S. Herman
Despite the overwhelming
politicization and abuse of judicial process that has characterized the
International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY, or Tribunal)
from its inception, discussed in Part 1, the Western new humanitarians (David
Rieff, Michael Ignatieff, et al.) and mainstream media have taken its work as
entirely principled and truth- and justice-seeking. Demonization, an intense
focus on worthy victims, and an automatic acceptance of official perspectives,
quickly creates a consensus “truth” that is protected by repetition and an
avoidance of incompatible information. Everybody can then repeat the established
line and anybody who contests it becomes an “apologist for Milosevic.”
Several dozen new
humanitarians have played a major role in selling the official line. They have
uniformly accepted the ICTY as a legitimate judicial body dispensing justice.
For Aryeh Neier, president of the Open Society Institute (funded by Soros),
establishing the Tribunal was “the most important step by the United Nations to
protect human rights since it adopted the Universal Declaration.” The claim that
the Tribunal is a “tool of the U.S.” he dismisses as unworthy of refutation (WP,
May 5, 1998; NYRB, March 8, 2001). Neither Neier nor any of the new
humanitarians discuss the significance of the Tribunal’s NATO-power origination,
purpose, funding, and staffing; its less than stellar adherence to western legal
standards; or its service as NATO’s public relations arm. Their assumption of
the benevolent purposes of NATO’s leaders and of the unique villainy of NATO
targets precludes critical analysis.
Michael Ignatieff
says, “The great virtue of legal proceedings is that their evidentiary rules
confer legitimacy on otherwise contestable facts,” but he never examines the
evidentiary rules of the Tribunal or evaluates the criticisms made of them; he
knows a priori that it does not dispense “victor’s justice” (Harpers,
March 1997; “NewsHour With Jim Lehrer,” May 31, 2000). Apart from expressing
approval, neither Ignatieff nor his comrades discuss the Tribunal’s indictment
of Milosevic on May 22, 1999, while NATO was bombing Yugoslavia. This remarkable
politicization of an alleged judicial body did not bother the new humanitarians,
nor did the Tribunal’s refusal even to investigate the numerous claims of NATO
law violations. Yale law professor Ruth Wedgwood, who misleadingly calls Del
Ponte the “internationally appointed prosecutor of war crimes,” praises Del
Ponte’s report in which she declines even to open an investigation as “carefully
done,” resting on “emerging” standards of law, and recognizing that “there is
uncertainty and indistinctness in targets” in a “humanitarian intervention” (Fox
News, June 16, 2000). Having taken sides, no rationalization is too absurd; the
asserted moral ends justify the means.
The
politicization of the Tribunal serves the new humanitarians well. They regularly
cite its findings as definitive confirmation of what they want to prove in their
campaigning. For David Reiff, the Tribunal indictments of Karadzic and Mladic
“FOR GENOCIDE” (his emphasis) show what a determined West could have done at any
time to bring justice to the Balkans (Slaughterhouse, 1996). For Ian Williams,
Carla Del Ponte’s estimate of probable killings in Kosovo is the final authority
that “should have put questions concerning the death toll to rest”
(Knight-Ridder/Tribune, Nov. 23, 1999). Rieff points out that national
sovereignty no longer protects human rights abusers, “as Slobodan Milosevic
learned when at the height of the Kosovo conflict, he was indicted for war
crimes by an international tribunal at the Hague” (World Policy Journal,
Summer 2000). Rieff takes it for granted that this indictment was carried out by
a dispenser of justice—its public relations service to NATO during the NATO
bombing of Serbia is unmentioned, perhaps never even strikes this war enthusiast
and propagandist.
A
Prosecutor’s Dream Team
The preeminent feature of
media coverage of the Tribunal has been their uncritical following of the U.S.
official and Tribunal prosecutor lead in reporting and interpreting the
Tribunal’s work. They simply take Tribunal actions, usually the indictment or
seizure of some preferred (Serb) villain, report the prosecutor’s charges in
detail and without challenge, provide no critical historical context, and never
analyze the selectivity in choice of villain or the political context of the
Tribunal’s work.
>From the
beginning the media have never asked basic questions: Does the Security Council
have a legal right to establish a judicial body like the tribunal? Do the
funding, staffing, and police service of NATO entail NATO influence or control?
Do the dominant members of the Security Council, who also dominate NATO, have
political goals that might compromise the judicial efforts of a Tribunal?
