the ruling elite.
You will see in the chapters ahead that, although many such crimes were, indeed, committed by Serbian forces (primarily the rogue paramilitary and unofficial "militia" groups), several of the most major media events that were chosen and used by NATO, Western governments and mass media to justify increased NATO involvement in the war, culminating in the fullscale and ruthless bombing of Serbia, were in fact, not at all what we were told they were.
Please be patient, because there is so much to show you to get the whole picture here - and that is what this article is all about - showing you many things that the mass media never did, and never will.
Getting All of the Serbs Out of Croatia - Dead or Alive
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| Left: An elderly Krajina Serb woman murdered in Siroka Kula on August 8 by Croat forces during Operation Storm. Right: The mutilated corpse of a Krajina Serb soldier in Bruvno found on September 2, 1995. Croat troops stripped the flesh from his upper torso, leaving only the spine and ribs. |
More than 200,000 Serbian civilians were driven from their ancestral homes in Krajina - permanently, and upon the orders of the Croatian government - never to return. You probably didn't hear a whisper of this in the mass media - it certainly did not make the cover of Time or Newsweek magazines.
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| Left: Crkveni Bok, August, 1995, Croat military forces left Nazi-fascist graffiti on destroyed Krajina Serb homes: “NDH” (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska) was a World War II puppet state of Nazi Germany. Right: Croatian military forces deported and/or killed anything living that was Serbian, including their livestock. |
Operation Storm resulted in large numbers of ethnic Serbian civilians being killed and wounded in Krajina, most of which were never reported with any major interest by the mass media.
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| Innocent Serbian civilians slaughtered during Operation Storm by Bosnian and Croatian military forces in Krajina. |
You see, it would only confuse the public if they were to find out the truth - and the truth is that there were many thousands of innocent Serbian people suffering on what was obviously the NWO and mass media's predetermined "bad guy" side of this war, and there were many people who were causing their suffering (by committing crimes against humanity) on the media's "good guy" (NATO/Bosnian Muslim/Croatian/Kosovo Liberation Army) side of this war.
This is how Western governments and the mass media committed their own crimes against humanity, using psychological warfare to willfully deceive the masses about what was really involved in this Yugoslavian Civil War, and what was actually happening (and not happening) on all sides of the conflict.
Please also see this excellent article on the massive NATO-led Croatian and Bosnian Muslim atrocities against thousands of Serbian civilians in Krajina:
http://endrtimes.blogspot.com/2009/01/invasion-of-serbian-krajina.html
And this, relating the details of the war crimes committed against thousands of innocent Serbian civilians during 'Operation Storm':
http://continuingcounterreformation.blogspot.com/2011/04/persecution-of-orthodox-by-roman.html
MPRI - A Little Help From the US Mercenaries
MPRI, Inc., (referred to as "Military Professional Resources Inc." or simply MPRI) is a private military contractor (mercenaries) that provides a wide range of services to both public and private customers, most notably the United States Department of Defense. MPRI specializes in various professions such as law enforcement, security, military training, logistics, etc. By its own account, MPRI operates in over 40 countries. The firm is based in Alexandria, Virginia [no doubt as a CIA front and support mechanism].
Local forces in Croatia were referred to MPRI by The Pentagon and used their training. 120 African leaders and more than 5,500 African troops have been trained by MPRI on security issues. General Vuono commanded and participated in a training center which produced the military doctrine AirLand Battle 2000. This doctrine was used in 1995 for Operation Storm in the Krajina region of what was then (legally) Yugoslavia, and is now Croatia.
More than 220,000 innocent ethnic Serbian civilians were "cleansed" from this entire area, meaning they were either forced to leave their ancestral homes, or were murdered in large numbers - men, women and children - it made no difference in Operation Storm.
Although the exact funding mechanisms remain less than clear (and classified), the Croatian Army was given training and operational support for Operations Flash and Storm by this "private corporation" (CIA front) composed of retired US generals, officers and other military personnel.
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| MPRI mercenaries training Bosnian military forces |
Similar in concept to Blackwater and other "private security" organizations, MPRI provided the Croatian military with weapons, tactical and logistics training in the months leading up to Operation Storm, which removes all doubt as to whether various events in the Bosnian war precipitated or caused this massive and brutal assault against Serbian civilians.
The Croatian, US and CIA military planners (under the guise of MPRI) had obviously decided long before Operation Storm began that not only would the Yugoslav/Serbian military forces be expelled (and/or killed) in what they wanted to become the new nation of Croatia, but so would hundreds of thousands of innocent ethnic-Serbian civilians, who had lived in the Krajina region of Yugoslavia, legally and peacefully, for many decades.
Thus, the US Clinton administration, CIA and NATO knowingly and deliberately sanctioned, planned, greenlit and committed the very crimes against humanity (ethnic cleansing and genocide) that they were ostensibly claiming to be the heroic guardians against.
Please read this excellent article if you want to learn more about MPRI and their role in clandestine military operations in Bosnia and other war-torn areas of the world.
War Criminals On All Sides
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| General Ante Gotovina is still largely regarded as a hero in Croatia for his participation in driving more than 200,000 ethnic-Serbian civilians out of their homes in the Krajina region. |
Three Croatian generals, Ante Gotovina, Ivan Čermak and Mladen Markač, alleged to have been involved in the planning and execution of Operation Storm, were indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and are on trial in the Hague on charges of operating a joint criminal enterprise for the purpose of permanently removing the Serb population from the Krajina by force and for crimes against humanity.
CROATIAN WAR CRIMES UPDATE, 4/16/2011:
"The court in The Hague, Netherlands, on Friday sentenced Gen. Ante Gotovina to 24 years in prison for atrocities committed by his troops during "Operation Storm" — a 1995 military offensive designed to drive the Serb rebels out a swath of Croatia they had occupied.
The battle sealed Croatia's independence from Serb-led Yugoslavia after four years of conflict with minority Serbs.
The convictions of Gotovina and another wartime general, Mladen Markac, dealt a blow to Croatia's self-image as a victim rather than perpetrator of atrocities. Croatia has always seen itself as a victim of Serb war crimes and portrayed Gotovina as a hero who helped defeat its more powerful neighbour, Serbia.
The war veterans and other supporters protesting Saturday on Zagreb's main square and other Croatian cities believe Gotovina is innocent and is not responsible for war crimes committed during the offensive.
"We are still in shock after yesterday's verdicts," said Denis Mladenovic, one of the speakers at the Zagreb rally. "They jailed our heroes who defended our country against the Serbian aggression."
The protesters chanted "Treason! Treason!" denouncing the Croatian conservative government, its prime minister and the liberal president, claiming they did nothing to save the generals from U.N. war crimes prosecution.
They displayed a Croatian and a U.S. flag linked with a banner reading: "Together in 1995." Croatia received U.S. support during Operation Storm, as well as throughout its war for independence.
Gotovina and Markac, who received 18 years in jail, were found guilty of murder, expulsion, plunder and other crimes against humanity. A third general, Ivan Cermak, was acquitted of all charges.
Operation Storm forced some 200,000 Serbs to flee their homes. Soldiers and special Croatian police roamed from village to village, killing some 200 people and abusing villagers — many of them elderly, according to Friday's judgment."
- Source
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| April 2011: Convicted of war crimes in Operation Storm, 1995. It only took 16 years. |
Judges in The Hague found Ante Gotovina and Mladen Markač guilty on eight of nine counts for commanding operations that included the shelling of civilians, the torching of Serbian homes in south-west Croatia, the murder of hundreds of elderly Serbs and the forced exodus of at least 20,000 from the Serbian minority rooted in the Dalmatian hinterland for centuries.
Gotovina was given a 24-year jail sentence; Markač was jailed for 18 years.
This represents a political disaster and profound diplomatic embarassment for Croatia: but it is a triumphant vindication for Serbia.
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| Gotovina: GUILTY, Markac: GUILTY, Cermak: Acquitted |
Effectively, the Croats have been told that the decisive victory of the war, which sealed their independent statehood, was a war crime.
The judges found:"Croatian forces committed acts of murder, cruel treatment, inhumane acts, destruction, plunder, persecution and deportation. There was a widespread and systematic attack directed against this Serb civilian population, (creating) an environment in which those present there had no choice but to leave."
"UN court in the Hague has convicted a key wartime Croatian commander, General Ante Gotovina and another General Mladen Markac of committing atrocities in a campaign of shelling, murder and persecution which drove Serbs out of Croatia's Krajina border region in 1995.
At last the true horror of the persecutions of Serbs by Croats is acknowledged officially in western media who, throughout the Yugoslav war - begun by Croatia in 1991 when they declared illegal independence and started persecuting Serbs in Croatia - blamed only the Serbs.
The Yugoslav war crimes tribunal has also delivered a damning verdict on Croatia's then-president, Franjo Tudjman who declared that independence and whose 1969 book described genocide "as a natural phenomenon commanded by the Almighty in defence of the only true faith (Roman Catholicism)" - Serbs are, of course, Orthodox Christians.
I note that even today the Croatian Roman Catholic Church has defended these convicted Generals.
Tudjman was said by the Court to have led a "joint criminal enterprise" to repopulate the Krajina region with Croats after driving out Serbs.
It was Tudjman who had the full support of Germany, and Croatia has been invited to join the European Union!
Also see this article for more background information on Croatian General Ante Gotovina.
Getting To Know Franjo
The Hague Tribunal was preparing a war crimes indictment against then Croatian President Franjo Tuđjman for Operation Flash (the first stage of Operation Storm), but he died in 1999 before he could be prosecuted for his role in many crimes against humanity.
We will explore who Tudjman was more in the section on Ruder Finn and their psychological warfare (i.e., public relations) campaigns in this war on behalf of the Croatian and Bosnian Muslim governments, as well as the (non-existent at that time) Republic of Kosovo which was (and still is) being run entirely by KLA/UCK terrorists.
You will probably find that section extremely interesting, because you will learn about how an American PR firm strategically shifted public opinion in such a way as to get the major Jewish organizations to support the warring parties who were all proud Nazi Holocaust conspirators in WWII, while demonizing the Serbs (the only warring party who helped the Americans or Allies in WWII), and making them appear to be the Nazis in the Bosnian war.
But for now, here are a few quotes directly from the now deceased Croatian President Franjo Tudjman, just to give you a little insight about the thinking of the person who was in the top Croatian leadership position during the Bosnian War:
"Hitler's New European Order can be justified by the need to be rid of the jews." - Franjo Tudjman
"Genocide is commanded by the word of the Almighty for the restoration of the Kingdom of the chosen nation and spreading the one true faith (Roman Catholicism)."
- Franjo Tudjman
"Thank god my wife is neither a Serb nor a Jew."
- Franjo Tudjman
"The estimated loss of up to six million dead (Jews in WW2) is founded too much on both emotional, biased testimonies and on exaggerated data in the postwar reckonings of war crimes and on the squaring of accounts with the defeated."
- Franjo Tudjman
“In the mid-1980s, world Jewry still has the need to recall its "holocaust" even by trying to prevent the election of the former U.N. Secretary General Kurt Waldheim as president of Austria.”
- Franjo Tudjman
Mass Media's Willing Participation in Psychological Warfare
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| No evidence of institutionalized media bias here, eh? |
The corporate mass media repeatedly chose to run unverified, speculative and one-sided stories where "the Serbs" (as if they are all one thing, and not individual human beings - which is a classic PsyWar (dehumanization) tactic, by the way) were always falsely portrayed not only as the "bad guys" in the war - but as the only bad guys in the war.
Once again, nothing could be further from the truth.
I am willing to bet that most of you reading this had no idea about any of these things that I am going to tell you, and this is certainly understandable, considering the adundance of lies and scarcity of anything resembling truth in mass media. So this is going to be a surreal and almost unbelievable ride for many of you, not to mention just being so tragic on so many levels, for the innocent victims on all sides of it.
But I feel very strongly that the truth of these events needs to be told, again and again if necessary, until it is truly known and understood by as many people as possible, if we are going to have any chance of being able to withstand and combat the mass media lies and manipulation that we are continuously bombarded with in our lives together in this world.
Before we go any further, I also feel that it is very important to state a few facts up front, knowing very well just how controversial this subject is for so many people. I am neither Serbian, Croatian, Albanian or Muslim, and I have no vested interest in anything other than telling the truth of this subject to as many people as possible, regardless of how difficult it may be for some people to accept the truth.
I actually tested this out first on one of my dearest friends in the world, who is truly a saint on earth, and is American, but from a Croatian family. He told me that while it is natural to feel somewhat pissed off to read some of these things, it is backed up with facts, and is really not saying that any one side is fully to blame, so it is not personal at all.
It has nothing to do with individual people who live their lives, raise their children and do the best they can. It is governments, their intelligence agencies and the corporate mass media who are to blame for all of what happened in the Balkans - not the everyday people like us.
Indeed, that is my entire point here. And the reason you won't see much space given to the horrific things that some of the Serbian paramilitary people did, or Srebrenica, for example, is that, frankly, those are pretty much the ONLY things that most people have ever been told about this war...and they've already been told and told and told by the mass media - in the classic manner of Goebbels' "big lie" - until it became the truth. But there is much more to the whole truth of this story than what mass media will tell you. That is why this article was written.
I am fully aware that there were atrocities and victims on all sides of this conflict, and indeed most of them were undoubtedly caused, both directly and indirectly, by the bloody hands of the criminal and degenerate Clinton administration, CIA, NATO and the UN, at the direction of the ruling elite - which is the point here.
However, the reality is that most of the world has only ever heard about these horrible atrocities (both real and falsified) as having been committed on only one side - that would be the Serbian side - with no awareness of all the other war crimes committed by the other sides in the war against innocent Serbian civilians - before, during and after the war.
So, I am well aware of how deeply these feelings and hatreds run, but unfortunately, it was exactly these emotions and hatreds that allowed the elite ruling class (via their government and mass media puppets) to manipulate the events in the Balkans so that they would result in the all of the violent military conflicts and atrocities that occurred there.
Millions of people who had otherwise coexisted peacefully for the most part, even to the extent of widespread inter-cultural marriages and families, were enticed and provoked into situations that exploited their ethnic fears and hatreds, which were designed to do one thing - to divide and conquer. One of the oldest, and most effective, tricks in the book, as the saying goes.
In any event, please know that I do not view all Albanians (or Muslims in general), Croatians or Serbians as being the absolute villains or victims in this context. I do not view ALL of any ethnic, religious or any other form of "group" to be inherently good or evil - perhaps other than the ruling elite, for obvious reasons.
However, you will see specific examples given here that are deeply critical of the KLA/UCK and its savage and inhuman brutality, for example, simply because that is the absolute truth.
Additionally, it is the various governments and their "leaders" that I am holding primarily and directly responsible for the many war crimes and atrocities that occurred throughout this war, and not the many wonderful and innocent people who had no choice in what happened, and no part in the horrific and murderous events that occurred on all sides.
I want you all to realize that this piece is not about any bias for or against anyone. It is 100% about the lies and manipulation coming from governments and the corporate mass media. I have been blessed in life to have friends from many different countries and ethnic backgrounds, so this article could just as easily be about a situation involving India, Mexico and Pakistan instead of the Bosnian war, because in reality, we are ALL the targets of the ruling elite and NWO.
Again, the issue here is most definitely not being pro-Serb or anti-Croatian, Albanian or whatever - the issue is the lies and horrendous crimes against humanity that are caused and committed by the so-called world leaders in governments and their lapdog puppets in the mass media.
So, please keep this in mind, and realize that even as an American, I am most deeply critical of my own US government in this war, as well as the events in the aftermath of the war, which continue to this day.
I strongly believe that we should all stand for the truth, and despite our patriotism and love for our own nations, we should also have enough integrity and respect for the truth to be critical of our own governments and "leaders" when they do these evil and criminal things to the people of other nations, especially innocent civilians.
Therefore, please read carefully and understand that in this regard, the KLA/UCK, for example, is being called out for what it truly is - a despicable and murderous terrorist group - one that is just as guilty of commiting horrific violent crimes against its own people (Albanian Muslims who are moderate in their views and do not support the KLA's radical violence, bombings and murders of innocent civilians), as it is for such crimes against the innocent victims from other cultures and backgrounds.
I believe that the most critical thing for us all to realize about this entire situation and others like it, is this:
The elite ruling class and their proxies within governments and the mass media are an evil and malignant force that consistently plays all of us against each another (social classes, ethnic/skin color divisions, gay vs straight, men vs women, religious differences, etc.), successfully keeping us distracted and at each other's throats so much of the time that we lose sight of the fact that it is their throats we should actually be going after - figuratively speaking, of course.
So, with this deeper understanding and no preconceived ideas of who the heroes or villains automatically are, let's take a close look at this dark period in recent history (and some of the relevant past), and the series of events that has been so traumatic and devastating for so many innocent human beings.
What happened, how did it happen - and perhaps most importantly -what and how we were told about what happened, versus the truth of what actually did and did not happen? The answers to these questions are the key to understanding the methods and unprecedented levels of duplicitous psychological warfare involved.
The New World Order vs. National Sovereignty
The events that led to the breakup of the former nation of Yugoslavia and the ensuing civil war included, on the surface, the (alleged) demise of Soviet Communism, the death of Yugoslavian President Josip Broz Tito and the long-held ethnic hatreds in the region of Central Europe known as the Balkans - dating from the Turkish-Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian and Nazi German conquests and atrocities upon the people of this tortured region. But these were only one part of the equation and, ironically, not necessarily even the most important part.
The real catalyst for the war and destruction that was to come in this troubled part of the world had everything to do with the desire of the ruling elite to spread what I refer to as "false capitalism". That is, the privatization of formerly state-owned industries in socialist countries, to become the property of the ruling elite, which in reality, is anything but capitalism.
It is actually a lot like totalitarian pseudo-communism, but could more accurately be described as a hybrid of socialism (with the ruling elite at the top of the pyramid and everyone else suffering equally at the bottom) and "free market" pseudo-capitalism, taking only the slave labor and obscene profit aspects of capitalism - and, of course, not the large and prosperous middle class (as in the American model), which the global ruling elite find so annoying, and are working very hard to render extinct using their current strategy of financial crimes against humanity.
The other key aspect of this story is the ruling elite's strategy to continue chipping away at the concepts of national sovereignty and independence, replacing them with "interdependence" and "global governance".
Some of this comes in the form of supranational military alliances, such as NATO and the UN, and some are in the areas of financial crimes, or "free trade" organizations, such as GATT, NAFTA and the EU - the latter being an example of both military and financial crimes - which are focused on the subversion of individual national rights to a larger supranational body, as well as having the commerce and "free trade" elements.
In refusing the IMF and World Bank demands for crippling austerity measures ("strong economic medicine") in a country that was already struggling economically, "privatization" of industries - i.e., giving them away to Western entities that were already billionaires, Yugoslavia was chosen to be made the example of what happens to any nation when it does not go along with the ruling elite's plans for world domination and financial control.
The Beginning of the End of Yugoslavia
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| Yugoslavian National Army (JNA) troops enter Slovenia after its illegal declaration of independence (war). |
In June of 1991, the Yugoslavian province of Slovenia illegally declared indepedence from the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, knowing full well that this would provoke a military conflict, if not all out war. But Slovenia's provocative act was not an isolated or spontaneous event. As early as 1990, a year earlier, the government officials of both Slovenia and Croatia had quietly held discussions and made plans to do exactly what occurred in 1991.
Thus, as soon as Slovenia decared independence (war), the Yugoslavian provinces of Croatia and the heavily muslim Bosnia-Herzegovina quickly followed suit - also having had prior discussions to gain support, financing and weaponry from Germany (who was the past Nazi mentor and partner in war crimes with Croatia, Bosnian Muslims and Albanians in Kosovo) and several other muslim nations, including Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Iran.
Now, before anyone says, "Hey, good for them, they should be allowed to be independent!", I want you to think long and hard about the consequences of the same scenario were it to involve Texas or Florida suddenly declaring their independence from the United States, Ireland/Scotland/Wales from the UK, Taiwan or Tibet from China, Corsica from France or Quebec from Canada.
I was going to use the example of California leaving the USA, but that would actually be something that an overwhelming number of Americans would enthusiastically welcome, so I realized that was a bad example. :)
To better illustrate this "what if" scenario, let's imagine an example where - let's say Minnesota - suddenly declares its independence and secedes from the United States.
The US govt rightly sends our military to protect and maintain the unity of our sovereign nation. But wait...suddenly the EU, UN and a Communist Chinese-Russian superpower strength military alliance recognizes and supports Minnesota as a new independent nation, and decides that we can't do that to them...and they begin an aerial bombing campaign - not only of Minnesota, but also of strategic military targets in Washington, D.C. and other places, and worse yet, industrial factories and civilian residential area targets with cluster bombs designed only to cause maximum pain and death, in order to break our will and make us stop bothering those heroic freedom fighters in Minnesota.
