From the Archive: President Bill Clinton’s bombardment of Serbia in 1999 marked a grim turn in the practice of “information warfare,” with a lethal NATO attack targeting a Serb TV station which criticized the war, observed war correspondent Don North.
By Don North (Originally published on May 4, 1999)
On April 23, 1999, at 2:06 a.m. Belgrade time, as NATO was preparing for its 50th anniversary celebration in Washington D.C., two cruise missiles struck the Radio Televizija Srbija (SRT) headquarters in Belgrade.
About 150 civilian journalists, producers, technicians and janitors were working the nightshift when the missiles hit with what NATO called “surgical precision.”
President Bill Clinton
The building’s four stories collapsed to the ground, sandwiching offices, television equipment, transmitters and people into a pile of smoldering rubble only 15 feet high.
TV screens throughout Serbia went blank in the middle of a Houston, Texas, TV station’s interview with Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. Firemen rushed to the scene to remove the injured. One technician trapped by tons of concrete could be extracted only by the amputation of both legs.
As the smoke and dust settled, at least 16 people were confirmed dead, another 19 injured and others were missing and feared buried in the rubble. But NATO’s premeditated attack on a civilian media target did little to drive SRT off the air.
By daylight, alternate transmitters had been activated and Serb TV was back on the air again. That morning, a blond woman was reading the morning news and calmly placed the devastation of SRT several minutes down the lineup of top news stories.
Few foreign journalists had believed that NATO actually would bomb SRT. But the Serbs did — and were prepared.
The Clinton administration and NATO made no apologies for the civilian dead. “Serb TV is as much a part of Milosevic’s murder machine as his military,” said Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon. “The media is one of the pillars of Milosevic’s power machine. It is right up there with security forces and the military.”
A Quiet Acceptance
The reaction to the SRT bombing was muted within many U.S. news organizations. Elsewhere, however, journalists and humanitarian organizations, including Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders, condemned the strike against SRT.
Ruins of the Serb TV network destroyed by NATO bombing on April 23, 1999. (Photo via Wikipedia)
Notable was a terse letter to NATO’s Secretary General Javier Solana from the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists: “NATO’s decision to target civilian broadcast facilities not only increases the danger for reporters now working in Yugoslavia but permanently jeopardizes all journalists as noncombatants in international conflicts as provided for in the Geneva Conventions. It represents an apparent change in NATO policy only days after your spokesman Jamie Shea offered assurances that civilian targets would be avoided.”
From Belgrade, the Association of Independent Electronic Media in Yugoslavia, a leading voice of Serbian anti-Milosevic sentiment, also condemned the attack. “History has shown that no form of repression, particularly the organized and premeditated murder of journalists, can prevent the flow of information, nor can it prevent the public from choosing its own sources of information,” the groups said.
The New York Times quoted a senior Serb journalist saying he thought NATO had crossed an ambiguous moral line: “The people who were there were just doing their jobs. They have no influence on the content or on Milosevic. I hate Serb television. [But] we can differentiate between big lies and little ones.” [NYT, April 24, 1999]
Yugoslav officials said NATO was trying to destroy the free marketplace of ideas and insure that just one side’s “propaganda” could be disseminated.
Offending NATO
There is no doubt that SRT was a propaganda organ for Milosevic and his regime. Since the NATO bombing campaign began on March 24, 1999, SRT also had deeply offended NATO’s sensibilities with its graphics.
NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium.
The NATO symbol was regularly shown turning into a Nazi swastika and Madeleine Albright grew Dracula teeth in front of burning buildings.
While highlighting the suffering from NATO air attacks, SRT ignored the tens of thousands of Albanian refugees fleeing Kosovo with their tales of rape and execution. SRT repeatedly showed video clips of old scenes: Milosevic meeting Serbian church leaders, Russian envoys and the Kosovo Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova.
But the station also broadcast to the world dramatic images of destruction caused by the NATO bombing and gave credible estimates of civilian casualties. SRT scooped the world press when it disclosed that a NATO aircraft had killed scores of Kosovar refugees in a bombing attack.
After SRT broadcast the scenes of the civilian carnage, NATO flip-flopped through the next 24-hour news cycle. NATO’s first response was: “We didn’t do it, the Serbs did it.” That changed to “we did bomb the column, but the Serbs killed the refugees.” Finally, NATO accepted fault and apologized.
Still, NATO’s glib cockney spokesman, Jamie Shea, pushed the edges of Orwellian doublespeak when he declared that the pilot had “dropped his bombs in good faith.”
Later, NATO played an audio-tape supposedly of the pilot in question. But it turned out that the recorded pilot was involved in a completely different operation. The real tape was withheld.
