www.hirhome.com

Historical and Investigative Research - last revised October 2005
by Francisco Gil-White
http://www.hirhome.com/yugo/ranta.htm

First published in Emperor's Clothes (16 April 2003)
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Introduction

It appears at first that the title and the subtitle of this piece are not related, but they are, for the road to Jenin runs through Racak.

That may sound strange to those who know their geography because Jenin is a town in the West Bank, and Racak is a town in the Serbian province of Kosovo. But here's the connection: the Serbian security forces were falsely accused of committing a massacre against Kosovo Albanians in Racak, and later the Israelis were falsely accused of committing a massacre against Arab civilians in Jenin. Both times, both places, the powers that be sent Helena Ranta, a Finish pathologist, to lie -- her job was to give the accusations credence.

The Racak accusations were false, and Ranta always knew it.

"It has since turned out, through subsequent investigations by German, French and American correspondents and by human rights and peace groups... that the Racak massacre seems an enormous, albeit effective, hoax…" - The Toronto Sun, April 1, 2001.[6]

Now, this is quite significant, because the allegation of a massacre in the Kosovo town of Racak was NATO's excuse to start bombing Serbia on March 24, 1999.

If Racak was a hoax, we must ask: did NATO really have a reason to bomb Serbia? The answer is no. Despite years of trying, NATO has failed to produce even one body of an Albanian civilian murdered by Milosevic's forces. You read correctly: not one.[1]

In this piece I document:

1) that the accusations of a massacre at Racak were false accusations;

2) that the accusations were made as part of an elaborate KLA/CIA hoax; and

3) that Finnish pathologist Helena Ranta, sent to investigate the events at Racak, talked out of both sides of her mouth in order to give NATO the appearance of justification so that it could start bombing Serbia.

Before I do that, however, it is worth briefly considering this question: Given that Ranta helped NATO engineer a hoax at Racak in order to slander the Serbs, why did the UN send Ranta to 'investigate' allegations that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) had supposedly perpetrated a massacre in Jenin?

Is this coincidence? Or are the Western powers doing to the Israelis the same thing they did to the Serbs?
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Table of Contents

( hyperlinked <  )

<  Introduction

<  Why did the UN send Ranta to 'investigate' allegations of a supposed IDF massacre in Jenin?

<  Racak: Why such a hurried accusation?

<  An orchestrated plot

<  A few words about Madeleine Albright

<  The absurdity of the accusation against the Serbs

<  What is "a crime against humanity"?

<  Ranta never disagreed with the other two forensic teams

<  The Finnish Team convicts itself

<  Back to The New York Times

<  The Big Picture: What does it mean that NATO and the KLA carried out a hoax at Racak?

<  Israel and the UN

<  Human Rights Watch: Another tool of Empire?

<  Epilogue: And the lies and absurdities continue...
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Why did the UN send Ranta to 'investigate' allegations of a supposed IDF massacre in Jenin?
____________________________________________________

In April 2002 Arafat and Co. claimed that Israeli soldiers had massacred Palestinian Arab civilians in the town of Jenin (usually they said 500, but on occasion they said 'thousands', and Yasser Arafat compared Jenin to Stalingrad, where 600,000 people died).[1a]

But 500 civilians were not massacred in Jenin -- nothing like that happened.

[Quote From Washington Times Starts Here]

"Kadoura Mousa Kadoura, director of Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement for the northern West Bank, told The Washington Times on Tuesday that after receiving a report from four Palestinian-appointed investigators, he no longer believed there had been a massacre at the camp. He produced a list of 56 persons known to have died in Jenin.

Latest reports have placed the casualty figure at about 50.

Israeli spokesman Dore Gold last night welcomed the decision to call off the [UN] probe, saying it had been called for in the first place because of the 'lie' that some 500 people had been massacred there...

...Israel has denied the charges [of war crimes] and says it tried to spare civilians. It notes that it lost 23 soldiers in the fighting because it declined to use artillery or air strikes."[2]

[Quote From Washington Times Ends Here] 

The Washington Times was an exception. In general, the media were much less energetic about setting the record straight than they were stoking the fires of the accusation, and organizations such as Human Rights Watch never let up, in fact.[2a] People who didn't pay close attention to the news, therefore, continue to think that there was a massacre at Jenin.

But even Al Jazeera ("the Arab CNN") -- a satellite-TV news channel based in Qatar, and owned by the Emir of Qatar, a Wahhabi Muslim fundamentalist[3] -- agrees with the body count above, so we may consider the matter settled:

AL JAZEERA: "Dozens of Palestinian men armed with light weapons kept the world’s toughest army at bay for 11 days and killed 23 Israeli soldiers, using basic, homemade weapons. 56 Palestinians died in defence of Jenin..."[4]

Though Al Jazeera tries to glorify the Palestinian terrorists, notice what this concedes: it was a fight. And the figures of 23 dead on the Israeli side, as against 50 or 56 on the Palestinian side, confirm this, because such are the numbers of a combat ratio, not the ratio of a massacre. All of this supports Israeli claims.

Al Jazeera's claim that the terrorists in Jenin were using "homemade weapons" against "the world's toughest army" (as if the US and many other militaries didn't exist) conveys an image of Palestinians using slingshots against IDF artillery. This is laughable.

First of all, the IDF did not use artillery, but fought house-to-house precisely in order to protect civilians (see above).

Second, as had been reported already in February 2002 by the BBC, the Jenin UN refugee camp, where the battle took place, had a secret "bomb-making factory" and a "weapons making factory."[5] What is produced in a factory, naturally, is precisely the opposite of "homemade."

And third, as the BBC had written earlier,

"Jenin, just a few miles from the Israeli town of Afula, has become one of the most important bases from which suicide attacks are launched."[5]

In other words, the people whom Al Jazeera glorified were terrorists dedicated to kill and maim innocent Israeli men, women, and children, and they had an important base of operations inside the UN refugee camp at Jenin. The refugee camp was therefore not an innocent little place, and this means that the UN has quite a bit to answer for, since the UN was running it!

How interesting, then, that the UN pushed for the allegations of massacre at Jenin to be investigated by a team of its own choosing...

When Israel objected to the UN’s choice of experts, the media rushed to accuse that the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) had something to hide. But it is now clear that the IDF had nothing to hide. So let us consider more closely this question: Perhaps the Israeli objection to the composition of the UN team was genuine? After all, the leading forensic on the team was Helena Ranta.

NATO had already chosen this woman once before to investigate alleged massacres in Yugoslavia, and most infamously in the case of the Kosovo town of Racak, in early 1999. Ranta lied about her findings and falsely called Racak a "crime against humanity" thus providing NATO with the excuse it was seeking to start bombing Serbia (documented below). None of this is a secret to those who follow closely foreign policy developments.

So if Ranta lied when NATO needed her to lie, might she not lie again, accusing Israel of a massacre in order to deflect attention from the UN's responsibility in Jenin? After all, the Jenin refugee camp, from which so much terror emerged to slay innocent citizens of the State of Israel, belonged to the UN.

It was certainly enough to make the Israelis worry. One suspects, therefore, that the UN offered Ranta to the Israelis as a lose-lose proposition. If Israel let her in, Ranta would lie again and proclaim Jenin a "crime against humanity." If Israel refused, everybody would think that the IDF had something to hide. A quick look at press reports from that time easily confirms that the Israeli refusal was interpreted in precisely these terms.

This attack on Israel succeeded only because the mainstream media had never made a scandal out of Ranta's lies in the case of Racak, and so the public could not interpret Israel's reluctance in context. In other words, people think there was a massacre in Jenin because they think there was a massacre in Racak. The first step in setting the record straight, therefore, is to establish that there was never a massacre in Racak.

This matters, because the allegation that there had supposedly been a massacre at Racak was the excuse that NATO used to justify to the world the brutal bombing of Serbia.

Below I examine how the Racak hoax was carried out, and the various roles played by NATO officials, the Western mainstream media, so-called "human rights organizations" such as Human Rights Watch, and, of course, our main protagonist: Helena Ranta.

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Racak: Why such a hurried accusation?
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In January 1999 NATO leaders launched a media campaign, blasting Yugoslav security forces for what they claimed was excessive use of force and atrocities in Kosovo.

Many observers charged that NATO’s real goal was to foster a political climate that would permit the bombing of Yugoslavia. But NATO leaders claimed they had no ulterior purpose -- theirs was just a decent reaction before gruesome crimes, they said.

What crimes? As reported in the Toronto Sun:

"On Jan. 16 [1999]…William Walker, the veteran American diplomat who headed [the American] peace verifiers for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), was taken by Kosovo Liberation Army members to Racak to see the bodies in the ditch. He declared that the dead 'obviously were executed where they lay.'

