Swans

Munchausens At The Hague, Cowards At Woods Hole

by Stephen Gowans

February 25, 2002

Mun.chau.sen

After Baron K. F. H. von Münchhausen, a proverbial teller of exaggerated tales. A liar.

Cow.ard

One who shows or yields to ignoble fear.

If Carla del Ponte, The Hague's chief prosecutor, were a piece of chocolate, she wouldn't so much resemble the chocolate of her native Switzerland as she would a bar of Ex-Lax, the faux chocolate laxative made in America, whose sole purpose is to draw forth copious quantities of shit. For what else is The Hague Tribunal but shit? And American?

Said del Ponte, "every individual irrespective of his position, his rank or the power he holds can be brought to justice for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide." (1) This, to mark the opening of the trial of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, who, illegally abducted and transported to The Hague, (sparking paeans in the Western press to how the rule of law had been vindicated) faces charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.

The fashion on the American Left, or large parts of what's called the American Left, is to say, "Were it true that every leader could be brought to justice, then Clinton, Blair, Schroeder, Albright, Fischer, and a long list of NATO supremos, would be sitting in the dock with Milosevic."

That NATO leaders should be sitting in the dock is true enough. As John Laughland, writing in the February 16 Guardian put it, "It has always been obvious that the NATO attacks on Yugoslavia were illegal under the post-war United Nations-based system. Not only were the attacks not approved by the security council, that body was not even consulted."

Of course, NATO leaders aren't going to be answering for their crimes against peace. Who's going to make them? For one, they created the tribunal, appointed the prosecutors, provided the staff, and furnished part of the tribunal's budget. It's their creation.

The tribunal also gets help from financier George Soros's Open Society Institute. (2) That's "open" society, as is in open markets, as in not communist, as in not socialist, as in not resembling the social ownership model of the Yugoslav economy under the communists and Milosevic's Socialist Party. Milosevic's socialism is rarely mentioned in the media, lest two and two are put together, and four, rather than five, is the answer, and the name Allende suddenly springs to mind.

But there's another reason NATO leaders won't ever have to answer for violating the UN Charter, refusing to consult the Security Council, and elevating themselves above international law. The Hague Tribunal hasn't the jurisdiction to prosecute crimes against peace. Indeed, there is no longer any such thing as a crime against peace, the basis of Nuremberg and the UN Charter. That was tossed out by Blair and Clinton, who declared a new world order, one in which NATO, or more to the point, the US, could intervene at will in the internal affairs of sovereign states.

John Laughland says this was adumbrated by the Nazis. "Like today's globalists," he points out, "the Nazis argued that economic realities had changed and that, therefore, the great powers should have the legal right to interfere in the internal affairs of smaller nations in their sphere of influence."

"According to Nazi theory of 'great space'," continues Laughland, "state sovereignty was a bogus invention of materialistic liberalism." Or in today's language, it's a bogus invention of leaders who want a shelter behind which to violate human rights, build weapons of mass destruction, or harbour Osama bin Laden.

The preferred view of the Chomsky Left is that Milosevic is a little thug, an unlikeable man who did some bad things, but not as bad as what NATO leaders did. The big thugs live in Washington and London, we're told.

Is Milosevic a thug, even a little one, as this view holds? I'll be honest. I don't know. But I do know it is generally considered appropriate to have a sound basis for alleging someone is a thug, which means something more than someone else's unsubstantiated accusations. But all too often newspaper reports are taken at face value, even by those who've spent some considerable time writing books on media bias. And what I've seen so far from del Ponte, resembles what Tony Blair splattered across the public record as "incontrovertible" evidence of Osama bin Laden's masterminding 9/11 -- old newspaper stories based on innuendo, hearsay, and illegitimate inference. In other words, accusations, without a lot of meat on them.

Let's take the allegation that Milosevic used his 1989 speech as Kosovo Field to whip Serbs into an ultra-nationalist frenzy. The tribunal's prosecution made sure to trot this out in its opening remarks. It's a good story. But that's all it is. A story, repeated by the press, and now picked up by the tribunal. But it's fiction. (3)

Funny thing. The press originally reported the story correctly, only later to turn it on its head at a time NATO was pounding Yugoslav hospitals, factories, power stations, homes, embassies, apartment buildings and refugee columns with bombs, showing a few thousand Serb civilians an early exit from this life. That NATO might want to create a myth about a horrible ultra-nationalist to deflect criticism of its bombing campaign is hardly a possibility to be dismissed.

