Allied Farce:
A Wartime Diary

by Justin Raimondo

5/13/99

INTERNET WARS

The NATO-crats have been trying their darndest to control the dissemination of information about the war from day one – and they are making considerable progress. First, they bombed Serbian television outlets, both public and private, in the hope of silencing the voice of resistance. Now they are going after the Internet. According to the popular Yugoslav website Beonet.com, the U.S. Government ordered the shut down of satellite feeds for Internet customers in Yugoslavia, as a result of NATO air war against this country. This action might be taken as soon as later tonight or tomorrow (May 12 or 13, 1999). Now this will hardly suffice to shut down the Internet in Yugoslavia – they would have to shut down all the phone lines in order to pull that off – only make it harder for Yugoslav sites to stay up. But they are getting perilously close to having their way. There are only 4 Internet service providers in Yugoslavia: EUnet, BeoTelNet, SezamPro, and BITS. These providers rely on three land lines and one satellite link out of the country. One of the lines runs through London and is owned by EuNet, a large European network operator, according to a report published in Wired News. "It's overloaded," said Pierre Baume, an EuNet network engineer based in Amsterdam. "But it's been overloaded for as long as we can remember." The country's telephone network is also badly overloaded and it is almost impossible to get a connection out. The Internet may well be the last link between Yugoslavia and the outside world – and right now even that link is hanging by a very slender thread. According to Scott Ellentuch, a communications security specialist with TTSG: "It's not like the United States, where there's a lot of connectivity redundancy and if lines are taken out, the network would heal itself quickly and you'd hardly notice."

THE NEW CENSORSHIP

This attack on the Internet is aimed not just at Yugoslavs, but at Americans and people all over the world who look to alternative sources of information: it is a blatant act of censorship. Just as the U.S. government banned German-language newspapers and the antiwar press during World War I, and routinely censored the news during World War II, the old pattern repeats itself – with very little in the way of opposition. Where are all the "civil libertarians" and "free-thinking" liberals? The NATO-crats want to turn off the lights in Yugoslavia so they can mug their victims in the dark. With the complicity of our own "free" media – which is paying no attention to this important story – they will soon accomplish their goal.

FIGHTING BACK

Yet the NATO-crats suffered a defeat in the war on the Internet when Chinese cyber-warriors overwhelmed the White House website with messages protesting the embassy bombing – so many that the site was forced to shut down. They also hacked their way into the website of the U.S. embassy in Beijing, where they put up a banner proclaiming "Down with the barbarians!" on the embassy's home page. Mike Hammer, the dumb bureaucrat at the National Security Agency who spoke to the issue, nonetheless saw a bright side to the incident: "All those users can access and receive our information," he said. "It works both ways." That's right, Mike – all you have to do is just post Clinton's "apology" on www.whitehouse.gov and all will be well. I'll bet that was one of Al Gore's cool ideas – and what else would you expect from a man who thinks that he invented the Internet?

INJUN TROUBLE

President Clinton met with American Indian leaders yesterday, and together they did quite a little war dance, complete with a chorus of war whoops. The Injun chiefs – dosed with plenty of firewater no doubt – endorsed the war on the grounds that NATO is fighting the same sort of "ethnic cleansing" their ancestors supposedly faced. "We must acknowledge that our own history has given us plenty of humility because of our history of slavery, and because we too are guilty of cleansing when the American people pushed the native American tribes off their lands without adequate compensation, and without any concern for how they would govern themselves and make their way in life so long ago." The President likes to cite history, but unfortunately his version of it has a tenuous link with reality. The American Indians were decimated by diseases for which they had no immunity, by vicious internecine warfare, and by alcoholism, which killed more Injuns than all the Indian wars combined. Far from acting without concern for their fate, the U.S. Government has for many years maintained an extensive bureaucracy, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which has supported "native Americans" – as they now like to be called – from cradle to grave. They have been granted full autonomy by the U.S. Government and the courts, and now operate gambling casinos from which they make a fortune. But what is really striking is that the President of the United States believes his country was founded on an act of "ethnic cleansing." If so, then would NATO (or the UN) be justified in launching a military campaign to take it back? Should they bomb Washington until the United States agrees to restore America to its original Injun owners? Click here to vote yes.

