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All brasscheck.com dispatches on the US-led
attack on Yugoslavia are available, complete
with index, at http://www.brasscheck.com/yugoslavia
Please inform your friends, colleagues, and
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May 25, 1999

Back in the saddle

"Jane's Defense Weekly, in a very significant story in the May 10
issue, reports that the current leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army
is a Croatian general, Agim Ceku.  He was in charge of Operation
`Storm,' the bloodiest and most brutal military campaign -until the
current NATO bombing--carried out in the Balkans since the invasion of
the Nazis during World War II.  In August 1995, the Operation `Storm'
offensive against the Serbian population in the Krajina region in
Croatia that drove hundreds of thousands of Serbs from the region that
they have inhabited for centuries.

Ceku is a U.S.-trained military officer who is closely tied to the
Pentagon's Military Professional Resources, Inc. (MPRI). The MPRI is a
semi-official Pentagon contractor, headed by retired U.S. military
officers. It specializes in sending mercenary armies under Pentagon
contract into unofficial wars. The MPRI was contracted by the Pentagon
to organize and train the Croatian Army for its Operation Storm
against Serbs in  Krajina. This massive ground offensive against
hundreds of thousands of civilians was seen as the decisive military
event that forced the Milosevic government in Yugoslavia to sign the
U.S.-brokered Dayton Accord for Bosnia."

Source: Brian Becker, Co-Director, International Action Center
"Is the U.S./NATO leadership planning a ground war?"
http://www.iacenter.org  email: iacenter@iacenter.org

MPRI's web site: http://www.mpri.com
You can anticipate where America's next major military involvement
will be by reading MPRI's "help wanted ads." Hint: Africa.

==============================================================

Retired Canadian military officer given platform by
the Washington Post to predict a Serb atrocity

"Based on the principle that the best defense is a good
offense, it would seem that Milosevic's best option would
be an attack, perhaps with artillery and missiles, against
the crowded refugee camps on the Kosovo borders."

- Lewis MacKenzie. Commander of U.N. troops during the siege
of Sarajevo in the Bosnian  war in 1992. Source: The Washington
Post, Sunday, May 23, 1999; Page B01

This odd comment comes from a military man who, like Agim
Ceku, spent his time in Yugoslavia directing the shelling of
areas inhabited by Serb civilians. His suggestion was slipped
into a not terribly insightful or enlightening "critique"
of NATO. Summary: a) it's not as well organized as the UN was
and b) it suffers from too many opinions to be able to carry
out a proper war.

But to focus on MacKenzie's statement:
If the government of Yugoslavia were of a mind to shell
Albanian civilians, why hasn't it done so already? And
why, in the middle of a life and death struggle to
defend its territory against NATO bombing and KLA
terrorism, would it expose itself and commit scarce
resources by crossing an international border for
the purposes of committing an atrocity in broad daylight.

Clearly, this is the fantasy of a professional Serb hater,
and this kind of bizarre projection is more appropriate
for the cover of a supermarket tabloid than a newspaper
with pretensions of accuracy. Yet there is it, in black
and white, an "authority" in a "legitimate" paper
stating that the Yugoslavian army's best tactic at
this point is to stage an "attack, perhaps with artillery
and missiles, against the crowded refugee camps on the
Kosovo borders."

Are the professional Serb-haters telegraphing their
next move? Is a staged atrocity involving refugees to
be blamed on the Yugoslavian government in order to
convert popular opinion in favor of a ground invasion.

Interestingly, today NATO announced via an AP
report that the policy of using the UN to frighten
Albanian refugees into moving away from the border
area and deeper into Albania has been dropped. ``These
people have seen  enough violence in Kosovo. They should
be treated with respect,'' NATO spokesman Lt. Col.
Helge Eriksen said.

NATO's all heart, isn't it?

If an "atrocity" like the one in McKenzie's fantasies does
in fact occur, it will be timed to take place at more or less
the same time NATO is prepared to launch its ground invasion.
A press pool will just happen to be conveniently near
by and, if the presentation is dramatic enough, it
may be used to break into normal TV programming ala
OJ Simpson's non-getaway in the Ford Bronco. Christiane
Amanpour is not cooling her jets in Albania for nothing.