Are we getting the very hypocritical picture here?
The point here is that when provinces or states unilaterally "declare independence" from sovereign nations, this is a very touchy subject, in which it can seem very tempting, on the surface, to support such independence - just as long as it is not in one's own backyard, or country.
These are exactly the kind of hypocritical policies that were pursued by the US and several Western European governments in the Balkans, precisely because it was not occurring within their own countries.
The Diplomacy of Duplicity
Prior to the Slovene declaration, US Secretary of State James Baker told the Prime Minister of Yugoslavia (who was a Croatian, incidentally) that if the Slovenes took overt action to secede from Yugoslavia, the United States would not object if the Yugoslavian Federal army was called in to preserve the unity of their nation. Well, that was very considerate of Mr. Baker, wasn't it - you know, considering that it was their own country and all.
Within a matter of days, the Slovenes seized by force the Federal customs posts along the Italian and Austrian borders, and Markovic, the Yugoslav Prime Minister, ordered the Yugoslav Federal army into Slovenia.
Most observers did not expect the Slovenes to resist against the powerful Yugoslav army (JNA), but contrary to all expectations, the Slovenes did resist.
Armed with German-supplied handheld antitank missiles, the Slovenes destroyed a number of JNA tanks, and in order to avoid further bloodshed, Markovic ordered the army to withdraw. Thirty-seven JNA soldiers were killed in the brief encounter and twelve Slovene Territorial Defense members also lost their lives.
Thus, from the very beginning of the Yugoslav conflict, the Serbs were branded as the bad guys, even though most of the JNA troops were actually conscripts from Kosovo or Macedonia.
The Yugoslav Federal armed forces withdrew into Croatia, and soon after, fighting broke out when Croatian paramilitary groups attacked the Yugoslav Federal troops, without provocation. The dismemberment of Yugoslavia had begun. The "Slovene War" marked a turning point in the attitude adopted by western governments toward the possible disintegration of Yugoslavia.
Prior to the Slovene unilateral action, the European Union and the United States were in complete agreement that the nation of Yugoslavia must remain united. This policy soon changed, and it became evident that Germany and Austria were pressing for the recognition of both Slovenian and Croatian independence.
It is now known that as early as 1990 Croatian and Slovene leaders held meetings with senior politicians from both Germany and Austria urging support for independence. During this time, the Vatican was also openly lobbying for their independence and had particular influence on German politicians in Bavaria.
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| German Chancellor Helmut Kohl |
Germany also stated (purely on its own dubious authority) that all six of the Yugoslav Republics were eligible for independence. It was also agreed that before independence would be granted, the Republics would have to meet criteria established by the Badinter Commission, a group of European jurists set up by the European Union to arbitrate disputes and establish criteria for recognition.
However, without waiting for any input or decision from the EU's Badinter Commission, Germany unilaterally announced its recognition of Slovenia and Croatia on December 23, 1991.
Germany's premature recognition of Slovenia and Croatia as independent states guaranteed, in and of itself, that the breakup of Yugoslavia would not be resolved by peaceful means. Once again, Western intervention had exacerbated and complicated an already serious Balkan problem. And again, the German intervention had very little to do with the actual problems on the ground in Yugoslavia.
Additionally, and very significantly, US Secretary of State James Baker also did not threaten any U.S. intervention should the Serbs use the Yugolavian army to quell the illegal secessionist attempts by Slovenia and Croatia - only "ostracism" for the Serbs, and a refusal by the West to recognize breakaway republics.
This could easily be viewed (and was) as a green light for the Yugoslavian government's decision to, legally and legitimately, use force to maintain the integrity of their sovereign nation.
If all of this sounds eerily familiar, that's because it is. You may be wondering, "Where have I heard this before?".
James Baker's duplicitious "assurances" about the United States not intervening in Yugoslavia's internal affairs as a sovereign nation, mirrored almost exactly the words that Baker directed US Ambassador April Glaspie to deliver to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein regarding "their border dispute with Kuwait", allegedly involving "slant oil drilling" underneath the border and into Iraqi territory; i.e., oil theft.
To quote specifically from transcripts published in the New York Times, Ambassador Glaspie told the Iraqi President in July of 1990:
"But we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.
I was in the American Embassy in Kuwait during the late '60s. The instruction we had during this period was that we should express no opinion on this issue and that the issue is not associated with America. James Baker has directed our official spokesmen to emphasize this instruction.
We hope you can solve this problem using any suitable methods via Klibi (Chedli Klibi, Secretary General of the Arab League) or via President Mubarak (of Egypt). All that we hope is that these issues are solved quickly."
This, too, was obviously interpreted as a green light by Saddam Hussein (who had been a longtime CIA asset and "friend" of the United States in the Iran / Iraq war) to invade Kuwait with no fear of any significant US intervention.
And, if you recall, the same heart-wrenching stories of "war crimes and atrocities" (as were used in Bosnia), surfaced immediately in the global mass media propaganda about Iraq, to provoke the public's support against the "Iraqi soldiers murderering Kuwaiti babies in incubators" - which we now know was fabricated and absolutely false, by the way. But it played a huge part in "getting the ball rolling", in terms of public opinion.
Please see this excellent article for a thorough and outstanding breakdown of the Kuwaiti PR (propaganda) campaign, which was invented and managed by close Bush friend and advisor, Craig Fuller, at Hill & Knowlton Public Relations, using the front "Citizens for a Free Kuwait".
And please stay with me here, because this part really is crucial to understanding this subject, and has literally everything to do with what happened in the Bosnian War. Specifically, how one side of the conflict (and one side only) was sold by the mass media and expensive American PR firms as "the bad guy".
Just hang in there and keep reading, because I believe this will really turn on a lot of light bulbs out there, in demonstrating the incestuous and criminal relationships between governments and their intelligence agencies, private PR firms and corporate mass media in their extremely effective combined attacks using psychological warfare to manipulate the masses.
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| Craig Fuller, the Hill & Knowlton spin doctor for the Kuwaiti royal family. |
"Hill & Knowlton, then the world's largest PR firm, served as mastermind for the Kuwaiti campaign. Its activities alone would have constituted the largest foreign-funded campaign ever aimed at manipulating American public opinion. By law, the Foreign Agents Registration Act should have exposed this propaganda campaign to the American people, but the Justice Department chose not to enforce it.
Nine days after Saddam's army marched into Kuwait, the Emir's government agreed to fund a (multi-million dollar) contract under which Hill & Knowlton would represent "Citizens for a Free Kuwait," a classic PR front group designed to hide the real role of the Kuwaiti government and its collusion with the Bush administration.
Every big media event needs what journalists and flacks alike refer to as "the hook." An ideal hook becomes the central element of a story that makes it newsworthy, evokes a strong emotional response, and sticks in the memory. In the case of the Gulf War, the "hook" was invented by Hill & Knowlton. In style, substance and mode of delivery, it bore an uncanny resemblance to England's World War I hearings that accused German soldiers of killing babies.
In fact, the most emotionally moving testimony on October 10 came from a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl, known only by her first name of Nayirah. According to the Caucus, Nayirah's full name was being kept confidential to prevent Iraqi reprisals against her family in occupied Kuwait. Sobbing, she described what she had seen with her own eyes in a hospital in Kuwait City. Her written testimony was passed out in a media kit prepared by Citizens for a Free Kuwait.
"I volunteered at the al-Addan hospital," Nayirah said. "While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns, and go into the room where . . . babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die."
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| Media lying gets the warplanes flying... |
Three months passed between Nayirah's testimony and the start of the war. During those months, the story of babies torn from their incubators was repeated over and over again by mass media. President Bush told the story. It was recited as fact in Congressional testimony, on TV and radio talk shows, and at the UN Security Council. "
"Of all the accusations made against the dictator," MacArthur observed, "none had more impact on American public opinion than the one about Iraqi soldiers removing 312 babies from their incubators and leaving them to die on the cold hospital floors of Kuwait City."
At the Human Rights Caucus, however, Hill & Knowlton and Congressman Lantos had failed to reveal that Nayirah was a member of the Kuwaiti Royal Family. Her father, in fact, was Saud Nasir al-Sabah, Kuwait's Ambassador to the US, who sat listening in the hearing room during her testimony. The Caucus also failed to reveal that Hill & Knowlton vice-president Lauri Fitz-Pegado had coached Nayirah in what even the Kuwaitis' own investigators later confirmed was false testimony.
Following the war, human rights investigators attempted to confirm Nayirah's story and could find no witnesses or other evidence to support it. Amnesty International, which had fallen for the story, was forced to issue an embarrassing retraction. Nayirah herself was unavailable for comment.
This pattern (of deception and psychological warfare) underscored what Napoleon meant when he said it wasn't necessary to completely suppress the news; it was sufficient to delay the news until it no longer mattered."
Please keep all of this in mind, because what you are about to read will show you many examples of the very same psychological warfare techniques (falsification, manipulation and deception), and how the propaganda that flowed as freely as the blood in the Balkans had the same point of origin as the "dead Kuwaiti incubator babies" - yes, you guessed it - expensive American public relations firms and the corporate mass media all too willingly circulating the lies to keep the "echo chamber" effect going.
What's Past is Prologue: History Repeats Itself in Yugoslavia
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| Germany and Croatia - partners in genocide, more than once. |
The above quote paraphrases the famous line from Shakespeare's "The Tempest", and is one of my favorites because it is so amazingly true, much of the time.
What it means is that where we have been can often tell us a great deal about where we are going, and how the tragic mistakes of the past are often repeated, if not keenly observed and understood by people wise enough to heed this profound warning.
There is no doubt that history often has a nasty habit of repeating itself, and unfortunately, this repetition usually manifests itself in the worst possible ways.
You are about to see some glaring examples of this concept, by taking a brief detour back to the World War II era in order to refresh our memories (and probably expose some people to these things for the first time), and thus to be more alert in noticing the similarities and patterns that foreshadowed the nightmarish events that haunted the people of the Balkans once more in the early 1990s.
Old Friendships and Old Habits Die Hard
In April of 1941, the Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, NDH) was established, supported by Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. It adopted their racial and political doctrines and adopted the name Ustase, or Ustashi. The Ustaša - Croatian Revolutionary Movement (Croatian: Ustaša - Hrvatski Revolucionarni Pokret, members known collectively as Ustaše, but sometimes anglicised as Ustashe, Ustashas or Ustashi) was a Croatian fascist anti-Yugoslav separatist movement.
The ideology of the movement was a blend of fascism, Nazism, Croatian ultranationalism, and Roman Catholic Clericalist Fundamentalism.
The Ustaše supported the creation of a Greater Croatia that would span to the River Drina and to the border of Belgrade. The movement emphasized the need for a "racially pure" Croatia and promoted persecution and genocide against all Serbs, Jews and Roma people.
The Ustaše movement functioned as a terrorist organization before World War II, but in April 1941, they were appointed to rule a part of Axis-occupied Yugoslavia as the Independent State of Croatia, a puppet state of Nazi Germany. The Ustaše were chiefly responsible for the WWII holocaust in occupied Yugoslavia.
An unknown number of people, hundreds of thousands by most estimates, were killed by the collaborationist Croatian Ustaše government in compliance with its Nazi-aligned racial policies, which condemned Serbs, Jews, and Roma to death in the concentration camps, alongside Croat resistance members and political opponents.
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| Croatian Ustaše and BosnianMuslim Handschar SS doing what they did best - murdering innocent people. |
The Ustaše aimed at an ethnically "pure" Croatia, and saw the Serbian people who lived in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina as the their biggest obstacle. Thus, Ustaše ministers Mile Budak, Mirko Puk, and Milovan Žanić declared in May 1941 that the goal of the new Ustaše policy was an ethnically clean Croatia. They also publicly announced the strategy to achieve their goal:
One third of the Serbs (in the Independent State of Croatia) were to be forcibly converted to Catholicism.
One third of the Serbs were to be expelled (ethnically cleansed).
One third of the Serbs were to be killed.
The Ustaše persecuted the Serbs who were mostly Orthodox Christians, yet they were tolerant toward the Bosnian Muslims because of the prevailing belief that Bosniaks were actually ethnic Croats that converted to Islam under Ottoman Turkish rule.
Muslim Bosnians who were sympathetic to the Ustaša cause joined in the Nazi and Ustaše forces as part of Waffen-SS divisions 13th SS Mountain Division Handschar (or Handzar) in Bosnia (led by Amin al-Husayni) and 23rd SS Grenadier Division Kama advised by Edmund Glaise von Horstenau (the representative of the German military in Croatia) and led by Colonel Ivan Markulj, who was later replaced by Colonel Viktor Pavicic.
The state even converted a former museum in Zagreb for use as a mosque. The Ustaše were against industrialization and democracy. The basic principles of the movement were laid out by Pavelić in his 1929 pamphlet "Principles of the Ustaše Movement".
A problem with the Nazi ideology was that the Croats are Slavs and were considered inferior to Aryans by Nazi standards. Ustaša ideology thus created a theory about a pseudo-Gothic origin of the Croats, in order to raise their standing on the Aryan ladder.
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"The Family" is a bronze monument located in Novi Sad, Serbia, made by sculptor Jovan Soldatovic. It was placed in 1971, in living memory to honor the victims of 'The Raid' made by Nazi-allied Hungarian occupation forces in January of 1942, when more than 1,300 Serbs, Jews and Gypsies were murdered and thrown under the ice of the Dunav (Danube) River.
In 1992, four plates in Serbian and Hebrew with basic information about the event were placed on the monument, along with 60 plates listing the names of the murdered victims.
The Horrors of Jasenovac
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| Croatian Ustaše beheading a man with a saw, and a young child dead from starvation at Jasenovac. |
The Jasenovac concentration camp's role in the Nazi "final solution" was the ethnic cleansing and mass executions of Serbian, Romany (Gypsy) and Jewish inhabitants. The Ustase's death camps in Croatia were directed by numerous Nazi sources:
The office of foreign affairs, represented in Croatia by Siegfried Kasche.
The S.S., represented by a Gestapo official whose identity has not been fully established, but whom Jewish witnesses knew as "Miller".
The Reichsfuhrung and the Wehrmacht.
The competition between the different authorities did not usually benefit the Jews, but actually caused each to try and excel past its competitors in maltreatment of Jews and others. The Nazis encouraged the Ustase's anti-Jewish and anti-Roma actions and showed support for their policy of the extermination of Serbs.
Soon, the Nazis began to make clear their genocidal goals, as shown by the speech Adolf Hitler gave to Slavko Kvaternik, at their meeting on 21 July 1941:
"The Jews are the bane of mankind. If the Jews will be allowed to do as they will, like they are permitted in their Soviet heaven, then they will fulfill their most insane plans. And thus Russia became the center to the world's illness... if for any reason, one nation would endure the existence of a single Jewish family, that family would eventually become the center of a new plot. If there are no more Jews in Europe, nothing will hold the unification of the European nations... this sort of people cannot be integrated in the social order or into an organized nation. They are parasites on the body of a healthy society, that live off of expulsion of decent people. One cannot expect them to fit into a state that requires order and discipline. There is only one thing to be done with them: To exterminate them. The state holds this right since, while precious men die on the battlefront, it would be nothing less than criminal to spare these bastards. They must be expelled, or – if they pose no threat to the public – to be imprisoned inside concentration camps and never be released."
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| The srbosjek ("Serb cutter") knife used by the Croatian Ustaše for the quick slaughter of victims in concentration camps. In Jasenovac, competitions in speedy slaughter were organized by the Ustaše. The winner of one such competition, Petar Brzica, slit the throats of 1,360 prisoners and received a gold watch, a silver service, a roasted suckling pig and wine as his rewards. |
The Jasenovac concentration camp was the largest extermination camp in the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) and occupied Yugoslavia during World War II. The camp was established by the Ustaše regime in August 1941 and dismantled in April 1945. In Jasenovac, the largest number of victims were ethnic Serbs, whom Ante Pavelić considered the main opponents of the NDH.
The Ustaše interned, tortured and executed thousands of men, women and children in Jasenovac. The largest number of victims were Serbs, but other victims included Jews, Roma (Gypsies), and Croatian resistance members opposed to the regime (i.e., Partisans or their sympathizers, categorized by the Ustaše as "communists"). Upon arrival at the camp, prisoners were marked with colors, similar to the use of Nazi concentration camp badges: blue for Serbs, and red for communists (non-Serbian resistance members), while Roma had no marks.
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| Slaughtered victims at Jasenovac were often dumped into the Drina River. |
The Jewish virtual library estimates the number of Serbs killed by the Ustaša between 330,000 and 390,000, with 45,000 to 52,000 Serbs murdered in Jasenovac, which makes it the largest extermination camp in the Balkans and among the largest in Europe. The camp alone accounts for about 10% of the total number of persons killed in all of wartime Yugoslavia.
Jews, being the primary target of German Nazi-oriented genocide, were the second-largest category of victims of Jasenovac. The number of Jewish casualties is uncertain, but ranges from about 8,000 up to 25,000. Most of the executions of Jews at Jasenovac occurred prior to August 1942. Thereafter, the Croatian Ustase (NDH) started to deport them to Auschwitz. In general, Jews were initially sent to Jasenovac from all parts of Croatia after being gathered in Zagreb, and from Bosnia and Herzegovina after being gathered in Sarajevo. Some, however, were transported directly to Jasenovac from other cities and smaller towns.
The Bosnian Muslim SS "Handschar" Division
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| Infamous Nazi Heinrich Himmler proudly inspecting the Bosnian Muslim Handschar SS division. |
The 13th Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Handschar (1st Croatian) was one of the thirty-eight divisions fielded as part of the Waffen-SS during World War II. Its recruits were composed of Bosnian Muslims and Croats.
The Yugoslav provinces of Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and parts of Serbia were reconstituted as a pro-Nazi satellite entity under joint Nazi and Italian occupation. The Croatian Ustaše almost immediately launched a vicious campaign of violence directed at unarmed Serb civilians.
In fall of 1942, the SS Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler and SS-General Gottlob Berger approached Hitler with the proposal to raise a Bosnian Muslim SS division. Both the Wehrmacht and the SS were concerned about the rapidly deteriorating security situation in the NDH that tied down German military personnel that could be better employed elsewhere.
Himmler fantasized that there was a fanatical, blind obedience in the Bosniaks. He thought that Muslim men would make perfect SS soldiers as Islam "promises them Heaven if they fight and are killed in action." As for their ethnic background and SS requirements, the belief that the Bosniaks were in fact descendants of 6th century Goths was even supported by Himmler, as well as Bosniak autonomists.
Himmler was also inspired by the noted successes of the Bosnian-Herzegovinian Infantry in World War I. George Lepre wrote, "Himmler endeavoured to restore what he called "an old Austrian" tradition by reviving the Bosnian regiments of the former Austro-Hungarian army in the form of a Bosnian Muslim SS Division.
Once raised, this division was to engage and destroy Tito's Partisan forces operating in North-eastern Bosnia, thus restoring local 'order'. To be sure, Himmler's primary concern in the region was not the security of the local Muslim population, but the welfare of ethnic German settlers to the north in Srem.
"Srem is the breadbasket of Croatia, and hopefully it and our beloved German settlements will be secured. I hope that the area south of Srem will be liberated by the Bosnian division so that we can at least restore partial order in this ridiculous (Croatian) state."
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| Bosnian Muslim SS Handschar troops reading a pamphlet about Islam and Jews. |
The Handschar division was commanded by German officers, and composed of native Germans from Croatia (Volksdeutsche), Croat Christians and Bosniaks (considered ethnic Croats during WWII), who are Muslims from Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was the largest of the Muslim-oriented divisions and the SS Divisions with 21,065 men, of whom 2,800 were Croat Christians and the remainder Bosnian Muslims. The number of Christians was higher than directed by Himmler, who had allowed a 10% Christian component only after the recruitment of sufficient Muslims proved difficult.
The division had a Muslim Imam for each battalion other than the all-German signal battalion. Initially there was a small Albanian component. In 1943, a number of Albanians from Kosovo and the Sandžak region were recruited and teamed up into Battalion I/2. This was perhaps the best trained and equipped Nazi Albanian military formation during the war. Ironically, in 1944, the formation was transferred directly from combat in Bosnia to Kosovo following the creation of 21st Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Skanderbeg (1st Albanian).
The head of Waffen SS recruitment, SS Obergruppenführer Gottlob Berger reported to Himmler that the Albanians "were quite sad about leaving."
These Muslims were then transferred into what became the Skanderberg SS Divison in Albania, who were equally notorious for their murderous atrocities on soldiers and civilians alike.
