Posted on 03/23/2005 3:32:49 PM PST by jb6
Its like a well run PR campaign, the projection of the image is more important than the substance.
He'll get over it I think? Me as usual will be sticking around.
Must be the four wives thing and the quicky devorce, not to mention raping the non-believers.
Mark you are so full of it! The Army awarded the My Lai murderers for bravery. It sent out false report of a great "victory" in routing out the "enemy" at My Lai. The Army, all the way up the chain of command, was eager to cover up the truth and magnify the lie. It would have succeeded had it not been for a few brave servicemen who told Seyomour Hirsh -- who published their stories and brought the My Lai to the surface eleven months after. There was no eagerness on the aprt of the Army to do anything but to forget and cover-up.
No, Mr. career officer, the Army was not eager at all to prosecute its own any more than it is eager to do it today. The Army had no choice but to put up a cangaroo court because it was caught with its pants down! Despite clear footage taken of the massacre, more than 80 suspected and more than a dozen indicted were excused. The ony conviction -- for "mass murder" (not war crime!) -- was Lt Calley, the most junior and very unpopular officer.
There was no chain-of-command responsibility. The most junior officer was the fall guy. Conveniently. But even that didn't satisfy our sense of justice -- his sentence was reduced from 20 to 10 years almost immediately, then he was put in "house arrest" (he was actually free to walk and shop on base!), and then he was pardoned by President Nixon.
Some of those bodies were dragged in the previous night from Western Kosovo after those bodies were killed in battle with Serbian MUP.
Evidence has been pointed to that directin but the protectors of that story will not reveal the truth til they are long gone.
That infighting killing should have never occurred if the Albanians took part in national, regional and local elections. They chose to snipe, kidnapp, torture Serb officials and civilians. Try looking at both sides of the story, mark.
NIce attempt of creative writing on the known topic of Viet Nam war history. Unfortunatelly, your career can not will not gain anything from it - you are no Major Powell.
One has to be fool to believe there are no war crimes when the war is going on. In Viet Nam, Kosovo or elsewhere.That is the reason why THE PLANNING AND INSTIGATING of WAR, i.e. crime against peace was the key crime in Nuremberg Military tribunal. Think who trained Albanian terrorists, who provided diplomatic and media coverage to them and who attacked Yugoslavia on theor behalf and you will get the picture how Nuremberg would apply in this case.
As of Serbian Army, more than 100 cases were brought up to military courts for criminal conduct of individuals during Kosovo conflict. Serbian code of military justice is similar to American or any other democratic nation.
I believe the number of trialed compares favorably to the number of American individuals brought to justice for crimes commited against Vietnamese civilians, adjusted per size of the armed forces and the number of dead civilians.
Also, I have noticed you use the term "THE SERBS" when depicting the events in Kosovo. Even if Serb army and police behaved in fashion you believe(and they did not) it gives you no right to smear the entire people with your accusations. This is RACISM. And career U.S. officer can not be a racist. I wonder what is really going on here.
On La Brea? Just south of I-10? I used to hit that one a lot--great biscuits!
You said: Seshelj has said many things. What's your point? His is not the opinion of every Serb
I was responding to the other poster's comments on extremist Slav elements in the Balkans. Seselj is an example--he's a Serb nationalist extremist, a racist who openly advocated a Greater Serbia and the ethnic cleansing of non- Serb untermenschen and who celebrated the 9-11 attacks on America. And he's the leader (that is, until he went to the Hague) of one of Serbia's largest political parties; the approximately 1/3 of the Serb electorate who think as he does.
Just FYI, General Gojovic's testimony, from 3/15-16 addresses the VJ's attempt to police itself, and provides the following, as of May 15th, 1999:
| Failure to Report | Article 201 (Mistreatment of detainees) | Crimes against Property | Crimes Against Life & Limb | Other Crimes | Total |
| 3,544 | 24 | 199 | 55 | 75 | 3,897 |
And provides further totals for the Military Courts for the period 3/24/99 - 6/10/99, with 18,541 criminal reports filed, resulting in 2,185 convictions, 360 acquittals, and 266 dismissals. Of the convictions, 32 were for crimes against Life and Limb, so any protestations as to the thousands of prosecutions brought by the VJ against it's own members needs to be viewed in this context, along with a request to provide actual convictions for murder. Considering that the case against Dragisa Petrovic, Nenad Stamenkovic, and Tomica Jovic was, I believe, the first case resulting in a conviction for murder, and that verdict wasn't pronounced until late 2000, General Gojovic's numbers could do with some further clarification.
Further, he stated that the mass graves in Izbica, which our friends hereabouts have spent so much time denying ever existed, was actually exhumed (no sh*t, Sherlock) and 101 of the bodies autopsied by a VJ team, which calls into question how those bodies eventually came to be found in a MUP facility with nobody ever being charged for the murders.
The logic behind Slobo's defence strategy continues to elude me.
As to Slobo's strategy, it appears that now that he's finally figured out that denial is unrealistic, he's got his military lawyer in to say that he did the best he could to enforce military discipline, but the NATO attacks disrupted his efforts.
As you referenced, it should be very entertaining to see how he tries to explain how bodies of Albanians killed in Kosovo have been found in mass graves outside Belgrade.
My favorite part of the testimony was when Gojovic was asked about a mass grave and he said it was not a mass grave, it was a large number of individual graves in a very small area.
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