On June 29, 1989, the day following the infamous speech the Tribunal says shows Milosevic as an ultra-nationalist demagogue, The Independent reported:

"There is no more appropriate place than this field of Kosovo to say that accord and harmony in Serbia are vital to the prosperity of the Serbs and of all other citizens living in Serbia, regardless of their nationality or religion,' [Milosevic] said. Mutual tolerance and co-operation were also sine qua non for Yugoslavia: 'Harmony and relations on the basis of equality among Yugoslavia's people are a precondition for its existence, for overcoming the crisis.'"

Milosevic "talked of mutual tolerance," The Independent added, "'building a rich and democratic society' and ending the discord which had, he said, led to Serbia's defeat here by the Turks six centuries ago."

The same day, the BBC reported, "Addressing the crowd, Milosevic said that whenever they were able to the Serbs had helped others to liberate themselves, and they had never used the advantage of their being a large nation against others or for themselves."

"He added that Yugoslavia was a multi-national community," the BBC continued, "which could survive providing there was full equality for all the nations living in it."

Twelve years later, on April 1, 2001, the BBC would change its story, claiming Milosevic had "gathered a million Serbs at the site of the battle to tell them to prepare for a new struggle."

The BBC was not alone. Newspapers that had originally reported Milosevic's speech as conciliatory, now claimed he delivered an ultra-nationalist diatribe.

On June 3rd, 1999, with large parts of Serbia laying in ruins after being targeted by NATO warplanes, The Economist said,

"But it is primitive nationalism, egged on by the self-deluding myth of Serbs as perennial victims, that has become both Mr. Milosevic's rescuer (when communism collapsed with the Soviet Union) and his nemesis. It was a stirringly virulent nationalist speech he made in Kosovo, in 1989, harking back to the Serb Prince Lazar's suicidally brave battle against the Turks a mere six centuries ago, that saved his leadership when the Serbian old guard looked in danger of ejection. Now he may have become a victim of his own propaganda."

On July 9th, the international edition of Time reported,

"It was St. Vitus' Day, a date steeped in Serbian history, myth and eerie coincidence: on June 28, 1389, Ottoman invaders defeated the Serbs at the battle of Kosovo; 525 years later, a young Serbian nationalist assassinated Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, lighting the fuse for World War I. And it was on St. Vitus' Day, 1989, that Milosevic whipped a million Serbs into a nationalist frenzy in the speech that capped his ascent to power."

And on July 28th, as questions were being asked about NATO's 78-day bombardment, The New York Times weighed in with this:

"In 1989 the Serbian strongman, Slobodan Milosevic, swooped down in a helicopter onto the field where 600 years earlier the Turks had defeated the Serbs at the Battle of Kosovo. In a fervent speech before a million Serbs, he galvanized the nationalist passions that two years later fuelled the Balkan conflict."

Gregory Elich, a researcher and writer, decided to check the media's depiction against a transcript of Milosevic's speech. (4) Tracking down a US government translation of the address, Elich discovered the media (and now the Tribunal) had the story all wrong. Not only had Milosevic not whipped up nationalist fervor, he'd tried to do the very opposite, as the press reports the day after the speech had shown.

"Serbia," said Milosevic at Kosovo Field, "has never had only Serbs living in it. Today, more than in the past, members of other peoples and nationalities also live in it. This is not a disadvantage for Serbia. I am truly convinced that it is its advantage. National composition of almost all countries in the world today, particularly developed ones, has also been changing in this direction. Citizens of different nationalities, religions, and races have been living together more and more frequently and more and more successfully." (5)

Hardly an appeal to hate-filled nationalism.

Milosevic continued:

"Equal and harmonious relations among Yugoslav peoples are a necessary condition for the existence of Yugoslavia and for it to find its way out of the crisis and, in particular, they are a necessary condition for its economic and social prosperity. In this respect Yugoslavia does not stand out from the social milieu of the contemporary, particularly the developed, world. This world is more and more marked by national tolerance, national co-operation, and even national equality. The modern economic and technological, as well as political and cultural development, has guided various peoples toward each other, has made them interdependent and increasingly has made them equal as well [medjusobno ravnopravni]. Equal and united people can above all become a part of the civilization toward which mankind is moving." (6)

So, where did the Tribunal come up with the idea that Milosevic used his Kosovo Field speech to transform himself from communist party apparatchik, to virulent Serb nationalist, intent on building a "Greater Serbia"? Did it rely on the wildly inaccurate later press reports for its research? Did its researchers ever actually read Milosevic's Kosovo Field address? Or have they simply spun the story to justify NATO's intervention?

