NATO’s war on Serbia in 1999 was the template for other “humanitarian” wars – in Iraq, Libya and now Syria – but it wasn’t “news” when the Serbian leader was cleared, notes John Pilger.
By John Pilger
The exoneration of a man accused of the worst of crimes, genocide, made no headlines. Neither the BBC nor CNN covered it. The Guardian allowed a brief commentary. Such a rare official admission was buried or suppressed, understandably. It would explain too much about how the rulers of the world rule.
Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague has quietly cleared the late Serbian president, Slobodan Milosevic, of war crimes committed during the 1992-95 Bosnian war, including the massacre at Srebrenica.
Far from conspiring with the convicted Bosnian-Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, Milosevic actually “condemned ethnic cleansing,” opposed Karadzic and tried to stop the war that dismembered Yugoslavia. Buried near the end of a 2,590-page judgment on Karadzic last February, this truth further demolishes the propaganda that justified NATO’s illegal onslaught on Serbia in 1999.
Milosevic died of a heart attack in 2006, alone in his cell in The Hague, during what amounted to a bogus trial by an American-invented “international tribunal.” Denied heart surgery that might have saved his life, his condition worsened and was monitored and kept secret by U.S. officials, as WikiLeaks has since revealed.
Milosevic was the victim of war propaganda that today runs like a torrent across our screens and newspapers and beckons great danger for us all. He was the prototype demon, vilified by the Western media as the “butcher of the Balkans” who was responsible for “genocide,” especially in the secessionist Yugoslav province of Kosovo. Prime Minister Tony Blair said so, invoked the Holocaust and demanded action against “this new Hitler.”
Exaggerating the Death Toll
David Scheffer, the U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes, declared that as many as “225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59” may have been murdered by Milocevic’s forces.
President Bill Clinton
This was the justification for NATO’s bombing, led by Bill Clinton and Blair, that killed hundreds of civilians in hospitals, schools, churches, parks and television studios and destroyed Serbia’s economic infrastructure.
It was blatantly ideological; at a notorious “peace conference” in Rambouillet in France, Milosevic was confronted by Madeleine Albright, the U.S. Secretary of State, who was to achieve infamy with her remark that the deaths of half a million Iraqi children were “worth it.”
Albright delivered an “offer” to Milosevic that no national leader could accept. Unless he agreed to the foreign military occupation of his country, with the occupying forces “outside the legal process,” and to the imposition of a neo-liberal “free market,” Serbia would be bombed.
This was contained in an “Appendix B,” which the media failed to read or suppressed. The aim was to crush Europe’s last independent “socialist” state.
Once NATO began bombing, there was a stampede of Kosovar refugees “fleeing a holocaust.” When it was over, international police teams descended on Kosovo to exhume the victims.
The FBI failed to find a single mass grave and went home. The Spanish forensic team did the same, its leader angrily denouncing “a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines.”
The final count of the dead in Kosovo was 2,788. This included combatants on both sides and Serbs and Roma murdered by the pro-NATO Kosovo Liberation Front. There was no genocide. The NATO attack was both a fraud and a war crime.
All but a fraction of America’s vaunted “precision guided” missiles hit not military but civilian targets, including the news studios of Radio Television Serbia in Belgrade. Sixteen people were killed, including cameramen, producers and a make-up artist. Blair described the dead, profanely, as part of Serbia’s “command and control.”
In 2008, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, Carla Del Ponte, revealed that she had been pressured not to investigate NATO’s crimes.
A Model for More Wars
This was the model for Washington’s subsequent invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and, by stealth, Syria. All qualify as “paramount crimes” under the Nuremberg standard; all depended on media propaganda.
At the start of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, President George W. Bush ordered the U.S. military to conduct a devastating aerial assault on Baghdad, known as “shock and awe.”
While tabloid journalism played its traditional part, it was serious, credible, often liberal journalism that was the most effective – the evangelical promotion of Blair and his wars by the Guardian, the incessant lies about Saddam Hussein’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction in the Observer and the New York Times, and the unerring drumbeat of government propaganda by the BBC in the silence of its omissions.
At the height of the bombing, the BBC’s Kirsty Wark interviewed General Wesley Clark, the NATO commander. The Serbian city of Nis had just been sprayed with American cluster bombs, killing women, old people and children in an open market and a hospital. Wark asked not a single question about this, or about any other civilian deaths.
Others were more brazen. In February 2003, the day after Blair and Bush had set fire to Iraq, the BBC’s political editor, Andrew Marr, stood in Downing Street and made what amounted to a victory speech. He excitedly told his viewers that Blair had “said they would be able to take Baghdad without a bloodbath, and that in the end the Iraqis would be celebrating. And on both of those points he has been proved conclusively right.”