The SRT bombing, however, was no mistake. Internally, NATO had been debating for weeks whether or not to destroy Serb television.
Shea even suggested that the network might be spared if it would begin broadcasting at least six hours of Western news reports reflecting NATO’s views. Ironically, SRT had been broadcasting many of NATO’s pronouncements, albeit focusing on the misstatements and contradictions.
Still, though the bombing of SRT may have been aimed at the Milosevic propaganda machine, it also set back American and other foreign TV efforts to document the siege of Belgrade. Most of the video broadcast on international TV showing the results of bombing raids was obtained from SRT.
Controlling Information
Even before the SRT attack, NATO’s struggle to control the information flow had riled many leading Western media outlets.
Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic.
On April 9, 1999, editors and executives of seven major U.S. news organizations — including The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN — protested to Defense Secretary William Cohen and urged him to loosen controls on information about the air strikes.
“Detailed information about the allied operation is vital to an informed public discussion of this matter of national interest,” the letter said. “On many days, the state-controlled Yugoslav media has been more specific about NATO targets than the United States or NATO.”
Historically, of course, the U.S. military has always been uncomfortable with American journalists reporting from behind enemy lines. Many senior U.S. officers are veterans of the Vietnam War and believe that American journalists should tailor their reporting to support the cause.
In that vein, Harrison Salisbury, the famous war correspondent for The New York Times was hailed for his reporting from the siege of Leningrad in World War II, when the Soviet Union was allied with the United States.
But when Salisbury became the first correspondent from a major U.S. newspaper to report from Hanoi during the Vietnam War, he was denounced as disloyal. In December 1966, Salisbury wrote, “Whatever the explanation, one can see United States planes are dropping an enormous weight of explosives on purely civilian targets.” His work earned him the nickname “Ho Chi Salisbury” at the Pentagon.
CNN’s Peter Arnett smuggled a satellite phone into Baghdad and reported live during the Persian Gulf War. His stories included moving first-person accounts of civilian targets destroyed by U.S. air attacks. In Washington, Arnett was subjected to insults as traitorous “Baghdad Pete.”
Sparing Americans
Some similar tensions — though not as severe — have surfaced in the current war for Kosovo. In the case of the SRT attack, however, U.S. officials were careful not to worsen relations with the American news media by accidentally killing U.S. correspondents.
In mid-April, about a week before the cruise missiles were launched, the White House reportedly tipped off the CNN brass about the impending attack of SRT headquarters. CNN bosses called Belgrade and ordered CNN’s people out of the SRT building where they had been preparing TV reports for a month.
Other reporters, however, did not get the word, or chose not to believe it. The London Independent’s Robert Fisk, an intrepid Western reporter, said he was invited to the doomed building for coffee and orange juice by Goran Matic, a Serb government official. Matic was convinced that the TV studios were next on NATO’s target list.
“Yet, oddly, we didn’t take him seriously,” Fisk reported. “Even when the air raid siren sounded, I stayed for another coffee. … Surely NATO wouldn’t waste its bombs on this tiresome station with its third-rate propaganda and old movies, let alone kill its staff. Once you kill people because you don’t like what they say, you change the rules of war.”
The content of SRT broadcasts also was more complicated than NATO has asserted.
Besides serving as a Serb government voice, SRT was a center of cultural identity for the Serb nation. With the destruction of SRT headquarters, thousands of tapes and films have now been crushed to rubble, videos that once helped tell the Serbs and their children who they are — and provide some small comfort in their difficult lives.
Among the tapes smashed and burned was a program that I produced called “Servus, Adieu, Shalom,” a documentary tracing the long history of Viennese Jews, their persecution, their suffering in the Holocaust and their community’s resurgence in recent years.
The film was my donation to the UNESCO video bank. It was translated into the Serb language and distributed by UNESCO to SRT and other Balkan TV stations strapped for funds to buy quality programs.
My tape was being used in Belgrade as part of international efforts to encourage the region’s ethnic groups to overcome their historic hatreds.
There is also the question whether NATO’s briefings, aired live by CNN and other Western all-news networks, constitute propaganda as dubious as what appeared on SRT. On April 20, 1999, for instance, Shea reported that ethnic Albanian boys were forced to give blood for Serb casualties.
Though highly inflammatory, the allegation was made without attribution and without verifiable details. On April 22, Serbian Health Minister Leposava Milicevic denied Shea’s report, and Shea did not respond.
The mix of NATO propaganda and the selection of Serb targets also may represent a broader psychological warfare campaign against the Serb people. Gen. Wesley Clark, the American NATO commander, announced that NATO was seeking targets to “see to it that the morale of the people in Serbia continues to erode.”
