I think people do not understand where people like Sava are coming from. Sava actually lived in Kosovo, I believe, when these bombings were taking place. We all KNOW our media doesn't report these things so why should we be surprised and attack someone simply for trying to make us aware that our hero- your hero, my hero- Bill Clinton was no saint, no liberal and no humanist. It's just that we had it good back then and weren't paying attention. Most of us didn't start paying attention until Bush stole the White House- I know that's when I REALLY perked up and started digging.
So anyway, this post is my sad plea, at the risk of making enemies at DU, that we open our eyes also if we are that interested in peace and justice. How can we make intelligent, well-informed choices for the up-coming primaries if we can't even deal with what our main rep, Clinton, did in our name during his watch?
We are SO sadly uninformed of what really went on in Kosovo, Serbia & Iraq under Clinton. What we did in Columbia was heart-breaking...
Wellstone Calls on President Clinton to Explain Criteria for Selecting Bombing Targets Says Senate Must Ensure That U.S. is Observing International Rules of War[br />
Senator Wellstone: Pause The Bombing Before It's Too Late To Avoid A Wider WarCongresswoman McKinney Says "NATO Should End The Bombing" Sava, I've seen you in other threads and certainly don't think you're a disruptor but you're bringing up unpleasant and unknown facts that are difficult to deal with.
Those of us unwilling to even entertain the thought that Clinton did anything wrong should use this as insight into how the average American feels when we assault them with everything Bush is doing. They are just as ignorant NOW as most of us were THEN.
I'm with Sava on this one- regardless of how big a Clinton fan I am. Clinton was a great President for the US- I voted for him twice and would vote for him again but I AM ashamed of the atrocities which took place in Kosovo under his watch. Both Clinton and Blair (sound familiar?) are are seen as war crimes by many over this... Just do a google and see...
Sava, maybe you should tell people where you were living, what you've seen and experienced and maybe they'll understand where you're coming from otherwise you do risk coming across as a freeper/disruptor to those who don't know.
Under Clinton, we bombed Serbia on Easter Sunday! Kosovo is still a mess and both Clinton and Blair are seen as war criminals by the general populace. It was also under Clinton that Iraqi civilians were bombed and terrorized daily. Just want to be real here.
We are an imperialist, war-mongering, exploitative nation and we need to come to terms with that if we want to make things better otherwise we are no better than the freepers who bury their heads in the sand anytime something less than complimentary is said about Bush or Reagan.
I would like to think we are all better.
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Successful operation or war crime?
International hearings hold Clinton, Albright, Cohen responsible
NEW YORK -- The Geneva Convention, The United Nations Charter, the Nuremberg Principles, the Helsinki Accords and the U.S. Constitution have all been violated by Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright and William Cohen, according to charges filed by the Commission of Inquiry of the International Action Coalition.
Nearly 800 persons participated in the inquiry hearings. Charges are primarily grouped around those of "starting a war," the "deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure" and "violating and destroying the peacemaking roll of the United Nations."
There are 19 charges detailed in articles and paragraphs from major international treaties and even the U.S. Army Field Manual 27-10 (for planning, announcing and executing attacks intended to assassinate government leaders and selected civilians, e.g. "friends of Milosevic," the Yugoslav president). U.S. commanders and NATO/State Department spokesmen were so ignorant or arrogant about international treaties and laws, according to the charges, that they even publicly boasted of highly illegal actions and destruction of non-military civilian targets. For example, targeting Yugoslav journalists was a violation of Article 79 of the U.N. Charter. Bombing fertilizer plants and a cigarette factory was a violation of the Geneva Convention about hitting non-military targets.
"Inflicting, inciting and enhancing violence between Moslems and Slavs" was one of the charges. Aggravating conflict between Slavs and Moslems and injecting U.S. troops for future actions to control Caucasus oil exports was the argument of committee chairman, Ramsey Clark, former attorney general and a former marine. He argued that the Orthodox and Muslim worlds were potential centers of power that could thwart Washington's "imperialist objectives." It had been pointed out that Washington purposefully brought in Turkish planes (with no military necessity) to bomb Serbian Slavs in what could have been an effort to revive centuries old hatreds from Turkish colonial rule.
