THE
CASE OF THE MISSING CORPUS DELICTI
In
a sense, the NATO-crats have been tripped up by their own
web of propaganda: in their eagerness to charge Yugoslav strongman
Slobodan Milosevic with "war crimes," and indict him before
their self-appointed "War Crimes Tribunal," Western governments
have had to follow at least the forms of legality: due process,
the rules of evidence – and, in the case of murder, not
to mention "genocide," the necessity of producing the corpus
delicti. Where are the bodies, all 100,000 of them? This
became the task of the "war crimes experts," as the Guardian
describes them: to produce what never existed in the first
place – a task that naturally had to end in failure.
The Guardian reports:
"As
war crimes experts from Britain and other countries prepare
to wind down the exhumation of hundreds of graves in Kosovo
on behalf of the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for
the former Yugoslavia in the Hague, officials concede they
have not borne out the worst wartime reports. These were given
by refugees and repeated by western government spokesmen during
the campaign. They talked of indiscriminate killings and as
many as 100,000 civilians missing or taken out of refugee
columns by the Serbs."
MADELEINE'S
WILLING EXECUTIONERS
It
was lies, all lies, from beginning to end. They may have originated
from government sources, in most cases, but in spreading these
lies far and wide the Western media were more than willing
accomplices. Keeping in mind that over 5,000 civilians were
slaughtered in the NATO air strikes, the ladies and gentlemen
of the Fourth Estate might fairly be characterized as Madeleine's
willing executioners. This is a takeoff, of course, on the
favored phrase of the New Republic wing of the War
Party, which condemns the entire Serb nation as "Milosevic's
willing executioners." Based on the myth of an Albanian
Kosovar "holocaust" perpetrated by the Serbs, not only Milosevic
and his regime but the entire Serbian people are condemned
as being no better than the "good Germans" who voted Hitler
into power and tacitly supported the Holocaust. Here was classic
war propaganda, on a par with stories of Belgian babies impaled
on German bayonets during World War I and tall tales told
during the Gulf war of babies dumped out of incubators and
gasping for breath on the floor of a Kuwaiti hospital. The
idea is to get public opinion behind the complete subjugation
and "reeducation" of the Serbian people, utilizing the postwar
German model.
HEROES
TO SHILLS
In
a 1999 speech
to the Freedom Forum that bears rereading, Phillip Knightley
predicted this turn of events, and his prescience is stunning.
Speaking of how he came to write The
First Casualty, his famous (and recently
updated) account of wartime propaganda and its intimate
relationship with "journalism," he relates how he started
out wanting to portray war correspondents as heroes, but explains
that he had to change his theme when he discovered that war
reporting invariably falls into the following pattern:
"1.
Although all the right is seldom on one side, the media will
present the war in stark terms of good and evil.
"2.
The evil side will be demonized, its leader depicted as mad,
bloodthirsty, and subhuman, a modern-day Hitler.
"3.
The good side will be presented as the savior of civilization,
humanitarian, caring, and compassionate, forced to act because
of the barbarity of the other side.
"4.
To this end – ignoring the fact that there are atrocities by
all sides in all wars – old atrocity stories will be dusted
off and recycled. Some will be true, many will be false, and
it will be difficult – if not impossible – to tell while the
war is on which are true and which are propaganda. After the
war, although some of the atrocity stories will be confirmed,
there will be a retreat from many of the most outrageous ones."
SOUND
THE RETREAT
In
the case of the Kosovo war, the retreat has already begun.
Far too late to help the victims of the vicious "Allied" air
war: they are dead and buried, or else mutilated beyond repair.
Yet we are still waiting for some acknowledgment – aside
from a few stories in overseas newspapers – from the
media that they were wrong. After endless horror stories illustrated
with fantastically high death tolls were aired day after day
on CNN, when will we hear a retraction? Christiane Amanpour
repeated her husband's lies with a perfectly straight face:
tens of thousands slaughtered, we were told, and the murderous
drug-dealing KLA were really "freedom fighters," the Albanian
equivalent of George Washington and his Continental Army!
Journalists didn't question the government line about alleged
Serbian "genocide": instead they wanted to know if the President
would send in the ground troops – and if not, why not?
KNIGHTLEY'S
INSIGHT
Knightley
gave his speech before an audience of journalists who reacted
much as one might expect; furiously
defensive and unrepentant. But the predictive power of
Knightley's insight into the psychology of wartime propaganda
has withstood the test of time, and is underscored by the
following excerpt from his remarks:
"Usually
the truth about what has really happened during a war will
emerge after it is over. Sometimes it takes years and years – we
are still learning new things about the Second World War.