Since the April 23 bombing, SRT transmissions have jumped from one site to another in hopes of avoiding the next bombs. Now, high on NATO’s target list is Politico Television, another outlet of Milosevic’s power structure in downtown Belgrade.
The London Guardian interviewed a 29-year-old tape editor, Vena Ducic, who was working the nightshift there along with about 100 other employees. “I am terrified,” Ducic said. “But I have two boys, so if I give up my job what do we do tomorrow?”
Beyond breaking the Serbs’ will, however, the attack on SRT was a blow to the world’s ability to view unfettered information, even when it is interspersed with propaganda.
Paul Scott Mowrer, a correspondent for the Chicago Daily News during World War I, understood the need for a maximum flow of news at a time when human lives are in the balance. He wrote: “In this nation of ours, the final political decisions rest with the people. And the people, so that they may make up their minds, must be given the facts, even in time of war, or perhaps, especially in time of war.”
Don North is a veteran war correspondent who covered the Vietnam War and many other conflicts around the world. He is the author of a new book, Inappropriate Conduct, the story of a World War II correspondent whose career was crushed by the intrigue he uncovered.
As the US Open tennis tournament begins on Monday, now is perhaps an opportune moment to remember this episode from the childhood of World #1 Novak Djokovic: https://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/tennis-busted-racquet/novak-djokovic-recounts-terror-worst-night-life-during-205950671–ten.html
Djokovic never shows the least outward sign of resentment or bitterness towards America, but he would not be human if it did not burn inside him.
“Since the NATO bombing campaign began on March 24, 1999, SRT also had deeply offended NATO’s sensibilities with its graphics”.
What a breathtaking sentence! I do hope it was written ironically. I seem to recall that, during the Luftwaffe’s Blitz against London and other British cities, British media also took every opportunity to lampoon Hitler and the Nazis.
That one sentence really sums up the sublime impudence and entitlement of the American ruling class. They bombed Serbia, killing thousands in a classic example of unprovoked aggressive war – “the supreme international crime” according to their own precious Nuremberg Tribunal – and their sensibilities were hurt?
One of these days they will bite off more than they can chew, and then a lot more than their sensibilities will be hurt.
Thanks a lot for helping to expose this inexcusable crime.
I have an interesting parallel to point out. You may recall how Bush and Blair later discussed the possibility of bombing the Baghdad office of Al Jazeera during the occupation of Iraq: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Jazeera_bombing_memo.
Whilst Bush II was not a member of the team which decided to bomb Serbian TV, Blair was. In other words, the muted reaction of the Western MSM to this blatant war crime, encouraged the Western “leaders” to continue targeting the enemy’s journalists with impunity, just by declaring the enemy’s media to be the “propaganda organs” (what kind of organs are then the Western MSM?). In several other war zones, US and Britain did bomb offices of media they did not control.
This is why the Western MSM now have reporters sitting at home whilst reporting from war zones, or standing in front of blue screens with bullets zooming around their heads. This is because they would also be treated as “propaganda organs” if they were truly in a war zone.
Kiza,
Well done and thanks for not hiding your good sense of humor.
Will these network studio war correspondents have to use the “behind their back” screens much like weather reporters who never have to go outside.
That might make a great satire: war correspondents who never visit war zones and weather correspondents who only need to look pretty (or handsome) and don’t need to know the slightest bullshit about what makes the weather or how it feels (as opposed to talking about how it feels without ever feeling it–the cold, the rainy, the damp, the 115F heat…).
I clearly had to use the term “bullshit” with its analytically clarified meaning. Professor Frankfurt would be proud of me, as I am impressed by his thorough analysis of bullshit.
The term “propaganda organs” is indeed a strange one. The muted reaction of the Western MSM to this blatant war crime of killing foreign journalists, encouraged the Western “leaders” to continue targeting the enemy’s journalists with impunity, just by declaring the enemy’s media to be the “propaganda organs” and so “fair game.” Does that mean if the Russians train seals to carry misinformation or even information they too are fair game?
Best wishes,
Bart
Dear war correspondent Don North,
We used to have war correspondents that were independent of Pentagon control. They became a politically endangered species as the Vietnam War came crashing down on the president et al.
It was clear that our war correspondents had shown Americans the realities and the horrors of this war that would eventually create well over 250,000 grieving American parents, wives, children, good friends and community acquaintances of the American dead. At the time I was supporting the war but then a little research exposed the then BIG LIE, that the war was between those who were defending South Vietnam and the “Communist invaders” from the north. It turns out that a careful reading of a pamphlet by Undersecretary of State, Alexis B. Johnston III, make it clear that the invaders were south Vietnamese who went north to be trained and given weapons and ammunition and that they were, by and large, not Communists.
