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Elizabeth
Sullivan, Newhouse News Service | |
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Published
February 1, 2004 |
SULLIVAN0201 |
The New Hampshire primary offers another reason not to elect retired Gen. Wesley Clark president, beyond his middling finish and muddled message. An interview Clark gave in the waning days of the New Hampshire campaign, seeking to justify the 1999 decision he championed as NATO's military commander to blow up a Belgrade television station, has exposed the blinders he wears about his maladroit handling of the Kosovo air war.
The laws of war give some latitude to attack military targets masquerading as civilian territory. They do not support killing innocent civilians merely to send a signal.
Clark has always maintained that Radio Television Serbia was a legitimate military target, as part of the nexus of communication and control that knitted together Serbia's military and political leadership.
But in an interview he gave last weekend, he said he "personally called" a CNN reporter, setting up a leak so that Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic would find out, and Milosevic did in fact find out. Not so the 16 lowly technicians, security guards and a makeup artist working at the station that night, who were killed.
The admission came during a taped interview with Jeremy Scahill, a reporter from Democracy Now!, which describes itself as an alternative, progressive media collaboration. Scahill apparently followed and questioned Clark after a rally.
"The truth was that first of all, we gave warnings to Milosevic that that was going to be struck," Clark said about the April 23, 1999, airstrike. "I personally called the CNN reporter and had it set up so that it would be leaked, and Milosevic knew. He had the warning because after he got the warning, he actually ordered the Western journalists to report there as a way of showing us his power, and we had done it deliberately to sort of get him accustomed to the fact that he better start evacuating it," adds Clark, according to the transcript that was posted on the Democracy Now! Web site Monday. "There were actually six people who were killed, as I recall."
Scahill tells Clark the 16 families hold Clark partly accountable for their loved ones' deaths, along with Milosevic.
"They were ordered to stay there," Clark responds.
Clark's campaign spokesman, Bill Buck, said he was not familiar with the Scahill interview but that it sounded like old news.
CNN said in a statement, "There is absolutely nothing new in the fact that the media was aware that RTS was a target."
Clark, in his book "Waging Modern War," says that before the strike, "we had planted a question" at a Pentagon news conference "hinting at a possible strike at the television facility."
Perhaps the "leak" Clark now discusses was the planted question.
Dragoljub Milanovic, former chief of Serbian television, is serving 10 years in a Serbian prison for negligence in failing to order the evacuation of workers, knowing that the building could be targeted. But the decision to bomb a television studio still reeks of wrong.
During the 1999 Kosovo air war, reporters from CNN, NBC and other media outlets used the Serbian television studios to file their reports. In a little-publicized incident that was investigated by Newsday reporter Patrick Sloyan, bombers were called back from an earlier run, midway to the TV station, apparently because Western reporters were still inside.
As a symbol, the attack, when it came, was wasted. Milosevic was gleeful about the strike, exploiting its propaganda value. He used the NATO attack to justify a crackdown on the opposition media that posed a threat to his hold on power, silencing many.
As a practical matter, the attack also proved worthless. Serbian television was back on the air in short order, using alternative broadcast outlets.
Clark's tenacious -- some would say single-minded -- drive to overcome allies' objections to this and other controversial targets contributed to perceptions both in European capitals and in the Pentagon that the NATO alliance was too ungainly to fight a war. NATO hasn't recovered from that nadir.
Clark has never had to answer for his actions. Amnesty International called the TV station bombing a war crime, but the United Nations war-crimes prosecutor for Yugoslavia declined to prosecute. Now voters have their chance to give their verdict on Clark's judgment.
http://www.startribune.com/stories/1519/4349504.html
