Reply #125: Successful generals don't get fired for no reason, only someone in denial

[mojowork_n]

or with a severely distorted self-image would make a remark like that, on the record, to a journalist.

And seriously, I believe your contemporaneous, PR-firm-generated phony news story (LA times "mass starvation") must be from the same news-factory (Hill and Knowlton, most likely) as the Kuwaiti ambassador's daughter "baby incubator" tale of woe, that helped stoke the fires for the First Gulf War.

http://www.prwatch.org/books/tsigfy10.html

http://www.prwatch.org/node/3011

You can't recognize any similarities between what happened in Kosovo?

• Illegal war,
• No threat to international peace or security,
• Madelaine Albright goes to Rambouillet, knowing ahead of time what the outcome of peace talks will be.
• A furiously exaggerated media (psy-ops) campaign framed the conflict as a human rights issue.
• Radio/TV Belgrade was bombed, killing no journalists but taking out civilian staff.
• Pipeline terminal for new Caspian Sea oil route secured, blocking Europeans. Kosovo mineral reserves secured.
• Halliburton/KBR builds largest new American military base since the Vietnam War
• Kosovo, Bosnia under colonial administration for the foreseeable future.

And what's been happening in Iraq, under Bush?

• Illegal war,
• No threat to international peace or security,
• Colin Powell forced to give dog and pony show at UN, complete with bad PowerPoint presentation and graphics featuring mobile weapons labs.
• Furiously exaggerated media (psy-ops) campaign to frame conflict as “WMD” domestic threat to U.S. security, by known human rights violator.
• Al-Jazeera bombed.
• 2nd largest known oil reserves on planet secured.
• Just last night on the Daily Show, Helen Thomas recounted her attempts to ask Tony Snow “how long will we military bases in Iraq?”
• 20 billion dollars from U.S. treasury misappropriated, or unaccounted for

This was written before the Busheviks invaded Iraq, but the foundation of lies is only too similar.

http://www.zmag.org/ZMag/articles/hermanmay2000.htm

The NATO-Media
Lie Machine


“Genocide” in Kosovo?

By Edward S. Herman & David Peterson



NATO’s “humanitarian” enterprise in Kosovo was built on a structure of lies, many of them flowing from NATO headquarters and officials of the NATO powers, and uncritically passed along by the mainstream media of the NATO countries. One of the great ironies of Operation Allied Force, NATO’s brief 1999 war against Serbia, was that Yugoslavia’s broadcasting facilities were bombed by NATO on the claim that they were a “lie machine” serving the Yugoslav apparatus of war. This was contrasted with the NATO media, which in the view of NATO officials, and in that of media personnel as well, were “objective” and provided what Richard Holbrooke described as “exemplary” coverage. It never occurred to media leaders and journalists that Holbrooke’s accolade should embarrass them —- although were Slobodan Milosevic to have lauded the Serb media’s performance as “exemplary” we suspect their NATO-bloc counterparts would have interpreted this as proof of the “lie machine” accusation. The double standard runs deep.

An important reason for the congruity between Holbrooke’s and the media’s views was the sense of self-righteousness that accompanied Operation Allied Force. The belief that NATO was fighting a “just war” against an evil enemy had been so well cultivated over the prior decade that for the media, “getting on the team” and thereby promoting the war effort seemed perfectly consistent with “objective” news reporting. This perspective, which was not shared by most governments and media outside NATO, or by a vigorous but marginalized media within the NATO countries, was ideal from the viewpoint of the NATO war managers, as it made their mainstream media into de facto propaganda arms of NATO. Ultimately, this gave NATO and its dominant governments a freedom to ignore both international opinion and international law—and to destroy and kill—that would have been far more difficult to achieve if their media’s performance had been less “exemplary.”




Genocide Politicized

One of the many successes of the NATO-media lie machine was effectively pinning the label of “genocide” on the Serbs for their operations in Kosovo. “Genocide,” like “terrorism,” is an invidious but fuzzy word, that has long been used in propaganda to describe the conduct of official enemies. It conjures up images of Nazi death camps and is frequently used along with the word “holocaust” to describe killings that are being condemned. On the Nazi-Jewish Holocaust model, genocide implies the attempt to wipe out an entire people. But in the Genocide Convention of 1948 the word was defined more loosely as any act “committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group as such.” The Convention even included in genocide acts that were causing serious “mental harm” or inflicting “conditions of life” aimed at such destruction. This vagueness has contributed to its politicization, and Peter Novick notes how in the 1950s its users “focused almost exclusively on the crimes—sometimes real, sometimes imagined—of the Soviet bloc” (The Holocaust in American Life).