HUMAN SACRIFICE

Later, at a meeting of Democratic donors, Clinton said one of the Indians (perhaps an Apache with a Tomahawk) told him he had a great-great-grandfather who was killed at Wounded Knee, an uncle who participated in the World War II beach landing at Normandy and another uncle who became the nation's first Indian fighter pilot. He then added, according to Clinton, "I only have one son, but I have seen America's journey, and I would gladly have my son go fight to protect the Kosovar Albanian Muslims from ethnic cleansing." While human sacrifice was commonly practiced by many Indian tribes, it has long been thought that the practice died out some time ago. In the meantime, no one has heard from Chief Ticklefeather's only son. How does he feel about being a sacrificial victim on the altar of political correctness?

PHONY PEACENIKS SILENT ON WAR

An international conference of phony peaceniks, government shills, and quasi-official "NGOs" gathered in The Hague without condemning NATO's merciless and increasingly bloody war on the Serbian people. This gaggle of government representatives, Nobel Peace prize winners, and UN bureaucrats spent a whole four days discussing "global violence" without once addressing the outstanding example of violence on a mass scale taking place a few hundred miles to the southeast. What kind of a "peace" conference is it when the opening remarks consist of a ferocious speech by Dutch Foreign Affairs Minister Jozias van Aartsen, who insisted that NATO would continue its relentless air campaign? Conference President Cora Weiss, a veteran peacenik who vigorously opposed the Vietnam war, could only manage the feeblest protest: "the bombing has already lasted too long," she said, in response. Weiss heads up the U.S.-based activist group the International Peace Bureau. Nobel Peace laureate Jose Ramos-Horta of East Timor, told The Associated Press he supported the war because "it has already been shown that tyrants cannot be stopped with diplomacy." A Nobel Peace prize recipient who opposes the very concept of diplomacy? It is possible only in our crazy era. Left-wing icon South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu addressed the opening session and received loud applause Wednesday for his denunciation of apartheid, which no longer exists. The war did not merit his attention. "What we have learned from this century is that human beings are horrible," he said. Yes, indeed, and if this shameful conference doesn't prove it, then what does?

ETHNIC CLEANSER IN TOP KLA POST

While the NATO-crats rant that all their enemies are "war criminals" a real war criminal has been promoted to the post of the KLA's military chief of staff: Agim Ceku, 39, an ethnic Albanian from Kosovo who rose to the rank of brigadier-general during eight years with the Croatian army, replaces Suleiman "Sultan" Selimi. He took part in several battles against Serb forces in Bosnia and Croatia, notably "Operation Storm" in which the Croats ethnically cleansed over 300,000 Serbs out of the Krajina region of eastern Croatia in 1995, and murdered tens of thousands. He left the Croatian army in February.

IT FIGURES

A high-level Albanian government delegation to the International War Crimes Tribunal had just landed at the airport in Geneva and was going through customs when an irregularity in one of their passports raised suspicions: the delegate was detained until it was discovered that he just happened to be a major figure in the Albanian Mafia and quite high up there on Interpol's "Most Wanted" list of criminals.

IT FIGURES (II)

The same Pentagon agency that used an outdated map to target the Chinese embassy instead of the Yugoslav Federal Department of Procurement, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, also prepared the maps for the crew of the Marine Corps jet that struck a ski-lift in February 1998 near Aviano, Italy, in which 20 people were killed. But you knew that, didn't you?

Please Support Antiwar.com

A contribution of $20 or more gets you a copy of my Into the Bosnian Quagmire: The Case Against U.S. Intervention in the Balkans, a 60-page booklet packed with the kind of intellectual ammunition you need to fight the lies being put out by this administration and its allies in Congress. Send contributions to

Antiwar.com
520 S. Murphy Ave. #202
Sunnyvale CA 94086
Make all checks payable to antiwar.com

Justin Raimondo is the editorial director of Antiwar.com. He is also the author of Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement (with an Introduction by Patrick J. Buchanan), (1993), and Into the Bosnian Quagmire: The Case Against U.S. Intervention in the Balkans (1996). He is an Adjunct Scholar with the Ludwig von Mises Institute, in Auburn, Alabama, a Senior Fellow at the Center for Libertarian Studies, and writes frequently for Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. He is the author of An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (forthcoming from Prometheus Books).