-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.aci.net/kalliste/ <A HREF="http://www.aci.net/kalliste/">The Home Page of J. Orlin Grabbe</A> ----- Der Fuhrer Invades Yugoslavia "Collateral Damage" Lights the Fires of Rage Clinton bombs the children BELGRADE - Early Tuesday morning, Dragana Krstic was recovering an operation to remove a tumor from her stomach when there was a deafening explosion outside Belgrade's largest military hospital. The blast shattered numerous windows, sending a shower of glass and metal over the 23-year-old shopkeeper, wounding her in the shoulder. Eight hours later, a shaken Miss Krstic was denouncing NATO leaders as ''fascists, imbeciles, and vandals,'' in interviews with Western journalists taken to the scene by the Yugoslav Army. Belgrade had added another civilian casualty story in the propaganda war with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and ordinary Serbs had been strengthened in their belief that they - not the government of President Slobodan Milosevic - are the real victims of the three-week-old bombing campaign against their country. Compared with other ''mistakes'' by NATO missiles and warplanes, including a missile attack Monday on a train in southern Serbia, the latest spate of civilian injuries was relatively minor. According to doctors at the military clinic in the Belgrade suburb of Banica, at least 16 hospital patients were wounded as a result of the bombing of a military transport depot roughly 100 yards away. Most of the wounds were caused by flying glass. The cumulative result of all this ''collateral damage,'' however, has been to fan popular anger here against the United States and other Western countries and make ordinary Serbs more determined than ever to hang on to Kosovo. In the words of a Belgrade taxi driver, ''since our country has already been destroyed, we have less to lose now and less reason to give in to NATO demands than we had three weeks ago.'' The military hospital director, General Aca Jovanovic, compared the latest bomb attacks to the ''ravages of Genghis Khan'' and speculated that his facility had been directly targeted by NATO. He said no military purpose was served in hitting the transport depot because it was empty at the time of the attack. The military hospital suffered minor damage 10 days earlier in a bomb attack on a nearby police academy, but no one was injured on that occasion. After a brief respite over the Orthodox Easter, NATO appears to be targeting the capital once more. On Monday night, some residents applauded as anti-aircraft units fired on NATO planes. People with young families tend to take refuge in the air-raid shelters. At one such shelter Monday night, on March 27 Street in the center of Belgrade, volunteers were distributing finger puppets to children who appeared to be growing ever more accustomed to the communal, underground life. For the most part, the children seemed satisfied with the simple explanations given to them by their parents for the need to seek shelter underground. ''We come here because we hear the sirens,'' said 4-year-old Milena, as she prepared to go to bed on one on of dozens of mattresses scattered across the concrete floor. Piped up Sasha, 5: ''It was frightening the first time we heard the sirens. But now I am not afraid any more. I go to the window and shout, 'Go away!''' ''I like it down here. There are lots of toys down here,'' said 4-year-old Dejan, clutching a Charlie Brown book in one hand and a pink finger puppet in the other. He went to bed wearing a T-shirt with the bull's-eye target sign that has become a symbol of Serb resistance to the bombing. Asked who was bombing them, the children replied in a chorus, ''America, Clinton.'' Dejan's mother, the ski instructor Katerina Radusinovic, said she had told her son there were some ''bad people'' in the world who wanted to drop bombs on Yugoslavia. A few days ago, Dejan asked her what a bomb was, and she showed him a newspaper photograph of an American Tomahawk missile. City officials estimate that between 20 percent and 30 percent of residents have been using the underground shelters. ''Discipline has been gradually breaking down,'' said Milan Bozic, deputy mayor of Belgrade, ''Because missiles can be fired at us from hundreds of miles away, we have very long air-raid alerts, at least 12 hours at a time. It's difficult to keep people underground for that length of time.'' International Herald Tribune, April 14, 1999 Der Fuhrer Invades Yugoslavia Escalation of Air War Shows Its Flaws I am Clinton. Hear me roar. PARIS - NATO's announcement of major reinforcements, confronting Serbia with a U.S.-led air armada of more than 1,000 warplanes, underscored signs Tuesday that the alliance's initial battle plan had failed to deliver the expected results and needed an urgent escalation in firepower to offer a realistic prospect of military victory in Kosovo. ''Our high technology weapons' performance would be devastating against a sophisticated adversary fighting our kind of war,'' a North Atlantic Treaty Organization commander acknowledged privately, ''but they work much less well in a politically constrained campaign against Serbians who are skillfully using nearly obsolescent weapons to fight in ways we had almost forgotten about.'' Serbian forces, for example, have resorted to firing their surface-to-air missiles using radar mounted on each battery. That method reduces the effectiveness of the missiles in comparison to modern systems integrating individual batteries with remote