His OSCE report spoke of 'arbitrary arrests, killings and mutilations of unarmed civilians' at Racak."[6]

In a German documentary film about the Racak Hoax called "It All Started With A Lie," German General Heinz Loquai, a critic of the NATO attack on Yugoslavia, explained matters thusly:

"Walker collected up a number of journalists. He went to the spot [Racak] and, after a short period of time [in fact, the very same day -- FGW], said that what had happened was a massacre of [meaning by -- FGW] the Serbs, in fact. At that particular moment, he was not able to make a judgment of any kind. This opinion was taken over by the OSCE, the United Nations, and all the governments of the world. One day later, NATO held a meeting. It was an extraordinary meeting, and this was quite unusual. With his conduct, Walker had ignited the flame for war, a war which was to be a violation of international law, a war in which many civilians paid with their lives, a war for which German politicians hold the responsibility."[7]

So William Walker’s decision to proclaim the incident at Racak a “massacre” was immediate and on the spot. And yet, As Heinz Loquai points out, on that day Walker “was not able to make a judgment of any kind.” Why? Because Walker is not a forensic pathologist. So why did Walker make extreme pronouncements? He was supposedly there as a diplomat. He certainly did not behave like one. A diplomat would hold his judgment and wait for the forensic experts to look at the evidence.

Walker was officially there as the leader of the American delegation of supposedly neutral OSCE observers -- “peace verifiers,” they called themselves.

Was his behavior neutral?

Walker went to Racak with representatives of one side only -- the Albanian KLA, and he unquestioningly accepted their claims. It is never legitimate to simply ignore the claims of one side when, in the context of war, there is an accusation of atrocity, so we must ask: Why did Walker rush to accept the KLA version and ignored the claims of the Yugoslav government?

It was well known that the KLA were brutal terrorists, and at first even the US government (later to become the KLA's air force) openly recognized this. For example, in 1998, US special envoy to the Balkans Robert Gelbard had...

“...condemned the actions of an ethnic Albanian underground group Kosovo Liberation Army (UCK) which has claimed responsibility for a series of attacks on Serb targets. ‘We condemn very strongly terrorist actions in Kosovo. The UCK is, without any questions, a terrorist group,’ Gelbard said.”[8] [my emphasis]

The KLA (UCK in Albanian) was getting funded by, and had terrorist trainers from, Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda, and they also got funds from the KLA's prominent role in international heroin trafficking.[9]

Not exactly a reputable bunch...

And, anyway, what was the rush? Why the mad hurry to make the most serious accusation possible -- "war crime" -- prior to any serious examination of the evidence?

On this point, NATO’s reaction speaks volumes (emphasis below is mine).

"U.S. Foreign Secretary Madeleine Albright, eager to make war against then-Yugoslavia and speaking on CBS' Face the Nation, cited Racak where, she said, there were 'dozens of people with their throats slit.' She called this the 'galvanizing incident' that meant peace talks at Rambouillet were pointless, and 'humanitarian bombing' the only recourse. Germany's Foreign Minister, Joschka Fischer, told the newspaper Berliner Zeitung that the Racak massacre 'became the turning point for me' and war was the only answer."[9a]

Madeleine Albright (like her German counterpart Joschka Fisher) was eager to make war.

How eager? Very.

Madeleine Albright was such an extreme warmonger that, in Washington, and in the media, NATO’s bombing campaign eventually got called “Albright’s War.”[10]

That was the rush.

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An orchestrated plot
____________________________________________________

Did Madeleine Albright send William Walker to Kosovo for the express purpose of making phony accusations that would give her an excuse to start the war?

Consider the following.

First, since Walker was officially an American diplomat, the Secretary of State of the United States, Madeleine Albright, was his boss. And Albright handpicked Walker for the job: "Walker...was nominated by Madeleine Albright, the American secretary of state."[11]

Second, Albright knew what she was doing: Walker was perfect for a job that required linking with brutal terrorists and giving them political cover, given his past association with US sponsorship for paramilitary terrorism in Central America.[12]

Thirdly, a London Times article has now reported that Walker's OSCE mission was crawling with CIA operatives and employees of two US paramilitary companies (Dyncorp and MPRI) that have close ties to US military intelligence and to the CIA. This personnel was there to establish close links with the KLA, to train them, and to prepare the ground in advance of the NATO bombing.[13]  

And this squares very well with the fact that the CIA had been training the KLA already, since early in 1998, in Albania, where the KLA had its bases.[13a]

In other words, the decision to bomb had been taken long before. What was needed was an excuse to start, and furnishing that excuse was Walker's job. Albright was at the center of it all, and she energetically deployed threats that NATO would start bombing unless the Yugoslavs allowed Walker to stay in Yugoslavia and move unhindered.[14] The Yugoslavs wanted to throw him out, but Albright desperately needed to keep him in because his mission was crucial to the foreordained bombing

And Albright's hand can be seen everywhere. It was Albright who "...hand-picked Canada's Louise Arbour to be [ICTY] war crimes prosecutor, who had no experience with the Balkans and tended to believe every atrocity claimed by the Muslims."[14a] And Arbour was quickly deployed.

"Canada's Louise Arbour…(hand-picked for the job by Albright) was prevented by Serb authorities from visiting Racak. She vowed retribution for the massacre, urging that 'international troops on the ground' were the only way to effect arrests."[14b]

Suspicious?

Yes. Especially given that (1) the ICTY was illegally set up by NATO; (2) it exists only because NATO funds it [15]; and (3) it is an aberration that exists to investigate accusations of war crimes only if such accusations are made against Yugoslavs, but never against NATO (the 'Tribunal' considers NATO in principle incapable of committing war crimes...).[16]

Albright appoints the ICTY prosecutors and also dispatches the man making the accusation: William Walker. She has all the strings in her hand. For that reason, allow me a few words about Madeleine Albright, lest her role be improperly construed.

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A few words about Madeleine Albright
____________________________________________________

In early February 1997, Madeleine Albright suddenly discovered that she was 'Jewish.' It was front-page news. Why? Why would this be front-page news? The Washington Post explains:

"Since the particular child reported to have made such a late-life discovery is our new secretary of state, concerns have been raised about the implications for her future conduct of foreign policy."[16a]

Can you imagine the media reporting "concerns...about...her future conduct of foreign policy" if Albright had discovered that she was of, say, German ancestry? I cannot. And yet it was the Germans who recently plunged the entire world into war. The Jews were the ones dying by the millions. In any case, if the president of the United States had not liked Albright's conduct of foreign policy, all he had to do was fire her: the Secretary of State is the president's employee, and serves at his pleasure. Albright's "conduct of foreign policy" was Bill Clinton's.

And what did Albright's "future conduct of foreign policy" turn out to be? Why, it was a war launched on 24 March 1999 that was baptized "Albright's War"...against the Serbs. In other words, first the US Secretary of State 'discovered' that she was supposedly 'Jewish,' and then Bill Clinton launched a war against the Serbs that the media went out of its way to identify with Albright personally.

Was this a coincidence? Or was it a calculated move designed to make the Serbs think that "the Jews" were the ones attacking them?

You may protest that there isn't a good reason for the NATO powers to make the Serbs think that they were being attacked by "the Jews". But this objection cannot be made except out of ignorance of recent Serbian history (which is understandable, because the overwhelming majority of people around the world know absolutely nothing about the Serbs).

In the 1990s, during the civil wars in Yugoslavia, the enemies of the Serbs were the Bosnian Muslims led by Alija Izetbegovic, the Croats led by Franjo Tudjman, and the Albanians of the KLA. These three forces trace their roots to fascist movements that allied with the German Nazis during World War II.[16b] In that World War, the Serbs were by far the staunchest opponents of the Nazis, and the bravest defenders of the Jews, dying in the hundreds of thousands in Nazi concentration camps because they chose to oppose Hitler, and because they refused to abide by even one of Hitler's anti-Jewish laws.[16bb]

The Serbs are unique.

Suppose you could convince the Serbs that, in the 1990s, it was "the Jews" who made it possible for these fascist forces to attack them again. What do you suppose would be the effect on the Serbs? They would feel violently betrayed, of course. Naturally, this would raise the likelihood that they would become antisemites too. Having thus joined ideological forces with their enemies, they would have ended up in an impossible position, without the moral superiority which gave them courage to defeat the fascists in WWII -- an easy prey at last. It is bad enough that they were badly outnumbered, this would have destroyed the Serbs as a culture.

So if the way to break the Serbs is to turn them into antisemites, then NATO certainly did have a good reason to try. One way to do this was to identify the war against the Serbs with the American Secretary of State Madeleine Albright who, all of a sudden, 'discovered' that she was Jewish. Another way to do this was for the Croat, Bosnian Muslim, and Albanian enemies of the Serbs simultaneously to hire the public relations firm Ruder Finn, which, collaborating with the NATO governments, got the leaders of three American Jewish organizations to denounce the Serbs in public, even though they had no evidence of Serbian misdeeds.[16c] Some Serbs certainly concluded from this, as intended, that they were being attacked by "the Jews."

But they weren't.

