issue

Benjamin C. Works, Executive Director

--Speak the Truth and Shame the Devil--

SIT-REP 4-23; Friday, April 23, 1999

In this Issue: NATO v. The People of Yugoslavia; Bombing, Meeting, Not Dealing

NATO is meeting in Washington today and tomorrow, the war-mongers are circling wagons in a mutual-support group session.

Meanwhile, the NATO bombing campaign gets more curious, more indefensible. The other night, NATO bombed the landmark-former Royal Palace, now casa Milosevic. It was, we are told, "a command-control center" and instrument of the regime's power. The palace's importance was dismissed by describing its 1936-design as "Hollywood-influenced." I would observe that the Nazis did not directly bomb Buckingham Palace and the US deliberately avoided bombing Japan's Imperial Palace. Saddam's palaces have been bombed, but they were hardly historic.

Worse, NATO bombed the TV studios in Belgrade, another "instrument" of the regime's power; killing some technicians and journalists in the process. They were only tools of Milosevic's propaganda mill, our Orwellian briefers claim.

I thought NATO was bombing military command-control facilities, war materiel, military-industrial complex targets, lines of communications, SAM defenses and the army in the field. But those target sets are not enough for General Clark, his political masters and military planners.

In blasting bridges of minimal military importance, we are cutting power, telephone and water lines, making ordinary people uncomfortable and angry. In attacking consumer product factories, NATO is rendering ordinary people unemployed, and angry.

Yes, NATO is bombing munitions plants and fuel supplies, but this "strategic bombing" will not effect the Yugoslav military's extensive inventories distributed in caches throughout the country. Bombing oil stocks has not even prevented refugess from filling the tanks of their cars and tractors as they drive down into Macedonia and Albania.

To my fellow military theorists and strategists, I would propose that this is further evidence that Air Force Colonel John A Warden's "Centers of Gravity" theorizing, outlined in his 1988 book "The Air Campaign," is very badly flawed; worse when in the hands of politicians and political generals. It is an elegant theory that does not work in practice: go for the jugular. NATO attacked a palace as it was a command-control center, but any place where there is a phone and a chair is a command-control center for Mr. Milosevic or for any of his field commanders. So much for "Center of Gravity" analysis.

It is also apparent that the tempo of the NATO air campaign is not disrupting Mr. Milosevic's "Decision Cycle," or "OODA Loop," as defined by Air Force Colonel John Boyd. OODA stands for the commander's decision cycle of "Observe, Orient, Decide, Act." If the attacker moves in a tempo faster than the defender can decide and react, exploiting the fog of battle, the attacker wins. NATO is not affecting either the political or military decision cycles at this tempo of operations; the only surprise in its attacks is the nastiness of target selections, which only anger the people or cut off their access to ordinary information.

NATO says in striking the Belgrade TV studios it was shutting down Mr. Milosevic's propaganda mill, but the Yugoslav people have access to its government's spin and to other images via its media. More importantly, by Internet and telephone, they have access to the world's information, including NATO and American propaganda which is vastly more ludicrous in its neo-Orwellian spin, lies, dissembling, sophistry and misrepresentations, than Belgrade's garden-variety patriotic and conspiracy-theory prattle. And much of what Belgrade shows its people and the world is even true.

Bombing the Media: think about it American professionals; your telecommunications technical and professional colleagues are being killed on the basis that they are cynical lackeys of the cynically-manipulative Mr. Milosevic. But does killing a few engineers shut down Yugoslavia's war-fighting capability? Of course not.

A correspondent of mine has already labeled this bombing as "Censorship by Terror," and he is absolutely right. This ia another tantrum-bombing in a campaign waged by NATO against all international law including the UN Charter. So it is not only ineffective (the station was back on-air in 6 hours), as part of an anti-communications target set it was not moral (NATO is attacking free speech and information flow), it is not legal (under the UN Charter and NATO's own defensive charter), it was not productive (in weakening the sinews of military power), and thus, it was everything but wise. But that is the characteristic of too many target choices in this month-old barrage.