<snip>
Ramsey Clark referred to Spanish pilots who had refused orders to attack civilian targets. A commission study referred to testimony in the Spanish newspaper, ARTICULO 20, of Captain Martin de la Hoz, "Several times our colonel protested to NATO chiefs about why they select targets which are not military targets.... They are destroying the country, bombing it with novel weapons, toxic nerve gasses, surface mines dropped by parachute, bombs containing uranium, black napalm, sterilization chemicals, spraying to poison crops and weapons of which even we still do not know anything." The United States and President Clinton were singled out as the prime motivator for the war and the "overwhelmingly responsible nation" for its atrocities and legal violations.
<snip>
The rest is at:
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=17147---------
Wellstone Renews Call For Bombing Pause
WASHINGTON - May 13 - Senator Paul Wellstone renewed his call today for a brief, conditional pause in NATO airstrikes, and urged President Clinton and NATO to make greater diplomatic exertions to resolve the Kosovo crisis. In a speech delivered on the Senate floor, Wellstone urged the Administration to seize the opportunity created by last week's G-8 agreement on Kosovo, and to press forward with energy towards a UN Security Council resolution to implement it.
Wellstone repeated his call from ten days ago for the White House and NATO to consider a temporary halt of 48 hours or so to the air campaign against Yugoslavia in order to improve the environment for diplomatic discussions. He expressed regret today that such a pause in the airstrikes had not been attempted. <snip>
"Contrary to some published reports of US and NATO public statements, which suggest that we intend to continue the airstrikes even against Serb forces who may be actually beginning to withdraw, I believe the U.S. and NATO should reiterate what we had been saying earlier--that NATO will not strike at Serbian troops who are actively pulling out of Kosovo. How can we expect the Serbs to withdraw their troops if we have made clear that we will bomb them on the way out unless they have agreed to a full withdrawal, and outlined a timetable for it? Is this seeming new emphasis on continuing the airstrikes even if the troops are withdrawing a change in emphasis, or tone, or is it a substantive change?" Wellstone asked.
http://www.commondreams.org/pressreleases/may99/051399i.htm------
Excerpt from Clinton Is The WorId's Leading Active War Criminal
Clinton's crimes, after just seven years in office, are competitive with Suharto's
by Edward S. Herman
Z magazine , December 1999 Third World Traveler one of the MOST progressive and alternate web-sites we have
Clinton: Postmodern War Criminality
This brings us to Bill Clinton, who has gone beyond the Bush record of criminality, and has brought to the commission of war crimes a new eclectic reach and postmodern style. A skilled public relations person, he has refined the rhetoric of humanistic and ethical concern and can apologize with seeming great sincerity for our earlier regrettable sponsorship and support of mass murder in Guatemala while carrying out similar or even more vicious policies in Colombia and Iraq at the same moment.
<snip>
Clinton's crimes range from ad hoc bombings to boycotts and sanctions designed to starve into submission, to support of ethnic cleansing in brutal counterinsurgency warfare, and to aggression and devastation by bombing designed to return rogues to the stone age and keep them there.
On June 26, 1993, Clinton bombed Baghdad in retaliation for an alleged but unproven Iraq plot to assassinate former President George Bush. Eight Iraqi civilians, including the distinguished Iraqi artist Layla al-Attar were killed in the raid, and 12 more were wounded. This kind of unilateral action in response to an unproven charge is a violation of international law. The legal excuse given by U.S. officials, which they relied on in justification of the bombing of Libya in 1986, is the right to self defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter. But that Article requires that the response be to an immediate threat to the retaliating party, clearly not the case, and therefore a legal fraud. This was a crime-petty by the usual U.S. standard-but still a crime. And it had the further repellent feature that it was done almost surely for purely internal political reasons-to show Clinton's toughness, despite his Vietnam War record, and to countervail right-wing attacks on his lack of militancy.