Once I knew, I became an anti-Vietnam war leader on our campus and was the first “professor” who cancelled classes. How can you teach when military with live ammunition was patrolling our campus?
The Vietnam Was was also the last time we citizens were told the truth about one of our wars.
American “leaders” became hostile to the truth getting back to the citizens.
Your article is fascinating. I’m quoting just to insure a few bits get through to the loyal commentators who will eventually show up here. You wrote:
“Historically, of course, the U.S. military has always been uncomfortable with American journalists reporting from behind enemy lines. Many senior U.S. officers are veterans of the Vietnam War and believe that American journalists should tailor their reporting to support the cause.
“In that vein, Harrison Salisbury, the famous war correspondent for The New York Times was hailed for his reporting from the siege of Leningrad in World War II, when the Soviet Union was allied with the United States.
“But when Salisbury became the first correspondent from a major U.S. newspaper to report from Hanoi during the Vietnam War, he was denounced as disloyal. In December 1966, Salisbury wrote, “Whatever the explanation, one can see United States planes are dropping an enormous weight of explosives on purely civilian targets.” His work earned him the nickname “Ho Chi Salisbury” at the Pentagon.
“CNN’s Peter Arnett smuggled a satellite phone into Baghdad and reported live during the Persian Gulf War. His stories included moving first-person accounts of civilian targets destroyed by U.S. air attacks. In Washington, Arnett was subjected to insults as traitorous “Baghdad Pete”…..
“In mid-April, about a week before the cruise missiles were launched [on SRT, the most important TV station in Serbia], the White House reportedly tipped off the CNN brass about the impending attack of SRT headquarters…. and ordered CNN’s people out of the SRT building where they had been preparing TV reports for a month.
“Other reporters, however, did not get the word, or chose not to believe it. The London Independent’s Robert Fisk, an intrepid [FIRST CLASS] Western reporter, said he was invited to the doomed building for coffee and orange juice by Goran Matic, a Serb government official. Matic was convinced that the TV studios were next on NATO’s target list.
“Yet, oddly, we didn’t take him seriously,” Fisk reported. “Even when the air raid siren sounded, I stayed for another coffee. … Surely NATO wouldn’t waste its bombs on this tiresome station with its third-rate propaganda and old movies, let alone kill its staff. Once you kill people because you don’t like what they say, you change the rules of war”….
“SRT was a center of cultural identity for the Serb nation. With the destruction of SRT headquarters, thousands of tapes and films have now been crushed to rubble, videos that once helped tell the Serbs and their children who they are — and provide some small comfort in their difficult lives.
“Among the tapes smashed and burned was a program that I produced called “Servus, Adieu, Shalom,” a documentary tracing the long history of Viennese Jews, their persecution, their suffering in the Holocaust and their community’s resurgence in recent years…. My tape was being used in Belgrade as part of international efforts to encourage the region’s ethnic groups to overcome their historic hatreds.
“There is also the question whether NATO’s briefings, aired live by CNN and other Western all-news networks, constitute propaganda as dubious as what appeared on SRT. On April 20, 1999, for instance, Shea reported that ethnic Albanian boys were forced to give blood for Serb casualties…. On April 22, Serbian Health Minister Leposava Milicevic denied Shea’s report, and Shea did not respond.
“The mix of NATO propaganda and the selection of Serb targets also may represent a broader psychological warfare campaign against the Serb people. Gen. Wesley Clark, the American NATO commander, announced that NATO was seeking targets to “see to it that the morale of the people in Serbia continues to erode.”
“Since the April 23 bombing, SRT transmissions have jumped from one site to another in hopes of avoiding the next bombs. Now, high on NATO’s target list is Politico Television, another outlet of Milosevic’s power structure in downtown Belgrade.
“The London Guardian interviewed a 29-year-old tape editor, Vena Ducic….. “I am terrified,” Ducic said. “But I have two boys, so if I give up my job what do we do tomorrow?”
“Beyond breaking the Serbs’ will, however, the attack on SRT was a blow to the world’s ability to view unfettered information, even when it is interspersed with propaganda.
“Paul Scott Mowrer, a correspondent for the Chicago Daily News during World War I, understood the need for a maximum flow of news at a time when human lives are in the balance. He wrote: “In this nation of ours, the final political decisions rest with the people. And the people, so that they may make up their minds, must be given the facts, even in time of war, or perhaps, especially in time of war.”
——————————————————————-
The same old stuff that we’ve gotten used to after indignity of those hanging from the last US helicopters fled the fall of Saigon.