Today, with a million dead and a society in ruins, Marr’s BBC interviews are recommended by the U.S. Embassy in London.
Marr’s colleagues lined up to pronounce Blair “vindicated.” The BBC’s Washington correspondent, Matt Frei, said, “There’s no doubt that the desire to bring good, to bring American values to the rest of the world, and especially to the Middle East … is now increasingly tied up with military power.”
Obeisance to Power
This obeisance to the United States and its collaborators as a benign force “bringing good” runs deep in Western establishment journalism. It ensures that the present-day catastrophe in Syria is blamed exclusively on Bashar al-Assad, whom the West and Israel have long conspired to overthrow, not for any humanitarian concerns, but to consolidate Israel’s aggressive power in the region.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
The jihadist forces unleashed and armed by the U.S., Britain, France, Turkey and their “coalition” proxies serve this end. It is they who dispense the propaganda and videos that becomes news in the U.S. and Europe, and provide access to journalists and guarantee a one-sided “coverage” of Syria.
The city of Aleppo is in the news. Most readers and viewers will be unaware that the majority of the population of Aleppo lives in the government-controlled western part of the city. That they suffer daily artillery bombardment from Western-sponsored Al Qaeda is not news. On 21 July, French and American bombers attacked a government village in Aleppo province, killing up to 125 civilians. This was reported on page 22 of the Guardian; there were no photographs.
Having created and underwritten jihadism in Afghanistan in the 1980s as Operation Cyclone – a weapon to destroy the Soviet Union – the U.S. is doing something similar in Syria. Like the Afghan Mujahedeen, the Syrian “rebels” are America’s and Britain’s foot soldiers. Many fight for Al Qaeda and its variants; some, like the Nusra Front, have rebranded themselves to comply with American sensitivities over 9/11. The CIA runs them, with difficulty, as it runs jihadists all over the world.
The immediate aim is to destroy the government in Damascus, which, according to the most credible poll (YouGov Siraj), the majority of Syrians support, or at least look to for protection, regardless of the barbarism in its shadows. The long-term aim is to deny Russia a key Middle Eastern ally as part of a NATO war of attrition against the Russian Federation that eventually destroys it.
Nuclear Risk
The nuclear risk is obvious, though suppressed by the media across “the free world”. The editorial writers of the Washington Post, having promoted the fiction of WMD in Iraq, demand that Obama attack Syria. Hillary Clinton, who publicly rejoiced at her executioner’s role during the destruction of Libya, has repeatedly indicated that, as president, she will “go further” than Obama.
Hillary Clinton speaking at a rally in Phoenix, Arizona, March 21, 2016. (Photo by Gage Skidmore)
Gareth Porter, a journalist reporting from Washington, recently revealed the names of those likely to make up a Clinton cabinet who plan an attack on Syria. All have belligerent Cold War histories; the former CIA director, Leon Panetta, says that “the next president is gonna have to consider adding additional special forces on the ground.”
What is most remarkable about the war propaganda now in flood tide is its patent absurdity and familiarity. I have been looking through archive film from Washington in the 1950s when diplomats, civil servants and journalists were witch-hunted and ruined by Sen. Joe McCarthy for challenging the lies and paranoia about the Soviet Union and China. Like a resurgent tumor, the anti-Russia cult has returned.
In Britain, the Guardian’s Luke Harding leads his newspaper’s Russia-haters in a stream of journalistic parodies that assign to Vladimir Putin every earthly iniquity. When the Panama Papers leak was published, the front page said Putin, and there was a picture of Putin; never mind that Putin was not mentioned anywhere in the leaks.
Like Milosevic, Putin is Demon Number One. It was Putin who shot down a Malaysian airliner over Ukraine. Headline: “As far as I’m concerned, Putin killed my son.” No evidence required.
It was Putin who was responsible for Washington’s documented (and paid for) overthrow of the elected government in Kiev in 2014. The subsequent terror campaign by fascist militias against the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine was the result of Putin’s “aggression.” Preventing Crimea from becoming a NATO missile base and protecting the mostly Russian population who had voted in a referendum to rejoin Russia – from which Crimea had been annexed – were more examples of Putin’s “aggression”.
A Warmongering Media
Smear by media inevitably becomes war by media. If war with Russia breaks out, by design or by accident, journalists will bear much of the responsibility.
Economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. (Photo credit: David Shankbone)
In the U.S., the anti-Russia campaign has been elevated to virtual reality. The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, an economist with a Nobel Prize, has called Donald Trump the “Siberian Candidate” because Trump is Putin’s man, he says.
Trump had dared to suggest, in a rare lucid moment, that war with Russia might be a bad idea. In fact, he has gone further and removed American arms shipments to Ukraine from the Republican platform. “Wouldn’t it be great if we got along with Russia,” he said.
