Bill
Clinton’s war
Reviewing the attack on Yugoslavia
(urged
by Hillary) and other
Clinton acts of war—
a study of arbitrary
power & media
servility
Congress
could have impeached Bill for far
worse
crimes than those it charged him with
Early
in U.S. history, it was firmly established that
Congress made the decision to
fight a war. The Constitution assigned that grave
decision to the national
legislative body so it wouldn’t be made often or
frivolously, in the manner of
Old World kings. Nowadays, the United States wages
wars constantly, on the whim
of a single person.
Why
does a president commit those unconstitutional
acts? There are the official
reasons, for which he (or she?) gets free time on
television networks and which
make the headlines. Then there is the truth.
To illustrate
pure, presidential war-making, in which Congress
and law played no direct role,
take the actions of Bill Clinton. The Clintons may
be back in the White House
next year, albeit in reversed roles. In any event,
Bill’s deeds have lessons
for Americans. Had we learned them, maybe no U.S.
forces would be fighting in
Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and elsewhere.
The main
lesson: Tragedy ensues when one person can
decide war. The decision may hinge on personal or
other irrelevant motives. To
illustrate, we review chronologically seven of
Clinton’s acts of war.
Iraq.
Clinton’s first bombing of Baghdad, on June 26,
1993— killing eight
civilians—was supposedly punishment for an attempt
by Saddam Hussein to kill
George Bush (senior). Kuwaiti police had arrested
seventeen men, claimed to
find a bomb in a car from Iraq, and said an Iraqi
“confessed” to an
assassination plot. On the witness stand, he
declared he was innocent and
signed because police beat him.
Seymour Hersh
wrote in The
New Yorker (Nov. 1, 1993) that
Clinton had been mired in controversy over his
cautious Bosnia policy and White
House staffers advised that “bombing Baghdad would
improve Clinton’s political
standing at home and his diplomatic standing in
the Middle East.” Past and present
intelligence officials told Hersh
the acceptance of
the Kuwaiti allegation was based on “conflicting
and dubious evidence.”
Bosnia. Amid
a civil war among Bosnian Serbs, Croats, and
Muslims, came two bloody
explosions in Sarajevo’s main market, in 1994 and
1995. Supposedly in response
to the latter blast, Clinton and NATO promptly
launched a heavy bombing
campaign against Serbs—without considering the
evidence. (It was ambiguous and
did not point to any party as culpable, Professors
Steven Burg and Paul Shoup
wrote in The
War in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1999.)
Clinton later sent 20,000 U.S. troops to
Bosnia to join NATO “peacekeepers.”
By
showing toughness, he could further his
re-election after being called
wishy-washy and anti-military. One writer believed
that Clinton, in expectation
of cheap oil and huge aircraft sales,
intentionally advanced Saudis’ desire for
an Islamic country in Europe.
Iraq
again. Clinton
bombed Iraqi air defenses—and some civilians—on
September 3 and 4, 1996, to make
Saddam Hussein “pay a price” for sending troops to
Kurdish Iraq. (Hussein said
he was quelling strife between factions.) U.S.
presidential voting was two
months off.
Afghanistan
& Sudan. The media
covered Clinton’s sex scandal heavily.
Widely suspected of lying about his association
with the intern Monica
Lewinsky, he was advised to come clean to get the
public on his side. On August
17, 1998, in grand jury testimony and a television
address, he abandoned months
of denial and admitted “inappropriate” contact
with her and having misled the
public and his own wife. A poll taken immediately
after the speech showed that
a favorable rating of 60 percent five days earlier
had dropped to 40 percent.
On
August 20 Clinton bombed Afghanistan and the
Sudan. The news upstaged the
Lewinsky scandal. Clinton claimed he was fighting
“terrorists.” But it soon came
out that one of his supposed terrorist targets was
the Sudan’s only medicinal
factory, indicating haste in planning the raids.
Two
senators and two representatives questioned
Clinton’s timing and credibility,
and the Los
Angeles Times asked
whether the movie Wag the Dog
had
come to life. In the movie, a Hollywood producer
was hired to fabricate a war
to distract the public from a presidential sex
scandal. But Clinton’s acts of
war were real.
Iraq once
more. In early
December 1998, the biggest news concerned
impending impeachment proceedings in Congress. The
question of Clinton’s
impeachment was scheduled for House floor debate
on Thursday, the 17th. Voting
appeared likely the next day.