The Chetniks
While parts of Serbia were also conquered and occupied by Nazi forces in World War II, a significant number of Serbs resisted this occupation, and fought against it in two major opposing factions.
One was the Partisans, led by Tito who later became President, and were sympathetic to and aligned with Communist Russia.
The other was the Chetniks, who were primarily guerilla forces loyal to the Yugoslavian royal government in exile due to the Nazi occupation. They initially opposed both the Communist Russian and Nazi forces and thus, all of their respective Nazi collaborators in Croatia, Bosnia, Herzegovina and Albania.
Later, they became unable to maintain this resistance against generally everyone on the battlefield other than the Allies, and entered into an alliance of convenience ("the enemy of my enemy is my friend") with the Axis powers, in order to fight against their greatest perceived enemy at the time, Tito's Partisans.
This was obviously very convenient for Nazi Germany as well, and especially significant in terms of military strategy, being that the Russians had originally signed a "non-aggression" (don't bother us and we won't bother you) pact with Nazi Germany, which Hitler, of course, betrayed later by attacking Russia when it was most militarily convenient and useful for him to do so.
This betrayal would prove to be a fatal mistake for Nazi Germany, and a great blessing for the rest of the world, in many ways.
Operation Halyard
The Chetniks, for their part, were largely successful in many battles, and received support from Allied (American and British) forces.
In Operation Halyard (a.k.a. Halyard Mission), the largest Allied airlift operation behind enemy lines, over 500 Allied airmen downed over Nazi occupied Serbia were rescued and protected by Serbian Chetnik guerrillas, led by General Dragoljub Mihailović, with the assistance of American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) liaison officers.
Most of the airmen had been shot down during numerous bombing runs, most of which were on their way from Italy to bomb German occupied oil fields in Romania. They were not captured, but instead practiced escape and evasion until coming into contact with the Chetniks.
This operation took place between August and December 1944 from a crudely constructed forest airfield created by Serbian peasants in Pranjani, Serbia. It is little known today, and largely unknown to most Americans - in other words, the WWII-obsessed filmmakers (such as billionaire Steven Spielberg) have not yet chosen to tell this story of extreme courage and heroism.
It is, however, the subject of the excellent 2007 book 'The Forgotten 500: The Untold Story of the Men Who Risked All For the Greatest Rescue Mission of World War II', by author Gregory A. Freeman.
In his book, he describes it as "one of the greatest rescue stories ever told". It tells the story of how the airmen were downed in a country they knew nothing about, and how the Serbian villagers (civilians) were willing to sacrifice their own lives to save the lives of the Allied (American, British and Canadian) air crews.
The OSS planned an elaborate rescue involving C-47 cargo planes landing in enemy territory. It was an extremely risky project, involving the planes not only entering enemy territory without being shot down themselves, but also landing, picking up the downed airmen, then taking off and flying out of that same territory, again without being shot down themselves.
The rescue was a complete success, but received little to no publicity. This was partly due to the timing, and the world being focused on the D-Day operations in France.
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| US Major Richard Helman, whose life was saved by Serbian Chetniks in Operation Halyard |
Due to the efforts of Major Richard L. Felman and his friends, President Harry S. Truman, on the recommendation of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, posthumously awarded General Mihailović the Legion of Merit for the rescue of American airmen by the Chetniks. For the first time in history, this high award and the story of the heroic rescues was classified secret by the US State Department, so as not to offend the Communist Yugoslav government.
Such a display of appreciation for the Chetniks would not have been welcome in Yugoslavia, being that the Allies, who had once supported the Chetniks early in World War II, switched sides to Josip Broz Tito's Communist Partisans for the latter part of the war.
"General Dragoljub Mihailovich distinguished himself in an outstanding manner as Commander-in-Chief of the Yugoslavian Army Forces and later as Minister of War by organizing and leading important resistance forces against the enemy which occupied Yugoslavia, from December 1941 to December 1944. Through the undaunted efforts of his troops, many United States airmen were rescued and returned safely to friendly control. General Mihailovich and his forces, although lacking adequate supplies, and fighting under extreme hardships, contributed materially to the Allied cause, and were instrumental in obtaining a final Allied victory." (March 29, 1948, Harry S. Truman)
Almost sixty years after his death, on May 9, 2005, Draža Mihailović's daughter, Gordana, was presented with a decoration bestowed posthumously on her father by United States President Harry S. Truman in 1948, for the assistance provided to the crews of US bombers that were gunned down on the territory under Chetnik control in World War II.
On September 12, 2004, five years after the NATO armed conflict against Yugoslavia, four American veterans, Clare Musgrove, Arthur Jibilian, George Vujnovich, and Robert Wilson, visited Pranjani again for the unveiling of a commemorative plaque at the Pranjani Airfield. A bill introduced to the U.S. House of Representatives by Bob Latta on July 31, 2009, requested that Jibilian be awarded the Medal of Honor for his part in Operation Halyard.
Mihailović was captured on March 13, 1946 by agents of the Yugoslav security agency, the OZNA. He was charged on 47 counts. In the end the court found him guilty on 8 counts, including war crimes and high treason. The trial lasted from June 10 to July 15, he was found guilty and sentenced to death by firing squad on July 15. The Presidium of the National Assembly rejected the clemency appeal on July 16.
Mihailović was executed together with nine other officers in the early hours of July 18, 1946, in Lisičiji Potok, about 200 meters from the former Royal Palace, and buried in an unmarked grave on the same spot.
Clinton and His Cronies: Loyal Servants of the NWO
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| Madeleine Albright - a walking crime against humanity |
Madeleine Korbel Albright (born May 15, 1937) is the first woman to become a United States Secretary of State. She was appointed by U.S. President Bill Clinton on December 5, 1996, and was unanimously confirmed by a U.S. Senate vote of 99-0. She was sworn in on January 23, 1997.
Albright now serves as a Professor of International Relations at Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service.
Albright also serves as a Director on the Board of the Council on Foreign Relations. She also took a graduate course given by Zbigniew Brzezinski (who I mentioned in this article as being a key figure of the ruling elite), who would later be her boss at the U.S. National Security Council.
Ghosts of Rwanda
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| Madeleine Albright refused to call this genocide in Rwanda until months later, yet she had no difficulty labeling two dozen KLA terrorist soldiers killed in combat (as proven by autopsies) near Racak as "genocide" and a "massacre" serious enough to justify the full-scale NATO bombing of the entire nation of Serbia. |
Albright was appointed ambassador to the United Nations, her first diplomatic post, shortly after Clinton was inaugurated, presenting her credentials on February 9, 1993. During her tenure at the U.N., she had a rocky relationship with the U.N. Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, whom she criticized as "disengaged" and "neglect[ful]" of genocide in Rwanda. Albright wrote:
"My deepest regret from my years in public service is the failure of the United States and the international community to act sooner to halt these crimes."
So, Albright apparently has no deep regrets about playing a major role in directly and deliberately manipulating events that caused the war crimes and deaths of thousands of innocent people in Serbia and Kosovo.
In 'Shake Hands with the Devil', Roméo Dallaire claims that in 1994, in Albright's role as the U.S.'s permanent representative to the U.N., she avoided describing the killings in Rwanda as "genocide" until overwhelmed by the evidence for it; this is now how she describes these massacres in her memoirs.
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| Albright at the Council on Foreign Relations - the epicenter of New World Order crimes against humanity and home for globalist criminals of all stripes. |
How ironic and hypocritical that Madeleine Albright can keep a straight face while decrying the genocide in Rwanda (having failed to do anything stop it), while at the same time being one of the key figures in causing the genocide and mass civilian casualties that resulted from the illegal and ruthless NATO bombing of Serbia and Kosovo.
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| Madeleine Albright getting friendly with KLA terrorist leader Hashim Thaci. |
Albright was also a primary source of support for the terrorist KLA/UCK, who the entire Clinton administration knew very well was committing countless atrocities and mass murders against both ethnic Serbian and Albanian Muslim civilians alike.
Richard Holbrooke - Diplomat, War Criminal and NWO Puppet
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| Holbrooke, playing his part in the cozy US relationship with terrorist murderers of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). |
During 1998 and 1999, in his capacity as "special presidential envoy", Holbrooke ostensibly worked to end the conflict between the armed forces of Serbia and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), who were not only fighting against the Serbian military and police, but also terrorizing and murdering innocent civilians, both ethnic Serbs and Albanian Muslims, throughout Kosovo.
All of this was known by the United States and other Western governments, as well as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and others, who were financing and supporting the KLA, both covertly and openly.
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| Holbrooke and his friend Hillary, who I must say is looking a little dissociative. She might also just be bored to death…now there's something we could pray for, literally. |
General Wesley Clark: From Waco to Bosnia - Mass Murderer For the NWO
Wesley Kanne Clark, Sr., KBE (born December 23, 1944) is a retired general of the United States Army. Graduating as valedictorian of his class at West Point, he was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to the University of Oxford (a key indicator of ruling elite NWO sponsorship, by the way) where he obtained a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, and later graduated from the Command and General Staff College with a master's degree in military science.
He spent 34 years in the Army and the Department of Defense, receiving many military decorations, several honorary knighthoods, and a Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Clark commanded Operation Allied Force in the Kosovo War during his term as the Supreme Allied Commander Europe of NATO from 1997 to 2000.
Clark was born Wesley Kanne in Chicago on December 23, 1944. His father Benjamin died on December 6, 1948, following which his mother then moved the family to Little Rock, Arkansas. Wesley's name was changed to Wesley Kanne Clark. Viktor Clark's name actually replaced that of Wesley's biological father on his birth certificate, something Wesley would later say that he wished they had not done.
His mother, Veneta, said she raised Wesley without telling him of his Jewish ancestry to protect him from the anti-Semitic activities of the Ku Klux Klan occurring in the South at the time.
Waco and A Lot of Dead Americans
Some critics, such as left-wing CounterPunch and right-wing FrontPageMag.com, have made allegations that Clark was, to some degree, involved in the Waco Siege, where 74 Branch Davidian followers were killed during the final raid, including their leader David Koresh.
Groups making allegations of Clark's involvement note that Clark's second-in-command at the time, future General Peter Schoomaker, met with then-Texas governor Ann Richards and then-Attorney General Janet Reno, who were also allegedly involved with the siege.
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| US Army tanks under the command of General Wesley Clark roll into Waco, Texas in direct violation of Posse Comitatus laws that forbid military involvement in civilian law enforcement. 76 men, women and children died in the fire that destroyed the Branch Davidian compound. |
They also note that some military technology and personnel from Fort Hood, including two M1 Abrams tanks, were lent to the FBI for the operation. Some also suggest that, given the sensitive nature of the materials lent for the operation, Clark had knowledge of and perhaps a hand in planning the Waco Siege.
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| The burnt remains of a 3-year-old child murdered by the US government in Waco, Texas. |
The Insanity of Rambouillet
In March 1999, Richard Holbrooke traveled to Belgrade to deliver the final ultimatum to Serb leader Slobodan Milošević before the NATO bombing campaign began.
The Rambouillet Agreement is the name of a proposed peace agreement between then-Yugoslavia and the separatist-terrorist KLA delegation representing the ethnic-Albanian majority population of Kosovo. It was drafted by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and named for Chateau Rambouillet, where it was initially proposed.
The significance of the agreement lies in the fact that Yugoslavia refused to accept it, which NATO used as justification to start the Kosovo War. Belgrade's rejection was based on the argument that contained provisions for Kosovo's autonomy that went further than the Serbian/Yugoslav government saw as being reasonable.
The most controversial provision was that Kosovo would only de jure be a province of Serbia and de facto a third republic, but with greater autonomy than Serbia and Montenegro with their respect to their relations to the federal government.
Serbia viewed this as secession of Kosovo from Serbia, but the most controversial aspect of this was that while Serbia would have no influence over its southern province whatsoever, Kosovo would have substantial influence over Serbia. Kosovars would take part in Serbian elections and its MPs would sit in a parliament which would have no jurisdiction over Kosovo. Kosovars would have guaranteed seats in the Serbian Government and the Serbian Supreme Court, which would deal exclusively to the territory of Serbia without Kosovo.
Kosovo would also have an independent judicial system including a its own autonomous Constitutional Court, but it would also have guaranteed representatives in the Yugoslavian judiciary, which would have no jurisdiction over Kosovo.
Furthermore, NATO would have free and unrestricted military access to the country, something that no sane leader of any sovereign nation would accept.
According to Appendix B:
"NATO personnel shall enjoy, together with their vehicles, vessels, aircraft, and equipment, free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access throughout the FRY including associated airspace and territorial waters. This shall include, but not be limited to, the right of bivouac, maneuver, billet, and utilization of any areas or facilities as required for support, training, and operations."
After the war, the International Independent Inquiry on Kosovo led by Richard Goldstone investigated the Appendix issue and concluded that it had by accident been copied from other peacekeeping agreements such as those for Bosnia.
However, the British politician, Lord Gilbert, said in an inquiry by a House committee "I think the terms put to Milošević at Rambouillet were absolutely intolerable; how could he possibly accept them; it was quite deliberate".
The Serbian Parliament responded on 23 March 1999 to the agreement with a sharp criticism. Though it agreed that Kosovo should be given autonomy, it stated that it would prefer the incursion of the United Nations over that of NATO, accusing the "separatist-terrorist delegation of ethnic Albanians" of: [avoiding] direct talks as it did not give up its separatist goals: to use autonomy as a means for establishing a 'state within a state'; to secure occupation of Serbia through the implementation of the political agreement; to create an ethnically pure Kosovo-Metohija under the pretext of protecting human rights and democracy; and to secure the secession of Kosovo-Metohija from Serbia with the help of their patrons and through an international protectorate and referendum.
The Rambouillet Agreement was important for the debate about Kosovo War. However, the whole agreement was leaked onto the Internet about the time when the war started and many non-mainstream reporters and NGO activists were referring to it in their commentaries on war.
The Rambouillet Agreement was initially fully rejected by the Kosovar Albanian side, whereas Belgrade had agreed to all of the political and non-military points. Belgrade requested NATO troops be replaced with UN troops for full acceptance. The Agreement was at the talks repeatedly amended until the Kosovo Albanian side was forced to sign, whereas Belgrade rejected it. It was amended to open the Kosovo status process and include Annexes which were found unacceptable by most, which bordered FRY on the level of NATO occupation.
A republican foreign-policy aide later told a think tank that he'd heard a US official say:
“We intentionally set the bar too high for the Serbs to comply. They need some bombing, and that's what they are going to get.”
John Pilger wrote in New Statesman:
"Anyone scrutinizing the Rambouillet document is left with little doubt that the excuses given for the subsequent [NATO] bombing were fabricated. The peace negotiations were stage managed and the Serbs were told: surrender and be occupied, or don't surrender and be destroyed."
Ruder Finn Public Relations - Masters of Deception
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| Ruder Finn exploited this deceptive image (and others) to maximum effect, conjuring up memories of Auschwitz to deliberately mislead the Jewish public and get them on the side of those in the Bosnian War who had major historical involvement in the Holocaust of six million Jews in WWII - a huge PR success for Ruder Finn and Nazi sympathizers everywhere. |
Selling Nazi Holocaust Conspirators to the Jewish People as Victims and Friends
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| Croatian, Bosnian and Albanian Muslim (KLA) armies and leadership all had extensive past involvement with the Nazi SS and genocide of Jews, Serbs, Roma and other "inferior races". |
The following is an interview with Mr. James Harff (director of Ruder & Finn Global Public Affairs) given to Mr. Jacques Merlino in Paris in October 1993. Ruder Finn is a large and powerful public relations company, currently registered as foreign agents. Here are Harff's statements, slightly abridged.
Harrf: For 18 months, we have been working for the Republics of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, as well as for the opposition in Kosovo. Throughout this period, we had many successes, giving us a formidable international image. We intend to take advantage of this and develop commercial agreements with these countries. Speed is vital, because items favourable to us must be settled in public opinion. THE FIRST STATEMENT COUNTS. The retractions [or denials of false accusations] have no effect.
Question: What are your methods of operation?
Harff: The essential tools in our work are a card file, a computer, and a fax. The card file contains a few hundred names of journalists, politicians, academicians, and representatives of humanitarian organizations. The computer goes through the card files according to correlated subjects, coming up with very effective targets.
The computer is tied into a fax. In this way, we can disseminate information in a few minutes to those we think will react (positively). Our job is to assure that the arguments for our side will be the first to be expressed.
Question: How often do you intervene?
Harff: Quantity is not important. You have to intervene at the right time with the right person...
Question: What achievement were you most proud of?
Harff: To have managed to put Jewish opinion on our side. This was a sensitive matter, as the dossier was dangerous looked at from this angle. (Croatian) President Tudjman was very careless in his book "Wastelands of Historical Reality". Reading this writtings, one could accuse him of anti-semitism.
In Bosnia, the situation was no better: President Izetbegovic strongly supported the creation of a fundamentalist Islamic state in his book "The Islamic Declaration".
Besides, the Croatian and Bosnian past was marked by a real and cruel anti-semitism. Tens of thousands of Jews perished [were brutally tortured and murdered] in Croatian camps. So there was every reason for intellectuals and Jewish organizations to be hostile towards the Croats and Bosnians. Our challenge was to reverse this attitude. And we succeded masterfully."
Ruder Finn's 'Mission Impossible': We Fooled the Jews
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| Thousands of Albanian KLA/UCK supporters have burned and destroyed hundreds of ancient Serbian Christian churches and monasteries in Kosovo, Metohija and Djakovica. |
The interview with James Harff of Ruder Finn continues:
Harff: At the beginning of August 1992, the New York Newsday (Roy Gutman, who you will read much more about soon) came out with the affair of (Serb) concentration camps. We jumped at the opportunity immediately.
We outwitted three big Jewish organizations - B'Nai Brith Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish Committee, and the American Jewish Congress. We suggested to them to publish an advertisement in the New York Times and to organize demonstrations outside the U.N.
This was a tremendous coup. When the Jewish organizations entered the game on the side of the (Muslim) Bosnians, we could promptly equate the Serbs with the Nazis in the public mind.
Nobody understood what was happening in Yugoslavia. The great majority of Americans were probably asking themselves in which African country Bosnia was situated. But, by a single move, we were able to present a simple story of good guys and bad guys, which would hereafter play itself.
We won by targeting the Jewish audience. Almost immediately there was a clear change of language in the press, with the use of words with high emotional content, such as "ethnic cleansing", "concentration camps", etc. which evoked images of Nazi Germany and the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
The emotional charge was so powerful that nobody could go against it.
Question: But when you did all of this, you had no proof that what you said was true. You only had the one article in Newsday!
Harff: Our work is not to verify information. We are not equipped for that. Our work is to accelerate the circulation of information favorable to us [i.e., DISINFORMATION], to aim at judiciously chosen targets. We did not confirm the existence of death camps in Bosnia, we just made it known that Newsday affirmed it.
Question: Are you aware that you took on a grave responsibility?
Harff: "We are professionals. We had a job to do and we did it.
WE ARE NOT PAID TO BE MORAL".
Creating Public Opinion - "We Are Not Paid To be Moral"
On 7 July 1991, under the auspices of the European Community, the leaders of Slovenia and Croatia agreed (in the so-called "Brioni Declaration") to suspend their declarations of independence for three months to allow negotiations toward a peaceful solution.
However, during this supposed cooling-off period a major unilateral step was taken in the most decisive of all wars in Yugoslavia: the public relations war.
On 12 August 1991, the Croatian government hired the American public relations firm Ruder Finn Global Public Affairs to "develop and carry out strategies and tactics for communication with members of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate as well as with officials of the U.S. government including the State Department, the National Security Council and other relevant agencies and departments of the U.S. government as well as with American and international news media".
On 12 November 1991, Ruder Finn's contract was renewed to include lobbying in relation to diplomatic recognition, sanctions, and embargoes, as well as briefings for officials of the first Bush administration and preparation of special background material, press releases, both reactive and proactive articles and letters to the editors to appear in major newspapers, briefings for journalists, columnists, and commentators.
In January and February 1992, Ruder Finn organized trips to Croatia for U.S. Congressmen. The United States recognized Croatia as an independent state on 7 April 1992.
Many people's first impressions of the conflict were influenced by the deluge of press releases sent to Congressmen and media. Video clips with frightful images of death and destruction were distributed worldwide with commentaries designed to support the idea that the fighting taking place in Croatia was part of a deliberate plan to create "Greater Serbia" by the conquering of Croatia [which was entirely false].
On 23 June 1992, Izetbegovic's [Bosnian Muslim] government in Sarajevo in turn signed a contract with Ruder Finn in order to promote a stronger leadership role for the United States in the Balkans.
