Visit our website: HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK --------------------------------------------- http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/goff/goff.htm www.tenc.net [Emperor's Clothes] WAR CRIMES AND THE HAGUE TRIBUNAL July 30, 2001 [Stan Goff is a Retired U.S. Special Forces Master Sargent, an author, Organizer for the North Carolina Alliance for Democracy and a member of the International Committeee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic. (ICDSM)] What do you call someone who pays officials to break the law, threatens people with violence if they don't do what he demands, spreads outrageous lies to impugn people's reputations, and participates in a plot to illegally take an unwilling person out of the country in captivity? Guilty of bribery, extortion, slander and kidnapping. What do you call a government which does precisely those things? The United States in Yugoslavia. Let's get something straight here. The International Tribunal at the Hague is no more an impartial judiciary (1) than Geraldo Rivera is a neurosurgeon, and Slobodan Milosevic is no war criminal. These are just simply facts, and the thing that--even at 50--still amazes my ass is the sheep-like, gullible, we-just-fell-off-the-turnip-truck acceptance of the capitalist media's horse-manure by comfortable fellow Americans. United States military troops are occupying the Balkans, many of them with relatives who might read this, and very few people seem the least bit inclined to find out what's really going on there. So they listen to CNN, read the 'New York Times' or the 'News and Observer,' watch PBS, or listen to NPR, brought to you by... name your favorite agribusiness or weapons contractor... and believe them. I've got a news flash for you, folks. The media lie. They lie early and often, and they keep on telling the same lies over and over, apparently in the well-founded hope that we will simply and finally equate repetition with accuracy. (2) Slobodan Milosevic is no war criminal. Nor was he a dictator. (3) Until the US started a massive campaign of extortion, bribery and election-rigging in Serbia, he won his elections fair and square--unlike the current de facto President of the United States. Nor did Milsoevic ever lead the non-existent movement for Greater Serbia. Nor do Serbs collectively "share" any blame for whatever flavor-of-the-day atrocity is being invented by the IMF, the State Department, NATO Headquarters in Brussels, or that fake Tribunal. Serbs are as fractious and pluralistic as any group, especially about politics, deeply split even today between nationalists and socialists. What they are not, contrary to the recent resurgence of Serb-bashing, is self-pitying and paranoid. They are one of the most stoic, and tolerant, people in Europe. The distortions that underwrite this latest violation of Yugoslav and International law--the veritable kidnapping of a former head of state--would make Joseph Goebbels blush. Crimes were invented to fit the punishment of the Serbs. Allegations were reported as facts, then referenced later as if they really were facts. The mounting evidence of a giant hoax in almost every case has been completely ignored by capitalist media. The effect--intended I think--is to create an impression so overwhelming of Serbian guilt that to question it is to be regarded as a miscreant holocaust denier. Guilt by analogy. Milosevic equals Hitler, therefore defending Serbians equals defending Nazis (a huge irony here, since Serbs were tenacious and fearless fighters against the Third Reich). There's only one little rub. The Holocaust has been well documented by the physical evidence. The Serbians' guilt, and that of Milosevic, has not. But skepticism, fact-checking, and logic have become forbidden foreign languages in the United States, especially our (laugh track here) "free" press. The overwhelming evidence is that there was never any coordinated campaign of genocide or ethnic cleansing by Serbs, no massacres at either Racek or Srebrenica, and never any such thing as Serbian "rape camps." The Kosovo violence was initiated by Albanian heroin-gangsters, who named themselves the Kosovo Liberation Army once they started to get weapons and training from German and US Intelligence. The mass exodus out of Kosovo was not triggered by Serb violence, but by NATO bombing. The reports of 100,000 Kosovar Albanians killed has yet to be corroborated with bodies, and is being quietly scaled ever downward as the bodies fail to appear. Racek was shown to be staged. The bodies from the Srebrenica "massacre" were never located either, and in fact many of the "missing" later turned up alive and accounted for in Bosnian Muslim combat units outside Srebrenica. The US and the psuedo-Tribunal have an answer for the missing evidence, those tens of thousands of corpses, that is. Right under the noses of US surveillance satellites--and I have seen imagery from them that can spot a motorcycle and rider--the crafty Serbs, undetected, moved thousands of decomposing bodies to other locations... still to be discovered. (4) Right! The break-up of Yugoslavia has been largely due to the efforts of US and German gambits, with substantial help from the International Monetary Fund, since the late 1980's. To justify this economic warfare, this trampling of sovereignty, this military aggression, these massive violations by NATO and the US of the Law of Land Warfare and the Geneva and Hague Conventions, and the military occupation of the Balkans, our government and its international financier pals have had to concoct an elaborate Manichean fantasy with Serbs as the heavy. Don't take my word for it, but don't look for a one-paragraph rebuttal either. Understanding requires study and work. If you're inclined to swim upstream in this perennial flood of stubborn American ignorance, read the research and reports from Michel Chussodovsky, Diane Johnstone, and Jared Israel - none of them Serbian or Yugoslav, and all of them proud progressives. They are archived at www.emperors-clothes.com . An apt name for that web site, if ever there was one. (5) (6) & (7) The Hague Tribunal is about war crimes, all right. It's about covering up the war crimes of the North American Treaty Organization and the US Government. - SG *** Stan Goff is author of "Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the U.S. Invasion of Haiti," Soft Skull Press, 2000. The book is available online at www.softskull.com . For a review of 'Hideous Dream' that appeared in the 'Chicago Tribune,' go to http://www.webster.edu/~corbetre/haiti/bookreviews/bell-on-goff.htm Mr. Goff's article, 'In Your Name: A Soldier's Story,' can be read at http://emperors-clothes.com/analysis/waronthe.htm Further reading: 1) 'An Impartial Tribunal? Really?' by Christopher Black. Can be read at http://emperors-clothes.com/analysis/Impartial.htm 2) 'Media in Serbia' by Diana Johnstone Can be read at http://www.emperors-clothes.com/articles/Johnstone/SerbMedi.html 3) 'Official German Documents Contradict Humanitarian Claims in Kosovo'. In these documents, the German Courts and Foreign Ministry ruled on requests made by ethnic Albanians from Kosovo that they be granted status as refugees from persecution. The rulings were prior to the onset of NATO bombing in March, 1999. The findings: the claims of perseuction were false. Can be read at http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/german/Germany.html 4) 'Were NATO's Aerial Photo's of Mass Graves Faked?' by Jared Israel at http://emperors-clothes.com/misc/graves.htm 5) 'The UN appoints an alleged war criminal in Kosovo' by Michel Chossudovsky. Can be read at http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/chuss/unandthe.htm 6) 'COLLECTIVE GUILT AND COLLECTIVE INNOCENCE,' by Diane Johnstone at http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/Johnstone/GUILT.html 7) 'Barbarians At The Gate,' by Jared Israel. Can be read at http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/jared/Barbaria.html __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? 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