First of all, it is false that Madeleine Albright is Jewish. Second, the leaders of three Jewish organizations do not speak for "the Jews." By that logic we could just as easily say that "the Jews" defended the Serbs, because there is no journal more famous for its research defending the Serbs than Emperor's Clothes, whose editor in chief, Jared Israel, happens to be Jewish. In fact, Jared Israel founded Emperor's Clothes precisely in order to defend the Serbs by telling the truth about them, working in this way to personally repay them for their brave sacrifices on behalf of the Jewish people during WWII.[16cc] But is this really evidence that "the Jews" have defended the Serbs? No, it is not. It is evidence that one Jewish person has defended the Serbs. What one Jewish person does cannot speak for the Jewish people. This point would naturally apply also to Madeleine Albright, if she happened to be Jewish, which she is not, and it applies to the leaders of three Jewish organizations.

On the other hand, there are about 5 million Jews living in the Jewish state of Israel, which is a little under half the world's Jewish population. And Israel is a democratic state whose government must take into account the wishes of its people. So it matters that

“...[whereas] the Pentagon and radical Islamist groups from the Middle East designed to assist the Bosnian Muslims...[i.e. Alija Izetbegovic's antisemitic and terrorist faction]... the secret services of Ukraine, Greece, and Israel were busy arming the Bosnian Serbs. Mossad was especially active and concluded a deal with the Bosnian Serbs at Pale...[16d]

Of course, the NATO powers forced the Israelis to back down.

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The absurdity of the accusation against the Serbs
____________________________________________________

When Albright sent Louise Arbour to examine the evidence at Racak, the Yugoslav government naturally refused because this had all the markings of an attack. Arbour immediately confirmed their suspicions when she “vowed retribution for the massacre” and called for “international troops on the ground” to make arrests.

Should a prosecutor for an international tribunal be vowing retribution (!) for a supposed “massacre” that she can only allege -- having seen no evidence -- to have happened? Should she call for foreign troops to make arrests in a sovereign state? She sounds like the agent of a colonial empire, not the prosecutor for an international court of law.

But at least we can say that Arbour was as good as her word: within two weeks NATO was threatening Milosevic to either sign the Rambouillet “peace” agreement or be bombed. [17]

Should anybody conclude that the Yugoslavs, in denying Arbour, were behaving like criminals with something to hide?

Hardly. As reported by Ramsay Steele in Liberty:

"…[the] shoot-out at Racak between Serbian police and KLA insurgents…was filmed by French TV journalists[19] and observed by OSCE personnel, who had been notified by the Serbian police."[18]

If you just did a double take, then you were paying attention. If not, please read the above quote again.

Would the Serbian police invite a TV crew and OSCE observers to watch their planned massacre of Albanian civilians?

Of course not.

Even a criminal government would have to be run by utter imbeciles in order to massacre civilians under the noses of journalists and international observers who had been invited by that same government to witness the event. Ramsay Steele continues:

"The Serbs denied the KLA account…The videos of the fight itself, the paucity of blood and cartridge cases in the ditch, and certain other circumstances appeared to bear out the Serb side.[19] The Yugoslavs demanded an independent investigation, and the OSCE invited a team of Finnish pathologists. The bodies were examined by three teams of pathologists: Yugoslav, Belorussian, and the Finns."

So it was the Yugoslavs who demanded an independent investigation. Is that the behavior of a government with something to hide?

What the Western press tended to omit was that Racak was a heavily fortified base of operations of the terrorist KLA, not an innocent little village. The claims of massacred unarmed civilians had very little surface plausibility to begin with, and the Yugoslav government knew itself to be perfectly innocent. Hence, though they stymied Louise Arbour (Albright's tool), they demanded an independent investigation. 

They got three. Forty (out of the 45) dead bodies were taken to the city of Pristina, where Yugoslav, Byelorussian, and Finnish forensic teams (the last one headed by Helena Ranta) performed autopsies.

Why three investigations?

NATO accused that the Yugoslav and Byelorussian experts were tools of Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, so NATO asked the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe), to pick a third team. The Finns, who had been working in Yugoslavia under the auspices of the European Union (EU), got picked.

The OSCE could be counted on to choose a team that NATO could rely on to lie, if necessary, because Knut Vollebaek, who was then Norwegian Foreign Minister and Chairman of the OSCE at the time, is dishonest and a major power in the US-led Empire.[20] Ramsay Steele continues:

"The Yugoslavs and the Belorussians concluded that the fatal wounds were occasioned by bullets fired from a distance and that additional bullet and knife wounds were inflicted after the bodies had been dead for some hours, also that some of the clothing had been changed after death, presumably to replace KLA uniforms with civilian garb…

The Finnish report did not appear as promised…It appears almost inescapable that [it] bears out the conclusions of the Yugoslav and Belorussian reports, and that there was no massacre of civilians at Racak. Who can doubt that, if the report had endorsed the KLA claim of a Serb atrocity, it would have been published in full, minutely analyzed by U.S. 'news' weeklies, and featured in Clinton's speeches…?"

"The Finnish report did not appear as promised..."

That's right: it didn't. But that didn't stop NATO spokesmen from claiming that the Finnish team's findings supported NATO charges against the Serbs, and "Ranta's secret report...[became] a key reason for the NATO decision to start the bombing campaign."[21]

Ponder that. Why "secret report"? What was the big secret?

NATO was making a decision to bomb a country -- to kill, injure, and/or displace large numbers of people, and to cripple the country's infrastructure -- and the report it was supposedly basing this decision on was contradicted by two other reports from investigators who had looked at the same scene. So how could they keep Ranta's report a secret? If the facts had really been on NATO's side, who can doubt, as Ramsay Steele says in Liberty, that NATO would have shouted the contents of Ranta's report from the rooftops?

But that, of course, was the problem: the Finnish report agreed with those of the Yugoslav and Byelorussian teams: there had been no massacre. And this is precisely why the report's contents had to remain secret. Otherwise, NATO could not use Racak as the excuse to start bombing. So the European Union, under German leadership at the time, refused to publish the report!

And Serbia was laid waste.

And apocalyptically so. Serbian democracy and economy have been destroyed. The Serb and Roma[22] populations of Kosovo have been permanently driven from their homes by KLA terrorists. Many of them were wounded. Quite a few were murdered. The lot of Serbs remaining in Kosovo is worse than slavery. And even the Albanian population of Kosovo now lives under the most brutal and chaotic gang-terror regime of the KLA, who continue to use Kosovo as a base of operations to flood Europe with heroin.[23] This helps explain why any Albanians who could were in fact running off to... Belgrade![23a] Neither peace, nor justice, nor life is protected in this "UN protectorate," created after waging a most inhumane "humanitarian war."

____________________________________________________

What is "a crime against humanity"?
____________________________________________________

Ranta's crime of omission (not publishing her report) speaks volumes. Her crimes of commission are just as eloquent. 

Despite her report being secret, Ranta immediately started making statements in press conferences, and she did her best to sound accusatory, which was a great help to NATO as it prepared the political ground to bomb Serbia.

And yet Ranta had to concede, out of the other side of her mouth, that she had found no evidence of Serbian guilt.

Consider: as reported at the time by the Associated Press, “the head of the forensic team, Helena Ranta, called the Racak killings ‘a crime against humanity,’ [but] the report did not directly accuse Serb forces of a massacre.”[24]

Huh?

Let's see. If she was not directly accusing Serb forces of a massacre, then what in the world was her rationale for using the inflammatory phrase “crime against humanity”?

Ranta explained that she called it a “crime against humanity” because “so many people died at ‘approximately the same time.’”[25]

If you just did a double take, then you were paying attention. If not, please read that quote again. By Ranta's nonsense standard the accidental sinking of a ship is a crime against humanity, because many people die at the same time in such events. Flash floods in populated areas? Crimes against humanity...

Earthquakes? Yes, crimes against humanity...!

Let us be clear. “Crime against humanity” is not a metaphorical expression but a defined legal term under international law. It does not refer to casualties in armed conflict between combatants, much less to the sundry other circumstances in which “so many people died at ‘approximately the same time.’”

"A crime against humanity is the result of persecution against a group, and is so heinous as to warrant punishment under international law. The term was first used in the preamble of the Hague Convention of 1907, and subsequently used during the Nuremberg trials as a charge for actions such as the Holocaust which did not violate a specific treaty but were deemed to require punishment."[26]

Unbelievably, according to the Finnish press and the Hague Tribunal, Ranta used this term because she was supposedly trying to avoid expressing a legal opinion.

"During the investigations Ranta found herself in a somewhat awkward situation, when she was called upon to give a legal opinion on the events of Racak. As a doctor Ranta refused to use any term other than 'crime against humanity'.

"Many expected Ranta to say that it was a massacre. However, she was not a lawyer. Instead, she worked to determine causes of death. Her task as a pathologist was not to define the events in legal terms", explained prosecution spokeswoman Florence Hartmann by telephone from The Hague on Monday."[27]

There's only two problems with this.

First, a spokeswoman for the prosecution at an international court of law (Hartmann) appears not to understand that Ranta's chosen expression -- “crime against humanity” -- is a defined legal term under, of all things, international law. Whether or not Ranta's job was to pronounce herself in legal terms (and I agree that this was not her job), what she in fact did was...to pronounce herself in legal terms.