To this end, the agency undertook an impressive array of actions, notably setting up a "Bosnia Crisis Communication Center" in contact with American, British, and French media; media appearance coaching for Bosnian foreign minister Haris Silajdzic; sending press releases to U.S. Congressmen and "Fax Updates" on developments in Bosnia-Herzegovina to over 300 addresses, including the most important world media and parliamentarians; writing 17 letters to be signed by Izetbegovic and Silajdzic and addressed to top world representatives at international conferences; organizing personal contacts between Silajdzic and Al Gore, Margaret Thatcher, and other influential personalities, including 17 U.S. Senators; placing articles on in the editorial pages of the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, and so on.
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| Bernard Henry Levy - cheerleader for the Bosnian Muslim military |
Siladjdzic revealed the effects of his Ruder Finn training in subsequent conversation with the French writer Bernard-Henry Levy, who had undertaken volunteer public relations for Izetbegovic in Paris. Silajdzic boasted naively of being a "star" in the United States, and claimed that he was able to change millions of votes by merely appearing on television. Silajdzic startled Levy by reproaching him for failing to exploit sufficiently the "propaganda" theme of "genocide". This showed his "American side", commented Levy.
Eighteen months after taking the Croatian contract, Ruder Finn was able to boast to having "developed a reputation as the international public relations agency with the greatest experience and involvement with the crisis in the Balkans. Our work has helped put Ruder Finn on the map in Washington, DC, and internationally." The agency claimed to have gained "dozens of close contacts in Congress and among the news media".
In October 1992, Ruder Finn took the job of public relations for the "ethnic Albanian separatists" in the Serbian province of Kosovo; i.e. the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA/UCK) - which was long known and listed by the CIA as a dangerous terrorist organization that was heavily involved in Albanian organized crime (including heroin, weapons and human sex slave trafficking), right up until the moment they suddenly became useful and convenient "allies" in the NATO media and military actions against Serbia.
In March 1993, as hostilities sharpened between Croatia and Muslim forces disputing territory in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Croatian government turned to another American agency, Waterman and Associates, to stave off eventual Muslim accusations that Croatia shared equal responsibility with Serbia. The campaigns on behalf of Tudjman's Croatia enjoyed financial and political support from Croatian Âmigrà organizations in the United States and Canada.
In April 1993, French television journalist Jacques Merlino visited the Washington headquarters of Ruder Finn Global Public Affairs to interview the man in charge of the Balkan contracts, James Harff.
Merlino asked Harff what he considered his proudest achievement in this operation. The answer: "Having succeeded in putting Jewish opinion on our side." The image of both Croats and Bosnian Muslims risked being tarnished by their involvement in the persecution of Jews during World War II. "Our challenge was to turn that around", Harff told Merlino, and this had been done thanks to the "camps" story.
In the first days of August 1992, the Long Island newspaper Newsday published reports from its Bonn correspondent Roy Gutman, based [solely on hearsay, as Gutman never visited any camps until after they were closed down!] interviews in Zagreb, telling of horrendous conditions in Serb-run internment camps in Bosnia.
Seeing the potential impact of comparison with Nazi "death camps", Ruder Finn immediately contacted three major Jewish organizations, the B'nai B'rith Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, and the American Jewish Congress, suggesting they publicly protest. They did. This launched the demonization of Serbs as the new Nazis. In 1993, Ruder Finn was awarded the Silver Medal of the Public Relations Society of America in the category "crisis communication".
How to Make a Bad Situation Much Worse - Mass Media Propaganda 101
Propaganda Exhibit A: "Serbian Death Camps"
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| A prime example of mass media deception: "Muslim prisoners in a Serbian detention camp"? No, not even close. |
The Time magazine cover photo shown above was only one of many "mistakes" and outright lies sold to the public as truth by mass media throughout the Bosnian war. In the case of this deceptive Time magazine cover, it was taken from film footage provided by Penny Marshall an ITN film crew, who had visited a refugee camp at a place called Trnopolje, a transit center for refugees, at the invitation of the Bosnian Serb government.
You probably don't remember Hitler inviting the media to openly tour Auschwitz or Dachau, because...well, it didn't happen. Probably because they really were death camps. Yet the mass media felt no shame whatsoever in making this grossly inaccurate association in the minds of the generally apathetic, self-absorbed and unaware public.
Originally, the puny chickenwire fence you see in the photo had been there to protect a tool shed on the land adjacent to the refugee camp, and it was mostly falling down and in disrepair.
What Penny Marshall did was set up the camera shot with her ITN camera crew INSIDE this chickenwire enclosure on the adjacent property (not the "death camp", which was open and unguarded), and then called the refugees over to talk to her across a small but still standing section of that one time fence.
Obviously, this created the false appearance that the refugees were inside the "death camp", imprisoned behind barbed wire, when they were actually OUTSIDE the chickenwire, in a large open field area, looking in - at Penny and her ITN camera crew, who had deliberately positioned themselves there for a very obvious reason - to create the (false) impression of prisoners behind barbed wire, thus triggering the Auschwitz imagery that they wanted so badly to create.
Suing Your Enemies Into Submission (And Bankruptcy) To Defend Your Deception
Although ITN and Marshall have since claimed ignorance, and further used liberal British libel laws to sue the journalists who exposed their misrepresentations out of existence, she and her crew clearly did their best to falsely create an image of a death camp for mass consumption - an image that was quite obviously their preconceived notion of the camp, which they proceeded to "prove" by deceptive means.
On March 15 [2000] a London High Court jury found that the story “The Picture that Fooled the World” published by the independent magazine LM had libelled Independent Television News (ITN) and two of its journalists. The maximum damages suggested by Justice Morland were awarded against the magazine's editors, Michael Hume and Helene Guldberg, and its publishers, Informing (LM) Ltd.
ITN was awarded £75,000, and journalists Penny Marshall and Ian Williams were awarded £150,000 each. Together with court costs, LM faces a total bill estimated at £600,000 — which will bankrupt the magazine.
The libel verdict against LM has major implications for democratic rights and press freedom. ITN is a multimillion-pound corporation that provides news for three of Britain's major TV channels and has millions of viewers.
Investigating the "ITN Investigative Journalists"
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| The fabled Omarska "death camp" |
The libel case concerned LM's publishing of an article by German freelance journalist Thomas Deichmann in its first edition in February 1997. The article was based on Deichmann's investigation of an ITN news report shot on August 5, 1992. Marshall and Williams were part of a television crew invited by Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic to inspect compounds holding Muslims, in order to refute allegations that the Serbian authorities had established concentration camps during the Bosnian civil war.
Williams and Marshall visited two camps in northern Bosnia, at Trnopolje and Omarska. Their footage broadcast from the Trnopolje camp concentrated on a single image of a Bosnian inmate, Fikret Alic, standing behind barbed wire, his ribs protruding through his emaciated frame.
ITN won a string of awards for the report, which was credited as the first proof of Serb-run concentration camps. The picture of Fikret Alic was shown around the world, and played an important role in justifying Western intervention in Bosnia. US President George Bush likened it directly to images of the Nazi death camps.
In 1996, Dutch lawyer Professor Mischa Wladimiroff asked Deichmann to provide expert testimony on German media coverage of the war in the trial of Dusko Tadic, a Bosnian Serb accused of war crimes. Deichmann recalled that in looking back through the media coverage, the ITN image kept reappearing. On closer observation, he noticed that the posts holding up the barbed wire in the photograph were on the side of the fence where the prisoners were standing, not the outside, as would be expected.
Deichmann went to Bosnia to investigate the Trnopolje camp, a former school building. His article asserted that there was no barbed wire around the camp — which he said was a collection centre for refugees and not a prison — but was, in fact, around a small enclosure next to the camp from where the ITN news team had been filming.
"Whatever the British news team's intentions may have been, their pictures were seen around the world as the first hard evidence of concentration camps in Bosnia," he wrote. However, “an important element of that 'key image' had been produced by camera angles and editing."
Deichmann wrote that Muslim refugees had set up the collection centre in May 1992 on the grounds of a school as a refuge after Serbs took control of Kozarac.
He quoted former British Liberal Democratic Party leader Paddy Ashdown , who visited the camp a few days after Marshall and Williams' news team. From the August 13 Independent newspaper:
"They have gathered here because they had to go somewhere. Their houses have been burnt and their lives threatened. Muslim extremists pressure the men to join up with the guerrillas, so they have come here for safety. But on most recent nights the unprotected camp has been raided by Serbian extremists who beat them, rob them of what little they have left and, it is claimed, rape the women. Things are better now."
ITN, Marshall and Williams then began libel proceedings. Other British news sources that had carried the story, such as the Financial Times, published retractions so as to avoid potentially costly fines.
Much of ITN's legal argument centred on the alleged pro-Serb bias of LM, which, the media corporation claims, led the magazine to conceal Serbian war crimes. LM deny this.
Writing in the Independent January 11, LM publisher Claire Fox said, “We published it [Deichmann's article], not to make excuses for atrocities, but to demonstrate our belief that there was no comparison between the Nazi death camps and what happened in Bosnia ... which could both distort our view of the conflict in somewhere like the Balkans, and belittle the true horror of the Nazis' Final Solution.”
Britain's Liberal Libel Laws
Britain is renowned as one of the best places in the world to take out a libel action. Its laws are notoriously biased in favour of wealthy litigants, offering a better chance of success and higher awards. English libel law is not subject to constitutional constraints defending free speech; nor is there a statutory press code. It is directed at the protection of private reputation at the expense of freedom of expression.
Consequently, the burden is on the defendant, who must prove the truth of his statement, as opposed to the US and other countries where the plaintiff must prove its falsity. British law also presupposes that a libel has caused loss (both financial and personal), and consequently no actual damage need be proven. In addition, the loser normally pays both sides' legal costs.
Journalists are treated the same as private citizens. The ITN action was groundbreaking because it is normally the media and journalists who are the target of such libel actions, not the litigators.
The factual veracity [truthfulness] of the Deichmann article was not made an issue in the libel action. Rather it was the motives that LM had supposedly attributed to ITN and its journalists — that they had deliberately misled the public through “editing and camera angles”.
In other words, ITN did not dispute that they falsely created the image that was sold to the world of emaciated prisoners confined against their will behind barbed wire, obviously reminiscent of death camps in Nazi Germany.
The Judge's Revealing Remarks
In his closing remarks, Justice Morland stated that: “It is the thrust of the defendants' case that Ian Williams and Penny Marshall must have known and did know that the men were not caged in behind barbed wire but it was they, with their TV teams, that were enclosed by the barbed wire fence which surrounded the barn area... Clearly Ian Williams and Penny Marshall and their TV teams were mistaken in thinking they were not enclosed by the old barbed wire fence, but does it matter?”.
I, for one, think it absolutely matters. For example, the truth versus deceptive advertising is constantly at issue in our society. Are these people actually saying that an advert falsely claiming that one product cleans better than another is serious business, but using deceptive, staged photographs in major news media that is broadcast to convince the world that a nation is running Nazi death camps is not so serious?
The key claim by ITN and the two journalists was that they were not aware of the barbed wire fence when they shot the footage, and so allegations that they had deliberately misled were false.
So, these gifted, crack reporters (or were they simply ON crack?) who were touring what they allegedly believed to be a Nazi-esque death camp - a very serious situation - were just so utterly stupid that they honestly could not tell the difference between a large field area with hundreds of people standing around in the open, and a smaller barn area that was enclosed with a small section of chickenwire???
This would lead any reasonable person to wonder how many other "death camps" were reported throughout the war by such mass media geniuses that were actually nothing more than the barns or toolsheds with some chickenwire strewn about?
The point being, if one goes into a situation looking to find a certain conclusion, they will almost certainly "find" what they are looking for, whether it is actually there or not.
Nowhere is this more true than with the ruling elite-controlled mass media. They report what they are told to report, and the "news" we hear is very often contrived, and/or selectively filtered to fit the predetermined schemes of what the wealthy and powerful elite of this world want us to hear...and nothing more.
ITN's legal team sought to establish that the camp was in fact a prison and not a collection centre, to prove that their picture accurately portrayed its function. Its legal team produced witnesses who testified that Muslims were held against their will at the camp, and that many were beaten, tortured and underfed. In total, ITN fielded 18 witnesses, 17 who worked in TV broadcasting.
Well, that certainly is an interesting "witness list", isn't it?
So, this footage that clearly misrepresented the actual situation on the ground at the Trnopolje camp - the picture of the very skinny, yet smiling guy (Fikrit Alic ) became the 'evidence' that the Bosnian Serbs were running death camps, hence the phrase quoted from the London Sunday Times, "To see adults starving was like a throwback to the death camps of wartime Germany."
LM had sought to bring out this aspect of ITN's libel action: BBC's World Affairs Editor John Simpson, whom they had attempted to call as a witness, has spoken out against what he calls “journalism of attachment” in connection with ITN's libel action against LM.
In the Sunday Telegraph of September 14, 1997 he condemned reporters who go to war zones “not to tell us who is winning or who is behind it all”, but “which side is good and which is evil”. Simpson was subjected to a vicious witch-hunt for reporting the impact of NATO's bombing of Belgrade last year.
One of the foremost defenders of ITN's decision to prosecute LM was Guardian journalist Ed Vulliamy, who was with Marshall and Williams during their 1992 trip. Nevertheless, in his first article on their visit, published on August 7 1992, he stated that “Trnopolje cannot be called a ‘concentration camp' and is nowhere as sinister as Omarska: it is very grim, something between a civilian prison and a transit camp”. He interviewed Muslims and stated that “some people have fled voluntarily to Trnopolje simply to avoid the raging battles in the villages around”.
Critical Implications For Free Speech
What were the political stakes in the ITN libel action, which outweighed all considerations of factual accuracy and free speech?
A verdict against LM was crucial, and not just for the reputation of ITN and its journalists. ITN's pictures of Fikrit Alic have become so closely identified with official justifications of NATO's intervention against Serbia, that to throw doubt about the former inevitably raises questions concerning the latter.
The same day the ITN libel action opened, last February 28, a War Crimes Tribunal at the Hague began hearing the case against three Bosnian Serbs accused of committing torture, rape and murder at the Omarska prison camp. The picture of Fikrit Alic was presented in evidence, despite having been filmed at Trnopolje [a completely different location].
Opening the trial, the Australian prosecutor Grant Niemann said, "the images of skeletal malnutrition...sent shock waves around the world".
The implications of the verdict against LM go far beyond restrictions on the ability to make critical comment about NATO's actions in the Balkans, Iraq and elsewhere.
Aside from upholding the factual accuracy of their article, LM's defence was based upon “fair comment”. This defence means that the comment is one that a fair-minded person could make based on the facts [provided]. It is regarded as an important legal bulwark, safeguarding writers of editorials and commentary pieces.
However, under English law, there is no absolute protection for certain comments or statements of opinion and, if malice can be proven on the part of the defendant, the plea of fair comment can be defeated.
In this case, malice has been defined as any questioning of the political motivations of either the major news corporations or, by extension, Western governments. Coverage by the big business media of every major war in the last decade has been characterised by an embrace of the rationale advanced by Britain, the US and other NATO powers.
During NATO's Kosovo campaign last year, the WSWS noted, “It is impossible to obtain an objective picture of what is happening in Kosovo — the extent of Serb violence, the role of the KLA in attacking Kosovan Serbs, the destructive impact of NATO bombing on the Kosovars — under conditions in which official and media reports are dictated by the political and military aims of the US and its KLA allies.”
This characterization of the relationship between government and the mass media has been amply confirmed by the ITN action against LM. Not only does ITN defend its right to present a partisan account of NATO's war, while portraying itself as an unbiased news source, it has also given notice that anyone questioning this will be subjected to crushing financial sanctions by the British legal system.
The illegal Clinton-NATO bombing of Serbia that was soon to come was fueled in part by this staged ITN news report purporting to show evidence of a Bosnian Serb death camp. Pictures of emaciated 'prisoners' behind a barbed wire fence were used to claim the Serbians were running internment camps which were as bad, if not worse, than anything the Nazis did in WWII.
REALITY CHECK: 1) The people shown were Bosnian refugees who willingly entered the camp for help in fleeing the violence created by the Bosnian Muslim army combat actions and mujahideen terrorist attacks in the area - they were falsely misrepresented as prisoners who had been forcibly detained by "the Serbs".
2) The ITN film crew either "accidentally" (or deliberately?) positioned themselves inside the chickenwire enclosure on land adjacent to the camp, in order to create the illusion that the people were imprisoned behind barbed wire.
3) The emaciated man shown, Fikrit Alic, had suffered from a serious health condition, tuberculosis, for a decade or so, not starvation - or at the very least, he looked pretty much the same before entering the camp as when the earth-shaking ITN video was so cleverly and conveniently shot at the Trnopolje refugee center.
Conclusion: This video footage, the story and the false impression it (intentionally) created, was very deceptive - and once again, a reasonable person has to wonder, if things were really so clearly horrific at this "death camp" and others, then why was it necessary to stage the photography to create the illusions - and obvious allusions - to Auschwitz?
Nevertheless, this propaganda effort was very successful in manipulating the emotions and attitudes of the public to a great extent. But it was not enough yet to convince people that the full-scale NATO bombardment of Serbia was justified.
There would need to be more blood, carnage and hysteria to manipulate the masses to that degree - and so it was delivered unto them.
Propaganda Exhibit B: Sarajevo and the Markale Marketplace Bombings
Did you notice that I used the term "bombings" there, and not "massacre"? There are some very important reasons for that.
The First Attack in 1992
The first of three attacks happened on 27th May 1992 when 16 people were killed in a "mortar attack" on a bread queue in Vase Miskina street in Sarajevo. As The Independent (22nd August 1992) noted, the televised scenes of civilians cut to pieces by an explosion as they queued for bread horrified international public opinion, and increased the growing pressure for NATO to "intervene" in the civil war against the Bosnian Serbs. Vivid footage showed dead bodies littering the street and "terrified crying people sitting on the pavement in pools of blood".
The attacks came shortly before a meeting by European Union ambassadors to consider imposing sanctions on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. UN officials from the start were "suspicious about the circumstances but would not go public with their thoughts without jeopardising the UN mission" in Bosnia.
Classified reports given to the commander of the UN peacekeepers, General Satish Nambiar, concluded that it was likely that the army of the Bosnian Muslim government in Sarajevo carried out the attack. In fact, they were reported to believe it wasn't a mortar attack at all but a "command-detonated explosion - probably in a can".
The impact mark left by the "mortar" on the market square floor was "nowhere near as large as we came to expect with a mortar round landing on a paved surface". There was also none of the fragmentary evidence that accompanies a mortar projectile found, as well as the fact that of the multiple UN personnel and observers in the immediate area that day, none heard artillery or mortar fire - which is fairly easy to recognize, and somewhat hard to miss, actually.
This is also supported by another UN commander in Bosnia, General Michael Rose of the British army, who said in his book 'Dispatch' that the Bosnian Muslim government in Sarajevo shelled their own people to get a military response by NATO against the Bosnian Serbs (The Observer, 28th March 1999). NATO launched air strikes against the Bosnian Serbs as a result of this attack.
According to The Independent, United Nations (UN) officials and senior Western military officers believe that the attack in 1992 was carried out by the Bosnian Muslim government, "To win world sympathy and trigger intervention". This was also expressed in confidential reports circulating at the UN headquarters in New York, and in classified briefings to US policy makers in Washington, according to the British newspaper.
The attack on the bread queue in Vase Miskina Street also led to draconian sanctions against Yugoslavia imposed by the Security Council (resolution 757) on 30th May 1992 (which had been preceded by Yugoslavia's expulsion from the WHO). All supplies of raw materials to the well-developed pharmaceutical industry of Yugoslavia for production of medicines were immediately suspended. The justification for blaming Yugoslavia for attacks carried out in Bosnia was based on Western intelligence disinformation that the country was directing the war on behalf of the Bosnian Serbs.
The Second Attack in 1994
The second attack on a market in Sarajevo happened on 5th February 1994, when a "single mortar round" left 68 dead and 200 wounded.
Some people immediately questioned how so many civilians had been killed or wounded by one mortar bomb - which any military person (and probably most civilians) would know simply does not pack that kind of explosive punch.
Furthermore, officials from the Bosnian Muslim government did allow anyone from UNPROFOR (UN Protection Force) to verify what had happened. Despite vehement denials from the Bosnian Serbs, the US news channel, CNN, immediately reported that they were responsible for the shocking carnage that the bombing had caused, which CNN claimed was "caused by a Serb mortar bomb". US President Bill Clinton added to this by quickly saying it was "highly likely" that the Bosnian Serbs were responsible for the bombing.