Instead of
addressing these questions the media have assumed that justice was being served,
with the benevolent NATO properly, perhaps belatedly, trying to bring “another
Hitler” to justice. But such assumptions violate the principles of objectivity
whose use supposedly differentiates a free from a totalitarian press. It will
not do to say that “in this case” the truth was obvious, because the truth
should always be kept open to question—and the media have repeatedly gotten on
similar bandwagons of “obvious” truth that turned out to be untrue (the
KGB-Bulgarian connection to the shooting of the Pope in 1981, the Soviet’s
deliberate shooting down of Korean civilian airliner 007 in 1983, the latter
later admitted by the New York Times to have been “The Lie That Was Not
Shot Down” [editorial, January 18, 1988]).
The media
occasionally touch upon the problem areas, but they fail to acknowledge their
relevance and importance and, instead of building on the challenging information
they quickly move on. Jamie Shea’s NATO press conference statement of May 17,
1999, that NATO had no worries about prosecution by the Tribunal because the
NATO powers finance the Tribunal and the prosecutor does only “what we allow her
to,” was entirely ignored by the U.S. mainstream media, despite its clear
assertion of Tribunal subservience to external political control.
On National
Public Radio (NPR), the issue of whether NATO could be prosecuted for war crimes
came up on “All Things Considered” (March 24, 2000), but the program dealt only
with U.S. officials’ annoyance at the question, and the resultant possible
straining of relations between the United States and the Tribunal. U.S.
officials pointed out that the Tribunal “depends heavily on the United States
for funding, personnel, and the collection of evidence,” and that raising the
question of NATO crimes had led to U.S. authorities already “putting
bureaucratic obstacles in the way of Tribunal requests.” With only U.S., NATO,
and Tribunal officials commenting on the issue, its scope was narrow, and the
NPR reporters did not ask what kind of justice results from a judiciary so
dependent on an interested power.
This same bias
pervaded the coverage of Del Ponte’s June 2000 decision to exonerate NATO from
war crimes charges without even opening an investigation. The major New York
Times article on this decision was entitled “Kosovo Inquiry Confirms U.S.
Fears of War Crimes Court” (Steven Lee Myers, January 3, 2000). In keeping with
its title, the article did not discuss the evidence of NATO war crimes, which
Canadian law professor Michael Mandel presented to Del Ponte in three large
volumes, nor does it examine the basis on which Del Ponte refused to investigate
as laid out in the Final Report to the Prosecutor by the Committee Established
to Review the NATO Bombing Campaign (OTP Report). The article focuses instead on
theoretical U.S. vulnerability to war crimes charges. An AP report from the
Hague (“U.N. Court Examines NATO’s Yugoslavia War,” NYT, December 29,
1999) notes that even if evidence of NATO law violations was found, “it is
questionable whether Ms. Del Ponte…would go so far as to issue any
indictments. The handling of the report is a delicate matter for the tribunal,
which depends on the military alliance to arrest and hand over suspects.” But
there is no suggestion that this dependence compromises the judicial character
of the tribunal.
Even more
explicit in NATO- friendly framing is AP’s January 4, 2000 report “White House
Blasts Kosovo Inquiry,” which features “Washington’s patience” being exhausted
at these Tribunal provocations, its view that an inquiry would be “completely
unjustified” (White House spokesperson), the awkward position of Del Ponte in
trying to avoid charges of pro-NATO bias, and a number of citations to NATO
spokespersons on NATO’s innocence—but not a word on the charges against NATO and
the supporting evidence. Charles Trueheart in the Washington Post
did quote Michael Mandel making a general case against NATO (“Taking NATO to
Court, Tribunal Reviews Professors’ Charging That Alliance Committed War
Crimes,” January 20, 2000), while giving NATO and the prosecutor equal space and
the last word. Trueheart cites NATO officials saying “they had been assured by
Ms. Del Ponte that she would not carry the exercise far,” and that assurance was
fulfilled.
The media’s
coverage of the NATO “inquiry” and exoneration comprised a few back-page
articles, far less coverage than given indictments of even low-level Serbs. The
media never compared the speed with which charges were made that served NATO,
based on NATO-supplied information, with the inability to decide the NATO case
for many months despite massive information in the public domain (summarized in
Mandel’s three-volume dossier). The fact that Milosevic was indicted for “crimes
against humanity” based on 375 deaths, whereas according to the OTP Report
“there is simply no evidence of the necessary crime base” with 500 NATO-caused
deaths, failed to attract the media’s attention. There was not a single citation
by the media to the report used by the prosecutor, which relied on NATO press
releases as authoritative sources and gives solid evidence of pro-NATO bias, as
demonstrated by Mandel. The reporters were too lazy and biased to examine this
readily available document.
