ZGram - 3/7/2002 - "The Case of the Invisible Trial"

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

Copyright (c) 2002 - Ingrid A. Rimland

ZGrams - Where Truth is Destiny

March 7, 2002

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

Two pregnant-with-meaning opinion pieces below on a political show 
trial - but first, let us set up a clip, as they say in movie land:

It is a truism that politics makes for strange bedfellows.  The same 
can be said for Revisionism.

Take the case of Slobodan Milosevic!  Who would have ever imagined 
that he, of all people, would become the "fall guy" for those 
sinister forces hell-bent on bringing about their "New World Order" 
- come hell or high water?  This aging, hard-line Bolshevik who, on 
his way up the steep incline to power, undoubtedly oversaw with 
gusto the orchestration of many an unfair trial against dissidents 
and political opponents , now finds himself caught in a karmic 
spectacle come full circle!

One might wonder if the man at least reflects on the cosmic aspects 
and forces at play!  And one must wonders if those who sit in 
judgment of him today might sooner or later find themselves exactly 
in his place?

We Revisionists, many of whom have been at the receiving end of the 
same kind of crooked, diabolical show trials, cannot help but see 
the parallels - turned-off microphones, haughty and arrogant judges, 
politically motivated prosecutors, selective use of hearsay and 
outright concocted "evidence", false charges - and, of course, 
ideologically motivated and even bought witnesses!

We can all relate to the illegal proceedings behind closed doors, to 
"secret witnesses" who have their own axes to grind or whose lives 
are so empty that they need to grovel or impress.

All this to help establish a World Criminal Court?

The Hague International War Crimes Tribunal or "court" is victors' 
justice designed to hide the crimes of those "victors" by blaming 
their victims. If such a "court" comes about as a permanent feature, 
it will be an institution just like Nuremberg - spawned by hatred, 
deception and greed for power, imbued with a spirit of vengeance 
against all those deemed "enemies" by those shadowy forces seeking 
world domination.

The shameful Kangaroo Court in Nuremberg did not prevent war, 
violence, mass murder and ethnic cleansing - Milosevic's prosecution 
will not either.  As long as the Sharons, Clintons, Albrights and 
Tony Blairs continue to roam the earth - untouched, untried, never 
to be convicted, there will be no peace and no justice on this 
planet.

With this as a backdrop, read on:

[START]

The Case of the Invisible Trial, or
'Where's the Beef?'
by Stella L. Jatras
3/7/02

It's called the most important trial since Nuremberg; yet, of the 
over 100 TV channels at my disposal, not one carries it. Curious, 
since for the past ten years the media and the major TV channels 
couldn't wait to spin all the sordid details of mutilations, 
murders, torture and charges of genocide that the accused, former 
Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, faces at The Hague's Stalinist 
show trial. However, this trial is not just about Slobodan 
Milosevic; it is also about the Serbian people. Why then has the 
media ignored it? Can it be because of the inept prosecution of the 
trial? Can it be that the "heinous criminal, Milosevic," with only 
the use of a public pay phone and acting as his own lawyer from his 
9 by 15 foot jail cell, is making fools of the international 
tribunal? Can it be that, since his guilt is a foregone conclusion, 
it wouldn't do for the public to see how weak the case is against 
him?

Ironically, it was a report co-authored by Daniel Pearl that broke 
the story in a 1999 article in The Wall Street Journal titled, "Body 
Count," that enabled Slobodan Milosevic to discredit one of Chief 
Prosecutor, Carla del Ponte's star witness against Milosevic, Halit 
Barani, former actor turned reporter. The article was subtitled, 
"War in Kosovo Was Cruel, Bitter, Savage: Genocide It Wasn't," and 
"Tales of Mass Atrocity Arose And Were Passed Along, Often With 
Little Proof." One of the most gruesome charges was that the Serb 
paramilitary had dumped 700 [some reports were as high as 1,500] 
bodies into the furnace at the Trepca mine, after having been ground 
up into little pieces. As Pearl writes,

"By late summer, stories about a Nazi-like body-disposal facility 
were so widespread that investigators sent a three-man French 
Gendarmerie team spelunking half a mile down the mind to search for 
bodies. They found none. Another team analyzed ashes in the furnace. 
They found no teeth or other signs of burnt bodies."

Of Mr. Barani, Pearl writes,

"Mr. Barani doesn't completely stand by his story. 'I told everybody 
it was supposition, it was not confirmed information, he says.'"

The Pearl article also referred to Barani's use of a KLA satellite 
phone to call in his stories, although Barani testified at the 
Milosevic trial that he had no contact with the KLA. Mrs. Pearl 
characterized her husband as a journalist who sought the truth. It 
would be interesting to know if Daniel Pearl were alive today, would 
he be called as a witness for the defense?

