Posted on 05/21/2003 3:34:18 PM PDT by uplandgame
David Hicks, a 27-year-old Australian expatriate, is among the captured Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters detained at Camp X-Ray in Cuba. Like John Walker Lindh, the so-called "American Taliban," Hicks is a disaffected western youth who became enchanted with Islam, and was caught in a revolutionary undertow that took him first to Pakistan and then to Afghanistan. Hicks' case is particularly interesting because the first stop in his revolutionary odyssey was the Balkans, where he joined the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army (or KLA).
During the U.S.-led NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, Hicks was one of several thousand international recruits who traveled to Kosovo to fight on behalf of the KLA. Most of those volunteers were seduced by the romantic image of the KLA as a hardy band of idealistic freedom fighters seeking to save Kosovo's besieged Albanian Muslims from a Nazi-like campaign of "ethnic cleansing."
The unappetizing truth about the KLA, as The New American reported prior to the 1999 NATO campaign, was that the group "is a terrorist criminal syndicate, Maoist in its ideological bent, hard-wired into the international heroin trade, and tightly allied with Osama bin Laden." That description was based on European press and intelligence reports and information compiled by our own government.
During the 78-day NATO bombing of Serbia, KLA forces seized control of key sectors in Kosovo. Today, that one-time Serbian province is now a UN protectorate ruled by the KLA. Once Kosovo was placed in the KLA's hands, it became a staging area for international narcotics trafficking, the European sex slave trade, and terrorism. The illicit profits generated by the KLA's narcotics and sex trade helped fund the al-Qaeda network, with lethal consequences for Americans. As demonstrated by the recent al-Qaeda attack against Americans in Saudi Arabia, our nation is still paying a price in blood for our alliance with the KLA.
Writing in the September 21, 2000 New York Review of Books, foreign affairs correspondent Timothy Garton Ash expressed amazement that the KLA, "a bunch of farmyard Albanian ex-Marxist-Leninist terrorists[,] managed to enlist the United States to win their battles for them." The most important weapon in the arsenal of the KLA and its allies, Ash pointed out, was the global media, which inundated the public with lurid atrocity tales. Thus conditioned, much of the public viewed Serbian ruler Slobodan Milosevic as the reincarnation of Hitler, bent on committing genocide against Kosovo Albanians. Accordingly, many Americans supported NATO's terror bombing of Serbia as a justified exercise in "humanitarian intervention."
At one point, as NATO warplanes battered civilian targets in Belgrade, Bill Clinton claimed that as many as 600,000 ethnic Albanians were "lying in mass graves [or] starving and too frightened to go home." Speaking to NATO combat pilots in Aviano, Italy on April 8, 1999, Secretary of Defense William Cohen raised the bid, accusing Serb forces of "engaging in rape, pillage, and mass murder on a scale that we have not seen since the end of World War II.... They have pushed over a million people onto a highway of hell that is littered with depravation and suffering that is almost unimaginable."
On another occasion, State Department spokesman James Rubin declared that 100,000 Albanians were being held at the municipal stadium in Pristina, Kosovo's provincial capital. As American media outlets breathlessly reported this claim as a fact, France's AFP wire service sent a reporter to Pristina to verify the story. That reporter found that the stadium was "deserted and showing no signs of recent occupation." The story about a makeshift concentration camp, it turns out, was fed to Rubin by KLA leader Hashim Thaci, and retailed to an uncritical media without being confirmed.
Following the so-called Kosovo War, as the KLA consolidated its control over the province, the Wall Street Journal ran an expose headlined: "War in Kosovo Was Cruel, Bitter, Savage; Genocide it Wasn’t: Tales of Mass Atrocity Arose and Were Passed Along, Often with Little Proof." One co-author of that December 31, 1999 story was Danny Pearl, who was later the victim of a hideous, videotaped murder by al-Qaeda terrorists. Pearl's supposed offense, in the eyes of the subhuman wretches who killed him, was to be an American and a Jew. But the murder may also have been, at least in part, payback for Pearl's efforts to expose the KLA's campaign of deception during the Kosovo conflict.
In the Journal expose, Pearl and co-author Robert Block described the propaganda efforts of KLA functionary Halit Barani, "a former actor with a Karl Marx beard who summarizes Serb war crimes by showing a photo of a baby with a smashed skull. [He] spent the war moving from village to village with his manual typewriter, calling in reports to foreign radio services and diplomats with his daily allotment of three minutes on a KLA satellite phone."
Barani’s fertile mind and antique typewriter were the primary source for many of the lurid atrocity accounts cited by official sources during NATO’s assault on Yugoslavia. When Pearl and Block asked about the reliability of his stories, Barani replied: "I told everybody it was supposition, it was not confirmed information.... For the Serbs, anything is possible." Significantly, Barani has been tapped to serve as an "expert" witness for the prosecution in the UN’s war crimes trial of former Serbian ruler Slobodan Milosevic.
After the Serbs surrendered and allowed NATO and UN forces to occupy Kosovo, forensic investigators from the UN and the FBI were dispatched to collect evidence of genocide. Curiously, however, the mass graves that figured so prominently in NATO's war propaganda failed to materialize.
The U.S. and British governments insisted that "ethnic cleansing" had claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent Kosovo Albanians. However, Spanish forensic surgeon Emilio Perez Pujol, who was sent by the UN’s war crimes Tribunal to unearth evidence of genocide, found that the identifiable remains of civilian victims in Kosovo are numbered in the hundreds. This is what one would expect in a brutal civil war — rather than thousands or tens of thousands of casualties resulting from a campaign of genocide. In an interview published by The Times of London on October 31, 1999, Pujol described the notion that "mass graves" exist in Kosovo as "a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines, because we did not find one — not one — mass grave."
(Excerpt) Read more at thenewamerican.com ...
A cease-fire was negotiated between the Serbian government and the KLA in late 1998, but it did not stop the fighting. According to former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, 80 percent of the cease-fire violations in the months before the NATO bombing campaign began were committed by the KLA.
The United States and its NATO partners pressured the Serbian government to agree to a set of demands that purported to end the ethnic violence in Kosovo. When Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic refused, NATO bombed. In a speech on March 24, 1999, the day the bombing began, Clinton denounced Milosevic for rejecting “the balanced and fair peace accords that our allies and partners, including Russia, proposed last month, a peace agreement that Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians courageously accepted.” However, at negotiations in Rambouillet, France, NATO effectively demanded the equivalent of unconditional surrender from the Yugoslavian government.
Clinton’s war against Serbia epitomized his "moralism", his arrogance, his refusal to respect law, and his fixation on proving his virtue by using deadly force, regardless of how many innocent people died in the process.
Shirley, you jest.
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