Several of us are still working on a special project, and I have held back doing an original editorial on the Kosovo development. It will be done in a few days, but on this Easter Sunday, which is supposed to be a happy day, the media are so chockful of lies and distortions about what's happening in distant, troubled Europe I feel the way I did when the Gulf War broke loose: Like many in Americans, I feel upset and troubled by what is done in our name by the "Western governments" and their military in Yugoslavia.
I haven't been able to follow the story consistently at all, but from what I have seen, the best way to describe it is to say that an extreme unease and jitteriness of the political leadership and usual coterie of media spin-doctors is palpable. Not a few people know that our powers-that-be have overreached themselves and walked right into a bullpen quagmire.
Again, I borrow from the Hoffman Wire, this time # 127. Michael prefaces this summary with a few poignant questions and observations about what this mess is going to cost us.
Here's Michael Hoffman II, one-time Associated Press reporter:
In your letters-to-the-editor, talk-show call-ins and correspondence with journalists and politicians, hammer home the question: "When will the media tell us how much this NATO war is costing American taxpayers? How much does it cost American taxpayers per day to mount this war?"
Furthermore, the media refuse to put the NATO attack in historical perspective. US taxpayers were goaded into supporting the"Desert Storm" war on Iraq by the media having uncritically trumpeted the claim that Iraqi troops raided a hospital nursery in Kuwait, tipping over incubators and killing infants. It was later revealed that the testimony concerning this "atrocity" originated with a relative of the Kuwait ambassador to the US and had been assembled and orchestrated by a US advertising agency in the pay of Kuwait.
As the corrupt establishment US media refuses to report war crimes and casualties perpetrated by NATO and its bombs, and uncritically disseminates anti-Serbian atrocity propaganda to "bolster taxpayer resolve," we offer the following for balance.
1. M.I.T. Prof. Noam Chomsky on NATO's Violation of International Law
Despite the desperate efforts of ideologues to prove that circles are square, there is no serious doubt that the NATO bombings further undermine what remains of the fragile structure of international law. The US made that entirely clear in the discussions leading to the NATO decision...France had called for a UN Security Council resolution to authorize deployment of NATO peacekeepers. The US flatly refused, insisting on "its stand that NATO should be able to act independently of the United Nations," State Department officials explained.
The US refused to permit the "neuralgic word `authorize'" to appear in the final NATO statement, unwilling to concede any authority to the UN Charter and international law; only the word "endorse" was permitted (Jane Perlez, NYTimes, Feb. 11). Similarly the bombing of Iraq was a brazen expression of contempt for the UN, even the specific timing, and was so understood. And of course the same is true of the destruction of half the pharmaceutical production of a small African country a few months earlier...
2. Environmental Consequences of NATO Bombing
Message from Milica Dedijer in Belgrade:
I directly urge you to do everything to stop the NATO intervention against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, because it will not bring peace ...I wish to point out a special side-effect of the bombing of which little has been said: the actions of NATO Pact are so wide, that in the first phase they can already be characterised as absolute war which means the destruction of the cultural, spiritual and natural lives of millions of people of all our country.
The toxic nature of the 19,200 tons of explosives (equal to the amount used in the Nagasaki bombing) used is well known to you - we warn you that Serbia is one of the greatest sources of underground waters in Europe and that the contamination will be felt in the whole surrounding area all the way to the Black Sea. NATO Pact is bombing factories, the workers in the greater part of our great industrial complexes have decided to make a "living wall" around their working places, they are not doing this because they are only defending their country, but also because they have become so impoverished by the years of sanctions, that the destruction of factories would mean the condemnation to the unequalled poverty equal to execution. Such poverty will soon cause the long lasting crisis in this area, and will become the center of potential terrorism.
NATO chooses the targets in the vicinity of extremely dangerous sites. On the very first day, the municipality of Grocka has been hit - on the territory of which the nuclear reactor Vinca is situated, containing a great storage of nuclear waste; the municipality of Pancevo has been hit, on which the petrol-chemical factory and the factory for the artificial fertilizers are situated; the municipality of Baric has also been hit with the great complex for the production of chloride, which is using Bopal technology. It is not necessary for me to explain what the blowing up of one of such factories would represent. Not only Belgrade which is situated at a 10 km distance, would be endangered, but the rest of Europe too. On the second day, in the Belgrade suburb of Sremcica a factory for the chemical production and a rocket fuel storage was hit causing a milder intoxication of the surrounding area.... The village of Gracanica was also shelled: there is situated one of the most important monasteries of the medieval orthodox culture...Numerous civil targets in other cities were hit - schools, hospitals...
Especially worrying are the latest news saying that, in the next phases of their bombing, NATO will use the airplanes B1 and A10 which are carrying missiles with depleted uranium previously used in Iraq and Bosnia Herzegovina. The use of these will bring about the vast dangerous consequences to the health not only of the soldiers, but also of the whole population, and you know that the toxins and the radioactivity know no nationality or borders.