This is why America’s warmongering liberal establishment hates him. Trump’s racism and ranting demagoguery have nothing to do with it. Bill and Hillary Clinton’s record of racism and extremism can out-trump Trump’s any day. (This week is the 20th anniversary of the Clinton welfare “reform” that launched a war on African-Americans). As for Obama: while American police gun down his fellow African-Americans the great hope in the White House has done nothing to protect them, nothing to relieve their impoverishment, while running four rapacious wars and an assassination campaign without precedent.
The CIA has demanded Trump is not elected. Pentagon generals have demanded he is not elected. The pro-war New York Times – taking a breather from its relentless low-rent Putin smears – demands that he is not elected. Something is up.
These tribunes of “perpetual war” are terrified that the multi-billion-dollar business of war by which the United States maintains its dominance will be undermined if Trump does a deal with Putin, then with China’s Xi Jinping. Their panic at the possibility of the world’s great power talking peace – however unlikely – would be the blackest farce were the issues not so dire.
“Trump would have loved Stalin!” bellowed Vice-President Joe Biden at a rally for Hillary Clinton. With Clinton nodding, he shouted, “We never bow. We never bend. We never kneel. We never yield. We own the finish line. That’s who we are. We are America!”
Britain’s War Party
In Britain, Jeremy Corbyn has also excited hysteria from the war-makers in the Labour Party and from a media devoted to trashing him. Lord West, a former admiral and Labour minister, put it well. Corbyn was taking an “outrageous” anti-war position “because it gets the unthinking masses to vote for him.”
British Prime Minister Tony Blair and U.S. President George W. Bush shake hands after a joint White House press conference on Nov. 12, 2004. (White House photo)
In a debate with leadership challenger Owen Smith, Corbyn was asked by the moderator: “How would you act on a violation by Vladimir Putin of a fellow NATO state?”
Corbyn replied: “You would want to avoid that happening in the first place. You would build up a good dialogue with Russia … We would try to introduce a de-militarization of the borders between Russia, the Ukraine and the other countries on the border between Russia and Eastern Europe. What we cannot allow is a series of calamitous build-ups of troops on both sides which can only lead to great danger.”
Pressed to say if he would authorize war against Russia “if you had to,” Corbyn replied: “I don’t wish to go to war – what I want to do is achieve a world that we don’t need to go to war.”
The line of questioning owes much to the rise of Britain’s liberal war-makers. The Labour Party and the media have long offered them career opportunities.
For a while the moral tsunami of the great crime of Iraq left them floundering, their inversions of the truth a temporary embarrassment. Regardless of Chilcot and the mountain of incriminating facts, Blair remains their inspiration, because he was a “winner.”
Dissenting journalism and scholarship have since been systematically banished or appropriated, and democratic ideas emptied and refilled with “identity politics” that confuse gender with feminism and public angst with liberation and willfully ignore the state violence and weapons profiteering that destroys countless lives in faraway places, like Yemen and Syria, and beckon nuclear war in Europe and across the world.
The stirring of people of all ages around the spectacular rise of Jeremy Corbyn counters this to some extent. His life has been spent illuminating the horror of war. The problem for Corbyn and his supporters is the Labour Party.
In America, the problem for the thousands of followers of Bernie Sanders was the Democratic Party, not to mention their ultimate betrayal by their great white hope.
In the U.S., home of the great civil rights and anti-war movements, it is Black Lives Matter and the likes of Codepink that lay the roots of a modern version.
For only a movement that swells into every street and across borders and does not give up can stop the warmongers. Next year, it will be a century since Wilfred Owen wrote the following. Every journalist should read it and remember it.
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
John Pilger is an Australian-British journalist based in London. Pilger’s Web site is: www.johnpilger.com
“Bill and Hillary Clinton’s record of racism and extremism can out-trump Trump’s any day. (This week is the 20th anniversary of the Clinton welfare ‘reform’ that launched a war on African-Americans).”
The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) is described at Wikipedia as a “cornerstone of the Republican Contract With America.” The main behind-the-scenes proponent of it was the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The Clinton administration’s focus on universal healthcare caused Newt Gingrich to claim that Clinton was stalling on welfare reform and that, if necessary, Congress could pass a welform bill in less than 90 days without Clinton’s cooperation. Eventually, Clinton was forced to cooperate with the Republican-majority Congress and sign the PRWORA bill into law.
The 1999 US/NATO war was fabricated to “Wag the Dog” (a deNiro movie about political marketing and crisis fabrication). It started weeks after the impeachment. It countered the State Dept. description of the KLA days earlier. The Administration wanted to create a diversion in a civil war and ignored real genocide in Rwanda. There are many Clinton apologists that will tell you their James Carville spin, but you need to explore the truth.