<snip>
The most monumental of Clinton's war crimes, however, has been his policy of sanctions on Iraq, supplemented by the maintenance of intense satellite surveillance and regular bombing attacks that have often resulted in civilian casualties. UNICEF reports that in 1999 more than 1 million Iraqi children under 5 were suffering from chronic malnutrition, and some 4,000-5,000 children are dying per month beyond normal death rates from the combination of malnutrition and disease. Death from disease was greatly increased by the shortage of potable water and medicines, that has led to a 20-fold increase in malaria (among other ailments). This vicious sanctions system, causing a creeping extermination of a people, has already caused more than a million excess deaths, and it is claimed by John and Karl Mueller that Clinton's "sanctions of mass destruction" have caused "the deaths of more people in Iraq than have been slain by all so-called weapons of mass destruction
throughout all history" (Foreign Affairs, May/June 1999). U.S. mainstream reporters, who have so eagerly followed the distress of the Kosovo Albanians, somehow never get to Iraq for pictures of the thousands of malnourished children.
One of the notable features of the NATO-U. S. war against Yugoslavia was the gradual extension of targeting to civilian infrastructure and civilian facilities-therefore civilians who would be in houses, hospitals, schools, trains, factories, power stations, and broadcasting facilities. Two months after the war was over, the BBC "revealed" that the attack on Yugoslav television on April 23 was part of an escalation of NATO bombing whereby the target list was extended to non-military objectives; NATO was "taking off the gloves." According to Yugoslav authorities, 60 percent of NATO targets were civilian, including 33 hospitals and 344 schools, as well as 144 major industrial plants and a large petro-chemical plant whose bombing caused a pollution catastrophe. John Pilger noted that the list of civilian targets included "housing estates, hotels, libraries, youth centres, theatres, museums, churches and 14th century monasteries on the World Heritage list. Farms have been bombed and their crops set afire."
<snip>
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/International_War_Crimes/ClintonWarCriminal_Herman.html
THIRD WORLD TRAVELER puts up magazine articles and book excerpts
that offer an alternative view to the corporate media about the state of democracy in America, and about the impact of the policies of the United States' government, transnational corporations, international trade and financial institutions, and the corporate media, on war and peace, democracy, civil liberties, free speech, human rights, and social and economic justice, in the Third World, and in the United States.
THIRD WORLD TRAVELER also provides information and links to aid international travelers.
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Clinton gave several excuses for bombing Iraq on the eve of the impeachment vote, especially the (bogus, but unquestioned) claim that Iraq had stopped cooperating with UNSCOM inspectors. In reality, Iraq’s cooperation with UNSCOM inspectors had actually been increasing, despite U.S. attempts to provoke a confrontation. However, knowing the impeachment schedule, Clinton had directed UNSCOM chief Richard Butler to write a report that Iraq was not cooperating. Even Scott Ritter, the former chief UNSCOM weapons inspector who quit because he thought the weapons inspectors were not tough enough, said that the White House had been on the phone with UNSCOM "shaping" the report to make sure it would justify bombing Iraq during the impeachment trial.
Clinton actually used the Muslim holy month of Ramadan as an excuse for the timing of the bombing. This may have fooled the American media, but didn't fool Muslims, as Clinton continued the bombing even after Ramadan had started (but halted the bombing as soon as the impeachment vote ended).
Fact: the UNSCOM inspectors were not kicked out of Iraq in December 1998 by Saddam -- President Clinton had UNSCOM chief Richard Butler pull out the UN inspectors so he could bomb. United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan was understandably angry that Clinton ordered out not just the U.S. inspectors, but all United Nations inspectors (which he had no authority to do).
Fact: ever since Bill Clinton ordered the UNSCOM inspectors out of Iraq so he could bomb (the day before the impeachment vote), there have been no UN weapons inspectors in Iraq. So when Clinton said (as soon as the impeachment vote ended), "We have achieved our objectives," was one of those objectives to permanently remove weapons inspectors from Iraq?
Fact: days before the UNSCOM report came out, Clinton was in Israel, already telling Prime Minister Netanyahu that he was expecting a negative UNSCOM report, and that he would soon be bombing Iraq. Clinton knew the contents ahead of time because he was "shaping" that report.