Second, the same prosecution sokeswoman Florence Hartmann informs us that Ranta "worked to determine causes of death," and this indeed would be the job of a forensic sent to an alleged crime scene. But Hartmann should have checked with Ranta anyways, because Ranta denies that her job was to determine the causes of death. Notice what Ranta said right after conducting her investigations. As the New York Times told it,

Despite the exhaustive documentation, Dr. Ranta refused to draw conclusions as to the manner of death. She said it was not her role as a scientist to ascertain whether the killings were a massacre.

She said she had not visited the gully herself, which lies 25 miles southwest of Pristina, and so could not judge the distance from which the victims were killed.[28]

It was not her role as a scientist to determine if the killings were a massacre? That is absurd (but don't hold your breath for the New York Times to point it out).

Ranta was leading a team of forensic pathologists. As Ranta herself recently testified at The Hague (in contradiction with the above statements to the press), "she was in Kosovo exclusively to determine the causes of death of those who were killed..."[29] Well yes, naturally, because determining causes of death is what a team of forensic pathologists is for. And Ranta's team was sent to Racak because the KLA and William Walker had alleged a massacre there. Thus, the relevant question at Racak was whether the "causes of death" were consistent with a massacre (as the KLA claimed), or combat (as the Yugoslavs claimed).

If the bodies, for example, show evidence of having died while firing weapons, were they civilians? Not likely. If they have multiple shots, many of them non-lethal, and showing bizarre paths, were they summarily executed? Not likely.

So Ranta could do one of the following:

1) establish “the causes of death” and from this conclude there was a) a military firefight, or b) a massacre; or else,

2) she cannot determine “the causes of death,” and should limit herself to stating this and nothing more.

Ranta did neither. What she did instead was incoherent. On the one hand, she "refused to draw conclusions as to the manner of death," and even claimed on occasion that even trying to was not supposed to be her job (!), and on the other hand she stated that Racak had been a "crime against humanity." Everybody naturally interpreted that to mean 'a massacre of civilians.'

Why these absurdities from Ranta?

Well, this was apparently so that the mainstream Western press, which had already been reporting Racak as "a massacre," in horrified tones, and in a million repetitions, could once again splatter the disinformation across its headlines. For example, the New York Times, following Ranta’s press conference of 17 March, 1999, blared: “Serbs' Killing of 40 Albanians Ruled A Crime Against Humanity.”[28]

Not only does this headline make the gravest accusation possible, but it pretends that Ranta's claim amounts to a legal finding (note the word "ruled"). But what is truly amazing is that this is the headline for the article (quoted above) which reports that "Ranta refused to draw conclusions as to the manner of death."

The article and headline completely contradict each other!

Why does the New York Times print Ranta's incoherencies and absurdities with no comment? And why does the New York Times affix a headline that raises the most serious accusation possible -- “crime against humanity” -- when the body of the article states the contradiction that "Ranta refused to draw conclusions as to the manner of death"?

And why does the New York Times put this utterly contradictory passage at the very end of the article?

Well, most readers never go past the headline, and only a few read the entire article, so this is what most remembered: “Serbs' Killing of 40 Albanians Ruled A Crime Against Humanity.” To those readers, the fact that NATO subsequently bombed Serbia will have appeared motivated by "humanitarian" impulses, and following sound legal justification.

The New York Times, then, was engaging in hostile war propaganda, and thus contributed to the death, dispossession, and/or displacement of thousands of innocent people.

____________________________________________________

Ranta never disagreed with the other two forensic teams
____________________________________________________

In addition to her incoherently accusatory statements, Ranta refused to sign with the Byelorussian and Yugoslav teams a common report which exonerated the Serbian security services. Naturally, this was widely interpreted as Ranta’s disagreement with the conclusions of the other two teams, and it led to headlines such as that in the New York Times.

But Ranta never actually said that she disagreed with the other two teams. Quite the contrary. In a report that she authored on 17 March, 1999, and which almost nobody saw, and which no media company reported, she said the following:

"Confusion has been caused by statements and premature conclusions…After the completion of the autopsies in January, the Serbian and Belorussian pathologists decided to draw up common reports summarizing their findings. The Finnish Team declined to sign these which was erroneously interpreted as disagreement on the findings between the local experts and the Finnish Team."[30] [my emphasis]

In fact, although NATO and the Western press accused that the Yugoslav and Byelorussian experts had got hold of the bodies first, and therefore could not be trusted, it is clear from the Finnish report that all three teams cooperated extensively and in mutual harmony, as the following quote from page 184 of the published Finnish report of 2001 makes clear:

"Forensic experts from Yugoslavia, Finland and Byelorussia participated in the investigation of the victims from Racak. This double-checking was fruitful because forensic pathologists seldom work under the pressure of such international publicity. Having some differences in practical questions between different schools complemented the end result. The autopsy findings were discussed in full professional consensus."[31]

As Table 3 of that report indicates (p. 179), all of these forensic experts reached similar conclusions in their autopsies. 

But why, if the Finns did not disagree with their colleagues from Byelorussia and Yugoslavia, did Ranta not sign with the other two teams? She had to know that the eager NATO warmongers would loudly claim that her refusal to co-sign was a disagreement. This was not an innocent difference of opinion, but rather the pretext for unleashing a bombing campaign, killing or displacing thousands of people.

If Ranta did not disagree, how could she not sign?

We can make sense of Ranta’s absurd and maverick behavior only if (1) it was her job to provide NATO with a pretext for war, but (2) she could not do so honestly because her findings did not in fact support the conclusion of a massacre at Racak. Ranta thus resorted to saying “crime against humanity” (because “so many people died at ‘approximately the same time’” [!]) out of one side of her mouth, while out of the other side "Ranta refused to draw conclusions as to the manner of death." This allowed NATO and the Western media to proclaim anything they wanted.

What closes the case against Ranta, ironically, is her own Finnish Team’s official report, published finally in Forensic Science International in 2001 (two full years after the NATO bombing, mind you). This second report, which we discuss below, is simply amazing. It completely confirms the conclusions reached by the Byelorussian and Yugoslav teams: people were not executed and there was no torture or mutilation of bodies. Thus, it proves that the charges of “massacre” and “crime against humanity” were false.

____________________________________________________

The Finnish Team convicts itself
____________________________________________________

The Finnish Team’s report was finally published in Forensic Science International in 2001.[31] The main points in that report are these:

1) Every victim is crisscrossed by an astonishing number of bullets. There are a total of 80 entry or tangential gunshot wounds, or an average of eight per body (p. 178).

2) For an execution, the bullet paths are bizarre.

The 7th bullet in victim RA-33-7009F goes in upwards through the ribs and comes out through the head. The 2nd bullet in victim RA-35-7012F traveled from the top of the shoulder into the abdominal region. Victim RA-3-7024F has three bullet paths entering the calf, in three different directions (one them entered near the ankle and moved up!). The other bullets have similarly bizarre paths, these were just chosen for illustration. 

Many of the bullet wounds are non-lethal. For example, victim RA-38-7014F had fewer bullet paths than most other victims -- just five -- but only one of them appears to have been conceivably lethal, and it is hardly one an executioner would choose: the bullet entered the lower back and exited via the lower chest.

3) There is a lack of close-range wounds.

The autopsy team looked for “signs of contact or close-range firing” (p. 177) - what one would find in a summary execution - and found only one possible example (Table 3, p. 179). But even this lonely case was uncertainly referred to in the relevant footnote as a “probable [my emphasis] close-range discharge.”

The evidence therefore suggests a military firefight. In combat, those who fire weapons attract return fire, so one can expect victims will have multiple shots. In a summary execution, by contrast, multiple shots are unnecessary.

The bullet paths are consistent with people whose orientation towards the incoming bullets was horizontal, with the head towards the source of fire. This is natural in a military firefight, where people often flatten themselves against the ground and face their attackers as they return fire. But such bullet paths are hardly to be expected from a summary execution.

And the absence of close-range wounds again argues against a summary execution.

Thus, since:

1) everybody agrees that a military firefight did occur at Racak; 

2) the forensic evidence is perfectly consistent with a military firefight;

3) all the other evidence is also consistent with the claims of the Serbs (e.g. the fact that the Yugoslav security forces had invited journalists and observers to witness the operation); and

4) none of the evidence is consistent with an execution;

the only reasonable conclusion is that there was no massacre.

The authors of this report are therefore probably hoping that nobody will read it, as it exposes Ranta and colleagues as paid liars for NATO who had rebuked their Hippocratic Oath to “first, do no harm” by telling lies to justify a war (the worst thing that a human being -- let alone a doctor -- can do). Perhaps for this reason the authors wrote an abstract for their report in which they falsely claim that “the manner of death remained undetermined,” and also that “The events at Racak were the first of those leading to charges by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) against the highest authorities in power in the FRY for crimes against humanity…” The message of this abstract is clear: the report supposedly does not support any particular conclusion, but we all know anyways that the Serbs are bad, so there is little point in reading further!