Thus, US ambassador to the UN, Madeline Albright and the US national security advisor Anthony Lake, immediately called for NATO air strikes against the Bosnian Serbs.
Yet there were already people claiming that even the UN itself did not suspect the Bosnian Serbs, but this appears to have been suppressed by the Western media, possibly acting under covert British and American pressure, assuming that the whole purpose of the "mortar attack was to provide the pretext for NATO military involvement in the Balkans for the first time.
If this is not the case, then it is certainly hinted at by the former British Foreign Secretary David Owen in his book 'Balkan Odyssey' (Victor Gollanz, London, 1995):
"People around General Rose never tried to hide the fact that at his meeting with Bosnian Muslim leaders (President Alia Izetbegovic and General Delic) he said that he had just received some information which shows that the mortar bomb did not come from the area under Serb control but from the Muslim part of the city."
On 6th June 1996, Yasushi Akashi, UN special envoy for Bosnia, told a German journalist working for DPA in New York, that there was a secret UN report accusing the Bosnian government forces of this massacre. It was claimed that this secret report was passed on to the UN Secretary General, Boutros Boutros Ghali, who did not publish it in the interest of "higher politics".
Citing this UN report, B. Volker, a French journalist working for TV TF1 said that the mortar bomb was fired from Bosnian government positions. Volker also quotes the words of President Mitterrand: "A few days ago Mr. Boutros Ghali informed me that the projectile which hit the Markale marketplace in Sarajevo was an act of (Bosnian) Muslim provocation".
The Third Attack in 1995
The third attack, on 28th August 1995 also hit the market and left 37 dead and 90 wounded.
When the UN issued a declaration blaming the Bosnian Serbs, it evidently ignored the report of the British and French experts as well as the assessment of the UN's artillery expert for the Sarajevo sector, a Russian colonel, A. Demurenko. Soon after the attack, NATO launched extensive air strikes against Bosnian Serb military and civilian targets.
The strategy, once again, appeared pre-planned, as it conveniently coincided with a joint Croat-Bosnian Muslim government offensive against the Bosnian Serbs. The attacks changed the course of the war in Bosnia, as they enabled NATO to enter the conflict on behalf of the Bosnian government and Croat forces.
After this attack, President Yeltsin gave official credence to reports circulating in the Russian media that a "third party" was responsible for the mortar attack on the bread queue. Yeltsin said that Russia "insists" that the UN "look again" at the attacks as there was new evidence indicating that it was not the Bosnian Serbs who carried out the attack.
Despite this evidence, NATO went ahead and launched air strikes. One military adviser to the foreign ministry, General Boris Gromov, even claimed that one of the NATO powers was involved in the mortar attack "as a provocation". Yeltsin also said:
"Why am I against the expansion of NATO? This (mortar attack in Sarajevo) is the first sign of what might happen when NATO comes right up to the borders of the Russian Federation. Those who insist on the expansion of NATO are making a major political mistake. The flame of war would burst out across the whole of Europe." (The Guardian, 9th September 1995).
The Russians and Bosnian Serbs have claimed that the third attack was prepared in advance over many months by "certain" Western secret services (probably including the CIA), and that Bosnian Muslim government troops under the commander of the General R. Delic carried it out. The reason for this, they argue, was to provide NATO with an opportunity not only discredit the Bosnian Serbs, but to provide the pretext to use heavy air strikes on them so as to destroy their military potential.
The Russian intelligence service (FSB) were said to have known about the preparation of this plan since February 1995. Then a detailed plan, allegedly called Cyclone 2, was related to a secret memorandum, signed on 10th August 1995 at the Pleso airport in Zagreb, Croatia. The memorandum was signed for the UN by the commander of the UNPROFOR forces based in Croatia and Bosnia, General B. Janvier and by Admiral L. Smith for NATO.
This secret memorandum was not released, as "secret", on 13th September 1995 to the UN Security Council, when the main destruction of Serb targets had already taken place. According to article 7 of the memorandum UNPROFOR agreed to provide all information necessary for the NATO strikes against Serb targets to achieve the maximum success.
According to the FSB, the mortar was fired from the roof of a building near the market and they further claimed that the device was not a standard mortar bomb. Another author, Y. Bodansky, the director of the Republican parliamentary task force studying terrorism and unconventional warfare (Target America, Terrorism in the US Today, S.P.I. Books, Shapolsky Publishers, New York, 1993), believed that the Bosnian Serb intelligence service knew that "something was being planned" in Sarajevo.
On 26th August 1995 (two days before the second massacre) he spoke by telephone to a senior official of the Republika Srpska in the Yugoslav capital, Belgrade, who told him anxiously that once again "something terrible is being planned against the Serbs" in Sarajevo.
It claimed that British ammunition experts serving with the UN in Sarajevo had "challenged" key evidence of the attack on the bread market which not only triggered NATO attacks against the Serbs in Bosnia, but turned the tide of the war against them. According to the newspaper, the British experts "found no evidence that the Bosnian Serbs had fired the lethal round".Another report indicating that the Bosnian Serbs were not responsible for this marketplace attacks was published in The Sunday Times on October 1st 1995.
Nora Beloff, writing in her book Yugoslavia: An Avoidable War (New European Publications, London, England, 1997), also alleges that "that Bosnian [Muslim] government arranged to kill their own people" so as to get the Bosnian Serbs blamed for it. She alleges that news reporter Martin Bell, now an independent MP in Britain, had known about these allegations through his contacts with British UN officers but "he ignored what they might have told him".
She repeats claims, as reported in Lord David Owen's account of the bombings, that western experts had discovered that it was the Bosnian Muslim government forces and not the Bosnian Serbs who had been behind the attack in February 1994.
Allegedly, when UNPROFOR wanted the Bosnian Muslim government to participate in truce negotiations, the British commander, General Michael Rose "blackmailed the Bosnian Muslim leaders into submission. He told them that unless they agreed to cooperate, he would tell the international press that he had technical expertise proving that the grenade came from the Muslim, not the Serb, side" (Beloff, p. 112/113).
Other Points of Interest
Philip Corwen, a senior member of the UN in Bosnia, has also written a book about his experiences there, (Dubious Mandate: A memoir of the UN in Bosnia, Summer 1995 [Duke, London, UK, 1999]), in which he says:
"The French forces (the main UN armed force in Sarajevo) were continually harassed, shot at, blocked at, and threatened by Bosnian Muslim government forces...it was the French who pointed out that the Bosnian Muslim government was placing weapons systems next to UN facilities in order to draw fire from Serb artillery onto civilian and UN targets, and thus provoke international outrage against the Serbs." (p. 178)
I recommend that anyone who is interested in further background of the conflict in Bosnia read Corwen's book. His meticulous account shatters once and for all the "one victim - one enemy" myth promoted mainly by the Western mass media.
The Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic may (and I emphasize may) have been rightfully indicted by the International war crimes tribunal in the Hague - but why has this tribunal failed to indict Alija Izetbegovic, the Bosnian Musim President, and other senior officials of his government? There is clearly enough prima-facia evidence of their complicity in war crimes carried out by the Bosnian Muslim army, not the least of which include the Sarajevo-Markale marketplace bombings.
The UN and others undoubtedly have plenty of evidence showing that the Bosnian Muslim government forces carried out these marketplace attacks against civilians in Sarajevo to draw condemnation and blame upon the Serbs, but along with NATO, decided not to pursue charges against Bosnian Muslim government leaders for political reasons, and decided instead conspired to suppress the whole thing and sweep it under the rug.
http://www.fantompowa.net/Flame/bosnia_sarajevo.htm
Propaganda Exhibit C: Racak - Massacre of Innocent Civilians or Obvious Fraud?
A small village played a crucial role just as the course was set for the Kosovo war: Racak.
In this village, once inhabited by mostly ethnic-Albanians, Serb security forces allegedly executed unarmed civilians in cold blood on January 15, 1999. That was the claim of US President Bill Clinton, among many other NATO politicians, which was of course, immediately and loudly parroted by the corporate mass media machine.
Was the public fed these half-truths and unproven claims throughout the spring of 1999 to manipulate public opinion and secure consent for NATO military intervention in the Kosovo conflict?
I say, without any doubt, yes. We were absolutely sold a pack of lies, by a pack of wolves in "journalist" clothing, so to speak. And I can prove it to you, if you will only continue reading.
The Berliner Zeitung was able to get access to secret documents which raise serious doubts about the "civilian massacre" version of events that was so widely, and willingly, trumpeted by the mass media without question or further investigation:
What happened in January 1999? Let's look at the war crimes tribunal for Yugoslavia in The Hague:
"On or about 15 January 1999, in the early morning hours, the village of Racak (Stimlje/Shtime municipality) was attacked by forces of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) and Serbia. After shelling by the VJ units, the Serb police entered the village later in the morning and began conducting house-to-house searches.
Villagers, who attempted to flee from the Serb police, were shot throughout the village. A group of approximately 25 men attempted to hide in a building, but were discovered by the Serb police. They were beaten and then were removed to a nearby hill, where the policemen shot and killed them. Altogether, the forces of the FRY and Serbia killed approximately 45 Kosovo Albanians in and around Racak. The Hague indictment calls it "murder of Kosovo-Albanian civilians."
Were the victims executed in cold blood, as the terrorist KLA/UCK said, or were they killed in combat, as the Serbs say?
According to the version gathered and broadcast by the press and the Kosovo verification mission (KVM) observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the massacre took place on January 15 in the early afternoon.
"Masked" Serbian police entered the village of Racak, which had been shelled all morning by Yugoslav army tanks. They allegedly broke down the doors and entered people's homes, ordering the women to stay there while they pushed the men to the edge of the village to calmly execute them with a bullet through the head, not without first having tortured and mutilated several victims. Some "witnesses" even said that the Serbs sang as they did their dirty work, before leaving the village around 3:30 p.m.
But the account by two journalists of Associated Press Television (AP TV) who filmed the police operation in Racak starkly contradicts this tale. When they entered the village at 10 a.m. in the wake of a police armored vehicle, the village was nearly deserted.
They advanced through the streets under the fire of the Kosovo Liberation Army (UCK) fighters lying in ambush positions in the woods above the village. The exchange of fire continued throughout the operation, with varying intensity. The main fighting took place in the woods.
The Albanians who had fled the village when the first Serb shells were fired at dawn tried to escape. There they ran into Serbian police who had surrounded the village. The UCK was trapped in between. The stated objective of the police action in Racak was a stronghold of UCK Albanian terrorists, who were known to be in the village for some time and maintained dug-in firing positions in trenches around the village.
Virtually all of the inhabitants had fled Racak during the frightful Serb offensive of the summer of 1998, six months earlier. With few exceptions, they had not come back. "Smoke came from only two chimneys", noted one of the two AP TV reporters. The Serb operation was thus no surprise, nor was it a secret.
On the morning of the attack, a Serbian police source tipped off AP TV: "Come to Racak, something is happening". At 10 a.m., the team was on the spot alongside the police; it filmed from a peak overlooking the village and then through the streets in the wake of an armored vehicle.
The OSCE was also warned of the action. At least two teams of international observers watched the fighting from a hill where they could see part of the village. They entered Racak shortly after the police left. They then questioned a few Albanians about the situation, trying to find out whether there were wounded civilians.
Around 6 p.m., they took four persons - two women and two old men - who were very slightly wounded toward the dispensary of the neighboring town of Stimje. The verifiers said at that time that they were "incapable of establishing the number of casualties of that day of fighting".
The publicity given by the Serbian police to that operation was intense. At 10:30 a.m., it gave out its first press release. It announced that the police had "encircled the village of Racak with the aim of arresting the members of a terrorist group (KLA/UCK) who killed a policeman" the previous Sunday. At 3 p.m., a first bulletin announced fifteen Albanians killed in fighting.
The next day, Saturday, it welcomed the success of the operation which, it said, had resulted in the death of dozens of UCK terrorists and the capture of a large stock of weapons.
The attempt to arrest an Albanian presumed to have murdered a Serb policemen turned into a firefight. At 5:30 p.m., the police evacuated the site under the sporadic fire of a handful of UCK fighters who continued to hold out thanks to the steep and rough terrain.
In no time, the first of the Albanians who had gotten away came back down into the village, those who had managed to hide came out in the open and three KVM vehicles drove into the village. One hour after the police left, night fell. The next morning, the press and the KVM came to see the damage caused by the fighting.
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| US "diplomat" William Walker, shown above with other CIA operatives, immediately declared Racak to be a "massacre of civilians" - a conclusion that was completely contradicted by the forensic evidence of the victims. |
It was at this moment, guided by the armed UCK terrorists who had recaptured the village, that they suddenly discovered the ditch where a score of bodies were piled up, almost exclusively men. At midday, the chief of the KVM in person, the American diplomat William Walker, arrived on the spot and immediately declared his indignation at the "atrocities committed by the Serb police forces and the Yugoslav army". His condemnation was total, and irrevocable.
And yet, questions remained. How could the Serb police have gathered a group of men and led them calmly toward the execution site while they were constantly under fire from UCK fighters? How could the ditch located on the edge of Racak have escaped notice by local inhabitants familiar with the surroundings who were present before nightfall - or without being noticed by the observers, who were present for over two hours in this tiny village?
Why were so few spent cartridges around the corpses, and why was so little blood in the hollow road where twenty three people were allegedly shot at close range with several bullets in the head?
Or, rather, were the bodies those of the Albanian UCK terrorists who were killed in combat with the Serb police gathered into the ditch to create a horror scene which was sure to have an appalling effect (which was quite favorable to the goals of the KLA/UCK terrorists) on public opinion?
The pictures of the bodies triggered worldwide shock and dismay. US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright called it a "galvanizing incident". Three days later - before any forensic analysis of what had actually happened was completed - she demanded the bombardment of Yugoslavia as "punishment".
In a letter sent to Yugoslav president Milosevic on January 20, the German foreign minister Joschka Fischer wrote that any excuses from Belgrade "in no way can justify the execution of 45 unarmed people, amongst them women and children, by the security forces." Later on, Fischer said: "Racak became the turning point for me."
She was not alone. This staged event (as you will see clearly demonstrated in the following pages) was exactly the propaganda coup d'état that the US, NATO, KLA/UCK and corporate mass media had been waiting for.
Denial from Belgrade
The Yugoslav government vehemently disputed this condemnation and version of events. Belgrade spoke openly before, during and after the incident of a police action against UCK terrorists. According to Belgrade, the bodies were collected by the UCK on the night of January 15 and presented as civilian victims.
On January 22, a forensic team from Finland begins with the autopsy of the corpses that have been brought to the capital of Kosovo. A week later, it has concluded its inquiry. The public waits for the conclusion. But for the time being, the team led by Dr. Helena Ranta takes its time to evaluate the findings. It would not come until 2001, two years later, when it was much too late for the truth of Racak to make any difference, or prevent the NATO bombing of Serbia that came largely as a result of this falsified propaganda ploy.
Meanwhile, the Kosovo conflict became more intense by the day. In Rambouillet near Paris, the Western powers, Russia, Serbs and Kosovo-Albanians were negotiating a peaceful solution to the dispute. The Rambouillet talks had entered a decisive phase when the forensics team leader Ranta hosted a confusing press conference in Pristina, Kosovo.
Instead of issuing the inquiry results, she shared "comments" that reflect her "personal opinion." On the 17th of March 1999, no one knows yet that political forces have urged Ms. Ranta to go public now, albeit to say nothing specific or conclusive about the Racak incident. Quite the contrary, in fact.
In complicated sentences, prone to misunderstandings, Ms. Ranta tries to extricate herself from the affair. She declines to speak of a "massacre". Instead, she calls the tragedy a "crime against humanity". She states that no ammunition and no uniforms were found on the bodies, but that some of them were clothed in several thick sweaters. She elaborates on the fact that no gunpowder traces were found on the hands (as occurs when people fire guns), but she doesn't clearly state (what became known later) that no such tests were even done at all - a critical piece of evidence that was somehow "overlooked".
Nevertheless, most observers took Helena Rantas' statements as a confirmation that mass executions had taken place. Important politicians allowed no more leeway for doubt. US President Clinton said that "innocent men, women and children" have been driven from their homes, forced to "kneel in the dirt and were moved down."
Anonymous Western government representatives tell the International Herald Tribune that the most horrendous details from the Finnish report have not yet been made public. A week later, the ruthless and horrific NATO bombing of Serbia began, and the Racak forensic reports still remained secret.
The Berliner Zeitung has now been able to access copies of the autopsy documents. Of all these reports, NONE contain any evidence of an execution scenario. The Finnish forensic experts and their Yugoslav and Belorussian colleagues found traces that point to a single gunshot fired from "relatively close" on only one of the victims. In all of the other cases, the findings were negative. In other words, Racak was a combat-related firefight, and not a massacre of civilians at all.
Nor was the alleged absence of gunpowder residue [on the victims'] hands documented. As a consequence, there is no evidence that the victims were civilians.
We asked Ms. Ranta about the reason for this. After brief consideration, she solved the puzzle: The Finnish team never looked for such traces of gunpowder residue. Rather, the tests mentioned at the press conference on March 17, 1999, were carried out to look for "traces" of executions or point blank shootings. These were the tests that all proved negative. "It was somewhat easy to misunderstand that at the press conference," Ms. Ranta now admits. That is quite an understatement, indeed.
But this "misunderstanding" is crucial to the Racak case. Were the dead victims actually unarmed, peaceful villagers? Or were they Albanian UCK terrorists killed in combat with Serbian police? Was it a mass execution or a battle? In all official statements by the US government, NATO, OSCE, the Hague tribunal and the EU, the second possibility is never mentioned at all. Considering the forensic evidence that was found, any reasonable person has to ask why that is the case.
As early as the morning of January 16, 1999, the UCK issued the first communique stating that eight of its fighters had been killed in combat in Racak. The names of these dead do not appear on the Hague tribunal's list. Another strange thing: Also on January 16, the UCK mentions 22 execution victims in Racak by name. But only eleven of them are recorded on the tribunal's victim list. Only the figure 22 approximately correlates with the number of dead found on the hill behind Racak. How many dead were there really?
"The truth is," says French journalist Renaud Girard, "that Racak was a fortified village with a lot of [gunfighter] trenches." There isn't a single word about that to be found in the OSCE's "special report."
On January 16 1999, Girard had hurried to the scene of the tragedy, and he saw the OSCE chief of mission in action. "In terms of massacres, [William] Walker is a professional," says Girard. "Any professional knows what to do. He blocks off access to the crime scene to secure the evidence. Walker did no such thing. He trampled around there himself and let the journalists fiddle around with the corpses, collect souvenirs and wipe out evidence. Initially, Girard filed a massacre story like all his colleagues with his paper, Le Figaro. But then he started pondering. "I felt that something was wrong," he said.
A colleague of his with Le Monde contributed to his doubts. Christophe Chatelet had been in Racak the day before - the day of the alleged massacre. Together with OSCE representatives, he entered the village in the late afternoon, when the Serbs had left. The foreigners found four wounded and were told about one dead. Chatelet returned to Pristina at dusk. He told a colleague that nothing particular had happened at Racak. The day after, when Walker went to Racak with a large press entourage, Chatelet declined and stayed at the hotel.
Chatelet cannot explain why the OSCE only recorded one dead on the afternoon of January 15, while the OSCE the morning after suddenly found at least 13, possibly as many as 18, corpses in the streets and farmhouses: "I can't solve that mystery."
Well, this was apparently so that the mainstream Western press, which had already been reporting Racak as a "massacre," in horrified tones and in a thousand repetitions, could once again splatter this disinformation across its headlines. For example, the New York Times, following Ranta’s press conference of 17 March, 1999, blared: “Serbs' Killing of 40 Albanians Ruled A Crime Against Humanity.”
Not only does this headline make the gravest accusation possible, but it pretends that Ranta's claim amounts to a legal finding (note the word "Ruled"). But what is truly amazing is that this is the headline for the same article (quoted above) which reports that "Ranta refused to draw conclusions as to the manner of death."
The article and its headline completely contradict each other.
Ms. Ranta refused to sign the common forensics report by the Belorussian and Yugoslav forensics teams, which conclusively showed multiple long-range gunshot wounds consistent with combat, and thus exonerated the Serbian security services of any massacre of civilians. Naturally, this was widely interpreted as being Ranta’s disagreement with the conclusions of the other two teams, and it led to headlines such as that in the New York Times.
But Ranta never actually said that she disagreed with the other two teams. Quite the contrary.
In a report that she authored on 17 March, 1999, which almost no one saw (and which no media company reported), she said the following:
"Confusion has been caused by statements and premature conclusions. After the completion of the autopsies in January, the Serbian and Belorussian pathologists decided to draw up common reports summarizing their findings. The Finnish Team declined to sign these, which was erroneously interpreted as disagreement on the findings between the local experts and the Finnish Team."
