SIT-4-14; Wednesday, April 14, 1999

In this Issue: Kosovo- Propaganda, Images and "The Art of the Deal, Part II"

Note: Important new material has been added to "Background Issues" files "KLA-Ideology-Leaders.html, " "Kosovo-1980s.html" and the "Croatia&Bosnia" propaganda file.

I hope the people of Yugoslavia's cities and towns have long-since taken the sensible precaution of putting tape on their windows during this ongoing NATO blitz. There are enough survivors of the 1941 and 1944 aerial bombardments to have spread this word already, I hope. But I mention this because I read a report from an English paper of somebody gravely wounded in the neck by glass shards. Taped crosses reduce the hazard of flying glass. Any tape will do, the bigger the window, the wider the tape. An "X": pattern was favored by Londoners in World War II. I'm sure tape is in short supply already.

The Art of the Deal II: The German proposal, setting reasonable conditions for a graceful way out of the bombing campaign, has generated a lot of diplomatic movement today. One of its more interesting conditions is that it requires the KLA to stay in position and to disarm when peacekeepers arrive.

I have repeatedly suggested that an international security presence in Kosovo would logically be under the OSCE --Helsinki Accord-- rather than NATO. Obviously the UN is another legitimate sponsor. The practical problem being wrestled with is that NATO has command headquarters and staffs, while the other sponsoring organizations do not. I think we are about to find that every Yugoslav government action is carefully documented and very different than we have been led to believe by NATO. But to settle things down and to set the record straight, some security and verification will be necessary.

Were it not for 22 days and nights of bombing, it would be easy to re-flag a NATO headquarters under the UN or OSCE. Even with the bombing, it is really the US, Britain, France and Germany which have been nastiest and which the Serbs are angriest at --and rightly so. Since a security force will need logistics, it would be best if those four countries ran the logistics in Greece, Macedonia and Albania and pay the bills, while other countries provide whatever military units and observers are needed inside Kosovo. I should think more military police and logistics units, rather than armored battalions are what's needed.

But who is going to man positions on the Albanian border to assure the KLA stops its attempts to infiltrate and restart its terror and guerrilla operations? I doubt the OSCE-UN force will be any more effective at that than the old UN force in Macdonia was at stopping smuggling into Serbia. So, I think there are a few meaningful details to be worked out.

Propaganda and Images: At the three-week mark, we are now well into the game of fabricated atrocities allegations --"genocide'-- atop a genuine population dislocation --"ethnic cleansing." It is clear that most of us believe all the atrocities alleged by the KLA are factual --victims say so. I do not believe in Santa or the Easter Bunny: in war, not only is truth the first casualty --so that emotion may overwhelm reason-- but in this conflict, it is clear that everybody is lying constantly and one must measure for relative merit in the magnitude of lies.

Photos lie to us in how they are "cropped," labeled and selected for presentation. In 1968-69 I was trained at Fort Holabird, MD as an aerial imagery interpreter, a "96D20," so I know the collection, processing and presentation of imagery and briefing "eyewash" very well. I have studied the paired photos of a graveyard in Pusto Selo, dating to April 6 and April 9. Yep, there are apparently two rows of individually dug graves in the photo as reprinted in the New York Times. But subtly, in the prior photo, where these graves are not visible, it is clear to my expert eye that some sort of haze-fog-smoke was clouding over a building to the top left of the photo and the area where the graves appear three days later. This haze also blurs details of some of the more visible buildings. So, here are some points:

1. Some of the graves may have been there already.
2. The graves are individually dug, not a "mass excavation."
3. Deliberately out there in a tidy fashion for all the world to see.
4. I also note, that though NATO has told us much about burned out towns and villages, in this hamlet, apparently near the heart of the "KLA Triangle" of Malisevo-Pec-Djakovica, the buildings and their roofs appear to be all intact. Hmm.
5. It is odd to me as an analyst that so little is labeled in the photos, an aspect of eyewash.

George Orwell warned repeatedly about the political abuse of language in essays as well as his novel 1984. The press likes to call group burials "mass graves" and began the practice last March after the Prekaz and Srbica fights. But Yugoslav authorities were intelligent enough to dig individual graves and provide coffins; they even invited the local imams to officiate. Now the massacre at Babi Yar filled enormous "mass graves" and there are big and small ones full of Serb victims of the Croat Fascist Ustasha in many places around Bosnia and Croatia itself. But what we are asked to accept as a mass grave does not fit a legal or factual definition. All "massacre" allegations repeated by NATO, the Pentagon, State and White House briefing officers come from KLA sources, yet we are expected to accept these as "verified." Our leaders think we all believe in Santa and the Easter Bunny. Unsurprisingly, some very intelligent talking heads actually do believe this nonsense.

I suspect the Kosovo Investigating Magistrate's office, which looked into all the violent goings-on in Kosovo prior to the bombing campaign is still plugging away from some sheltered office and has the facts in hand, ready to present to foreign observers, when this is all over.

Another story bugs me: the rape camp. Sunday, the talk of a rape camp had begun --20 girls, KLA informants swore-- had been ravished and murdered at a "Yugoslav Army training camp" in Djakovica, near the Albanian border. On Tuesday, Britain's Foreign Minister Robin Cook asserted that 30 girls had been ravaged there, as NATO's politicians sought valiantly to keep the credibility of the bomb plan's cause alive --there was an inexplicable bombed-out passenger train to counter-spin.

Alas, there is no "army training camp" of any kind in that town, or in Kosovo --remember, there's a rebellion going on there? The "training" bit was the unnecessary embellishment to an otherwise-plausible propaganda allegation. Djakovica, by the way, is overwhelmingly Albanian populated, or was before the stampede into Albania precipitated by bombing and continued operations against the KLA.

The "rape camp" stories in Croatia and Bosnia have long-since been debunked by creditable journalists in many countries, but never quite written off by the networks and major papers.-Thus, it is tried again --recycled. My archive on this is not anywhere near perfect yet but I have enough of a start to satisfy my core purpose.

A few days ago some residences in Pristina were hit and NATO tried to accuse the Serbs of dummying that attack as propaganda. The next day NATO had to admit its stray weapon had caused the wreckage. Then NATO had to explain away the destroyed passenger train. Today, NATO aircraft, which operate at altitudes above 10,000 in order to avoid heat-seeking, shoulder-fired missiles, whacked a column of what turned out to be Albanian refugees in tractors and trucks. NATO denied the attack. When confronted with the footage, NATO tried to raise suspicions, first about "human shields" then that Serbs attacked the refugee column in revenge for NATO strikes on nearby military vehicles. The Pentagon says NATO is now looking for gun-camera film, but will likely discover another foul-up by eager pilots.

"You've got to know the territory."

© Copyright 1999 by Benjamin Works - SIRIUS www.siri-us.com