On
Wednesday, the 16th, Clinton again bombed Iraq,
falsely claiming it was not
cooperating with UN inspectors. Consequently the
House postponed the
impeachment question for a day and Iraq took over
the headlines. Killing a
couple of hundred Iraqis, the bombings continued
until impeachment was voted
December 19.
Yugoslavia. For three
months, peace talks went on in Rambouillet, France, over
strife between Yugoslavia and
ethnic Albanians in the Serbian province of
Kosovo. Other nations,
including the U.S., participated.
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Family House, Nis,
Yugoslavia, July, 1999
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What brought matters to a head, in
March 1999, probably had less to do
with European troubles than with two news stories
troubling Bill Clinton. One
dealt with an Arkansas woman’s allegation that he
raped her twenty-one years
earlier when he was attorney general of Arkansas.
Another concerned allegations
in the Republican Congress of Chinese theft of
U.S. nuclear weapons secrets and
inaction by Clinton, alleged recipient of campaign
donations from China. A
House committee had prepared a classified report
on the matter; a Senate panel
planned an investigation.
In Belgrade, Yugoslavia, Clinton’s
envoy, Richard
Holbrooke, delivered an ultimatum to the
president, Slobodan Milosevic. To
avoid war, the latter had to sign an agreement
letting NATO troops occupy all
Yugoslavia, then comprising Serbia and Montenegro.
A day or two later, on March
23, Holbrooke forwarded the go-ahead for war to
NATO’s secretary general in
Brussels.
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Freedom Bridge
over the Danube, Novi Sad, April, 1999
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The
attack came March 24, wiping the allegations about
Clinton off the TV news and
front pages. U.S. and other NATO forces spent the
next eleven weeks hitting
Yugoslavs with air-launched missiles, bombs, and
bullets. Mrs.
Clinton may have influenced Bill’s decision. On
March 21, when he was undecided
about attacking Yugoslavia, she phoned and “I
urged him to bomb” (as quoted by
biographer Gail Sheehy in Hillary’s
Choice, p. 345).
Throughout
the country, the death toll exceeded 2,000
civilians; the civilian injury toll reached
at least three times that many, let alone
casualties among soldiers. Why the
mass killings? Bill Clinton said they were to stop
mass killings in Kosovo,
which had been going on for a long time. But if
they were such an old story,
why did he choose the time he did to start a war?
Could this attack and the
previous three attacks all have served as
distractions from scandal?
The genocide tale
The official line was that the war
was humanitarian, a “moral imperative,” to stop
massacres by President Slobodan
Milosevic and men. Five days before attacking,
Clinton pictured shootings of
Albanians: “Innocent men, women, and children were
taken from their homes to a
gully, forced to kneel in the dirt and sprayed
with gunfire.”
In January of 1999, 45 bodies had
appeared in a ditch in the village of Racak, Kosovo,
Serbia. Without evidence, U.S. diplomat William
Walker, head of the
Organization for Security and Cooperation in
Europe (OSCE), said the dead, many
mutilated, were Albanian Kosovo civilians murdered
by Serbs.
The number of victims was inflated to
100,000 by both David Scheffer,
U.S. ambassador at
large, and William Cohen, secretary of defense; to
225,000, by Scheffer
later; and as high as 500,000 by the Department of
State. Scheffer
called it “genocide.”
Later,
Geoff Hoon, British
defense minister, said some 10,000
ethnic Albanians had been killed in over 100
massacres. The
Associated Press repeated the toll,
without explaining its origin. Likewise The New York
Times,
getting “fresh reports each day of newly
discovered bodies and graves.” It ran 80
stories referring to mass graves in Kosovo.
Rumors, which the Times and
National Public Radio
repeated, had bodies being disposed of at the Trepca
mine: in shafts, in acid, or in a furnace. Clinton
and others compared
Milosevic to Hitler. Such talk stirred hatred of
Serbs.
Unlike American media, which swallowed
the official
government line whole, their European counterparts
questioned the massacre
allegations. Doubters included France’s Le
Figaro and Le Monde
and Germany’s
Berliner Zeitung,
which reported (March 13, 1999) that several
governments wanted Walker out
of OSCE; they had statements from OSCE monitors
that the Racak
bodies were mostly of guerrillas killed in battle.
A year later (March 12, 2000) The Sunday Times
of London reported that
Walker had
been covertly helping the CIA push NATO into war.
Also promoting war in 1999
was the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). Aiming at
convincing the U.S. and NATO to
attack the Serbs and split the province from
Yugoslavia, it publicized the 45
bodies.
