-Caveat Lector- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/"> </A> -Cui Bono?- >From antiwar.com {{<Begin>}} Behind the Headlines by Justin Raimondo Antiwar.com March 31, 2000 MASTERS OF DECEIT: KOSOVO AND THE MEDIA The media told us that a reenactment of the Holocaust was going on in Kosovo, with the Serbs in the role of the Nazis and the Kosovar Albanians standing in for the Jews – and that was a lie. For it turned out that approximately 2,108 persons from both sides were killed in the pre-bombing phase of the Kosovo conflict – approximately the number of Serbs who have been kidnapped and killed since the "liberation" of Kosovo. The media told us that the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) was the Albanian equivalent of George Washington and the Founding Fathers, who were waging a righteous war against their Serb oppressors – and that, too, was a lie. Now even American reporters – during the war willing instruments played expertly by NATO – are forced to report the truth: that the KLA is now engaged in "cleansing" the last Serb from what is now an almost ethnically and religiously "pure" Albanian Muslim state. The media told us that the Serbs had developed a systematic "plan," enigmatically known as "Operation Horseshoe," to eliminate all Albanians from Kosovo, either by killing them outright or else driving them out of the country, which the media – in this country and abroad – reported as fact. Now we know that this tall tale should have been called "Operation Horseshit," because there was no such plan. While our own legislators in Congress haven't got the smarts or the balls to raise the issue of "who sold us on Kosovo?", German deputies are calling the NATO- crats on it, including some from the pro-government pro-war Green Party. AUTHOR, AUTHOR! The media did not simply allow itself to be deceived – they were active participants and the authors of this deception. Journalists were not only willing instruments of NATO but functioned as a kind of Greek chorus for the most extreme wing of the War Party: during the latter stages of the conflict, they ceaselessly and shamelessly bombarded officials with different variations of a single question: "Isn't it time to bring in the ground troops?" Now that the truth, or at least some of it, is beginning to come out, are they fessing up to their role as the courtier press, and beating their breasts with a thousand mea culpas? Of course not. THE NERVE Not only are they refusing to acknowledge their pernicious role as frontline soldiers in NATO's war on the truth, but they actually have the nerve to take umbrage at their postwar critics, such as Philip Knightley, who has called the Kosovo war "a disaster for journalism." During the war, Knightley – the author of The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-maker, which has just come out in a new edition including sections on the Gulf War and Kosovo – saw through the barrage of propaganda and predicted that we would arrive at precisely this pass: "The theory at briefings is simply (to) appear open, transparent and eager to help. Never go in for summary repression or direct control; nullify rather than conceal undesirable news; control the emphasis rather than the facts; balance bad news with good and lie directly only when you are certain the lie won't be found out during the course of the war. Looking back on history we see that these sorts of lies often don't surface until too late to make any difference to the outcome. Five, 10 years or 20 years later you suddenly discover the people you trusted to tell you what was happening were lying to you." DOWN THE MEMORY HOLE Knightley recently appeared before the Freedom Forum, a gathering of journalists sponsored by a group devoted to maintaining the integrity of the news media and its independence from governments, where he made his "disaster" comment – to a storm of protests from a mob of government toadies masquerading as the Fourth Estate. "I'm afraid truth was the first casualty in the reporting of the war in Kosovo, as it is in every war," said Knightley, warning that unless journalists developed some form of institutional memory to remind them of the lessons learned in previous wars, his was a "gloomy assessment of the future of war reporting." Michael Jermey of Britain's ITN had the temerity to stand up and declare: "I think, in the Kosovo conflict, television journalists from a lot of organizations did some very good work trying to get at the truth." This from the representative of a "news" organization that not only falsified reports of an alleged Bosnian "concentration camp" with its infamous "Photo that Fooled the World," but launched a malicious campaign to silence its critics and cover-up its own complicity in the selling of an immoral and increasingly disastrous war. Are we to be spared nothing? The report did not mention whether Jermey said it with a straight face. But I am willing to bet that he did. In the Orwellian world in which we are living, it brings to mind a quote from Eric Blair's novel, 1984: "It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself-anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face… was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime." [page 54] THE BRAZEN ONES Mr. Jermey was not alone in his brazenness. The shills for NATO's lies were in an uproar at this conference, with Mark Laity, a former BBC correspondent who made the effortless transition to being a deputy to NATO spokesman Jamie Shea, demanded that Knightley withdraw a comment that he, Laity, had become a "propagandist for NATO." In a heated reply, Knightley refused. Addressing the conclave by telephone from Brussels, Laity burbled: "I think the important thing [in assessing coverage of the Kosovo conflict] is honest intent. Now, NATO didn't get it right all the time, but I didn't believe then and I don't believe now they were deliberately lying ... NATO was trying as far as it could to get it right, and Belgrade wasn't." NATO's intent can be seen as we witness the consolidation of KLA rule in Kosovo, and as NATO troops invade the so- called demilitarized zone. A pretext for a renewed war is in the making; in light of this, the debate at the conference, and Knightley's remarks, are particularly ominous. RAH, RAH, SIS BOOM BAH The media, far from beating their breasts or even admitting that there is a lesson to be learned, seem content with their role as cheerleading rather than reporting the war. In response to Knightley's denunciation of the Western media as little more than the journalistic division of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the cry went up: "What about Paul Watson's reporting for the Los Angeles Times?" But Watson's fearlessly honest dispatches – filed from inside Kosovo during the war – stand out precisely because he is the exception that proves the rule. Such weak apologias merely