America pulling out of Germany

[MKSheppard]

http://www.findarticles.com/cf_dls/m0FQ ... icle.jhtml

US and British officials told us that at least 100,000 were murdered in Kosovo. A year later, fewer than 3,000 bodies have been found.(False figues from the Kosovo Liberation Army promulgated as fact.)(Brief Article)
New Statesman, Sept 4, 2000, by JOHN Pilger

After more than a year, the silence of those who wrote and broadcast the propaganda for Nato's "humanitarian war" over Kosovo remains unbroken: they who answered the Prime Minister's call to join "a great moral crusade" against a regime that was "set on a Hitler-style genocide equivalent to the extermination of the Jews during World War Two".

Something had to be done, they insisted. After all, by March last year, 500,000 Kosovar Albanians were missing, feared dead, according to the US State Department. In mid-May, the US defence secretary, William Cohen, said: "We've now seen about 100,000 military-aged men missing... They may have been murdered." Two weeks later, David Scheffer, the US ambassador at large for war crimes, increased the 100,000 figure to as many as "225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59". The British press took their cue. "Flight from genocide," said the Daily Mail. "Echoes of the Holocaust," chorused the Sun and the Mirror.

As the bombing dragged on, the facade began to crack; British television viewers were shown the ruins of trains and refugee convoys attacked by Nato aircraft, and their victims. "We have a public relations meltdown," said someone at Downing Street. On cue, the then Foreign Office minister, Geoffrey Hoon, announced that, "in more than 100 massacres", about 10,000 ethnic Albanians had been killed, adding that "the final toll may be much worse". Although inexplicably reduced from the original claims of 500,000 and 100,000, this was a substantial and utterly unsubstantiated figure.

By mid-June, with the bombardment over, international forensic teams began subjecting the province to minute examination. The American FBI arrived to investigate what was called the "largest crime scene in the FBI's forensic history". Several weeks later, having found bodies but not a single mass grave, the FBI went home. The Spanish forensic team also returned home, its leader complaining angrily that he and his colleagues had become part of "a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines, because we did not find one -- not one -- mass grave".

At grave site after grave site, the story was similar. Reports in the western media, sourced to local people but often traced back to the Kosovo Liberation Army (as with the figures quoted above), became unbelievable. One explanation was that the Serbs had come in the night and taken the bodies away. "Where," wrote Michael Parenti in his review of the investigation, "was the evidence of mass grave sites having been disinterred? Where were the new grave sites now presumably chock-full of bodies?"

Perhaps the most significant disclosure, confirmed by the International Criminal Tribunal last October, was that the Trepca lead and zinc mines contained no bodies. Trepca was central to the drama of the "genocide" investigation: the corpses of more than 1,000 murdered Albanians were presumed hidden there, many of them disposed of in vats of hydrochloric acid, according to Nato and American officials. According to the Mirror, there was evidence of the "mass dumping of executed corpses" and "Auschwitz-style furnaces". Not a single body was found: no teeth, no remains.

Last November, the Wall Street Journal published the results of its own investigation and dismissed "the mass-grave obsession". Instead of "the huge killing fields some investigators were led to expect ... the pattern is of scattered killings [mostly] in areas where the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army had been active". The Journal concluded that "Nato stepped up its claims about Serb 'killing fields"' when it "saw a fatigued press corps drifting toward the contrarian story: civilians killed by Nato's bombs". This propaganda, said the newspaper, could be traced back to the KLA; many of the most lurid and prominently published atrocity reports attributed to refugees and other sources were untrue. "The war in Kosovo was cruel, bitter, savage," said the paper. "Genocide it wasn't." Such honesty was rare.

Nato bombed, according to George Robertson, the then defence secretary, "to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe" of mass expulsion and killing. In December, the Organisation for Security and Co- operation in Europe, whose monitors were in Kosovo until just before the bombing, released its report on the war. This received almost no publicity in Britain. It confirmed that most of the crimes against the Albanian population had taken place after the bombing began: that is, they were not a cause but a consequence of the Nato campaign.