radars that provide more time for aiming and firing. But missile crews operating independently only turn on their radars briefly, making it harder for warplanes to home in for the kill using anti-radar missiles. Even with sharply reduced capabilities, the surviving missiles pose a potent threat to low-flying warplanes, dissuading NATO from ordering ground-attack fighters to pursue low-level attacks to kill tanks. Serbia, meanwhile, also has broken up its armored units so that tanks operate alone or in pairs, reducing their exposure as targets. Senior officials in Washington said Monday that the Pentagon planned to approve the deployment of 300 additional warplanes. The added planes, which were requested by General Wesley Clark, NATO's top military commander, would increase the number of U.S. and NATO aircraft committed to the campaign to nearly 1,000, more than double the number - 430 - that the alliance had on hand when it began the strikes on March 24. The White House spokesman said Tuesday that Defense Secretary William Cohen might ask President Bill Clinton for authority to call up some military reserve forces. The spokesman, Joe Lockhart gave no figures and did not outline what the reservists would be doing. In miscalculating the impact of air strikes and underestimating Serbian abilities to elude a knockout blow and exploit Western blind spots, the initial NATO battle plan has created an uncomfortably exposed position for the Clinton administration and European governments. The lack of visible progress in the war has triggered calls for ground forces from hawks and threatens to fuel pressure from European moderates for political accommodation over Kosovo. A fundamental mistake in the Western approach, an increasing number of experts say, was the decision by President Bill Clinton and the other NATO leaders to announce at the outset that they would not use ground forces. That assured Slobodan Milosevic, the Yugoslav leader, that he would have time for a sweeping ethnic cleansing of Kosovo - on a scale that Western capitals say they never suspected possible. ''Once Milosevic heard that he was not going to face Western troops,'' a British official said this weekend, ''it would have been natural for men with the mentality of his commanders to decide that they could take more punishment than the West was ready to dish out.'' Militarily, the decision meant that NATO lost the advantage that even the threat of a combination of air and land forces would have provided. As a French official said, ''Your armor and other forces on the ground pose a threat obliging the adversary to operate in strength, which exposes him to air attack.'' But Serbian forces remain masters of the terrain in Kosovo. General Clark said Tuesday that some units were regrouping and others were digging bunkers to conceal their tanks and artillery, apparently hoping to ride out the air war and deter any NATO ground incursion with the threat of sharp resistance. ''Militarily and psychologically, Milosevic has made some gains, and NATO may not be able to turn the tables in time unless we can start operating more smartly,'' a U.S. planner said this weekend. Sympathetic to the political leaders' view that it would have been risky to order infantry into combat from the outset, he noted that NATO could have ordered crack units into position in the Adriatic. That, he said, ''would have limited Milosevic's sense of his own impunity and room for maneuver - and meant that they were right there if and when we needed them.'' Such an approach seems to have been adopted this week as the strength of ground forces in the area has started to climb. The Apache helicopters heading for Albania are now said to need 4,800 U.S. soldiers - more than double the 2,000-strong contingent announced last week. In London, Prime Minister Tony Blair, while assuring Parliament that NATO had no advance inkling of Mr. Milosevic's plan to uproot most of Kosovo's population, announced Tuesday hat he was ordering an additional 1,800 British troops into the region. General Clark said Tuesday that he was sticking to an air war to destroy Serbian forces until Mr. Milosevic cedes politically, but his comments at a NATO briefing, also disclosed new tactics reflecting the lessons learned in the frustrating first three weeks of the campaign. Reinforced by the 300 U.S. warplanes promised late Monday by the Pentagon, NATO plans to concentrate on ''improving and refining our intelligence'' - meaning that NATO hopes to be able to shorten the time between allied spy flights to locate Serbian targets and attacks on the targets by aircraft. Among the 300 extra U.S. warplanes, a large proportion were said to be tankers - enabling more allied aircraft to stay over Serbia day and night. ''We'll sit up there and plink them,'' a U.S. officer said, implying that the alliance planners expected to be able to pursue the air war for weeks without exposing allied pilots to unacceptable risks involved in low-level attacks. This war of attrition, so different from earlier hopes for an overwhelming initial shock, will benefit from better flying weather, General Clark said. NATO aides have played up the weather as a factor in their adverse fortunes of war, but they have not said publicly, as officials disclosed privately, that the alliance started the offensive with a battle plan designed for a summer offensive last year and taken off the shelf without extensive rethinking when NATO started its war on March 24 - when bad weather was a statistical probability. General