The European Union hired a team of
Finnish
forensic pathologists to investigate. Their report
remained secret for two
years. U.S. media mostly ignored its release in
2001, except for a brief story
by United Press International.
The findings coincided, not with a
massacre,
but with a two-day battle between Yugoslav police
and Albanian guerrillas.
Nobody could tell if the 45 were civilians, where
they lived, or where they
died. Only one body showed signs
of shooting at short range,
only one was that of a woman, and only
one was plainly juvenile. Shots
had been fired into different bodily parts, from
different directions. Gunpowder
residue on the hands of 37 indicated firearm use.
A Yugoslav
pathologist also examined the bodies and, like the
Finns, found no massacre,
but few listened. In mid June 1999 the FBI sent a
team to investigate two
alleged grave sites and returned home with nothing
to say. French forensic
experts, looking for a grave said to have about
150 bodies, found none and no
evidence of bodies in the mine. A Spanish team,
expecting 2,000 bodies, found
187, mostly in individual graves and showing signs
of war deaths but not of murder
or torture.
A Le Monde reporter and an Associated
Press crew saw bodies one day
that they had not seen the day before. There were
no pools of blood, no shell
casings. Evidently the KLA had gathered the
victims of the gun battle, made
sure they were all in civilian clothes, and put
them in the ditch. Walker then announced
they were “executed.”
One whopper, told early in the war
by Jamie Rubin, State Department spokesman, had
100,000 Albanians imprisoned at
the stadium in Pristina, capital of Kosovo. He got
it from the KLA. Such
prominent media as Associated Press, ABC News, and
PBS reported it as fact. Only
a reporter for the French Press Agency thought of
going to the stadium and
looking. He found it empty with no sign of recent
habitation.
Humanitarian
slaughter
In waging their supposed humanitarian
war, the
Clinton-NATO forces made thousands of raids on
houses, bridges, hospitals,
water supplies, electric stations, trains, tracks,
buses, factories, and
offices. Besides traditional weapons, they used
newer devices of dubious
legality even against soldiers: cluster bombs and
shells with radioactive
uranium. Excerpts from Associated Press stories
follow (publication dates in
1999).
- “A NATO attack
left 12 civilians dead
and dozens injured. In Aleksinac,
pools of blood and
human body parts could be seen in the wreckage
of one building.” (April 6.)
- “An allied hit
was blamed for turning a
Yugoslav passenger train into a heap of
burning wreckage … . At least 10 people
aboard the train were killed.” (April
13.)
- “Two of the
strikes hit convoys of
ethnic Albanian refugees, killing at least 64
and wounding 20.” (April 24).
- “NATO warplanes
hammered Belgrade and
its suburbs Thursday, leaving a hospital in
smoldering ruins, three patients
dead and eight foreign missions damaged.” (May
21.)
As
far as I know, no news media mentioned the U.S.
treaties prohibiting aggressive
war—the best known being the United Nations
Charter—or the U.S. treaties
embodying humanitarian law, such as:
The Geneva Convention
(IV) from fifty years earlier: “Civilian hospitals
… may in no circumstances
be the object of attack … .” (Article
18).
The Hague Convention on Laws of War
on Land,
1907, prohibiting, e.g., treacherous killing and weapons
that are poisoned or designed to cause unnecessary
suffering (Article 23) and
the attack or
bombardment of undefended communities, dwellings,
or other buildings (Article 25).
The 1977 Protocol Additional to the
Geneva Convention of 1949. It bans attacks on
civilians or indiscriminate attacks that harm
civilians or civilian objects
along with military targets; violations are war
crimes. (The U.S. signed the
protocol; although the Senate never voted on it,
Amnesty International says
international law regards it as binding on all
countries in the conduct of war.
The U.S. Army Field Manual tends to support that
view: “Customary international
law prohibits the launching of attacks [including
bombardment] against either
the civilian population or individual civilians as
such.”)
The Los Angeles Times repeatedly ran
front-page stories on attacks against civilians,
like these two: Low-flying
planes bomb a
Serbian bridge, toppling cars into the water and
killing at least nine
civilians. When people rush to offer aid, the
planes return to kill
them too (May 31). A refugee camp is bombed (April
15):
At
least a dozen children were among the dead. An
infant buttoned up in terrycloth sleepers
lay among the corpses that filled the local
morgue.
Another child was
incinerated in the fire that
swept through the camp. The body was
still lying on the ground Friday morning,
beside that of an adult, in the
middle of a tangle
of farmers’ tractors and wagons that were
still burning 12 hours after the
attack.