Look no further than NATO spokesman Jamie Shea for the answer.

"It's not Milosevic that has allowed Justice Arbour her visa to go to Kosovo to carry out her investigation. If her court, as we want, is to be allowed access, it will be because of NATO so NATO is the friend of the Tribunal. NATO countries are those that have provided finance to set up the Tribunal, we are amongst the majority financiers." (7)

NATO funds the tribunal, furnishes it with its staff, appoints the prosecutors, and provides the evidence. Its obvious partiality, its motive for lying (to justify NATO intervention), and its demonstrated willingness to lie (del Ponte's obvious mendacity about any leader being in the position to be dragged before a court to answer for crimes against humanity), should at the very least send a signal that maybe, just maybe, the charges against Milosevic are fabricated. Strangely, that signal has been unheeded by much of what's called the Chomsky Left.

Instead, Chomsky and his disciples have accepted at face value most of the charges made by the press and the Tribunal without bothering to examine them, or at least, without bothering to challenge them. Take for example, Edward Herman, who writes brilliantly on Washington's hypocrisy. Herman's shtick, if you want to call it that, is to say: "Yes, yes, Milosevic (insert any leader here demonized by Washington) is a thug, but Clinton (insert whichever American leader you like) is a bigger thug."

Herman recently wrote that "the murder of between 800 and 3,000 unarmed Palestinians, mainly women and children, at Sabra and Shatila in 1982..[is]...20 to 50 times the deaths in the Racak massacre that precipitated NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia," carrying on in his, "American leaders and their allies (in this case Sharon) are worse than America's official enemies" (in this case, Milosevic, who is apparently held responsible for the Racak massacre) tradition. (8)

But there are three problems with this:

1. It's doubtful that the incident at Racak "precipitated NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia," as Herman puts it, any more than the Gulf of Tonkin affair precipitated America's bombing of North Vietnam. Racak was a pretext, not a precipitating event, a point Herman, on other occasions, has made.

2. While Milosevic is held responsible for the deaths at Racak, the media have been quick to point out that the ethnic cleansing and murders carried out by ethnic Albanians in Kosovo against the Serb minority is not, by itself, evidence that NATO forces are complicit in the crimes. Yes, the atrocities have been carried out under NATO's nose, the media observes, but that doesn't mean NATO is allowing them to happen, or approves them, or facilitates them. On the other hand, Milosevic is held directly responsible for the incident at Racak. If it happened, it must be because Milosevic either ordered it, or allowed it to happen, the reasoning goes -- an example of stunning hypocrisy you'd think Herman would seize upon. Milosevic is being judged by a different standard.

3. There are substantial reasons to doubt that a massacre ever occurred at Racak, and good reasons to suspect the incident was contrived to offer a pretext for NATO bombing.

The official story went like this: on January 15, 1999, Serb policemen entered the Kosovo village of Racak, a KLA stronghold, and killed men, women and children at close range, after torturing and mutilating them. Chillingly, the Serb police were said to have whistled merrily as they went about their work of slaughtering the villagers. (9)

It was a horrible tableau, sure to whip up the indignation of the world -- and it did.

US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, as eager to scratch her ever itchy trigger finger as her boss was to scratch his illimitable sexual itches, demanded that Yugoslavia be bombed immediately. Albright, like a kid agonizingly counting down the hours to Christmas, would have to wait until after Milosevic's rejection of NATO's ultimata at Rambouillet to get her wish.

Bill Clinton, not to be surpassed in expressing indignation, said, "We should remember what happened in the village of Racak...Innocent men, women, and children were taken from their homes to a gully, forced to kneel in the dirt, sprayed with gunfire -- not because of anything they had done, but because of who they were." (10)

But the French newspaper Le Monde doubted the authenticity of the massacre. 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. 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 international monitors.

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

The film showed that 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 being fired upon troubled Le Monde. So too did the fact that, entering the village after the firefight to assess the damage and interview the villagers, the observers saw no sign of a massacre. What's more, the villagers said nothing about a massacre either.