Great to see ConsortiumNews picking this up. This is, especially in conjunction with other known lies, probably the best showcase there is for proving how we are manipulated – and that the manipulators are still breezing through, a no-contest.
Best thing about this story is that you can easily debunk the Kosovo genocide claim by looking at official sources.
I can recommend the German docu “It began with a lie”, available on YouTube with English subs.
It would also be interesting to see some work done on the Serbian point of view in all this. For us Westerners it is difficult to realize that not everyone sees the world and history the way we do. Difficult, but necessary if we ever want to overcome the differences that hold us back from taking it to the powers that be.
Kosovo was not a “successionist province” . The KLA was/is an Albanian narco mafia terrorist group financed by BritishCrown/N.A.T.O.
The “Nuremburg standard” is when a military aggressor tortures and murders the leaders of the victimized nation in a show trial having no legal or historic precedent.
Germany never attacked the United States or Great Britain ever. No peace treaty was ever concluded with Germany. To this day Germany remains under the oppression and enslavement of the BritishCrown/N.A.T.O. invaders and has been used continuously as a base for the murder and rape of the European/Asian continent of which Yugoslavia is just another victim.
Excellent article! I remember the lies being told against Milosevik, and I couldn’t quite buy into them. We have so much blood on our hands because of who we elect to high offices! It doesn’t matter if it’s Republicans or Democrats. Both are rotten.
It didn’t start with Yugoslavia. Western fabricated pretexts of slaughter and pillaging is going though centuries. Just Crusaids are enough to mention. Particularly otrocious was the 4th one. We can also remember Opium wars. Good example because of the most disgusting pretext for war ever used. But it shows the western war mongers in the most vivd light. Crimian war ( happened just in between 2 Opium war) was also peculiar in protecting the last country openly involved international slave trade and other peculiarities.
The killing did not start with the bombing of Yugoslavia, but the model of the modern Western military intervention justified by R2P or WMD was established in bombing of Bosnia and bombing of Serbia. It is only the short memory of the general population which enables the complete re-use of identical propaganda memes.
The whole thing operates as the government (which they call – regime) change in a box. If you knew the details, you would be just amazed how sophisticated the regime-change package is by now – the regime change professionals even have conferences to exchange lessons learned and improve effectiveness. There is a division of labor and there are teams for the various phases of destruction and rebuilding of a targeted country. Most of these teams operate in the organisational form of NGO, that is specialised NGOs for the different phases of the process. For example, a lot really a lot of dirty money gets laundered during the rebuilding of the destroyed country, which is handled by a specialised financial NGOs. Most of this infrastructure was first established on the case of Yugoslavia/Serbia and I met a few locals who were employed by those Western NGOs in Bosnia.
Well just before Yugoslavia you had the Iraq war, and they were using the PR firms, like they did against the Serbs, against the Iraqi army and Saddam. They claimed the Iraqi soldiers were bayoneting incubator babies, even though it was a bloodless takeover. They even had some young girl “testify” to congress with some propaganda script.
So what they did to Iraq late 1990 to early 1991 was a precursor to some things done to the Serbs.
They even named the Croatian cleansing of 250,000 Croatian Serbs in a few days in August 1995 as “Operation Storm” which they also used for a U.S. attack on Iraq.
And the U.S. trained the Croats for that attack and the few months earlier attack “Operation Flash” which was a mini Operation Storm.
In the words of chief prosecutor in Hague:
“Some, including the Serbian Foreign Minister Ivica Dacic, contend that earlier this year the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) exonerated Milosevic in its trial verdict convicting former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic.
The arguments are not only misguided, but wrong. The only person on trial in Karadzic’s case was Karadzic himself.”
This PR campaign to clear Serbian criminals from war crimes is the same manipulation that Miloševi? used to manipulate international community and evade action against his hordes of butchers in Croatia.
How much did Serbia pay Pilger to write this stupid and false claim?
The present president of Serbia was one of the Miloševi?’s ministers and was part of the campaign to massacre and ethnicly cleanse Yugoslavia. That is why this campaign to falsely clear Miloševi? and by it himself is gaining strenght. Serbia is again spending more money for PR campaign to make it easy to enter EU without recognizing the past and giving info on still missing prisoners that were sent into Serbia from Croatia and Bosnia.
At the present there is still close to 900 missing persons from Croatia that were taken to Serbia after being captured and they want to enter EU without disclosing where they were burried after being murdered.
Croatia will block Serbia entering EU untill they disclose locations of missing persons bodies. Since many prisoners were given as slaves to locals who then killed them, by stories from survivors) most probably they wont be able to disclose such locations without opening secret police files.
