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“Remember why NATO spent 78-days bombing Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999?

There was the ethnic cleansing. The atrocities. The refugees chased out of Kosovo by the Serb army. The mass graves. The heaps of bodies tossed into vats of sulphuric acid at the Trepca mines.

NATO spokesman Jamie Shea said there were 100,000 Kosovars unaccounted for.

Remember?

If you’re like most people, you have at least a vague recollection of something that seemed to approach a modern-day Holocaust.

Problem is, none of it happened.”

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http://www.mediamonitors.net/gowans1.html

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” The French newspaper La Monde had some trouble swallowing the story. It reported on Jan. 21, 1999, a few days after the incident, that an Associated Press TV crew had filmed a gun battle at Racak between Serb police and KLA guerillas. Indeed, the crew was present because the Serbs had tipped them off that they were going to enter the village to arrest a man accused of shooting a police officer. Also present were two teams of KVM monitors.

It seems unlikely that if you’re about to carry out a massacre that you would invite the press — and international observers — to watch.

The film showed that as soon as the Serbs entered Racak they came under heavy fire from KLA guerillas positioned in the surrounding hills. The idea that the police could dig a trench and then kill villagers at close range while under attack troubled La Monde. So too did the fact that, entering the village after the fire fight to assess the damage and interview the villagers, the KVM observers saw no sign of a massacre. What’s more, the villagers said nothing about a massacre either.

Yet, when Walker returned the next day with the press — at the KLA’s invitation — there was the trench with the bodies.

Could the police have returned later on and carried out the massacre under cover of darkness?

That seems unlikely. Racak is a KLA stronghold. Serb police had already discovered that if they were going to enter the village they would have to deal with the guerillas. How could they torture, mutilate and cold-bloodedly kill villagers at close range while harassed by KLA gunfire?

And why, wondered La Monde, were there few signs of spent cartridges and blood at the trench?

And now there’s a report that the Finnish forensic pathologists who investigated the incident on behalf of the European Union, say there was no evidence of a massacre. In an article to be published in Forensic Science International at the end of February, the Finnish team writes that none of the bodies were mutilated, there was no evidence of torture, and only one was shot at close range.

Thirty-seven of the corpses had gunpowder residue on their hands, suggesting that they had been using firearms, and only one of the corpses was a woman, and only one was under 15 years of age. Not the picture Clinton painted of innocent men, women and children, dragged from their homes, and sprayed with gunfire.”

Long read.