It was only a day later, when Washington's man in Kosovo, William Walker, returned with the press in tow -- at the KLA's invitation -- that a trench was found filled with bodies.

Could the police have returned after their firefight with the KLA, when the observers and TV crew had gone, 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 guerillas, or what, Washington, would call terrorists, if the tables were turned. How could they torture, mutilate and cold-bloodedly kill villagers at close range while harassed by KLA gunfire?

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

Adding to the implausibility of the claim, a report last February by the Finnish forensic team that investigated the incident on behalf of the European Union said none of the bodies were mutilated, there was no evidence of torture, and only one was shot at close range -- all at variance with the official story. (11)

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.

The pathologists say Walker was quick to come to the conclusion a massacre had happened, even though the evidence was weak.

And they point out that there is no evidence the deceased were from Racak.

If there aren't good reasons to dismiss the incident entirely, there at least very good reasons to doubt it. But Herman, as disciple, is no different from Chomsky, the Messiah. In his The New Military Humanism, Lessons From Kosovo, (12) Chomsky neither accepts Racak as genuine or a fake. Instead, he compares Washington's concern over the events at Racak to the lack of concern over events of similar or greater enormity perpetrated by US clients. If US foreign policy is really driven by humanitarian intent, Chomsky asks, why the inconsistency? This is a clever way to expose the institutional patterns of American foreign policy -- a kind of reductio ad absurdum approach. If what you say is true, then x, y, and z, must follow, and since they don't, what you say must be false. In this case, however, Chomsky broaches Racak not to challenge the claim that a massacre occurred, but to challenge the claim the decision to bomb Kosovo was precipitated by humanitarian concern over events such as the alleged massacre at Racak. It is still possible, however, to believe that a massacre did occur, while accepting Chomsky's analysis that NATO's humanitarian concern was a stalking horse behind which the alliance pursued other goals. The truth or falsity of the claimed massacre is neither here nor there in Chomsky's analysis, another reason the analysis is clever: it avoids altogether the difficult problem of assessing whether the accusations NATO, and now the Tribunal, made against Milosevic are true or false. While useful in laying bare Washington's hypocrisy -- a Herman speciality -- it has the unfortunate, and doubtless unintended consequence, of encouraging others to take a pusillanimous position. Since what NATO says about Milosevic could be true, and since I could look like an apologist for horrible atrocities, I'll take the easy path and declare everyone a thug -- Milosevic, Blair, Clinton. If I'm wrong about Milosevic, so what? It will never be said I was an apologist for a monster, and my moral hymen remains intact -- or so it seems. But thinking like that suffuses lynch mobs. Is it moral to allow the innocent to be railroaded into a jail cell on false charges?

So, as the high priests of the Chomsky Left think they're making headway with their "Milosevic is bad, but Clinton was worse" line, their co-religionists work themselves up into high dudgeon over Milosevic, not Clinton. An ardent Z-Netter (Z-Net being the church of Noam Chomskyism, presided over by its Pope, Michael Albert, at Woods Hole, Mass.) wrote me that it was all right that NATO bombed Serb Radio-TV, an obvious war crime, because Milosevic is a thug who deserves what he gets and the radio-TV building was Milosevic's Ministry of Propaganda. So irredeemably evil is Milosevic, that destroying anything he touched, must, by definition, be good. He hoped Milosevic would meet the same fate as Mussolini -- strung upside down from a bridge. This was followed by a paean to Otpor, the "grassroots" movement funded and trained by Washington, to bring down Milosevic "peacefully," but not, as the Z-Netters seemed to have missed, to establish a libertarian socialist society, or "parecon," the Pope's participatory economics model, but to turn the economy over to the IMF and WTO so that Yugoslavia's assets can be sold off to the highest bidder, while millions of Serbs are thrown out of work.

There's something disquieting about the Church of Chomskyism. Willing to allow the press to have its head where official US enemies are concerned, the faithful channel their considerable enmity into the media-led two minute hate against the latest Emanuel Goldstein. But while Church doctrine holds that Western leaders are bigger thugs, the hate-filled, almost hysterical denunciations reserved for the world's Milosevics, Mugabes and Lukashenkos, are accompanied by a measured, reasonable, tone where Bush, Blair and other NATO war-mongerers are concerned. Milosevic can be called a murderer, dictator and thug; his ouster, by force, can be applauded, but it would be considered over the top to call Bush Jr. anything as incendiary, and calling for an insurrection to pressure the president to step down would be denounced as the height of irresponsibility. It's all right to hope Milosevic is strung up, but Chomskyites would never wish the same fate on Bush or Clinton, though Church doctrine holds these leaders to be bigger thugs, and therefore, presumably deserving of an equal or worse fate.