Not only did Daniel Pearl conclude that there was no genocide in 
Kosovo, but Agence France Presse of 5 April 1999, also headlined, 
"Kosovo is no genocide: Nobel Peace Prize winner," referring to Elie 
Wiesel. It's kind of hard to paint the Serbs as conducting a 
genocide against ethnic Albanians when over 100,000 fled to Belgrade 
to escape NATO's bombs in Kosovo. (...)

=====

Open Letter to General Michael Short
11/3/99

RAPES, MURDERS AND TORTURE OF SERBS IRRELEVANT

While rapes, murders, and torture of the Serbian population were 
totally ignored or discounted by the media and by human rights 
organizations, charges of barbarity against the Serbs were constant 
throughout the civil war in the Balkans, for that is exactly what it 
was: a civil war. In civil wars, people do terrible things to each 
other - but with an anti-Serb U.S. foreign policy agenda along with 
a willing media, only one side was Satanized. Former Canadian Major 
General Lewis MacKenzie, Bosnia's first UNPROFOR commander stated a 
simple fact, that all sides were doing bad things. For that 
impartial statement, the Bosnian Muslim government of Alija 
Izetbegovic saw to the good general's early exit from Bosnia by 
producing "a witness [who] had seen me [MacKenzie] come by and pick 
up four Muslim girls, who were taken away and presumably raped and 
murdered." A total fabrication.

Among the dozens of examples of the media spinning their version of 
events in the Balkans, another example of the lies being used 
against the former Serbian president is the 1995 Markale marketplace 
massacre for which we dropped 6,000 tons of bombs for two weeks on 
the Bosnian Serbs. NATO dropped its defensive mantra and became the 
offensive arm of the New World Order, in violation of its treaty. It 
had to. The Soviet Union was gone and Clinton needed to justify 
NATO's existence. Yossef Bodansky, the author of Bin Laden: The Man 
Who Declared War on America, in his book, Offensive in the Balkans, 
wrote the following:

"Phase Three started with a self-inflicted major terrorist 
provocation. On February 5, 1994, a major explosion rocked the 
Markale Sarajevo s main market place causing heavy casualties. What 
was immediately described as the ubiquitous 'Serb mortar shell' was 
actually a special charge designed and built with the help from 
Hizballah experts and then most likely dropped from a nearby rooftop 
onto the crowd of shoppers. Video cameras at the ready recorded this 
expertly-staged spectacle of gore, while dozens of corpses of 
Bosnian Muslim troops killed in action (exchanged the day before in 
a body swap with the Serbs) were paraded in front of cameras to 
raise the casualty counts. This callous self-killing was designed to 
shock the West, especially sentimental and gullible Washington, in 
order to raise the level of Western sympathy to the Bosnian Muslims 
and further demonize the Serbs so that Western government would be 
more supportive of Sarajevo s forthcoming aggressive move, and 
perhaps even finally intervene military."

European newspapers also confirmed that Bosnian Muslims had 
committed the Markale marketplace massacre, but Clinton needed an 
excuse to bomb the Serbs. Consider the following. Saudi Arabia 
signed a letter of intent to buy $6 billion dollars worth of Boeing 
aircraft. The day after we bombed the Serbs on a trumped up 
massacre, the Saudis signed on the dotted line. Coincidence? I don't 
think so. Saudi Arabia wanted the first Islamic nation in the belly 
of Europe, and we wanted Saudi oil and money. And that's what this 
war was all about.

I am not here to defend Slobodan Milosevic. I am here to defend the 
Serbian people who have been unjustly accused of atrocities 
(including cannibalism!) and who continue to suffer under our 
sanctions. However, you have to hand it to Slobo. He's got guts. He 
is brilliantly exposing these clowns for what they are, even with 
the disadvantage of having only one phone at his disposal, the 
cutting off of his mike when convenient by the chairman of the 
tribunal, and now faces testimonies of witnesses behind closed doors.

As columnist Don Feder writes in his West haunted by Balkans 
blunder, of 3 December, 2001, "Slobodan Milosevic has been charged 
with complicity to commit genocide and crimes against humanity. 
Before the travesty is over, he will doubtless be convicted of 
running the rail line to Auschwitz" [my emphasis].

Slobodan Milosevic has already been found guilty by those clowns at 
The Hague so why bother to air the trial? Why confuse the American 
people with the facts? Without Slobodan Milosevic's conviction, 
there will be no permanent International War Crimes Tribunal. It's 
their ticket to their New World Order.

[END]

(Source:  http://www.antiwar.com/orig/jatras8.html)

=====

Thought for the Day:

"Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other."

(Benjamin Franklin)