Unduly cynical? Only if you don't know how the
current air war got started...

===============================================

William Walker and the short memory of the
US press

"On January 15, 1999, in the Kosovo village of Racak, Yugoslav and
Serbian police forces were accused of carrying out a horrible massacre
of civilians. William Walker, a U.S. diplomat in charge of the
international monitoring force in Kosovo, went to the site with
Western reporters and proclaimed that 45 people had been "killed in
the massacre."  Pictures of 40 bodies laid out in a village Mosque
were put on the front page of all the major Western newspapers.
Walker called it a "crime against humanity" by the Yugoslav government
led by Slobodon Milosevic...

William Walker was presented as the consummate neutral peace keeper.
Why question his word?  In fact, no major U.S. media outlet did
question his account.  William Walker, however, is not a neutral peace
keeper.  He is a war criminal and a professional liar.  As a special
assistant to Lt. Col. Oliver North and Assistant Secretary of State
Eliot Abrams, Walker was a key operator in Reagan's White House
operation to overthrow the Nicaraguan government in the 1980s.

According to charges filed in U.S. district court by independent
council Lawrence Walsh, Walker was responsible for setting up a phony
humanitarian operation at an airbase in Ilopango, El Salvador.  That
"humanitarian" air base was used to run guns, ammunitions, and
supplies to the fascist Contra mercenaries attacking the Nicaraguan
Revolution.  Walker was also the U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador from
1988 to 1992 when military death squads murdered thousands of
progressive workers, peasants, and young people...

While the U.S. media accepted Walker's massacre story and used it to
create the war hysteria that permitted the current NATO bombing war,
many of the European press challenged Walker's and the KLA's account.
The French newspapers Le Monde, Le Figario, and Liberation all ran
stories pointing out major inconsistencies in the "massacre" report.
There was considerable evidence, in fact, that the corpses were not
civilians at all, but KLA soldiers who, after having been killed in a
battle, had been dressed in civilian garb and placed in the mosque."

Source: Brian Becker, Co-Director, International Action Center
"Is the U.S./NATO leadership planning a ground war?"
http://www.iacenter.org  email: iacenter@iacenter.org

I've seen the pictures from Racak and other sites that used
to be trumpeted as "proof" of genocide. All the victims
are military-aged men and their bodies have clearly been
moved and positioned for the camera. They were definitely not
shot where they lay and there is no way, based on the pictures
alone, or Mr. Walker's good word, to know who these people
were or the circumstances under which they died.

Why haven't American news readers being apprised of these
basic realities?

The answer is simple: because rather than inform
them, the US news media has choosen - as it has
in every other manufactured war - to participate in a
choreograph of misrepresention designed to draw Americans,
whose families provide the sons and whose taxpayers provide
the funds, into throwing their emotional support behind a war
they would never approve of if they knew the facts. A war that
has the potential to destabilize the world, bankrupt US
society, and spill oceans of innocent blood before all
its reverberations reach their end...

Agim Ceku, Lewis MacKenzie, William Walker, and others
like them can count on press "discretion" when then need
it and a platform when they want it.

The results of a study recently conducted by
FAIR on press coverage of the NATO bombing bear
repeating:

"Examining the transcripts of two influential (US) TV
programs, ABC's "Nightline" and the PBS "NewsHour With
Jim Lehrer," FAIR found that:

* Only 8 percent of the 291 sources were critics of NATO's
bombing.

* Forty-five percent of sources were current or former U.S.
government and military officials, NATO representatives or NATO
troops.

* On "Nightline," the study found, no U.S. sources other
than Serbian-Americans were given air time to
voice opposition."

Source: http://www.fair.org, cited in an article by
Norman Solomon.

====================================================================
Analysis of the US-led NATO Assault on Yugoslavia:
http://www.brasscheck.com/yugoslavia

Subscribe: mailto:yugonews@brasscheck.com  Subject: Yugo News

"...if only the press were to do its duty, or but a tenth of
its duty, this hellish system could not go on."
- William Cobbett, Rural Rides, 1830

>>> March on Washington, DC - June 5th. See: http://www.iacenter.org
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