The NATO Meeting:

The NATO 50^th Anniversary Meeting is underway, sans tuxedos and champagne --it has vowed to further intensify its air campaign, and will Maybe NATO will take out the country's furniture and lumber industries next. NATO has overreached and violated international law, but as long as the leaders stay together, the 19 countries, comprising 500 millions, can continue to attack 10 million Serbs. But the Serbs don't seem to mind 50:1 odds; in this case to a warrior people with their backs to the wall in what is a long-running conspiracy, 50:1 is a fair fight, when the Serb cause is just and the other side can only offer sophistry, rhetoric and propaganda lies.

Still, Mr. Milosevic's strategy for defeating the KLA has not worked and it is time to find a reasonable deal to end this homicidal farce. NATO has shown some of its cards regarding a deal that gives both sides some cover in an exit. But to come to terms, if Yugoslavia is to demonstrate what the real agenda is, it may have to accept some armed presence in Kosovo in order to influence necessary adjustments in the constitutional-political framework to eliminate Rambouillet's fatal defects.

Is this NATO campaign really about Milosevic or is it really the product of the long-running trail of political money to Washington politicians? Only a genuine indication of flexibility from NATO and the final terms of a deal will determine that.

But is there a chance for a fair deal? As of Thursday, Mme Albright was still signaling a combination of conspiracy and her own ill-informed view of the Kosovo problem when she indicated the Albanian population could no longer be expected to live with Serbs (and others). ``I think it is very hard to imagine that the Kosovar people could go back and just live easily side by side with the Serbs who have committed these kinds of atrocities,'' the Secretary of State said. Who in Belgrade can trust that there is any chance to come to terms for a fair deal, with that statement made and with NATO obstructing the inclusion of an honest broker under the UN's Charter and auspices?

Rambouillet had critical defects in both political-constitutional arrangements and in military provisions for the rights of the NATO Peace-keeping Force. All these defects compromised sovereignty and sense. In terms of America's own constitutional history, there are parallels.

The military provisions' language dictated an unrestricted access and latitude for NATO forces not just in Kosovo, but throughout Yugoslavia. While it might be argued that this was to facilitate logistics and communications, the clauses read like England's "Quartering Act," the abuse of which was one of the principal causes of the American Revolution. This sort of military authority is restricted by the Third Amendment and by our Posse Comitatus Act, an outgrowth of the failed military occupation of the former Confederate States during Reconstruction.

Civil provisions regarding Kosovo's legislature and courts with no legislative restraint, no judicial appeal or review at the national level are reminiscent of Jefferson's "Kentucky and Virginia Resolves" during John Adams' Administration. They also call to mind South Carolina and the Nullification Crisis of 1832-33. These sticking points are as real and critical to all sides whether Slobodan Milosevic or any other person is President of Yugoslavia.

Odds & Ends:

I know from a surfeit of allegations and a scarcity of evidence that Britain, NATO, State, the Pentagon and the White House are lying to me; do you? The Boston Globe published an interesting article Wednesday, Number of missing Kosovars is challenged, by Charles A. Radin, Globe Staff and Louise D. Palmer, Globe Correspondent It will be in the SIRI-US archives and will be appended to the website version of this report "for fair use only."

I have also appended an article reporting on General Clark's command tantrum over wanting to bomb a Russian oil tanker in a Montenegro harbor, also "for fair use only."

Senator Connie Mack tried to mount a credible hearing on Capitol Hill yesterday, but it turned out to be just a Republican majority caucus meeting --an effort to build some informed consensus? Of all the witnesses present only Rear Admiral Mark Hill had any combat experience. Worse, after discussion of the major flaws in the NATO campaign, when asked about committing American ground troops, Lawrence Eagleburger weakly offered: "well, they're all volunteers." "If we are in it, we've got to win it," prevails over the many inconvenient facts of this bizarre case in international relations, led astray by toxic campaign contributions and a long-running publicity smear campaign.

The Boston Globe

April 21, 1999, Wednesday, City Edition

Number of missing Kosovars is challenged

BYLINE: By Charles A. Radin, Globe Staff and Louise D. Palmer, Globe Correspondent

WASHINGTON - Experts in surveillance photography, wartime propaganda, and Balkan diplomacy say there is every reason to believe that atrocities are being committed against the ethnic Albanian majority in strife-torn Kosovo, but little reason at this time to accept the huge numbers of dead and missing Kosovars that are being bandied about.