____________________________________________________

Back to The New York Times
____________________________________________________

In light of all this, let us now take another look at the New York Times and how it reported the evidence at Racak. My readers may, at this point, not be entirely shocked to find that the NYT blared another prejudicial headline on 22 January: “Charting A Massacre: The Monitors' Report.” Underneath it, they wrote:

"One adult male shot outside his house with his head missing.... One adult male shot in head and decapitated. All the flesh was missing from the skull…"[32]

Etcetera.

The New York Times depicted a carnage for which only human monsters could be responsible. The Western media said that the Serbs had mutilated the bodies in the manner of a hate crime. As the NYT's headline itself explains, this all came straight from William Walker’s OSCE team of “peace monitors,” who were not pathologists but CIA operatives and who had, as you may recall, pronounced the scene a 'massacre of civilians' the minute they were brought to 'inspect' it on 16 January.[33]

Just a few days earlier, however, the official Yugoslav press, Tanjug, had presented quite a different picture, one based on the autopsy information from all three teams of pathologists, which information was already available:

Pristina Medical Centre Forensics Institute Manager Slavisa Dobricanin told Tanjug on Tuesday [16th February] that the team of pathologists from Finland, Belarus and Yugoslavia, who performed autopsies on bodies from Racak and Rogovi, did not find any signs of mutilation.[33a]

So the New York Times chose to ignore already available information when they falsely reported supposed human carnage and mutilation at Racak.

What Tanjug reported agrees with the Finnish report that was finally published in 2001 in Forensic Science International. The Finns reported that “six of the victims had sustained postmortem damage, most likely inflicted by animals” and “...the postmortem decapitation of two of the victims was likely caused by animals after a severe trauma to the head” (p. 183).

As with NATO’s lies about the number of Yugoslav tanks destroyed,[34] here is another example where the Serbian news has been more trustworthy than “news” in NATO countries. Small wonder, then, that NATO bombed Serbian Television, RTS, killing its civilian personnel while doing it (mind you, this is a crime of war, and it was not the only one by NATO).[34a]

In sum, to say that Finnish experts had substantiated a “crime against humanity” at Racak is to massacre the truth. Other investigations since have reached the same conclusion:

It has since turned out, through subsequent investigations by German, French and American correspondents and by human rights and peace groups... that the Racak massacre seems an enormous, albeit effective, hoax…[35]

But the most damning investigation is the one done by the Finnish team, because this was NATO's team. If even the findings NATO's own team are consistent with a military firefight rather than a massacre, then NATO never had a case.

____________________________________________________

The Big Picture: What does it mean that NATO and the KLA carried out a hoax at Racak?
____________________________________________________

The Racak incident makes a strong argument that the Yugoslav government was always extremely careful to protect innocent civilians in its operations against the KLA terrorists, and that the Serbs were generally slandered by their NATO accusers. I shall now defend this point.

NATO accused Milosevic's government of using excessive force and targeting civilians. Later the Serbs were accused of genocide.

But if the Yugoslav government was really so reprehensible, why was a hoax necessary to make the argument?

That is the question.

Any real massacre ordered by the Yugoslav authorities -- had there been one -- would have sufficed as a pretext for the salivating Albright, who was just itching for an excuse to start her war. The KLA was naturally eager to cooperate with Albright, and Albright with them. Furthermore, the KLA controlled 40% of Kosovo's territory. And finally, the KLA had been at war with the Yugoslav state for an entire year.

Human Rights Watch (about which more below) said the following about Racak:

"As has happened on numerous occasions in the Kosovo conflict, once the KLA retreated, government forces moved in and committed atrocities against the residents of the village."[36]

Really? This "happened on numerous occasions"?

Hmm... If Milosevic's government had been committing atrocities against civilians "on numerous occasions" why couldn't NATO and the KLA showcase a real massacre? They could have just picked one, any one, from among the "numerous" massacres. That was the easy and safe thing to do. Instead, they attempted a very difficult and risky thing: the staging of a hoax.

What follows? That the hoax was necessary. Nobody attempts a spectacular hoax when they have a real massacre to show.

The circumstances immediately preceding this hoax present a very important context here. This is David Ramsay Steele, writing in Liberty, July 1999:

"In 1998, the…KLA launched an offensive…, rapidly gaining control of many villages. Yugoslav forces struck back and largely defeated the KLA. The homicide toll rose to around 2,000 for that year…Many of the Albanian deaths, however, were directly due to the KLA, which, like any new insurgent group lacking broad popular support, had to persuade a largely reluctant Albanian population to accept it as effectively a new government… The KLA especially targeted Albanians who co-operated with the Yugoslav local authorities…

…In October 1998, responding to NATO's threat to bomb Yugoslavia, the Yugoslavs pulled back their troops and allowed OSCE observers into Kosovo. At that point, most of the 2,000 deaths had already been sustained, Yugoslavia's war against the KLA was mostly over…[but] Because of the Yugoslav withdrawal of troops, the KLA quickly took or retook many villages, and by March 24th, militarily controlled 40 percent of Kosovo's territory."[37]

Is Ramsay Steele correct that the KLA directed much of its violence against Albanians? Yes. Indeed, while the Yugoslav government always protested the murders of Albanian civilians, the KLA by contrast showed itself proud that it was murdering Albanian civilians. It is worth looking at an example.

Consider first how the Yugoslav government expressed itself concerning murdered Albanian civilians:

“Excerpts from report by Tanjug [Yugoslav government] news agency: Klina, 7th May: Hetem Dobruna, 40, has been killed in a terrorist attack in Lozica near Klina [between Pristina and Pec], while Sefedin Javori, 38, escaped unharmed, although the assailants also opened automatic rifle fire on him while he was sitting in his car, Pec district court judge Veselin Cadjenovic said. The attack took place at around midnight two nights ago, near Hazir Javori's shop, where Dobruna and his best friend Sefedin had popped in for a drink... An investigation is under way. The swift and premeditated action points to a classic terrorist attack. Dobruna was an honest, hard-working and respected family man and loyal citizen of Serbia, which the terrorists found hard to swallow. This is the second terrorist attack in Klina municipality in the past six months.”[38]

The Yugoslav government clearly condemned the murder of these Albanian civilians. Now consider the manner in which the KLA expressed itself with respect to murdered Albanian civilians:

“The clandestine Albanian separatist movement Kosovo Liberation Army (UCK) has vowed 'multiple vengeance for the innocent deaths' in the Serbian region's central Drenica area, in a statement published Wednesday…The UCK [KLA], a group that wants the province to secede, has claimed responsibility for numerous deadly attacks against Serbian civilians and Albanians loyal to the Belgrade regime.”[38a]

Now, if Milosevic's government had really been ethnically cleansing the Kosovo Albanians, would there have been so many “Albanians loyal to the Belgrade regime” that the KLA had to intimidate them with terror?

It is not mysterious why many Albanians opposed the KLA. This organization's goal was (is) secession from Yugoslavia (now, from Serbia), but secession could offer no improvements for Albanians, something that is readily established by looking into what the political and social facts were in Kosovo when the KLA (or its precursors) and other Albanian secessionists began making serious trouble. It turns out that no national minority anywhere in the world, or in history, had ever been more pampered and coddled than the Albanians living in Kosovo. The charges of Serbian "oppression" were just bare-faced lies. Albanians controlled the school system, the cultural institutions, industry, government and, for good measure, the police. The official language was Albanian. This is not to say that there was no oppression in Kosovo -- there certainly was: the minority Kosovo Serbs were discriminated against in government and industry, and they were also the target of persecution and murder by the same Albanian radicals who also happily murdered loyally Yugoslav Albanians.[39]

Quite the opposite of opposing oppression, the KLA were always a collection of heroin-traffickers and racist terrorists (with links to Al Qaeda).[9] The responsibility for the death toll in Kosovo can safely be laid at the KLA’s feet. They were and are brutal gangsters, behaving in the manner of unpopular separatists everywhere: victimizing even the people they claimed to represent.

So why again is the world so convinced of the supposed criminality of the Yugoslav army?

Because (as we have already seen) the mainstream Western press systematically lied about the supposed abuses of the Yugoslav forces. (For more evidence that all allegations of massacres supposedly committed by Milosevic's forces were NATO lies, see here).[40] 

Those of us who paid with our taxes for the NATO massacres of innocent Serbian civilians and soldiers (and also the NATO massacres of Albanian civilians!; see here [41]) should draw the obvious lesson: if something looks like a convenient pretext for war, then it probably is. This applies especially to any future oxymoronic “humanitarian wars” that our Orwellian leaders may want to involve us in. Just causes can be defended openly, after deliberation and examination. Illegitimate and immoral wars of aggression (with known terrorists for allies), on the other hand, need to manufacture pretexts and then rush to 'conclusions' lest the ordinary people who must support these wars stop to think too long.

Illegitimate wars of aggression also require that the press either be asleep or be cooperative. The facts here suggest the latter. We have seen the behavior of the New York Times, but the Times was hardly alone. The rest of the mainstream media did the same. For example, as the Toronto Sun put it, with regard to Racak, “CNN reporter Christiane Amanpour, wife of U.S. State Department spokesman James Rubin, showed little skepticism in reporting on the ‘massacre of civilians’” [my emphasis].[42]

If you just did a double take, you were paying attention. If not, please read the above quote again: the top propagandist for US foreign policy was sleeping with the top reporter at CNN, and both were telling the public that there had been a massacre at Racak when, obviously, there hadn't been.