In fact, although NATO and the Western press made false accusations that the Yugoslav and Byelorussian experts had gotten ahold of the bodies first, and therefore could not be trusted, it is clear from the Finnish report that all three teams cooperated extensively and in mutual harmony, as the following quote from page 184 of the published Finnish report of 2001 makes clear:
"Forensic experts from Yugoslavia, Finland and Byelorussia participated in the investigation of the victims from Racak. This double-checking was fruitful because forensic pathologists seldom work under the pressure of such international publicity. Having some differences in practical questions between different schools complemented the end result. The autopsy findings were discussed in full professional consensus."
Please watch this excellent video, which has an interview with Ms. Ranta - the part about Racak begins at about 1:30.
A Very Important Lesson in Forensics
I know that this is a great deal of information to absorb, but do you recall my earlier reference to Napoleon's famous view that "it wasn't necessary to completely suppress the news; it was sufficient to delay the news until it no longer mattered"?
Here is further proof of this concept.
The Finnish Team’s report on Racak was not finally published until 2001 - when the war was over and the damage was already done - in Forensic Science International. Not a coincidence.
The main points in this report are nearly identical to the findings reported by the two other forensics teams from Belarus and Yugoslavia that were released shortly after the killngs occurred in 1999 (which the Finnish team's leader, Ranta, refused to sign almost two years earlier, and quite significantly, before the NATO bombing of Serbia that was allegedly provoked by this "galvanizing incident", are as follows (please read slowly and carefully):
1) Every victim is crisscrossed by an astonishing number of bullets. There are a total of 80 entry or tangential gunshot wounds, or an average of eight per body (p. 178).
2) For an execution, the bullet paths are bizarre (and highly improbable).
The 7th bullet in victim RA-33-7009F goes in upwards through the ribs and comes out through the head. The 2nd bullet in victim RA-35-7012F traveled from the top of the shoulder into the abdominal region. Victim RA-3-7024F has three bullet paths entering the calf, in three different directions (one them entered near the ankle and moved up!). The other bullets have similarly bizarre paths, these were just chosen for illustration.
Many of the bullet wounds are non-lethal. For example, victim RA-38-7014F had fewer bullet paths than most other victims - just five - but only one of them appears to have been conceivably lethal, and it is hardly one an executioner would choose: the bullet entered the lower back and exited via the lower chest.
3) There is a lack of close-range wounds.
But even this lone case was hesitantly referred to in the relevant footnote as a “probable close-range discharge.”The autopsy team looked for “signs of contact or close-range firing” (p. 177) - what one would find in a summary execution - and found only one possible example (Table 3, p. 179).
The evidence therefore clearly suggests a military firefight.
In combat, those who fire weapons attract return fire, so one can expect that victims will have multiple shots. In a summary execution, by contrast, multiple shots are unnecessary.
The bullet paths are consistent with people whose orientation was horizontal, with their heads facing towards the source of fire.
This is natural in a military firefight, where people often flatten themselves against the ground and face their attackers as they return fire. But such bullet paths are hardly to be expected from a summary execution.And again, the absence of close-range wounds again argues against any summary executions.
Thus:
1) Everyone agrees that a military firefight did occur at Racak;
2) The forensic evidence analysis (done by three independent teams) is perfectly consistent with a military firefight;
3) All of the other evidence is also consistent with the claims of the Serbs (e.g., the fact that the Yugoslav security forces had invited journalists and observers to witness the entire operation); and
4) None of the evidence is consistent with a mass execution;
Case closed, as far as I'm concerned. The US and various other governments, their intelligence agencies, NATO, the Hague Tribunal, UN and EU ignored and/or lied about this very clearcut and compelling evidence that was (and still is) available to them about what happened at Racak. Period.
Further Evidence of Extreme Mass Media Bias
In light of all this, let's take another look at the New York Times and how it reported the evidence at Racak. At this point, you may not be entirely shocked to find out that the NYT blared another prejudicial headline on 22 January: “Charting A Massacre: The Monitors' Report.” Underneath it, they wrote:
"One adult male shot outside his house with his head missing.... One adult male shot in head and decapitated. All the flesh was missing from the skull…"
The New York Times depicted a level of carnage that only human monsters could be responsible for. The Western media said that the Serbs had mutilated the bodies in the manner of a hate crime.
But as the NYT's own headline explains, this all came straight from William Walker’s OSCE team of “peace monitors,” who were not pathologists but, in fact, were CIA operatives who, you may recall, had immediately pronounced the scene a 'massacre of civilians' the minute they were brought to "inspect it" on 16 January 1999.
Just a few days earlier, however, the official Yugoslav press, Tanjug, had presented quite a different picture, one based on the autopsy information from all three teams of pathologists, which information was already available:
Pristina Medical Centre Forensics Institute Manager Slavisa Dobricanin told Tanjug on Tuesday [16th February] that the team of pathologists from Finland, Belarus and Yugoslavia, who performed autopsies on bodies from Racak and Rogovi, did not find any signs of mutilation.
So, the New York Times chose to ignore the already available information when they falsely reported evidence of alleged human-caused carnage and mutilation at Racak.
What Tanjug reported agrees with the Finnish report that was finally published in 2001 in Forensic Science International. The Finns reported that “six of the victims had sustained postmortem damage, most likely inflicted by animals” and “...the postmortem decapitation of two of the victims was likely caused by animals after a severe trauma to the head” (p. 183).
Conclusions of Racak
The only reasonable conclusion, based on all of the evidence (forensic and otherwise), is that no "civilian massacre" occurred at Racak.
There were most certainly no "crimes against humanity", in terms of the mass execution of civilians that was portrayed by the mass media, the Clinton administration and other governments, who clearly had ulterior motives and hostility toward Serbia, regardless of what may or may not have happened at Racak - they didn't care what really happened, they wanted their NATO bombing and used this staged event to deceive the world in order to get it.
A typical, medium to high-intensity military firefight occurred, and it was then manipulated by the KLA/UCK terrorists (removing UCK uniforms and replacing them with civilian clothing, moving and staging the dead bodies in a ditch, etc.).
It was then hungrily consumed and propagated by the mass media to influence public opinion and justify the Clinton administration's foregone conclusion that NATO would bomb the sovereign nation of Serbia - a decision that had already been made long before anything had ever happened in the small village of Racak that became known to the entire world as the site of a "civilian massacre".
As you have also seen with the multiple Sarajevo marketplace bombings, this tactic of deliberately murdering innocent civilians to create panic, chaos and horrific bloody scenes for the media cameras in order to blame their Serbian enemies for the atrocities was done on multiple occasions throughout the war by the Bosnian and Albanian KLA/UCK Muslim forces.
These tactics were highly effective in manipulating world opinion, thanks to a great deal of help from the equally guilty war criminals within the corporate mass media - being that their intentionally false reporting and lies of omission for the purposes of propaganda, which resulted in the NATO bombing deaths of countless innocent civilians is as much a war crime, in my view, as any soldier who shoots unarmed civilians in the back.
It is a tragedy of our time that most journalists clearly do not demonstrate anything that resembles such a sense of responsibility to tell us the complete, unfiltered and unbaised truth. Indeed, such integrity would very likely put their paychecks and careers in serious jeopardy.Illegitimate wars of aggression require that the press either be asleep or be cooperative. The facts here suggest the latter. We have seen the behavior of the New York Times, but the Times was hardly alone. The rest of the corprate mass media did exactly the same things.
For example, as the Toronto Sun put it, with regard to Racak, “CNN reporter Christiane Amanpour, wife of U.S. State Department spokesman James Rubin, showed little skepticism in reporting on the ‘massacre of civilians’”.
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| CNN chief international propagandist Christiane Amanpour with her husband, James Rubin, chief propagandist for the US State Department. What a coincidence! |
If you just did a double take - congratulations - you were paying attention. If not, please read the above quote again: the top propagandist for US foreign policy (James Rubin) was sleeping with the top reporter at CNN, and both were telling the public that there had been a massacre [of civilians] at Racak when, obviously, there had not been, according to all of the widely available evidence and independently confirmed forensic evidence.
The “free press” hard at work, once again.
Here are a few more excellent articles on this subject:
http://www.hirhome.com/yugo/ranta.htm
http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/Johnstone/racakhoax.htm
Propaganda Exhibit D: Mass Media Genocide of the Truth
The following is from Peter Brock's outstanding book, "Media Cleansing: Dirty Reporting - Journalism and Tragedy in Yugoslavia".
Genocide and Sloppy Reporting
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| Fomer US State Dept official George Kenney quit his job in disgust at the deception he witnessed coming from the US government during the Bosnian War. |
The most succinct insight into the media obsession about the complaint of "genocide" came from George Kenney, a former US State Department dissident and one-time advocate for the multi-ethnic facade of the Bosnian government leadership before its takeover by hardcore Muslim nationalists.
Kenney, who earlier subscribed to US military intervention in Bosnia, quit his job in disgust at the State Department, only to later change his views when "multi-cultural, sophisticated Sarajevo...was turned over to coarse Muslim refugees who cared little for pluralistic values."
Kenney's disillusionment with the media bedlam over "genocide" eventually succumbed to doubts about "the hollowness of the vague, unsubstantiated accounts of mass murder...". Kenney continued:
"Full-throared advocates of intervention in Bosnia often dwell on the question of genocide in the hope that the high moral imperative of 'never again' may influence policy. As one of the original interventionists, I must confess here I'm guilty myself of having used the term genocide [rarely, with qualifications] in reference to Bosnia, yet I've never felt comfortable with insisting it was taking place. ...Where, one might ask, are the bodies?
Genocide, of course can't be merely a question of numbers, but one may use numbers as a rough - a very rough way - to figure out a threshold for declaring that genocide happened. Looking back after three years of war in Bosnia, a review of what we know about the numbers is sobering. How many people died? 250,000 is a number the press has used for some time. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees has no numbers for dead Bosnians, nor does the U.N.'s peacekeeping office in New York. Sources at the International Committee of the Red Cross in Washington and Geneva tell me their estimates range from 20,000 to 30,000 dead. ...Friends in the US intelligence community tell me their best guess for confirmed dead runs to tens of thousands. [It's worth noting that Secretary of State Warren Christopher's office has sometimes demanded the numbers, only to discover that they don't exist.]
Intelligence sources add that official Bosnian statistics simply 'come out of the air'. The Bosnian Ministry of Health, for example, reports 200,000 dead or missing. Although we'll never know for certain, the number 250,000 probably evolved out of sloppy reporting of Bosnian government claims, a
demonstration of the herd instinct at work among journalists. The question is not whether 250,000 dead is a wildly inflated number, but by how much it is wildly inflated."
Ex-Yugoslavia desk officer Kenney's defection stunned the interventionist press and diplomatic ranks. Kenney also took issue with David Reiff's claims in 'Slaughterhouse', as an example of the media's willful gullibility. [Kenney said] Reiff "paints no great and terrible picture of genocide. To the contrary, he awkwardly daydreams through a jumbled series of anecdotes, throwing in occasional half-baked theories about policy formation. ...it isn't based on facts."
Kenney's reversal was predictably ill-received, and he dug in to survive attacks from colleagues. Among the first to revile him was Newsday's Roy Gutman, co-winner of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting, who chastised Kenney for using unidentified and confidential sources, and that his conclusions about greatly reduced fatalities were invalid.
But Gutman's own war reporting habitually used unnamed sources.
Kenney, who was black-listed and no longer sought as [he was[ previously for frequent commentary by the BBC and major US media, described his upbraiding by Gutman, who had become an enforcer against defectors from pack journalists, as harrassment. "Gutman called me up for one of his harrangues and insisted, no, demanded that I reveal my sources!", said Kenney. "And I said, 'Here you are a journalist, and you want me to reveal my sources?!'"
The conscientous ex-State Department officer was also condemned in a scathing rebuke by The New Republic's Charles Lane, which Kenney called "a completely unethical, unprincipled, below the belt attack."
Kenney hung on doggedly, challenging the inflated death counts through NATO's Kosovo campaign.
The Chronology of "Genocide"
Later writing in the Nation in 1999, Kenney examined the Kosovo "genocide" chronology:
"...Almost everything you have read or heard or seen on television about Kosovo has been a partial truth or outright falsehood.
"On March 18, the Rambouillet talks broke down, David Scheffer, the State Department's ambassador at large for war crimes issues, proclaimed that 'we have upwards to about 100,000 men that we cannot account for' in Kosovo. Depending upon the sophistication of the press organ involved, this statement was variously construed as a warning, or as the New York Daily News put in a headline the next day, '100,000 Kosovar Men Feared Dead.'
The specter of mass murder critically supported public acceptance of NATO airstrikes, which began less than a week later, on March 24. After two months of bombing, the Yugoslav regime was still, to the Administration's deepening chagrin, in the fight. By this time there were increasing murmurs of discontent in the press regarding the effect of NATO airstrikes on unmistakably civilian targets.
Ambassador Scheffer stepped to the plate again in mid-May, calling for 'speedy investigations' of war crimes ([only] by Serbs) while now noting that 'as many as 225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59 remain unaccounted for.'
Several wire services quoted him on different days as saying that 'with the exception of Rwanda in 1994 and Cambodia in 1975, you would be hard-pressed to find a crime scene anywhere in the world since World War II where a defenseless civilian population has been assaulted with such ferocity and criminal intent, and suffered so many multiple violations of humanitarian law in such a short period of time as in Kosovo since mid-March 1999.'
It was a profoundly ignorant remark, of course, but what's important is that the Administration's laser-like focus on allegations and innuendoes of genocidal acts securely established the legitimacy of continued [NATO] bombing for an at-that-time unknown, perhaps lengthy period."
The ploy was unraveling.
"...Sensing that Washington - Scheffer and a battalion of like-minded flacks - had gone too far out on a limb, in June and July the British started publicizing their reduced estimate that 10,000 Albanian Kosovars had been killed. For whatever reason, that number stuck in establishment circles. In fact, however, it appears to be still too many. The actual number is probably somewhere in the low thousands.
In mid-July, sources from the NATO-led peacekeeping force in Kosovo, known as KFOR, were telling the press that of 2,150 bodies found by peacekeepers, only 850 were victims of massacres.
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| Clinton propaganda mouthpiece Sandy Berger |
Nevertheless, still eager to bolster the Serb = devil argument, National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, in an address to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) on July 26, poignantly mentioned 'the village of Ljubenic, the largest mass-grave site discovered so far from this conflict, with as many as 350 bodies.'
Berger may not have been aware that the Italian General in charge of the site, Brig. Gen. Mauro Del Vecchio had told the press several days earlier that the exhumation had been completed at the site and that SEVEN bodies had been found. Not 350. All press mention of Ljubenic ceases after that point."
Finally, Kenney cited an El Pais {Madrid} article two months later, which dealt the heaviest blow yet to claims of genocide in Kosovo, reporting that:
"...Spanish forensics investigators sent to Kosovo had found no proof of genocide. The team, which had experience in Rwanda, had been told to expect to perform more than 2,000 autopsies in one of the areas worst hit by fighting, but it found only 187 bodies to examine. No mass graves and, for the most part, no signs of torture."
By November, Kenney traced the sinking spiral of Kosovo deaths in such outlets as The Nation, Los Angeles Times, De Volksrant {Amsterdam} and The Sunday Times of London, which "...added an interview with the head of the Spanish (forensics) team, Emilio Perez Pujol, who was 'disillusioned' by the 'war propaganda machine.' Pujol says the death toll may never exceed 2,500."
Kenney noted that even Carla Del Ponte, the chief prosecutor for the war crimes tribunal at the Hague, told the UN Security Council on November 10 "that its investigators had found 2,108 bodies at 195 sites, out of 529 reported locales."
The State Department nevertheless clung to its unsupportable claim that the death count of the Kosovars was 8,000 or higher.
While the media adhered to its incoherent claims of up to 300,000 killed in the Bosnian war alone, Kenney's researched estimates settled on 100,000 or less, which was reinforced when the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute later published nearly identical figures in its yearbook.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer's Elizabeth Sullivan, one of the few noted for her objective reporting in the Yugoslav wars, was clearly as skeptical by November 1999 about the hyped body counts in Kosovo and Bosnia as she was doubtful about officialdom's abilities to substantiate the exaggerations:
"Likewise, for the death count in Bosnia's three-year war, usually put at 250,000. After the war ended in 1995, a Canadian working for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) contacted municipalities all over Bosniato try to get lists of their dead, to be used in correcting the election rolls. Few had any lists or even names to give him. The overall numbers never have been confirmed. Military analysts are dubious that a war in which only tens of thousands were injured could have produced that many dead."
[ Here is another excellent article by Elizabeth Sullivan that makes clear the overwhelming bias against Serbia, even many years after Milosevic's demise and anything to do with the war is long since past.]
[Indeed, even those of us without a PhD in Statistics and Probabilities know very well from even casual observation of this world that the numbers of wounded or injured - whether in wars or any almost other type violent incidents - are always much greater than the number of dead.]
"In the end, the interventionist [media's] polemic was always: I can claim that thousands more bodies exist if you can find thousands less!"
And The Pulitzer Prize for Fraud in Journalism goes to...
(Once again, excerpted from Peter Brock's 'Media Cleansing: Dirty Reporting...').
'A Partial Story' and half a Pulitzer
In 1981, Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction-writing. But the piece was submitted as factual in the News Feature category, and was therefore judged a lie. The reporter was stripped of the prize and left the newspaper.
In 1993, Roy Gutman and John F. Burns won Pulitzer Prizes for "persistence" and "thoroughness," respectively. But there are questions about consistency, bias, methods, about how and what kind of information was obtained, when and where and from whom they got it. There are larger doubts about objectivity and omissions.
[Janet] Cooke had to return her Pulitzer Prize.
Gutman and Burns got to keep theirs.
Formula For a Pulitzer
Burns and Gutman rarely covered the same story but baited the pack-reporting with their focus on two episodes during the end of July and beginning of August 1992. The "news" coming out of the Bosnian war during those days made no sense - except to a few skeptics who were beginning to eye the media more closely.
During the week of July 27, the UN repeated a claim by the Bosnian [Muslim] government that Bosnian Muslim prisoners were being held at a Serb-run detention camp in the former mining complex of Omarska - after Burns and Gutman wrote stories about Omarska the previous week. The UN's information was speculative and was derived from Bosnian [Muslim] government sources, like the "anonymous" sources that had instigated Gutman's story six days earlier about sealed freight cars full of deportees "like Auschwitz."
On the bloody Sunday of August 2, Burns was in Sarajevo and wrote his story about the ambush of a bus evacuating infants and toddlers. Two were killed. Burns blamed it on the Serbs, even though two days later the mourners at the Orthodox cemetery were shelled with mortars during the burial of one of the victims. Nobody found it odd or refuted that Bosnian Serbs had attacked an Orthodox funeral service!
Also, Burns never explained why the burial services would be held for a "Muslim" in a Serb cemetery. Burns then wrongly identified the dead two-year-old Serb girl as a Croat and never corrected his first report in the second follow-up story when the information became known to other reporters. Also he neglected [to provide] any explanation about why Serbs would shoot up a bus full of toddlers, including Serbs, and then take nine of them (identified as Serbs) off the bus before it continued its journey the next day.
The same day - August 2 - Newsday published Gutman's horrifying accounts about Omarska in Bosnia, but which were reported from Zagreb (Croatia) primarily from the accounts of two alleged camp survivors. One man was identified by Gutman only as "Meho," a sixty-three-year-old building contractor who supposedly had been an inmate at Omarska "for one week in June (3rd through the 10th) before being released."
Gutman's "Meho" estimated 8,000 prisoners were at Omarska when he was there, but he did not say how he calculated his estimate. Gutman said the previous week's report of 11,000 prisoners at Omarska came from the UN High Commission on War Crimes," a propaganda mill, adding that Omarska was the "largest of the ninety-four camps known to the commission."
Gutman said he first heard about Omarska in Zagreb and included a disclaimer that the International Committee for the Red Cross and other international agencies were not able to visit Omarska. In other words, nobody knew anything firsthand for sure - including Gutman. Also, Gutman had not personally gone to Omarska and did not desrcibe how the Bosnian State Commission on War Crimes, which was cut off and isolated in Sarajevo, could make such claims. Gutman was in Zagreb - 200 kilometers from Omarska and 400 kilometers from Sarajevo.
Burns wrote a story from Sarajevo on June 20 saying that "according to Bosnian government claims, more than 10,000 Muslim Slavs...are in Serbian camps." Burns was clearly referring to all Serb camps. Burns had gone to none of the camps.