The
Racak “Massacre”
By January 1999, the
United States and NATO were ready to attack Yugoslavia and the United States was
looking for a casus belli. The death of some 40-45 Albanians in the Racak area
on January 15 was therefore greeted happily in Washington. Many questions have
been raised about this incident: the Serbs had invited both OSCE monitors and
journalists to witness their assault on this KLA stronghold, A.P. photographers
were on the scene, and French reporter Christophe Chatelet, who arrived in the
village after the fighting, found the site calm, OSCE observers helping some
elderly people but telling Chatelet that nothing important had happened. There
were no signs of a massacre. After the report of a massacre, Chatelet and Figaro
reporter Renaud Giraud insisted on seeing the A.P. photographers’ tapes of the
day’s events, which again showed nothing supporting the claim of a massacre.
After the KLA
reoccupied the village, the next morning 40 bodies were on display, U.S.
officials immediately claimed a massacre, and Tribunal prosecutor Louise Arbour
rushed to proclaim a war crime.
The U.S. media
also rushed to give the incident intense and indignant coverage. The New York
Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Time, and
Newsweek supplied 40 often lengthy articles over the next ten days. All
regurgitated U.S., NATO, and Albanian claims of a slaughter of civilians. For
Steven Erlanger, Milosevic “has thrown down the gauntlet to the West” by
organizing a massacre (NYT, January 21, 1999). Erlanger and his
colleagues never mentioned the findings of the French journalists who were on
the scene, looked at the A.P. tapes, and expressed serious doubts in Le
Figaro and Le Monde. The U.S. reporters failed to question the AP
photographers present at Racak on January 15 whose documentation of the events
there has since been kept under wraps. They did not interview the OSCE observers
who were at Racak by invitation that day, even after U.S. and OSCE official
William Walker admitted that the observers had not witnessed a massacre (Watson,
LAT, January 20, 1999). They never asked why the Serbs had failed to
remove the bodies, but left them for Walker to find and put to work for NATO.
The U.S. media
claimed that the massacre was an embarrassment to U.S. officials and NATO—e.g.,
“The Serb dictator understands well that NATO has little appetite for
involvement in another Balkan conflict” (WP, ed., January 20, 1999).
However, British journalist Allan Little quoted Madeleine Albright as saying to
National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, after hearing of the alleged massacre,
“Spring has come early” (“How NATO was sucked into the Kosovo conflict,”
Sunday Telegraph [London], February 27, 2000).
William Walker,
the OSCE official who had hastened to the scene and claimed an atrocity, not
only had a conflict of interest as a U.S. representative, he was a Reagan era
apologist for Salvadoran army atrocities. Although the European press frequently
mentioned his bias and European officials’ annoyance at his compromised behavior
as head of the OSCE observer mission, the U.S. media took at face value his
stance of being “visibly shaken” at the Racak death scene (e.g., Guy Dinmore,
WP, January 17, 1999), and never mentioned his conflict of interest or tainted
record. Although the Jesuit Order had publicly opposed Walker’s nomination as
U.S. Ambassador to Panama, “based on his alleged complicity in [and role in the
coverup of] the November 1989 assassination of [six] Jesuit priests in El
Salvador” (Inter Press Service, June 28, 1993), Paul Watson of the Los
Angeles Times said only that “he was chief of the U.S. Embassy’s political
section in El Salvador [and] ambassador from 1988 to 1992" (LAT, January
20, 1999); and for Jane Perlez, he was merely “a seasoned diplomat” (NYT,
January 17, 1999).
The bodies at
Racak were quickly subjected to a forensic examination by Serb and Belarus
specialists, in coordination with a Finnish team sent by the European Union.
Professor Dusan Dunjic, of the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Belgrade, who
was one of the investigating team, says that 37 of the 40 bodies showed traces
of gunpowder on the hands, indicating that before death the individuals had
handled firearms; that the bullet wounds were in different parts and sides of
the bodies and had been inflicted from different directions; and that although
in civilian dress, many had identical black trousers and other clothing designed
for long wear out-of-doors.