There’s nothing I believe from US media. Even news about our domestic presidential race is a mix of bullshit* and lies, especially if the “news” was about Bernie Sander or is about Donald Trump, each of whom challenge the Establishment, which currently includes the CIA and the Pentagon. The Clinton Dynasty is also a part of the Establishment and the presstitutes from the Washington Post and the New York Times run protection protection for them.
There are ways of getting to what is likely the truth, but it is a very twisty path that needs confirmation step by step.
Thanks for the great article. Unfortunately things aren’t getting any better.
Cordially,
Bart Gruzalski, Professor Emeritus, Northeastern University, Boston
I had put an asterisk next to the word “bullshit” for a reason but I ran out of time to say why.
One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern.
We have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves. Take your hand at it and try to define it. Is it lying? More? Less?
And we lack a conscientiously developed appreciation of what it means to us, claims the late Professor Harry G. Frankfurt, who is an American philosopher. He is professor emeritus of philosophy at Princeton University, where he taught from 1990 until 2002, and previously taught at Yale University, Rockefeller University, and Ohio State University
Frankfurt, one of the English world’s most influential moral philosophers, offers a clear analysis and understanding of bullshit. With his characteristic combination of philosophical acuity, psychological insight, and wry humor, Frankfurt proceeds by exploring how bullshit and the related concept of humbug are distinct from lying. He argues that bullshitters misrepresent themselves to their audience not as liars do, that is, by deliberately making false claims about what is true. In fact, bullshit need not be untrue at all.
Rather, bullshitters seek to convey a certain impression of themselves without being concerned about whether anything at all is true. They quietly change the rules governing their end of the conversation so that claims about truth and falsity are irrelevant. Frankfurt concludes that although bullshit can take many innocent forms, excessive indulgence in it can eventually undermine the practitioner’s capacity to tell the truth in a way that lying does not. Liars at least acknowledge that it matters what is true. By virtue of this, Frankfurt writes, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.
Professor Harry Frankfurt has come up with a compact winner with this provocatively titled tome, all of eighty pages, about a subject around which we all seem to have a vast amount of experience. As a professional philosopher who has earned emeritus status at Princeton University, he surely must be a master at this topic and sets about to prove it by discussing it with irony, broad humor and a cheekiness that ultimately brings a certain seriousness to his work.
He is especially effective in portraying the mental improvisation we go through when asked unexpected questions that require thoughtfulness. Whether it is within the context of a political opinion or literary analysis, the very act he discusses actually provides great motivation for someone to learn more about what he or she is saying.
I can’t deny it. Part of the book’s charm is the puerile (yes, the kind of pleasure Trump gets from poking pundits in the eye when they question his sanity when he asks whether he can use nuclear weapons in Europe–if they didn’t already know that he knew the answer, they are clearly in the wrong business.
How can we not enjoy reading a classic academic work punctuated at regular intervals by the word “bullshit.” More pertinent is Frankfurt’s focus on intentions–the practice of bullshit, rather than its end result. Bullshitting, as he notes, is not exactly lying, and bullshit remains bullshit whether it’s true or false. The difference lies in the bullshitter’s complete disregard for whether what he’s saying corresponds to facts in the physical world: he “does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.”
This may sound all too familiar to those of use who still live in the “reality-based community” and must deal with a world convulsed by those who do not. But Frankfurt leaves such political implications to his readers.
Instead, he points to one source of bullshit’s unprecedented expansion in recent years, the postmodern skepticism of objective truth in favor of sincerity, or as he defines it, staying true to subjective experience. But what makes us think that anything in our nature is more stable or inherent than what lies outside it? Thus, Frankfurt concludes, with an observation as tiny and perfect as the rest of this exquisite book, “sincerity itself is bullshit.”
Frankfurt’s book, ON BULLSHIP, is available on prime for $5.38.
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You’ll certainly enjoy it, it’s a provocative and reflective on a topic that merits more work… and great fun.
Enjoy it (and it you are a politician it may help you hone your “craft”).
Meanwhile, who’s the biggest bullshitter: Clinton or Trump? Hands down it’s Clinton. Remember her tale of landing under fire in Bosnia? Such tales should match the ABC co
Wishing you well,
Bart
Thank you again today Robert Parry and Consortium News for this reporting. I’m sending another donation today because l can’t stand to be lied to by my government. I have been reading about Harrison Salisbury in the last several months and his is the kind of journalism we need and Must have if we’re to have a vibrant and functional US Democracy… Thank You CN.
Link to Harrison Salisbury: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Salisbury
Thank you for exposing NATO crimes.