The “free press” at work.

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Israel and the UN
____________________________________________________

Given what you now know about Helena Ranta and those she works for, is it so unreasonable for the state of Israel to oppose an investigation that Ranta was supposed to lead concerning allegations of a massacre in the town of Jenin? On the contrary. Innocent people are those who should be most wary of Helena Ranta. Her business is protecting terrorists.

And there is another thing to consider: why was Helena Ranta chosen to head the UN forensic team that was to be sent to Jenin? Ranta is a tool of the US-led Empire, and she can be trusted to prevaricate, obfuscate, stall, equivocate, and lie to advance imperial aims. So if the UN proposed that she lead a UN team, we may doubt the independence of the UN.

As Diana Johnstone put it when explaining what was done to Yugoslavia: 

"...the United Nations is instrumentalized by the United States to pursue dissident States which it has chosen to brand as rogues, terrorists or criminals. Capitalist competition is being forced onto the entire world as the supreme law by new bodies such as the World Trade Organization. NATO-land is a gated community whose armed forces are being prepared to intervene worldwide, at the bidding of Washington, to defend members' interests, in the name of the war against crimes against humanity."[43]

The next time you hear the words “international community” coming out of the mouth of a Western official, you will know what they mean: the US-led Empire. And the next time you see this “international community” lambasting a country for its supposed “crimes against humanity” you should suspect something else: that the US-led Empire has found a nuisance it needs to get rid of, but it will tell ordinary Americans that it is getting rid of a 'monster.'

Given the facts rehearsed here, it is not so hard to believe that the current demonization of Israel, and the championing of the West Bank and Gaza terrorists (who deserve zero international support; see here [44]), which is taking place in the media, is just one more smear campaign of this New World Order, and not unlike what was done to Yugoslavia. This will surprise those readers of mine who think that the US is Israel's staunch ally and friend. But the US is no such thing.[44a]

____________________________________________________

Human Rights Watch: Another tool of Empire?
____________________________________________________

On HRW's website one can find the following boast: "Human Rights Watch is dedicated to protecting the human rights of people around the world."[45] In other words, Human Rights Watch would deny that what they do is generate phony excuses for imperial powers to bomb the civilians of sovereign countries (because that, of course, is a crime of war, and therefore protects nobody's human rights).

Decent people all over the West believe HRW's boast, and even send financial contributions to this organization. Alas! Many examples can be given to document that HRW is really a tool of the US-led Empire. Since we are here talking about Racak, let us ask: what has been HRW's position on this?

As you may recall, William Walker's OSCE delegation (which was really CIA) made the accusation of a massacre at Racak on January 16, 1999. Just a few days later, on January 29th... 

"...Human Rights Watch released a statement in London saying it 'categorically rejected' Yugoslav government claims that the victims of the January 15 attack on Racak were either Kosovo Liberation Army soldiers killed in combat or civilians caught in crossfire....the organization accused Serbian special police forces and the Yugoslav army of 'indiscriminately attacking civilians, torturing detainees and committing summary executions'.[46]

Notice that Human Rights Watch "categorically rejected" the Yugoslav government's claims. This means it categorically accepted the claims of the other side. On what basis? Here is HRW's explanation:

"Human Rights Watch conducted separate interviews in Kosovo with fourteen witnesses to the attack, many of whom are hiding out of fear for their lives, as well as with foreign journalists and observers who visited Racak on January 16."[47]

Let's examine this. HRW reached its 'conclusions' on the basis of -- of what?

"...fourteen witnesses...[who]...fear for their lives"

HRW is telling us that the witnesses are Albanians (this is what the touch about the witnesses supposedly fearing for their lives is meant to convey). Since the KLA kept a tight grip on everything that happened, HRW spoke to KLA-supplied witnesses.

Trustworthy? Not exactly..

"...foreign journalists...who visited Racak on January 16..." 

Which journalists? Is any journalist as good as any other? Hardly.

If HRW spoke to "journalists...who visited Racak on January 16," then they spoke to those journalists who arrived with William Walker's OSCE (but really CIA) team. HRW's statement makes zero mention of the eye-witness journalists -- those notified in advance by the Yugoslav government about the impending operation at Racak -- and who were present at the event. These journalists expressed utter skepticism at the claims of William Walker and the KLA, and agreed with Milosevic's government, as can be seen in their published reports in Le Figaro and in Le Monde.[48]

"...and observers who visited Racak on January 16..."

These "observers" are none other than William Walker and his team. But William Walker was also 1) well known for his past connection to US-sponsored right-wing terrorism in Latin America, 2) personally handpicked by the eager warmonger Madeleine Albright, and 3) leading an OSCE mission packed with CIA operatives and employees of American paramilitary companies.[49]

Trustworthy? Not exactly.

So now you see the basis on which, in just a few days, Human Rights Watch rushed to its categorical judgment that Milosevic's forces had supposedly carried out a massacre at Racak.

Now, there are many positions that HRW could have adopted. For instance:

1) Denounce the rush to judgment in the press.

2) Wait and see, making no hasty declarations to the press.

3) Stating that they were concerned about the possibility of a massacre at Racak.

4) Stating that they were concerned about the likelihood of a massacre at Racak

Of the above, the first two would have been appropriate for a human rights organization. Given who was making the accusations, however, the most honorable choice would have been the first. The latter two choices would have been prejudicial and biased. But, even so, choices 3 and 4 would have been better than what HRW actually did.

Thus, what HRW did was to go out of its way to take the most extremely prejudicial and biased position conceivable: a hastily made and categorical (!) accusation against the Yugoslav government, and with zero evidence. In fact, less than zero evidence because the allegations were coming from the most disreputable sources and therefore should have been treated with extreme suspicion by HRW. Given that HRW claims to be "dedicated to protecting the human rights of people around the world," they could not have done worse.

Well, scratch that. They did do worse.

In the same report of January 29 HRW said the following: 

"A report in the Washington Post yesterday provided excerpts from telephone conversations between Serbian Interior Ministry General Sreten Lukic and Yugoslav Deputy Prime Minister Nikola Sainovic, who clearly ordered government security forces to 'go in heavy' in Racak. The two officials later discussed ways that the killings might be covered up to avoid international condemnation."

Notice what they claimed: that the Washington Post had supposedly "provided excerpts from telephone conversations" that incriminated the highest Yugoslav authorities in a massacre of civilians at Racak. Sounds very juicy. Did the Washington Post really do that?

Not by a long shot!

The Washington Post told its readers all sorts of things that supposedly had been said in these supposed phone conversations, but it printed not one "excerpt from a telephone conversation" in the entire article.[50] (And excerpts were not quoted either in other newspapers that talked about this, such as, for example, the Ottawa Citizen.)[51] So HRW wrote a falsehood, because HRW said that the Washington Post had printed excerpts from telephone conversations, and the Washington Post had not.

And why didn't the Washington Post provide any excerpts?

After all, that would have been the most dramatic way to break the story: show what was said. Or is it the case, perhaps, that the Washington Post never in fact saw the supposed telephone transcripts on whose alleged existence they so confidently reported?

Here is the first sentence in that Washington Post article:

"The attack on this Kosovo village that led to the killing of 45 ethnic Albanian civilians 12 days ago came at the orders of senior officials of the Serb-led Belgrade government who then orchestrated a coverup following an international outcry, according to telephone intercepts by Western governments."[50]

Notice first that the Post asserts, as if it were demonstrated fact, that the 45 bodies belonged to civilians. Second, notice that the Post says this is all "according to telephone intercepts by Western governments."

Western governments?

Could it be the US? Could it be Britain? Could it be Germany? Sure. Were these biased sources? Most certainly. These are the countries that led the attack on Serbia, and were, as we have seen, eager to start bombing. Since the people bombing a country have an obvious interest in making their behavior seem justified, the Post should have skeptically investigated the authenticity of these alleged telephone intercepts before writing an entire article with a convicting headline.

But matters are worse.

In the article's next sentence we learn -- amazingly -- that the Post is in fact not even basing itself on alleged "telephone intercepts by Western governments." Rather, this is really all "according to Western sources familiar with the intercepts." In other words, these mysteriously unnamed "Western sources" are the only ones who supposedly saw the supposed intercepts, and they then -- supposedly -- told the Post what was supposedly in them.

The Washington Post doesn't even claim to have seen anything at all.

The Post just repeated whatever these "Western governments" claimed. This is journalism? Isn't it possible that these "Western governments" made it all up? It is possible, because it turns out that no civilians were massacred at Racak, given that it was a hoax. So how could any such incriminating conversation have taken place? And if it didn't take place, how could it be intercepted?