The U.S. media
never talked with Dunjic or his colleagues and relied only on the frequently
ambiguous statements of the head of the Finnish delegation, Dr. Helen Ranta, who
was a dentist and not a forensic expert. Her most often quoted words were that
Racak was “a crime against humanity.” She continued by saying that “all
killings” are crimes against humanity. This followup statement, which made the
first statement meaningless, was never quoted.
The Finnish study
of the massacre has never been made public, which suggests that it fails to
support the official story. The U.S. media have not found this secrecy worth
mentioning. In January 2001 three of the Finnish experts published their
findings in Forensic Science International (J. Raino, K. Lalu and A.
Penttila, “Independent forensic autopsies in an armed conflict: investigation of
the victims from Racak, Kosovo,” 2001). Although lacking in explicit
conclusions, the article made clear that the bodies had been shot from many
different directions as Dudjic had stated, and suggested doubts about a
massacre. Deutsche Press-Agentur’s article summarizing the report is titled
“Finnish experts find no evidence of Serb massacre of Albanians” (January 17,
2001). No major U.S. publication ever mentioned this study, despite their prior
intense focus on Racak.
In Louise
Arbour’s indictment of Milosevic, the Racak massacre is the only pre-bombing
charge. The media, having raised not a single doubt about Racak, naturally never
questioned it as a basis for the indictment. When Arbour had sought to join
William Walker at Racak, the media’s sole preoccupation then was Milosevic’s
denial of entry to Arbour and threat to expel Walker. Paul Watson quoted James
Rubin on the unacceptability of “the Serbs interfering with monitors bravely
trying to do their work” (LAT, January 19, 1999). Milosevic had the
strange notion that Walker and Arbour had a political agenda in which he was the
target. Serving on the same team as Walker and Arbour, the media never hinted at
this possibility.
The
Arkan Indictment
On March 31, 1999, a week
after NATO began bombing Yugoslavia, Tribunal prosecutor Louise Arbour announced
the indictment of Serb paramilitary leader Arkan, which had been secretly issued
in September 1997. The timing of the announcement was alleged by Arbour to be
based on the desire to put on notice anyone who “might retain his services or
obey his orders.” Marlise Simons and Charles Trueheart in the NYT and
WP both reported the Tribunal explanation (April 1, 1999) and NATO’s
“welcoming” the indictment, but neither pointed out that the rationale was
silly, nor did they hint at the public relations service to NATO in focusing
public attention on Serb evil.
There were 11
articles on the Arkan indictment in my five media sample in the ten days after
March 31, more than double the number on the refusal of the Tribunal even to
investigate NATO war crimes. It is enlightening also to contrast the media’s
treatment of Arkan and Nasir Oric, the Bosnian Muslim paramilitary killer, who
had bragged to Western journalists about his slaughter of Serbs in and around
Srebrenica, and who was at least Arkan’s equal as a mass murderer of civilians.
But the West supported the Bosnian Muslims, so Oric was never indicted by the
Tribunal and the media coverage of this criminal was negligible. During the
period from January 1, 1992 through December 31, 1996, Arkan was mentioned 150
times in my media sample, 60 times in the New York Times. During the same
period Nasir Oric was mentioned only three times, not once in the New York
Times. Equally interesting, while Arkan was always described with adjectives
like “notorious” and “monstrous” and nouns like “massacres” and “ethnic
cleansing” (Charles Trueheart, WP, February 1, 1999), on the rare
occasions when Oric was mentioned those words were missing. Thus, John Pomfret,
although noting that Oric’s “war trophies” included videotapes of “burned Serb
houses and headless Serb men, their bodies crumpled in a pathetic heap,”
describes Oric only as “the toughest guy in town” and “a lion in his den” (WP,
February 16, 1994).
The
Milosevic Indictment
With NATO’s bombing of
Serbian military forces in Kosovo not yielding an early surrender, NATO started
to bomb the civilian infrastructure of Serbia. These attacks were contrary to
the laws of war and were producing growing criticism even within the NATO
countries. Into this public-relations breach stepped Louise Arbour and the
Tribunal, with a patched together indictment of Milosevic and four other high
Yugoslav officials, publicly announced on May 27, 1999.
In an outstanding
example of parallel media propaganda service, not a single news or opinion piece
in the 32 published in my media sample during the ten days after May 27, even
noted, let alone criticized, that the Tribunal was gearing its work to
accommodate NATO’s public relations needs, although several mentioned that it
did seem to justify NATO’s war, and several quoted Albright as saying the same
thing. Many articles focused on whether the indictments might hamper ongoing
peace negotiations, but not one questioned the appropriateness of a supposed
judicial body issuing indictments that would have immediate political
consequences.