It reads like you are a Croatian with an axe to grind, in which case fact do not matter. Pilger paid by the Serbians? Self-projecting much? It was the Croatian Goverment which hired a PR agency Ruder Finn during massacres of its rebellious Serbian population in Krajina (which was also militarily supported by the US Government):
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Ruder_Finn%27s_work_for_Croatia.
In Croatia they are still digging up graves of Serb CIVILIANS. In these graves there are a significant percentage of women.
Meanwhile in Srebrenica they are all men and usually army men.
Serbs are condemned for killing enemy COMBATANTS during the war while Croat and Muslim militants, armies and police were killing Serbian civilians throughout the wars.
Did anyone check the counterpunch report that Miloševi? was exonorated?
He was not exonorated as Pilger falsely claims. Please read the report.
It was the judgment on Karadži?, not judgment on Miloševi? that says that Miloševi? had no influence on Karadži? and his genocide in Srebrenica.
Obviously it was not from the process on Mioševi? that stated that. Did any prosecutor tried to claim that Miloševi? controlled Karadži? and hence taking away the blame from Karadži? on his trial? That woud be absurd. Yet Pilger claims that it Miloševi? was exonorated and by no less then by Haague tribunal. That is completely false and it takes extraordinary mental gimnastics to recreate such conclusion.
No, you are completely in the wrong. The South Korean judge from this Kangooroo Tribunal in the Hague presided in both the Milosevic Trial and the Karadzic Trial. I read many of the pages relating to the exoneration of Milosevic and although it is not a complete exoneration, it kills the key point of the prosecution that Milosevic was the leader of the so called Joint Criminal Enterprise to Commit Genocide (a new legal term created by the R2P establishment). Essentially, the “judge” exonerated Milosevic for the pure reason to blame Karadzic as the leader of the JCEtCG. Two people could not have been both leaders of the same Enterprise. Milosevic was dead anyway, it was much more important for this South Korean legal monkey to create a strong judgement that would be resistant to any appeal.
Srebrenica was not a genocide. Those who died were virtually all army soldiers and most died BEFORE the fall. They are collecting all their dead from throughout the war and are adding many who were never in Srebrenica during the war. For instance, they add those from Zepa, which was a city south of Srebrenica which, like Srebrenica, was a Muslim army base during the war.
In Srebrenica there was an entire brigade – the 28th Brigade with one of its commanders the bloodthirsty Naser Oric, who was well-known to the UN soldiers there for being a criminal and murderer.
The ONLY reason Srebrenica “fell” is because that army WALKED OUT the night before the fall. The entire army, along with the police and most of the able bodied men left Srebrenica in three large columns, totaling about 15,000 according to UN estimates (and they left from the north where the UN manned their stations the whole time before, during and after the fall). It was only the other areas around Srebrenica that both the UN and the Bosnian army deserted the day before the fall.
The 28th Brigade OUTNUMBERED the Serbian forces in the area and was in the advantageous “defensive position” for any attack. They could have easily repelled the Serb forces, if they were wanted to do that.
Instead it was an ARRANGED fall and Serbs would just drive in unopposed and would get the blame. Serbs walked into a trap.
The army and Muslim men left because they were ORDERED to leave their positions by their own brigade commanders AND the UN.
Those from high up in the Bosnian Muslim government AND the international community would have had to planned and agreed for it to have happened like that.
Srebrenica is huge MEDIA HYPE and used as a weapon against Serbs and for interventionism. They even used it before the Libya bombing 5 years ago.
Does anyone have the URL to Appendix B?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/apr/28/balkans12
I agree that humanitarian war is bogus.
As far as connecting all of this to Trump and the media. He is not against any of what Obama was when he first ran for pres yet unlike Obama, Trump is supposedly getting special bad treatment from the press because of the neocons anger over what he said about Russia?
Trump’s words about Russia and Putin are not in protest to the war on terrorism, otherwise known as humanitarian interventionism, regime change etc. He is for assassination by drone and much worse than the torture we as a nation have already been shamed by. Why would pro war media have a problem with that? Do they hate Obama for his restraint in foreign policy? No that would be Republicans.
Trump is not a victim and definitely not an antiwar candidate or a candidate of restraint in the hawk foreign policy establishment like Obama.
Trump says he wants to work with Russia against Daesh which is what Obama wants too, so why doesn’t the author give Obama given credit for this?
Why does the Republican Congress escape criticism for giving Obama such a bad time about attempting to restrain the hawks?
Why is President Obama only mentioned here as ‘the hawk’ and for what the author thinks he should have done for black people on welfare. That’s just wow.
Just so you know author from down under, you find jails, prisons and welfare offices in states with majority white population too and they are just full of white Christians. Does that make crime in those areas invisible less tragic? Are the victims of those crimes any less harmed or dead? Is this somehow telling about white people and Christianity? Should a black president be less concerned about them?