Fact: because of Clinton's December 1998 bombing, Iraq began challenging the U.S. and British "no-fly zones," which they had not been doing before. The risk to U.S. pilots is negligible (no U.S. plane has ever been hit), but it has given the U.S. and Britain an excuse for nearly daily bombing of Iraq (not just radar sites, but cities, towns, shepherd's camps, etc.). Since December 1998, this illegal bombing has killed about two hundred Iraqis, including shepherds with their flocks, families in their houses, and small children, and injured many more. It helps to put faces on the victims. I saw a photo of a cute, smiling little girl named Isra, from the Abu-Khasib neighborhood of Basra, who lost her right arm when a U.S. IGM-130 missile hit her neighborhood at 10:10 AM, January 25, 1999 (for a picture of her, see http://www.vitw.org/airwar.html).
http://www.ornery.org/essays/2001-01-26-1.html
----
(Excerpt)
Maybe Americans don't care about the hundreds of Iraqis Clinton killed during the impeachment trial bombings of Iraq, and the scores of Iraqi civilians (and sheep) killed during the almost daily bombings of Iraq in the two years since then. Most Americans, incredibly enough, don't even know we're still at war, that we've been bombing Iraq every other day for the last two years!
Okay, for the sake of argument, say we can forgive Clinton for killing a few hundred or thousand Iraqis with bombs.
Bombs are merciful compared to what Clinton has done to the innocent children of Iraq, the most vulnerable of all, by maintaining ten years of the harshest sanctions in the history of mankind, begun on August 6, 1990, and kept in place at the insistence of the United States. On May 12, 1996, television’s "Sixty Minutes" interviewed Madeleine Albright (then U.S. ambassador to the UN, now Secretary of State). Leslie Stahl asked Albright, "We have heard half a million children have died . That's more children than died in Hiroshima. Is the price worth it?"
Albright replied, "I think this is a very hard choice. But the price, we think, is worth it."
I believe there is a special place in hell reserved for Madeleine Albright.
Yes, even four and a half years ago, 500,000 Iraqi children had already died as a direct result of economic sanctions. Over one million Iraqi civilians have died from the sanctions, mostly children under age five. Those are not Iraqi figures -- those figures come from Unicef, the World Health Organization, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the UN’s Department of Humanitarian Affairs, and other international sources. The "oil-for-food" program is so ineffectual that two consecutive UN directors of that program (Denis Haliday and Hans Von Sponeck) resigned, out of protest that they were presiding over a humanitarian disaster which can only be called genocide. They were UN Assistant Secretaries General, the highest ranking UN personnel ever to resign for reasons of conscience. Now Denis Haliday and Hans Von Sponeck are touring America and other countries, pleading for an end to the sanctions on Iraq.
Embargoes during peacetime are tough enough, but after a devastating war, they are disastrous. During the Gulf War, U.S. forces deliberately targeted Iraqi water treatment plants, dams, and electric generating facilities (in violation of the Geneva Convention), later admitting they did it in order to cause disease (which was biological warfare by the United States). Iraq has not been allowed to rebuild its water treatment plants since then. Chlorine, and water chlorinators, are prohibited under sanctions. Disease is at epidemic levels, especially among babies and children under five. Nobel Peace prize winners have visited Iraq and described the sanctions as genocide. Iraqi children are dying from starvation, malnutrition, tainted water, lack of basic medicines, and diseases that were once rare but now epidemic.
http://www.ornery.org/essays/2001-01-26-1.html
"Our leaders are cruel because only those willing to be inordinately cruel and remorseless can hold positions of leadership in the foreign policy establishment ... People capable of expressing a full human measure of compassion and empathy toward faraway powerless strangers ... do not become president of the United States, or vice president, or secretary of state, or national security adviser or secretary of Defense. Nor do they want to."
William Blum
Much more stuff here: http://www.commondreams.org/kosovo/moreviews.htm
http://www.commondreams.org/kosovo/new.htm
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