Left unexplained by Burns, Gutman, the UN or any credible international agency was the obvious statistical disparity of how a number exceeding all of the estimated inmates in ninety-four alleged Serb-run camps six weeks earlier had been counted at Omarska by July 27.
To account for the inmate population at Omarska, the other ninety-three alleged camps would have to have been emptied and inmates hauled to Omarska - an unlikely logistical undertaking to transport thousands of prisoners over hundreds of miles through war zones in less than six weeks!
After all, the one unquestioned statistic that appeared in Michael Gordon's later report on January 23, 1993 in The New York Times was that the International Committee of the Red Cross had determined six months earlier - at the end of July and on the eve of Gutman's stories about Omarska the first week of August 1992 - that there were never more than 10,800 inmates in [all of the] detention camps run by all three sides in Bosnia!
Gutman continued to orchestrate inflated claims more than two years later, attempting to buttress the sagging credibility of his original stories that juxtaposed phrases about "death camps," "concentration camps," and "prisoner of war camps," depending on the audiences.
Reporting later [that] he'd talked only with unidentified "US officials," Gutman said "20,000 to 25,000 people killed in camps. The worst slaughters occurred in June and July 1992." (Gutman obviously considered that his anonymous sources were more credible than George Kenney's.)
Nuremberg Neurosis
There were growing questions concerning his reporting about the alleged "concentration camp" run by the Serbs at Omarska. Alleged mass murders at Omarska and other camps were at the heart of Gutman's package of stories submitted to the Pulitzer Prize judges.
Even when his 1992 Omarska reports appeared a year later in his book, the questions remained. But, confronted at [his home in] Villprot in early 1994, Gutman was suspicious, cagey and defensive. He refused to discuss it further. The only recourse was to scrutinize what he wrote and what he said.
Beginning with his July 19, 1992, report from Banja Luka, he cited an unidentified "witness" who told him "six to ten people die daily" at Omarska. That count disputed Gutman's own "Meho" (quoted in his August 2, 1992, Newsday story) who [allegedly] spent eight days at Omarska and claimed 8,000 had been slaughtered - tenfold more than were cited two weeks earlier!
Obviously, Meho was not a credible witness and was passing on hearsay. An attempt was made to cover the defects in his stories by hedging that "nothing definitive is known about Omarska" which "may be a genuine prisoner-of-war camp."
Who then, were the sources other than "Meho?"
"Also vaguely mentioned [was] an unnamed Red Cross worker who said "he knew of no civilians in Omarska". But in Gutman's thinking, places like Omarska were the destinations for trains with sealed freight cars and cattle cars carrying thousands of unarmed civilians when he wrote his second story, also datelined Banja Luka, on July 21, 1992. "It reminded him of Jews on their way to Auschwitz," he wrote. A Nuremberg neurosis had [clearly] set in.
A man in the article, identified only as sixty-six-year-old "Began Fazlic," described the unsanitary conditions on one train. Fazlic was obviously recruited for the Gutman interview, along with several other supposed former Omarska inmates in Zagreb, by a supposed Muslim humanitarian agency. Such "humanitarian" groups were also involved, it was well known, in weapons smuggling and propaganda.
Fazlic later posed for a staged photo inside a boxcar. The effect of the photo was to establish Fazlic as a "real" person and boxcars as the means to transport camp inmates and deport other Muslims. Aside from Fazlic, the article listed statements from four unidentified sources, along with Banja Luka Police Chief Stojan Zupljanin, Mayor Predrag Radic (both Serbs) and Bosnian Serb army spokesman Major Milovan Milutinovic.
Gutman's third story about Omarska carrieda dateline from Zagreb on August 2, 1992, and boldly labeled Omarska as a "concentration camp." Gutman's source was the supposed former inmate named "Meho" and another alleged witness who was unidentified and who claimed "thousands of men were also being held in an outdoor pit."
But Gutman also obtained a statment from an unidentified geological engineer "who helped design the mining facility" and who said that "Meho" could not have seen the pit from his own confinement in a large cage inside an ore loader.
So where, Gutman was never compelled to answer, did "Meho" obtain his information, and how reliable was it? Or, whose words were put into "Meho"'s mouth?
In Gutman's fourth story about Omarska, datelined Zagreb on August 5, 1992, he used information from a second alleged inmate identified only as a fifty-three-year-old survivor named "Hujca." Another "indirect account" came from a thirty-one-year-old member of the Bosnian Muslim defense force, who said a fifteen-year-old boy, identified only as "Gredelje," told him he'd once been confined in the Omarska pit.
This time, Gutman reported "hundreds of prisoners" were held in the pit - totaling three double-hearsay sources!
Mass Media "Mistakes" - Deliberate Deception and False Reporting
Among wounded "Muslim toddlers and infants" aboard a Sarajevo bus hit by sniper fire in August 1992 were a number of Serb children - a fact revealed much later. One of the children who died in the incident was identified at the funeral as Muslim by television reporters. But the unmistakable Serbian Orthodox funeral ritual told an entirely different story, which was obvious to anyone who knew these cultures in even the most basic way.
The 1992 BBC filming of an ailing, elderly "Bosnian Muslim prisoner-of-war in a Serb concentration camp" resulted in his later identification by relatives as retired Yugoslav army officer Branko Velec - a Bosnian Serb held in a Muslim detention camp.
In its January 4, 1993, issue, Newsweek published a photo of several bodies with accompanying story that began: "Is there any way to stop Serbian atrocities in Bosnia?" The photo was actually of Serb victims, including one clearly recognizable man wearing a red coat. The photo, with the same man in his red coat is identical to a scene in television footage from Vukovar a year earlier.
CNN aired reports in March and May 1993 from the scenes of massacres of 14 Muslims and then 10 Muslims who were supposedly killed by Serbs. The victims later turned out to be Serbs. Of course, there was no correction by CNN.
In early August 1993, a photo caption in The New York Times described a Croat woman from Posusje grieving for a son killed in recent Serb attacks. In fact, the Croat village of Posusje, in Bosnia near the Dalmatian coast, had been the scene of bloody fighting between Muslims and Croats that had caused 34 Bosnian Croat deaths, including the son of the woman in the photo.
This House of Cards Will Fall
One day, enough people will realize the truth about these deliberately staged and falsely reported events that were instrumental in provoking the ruthless and criminal 78-day NATO bombing of Serbia, and this entire illusion will come apart at the seams. In fact, it has already begun.
The "death camp" falsely represented by Time magazine, the Sarajevo marketplace bombings and the Racak "massacre" were all pivotal, orchestrated events used in the psychological warfare campaign to influence public opinon and persuade us to accept and support the NATO bombing of Serbia as being not only legitimate, but necessary.
There are so many more examples, but this article has already become somewhat of a novel in itself (my frequent flaw), and we're not nearly finished yet. So these primary events that the most people were exposed to in the corporate mass media can speak for themselves and serve as a very solid platform for which I would encourage all of you to continue your own research - if you want to know more.
Now that we know how and why this war began, the past alliances and histories of the players involved and the some of the major inciting propaganda events that led to the full scale NATO bombing attacks on a sovereign nation that had not attacked any NATO-member nation (which is the legal requirement for any NATO involvement or retaliation), we will take a serious and sadly, very gruesome look at just how brutally the nation of Serbia was attacked by NATO for not playing along with the demands of the ruling elite in their criminal desires for a New World Order.
SECOND WARNING: THE PHOTOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE OF THE INNOCENT CIVILIAN VICTIMS OF THE NATO BOMBING WAR CRIMES IN SERBIA THAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO SEE IS EXTREMELY GRAPHIC AND DISTURBING AND IS NOT RECOMMENDED FOR CHILDREN, OR ANY ADULT READERS WHO DO NOT WISH TO SEE WHAT REALLY HAPPENS WHEN CIVILIAN AREAS ARE BOMBED BY ADVANCED MILITARY WEAPONS.
It is very painful and gruesome, but I feel that people should truly see and feel what was done to the innocent men, women and children of Serbia (including Kosovo) in the name of "liberation" and "democracy".
I had deep concerns about showing some of these photos, but I have been urged and convinced by people who lived through this terrible war to show the world some of what happened to the innocent people there as a direct result of NATO bombing - people who had nothing whatsoever to do with the war, politics or any of the atrocities (whether real or invented by mass media) committed by anyone on any side of the whole nightmare.
It is my sincere hope that if we can allow ourselves to see and feel what happened to these "other people" in faraway places that most of us have probably never even heard of, then perhaps we will gain the deeper wisdom required to motivate us to not allow it to continue happening over and over again - with little or no consequences for those in positions of power (the ruling elite) who tell us these lies and commit these undeniable crimes against humanity.
I have been told that the greatest respect I can show for these people and their families is in showing these atrocities to the world, because the corporate mass media has obviously decided that only the atrocities on the "other side" of this war (both real and imagined) are worthy of your interest. I strongly disagree with the corporate mass media, and if you are up to facing it along with me - you are about to see why.
Brace yourself, though, because what follows is an incredibly powerful and sad dose of harsh reality - which is why I have chosen to show it to you - because it is reality. I believe we need to feel these emotions and be truly shaken and righteously upset by these things that the criminals within our governments do with our tax money and armed forces that only exist, by the way, to protect and defend US, not to start wars all over the globe. Those were never the intentions of our founders.
Whether or not they are legal or illegal (as in this case, clearly in violation of the UN and NATO charters, as well as US law), or whether they occur with or without our consent obviously makes very little difference to the ruling elite who run our world behind the scenes. This needs to be our one and only focus, rather than allowing ourselves to be constantly manipulated by governments and mass media into hating each another for differences in skin color, religion or financial status.
We need to see and feel and know about these things, and we need to be very pissed off as a result - and we need to seriously begin thinking about ways we can do whatever it takes to stop them from ever happening again.
The NATO War Crimes - 78 Days of Bombing Military, Industrial and Civilian Area Targets
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| Toxic chemical clouds pour into heavily populated civilian areas after the illegal NATO bombing of oil and petrochemical facilities near Novi Sad, Serbia. |
The NATO bombing of Yugoslavia (code-name Operation Allied Force or, by the United States, Operation Noble Anvil) was NATO's military operation against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia during the Kosovo War. The bombing strikes lasted from March 24, 1999 to June 11, 1999.
An alleged massive campaign of Serbian ethnic cleansing (known as Operation Horseshoe) was cited as the reason for the NATO intervention. This operation also appears to have been a wholesale propaganda ploy, most widely spread by the German Defense Minister, who held several press conferences displaying highly dubious (manufactured) documents and "proof" of its existence and implementation by Serb forces in Kosovo.
The German Defense Minister at one point explained in detail how the Serbs were destroying a large number of Kosovar Muslim homes by "turning on the gas in basements and leaving a candle burning upstairs". This genius was later severely embarrassed and proven fraudulent by a reporter, no less, who explained to him that propane is a "heavier-than-air" gas, and therefore, this would not be physically possible. The German Defense Minister then said, "Oh. No?", and then offered no further proof or explanations for his "top secret" claims.
This is not to say that no homes were destroyed by Serb forces, of course, but it does further illustrate the pervasive pattern that we have already seen demonstrated, in which government and mass media representatives simply invented "facts" out of thin air and fully expected that no one would dare question them.
Operation Allied Force, the NATO bombing operation against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY), was allegedly aimed at forcing the FRY government to remove its security forces from the Serbian province of Kosovo. The bombing campaign began by focusing on attacking military targets, but by mid-April the focus had switched to strategic and "economic" targets such as transport links, particularly bridges.
Nearly every bridge in Serbia was destroyed or damaged, whether they had any military value or not - including a bridge leading to Hungary (a NATO country) and another that provided critical civilian access to the largest cardiovascular medical center in Central Europe.
Large numbers of civilian casualties occurred in solely residential areas far beyond such military and industrial targets, destroying homes, public transportation vehicles, hotels and clerical offices.
There are simply no words to describe the following pictures, so I will let them speak for themselves.
Cluster Bombs and Depleted Uranium Shells Were Used In Residential Areas
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| This CBU-87 cluster munition is designed to scatter hundreds of explosive submunitions and mines over wide-area targets, such as large troop formations, etc. - which is why they are banned by the Geneva Convention for use near civilian areas. NATO aircraft dropped cluster bombs in densely populated residential areas, destroying many homes and wounding and killing hundreds of innocent civilians in Serbia and Kosovo. |
The "dud rate" of cluster bomb submunitions is about 5%. What this means is that for each cluster bomb dropped (over a thousand were dropped in Serbia and Kosovo, with each containing 202 bomblets) about 10 of these small explosive submunitions fall to the ground and lay there, until they are disturbed by a passing car, tractor or too often - a curious child.
Many children and adults have been killed and severely wounded by contacting unexploded cluster bomb munitions, most often losing hands, feet, arms and legs due to the grenade-like explosive power of these weapons.
Below are the effects of using inaccurate cluster bombs in populated residential areas - widespread destruction and no military value whatsoever, other than terrorizing the civilian population, of course.
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| The telltale scattered "pockmarked" appearance of cluster bombs, used against this storage depot near Sremska, Serbia, where numerous innocent civilians were killed and wounded in nearby residential neighborhoods. |
Depleted Uranium, or "DU"
Excerpt from this excellent article:
"During the Kosovo war, I travelled from Belgrade to Brussels to ask about Nato's use of depleted uranium. Luftwaffe General Jerz informed me that it was "harmless" and was found in trees, earth and mountains. It was a lie. Only uranium – not the depleted variety that comes from nuclear waste – is found in the earth. James Shea, Nato's spokesman, quoted a Rand Corporation report that supposedly proved DU was not harmful, knowing full well – since Mr Shea is a careful reader and not a stupid man – that the Rand report deals with dust in uranium mines, not the irradiated spray from DU weapons.
And so it went on. Back in Kosovo, I was told privately by British officers that the Americans had used so much DU in the war against Serbia that they had no idea how many locations were contaminated. When I tracked down the survivors of the Albanian refugee convoy, one of them was suffering kidney pains. Despite a promise by Shea that the attack would be fully investigated, not a single Nato officer had bothered to talk to a survivor. Nor have they since.
A year ago, I noted in The Independent that foreign secretary Robin Cook had admitted in the House of Commons that Nato was refusing to give DU locations to the UN. "Why?" I asked in the paper. "Why cannot we be told where these rounds were fired?"
During the war, defence correspondents – the BBC's Mark Laity prominent among them – bought the Nato line that DU was harmless. Laity was still peddling the same nonsense at an Edinburgh Festival journalists' conference some months later. Laity – who is now, of course, an official spokesman for Nato – was last week reduced to saying that "the overwhelming consensus of medical information" is that health risks from DU are "very low".
But the growing consensus of medical information is quite the opposite. Which is why a British report to the UK embassy in Kuwait referred to the "sensitivity" of DU because of its health risks.
And still the Americans and the British try to fool us. The Americans are now brazenly announcing that their troops in Kosovo have suffered no resultant leukemias – failing to mention that most of their soldiers are cooped up in a massive base (Fort Bondsteel) near the Macedonian border where no DU rounds were fired by Nato. Needless to say, there was also no mention of the tens of thousands of US troops – women as well as men – who believe they were contaminated by DU in the Gulf.
So it goes on. British veterans are dying of unexplained cancers from the Gulf. So are US veterans. Nato troops from Bosnia and now Kosovo – especially Italians – are dying from unexplained cancers. So are the children in the Basra hospitals, along with their parents and uncles and aunts. Cancers have now been found among Iraqi refugees in Iran who were caught in Allied fire on the roads north of Kuwait.
Bosnian authorities investigating an increase in cancers can get no information from Nato. This is not a scandal. It is an outrage.
Had we but known. On those very same Iraqi roads, I too prowled through the contaminated wreckage of Iraqi armour in 1991. And – I recall with growing unease – back in Kosovo in 1999, only a day after the original attack, I collected pieces of the air-fired rounds that hit the Albanian refugee convoy. Their computer codes proved Nato had bombed the convoy – not the Serbs, as Nato tried to claim. I also remember that I carried those bits of munition back to Belgrade – in my pocket. There are times, I must admit, when I would like to believe Nato's lies."
Here is another interesting article on this subject.
There Was No Mass Exodus From Kosovo Until After NATO Bombing Began
There were no significant numbers of refugees fleeing Kosovo until after the NATO bombing began. That's right. The NATO bombing itself was proven to be the primary cause of the flood of hundreds of thousands of refugees from areas throughout Kosovo.
The NATO bombing essentially created, and most definitely escalated, the very humanitarian crisis that it claimed it was there to prevent - with virtually all of the "war crimes" that were later alleged by the War Crimes Tribunal (ICTY) having occurred during and after the bombing - not prior to it, as was originally claimed by NATO as being the reason for the bombing in the first place.
The NATO bombing marked the second major combat operation in NATO's history, following the September 1995 Operation Deliberate Force in Bosnia and Herzegovina. This bombing was pragmatically justified by the US and NATO countries as legitimate, claiming good-willed, humanitarian reasoning.
Major Problem: Legality - The NATO Bombing Was Illegal On Every Level
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US President Clinton knowingly and deliberately violated all applicable United States laws (and this was not the first time), as well as the NATO and UN charters themselves in going forward with the bombing of targets in Serbia and Kosovo.
It was also conducted bypassing the United Nations, of which two major Security Council members (Russia and China) had rejected the authorization to bomb a sovereign nation that had not attacked any NATO country, including the United States - which is the only legal pretext allowing NATO involvement in any military conflict, by the way.
The US Congress rejected President Bill Clinton's proposal to attack the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY), delivering this message:
“In a remarkable vote against the war in Yugoslavia, the House of Representatives, by a vote of 213 to 213, failed to give the President the constitutionally required authorization he needed to carry on the air war against Yugoslavia.
The [United States] Constitution grants Congress the sole power to declare war. It must give its affirmative assent. It did not do so. Contrary to the President's statement that he will continue this war, he has no legal authority to do so. It would be a remarkable act of executive hubris and illegal as well to continue the bombing. It is a serious subversion of our constitutional structure (and is impeachable). His only option is to end the aerial bombardment and negotiate a peaceful solution."
Unfortunately, President Clinton continued with the illegal bombing, acting as a de facto dictator, with malice and in defiance of all established laws, at every level - most importantly, the laws of the United States, which is significantly, the only place the President of the United States has any authority to decide anything.
When Clinton and his key administration conspirators (Albright, Holbrooke, et al) lost all legal authority to make any further decisions as President, he should have been impeached and all involved cabinet officials immediately removed from office, according to the laws of the United States.
The fact that Clinton remained in office at all is a testament to the power and influence of the ruling elite oligarchy's hidden (yet obvious to many of us) role in controlling the major events in this world - outside the legal boundaries of what the United States bases its existence on; a free nation under the rule of law, not of any particular individual or dictator who would presume to casually disregard and violate the existing laws governing the limited powers granted to a duly elected President.
In swearing his oath to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States, Clinton swore not only to uphold, defend and enforce the laws of our country - but also to obey those laws. Bill Clinton and several of his cabinet-level appointed (not elected) officials openly violated their Constitutional oaths and should have all been removed from office, in addition to being prosecuted in both civil and criminal courts for the crimes that they knowingly committed in relation to the illegal NATO bombing of Serbia.
NATO's Widespread "Collateral Damage" - Thousands of Innocent Civilians Murdered
Human Rights Watch "concluded that as few as 489 and as many as 528 innocent civilians were killed in the ninety separate incidents in Operation Allied Force". However, the actual up to date numbers are closer to 2,500 civilians killed throughout Serbia and Kosovo by NATO bombing.
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| This refugee convoy near Prizren was one of several large groups of innocent civilians that were "accidentally" bombed by NATO - the very people they claimed they were trying to "help and protect". |
Many refugees who fled Kosovo after the NATO bombing began (not before, as was the alleged reason given by the US and NATO for the bombing in the first place) were among the victims. The more conservative numbers given by Human Rights Watch show that between 278 and 317 of the civilians killed by NATO bombing (between 56 and 60 percent of the total number of deaths) were in Kosovo. In Serbia, 201 civilians were killed (five in Vojvodina) and eight died in Montenegro. Almost two thirds (303 to 352) of the total registered civilian deaths occurred in twelve incidents where ten or more civilian deaths were confirmed.
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| Does this really look like a legitimate military target to anyone out there? |
This monologue by American radio broadcaster Michael Savage is a very good and accurate summary of the events related to the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, as well as the other crimes and corruption surrounding degenerate President Bill Clinton and his administration:
Too Many "Accidents" To Be Accidental
The Grdelica train bombing occurred on 12 April 1999 (it was the second day of Serbian Orthodox Easter holidays that year), when two missiles fired by NATO aircraft hit a passenger train while it was passing across a railway bridge over the Južna Morava river at Grdelica gorge, some 300 kilometres south of Belgrade in Serbia. As a result, 14 civilians including children and a pregnant woman were killed and another 16 passengers wounded.