That
attack inspired an editorial in The New
York Times, “Grisly Accident in Kosovo”
(April 16), which said the purpose
of NATO’s bombing was
“to stop the killing and reverse
the expulsion of Kosovo’s persecuted ethnic
Albanians.” Yet NATO bombs killed
72 of them. “But as President Clinton rightly
noted yesterday, accidents are
inseparable from war, and it would be a greater
tragedy to slacken the
bombardment or unduly restrict the military target
list.” It follows (as I
wrote the Times)
that
to cease the killing of civilians would be “a
greater tragedy” than to keep
killing them. “Shades of
Orwell! We kill to oppose
killing. To stop taking lives is tragedy.” (My
letter was not published.)
Tolerating homicide
Consider Clinton’s statement that such
“accidents” are inseparable from war. If that is
so, then how can war be
tolerated? Indeed, the U.S. government (under
President Calvin Coolidge) and
other governments sought to end it in 1928, when
the killing of civilians was less
acceptable. They made the Pact of Paris, or
Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact,
renouncing war as an instrument of national
policy. It was invoked at the
trials of Nazi and Japanese war criminals and
remains in effect.
Anyhow, if Clinton knew his bombings
would kill civilians, could their killings be
truly called accidental—as
opposed to homicidal? That editorial alluded to a
Times story headed, “Civilian
Deaths Inevitable in Warfare, Clinton
Says” (April 16). Lacking justification under
national or international law, he
could have justifiably been tried for more than
perjury and obstruction of
justice, the charges that the House of
Representatives impeached him on in
1998.
Charges could have included violation of
the
humanitarian laws cited above, as well as waging
of aggressive war in violation
of Kellogg-Briand, the United Nations Charter, and
the North Atlantic Treaty.
The UN Charter says (Article 2), “All members
shall settle their international
disputes by peaceful means” and refrain from “the
threat or use of force
against the territorial integrity or political
independence of any state….” The
North Atlantic Treaty accepts those UN provisions.
Moreover, Clinton usurped Congress’s
sole
authority under the Constitution to decide whether
to go to war (Article I,
Section 8), and he persisted even after specific
rebuffs by the House of
Representatives on April 28, 1999. They included a
427–2 vote against declaring
war on Yugoslavia and rejection of the bombing by
a 213 tie vote. Next day, The New York
Times wrongly stated that
Clinton “does not need the House’s moral support
to continue air strikes.”
Writings of the founding fathers confirm that the
Constitution authorized
Congress alone to initiate war. (See: “What the Founders
of the U.S.A. Wrote….” on this website)
Advocates
of war crimes
War pushers
at the home of “All the News That’s Fit
to Print,” besides editorial writers, included
two New York Times columnists who
advocated in effect the very crimes
that they blamed Serbs for.
“Let’s see what 12 weeks of less than
surgical bombing does. Give war a
chance,” Thomas Friedman wrote, using a slogan he
would recycle for every new
war (April 6). He went on (April 23): “Every power
grid, water pipe, bridge,
road and war-related factory has to be targeted.
Like it or not, we are at war
with the Serbian nation.”
Anthony Lewis wrote that critics of the
bombings should “think again about which side they
are on” (May 29). He said a
Serbian commander in Bosnia seven years earlier
ordered widespread burning of
Sarajevo. “That
should be remembered when Serbs today describe
themselves as victims…. NATO air attacks have
killed Serbian civilians. That is
regrettable. But it is a price that has to be paid
when a nation falls in
behind a criminal leader.”
So because a Serbian officer once
committed an
atrocity, the Serbian people deserve to die? Note
that when it comes to war,
notions of collective guilt and collective
punishment tend to replace American
principles of individual responsibility and
presumption of innocence.
Bill
O’Reilly, on the Fox News Channel, also favored
what amounted to war crimes
against the Serbian people (April 26): “Destroy
their infrastructure, totally destroy it. Any
target is OK … . I would level
that country so that there would be nothing
moving—no cars, no trains, nothing… . The Serb
people should be held accountable for this
dictator.”
In Time
magazine,
Bruce Nelen objected
to the use of relatively light
bombs, because it was not certain that a target
would be destroyed in one
attack (April 5). “And if the pilot
has to
come back, that increases the risk to him in order
to lessen the risk of
civilians on the ground—a kind of Disneyland idea
of customer service that
rankles many war fighters at the Pentagon.”