What could you possibly be suggesting Obama do to exclusively protect African Americans from cops and relieve their impoverishment and why cant it be done for the rest of the ethnic groups in America?
Trump’s approach to Russia is fundamentally different. He expects them to look out for and to protect their own interests. GWB, Obama, Hillary and the foreign policy establishment fly into a rage when Russia dares to assert itself against Pax Americana. They expect Russia to behave like Germany after WW2 and if they don’t then they are revanchist and we have to mobilize our Cold War machinery against them.
Obama doesn’t want to work with Russia, he wants Russia to work for us. Don’t you remember how he sneered that in Syria, Russia is a coalition of two while we have a coalition of 40+ (whatever our fake number is). Obama is still insisting on Assad must go, during the ceasefire we did not work with the Russians and separate the ‘moderate rebels’ from the Jihadists like we promised. Instead we worked feverishly with Turkey to rearm the rebels. We also fired up our Cold War PR machine basically calling them baby killers. How is this working with Russia? We pretty much established a no fly zone over Hasakah after the Kurds attacked Syrian forces there.
With Turkey plunging into Syria, I don’t know who is working with who anymore. I just hope that the Russians are not stupid enough to trust anything that comes out of Kerry or Obama’s mouth.
Chris here is a good article describing Russia’s philosophy in regard to arming strictly for defense. Russia is attempting to use their biggest weakness to be their strongest advantage. no, the Russians aren’t coming….read this;
http://thesaker.is/assessing-the-russian-military-as-an-instrument-of-power/
This is what Liberals and Conservatives vote for. Shouldn’t it be obvious by now?
The lower order individual will always be a tool as long as the ruling class hangs over them.
https://therulingclassobserver.com/2016/08/19/the-individual-among-us-part-ii/
Pictures on the few remaining walls,
The shadows cast by passersby recorded at the flash.
A glimpse in time left no one standing there.
Moonscape acres far as eyes could see.
Ash and dust cremation vaporized the people posed,
Where shadows cast their images remained.
Soles of shoes left prints of carbon black.
Footsteps turned to pictures by a white hot fireball,
Even bones and teeth were turned to steam.
A photo album finish line awaits.
Calculated to explode a radius from ground,
Circumference determined by the yield.
A man once hit his donkey with a stick.
Observers wondered why he didn’t reason with the beast.
The stick would get the beast’s attention first.
Hubris marks the photo finish line.
Hiroshima remembers what the photo album taught.
Hersey wrote about it in a book.
A stick awaits diplomacy eschewed.
Rosenberg and Streicher met a journalistic fate.
The finish line was drawn at Nuremberg.
A stick awaits but hubris reassures.
Inverted truth a negative without a picture frame,
What goes around returns in black and white.
This fact-based revision by a respected, truthful, ethical writer exposes the mendacity, odium, and danger of the Clintons. The entire conceptual basis of neo-con wars is shown up to be a napoleonic desire for absolute power, and further proof of Lord Acton’s adage that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Unfortunately, in an era of nuclear weapons, this does not appear likely to end well for our future.
A very interesting article by Mr. Pilger, in the links below there is more info on NATO, the Corporate Media and others.
http://graysinfo.blogspot.ca/2016/08/are-there-war-criminals-living-in.html
http://graysinfo.blogspot.ca/2016/07/the-war-gangs-and-war-criminals-of-nato.html
http://graysinfo.blogspot.ca/2015/12/are-corporate-media-and-others-covering.html
Great links Stephen, thank you.
Thanks Bob. Consortium News is a an excellent website for great information not seen in corporate media.
Serge Brammertz has a different take on Milosevic and directs readers to the ICTY’s judicial records to read the evidence. His piece can be found at AlJazeera.com
Serge Brammertz is the chief prosecutor of the ad-hoc ICTY tribunal set up to “try” the US’s enemies, paid for mostly by the US govt. and wealthy Arab countries. They don’t hire people there unless you’re a true believer in “the Serbs are always more guilty”, and there are plenty of those, or you’re cynical and ambitious.
It’s funny, so many people like to use the phrase that someone is using a ‘dog whistle’ to condemn the most innocuous of statements. Well I think that it is fair to say that whenever someone says, ‘he is the Hitler of our times’ that they are using a dog whistle and our MSM falls for it every time.
If you want a war just create a narrative where x is Hitler and y is Winston Churchill and anyone who protests the war is a Neville Chamberlain. This is definitely a gem of an article.
(BTW I’ll have to brush up on the facts of the alleged massacre actually being a fraud, that still gets trotted out from time to time as a raison d’etre of Bill Clinton’s mastery over foreign affairs, humanitarian intervention.)