The proceedings at the Hague Tribunal make clear that, naturally, this was all made up. The prosecutors trying Milosevic at The Hague would not have failed to use such intercepted phone conversations in court, if they had existed. Accordingly, I carefully searched the Hague Tribunal's court transcripts for any documents that contained the words 'Sainovic,' 'Lukic' (the names of the two parties to the supposed telephone conversation), and also the words 'telephone,' and 'Racak.' Three documents with all these words came up, but none of them contained any reference to the supposed intercept of the supposed conversation about the supposed massacre that was supposedly being planned for Racak. It is therefore conclusive that Western governments lied about the intercepts, and that the Washington Post, the Ottawa Citizen, et. al., and, of course, Human Rights Watch (HRW), eagerly repeated these lies.

Now, anybody fond of Human Rights Watch may at this point wish to argue that all of this is an aberration: a fluke of the moment which resulted from sloppy thinking, bureaucratic mismanagement, missed signals, etc., or some other relatively innocent explanation. But it won't wash, because HRW has kept going at it.

Three full years later, in 2002, Richard Dicker, head of Human Rights Watch, was still maintaining that there had been a massacre at Racak! And he was doing it (and still is) at the Hague Tribunal, giving phony 'moral cover' to the NATO powers that have been prosecuting Milosevic for alleged war crimes.

Here is what a wire from the Associated Press said about this:

"Slobodan Milosevic wasn't the only one in a combative mood at the war crimes tribunal Thursday. An argument in the normally orderly halls of the U.N. building nearly came to blows.

Gerard Israel, an American member of the lawyers committee supporting the former Yugoslav president, leaned forward and whispered an abusive comment into the ear of Richard Dicker, head of Human Rights Watch.

'Your organization is a whore,' he told the spectacled and soft-spoken Dicker, whose organization has supported the U.N. trial against Milosevic."[52]

The person referred to in the wire as Dicker's opponent -- "Gerard Israel" -- is really Jared Israel, the chief editor at "Emperor's Clothes" (where the original version of this article was published). As Emperor's Clothes readers know, EC has exposed many lies that NATO and its proxies, and the controlled western media, have put out about Yugoslavia. On that day, Jared Israel was expressing outrage that, at this late date, an organization such as Human Rights Watch should still be spreading unspeakable slanders against the Serbs concerning Racak.

And yet the Associated Press tries hard to make Jared Israel look like a bully, while at the same time presenting the liar, Dicker, as the stereotype of a victim: "soft-spoken" and "spectacled." Never mind that the Associated Press is reporting on an escalating "shouting match" (see below) between Mr. Israel and the "soft-spoken" Mr. Dicker, and that a shouting match can hardly be such -- much less escalate -- unless both sides are shouting. The Associated Press continues:

"Heads turned in the entranceway as the shouting match escalated. A detachment of blue-shirted U.N. guards was swiftly dispatched to the tribunal's lobby to break up the quarrel.

'Go upstairs, or take this outside,' the guard told the feuding men, their faces just inches apart.

The argument was over whether Serb forces murdered 25 people in the Kosovar village of Racak in 1999. The Racak incident triggered Western intervention in Kosovo and the 78-day NATO bombing campaign against Serb forces loyal to Milosevic.

Milosevic began his defense by screening a 50-minute German documentary shown last year on the ARD network contesting that the massacre in Racak was the work of the Serbs.

It was called: 'It All Started With a Lie.'

Witnesses say Serb troops shot and mutilated their victims in a six-hour orgy of violence before singing a nationalist song.

In the German documentary, Gen. Heinz Loquai and pathologist Helen Ranta claimed the events were staged and promoted by the German Defense Ministry as part of a Western propaganda campaign."

If you did a double take, then you were paying attention. If not, please read the last paragraph again: the Associated Press reported that Helena Ranta agreed, on camera, for a German documentary, that Racak had been a NATO hoax!

What exactly did Ranta say? This:

"I'm conscious of the fact that the whole scene was rigged and that is something that it is possible to do. There were many indications of this in the course of our initial investigations, forensic investigations later carried out on the spot in 1999, and the results of those examinations were sent to the International Tribunal in The Hague."[52a]

She later retracted these statements when she was summoned to testify at The Hague, where she again lied in order to assist the Hague prosecutors against Milosevic.

What is going on?

Well, it is not impossible that Ranta has a troubled conscience, and that her flip flops result from the fact that she has not been a willing liar, but a coerced one.

As for Human Rights Watch, as you can plainly see, it is still maintaining that there was a massacre at Racak despite the fact that all of the evidence I have presented here is publicly available.

And what can we say about the Associated Press? Nothing good. The TV journalists who were invited by the Yugoslav government to film the operation at Racak on that fateful day were from...the Associated Press![53] So the Associated Press knows better than anybody else that there was no massacre at Racak. And yet, there is zero hint of the AP's own Racak footage and what it demonstrates in the wire above.

____________________________________________________

Epilogue: And the lies and absurdities continue...
____________________________________________________

In March 2003, Helena Ranta again prevaricated about Racak when she testified at the trial of President Slobodan Milosevic at The Hague. The Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat reported on this. 

What they say is worthy of Kafka.

"Ranta was visibly relieved after her testimony. She said that she had expected a tougher grilling. She had prepared for the questioning by undergoing about half a dozen sessions of mock testimony in Helsinki."[54]

It is the height of absurdity that the biggest concentration of power ever known to humanity puts one man on trial, who chooses to defend himself, and this forensic, deployed to provide accusations against Milosevic, is so scared of him that she needs mock sessions to prepare for him. Why? Ranta was not on trial. And she was not -- get this -- even a witness for the prosecution. She was officially a 'court witness'. So what was all this anxiety and performance training about? Did she have anything to hide? If not, what was she worried about? All she had to do was answer the truth.

Those who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear -- especially those who are not even on trial.

Helsingin Sanomat also says that "Ranta never made eye contact with Milosevic, and was not intimidated by his tough cross-examination." Does that sentence make sense? Is it those who are not intimidated who avert their gaze? If nothing else gave Ranta away, her eyes did. But of course, a million other things have given her away as well.

But things did not turn out so bad for Ranta, after all, for Milosevic was not as tough as she expected. And why not? She explains:

"'I knew that Milosevic might launch an active attack. Fortunately judge Richard May interrupted him,' Ranta said later on."

Ah! Milosevic was not so tough because Richard May -- the judge -- did not allow him properly to cross-examine his witness. This has been a repeated scandal at the kangaroo court known as the Hague Tribunal, or ICTY. Whenever Milosevic shows a witness to be lying, Richard May intervenes and prevents Milosevic from asking further questions.[55]

The Helsingin Sanomat concludes with the following:

"One expert praised her performance on the witness stand. 'Her testimony was very good, clear, scientific, and professional', said Judith Armatta, a representative of the Coalition of International Justice. Armatta said that the testimony was important for clearing the air of claims that Ranta had characterised the events in Racak as a 'massacre'. 'The events in Racak are among the key issues at the Milosevic trial, and that is why Ranta's testimony was important', Armatta says."

What else can we demand? "One expert" praised Ranta's performance! A performance in which not only did she prevaricate again, but she had to completely reverse herself on what she had earlier told the makers of a German documentary on Racak, namely, that she was "conscious of the fact that the whole scene [at Racak] was rigged."

The same 'expert' who praises Ranta's performance -- Armatta -- explains that the events at Racak "are among the key issues at the Milosevic trial, and that is why Ranta's testimony was important."

Ponder that.

A key issue, which makes Ranta so important, is the accusation of a massacre at Racak. What does this mean? Well, considering that the Hague's forensics turned up no bodies of innocent Albanians murdered by Milosevic, it means that, as far as Kosovo is concerned, Racak is pretty much all the prosecution's got.[56]

And it was a hoax.

____________________________________________________

Footnotes and Further Reading
____________________________________________________

[1] "The Freezer Truck Hoax: How NATO framed the Serbs"; Emperor's Clothes; 19 September 2002; by Francisco Gil-White
http://www.hirhome.com/yugo/freezer1.htm

[1a] This is Arafat comparing Jenin to Stalingrad:

"Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat on Thursday compared fighting in the Jenin refugee camp to the devastating World War II battle of Stalingrad that destroyed the former Soviet city and killed more than 600,000 people.

'Jenin has turned into Jeningrad, instead of Stalingrad. Remember something like that, Stalingrad? Now, Jeningrad,' Arafat told CNN shortly after Israeli troops lifted their month-long siege of his Ramallah office.

Palestinian officials accuse Israeli troops of staging a massacre in Jenin while Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's government dismisses the claims as propaganda.

The Israelis insist they killed 52 people, mostly Palestinian fighters, in pitched battles that also left 23 of their soldiers dead."

SOURCE: Agence France Presse, May 2, 2002 Thursday, International News, 257 words, Arafat compares Jenin battle to Stalingrad, JERUSALEM, May 2

The Israelis were telling the truth: about 52 Palestinians were killed in fighting at Jenin. Arafat, as usual, was lying. 

[2] "Annan calls off Jenin Probe"; by Ben Barber; Washington Times; May 2, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20020502-349403.htm

[2a] The media, and organizations such as Human Rights Watch, did a good job stoking the fires of the Jenin accusations, but suddenly became apathetic (or added new lies) when it came to correcting the mistake.