On another front, Chomsky remarked in a recent interview that "If there is a serious proposal as to how to overthrow Saddam, we should surely want to consider it. He remains as much a monster as he was when the US and Britain supported him." (13)

Yes he does. But there's something pusillanimous in this, as in Chomsky's accepting Milosevic as a thug: First, a succession of US presidents, their minions, and their eminence grise, have been every bit as much monsters as Saddam, not least of which were those who supported Saddam, yet I have no doubt Chomsky would decry as recklessly irresponsible any "serious proposal as to how to overthrow" any U.S. president, past or present.

Second, in this, as in other cases, Chomsky remains silent on who the successor to the overthrown monster will be. Which isn't to suggest that Saddam Hussein is a great choice, but it doesn't follow that getting rid of one bad egg means the next egg won't also be unremittingly rotten, if not more so. That the new government is installed by Washington and is constrained, if not inclined, to pursue policies to benefit US foreign policy goals and economic interests, is simply ignored. Hence, in the case of Yugoslavia, Chomsky lauds the overthrow of Milosevic but says nothing of who follows, and on whose behalf they work, cautioning others not to make too much of US backing of the opposition. Likewise, we're to consider any serious proposal to oust Saddam, while turning a blind eye to the fact that any "serious proposal," by definition, is one intended to aggrandize US interests at the expense of ordinary Iraqis. Any serious proposal would not involve installing the Iraqi communist party in power, for example, or anyone for that matter who has even a passing interest in Albert's parecon. As Chomsky's critics of the Left put it, the State Department must be pleased.

The problem here is that with attacks on foreign leaders coming from all parts of the American political spectrum, that peculiarly American conceit is strengthened -- that "we" have a right, if not a moral obligation, to intervene in the affairs of sovereign nations to oust unpleasant leaders and impose our own. Were that not offensive enough, it's all done without a tittle of an effort made to substantiate whether the charges against foreign leaders are anything other than pure wind and self-serving pro-interventionist propaganda, or if there's substance to the charges, whether American leaders would be excused for doing exactly the same under similar circumstances. So it is that NATO's Munchausens have almost free rein to propagate pro-interventionist nonsense virtually unopposed. There's no opposition from Western media and no opposition from the Chomsky Left. Worse, the press and the Messiah talk as one, both in favour of tribunals.

The Hague Tribunal isn't, despite what newspaper editors tell you, a step forward for justice. It's simply a way of obscuring the motives NATO had for lying about why it intervened militarily in Yugoslavia. Not justice, but its antithesis.

Here's how it works: NATO fires from the hip, accusing Milosevic of all manner of atrocities and crimes. Spin, it's called. The problem is war-time spin is often recognized for what it is -- mendacity, the truth getting lost in the fog of war, pressure to put things in the worst possible light. So NATO hits upon the idea of establishing a tribunal to indict Serb leaders on war crimes charges, ignoring the fact that the UN Security Council hasn't the jurisdiction to establish a criminal court. Jurisdiction or not, a tribunal is established. The same "fog of war" charges are made, but now, the charges seem to have more substance because they're made by a tribunal, said to be backed by "the international community," and because legal language is pressed into service: indictment, prosecution, conviction, trial. It's one thing to have Jamie Shea, in the midst of a NATO bombing campaign say that Milosevic committed genocide, since Jamie Shea has a motive to lie under those circumstances, but it's quite another -- or so it seems -- to say Milosevic was convicted by an International Tribunal. It seems so much less like the self-serving propaganda of NATO, and so much more impartial. But is it? It's not Jamie Shea making the charges, or Blair, but it is people NATO hired and appointed, whose salaries they pay, making exactly the same charges with as little evidence as Blair and Shea ever had, repeating the same whoppers from the same press reports that were used the first time NATO sought to put a moral gloss on its immoral acts.