Chris your one sentence mentioning Hitler, Churchill, and Chamberlain game plan says it all in one bite. The saddest part is it successfully works on the American public every time. We are truly the doe eyed dumbed down sheep always being led to slaughter. Our medicine cabinets are filled by big pharma, while we watch disgusting reality television shows, and wait for the start of the new football season. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but does anybody know where the DOD left that missing 6.5 trillion dollars, or does anyone even care.
http://www.dodig.mil/pubs/documents/DODIG-2016-113.pdf
Hi Joe,
I care. That would even be enough for 24 thousand talks by Bill or Hillary. The math assumptions:If Hillary or Bill can “do” a talk in 20 minutes, and we’ll assume that they are working simultaneously (that’s 6 talks per hour at $2500 per talk, even at that frantic pace–that’s a lot of talking. It’s best we taxpayers don’t have to pay them and they don’t have to pay us–although somehow they should, before they purchase prison garb.
Ironic isn’t t? The dog whistles are skewed. Churchill was a real shit in many respects.
http://www.marxist.com/winston-churchill-modern-myth-1.htm
Hello Chris, regrading the bombing of Serbia, all the supposed massacres of civilians in Kosovo were a total invention. In actual fact, more Kosovo Albanian civilians were killed by the US Airforce mistakes (bombing of refugee columns) then by the Serbian police and military in Kosovo. However, the Clinons used at the time by now a well established propaganda technique of turning all of the Abanian terrorist guerrillas killed into civilians. It has become almost funny – when a US enemy kills terrorists, they are declared to be civilians or the moderate opposition (skipping that they carried guns and explosives and were killing and terrorising). When the US drone strikes kill true civilians, they are declared the enemy combatants purely on the basis of their fighting-capable age (unless proven otherwise).
Mr. Van Noy:
Mr. Pilger answers your question in his excellent article. Now what? It’s up to us; the schoolteachers, the unions, the retired, the corner retailer to start talking to each other and let our voices he heard and our disgust seen by other citizens. We can write our representatives of our new organizations as to how we will work to defeat them at the polls unless they start representing us and the general welfare of their constituents. We can discourage our children from joining the military until such time as the military’s mandate is to defend us and not chase dragons to slay while enriching those who disinform us. Start an on-line blog or newsletter!
Its a start!
I agree, thanks Will…
Thank you John Pilger for the article. I read about the exoneration of Slobodan Milosevic in RT and searched a few European newspapers and all I found was silence. Thank you for bringing this much needed information to the attention of more readers as I had wanted to do, but lack the credentials to write such a piece.
Exonerated! I wonder what the Clintons and NATO in particular would say. I was just following orders? That excuse went out in Nüremberg.
Please listen America and read this article to as many people who at least pretend to care about the US methods and falsehoods.
Well, the Clintons really could not care less about all of the war crimes they did, they care about it as much as about almost 150 of their own associates found dead (Arkancide). Bombing of Serbia happened in 1999. But even for the War on Iraq Hillary says that it is ancient history and should be disregarded. Her voters obviously have the memory of chooks. Naturally, those who do not learn from the Clintons’ past are bound to help them repeat it in the future. Every Hillary voter will be a war criminal together with her. She already carries deaths of hundreds of thousands of Libyan and Syrian children on her psychopathic conscience, there is simply no more room to pile up more dead bodies, not to mention the possible extinction of humankind.
Thank you so very much John Pilger and Consorttium News for this wonderful article. Could this be the piece that finally puts the puzzle together and describes our awful foreign policy? I think so. It accurately describes the “continuity” of foreign policy that The Clinton Administration seemed so separate from, and exposes the continuity of wrongdoing in international relations.
Many thanks…. Now what?
From the Roman lyrical poet Horace’s Odes (III.2.13). The line can be translated as: “It is sweet and glorious to die for one’s country.”
Pilger audio link here: http://store.counterpunch.org/john-pilger-episode-47/
Bob, I know this may sound contrived but I actually wrote back in 1999 that the bombing of Serbia is just a model for what I called at the time the pretend-humanitarian intervention, which a few years later got its official name: R2P or Responsibility to Protect. Also later, the US Democratic Party a kind of copyrighted its Humanitarian Military Intervention, because the Republican Party never used exactly the same model – they developed their own model of Disarming the supposed WMD owners. The Democratic Party applied exactly the same model from the bombing of Serbia to the bombing of Lybia. The model consisted of:
1) calling the foreign statesman a Hitler in Western MSM: Hitler Milosevic, Hitler Ghadafi,
2) bombing of civilians to protect some other civilians under imminent genocide,
3) invented mass rapes of women (in Bosnia they claimed that 300,000 Bosnian Muslim women were raped, whilst Bosnian Muslims had only about 1.2M female of all ages; in Libya they added distribution of Viagra pills by Gaddafi to his troops to rape “opposition” women) and so on.