Western gravediggers have found a total of 2,788 bodies, and not all of them war crimes victims. On 7 June this year, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) published a list of 3,368 missing persons whose names had been given to it by families from all communities in Kosovo, spanning January 1998 to mid-May this year. The ICRC says that a substantial number could be alive, among refugees scattered throughout Europe.

What is now beyond doubt is that the figures used by London and Washington, and by much of the media, were ludicrous inventions. The killings in Kosovo were despicable and tragic, but to equate them with genocide and the Holocaust is to mock the truth with profanity. With the exception of the Guardian, almost none of this has been reported in Britain. The Red Cross report was virtually ignored in this country. This is understandable; among the journalists who swallowed Nato's and their government's lies were the truly committed and triumphant, who wrote that "when the mass graves are opened, the opponents of this humanitarian war should apologise".

The defenceless population upon whom Nato's bombs rained down night after night, the 400 to 600 who died, blown up in crowded passenger trains and buses, in factories, television stations, libraries, old people's homes, schools and 18 hospitals, many cut to pieces by the RAF's thousands of "unaccounted for" cluster bombs which fragment into shrapnel, require an apology from the propagandists; because, as Nato's planners never tired of saying at their post-bombing seminars, without journalists "on board", they could never have pulled it off.

Robert Fisk, Britain's greatest war reporter, has called them sheep, gulled by professional manipulators. Take the bombing of the Belgrade TV headquarters and the murder of staff such as make-up ladies. Amnesty International, in a rare departure, called this "a deliberate attack on a civilian object, and as such constitutes a war crime". Shortly before the bombing, the Nato mouthpiece Jamie Shea had given a written assurance that the TV building would not be attacked.

With the media on board, Nato could go forth. At one "private preliminary review by Nato experts" of the bombing (reported in the Daily Telegraph), it was agreed that "any future operation by Nato is likelier to involve heavier, more ruthless attacks on civilian targets ..."

Having taken sides in what was a bitter but low-level civil war on the scale of Ireland in the 1970s, and having deliberately blocked a peaceful solution at the phoney Rambouillet "talks", Nato was able to finish off the west's "strategic concept" of destroying Yugoslavia - without recourse to the United Nations or international law. It was all based on a marriage of lies, thanks largely to those journalists who acted as the handmaidens of great and murderous power.

Kosovo is today, more than ever, a terror state, run by Mafia-style criminals with links to the KLA: the people who last year could call Robin Cook directly on their mobile phones.

More than 200,000 Serbs and Roma have since been driven out, with few headlines here. The Americans have built one of their biggest military bases in the world, Camp Bondsteel, which achieves a long-held strategic aim of Washington to straddle the Balkan transit routes. Stand by for their next humanitarian adventure.

COPYRIGHT 2000 New Statesman, Ltd.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group

[MKSheppard]

Yeah it's funny, the REAL ethnic cleansing did not begin until after the war,
when KFOR took over, and the KLA promptly ran about 100,000 Serbs
out of Kosovo.

Vympel will probably be along later tonight to school you; this is his pet
project.

[Illuminatus Primus]

Forget not that the light/FCS forces will be supplanted by heavy armor like the M1A2 in extended deployments.

You may be confusing the SBCT with the FCS- though the Stryker Brigades aren't meant to supplant the 'legacy' forces- there are no plans for a new US MBT or IFV, and the M1 is expected to be gone by around 2020- the FCS will be the new face of the US military. I don't like the concept personally- there are still plenty of low-tech things that can kill you- merely giving up on thick armor because you can't stop the best of the best seems like foolishness.

I agree. For occupation you need the armored can, but for rapid deployment FCS seems sound. DARPA/DoD charts I've seen outline the introduction of heavy forces including the M1 as a tertiary step in long campiagns (where the first is air support and strikes, second is FCS/light forces, and third is heavy armor/mechanized).