But sometimes the truth surfaces quite quickly. Within little
more than a year after the Gulf War we knew that the claims
for the pinpoint accuracy of Allied air strikes and the ability
of the Patriot missiles to intercept Iraqi missiles were all
nonsense. Within two years we knew that many of the atrocity
stories attributed to the Iraqis – the incubator babies story,
for example – had been invented by American public relations
companies working for the Kuwaiti government. But, of course,
by then it was too late to make any difference to the outcome
of the war, and the media caravan had moved on. We are learning
only now that the CIA helped train the Kosovo Liberation Army
before the bombing began. We did not realize at the time that
NATO was lying when it said it did not deliberately attack
civilian targets. There will be a lot more, believe me."
YOU
BETTER BELIEVE IT
Oh,
we believe you all right. There's more, a lot more –
including the story of how and why the media eagerly disseminated
the oily deceptions of little Jimmy Rubin and his cadre of
spin-doctors. And it is just now beginning to come out. When
oh when is the American media going to start reporting this?
Do we have to turn to the British papers via the Internet
to get the truth? Most importantly, when are the journalists
who "reported" Kosovo's phony "holocaust" as fact going to
own up to their mistakes – giving them the benefit of
a doubt that this was an error and not deceit. Knightley correctly
notes that in a war
"In
which the revolution in communications technology – the satellite
phone, 'the star of the war'; instant television links from
the front to the studio and between correspondents in the
field; electronic transmission of still photographs; and the
latest arrival at the front, the Internet – should have provided
the public with an unprecedented overview turned out instead
to be a disaster for journalism."
THE
EXCEPTION THAT PROVES THE RULE
Except
that the Internet was clearly light-years ahead of the Old
Media in discovering and reporting the truth about the nonexistent
"genocide" in Kosovo. Antiwar.com reported the truth from
Day One. We saw the culprits behind the campaign of lies,
the journalistic auxiliary of the War Party, who collaborated
with the NATO-crats – whether consciously or not –
in the biggest hoax since the discovery of "Piltdown
Man." In the opening paragraph of my
first column for Antiwar.com [26 March 1999], I wrote:
"It
was a sight that doubtless cheered virtually everyone who
saw it – the American media being chased down the street
by an angry crowd of their slandered victims. In Skopje, Macedonia,
thousands of Serbians, outraged by the relentless media barrage
of anti-Serbian propaganda, converged on news crews, destroyed
equipment, and literally chased American, British, and German
reporters down the street and out of town. The same journalistic
cleansing occurred in Pristina, capital of Kosovo province,
and in Belgrade, where Western journalists were expelled.
. . . In a tone of bewildered indignation, CNN reporters complained
on the air that they had been singled out. But those Western
journalists who have placed themselves and their profession
in the service of Allied Force should not be too surprised
to find that the people they have demonized are less than
hospitable."
DECADENCE
OR IGNORANCE?
If,
by some chance, the truth about Kosovo gets out, how will
the American people react to the revelation that they were
lied to by Clinton's numerous media enablers? Will they, like
the Serbs, chase the bums out of town – or will they
bask in the warm security of their narcotized ignorance, indifferent
to the truth and immune to righteous indignation except when
prompted by government propagandists? This is the difference
between cultural health and decadence, between a truly American
political culture in the traditional sense and one that has
become alienated from its roots and degenerate beyond redemption
or revival. I like to believe that Americans – even these
Americans, who watched as Waco burned – are not numb
to the crimes of their government. I like to think that they
don't react to the crimes of the US against the people of
Iraq – daily bombing excursions, and 5,000 children a
month killed by murderous sanctions – because they don't
know about it. That is why Antiwar.com exists –
and must continue to exist.
A
STATION BREAK
We
told the American people the truth last year, when the rest
of the media – with a few prominent exceptions, such
as Paul Watson in the Los Angeles Times – were
lying through their teeth, avidly transcribing every word
out of NATO shill Jamie Shea's mouth as if it were holy writ.
Let's hope we can continue to do so – with your continued
support. We depend on financial contributions from our readers
and supporters in order to bring you the real news of the
world five days a week, with frequent weekend updates. Don't
wait for the next war to remind yourself that there's just
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Make
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