Apart from the
three or four citing Serb and Russian opinion, no article criticized Arbour, who
was portrayed as a gallant believer in justice. In a later accolade to Arbour,
Marlise Simons allowed Arbour to state her reason for indicting Milosevic in
May—“we might miss out” on getting him as a result of a peace deal—but Simons
did not mention that there might be an alternative view, and she spoke only of
the indictment as “now seen as a tribute to the tribunal’s firmness” (“Proud but
Concerned, Tribunal Prosecutor Leaves,” NYT, September 15, 1999). In many
articles Arbour was described as in frequent conflict with NATO, which had been
allegedly dragging its feet in apprehending the villains that Tribunal justice
had indicted. Arbour’s statement accompanying the indictment, that indicted
individuals are “entitled to the presumption of innocence until they are
convicted,” was immediately contradicted by her remark that the current
indictment “raises serious questions about their suitability to be guarantors of
any deal.” These statements, which effectively declared Milosevic guilty by
indictment before conviction, were never cited by the media.
The media
regularly noted that Arbour depended on classified NATO evidence for the
indictments, but they never pointed out that this evidence had not been
independently confirmed by the Tribunal, or that its supplier had a conflict of
interest. The media, like NATO and Arbour, knew in advance that they were
dealing once again with “another Hitler” so that the sole question was
efficiently bringing him to book—there was no concern about niceties like due
process and conflict of interest.
Thus, in contrast
with the media’s treatment of the charges against NATO, here the media offered
voluminous and uncritical summaries of the charges, with gory details, along
with half-baked and error-laden “background.” Apart from a few articles that
gave brief contrary views from Belgrade and Moscow, the only dissent allowed was
that the Tribunal’s action had been too slow.
The
Seizure of Milosevic
When the Tribunal
organized the kidnapping of Milosevic to The Hague, once again the media and
Tribunal worked harmoniously in NATO’s service. The media treated this process
intensively and as a triumph of justice, epitomized by the title of Time
Magazine’s article “Bagging the Butcher,” and Newsweek’s reference to
Milosevic as “our postmodern Eichmann” (both on April 9, 2001). The media
prejudged the case, with vast assurance and matching indignation, parroting the
lines taken by the Tribunal prosecution, themselves identical with the position
taken by Madeleine Albright and her associates.
Milosevic was
spirited away secretly in defiance of the wishes of the relatively popular
President of Yugoslavia, Vojislav Kostunica, and an order of the Constitutional
Court, by a leader (Zoran Djindjic) who, while “pro-American,” had “fairly low
popularity ratings” (Jeffrey Smith, WP, June 30, 2001). It was treated as
a romantic escapade, with Djindjic the brave hero. That this kidnapping was done
under financial pressure from the United States and other donor nations was
viewed as entirely reasonable. None of my major media sample reported Djindjic’s
anger when he discovered that most of the donor money from selling Milosevic
went to liquidating Yugoslavia’s foreign debts.
A few articles
noted that forcing the extradition in the face of Yugoslav law and a court order
might not help Yugoslavia recognize the importance of the rule of law. A number
noted that the extradition was strongly opposed by many in Yugoslavia and might
create political turmoil and destabilize the fragile new democratic government,
but this view too was exceptional. None of the media noted the fact that
Madeleine Albright had earlier explained that it would be inappropriate to
pressure the Indonesian government to seek war crimes trials against Indonesian
war criminals because it might destabilize the new, fragile government of that
country.
In The Hague
Milosevic faced an expanded indictment, that now included his alleged
responsibility for Serb crimes in Bosnia and Croatia. John Laughland has pointed
out that this expansion “is in direct contradiction to one of the most
fundamental principles of customary extradition law, namely that a defendant may
not be tried for a crime other than the one for which he was originally sent for
trial” (“Victors’ Justice,” The Spectator [London], February 9, 2002]).
This point was never made in the major U.S. media.
Laughland notes
also that, as the expanded indictments cover matters now seven to ten years old,
which had produced no indictments earlier, “It seems obvious that these
last-minute indictments over Croatia and Bosnia were issued to cover up the
weakness of the Kosovo indictment. And the judges have connived in this.” The
U.S. mainstream media have never made these points either.