[Illuminatus Primus]

Sheppard is right. Kosovo was a farce (Bosnia was SNAFU, but not as bad as Kosovo). Clinton did misrepresent because no real ethnic cleansing/genocide was going on.

Bush's Administration lied, but no one calls Clinton on the nonexistant genocide in Kosovo and the subsequent intervention which installed terrorists as a legitimate authority, and resulted in overtaxing the military as its budget was being cut, essentially flushing billions upon billions of dollar in R&D for various projects as well as in war materiel that couldn't be maintained down the toilet.

There's at least concievable or arguable positive national security and U.S. foriegn power changes due to Operation IRAQI FREEDOM,even if perhaps only as neocon imperialist wetdreams.

That at least, IMHO, is better than the criminally incompetant foriegn policy which did nothing but totally waste countless sums of cash while simultaneously accomplishing nothing for U.S. interests and showing our foriegn policy to be morally bankrupt and our government to be complete idiots.

[MKSheppard]

That at least, IMHO, is better than the criminally incompetant foriegn policy which did nothing but totally waste countless sums of cash while simultaneously accomplishing nothing for U.S. interests and showing our foriegn policy to be morally bankrupt and our government to be complete idiots.

And one that Wes Clark was in charge of, and almost started a shooting
war between NATO and Russian troops. Oh yeah, and Slobo got elected
to the Serbian parliment recently or somefink

[Col. Crackpot]

That at least, IMHO, is better than the criminally incompetant foriegn policy which did nothing but totally waste countless sums of cash while simultaneously accomplishing nothing for U.S. interests and showing our foriegn policy to be morally bankrupt and our government to be complete idiots.

And one that Wes Clark was in charge of, and almost started a shooting
war between NATO and Russian troops. Oh yeah, and Slobo got elected
to the Serbian parliment recently or somefink

i heard about that. how does one get elected while sitting in a cell at the Hauge anyway?

[MKSheppard]

There's at least concievable or arguable positive national security and U.S. foriegn power changes due to Operation IRAQI FREEDOM,even if perhaps only as neocon imperialist wetdreams.

Well, we do now have a country where we can base troops out of that
isn't beholden to a country full of oil sheiks who are afraid of fundies
(Saudi Arabia), and well, that's a good thing, we removed, or are in the
process of removing the last US troops from Saudi Arabia, one of Osama's
goals, although we accomplished that in a way he didn't want.

[jegs2]

link

What the article does not mention is that various small bases around the world would have an equipment "grid" on which units like 3ID could fall on short to no notice. Contractors would maintain tanks, IFVs and supporting vehicles and equipment with a minimally-manned military garrison. In the event of trouble, something akin to an SBCT would be air-lifted to the trouble spot, along with carriers and Air Force support. Then heavy units (like 3ID) would be airlifted to the small base maintaining the "grid" of equipment, draw their vehicles and equipment, and then move out to augment the RRF force (SBCT, Air Assault, or Airborne unit). There is simply no longer a need to maintain entire divisions worth of forces overseas, considering the rapid force-projection capabilities of the US military...

[Lonestar]

The M8 armoured gun system. It was designed to combine a tanks firepower with a highly mobile, air-droppable vehicle.

so...something that did the job of a Stryker?

[Beowulf]

The M8 armoured gun system. It was designed to combine a tanks firepower with a highly mobile, air-droppable vehicle.

so...something that did the job of a Stryker?

Except better.

[Rubberanvil]

hmm... too bad, they were a nice economical factor. the GIs spent a shit load of tax dollars in german shops and bars.

What the G.I.s would spends on their own is little compare to what their spouses and thier kids would spend.

[Stormbringer]

Milosevic was a bad guy like Saddam so whats wrong with toppling him by force ?

Except we didn't do anything to oust Milosevic by force; he was ousted by the people. We had little to do with it.


The problem isn't that we did something. It's that we pussy footed around and so made a mess of things while not doing much good. Clinton wanted so badly to avoid any casulties that he pretty much tied our forces hands.