There were also some other propaganda set ups during the bombing of Serbia:
1) a civilian train was hit by a rocket whilst it was crossing a river bridge and the bombing video was sped up 3X to claim that the hit on the train was accidental (about 67 people on the train were killed and scores injured)
2) a purely civilian Serbian main (only) TV station was deliberately targeted, as John Pilger says, under the invented excuse that it was part of the Serbian Command Communicatin and Control military system (CCC)
3) Serbia was openly threatened that if it does not surrender and give 1/5 of its territory (Kosovo) the carpet bombing would start; the bombing of schools, hospitals, and TV station were all used as a confirmation that the West can do absolutely anything it likes and with complete impunity, therefore even the carpet bombing of the civilian population would be possible (nobody would help).
Finally, I knew that they would do the same to Russia in not too distant future. This is because Adolf Hitler did exactly the same – he attacked Serbia as a dress rehearsal for the subsequent attack on Soviet Union. This is because Serbia is mini-Russia. History truely repeats itself.
Don’t forget: US pilots double-tapped that civilian train: they came back to bomb rescuers that had jumped in the water to help the first ones hit.
What an out-and-out war crime. And it’s standard operating procedure against their “enemies”.
Actually, most likely the US pilots hit a river bridge in Northern Serbia (town of Varvarin) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varvarin
in the middle of a market (shopping) day full of civilians crossing and then hit it again about 10 minutes later when the rescuers rushed to help the injured. I am not aware that the double-tap happened on the train crossing the other bridge in Central Serbia.
I believe that not being a psychopath disqualifies one from becoming a US Airforce pilot.
Not at all contrived Kiza, thanks for your input as always…
It was Serbian women who first sent documented rape claims (of being raped by Croats and Bosnian Muslims) to the UN Security Council in the Fall of 1992. Before this, there was nothing in the mainstream media about rape camps.
In their claims there were stories of individual rapes – when the Bosniak militants/police/army – would break into their homes and attack them, as well as them being taken to camps – often in basements of apartments, restaurants, tunnels etc. – and the rapists would say things about making them “bear a Moslem child” or the Croats saying “we are making Serbian women bastards!”.
It was only after this, that the Sarajevo government (which must have gotten wind of that document), suddenly and without any documentation at the time, suddenly blurted out an astronomical number of Muslim women raped by Serbs.
To this day they do not have any hard evidence and there was no increase in the birthrate – which there definitely would have been if that many women were raped and the intent was to force them to have a baby.
Also, the UN never found any Serbian-operated camp and rescued a single woman – there would have been so much evidence if so.
There’s no DNA evidence nor even any medical evidence for this.
Plus their documented claims are far less than the Serbian women’s 800 cases fully documented with complete names. And I’ll bet their documented claims, if true, are mostly from the Croat-Muslim war and rapes between each other.
The Croats and Muslims put each other in some of the concentration/torture/rape camps where they had previously held Serbs when they were cooperating at the beginning of the war.
So the Bosnian Muslims and the mainstream media took what was genuinely happening to the Serb women and turned around and used it to demonize the Serbs.
Similar how CNN took the funeral of two Bosnian Serb children killed on a bus at the beginning of the war, carefully cropped out the Orthodox Priest conducting the ceremony, and claimed they were Bosniak children.
Murdered and injured Serbs were pictured and often falsely labeled as Croats and Muslims.
I also know they use damage caused by the Croat-Muslim war, such as in Mostar, and use it to condemn Serbs.
The UN also witnessed the Bosnian Muslim forces sniping at civilians within their own lines because they knew the Serbs would be blamed.
They also mortared civilians, including children, within their own lines, according to UN officers such as Canadian James R. Davis.
In Sarajevo were stationed 4 permanent UN contingents throughout the war (and there were UN officers from many other countries coming and going besides).
2 of the 4 were Canadian (the other 2 were Ukrainian and Egyptian, I believe), so fact is that the Canadians were often in the best position to see what was going on.
When another Canadian General said that the Bosnian Muslims forces were dishonest and involved in staging and provoking attacks, he was suddenly accused of rape and murder himself. Of course they could never name the alleged victims and they of course never had a shred of physical evidence.
But they also convicted Serbs (after torturing them to confess) for killing those were found alive, without a scratch, and living in Sarajevo the whole time, after the war!
They don’t need real evidence – just blame and the media hype!
“Similar how CNN took the funeral of two Bosnian Serb children killed on a bus at the beginning of the war, carefully cropped out the Orthodox Priest conducting the ceremony, and claimed they were Bosniak children.”
Can I get a source? I believe you