Prosecutor Del
Ponte openly admits that, despite the age of those earlier events, she is busy
collecting data for the new charges, thereby acknowledging that indictments
precede evidence, not vice versa as in a genuine court. This abuse replicates
Arbour’s in May 1999 when she rushed to indict based on unverified evidence from
a party to the conflict (NATO), eager for a propaganda boost. Now, as in May
1999, the U.S. mainstream media don’t notice.
The Hague trial
of Milosevic is a show trial, like the Moscow trials of 1936-1937, with a
demonized villain on stage whose certain conviction will vindicate the NATO war
and interventions. After this service, the Tribunal can be dissolved, and the
United States is now urging its near-term liquidation.
Toronto lawyer
Edward L. Greenspan writes in Canada’s National Post (March 13) that “The
first two minutes of the Milosevic trial told me all I needed to know. This is a
lynching.” Greenspan points out that in her opening statement prosecutor Del
Ponte claimed to be working “on behalf of the international community and in the
name of the member states of the UN”—in Greenspan’s words “Prosecutor for the
Universe.” Judge Richard May didn’t object, probably because “he actually
believes her. May knows what the world expects of him and this trial.” Greenspan
also asks: how can justice be done in a court presided over by a NATO-country
judge, and especially one who “clearly reviles Milosevic?”
Greenspan points
out further that, as Milosevic has opted to defend himself and is not very
sophisticated in cross-examination and court-room practice, a fair judge would
lean over backwards to help him—but May constantly presses Milosevic to be quick
and not to bully witnesses, although bullying and pressure are, as Greenspan
stresses, common, acceptable, and important courtroom practices.
Milosevic is also
at an informational disadvantage. An incarcerated individual, with some links to
his home country, versus NATO. The recent arrest of U.S. diplomat (and CIA
official) John David Neighbor along with Serbia’s deputy prime minister Momcilo
Perisic, apparently involved a U.S. effort to obtain secret documents that would
help the Tribunal prosecutor link Milosevic to war crimes in Bosnia (“Political
tension brews in Belgrade over spying row,” Agence France Presse, March 19,
2002). The U.S. media, however, never acknowlege an informational and resource
imbalance. They have even suggested that Milosevic may have an unfair
informational edge via associates back home, as compared with poor NATO and the
Tribunal, who complain of the foot-dragging of Yugoslav officials in producing
incriminating evidence. No mention is made of the new dependence of
Milosevic-free Yugoslavia on financial aid from the NATO powers, and the
leverage this gives for compelling the turning over of suspects, potential
witnesses, and information, in further arm-twisting operations like the one
employed in forcing the extradition of Milosevic.
May allows
prosecution witnesses to testify at length about personal experiences, usually
without supportive and verifiable evidence, and even to recite hearsay
experiences. In Mahmut Bakali’s testimony (February 18, 2002), the witness cited
what a local Serb official claimed to have heard that Milosevic might have said
about Kosovo— twice-removed hearsay—without judicial interference. The media did
not notice or object.
In his opening
presentation Milosevic showed the court some gruesome videotapes of Serb victims
of NATO bombing. The media do not ask why Milosevic’s evidence is less proof of
war crimes and genocide by Clinton and Blair than the current Tribunal witnesses
prove Milo- sevic guilt. That comparison would show both political selectivity
and the essential irrelevance of this kind of evidence, except to show that war
is ugly and—for the purposes of this trial—to produce a desired moral
environment that will sustain a conviction.
When Marlise
Simons interviewed and wrote about Carla Del Ponte, who claims to “represent the
victims” (“On War Criminals’ Trail, An Unflagging Hunter,” NYT, February
9, 2002), Simons did not ask her: what about the Serb victims in Bosnia,
Croatia, and those massively “ethnically cleansed” in NATO-occupied Kosovo? Why
does the “unflagging hunter” not fulfill her legal obligation and go after
NATO’s war criminals? Simons avoided such questions, in this interview and in
her numerous articles in the New York Times, just as her colleagues
failed to ask about the “evidence” that the KGB and Bulgarians were behind the
shooting of the Pope in 1981, or did not pursue the “lie that wasn’t shot down”
regarding the Soviet downing of Korean airliner 007. Her job is to go with the
flow of propaganda that, as NATO demands and the Tribunal implements, has
targeted Milosevic as the latest villain, whose conviction will demonstrate
Western justice, brought to the world by the rulers of the New World Order.
Z
Edward S.
Herman is an economist and media analyst.
Part 3
covers the Tribunal and media “truths.”