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| Two AGM-130 SLAM missiles fired by NATO aircraft hit a civilian passenger train in Serbia causing unimaginable burn injuries, suffering and death to the innocent civilians onboard. |
The bombing took place at about 11.40 hrs local time. An AGM-130 SLAM precision-guided missile released by a NATO F-15E Strike Eagle aircraft struck the centre of the bridge at the exact moment that the No. 393 passenger train, en route from Belgrade to Ristovac, was crossing the bridge. The missile struck the train, causing major damage, but did not destroy the bridge.
The pilot, now knowing for certain that a civilian passenger train had been hit, was either ordered or decided on his own, to fire yet another missile - which caused further devastation, injuries and deaths to the civilians who were now trapped inside the burning and mangled train - but still did not destroy the bridge.
According to General Wesley Clark, who was the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) at the time, the train had been traveling too fast and the bomb was too close to the target for it to divert in time. The first missile had been fired from a significant distance from the target, and the pilot was allegedly not able to visually recognize the train.
But anyone who knows anything about military weapons (and I do) knows that this is not true at all - the Weapon Systems Officer (WSO) in the back seat of the F-15E can guide this weapon to go anywhere he wants it to go by simply pointing it in that direction.
From the AGM-130 missile's manufacturer:
"As the target comes into view, the weapon systems officer has dual flexibility in guiding the weapon via the data link. For automatic terminal homing, the guidance tracker is locked on target but can be manually updated for precision bombing. When total manual guidance is used, the operator manually guides the weapon to the target aimpoint. Fifteen seconds prior to impact, the WSO locks-on to the target using the seeker tracker or manually tracks to the precise target impact point. For those aircraft not equipped with a data-link pod, the weapon may be launched in the direct attack mode (lock-on before release), as well as the primary indirect attack mode.
An additional capability is inflight missile retargeting. Real time targeting information is uploaded to the F-15E while inflight through the AXQ-14 Data link pod. The WSO then reprograms weapon target coordinates and attacks the new target."
Realizing that the train had been hit but believing that he could still complete the mission by striking the end of the bridge where the train had already passed, the pilot then made another pass and fired a second missile. This one hit the train, too.
General Clark described the second hit as an "uncanny accident" in which the train had continued moving into the target area, obscured by dust and smoke from the first strike, stating that the pilot allegedly had had less than one second to react. A gun camera video was released by NATO to support its version of the events.
The incident caused an immediate controversy in Serbia and abroad. The Yugoslav state news agency Tanjug released an editorial that accused NATO of carrying out the attack with the aim of "inflicting suffering on and destroying the Serbian people".
In a press conference held the day after the attack, General Clark stated that "it was an unfortunate incident which he, and the crew, and all of us very much regret" and "it is one of those regrettable things that happen in a campaign like this and we are all very sorry for it, but we are doing the absolute best we can do to avoid collateral damage."
The German Frankfurter Rundschau prompted a further controversy in January 2000, when it exposed the fact that the NATO video of the civilian train missile attack had been shown at three times its real speed, giving a misleading impression of the train's speed, and bringing into question the entire NATO story that the pilot could not have had time to see the train coming.
The Pentagon and NATO stated that the error had been the result of the video being sped up for battle damage assessment purposes, but not being slowed down again for the press conference.
Later investigation by Frankfurter Rundschau showed that the NATO video had actually been sped up 4.7 times.
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| Click here to see the deceptive NATO video which was sped up nearly 5x actual speed to give the false appearance that there was no time to divert the path of the missile away from hitting the train. |
This was yet another example of deception where the majority of the mass media simply ate it up and blindly regurgitated the "official" NATO version of the story without questioning anything. That was par for the course in the Bosnian War, without a doubt.
The Aftermath of War: Kosovo and the KLA
The KLA's stated goals, for media public relations purposes, were for an independent Kosovo, but in reality were just a thin disguise for what they actually wanted, which was to steal a large piece of a sovereign nation, and make it their own - a nation controlled by them - primarily Albanian organized crime gangs and terrorist thugs, who were and still are involved in everything from large-scale heroin trafficking (from Afghanistan into Europe), weapons trafficking and the worst of all crimes - human sexual slavery from Eastern European (former Soviet bloc) nations and the Far East into Western Europe, the Middle Eastern oil kingdoms and South America.
These are among the worst human rights violations on the planet, and they are occurring regularly, with the full support of the new "Kosovo" government, which is nothing more than the KLA terrorist leaders, including Hashim Thaci, who are now in the political leadership roles, rather than doing the murders and bombings themselves.
In case you are wondering - yes, all of the major intelligence and law enforcement agancies, including Interpol and Europol, have known about the KLA's direct involvement in these crime syndicates for decades now, but other than an occasional story, like this one, you won't hear about the higher level people in these organized crime rings (who are now - thanks to Clinton, Albright, Blair and Bush - an officially sanctioned "government") being caught or punished.
Here is another article from the Daily Mail, about Albanian sex slave trafficking that occurred in broad daylight on one of London's busiest streets. This is how brazen they have become, having done these crimes and gotten away with them for so long. Here's a quick excerpt:
"Police released the photo of the woman being trafficked on Oxford Street in a bid to raise awareness of the problem.
Seller number one, Izzet Fejzullahu - an Albanian vice gang member - is pictured selling the girl for £3,000. He was jailed for 14 years at London's Southwark Crown Court for controlling prostitution.
Seller number two, Albanian Agran Demarku, is seen discussing the deal with the brothel owner. He was sentenced to 18 years, as was his brother, Flamur, who stood guard over the girl.
The buyer, brothel owner Gazmet Turku, was also jailed.
Detective Chief Superintendent Richard Martin, of the Metropolitan Police Clubs and Vice Unit, said: 'The man to the left in the picture has £3,000 in cash in his hand, with which he is buying a human being.
'She is just a commodity to them. She is an item for selling sex.'
'The man is buying the girl for his own brothel from the men to his right, who ran a network of nine brothels. He is simply replenishing his stock, as a shopkeeper would.'
'These women are put into slavery and exploited in the vilest way.'"
And I'm sorry to report that anyone who thinks these are simply rogue organized crime gangs who are operating without the full knowledge, approval and cooperation of the Albanian and Kosovo (KLA/UCK terrorists) governments, is sadly and naively mistaken.
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| Great Britain's Tony Blair and KLA terrorist leader Hashim Thaci |
This is David Ramsay Steele, writing in Liberty, July 1999:
"In 1998, the KLA launched an offensive, rapidly gaining control of many villages. Yugoslav forces struck back and largely defeated the KLA. The death toll rose to around 2,000 for that year. Many of the Albanian deaths, however, were directly due to the KLA, which, like any new insurgent group lacking broad popular support, had to persuade a largely reluctant Albanian population to accept it as effectively a new government. The KLA especially targeted Albanians who co-operated with the Yugoslav local authorities.
In October 1998, responding to NATO's threat to bomb Yugoslavia, the Yugoslavs pulled back their troops and allowed OSCE observers into Kosovo. At that point, most of the 2,000 deaths had already been sustained, Yugoslavia's war against the KLA was mostly over, [but] because of the Yugoslav withdrawal of troops, the KLA quickly took or retook many villages, and by March 24th, militarily controlled 40 percent of Kosovo's territory."
Is Ramsay Steele correct that the KLA directed much of its violence against Albanians? Yes, he absolutely is. Indeed, while the Yugoslav government always protested the murders of Albanian civilians, the KLA by contrast showed itself as proud that it was murdering Albanian civilians. It is worth looking at an example of this.
Let us first consider how the Yugoslav government expressed itself concerning murdered Albanian civilians:
“Excerpts from report by Tanjug [Yugoslav government] news agency: Klina, 7th May: Hetem Dobruna, 40, has been killed in a terrorist attack in Lozica near Klina [between Pristina and Pec], while Sefedin Javori, 38, escaped unharmed, although the assailants also opened automatic rifle fire on him while he was sitting in his car, Pec district court judge Veselin Cadjenovic said.
The attack took place at around midnight two nights ago, near Hazir Javori's shop, where Dobruna and his best friend Sefedin had popped in for a drink... An investigation is under way. The swift and premeditated action points to a classic terrorist attack. Dobruna was an honest, hard-working and respected family man and loyal citizen of Serbia, which the terrorists found hard to swallow. This is the second [KLA] terrorist attack in Klina municipality in the past six months.”
The Yugoslav government clearly condemned the murder of these Albanian civilians. Now let us consider the manner in which the KLA expressed itself with respect to murdered Albanian civilians:
“The clandestine Albanian separatist movement Kosovo Liberation Army (UCK) has vowed 'multiple vengeance for the innocent deaths' in the Serbian region's central Drenica area, in a statement published Wednesday…The UCK [KLA], a group that wants the province to secede, has claimed responsibility for numerous deadly attacks against Serbian civilians and Albanians loyal to the Belgrade regime.”
Now, ask yourselves, if Serbia's Milosevic government had really been ethnically cleansing the Kosovo Albanians, would there have been so many “Albanians loyal to the Belgrade regime” that the KLA had to intimidate them with terror?
It is not so mysterious why many Albanians opposed the KLA. This organization's goal was (is) secession from Yugoslavia (now, from Serbia), but secession could offer no improvements for Albanians, something that is readily established by looking into what the political and social facts were in Kosovo when the KLA (or its precursors) and other Albanian secessionists began making serious trouble.
It turns out that no national minority anywhere in the world, or in history, had ever been more pampered and coddled than the Albanians living in Kosovo. The charges of Serbian "oppression" were just bare-faced lies. Albanians controlled the school system, the cultural institutions, industry, government and, for good measure, the police. The official language was Albanian.
This is not to say that there was no oppression in Kosovo - there certainly was: the minority Kosovo Serbs were discriminated against in government and industry, and they were also the target of persecution and murder by the same Albanian radicals who also happily murdered loyally Yugoslav Albanians.
Quite the opposite of opposing oppression, the KLA were always a collection of heroin-traffickers and racist terrorists (with links to Al Qaeda). The responsibility for the death toll in Kosovo can safely be laid at the KLA’s feet. They were and are brutal gangsters, behaving in the manner of unpopular separatists everywhere: victimizing even the people they claimed to represent.
Please also see this excellent article, "The KLA: gangsters, terrorists and the CIA", by Michel Chossudovsky, Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa.
WHY KOSOVO???
So, it's obvious now that the world's ruling elite pulled out all the stops, violated every type of national and international law, hired expensive PR firms to do their propaganda wars and coerced (or killed) anyone and everyone who stood in their way in order to get what they wanted - which was, ultimately, to get the small province known as Kosovo out of the possession of the sovereign nation of Serbia, which it was (and legally still is) a part of.
But, why?
Don't the ruling elite scum of the earth usually want oil or something worth money? Why would they want this silly chunk of land, anyway? These are very profound observations and questions, indeed.
Now we have arrived at the heart of the matter, as far as the New World Order is concerned, notwithstanding the aforementioned national sovereignty, global tyranny, false elitist capitalism and other relevant issues.
Now we get down to the "brass tacks", as they say...except that they are not brass.
Three Words = Vast Mineral Wealth
Mineral exploration has been ongoing in the region for the past two years now and according to the International Herald Tribune: “Kosovo likewise has significant natural resources, including some of the largest lignite coal deposits in all of Europe. There are also large reserves of lead, zinc, uranium, bauxite, chromium, silver, copper...and last, but never least...GOLD.”
So, we're not talking about a few million dollars here. We're talking about Billions with the big B. Even into the hundreds of Billions. Is that enough to start a war, slaughter tens of thousands of human beings and destroy millions of lives permanently?
Apparently, it was. At least for the sociopathic ruling elite, who are not encumbered like many of the rest of us with something known as a conscience.
All of which may explain why US Presidents Bush, Clinton and all the major European powers had backed calls for an independent Kosovo, foremost among them being the US and UK.
This was probably no coincidence, for it was a British mineral exploration company that was responsible for the soil testing. Did they refer their findings to the British government and did they promise to back calls for an independent Kosovo in return for preferential treatment for British companies exploiting Kosovo’s mineral deposits?
If so, it’s another example of how big money and government now work hand-in-hand. With political decisions being determined by profit as much as anything else.
No doubt the City of London will accrue benefits from this deal too. As it did over a century ago when Rothschild minions the Oppenheimers and their company Anglo-American began exploiting South Africa's vast gold, platinum, rhodium and diamond deposits.
So now you know. It really is all about power and wealth, after all. Just follow the money.
Surprised???
Now just watch what happens in the near future if the KLA terrorists ever get in the way of the ruling elite's precious New World Order and their vast mineral wealth...watch how quickly they become the "bad guys" and get trampled underfoot by NATO "humanitarian assistance" bombs.
Final Thoughts
Instead of expressing my own thoughts at the conclusion of this emotionally draining article - and believe me, that is quite an understatement of what I have felt during the many hours, days, weeks and months that I've spent researching and writing this - as much as I would love to deliver the powerful coup de grâce that it truly deserves in my own thoughts and words, I have found something even better.
Something that expresses all that I wish to say, and so much more - from the land of the most ancient lovers of freedom, democracy, law and rational thought.
I hope that, one day, these words will become fully recognized for being the groundbreaking legal precedent that they truly are, and will be prosecuted accordingly, no matter what the political costs may be. It's too late for apologies and empty suits speaking empty words - there must be action and justice brought to bear for NATO's crimes against humanity.
Post-Mortem of the NATO bombing of Serbia:
The Greek Supreme Court is Right
Twenty members of the Council of State (Greece's supreme administrative court) have issued a statement, citing legal arguments deploring the international crimes against Yugoslavia, which inaugurate a "period of lawlessness" and bring us back to the "eras of the Holy Alliance and the Axis."
NATO was found guilty of an unprecedented and barbaric attack against Yugoslavia in a statement signed by 20 high-ranking judges of the Greek Council of State, headed by its most senior vice-president Michalis Dekleris.
In this important statement, the judges condemn the NATO bombardments, denounce the international crimes being committed by the NATO countries through this armed attack, and warn that any law passed deciding to involve Greece in this war will constitute a gross violation of the Constitution.
Greek judges have taken a stand, pointing out that "this attack is accompanied by the revival of deceptively staged propaganda that attempts to exploit the misfortunes of the refugees to draw public attention away from the violation of international law."
The following is the full text of the statement:
1. NATO's offensive against a sovereign European state, unprecedented in the post-war years, is an affront not only to the ethical principles of Greek and European civilization, but also to the fundamental precepts of international law.
The latter is a legal issue and should not be overshadowed by the moral revulsion that is justly provoked by this cowardly and barbaric attack. On the contrary, this issue is of primary importance and must be clarified in particular by those who have a competent opinion about the Law, since their duty is to serve it.
2. This inexcusable attack is taking place in flagrant violation of articles 1 and 2 of the United Nations Charter, which expressly prohibits the use of violence in international relations, and designates the Security Council (article 41 ff.) exclusively competent in international crises. According to these provisions, but also to the generally recognized precepts of international law, there is no room for self-appointed crisis managers, nor is it permitted, on any pretext whatsoever, for third countries to intervene in the internal affairs of a sovereign state
3. But this attack even violates the NATO Charter, the exclusive purpose of which is collective defense of the area defined therein that coincides with the boundaries of its member states, and which has committed itself in its international relations to refrain from the threat or use of violence in any way whatsoever that is incompatible with the principles and purposes of the UN (article 1). That is, by its own Charter, NATO has been placed under the rule of the UN Charter. And it could not have been otherwise, since no international organization or alliance can be placed above the United Nations.
4. In addition, both the United Nations Charter and all generally recognized precepts of international law safeguard the equality and sovereignty of all peoples, irrespective of their numbers and power, and do not recognize any jurisdiction on the part of powerful nations to intervene in the internal affairs of weaker nations or to dictate solutions to their own liking.
Consequently, however serious the crisis in Kosovo may be, it remains an internal Yugoslav affair and belongs to the exclusive jurisdiction of the sovereign Yugoslav state. Any humanitarian or other interest on the part of the UN, other international organizations or third countries may be manifested only in a peaceful way and by diplomatic means within the context of the UN Charter.
5. And, in this case, the United Nations, respecting these restrictions, remained within its jurisdiction, recommending to the lawful government of Yugoslavia that they fulfill their obligations (Security Council resolutions No 1160/31.3.1998 and 1199/ 23.9.1998). But behind the scenes, the NATO military alliance appeared in a self-appointed role, and without having - nor could it have had - any competence to become involved in this matter, having first dictated an insolent ultimatum disputing the very sovereignty of Yugoslavia, then launched an aggressive war against this state, demanding that it conform to NATO demands.
This attack is accompanied by the revival of dark propaganda that attempts to exploit the misery of the refugees to draw public attention away from the violation of international law.
6. The legal significance of these actions should not be concealed nor underestimated. By their armed attack, the NATO countries are committing the following international crimes, in accordance with the charter being drafted for the International Criminal Court, which refers to the Geneva Conventions dated 12 August 1949 (UN Doc. A/CONF/183/9) and in particular:
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| Illegal NATO bombing destroyed numerous UN-designated "World Heritage" sites, including churches and monasteries dating from the pre-17th century. |
a) the crime of waging an offensive war, with the violent destruction of human life, cultural monuments and entire settlements; b) the crime of genocide by the deliberate destruction of the infrastructure of the Serbian community and the creation in it of conditions that lead to its physical annihilation; and
c) the crime of ecological destruction by the use of military technology that causes damage to people's health and to the natural environment, a crime also committed against third countries to which deadly pollution is carried.
7. During the recent Washington summit, the leadership of the attacking NATO countries tried to amend the provisions of its Charter to make it autonomous in continuing the attack on Yugoslavia, and also with regard to its plans for the future in carrying out so-called peace-making and humanitarian interventions under the pretext of "crisis management"!
It tried in vain. The only valid crisis management, according to international law, remains as ever the UN. And no other organization that is by definition inferior to it can remove or usurp this role. NATO cannot abolish international law nor can it produce new, generally recognized precepts of international legality. Its new Charter affects only the governments that signed it. And even if it is ratified by the national Parliaments of its member states, it will declare the intentions of just 19 out of a total of 158 states on the planet
The remaining states will not tolerate the falsification or mockery of international law. They reject the theory that might is right, whether overt or disguised. And small states like Greece will be in danger if they relinquish rights which have been undisputed for centuries. The truth is that NATO's attack on Yugoslavia inaugurates a period of lawlessness in international relations. We are returning to the era of the Holy Alliance and the Axis, against which humanity, and the Greeks in particular, fought with such great sacrifices.
8. Having become involved in this crisis, Greece has no option other than to do what its culture and Constitution dictate, namely to follow the generally recognized precepts of international law, to seek the consolidation of peace, and to use its armed forces only for defensive purposes (article 2 para 2 and article 4 para 6 of the Constitution).
In the light of these provisions of the Constitution of the Hellenic State and the provisions of the United Nations Charter, it is possible to interpret the provisions of articles 27 para 2 and 28 para 3 of the Constitution, which after a special law is passed, make it possible for foreign troops to sojourn in or travel across the Hellenic State or for national sovereignty to be restricted.
These provisions could, however, be implemented only with respect to the participation of Greece in a declaration of war, and not to facilitate an attack against a third state. Consequently, the involvement of Greece in this on-going war against Yugoslavia cannot be decided upon even by law because such a law would be totally unconstitutional.
In addition to Mr. Dekleris, this statement was signed by the following Council of State members: St. Sarivalasis, Ioanna Mari, Dim. Kostopoulos, Evdoxia Galanou, Sot. Rizos, Pan. Pikrammenos, Nik. Sakellariou, Th. Papaevangellou, Nik. Rozos, Dion. Marinakis, St. Haralambos and associate judges Maria Karamanov, Ekaterini Christoforidou, I. Kapelousos, Dim. Alexandris, Eleni Anagnostopoulou, Euth. Antonopoulos, Varvara Kapitsi, Theo. Aravanis..
If you are still reading, your tenacity and persistence amazes me. :)
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| The beautiful and talented Ana Ivanovic, Serbian tennis star and goodwill ambassador to UNICEF, shown with some beautiful young people who will be the future of their country. |
I thank you all sincerely for reading and I wish you peace, wisdom and justice in your lives. I pray that there are better days ahead for everyone in the entire Central European region known to us as The Balkans - you have all suffered enough, and you deserve happiness.
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| A panoramic view of Novi Sad, Serbia, with its bridges now rebuilt. |
The process of rebuilding and healing has begun. May God bless you all in every way possible.
All Original Content (C) Copyright 2010 LVB Research, All Rights Reserved.