Clark claimed Tuesday that better bombing weather was on the way, justifying his confidence by citing seasonal weather patterns in Kosovo. He said that NATO was close to achieving the goal of starving Serbian forces of fuel, saying that air strikes had destroyed more than two-thirds of Serbia's facilities for refining, stocking and supplying oil. Defense Secretary Cohen said Sunday that the air war had achieved ''tactical maneuverability,'' meaning that NATO attack planes can operate anywhere they choose provided they are accompanied by electronic aircraft that can jam missile batteries and prevent them from aiming. But for two weeks the Pentagon has not changed its assessment of Serbian air defenses: ''degraded but functional.'' Even if they cannot function as an integrated system, ''the missiles are still there,'' according to an official with access to classified reports. NATO planes encountered stronger Serbian air defense activity Tuesday than on any recent occasion in the campaign, officials said. NATO's hopes of gradually gaining unchallenged control of Serbian skies will brighten as the cloud ceiling lifts, allowing pilots to get visual confirmation of military targets before firing from a safe distance. Bad weather meant that NATO warplanes only operated fully on about two-thirds of the 21 nights in the campaign, officials said. A laser-guided missile hit a passenger train in Serbia by mistake Monday, apparently because the pilot fired from far away and only saw the bridge through his guidance system - which revealed the train only when the missile was too close. International Herald Tribune, April 14, 1999 Der Fuhrer Invades Yugoslavia Revision, Recycle, and Reality--Clinton Style by Joyce Mucci As bombs whistled over the head of Milosevic President Clinton, in his classic sober tone, asserted that Kosovo is, ". . .a powder keg at the heart of Europe" and that his justification for intervention is "to prevent a wider war". We are asked to believe that without our military power war is eminent. What he didn't tell you, and what he was hoping you wouldn't remember, is that he used the same speech in 1995. Back then the issue on the plate was Bosnia. He asserted then that Bosnia lies "at the heart of Europe." That any failure on our part could ignite, "the kind of conflict that has drawn Americans into two European wars in this century." Which is it Mr. President, Bosnia or Kosovo that threatens the world? There is something more going on here. Let's start with the obvious. President Clinton believes the American people are brainless and half-witted. By using revisionist history, metaphor, and a recycled speech where the only distinction is the real estate under discussion, we are asked to deliver our hearty support once again for military action. Which, at this point, has no end in sight or concrete American interest at stake. Moreover, we are admonished, that if we, as Americans, turn our backs on the troubles at the doorstep of Europe, we have the added burden of discrediting NATO. After all, according to the President, we should be grateful to NATO because they have been, "the cornerstone on which OUR security has rested for the last 50 years now." If we accept the claims made by the President to be credible, then we have a moral obligation to feel guilty about the peace we enjoy and further, we should be thankful that NATO has been the ever vigilant overseer of our national security. In spite of his apocalyptic warnings of world war, the only compelling interests being served by our presence in Kosovo, are those of Bill Clinton's reckless resolve to nail down his legacy as a leader. The United States forces have become his pawns in this crusade for world admiration. He blamed former Presidents of past wars for not "acting wisely and early enough"; the results were the loss of American lives. However, Clinton's predecessors were faced with one of the world's great powers � the German's well-trained military force � seeking world domination. President Clinton, on the other hand, is only facing a small time thug. The editors of the Wall Street Journal summed up accurately Milosevic's position in world, "Slobodan Milosevic is merely the irreden tist of the moment. All over the world are pirates masquerading as national leaders, eager to invade and kill the people next to them under the guise of historic grievances." Basically, the President wants to feel good about facing down the bad guy ofKosovo. Having been charged with numerous lapses of judgement and evil doings the President's most glaring character flaw is his manipulation of the good will of the American people. By the troubles in Kosovo to epic proportions as those of two world wars he could convince, albeit reluctantly, the American people to get on board his humanitarian program. Further, he has made good use our good will and unfailing support of the military for his long-range design. To rewrite a legacy that has so far proven to be flawed, blemished and disfigured. His desire, for all practical purposes, is to be memorialized, not as an impotent impeached President of the United States, but as the Leader of NATO. Finally, Clinton asked us, "do our interests in Kosovo justify the dangers to our Armed Forces?" His reassurance was that he "thought long and hard about that question" to which, we can conclude, was only long enough to rifle through his hard drive to find the 1995 speech about Bosnia. The New Australian, April 12-18, 1999 ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Om