But does the tribunal change anything? Is del Ponte really any different from Shea? If NATO lied about there being 100,000 Kosovar Albanians murdered to justify a bombing campaign that under Nuremberg and the UN Charter is a crime against peace; if it lied about a passenger train that was travelling too fast for a NATO pilot's missile to avoid; if it lied about Serbs attacking a refugee column that had really been attacked by NATO; if it lied about Albanian Kosovars imprisoned in a Pristina stadium; if it lied about organized rapes; if it lied about dozens of other things, (14) why shouldn't we expect the same from a tribunal that was set up and is controlled by the very same governments that lied so freely in the first place?

Look at it this way. If someone who has lied to you over and over again sets up a tribunal, hires the prosecutors, provides the evidence, and selects the judges, is it not criminally stupid to accept the tribunal as anything other than a continuation of the same pattern of lying? Is it not criminally irresponsible to accept the charges made against those who are indicted as beyond dispute, or even as probably true?

Ewan MacColl, who Washington never liked (he was denied a visa in 1962 to enter the US because of his political leanings), died before The Hague Tribunal was established, but he seems to have anticipated its hypocrisy.

It's illegal to carve up your missus, wrote MacColl,

Or put poison in your old man's tea

But poison the rivers, the sea, and the skies

And poison the mind of a nation with lies

If it's done in the interest of free enterprise

Then it's proper and perfectly legal. (15)

MacColl would have known it's not Swiss chocolate del Ponte is serving. Moreover, he would have said so.

Notes

^1. Deutshce Press-Agentur, February 11, 2002 (back)
^2. See Jared Israel, Official Statements Prove Hague 'Tribunal' Belongs to NATO, http://www.tenc.net/docs/h-list.htm (back)
^3. Francisco Gil-White, Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and a Fellow at the Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict, examined the media's depiction of Milosevic's Kosovo Field speech, comparing press reports against a BBC transcript of the address. See Expert in Psychology of Ethnic Conflict Changes his Mind about Yugoslavia, http://emperors-clothes.com/milo/gw.htm. The press reports on the Kosovo Field speech are taken from Gil-White's work. Gil-White's article is highly recommended.
See also Stephen Gowans, When it comes to Milosevic stories, more than a little scepticism is in order, Media Monitors Network, http://www.mediamonitors.net/gowans43.html (back)
^4. Milosevic's Speech, Kosovo Field, June 28, 1989, http://www.swans.com/libray/art8/smilos01.html (back)
^5. Ibid. (back)
^6. Ibid. (back)
^7. May 17, 1999 Transcript of NATO press conference by Jamie Shea & Major General W. Jertz in Brussels Transcribed by M2 PRESSWIRE (c) 1999 cited in Jared Israel, Official Statements Prove Hague 'Tribunal' Belongs to NATO, http://www.icdsm.org/more/belongs.htm (back)
^8. Edward Herman, Final Solution in the Occupied Territories, http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2002-02/11herman.cfm (back)
^9. See also Stephen Gowans, Sorting Through the Lies of the Racak Massacre and other Myths of Kosovo, Media Monitors Network, http://www.mediamonitors.net/gowans1.html (back)
^10. March 19, 1999 address to the nation, cited in FAIR: Media Advisory, An Update on Racak, July 18, 2001, http://www.fair.org/press-releases/racak-update.html (back)
^11. FAIR: Media Advisory, An Update on Racak, July 18, 2001, http://www.fair.org/press-releases/racak-update.html
See also Racak 'massacre' exposed as fraud, Workers World, Feb. 15, 2001, http://www.workers.org/ww/2001/yugo0215.html (back)
^12. Noam Chomsky, The New Military Humanism, Lessons From Kosovo, New Star Books, Vancouver, 1999, p. 40 - 48. (back)
^13. Stephen R. Shalom Interviews Noam Chomsky, January 2002 http://www.zmag.org/shalom0122.htm (back)
^14. See Stephen Gowans, Genocide or Veracicide Will NATO's Lying Ever Stop? http://www.swans.com/library/art7/gowans02.html (back)
^15. Legal-Illegal, Words and music by Ewan MacColl, From Hot Blast, Folkways. Published in Broadside #154, 1984 (back)

Stephen Gowans is a writer and political activist who lives in Ottawa, Canada.

Please, DO NOT steal, scavenge or repost this work without the expressed written authorization of Swans, which will seek permission from the author. This material is copyrighted, © Stephen Gowans 2002. All rights reserved.

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