The
Pentagon apparently paid heed to commentators like
those, who advocated in
effect stepping up the killing of civilians.
Toward the end of the war, there appeared
to be no restrictions on bombing. In an op-ed
article in The New York Times, ex-President
Jimmy Carter, wrote (May 27):
[O]ur
destruction
of civilian life has now become senseless and
excessively brutal … . As the
American-led force has expanded targets to
inhabited
areas and resorted to the use of
anti-personnel cluster bombs, the result has
been damages
to hospitals, offices and residences of a
half-dozen ambassadors,
and the killing of hundreds of innocent
civilians and an untold number of
conscripted troops … . Missiles and bombs are
now concentrating on the
destruction of bridges, railways, roads,
electric power, and fuel and fresh
water supplies … . The ends don’t always
justify the means.
Another
civilian target was Radio Television Serbia, where
bombs killed 16 to 20
(reports differed) editorial, technical, and
office personnel on April 23. The
attackers called their bombing accidental. But
nearly five years later, I heard
Wesley Clark, the war’s top
general,
admit that it was intentional. A reporter for
Pacifica Radio, Jeremy Scahill,
had questioned him and recorded his response.
U.S.
news media said little about that destruction of
media of speech and press.
Most accepted the president’s “air campaign” or
“strikes” (two popular
euphemisms for the aerial killing).
Unfit to print
In their zeal for war and scorn for
Serbs,
writers did not necessarily let logical consistency
stand in their way. Stacy
Sullivan in The
New Republic raised
“disturbing questions about the culpability of
Serbs as a whole in the actions
of the authoritarian government that rules them”
(May 10). It was not explained
how they could tell the authoritarian
government that ruled them what to do.
This was the lead of a main story in The New York
Times by Steven Lee Myers
and Elizabeth Becker:
WASHINGTON,
April 24—NATO began its second month of
bombing against Yugoslavia today
with new strikes against military targets that
disrupted civilian
electrical and water supplies, as the
alliance’s leaders took steps to
expand the war effort, including an agreement
to use air bases in
Hungary.”
Civilian drinking water and electricity
were bombed
out, yet the targets were “military”!
Meeting in Washington, those
leaders celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the
North Atlantic Treaty
Organization, the story added. But it failed to
mention NATO’s supposedly
defensive purpose.
This is from
Article 1 of the treaty (1949):
The parties undertake,
as set forth in the
Charter of the United Nations, to settle any
international disputes in which
they may be involved by peaceful means and
to refrain in their international
relations from the threat or use of force in
any manner inconsistent with the
purposes of the United Nations.
Contrarily, the organization had become
an
aggressive war machine, unrestrained by the
international law on which it was
supposedly based.
Many
news accounts in The New York
Times
could have been written by U.S. government
propagandists. Steven Erlanger
wrote, February 20:
An exception was Erlanger’s February 24
piece, on
the negotiations over Kosovo and the controversy
over an international force to
carry out a political settlement:
Mr.
Milosevic has shown himself at
least as reasonable as the ethnic Albanians about a political
settlement for
Kosovo … . Already the Serbian President, Milan Milutinovic,
has said that, when negotiations resume on March
15, the Serbs are ready to discuss “an
international presence in Kosovo” to
carry out political arrangements of any
agreement. And other Serbs have floated
ideas that include leavening Western forces
with lots of Russians … .
Within a month, Erlanger apparently
forgot all that.
His story headed “U.S. Negotiators Depart,
Frustrated By
Milosevic’s Hard Line” presented just one side:
U.S. officials’ talk of
Yugoslav intransigence (March 24). It said,
incorrectly, that the Yugoslav
parliament had met “to reject the idea of foreign
troops into Kosovo,” The
parliament had accepted exactly that. Although
rejecting a U.S. proposal, it adopted a
resolution declaring Yugoslavia “ready,
immediately after the signing of the political
settlement about [Kosovo’s] self-
management … to consider the dimensions and
character of the international
presence … for the implementation of such a
settlement.”
Jane Perlez
also erred in the Times (April 14): “Mr. Milosevic has
absolutely refused to
entertain an outside force in Kosovo, arguing that
the province is sovereign
territory of Serbia and Yugoslavia.”
To the contrary: on February 20, after
two
months of talks at Rambouillet
among the Yugoslavs,
ethnic Albanians, Americans, British, French,
Germans, and Russians, the
Russian news agency ITAR-TASS reported that a
compromise offer had been
floated: “a multinational force … under the UN or
the OSCE flag rather than
the NATO flag as was planned before.” The Yugoslav
delegation showed “signs
that it might accept international peacekeepers”
for Kosovo from one of those
two bodies. But the next day, Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright, stated on
CNN, “The United States’ position is that it has
to be a NATO-led force.”