served to underscore the trenchant point made by Knightley: that the objective of the War Party in the media was to create two illusions – that the facts about the war were actually being reported, and that everything coming out of Belgrade could be dismissed out of hand. At the height of the media-generated war hysteria, the Freedom Forum reported Knightley's vigorous dissent: "The hard facts on the battleground are simply not there and the hard facts in the newspapers are not there. Again it's opinion pieces or supposition,' he said. A second illusion that had taken hold was a more dangerous one, Knightley said. This was the idea put forth by NATO and Pentagon spokesmen that 'we as spokesmen for our side will always tell you the truth and that Belgrade on the other hand will only pump out propaganda.'" KNIGHTLEY VINDICATED The assembled servitors of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton never laid a glove on Knightley: the closest they got was with one Nancy Durham of the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., who claimed that Knightley had erred in discussing her reporting from Kosovo. Durham, it seems, had reported the story of a young woman who claimed her young sister had been mercilessly slaughtered by Serbs. Vengeance, the young woman movingly explained, was her motive in joining the KLA, and the resulting CBC report was part of a larger campaign to depict our noble allies in a favorable light. As it turned out, however, the woman had made up her story out of whole cloth – like so many of the stories told by the KLA and their recruits among the refugees, that were transcribed word-for-word by the Western media and reported as fact. Durham reported the deception in a later story, but Knightley apparently failed to note this in the new edition of his book or to contact her. In graciously conceding his error, however, Knightley once again is vindicated in his prediction that one day, "five, ten, or twenty years later," we would be sitting around trying to figure out how they got away with it. THE ROLE OF THE INTERNET Knightley's prediction was essentially correct, but please note that he was off by quite a few years, and this brings me to a crucial point: Knightley's pessimism about the future of wartime reporting may be true when it comes to the Old Media, and in that I am including the Internet editions of most of the old print-and-telecast news organizations. But the reality is that it is not five, ten, or twenty years later that a revised history of the Kosovo war and its coverage by the media is being put together, piece by piece, but only a year has passed – and already most of the pieces of the puzzle have been put together and made public. Nearly the whole truth is out – thanks almost entirely to the power and reach of the Internet and Internet-based institutions and news organizations, which has created a climate of public opinion increasingly hostile to any further intervention in Kosovo. The interventionists may have "won" the war on the ground in Kosovo, but they are losing the battle for hearts and minds on the home front. IT ISN'T TOO LATE TO STOP THE MADNESS Even as the Republicans in the House join their Clintonian compadres in a vote to fund Clinton's war in Kosovo – and make a new outbreak almost inevitable – opposition is building in the Senate. It isn't too late to stop this mad plunge into the European quagmire – but if we do fall into that particular abyss, we'll know who to blame, now, won't we? Trent Lott will have a lot to answer for if and when the body bags start coming home. The blood of American and Serbian patriots will be on his hands, as well as on Clinton's and the Democrats, if he goes along with Clinton's Kosovo adventure. This could have a huge impact on the presidential race, with Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan appealing to the huge antiwar majority – and racking up millions of votes on the strength of that issue alone. GOTTA LOTTA Lott's complicity in sending billions to Kosovo would be compounded by the treachery of the Republican House leadership: Speaker Hastert made a personal appeal on behalf of the President's bill. Worse, the Speaker and his enforcers led the effort to kill a proposed amendment that would have required the President to order the "safe, orderly and phased withdrawal" of the US occupation force by June 1 if the Europeans don't start paying out millions of dollars in pledges to fund the Kosovo operation. The amendment failed, 219-200. If Senator Lott caves in to the tremendous pressure from Establishment types in the GOP, as well as the White House, then he is running the risk of tying the Kosovo albatross around the neck of his own party during a crucial election year. Does he really want to hand this issue over to Pat Buchanan – and perhaps deprive Boy Dubya of his hereditary right to put his presidential feet up on the desk in the Oval Office? You gotta lotta things to think about, Senator Lott – and if I were you, I would ponder long and hard. Please Support Antiwar.com A contribution of $25 or more gets you a copy of Justin Raimondo's Into the Bosnian Quagmire: The Case Against U.S. Intervention in the Balkans, a 60-page booklet packed with the kind of intellectual ammunition you need to fight the lies being put out by this administration and its allies in Congress. And now, for a limited time, donors of $40 or more receive a copy of Ronald Radosh's classic study of the Old Right conservatives, Prophets on the Right: Profiles of Conservative Critics of American Globalism. Send contributions to Antiwar.com 520 S. Murphy Avenue, #202 Sunnyvale, CA 94086 or Contribute Via our Secure Server Credit Card Donation Form Your Contributions are now Tax-Deductible Back to Antiwar.com Home Page | Contact Us {{<End>}} A<>E<>R ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Integrity has no need of rules. -Albert Camus (1913-1960) + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + "Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your common sense." --Buddha + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly. -Bertrand Russell + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + "Everyone has the right...to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers." Universal Declaration of Human Rights + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + "Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut." Ernest Hemingway + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Forwarded as information only; no endorsement to be presumed + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without charge or profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this type of information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soap-boxing! 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 credence 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