It is a notorious fact that the Clinton administration carefully refrained from using the word genocide to apply to the huge 1994 Rwanda massacres of Tutsis by the Hutus. To have allowed the word to be used there would have suggested a need to act, and having decided not to act, the decision to avoid using an emotive word that might have mobilized public opinion on the need to act followed accordingly. By contrast, in the case of Kosovo, the decision to act demanded the mobilization of opinion to support violent intervention, so the aggressive use of the word genocide followed.

In the context of the wars over the disintegration of Yugoslavia, and in its opportunistic use elsewhere, the word genocide has been applied loosely wherever people are killed who are deemed “worthy” victims. In our view this is not only opportunism but also a corruption of meaning of a word whose unique sense implies not just killing or massacre but an attempted extermination of a people, in whole or substantial part.




Genocide Pinned on Serbia

The word genocide was applied to the Serbs in the early 1990s by some Western analysts and journalists who had aligned themselves with other Yugoslav factions (notably the Bosnian Muslims), but it came into intense use during the NATO 78-day bombing campaign and briefly thereafter. In good part this escalated usage was a result of the virtual hysteria of NATO leaders at the Serb reaction to their bombing, which had been put forward as necessary to stop Serb brutalities against the Kosovo Albanians but which caused their exponential increase. With the help of the media, and cries of genocide, Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, Gerhard Schroeder, and other NATO spokespersons were able to transform the consequences of their bombing strategy—the refugee crisis—into its retrospective justification.

To make their case the NATO leaders needed generous numbers of victims, stories of Serb terror, and images of women and children in flight or being put on expulsion trains, allowing recollections of trains to Auschwitz. The number allegedly “missing” and suggested to represent massacre victims by William Cohen on May 16 was 100,000, a figure which peaked at 500,000 in a State Department estimate. Both during and after the bombing campaign the main interest of the cooperative NATO media was in finding victims; a scramble to unearth and report on “mass graves” was launched. There were many victims, but the media’s appetite for them was insatiable and their gullibility led them to make numerous errors, exaggerations, and misrepresentations (see Philip Hammond and Edward S. Herman, eds., Degraded Capability: The Media and the Kosovo Crisis, forthcoming from Pluto press, for many illustrations). Numerous published images of departing Albanian woman and children were linked to the “Holocaust,” although as one British commentator noted “the Nazis did not put Jews on the train to Israel, as the Serbs are now putting ethnic Albanian Kosovars on the train to Albania” (Julie Burchill, Guardian, April 10, 1999).

The word genocide was applied to Serb operations in Kosovo even before the NATO bombing, although the number killed in the prior 15 months was perhaps 2,000 on all sides and despite the fact that there was no evidence of an intent to exterminate or expel all Albanians. The Kosovo conflict was a civil war with defining ethnic overtones and brutal but not unfamiliar repression (less ferocious than that carried out by the Croatian army against the Krajina Serbs in August 1995, in which some 2,500 civilians were slaughtered in the course of a few days). Even for the period of the bombing the term genocide is ludicrously inapplicable. The Serb reaction to bombing, while frequently savage, was based on their correct understanding that the KLA was linked to NATO and that NATO was giving it air support (Tom Walker and Aidan Laverty, “CIA Aided Kosovo Guerrilla Army,” Sunday Times , March 13, 2000). Their brutalities and expulsions were concentrated in KLA stronghold areas, and those expelled were sent not to death camps but to safe havens outside Kosovo. The intensive postwar search for killings and mass graves has produced under 3,000 dead bodies from all causes—killings of the same order of magnitude as the 1995 Krajina massacres of Serbs, carried out with U.S. support.

In short, the use of the word genocide for Serb actions in Kosovo was gross propaganda rhetoric designed to mislead as to the facts and to provide the moral basis for aggressive intervention. It paralleled the use of the War Crimes Tribunal to indict Milosevic in the midst of the NATO bombing campaign—an indictment that was also designed to justify NATO’s increasingly civilian-oriented (and illegal) bombing of Serbia by demonizing the head of the state under NATO attack.