What the Yugoslavs rejected was the
U.S. proposal for an occupation of the whole
country, including all of Serbia
and Montenegro—not just Kosovo—by a hostile army,
specifically 28,000 NATO
soldiers. The document handed to the Yugoslav
government to sign—or
else—contained provisions like these:
7. NATO personnel shall
be immune from
any form of arrest, investigation, or
detention by the
authorities in the FRY [Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia]… .
8. NATO personnel shall enjoy,
together with their vehicles, vessels,
aircraft, and equipment,
free and unrestricted passage and access
throughout
the FRY including associated airspace and
territorial water … .
9. NATO shall
be exempt
from duties, taxes, and other charges and
inspections and customs regulations… .
“They need some bombing”
The news media nearly all placed the
blame for the
breakdown of negotiations on stubborn
intransigence of the government in
Belgrade. The truth was otherwise. On May 18, Jim
Jatras,
a foreign policy assistant to the Senate’s
Republicans, said in a speech to the
Cato Institute in Washington that a senior
administration official told the
news media at Rambouillet,
“We intentionally set the
bar too high for the Serbs to comply. They need
some bombing, and that’s what
they’re going to get.”
A similar version appeared in The Nation
on June 14. George Kenney, a
former State Department officer, said an
unimpeachable press source who
regularly traveled with the secretary of state
told Kenney a senior State
Department official had bragged that the U.S.
“deliberately set the bar higher
than the Serbs could accept.” The official said
the Serbs needed a little
bombing to see reason.
The correspondents, representing the
major news
organizations, were sworn to “deep-background
confidentiality.” So what they
knew and what they reported were far different.
In June 2000, Amnesty International
issued a postwar report accusing NATO of violating
laws of war during its
bombing. The organization declared that NATO
committed war crimes by air raids
that failed to distinguish between civilian and
military targets and continued
even after it was obvious that civilians were
being killed and wounded.
A little-known
report by Human Rights Watch in 2001 held the
Kosovo Liberation Army
responsible for up to 1,000 “abductions and
murders of Serbs and ethnic
Albanians considered collaborators with the state
… widespread and systematic
burning and looting of homes belonging to Serbs,
Roma, and other minorities and
the destruction of Orthodox churches.” The place
was Kosovo after Yugoslavia’s
defeat and withdrawal.
The U.S.-sponsored International
Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia
refused to consider a complaint by
international human rights lawyers accusing NATO
leaders of war crimes. Instead
it tried the head of the nation they ravaged.
In February 2002, Slobodan Milosevic
went on trial in The Hague, Netherlands, on 66
counts of war crimes in Bosnia,
Croatia, and Kosovo during civil wars of the
1990s. The trial dragged on for
four years, never to be concluded. In attempting
to defend himself, Milosevic
tried futilely to detail American war crimes and
the common support for Albanian
terrorists by Osama bin Laden and the U.S. He
sought to compel Clinton, a
former friend, to testify. None of the defense
arguments made the main news
media.
Suffering heart disease and high
blood pressure, Milosevic, 64, requested a trip to
Russia for medical
treatment. After four months, in February 2006,
the tribunal rejected his
request. The following month, Milosevic wrote that
he was being poisoned, that
a “heavy drug” was found in his blood. Hours later
he was dead.
A Dutch toxicologist found traces of
an unprescribed
antibiotic in Milosevic’s system. The
Serbian president, Boris Tadic,
held the tribunal
responsible for his death. Milosevic’s son, Marko,
called it murder.
The news reports presented the
tribunal’s accusations as fact. ABC and NBC
television news both called the
late defendant “the butcher of the Balkans.” USA Today editorialized, “A
defendant is always innocent until
proven guilty,” yet it copied the “butcher of the
Balkans” epithet and
convicted Milosevic of “ethnic brutality.” MSNBC
said Milosevic faced charges
“after orchestrating a decade of bloodshed.”
CNN.com headlined, “Milosevic:
Architect of Balkans carnage.” CBS radio news
described “the dictator who
presided over ethnic cleansing in the Balkans.”
ABC radio news resurrected the
genocide accusation and had Clinton’s envoy
Holbrooke saying, “He killed
300,000 people.”
So who needed a court verdict?
By Paul W. Lovinger, Sept. 20, 2016