The US State Department said Monday that a half million ethnic Albanian men are unaccounted for in the disputed province, which is part of Serb-dominated Yugoslavia but 90 percent Albanian, and a department spokesman hinted that 100,000 may have met with foul play. The statements have stoked public outrage, but they are based on no publicly available documents or photographs.

"In all these cases, the first numbers we hear are overestimates," said Farouk El-Baz, a pioneer in photography from space who directs Boston University's Center for Remote Sensing.

"I am surprised we are not seeing more of what is on the ground. There must be more" that US officials could show, El-Baz added. "Sensing equipment is now at a state that should make these things more obvious and more certain."

In the 28 days since NATO began bombing Yugoslavia in what was portrayed as an effort to stop attacks on and expulsions of Kosovar Albanians, several instances of misinformation have sparked questioning of the information being released by alliance and US officials.

- After Yugoslavia charged that a refugee convoy had been bombarded by NATO jets, US General Wesley Clark, the supreme commander of NATO, spun the story around, blaming Yugoslav forces for an attack that killed dozens of civilians. Clark then retracted the statement, and NATO took responsibility for hitting civilians.

In the same incident, the Pentagon released a taped interview with an American pilot purportedly involved in the bombing, but it turned out that the pilot was describing a different mission.

- NATO and the State Department have repeatedly said that they had evidence that members of the Albanian intelligentsia were being executed. While some of those named were indeed killed, others turned up alive. Among them was Baton Haxhiu, who reportedly heard himself pronounced dead by NATO officials in Brussels. Haxhiu, the editor of the independent ethnic Albanian paper, Koha Ditore, was alive and in hiding.

- US and NATO officials have repeatedly asserted they had evidence that Yugoslav forces are committing crimes against humanity and committing mass genocide. This week, they said, these forces had dug mass graves pointing in the direction of Mecca, using a satellite photo to underscore their point.

"Long neat rows of individual graves, 150 very neatly dug graves - these are not mass graves," said MIT political science professor Barry Posen, a specialist in the history of warfare. "It's weird to think they would have a mass murder, recruit grave diggers, and properly orient the graves toward Mecca so as to give them some semblance of a proper Muslim burial."

Posen said hunger for news has led to nearly unquestioning acceptance of official statements and superficial appearances by the Western media, allowing the politicians and generals leading the air campaign to use the refugees to justify the bombing.

"Because the press has not gone back to investigate and dispel 'facts' that were staked out at the beginning that said there were already hundreds of thousands of refugees," Posen said, "NATO is able to absolve itself and make great use of very tragic pictures of people in very tragic circumstances to say, 'See, this is why we fought the war, to reverse this.' "

Nongovernmental specialists and analysts contacted about the various NATO claims uniformly said they believe atrocities are occurring, and stressed that they do not want to be interpreted as defending or excusing these acts.

But, said Robert Hayden, director of the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Russian and East European Studies, the State Department reports of 100,000 to 500,000 unaccounted-for Albanian men "are ludicrous - the story is just ludicrous."

"NATO is running a propaganda campaign, there's no question about that," Hayden said. "There have been lots of discrepancies in the official story, but what is interesting is that, until now, there has been amazingly little scrutiny of that story."

However, there are other explanations other than propaganda campaigning for NATO and the United States to hold back on high-altitude or space photos that could document the location of dead and missing Kosovars.

"When you show a picture, any good expert will know that this photo must have been taken by a certain type of platform, and that the camera characteristics are 1, 2, 3, 4," El-Baz said. "Governments do not want to tell the general public what the detailed capabilities of the sensing equipment are. And if you show the photo, an expert can make something like it, or try to evade it."

Swanee Hunt, who was US ambassador to Austria in the mid-1990s while the former Yugoslavian republic of Bosnia was the focus of ethnic wars, said she was looking at pictures of men lined up to be executed and piled into mass graves long before the photos were ever released publicly.

"The means we have of gathering information are very sophisticated. They are extraordinarily detailed," said Hunt, who runs a public policy program at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "But the intelligence community is very sensitive about their methods . . . maybe not because the Serbs are watching, maybe because the Chinese are."