Of course it is not necessary for me to point out the shocks that children and old people unable to hide in shelters are experiencing, the worsening of the situation in the hospitals. If the aim of this intervention was the prevention of the humanitarian catastrophe, its result will be a far greater humanitarian catastrophe with far more severe consequences to the generations of people living in this country.
I am deeply convinced that I am speaking in the name of all the citizens of Yugoslavia when I say that we have the capabilities and the political will to find a solution for the Kosovo and Metohija problem, if we are allowed to seek this solution together with the Albanians, and if we take into consideration the fact that all of us have the right to participate in this solution. All one-sidedness and media manipulation are a part of the mechanism bringing suffering, destruction and death. http://beograd.rockbridge.net/greens_from_belgrade.htm
3. NATOAtrocities
Casualties from NATO Bombings (via Bob Djurjevich)
The Apr. 2 report by The (London) Independent, filed from Belgrade by its veteran reporter, Robert Fisk:
On the second floor of the Serbian Clinical Centre in Belgrade are victims of the Balkan war who will never be mentioned in any NATO briefing. There's a 14-year-old boy with his head crushed, lying in a coma, eyes half-closed, a fat oxygen tube down his throat. There's a middle-aged farmer hit in the head by shrapnel and expected to die within a few hours. A little further down the emergency ward is another boy - 13 this time - with his head swathed in bandages, moving in agony, his brain damaged and his right leg fractured by a falling building. They are NATO's victims.
Our victims, I suppose. Standing at their bedsides, the phrase "collateral damage" seems somehow obscene. Ivan Tanasijevic, the 14-year-old from the Drina river valley, was wounded in a NATO air raid on Loznica, and his father came to see him on Wednesday. "He asked if he could see his son,"
Dr Dragana Vujadinovic says. "I said, yes, but that Ivan was in a coma. The father sat by his bed here and cried. He is a farmer. Yes, I told him his son is very bad but that we wouldn't know what will happen for another few days. Yes, the boy is likely to die."
[...]
Dobrica Vukojicic is likely to join them soon. He was a farmer and appears to have been in his fields near Kraljevo when a NATO missile exploded a few meters from him. Pieces of metal smashed into his head and the blast caused what the doctors call "contralateral" damage to his brain, which started internal bleeding. He was brought to the medical centre on Wednesday night.
Will he live, I ask Dr Mihaelo Mitrovic? He looks at me as if I am foolish to ask and raises his eyebrows. The man breathes noisily through his tubes, huffing and puffing as if aware of his fate. He will probably never awake.
Dr. Mitrovic, who refuses to talk politics, insists on pointing out those patients who are not war-wounded and those who - though they may not be direct victims of NATO's bombs - are victims of the war. Milan Lemajic, for example, lies unconscious in a bed at the end of the ward, his head as bloated as a football, his face a mass of bruises. "We think he tried to commit suicide after the first bombs," the doctor said. "He jumped from the fourth floor of his apartment block. Look at his X-rays." He holds out a sheet of negatives that shows just a big, dark mass. "His head is like a water-melon."
[...]
In one bed lies Dejan Lukic, 13, another victim from Loznica though this time with a birthplace of special horror. He was originally a Serb resident of the east Bosnian town of Srebrenica and was driven from his home by Muslim forces in 1992. It was those same Muslims who held Srebrenica as it filled up with Muslim refugees during the Bosnian war and it was their menfolk who were the victims of the 1995 atrocity when thousands were executed by Serb militiamen. By then, Dejan Lukic was 25 miles away in Loznica.
He was still there last week when NATO began raiding the eastern bank of the Drina. Doctors believe he was running for his life after a missile explosion when he was hit by concrete from a collapsing building. He never regained consciousness. But his eyes moved yesterday - a good sign, according to the doctors. He may live...
============================================
To that, I want to add two rookie revisionist recommendations:
1. For daily updates on what is going on in this crazy, unfortunate war, subscribe to Bob Djurdjevic's "Truth in Media" at
Bob Djurdjevic
TRUTH IN MEDIA
Phoenix, Arizona
e-mail: bobdj@djurdjevic.com
Visit the Truth in Media Web site http://www.truthinmedia.org/ for more articles on geopolitical affairs.
2. For editorial comment from an editorial Third World Order perspective, your best reporter is Mike Hoffman - attribution and links below.
Copyright ©1999 by Michael A. Hoffman II. All Rights Reserved. A catalog of Mr. Hoffmans books and tapes and Revisionist History newsletters is online at http://www.hoffman-info.com/bookstore.html
THE HOFFMAN WIRE is a free e-mail publication of The Campaign for Radical Truth in History, a subsidiary of Independent History & Research, Box 849, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho 83816 U.S.A.
To subscribe or unsubscribe, send e-mail to hoffman@hoffman-info.com with the message: "subscribe" or "unsubscribe".
==============================================
Thought for the Day:
"Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other."
(Benjamin Franklin)
Back to Table of Contents of the April 1999 ZGrams