USA Journal, April 21, 1999

IS GEN. CLARK TRYING TO START WORLD WAR III?

By JON E. DOUGHERTY

Contributing Editor: Brad Veer

During the Korean War, President Harry S. Truman had to fire Gen. Douglas MacArthur because he wanted to bomb China. Granted, China was indeed helping the North Koreans kill American soldiers by sending in tens of thousands of their own, but MacArthur wanted to do more than simply bomb the Chinese, who were massing troops across the Yalu River in the North before sending them in massed human wave assaults to the South.

He wanted to use nuclear weapons on China, 'if necessary'.

Yes, MacArthur -- fresh from the horrid memories of World War II -- rightly determined that Peking could throw, literally, scores of millions of men against him on the Korean peninsula. And, he concluded, the only way to stop that kind of onslaught was to nuke the People's Liberation Army and be done with it.

Truman, for his part, did not see the political wisdom in this -- and rightly so. But on the other hand, he should not have handed MacArthur a war he couldn't win easily or cheaply. In fact, he shouldn't have handed him one at all; we had no business fighting in Korea, just as we had no business in Vietnam or -- for that matter -- Yugoslavia, undeclared wars all.

President Bill Clinton has now handed that war to our generals and has, in Truman-esque fashion, set up the rules so that today's generals cannot win easily or cheaply either. Hence the frustration in Gen. Wesley Clark, commander of American and NATO forces conducting the Yugoslavian campaign, who is obviously distraught about this war. For if he is not -- and his is completely sane -- then what he said last week at a NATO "summit" meeting is decidedly insane. First of all, yes -- Gen. Clark wants to win this war, now that we're in it. But his way -- probably like MacArthur, if he had gotten permission to nuke Peking -- is liable to start World War III.

Obviously frustrated with increasing signs that Russia is definitely going to send an armada of warships to protect their legitimate interests in the Balkans, Clark told NATO personnel (and a few journalists as well) that we (meaning NATO and the U.S.) 'Should just bomb any Russian warship that sets foot in the Mediterranean.' In an attempt to spin this gaffe, one staffer immediately tried to qualified Clark's outburst by proclaiming that Clark 'obviously needs some sleep.' Yeah, or something. Perhaps some Valium?

So far the only journalist who has picked up on this is Robert Novak, who wrote about it in his Monday column this week. No one else -- including Clinton, supposedly the Commander-in-Chief who must answer for these kinds of 'misstatements' -- has even bothered to examine the implications of Clark's statement.

Even if Clark were tired, he would have had to think what he said out loud at some time or another. Tired or not, thoughts like that don't just "create" themselves out of thin air. We're talking about a lifelong professional American soldier, not some third-world banana republic dictator who likes to hear himself talk and whose forces couldn't bomb their way out of a 7-Eleven.

So the question clearly becomes, 'Does Gen. Wesley Clark really want to bomb Russian warships that enter the Mediterranean?' And if so, the next question ought to be, 'General, what are you smoking?' followed by, 'You're relieved.' To me, this is no 'minor slip of the tongue' or some simple misstatement. What makes this pronouncement even more ominous is Russia's response to NATO's bombing campaign before Clark made his statement -- utter contempt, and a rekindling of old Cold War feelings of mistrust and resentment towards the U.S. and the people of western Europe.

That's just what we needed right now, wasn't it?

Consequently, if you know you're making the number one military power in the region nervous or, at worst, fighting mad, just by sending a few bombers into a neighboring country, do you really want your top commander telling everyone we should just bomb any warships that country sends to the theater?

At least in MacArthur's case, the Chinese were actively fighting a war with us at the time. Clark has no such mandate; Russia may be covertly supplying Yugoslav forces (as a surrogate -- as we did for, say, Afghanistan) with military information and hardware, but Russia is officially neutral in this war so far.

So far. Who knows what they think now that they've heard what our top NATOcommander wants to do to any Russian warship he sees.

We are having a hard enough time handling Yugoslavia. Wanting to take on Russia too is worse than lunacy; it's homicidal mania. And it's suicide, for both Americans and Russians.

Gen. Clark should be relieved of his command now.