For example, when the UN finally issued a mealy-mouthed report in August 2002 that conceded that the IDF had not carried out a massacre, and shifted the blame, somewhat (but hardly enough), to the Palestinian terrorists, CNN carried the headline:

"U.N. Issues Report on Jenin; Law Enforcement Officials Discuss Tobacco Smuggling."[a]

That headline not only does not say anything juicy, but it distracts the issue by pairing it with another, unrelated issue. A more proper headline would be something like: "UN Report: No Evidence of IDF Massacre at Jenin; Palestinian Terrorists at Fault."

By contrast, when the accusations about Jenin first flew, CNN gave them undivided attention, and used juicy headlines such as:

"Crisis in the Middle East: Israeli Military Operations Continue,"[b]

with the immediately following highlight:

"The Israeli forces have withdrawn from the West Bank city of Jenin under very controversial circumstances. The Palestinians are claiming that a massacre took place while Israeli forces were in that city, a claim which Israel denies."

And CNN resisted making a correction that would make the IDF look good. For example, when it conceded that there had been no massacre, it nevertheless blared this convicting headline:

"Despite Human Rights Violations, Jenin No Massacre"[c]

CNN wrote as if it were established fact that the IDF was guilty of human rights violations!

However, this was nothing more than an allegation by Human Rights Watch, which organization in fact had no evidence whatever. In a later show, this accusation was upgraded to "war crimes":

[Quote From CNN Transcript Starts Here]

MACVICAR: After a week in the camp and interviews with dozens of people, New York-based Human Rights Watch agrees. There was no massacre here.

But its report concludes there were "serious violations of international and humanitarian law" that in some cases, it says, may amount to war crimes. [d]

[Quote From CNN Transcript Ends Here]

And what war crimes? Human Rights Watch alleged that the IDF soldiers had used Palestinian civilians as human shields, firing from behind them, over their shoulders!

[Quote From ABC Transcript Starts Here]

BURY: We talked to several Israeli soldiers. Their account is that they didn't use human shields. They did ask people to translate for them into Arabic.

Mr. BOUCKAERT [HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH]: That is absolutely untrue. We have documented more than a dozen cases of very serious human shielding issues. People who are walked by the soldiers in front of them, while they were moving through the town.[e]

[Quote From ABC Transcript Ends Here]

But how had HRW "documented" this in such a way as to know *categorically* that Israeli denials were "absolutely untrue"?

Amazingly, all that HRW had done was spend "a week in the camp" and conducted "interviews with dozens of people" (see above).

That's it!

HRW's accusation is true only if the Palestinians interviewed said the truth (assuming they really were interviewed). The stories they told about human shields were wildly implausible, for one, and contradicted by the other side, for another. Moreover, since the Palestinian side had already lied wildly about the body count, there should have been special skepticism for their claims. So how could HRW state *categorically* that Israeli denials were "absolutely untrue"?

An objective human rights group would interview people from both sides, and then try to find out who is telling the truth. But Mr. Bouckaert's organization interviews people from *one* side, in the most partisan of conflicts, and then, when their stories are contradicted by the other side, he immediately asserts "absolutely untrue."

Such practices do not protect human rights. On the contrary: if organizations such as HRW can point their accusing finger at anybody in a civil conflict based purely on the allegations of one side, then everybody's human rights are in danger.

The fact that HRW makes accusations frivolously, emotionally (consider the language used by Mr. Bouckaert), and with less than zero evidence, suggests that they have an agenda *other* than protecting human rights.

[local footnotes below]  [back to the article]

[a] CNN,  CNN DIPLOMATIC LICENSE 04:00,  August 3, 2002 Saturday,  Transcript # 080300CN.V44,  News; International,  4395 words,  U.N. Issues Report on Jenin; Law Enforcement Officials Discuss Tobacco Smuggling,  James Bone, Masood Haider, Mohamad Bazzi, Derek Yach,  Richard Roth

[b] CNN, CNN LIVE TODAY 10:00, April 19, 2002 Friday, Transcript # 041915CN.V75, News; International, 688 words, Conflict in the Middle East: Israeli Military Operations Continue, Daryn Kagan, Mike Hanna

[c] CNN, CNN DAYBREAK 05:00, April 29, 2002 Monday, Transcript # 042911CN.V73, News; International, 757 words, Despite Human Rights Violations, Jenin No Massacre, Sheila MacVicar, Carol Costello

[d] CNN, CNN SATURDAY MORNING NEWS 07:00, May 4, 2002 Saturday, Transcript # 050413CN.V28, News; International, 2633 words, An Inside Look at the Attack on Jenin, Miles O'Brien, Sheilah MacVicar

[e] ABC News, ABC News: Nightline (11:35 PM AM ET) - ABC, April 30, 2002 Tuesday, 3239 words, Battle of Jenin: The Search for Truth; Conflicting view of the battle in Jenin, TED KOPPEL, CHRIS BURY

[3] Al Jazeera is an instrument of international Muslim fundamentalism, and it is tightly controlled by the Emir of Qatar. Despite this, it is constantly lionized in the Western press as "independent" and a paragon of journalistic virtues.

For example, The New York Times writes in an official editorial titled "Why Al Jazeera Matters":

"Financed by the iconoclastic emir of Qatar, the gulf state where our war operations are based, Al Jazeera is the only independent broadcasting voice in the Arab world, watched by 35 million people." -- The New York Times, March 30, 2003, Sunday, Late Edition - Final, Section 4; Page 12; Column 1; Editorial Desk, 476 words, Why Al Jazeera Matters

What is wrong with the above sentence? Everything.

Notice first that the NYT charmingly tells us that Al Jazeera, which is "Financed by the iconoclastic emir of Qatar...[is]...independent..."

Oh really? Independent of whom? Well, certainly not of the Emir! So it pays to know exactly who the Emir is, and why he is so "iconoclastic."

First of all, what is an "Emir"?

He is the government, but in a traditional rather than a modern form. In other words, the Emir of Qatar owns Qatar, for he is a prince, not a president.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines it thusly: 

"An emir or prince under the Sultan"
http://dictionary.oed.com

The Emir is royalty:

"The Al Thanis have been the ruling family for over 100 years and the present ruler, Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al Thani assumed power as the Emir of Qatar on 27 June 1995..."
http://www.britishcouncil.org/qatar/work/notevisi.htm

What the New York Times is telling us, then, is that the Emir of Qatar, who owns Qatar, also owns Al Jazeera, since he is the one who finances it.

So Al Jazeera is independent? That's an interesting definition of "independence"...

And what kind of prince is the Emir of Qatar? In what sense is he "iconoclastic"? Or is he? Well, consider that:

"Islam is the state religion of Qatar and most Qataris belong to the strictly orthodox Wahhabi sect."
http://www.britishcouncil.org/qatar/work/notevisi.htm

Wahhabi fundamentalism is the institutionalized state religion in Qatar. That is to say, Qatar is a Wahhabi theocracy.

The quote above says "strictly orthodox." That's one way of putting it; "Muslim fundamentalists of the most extreme sort" is another. The Wahhabis are the same sect that rules Saudi Arabia with an iron fist. Some say that Qatar is a bit more relaxed, but remember: even if true, the comparison case is Saudi Arabia, one of the most viciously dictatorial states in the world, with a large slave population, and draconian laws that oppress and persecute women at every turn. Not to mention the fact that the Saudi oil millions are generously spent funding Islamist terrorist movements all over the world, and ensuring the health, in particular, of the Arab terrorist movement in the West Bank and Gaza.

So we find that Al Jazeera is owned by the Emir of Qatar, a Muslim fundamentalist of the terrorist Wahhabi sect, who runs a theocratic state.

Hmm...

The other thing that the New York Times says in the quote above, and which deserves mention, is that Qatar is "the gulf state where our war operations are based." In other words, Qatar is the base of operations for a war against Iraq that the entire Arab world (even Kuwait!) has opposed. The minuscule state of Qatar, therefore, virtually defines the meaning of "US puppet."

And so, if the Emir of Qatar is a US puppet, and if the Emir owns Al Jazeera, then Al Jazeera, which is not independent of the Emir, is also not independent of the US. In conclusion, we may reasonably assume that what Al Jazeera broadcasts fulfills the aims of the US foreign policy elite.

So why again is the New York Times saying that Al Jazeera is "independent"? And why is it doing so in an official NYT editorial, which expresses the opinion of the paper itself, with all the authority that its prestige carries?

One hypothesis says that the NYT does this deliberately to conceal the true nature of Al Jazeera (for the NYT is hardly unaware of the facts I review in this footnote). But then the NYT is spreading disinformation, and we may then conclude that this newspaper itself is not independent, a point that receives much substance from the body of this article.

[back to article]

[4] Disappointed Palestinians mourn the fall of Baghdad; by Dalia Hatuqa; Al Jazeera, Tuesday 15, April, 2003 / Last Updated:  9:55PM Doha time, 1:55AM GMT
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2003/04/59053.shtml

[5] "Gaining rare access to the Palestinian militias, Correspondent focuses on the nexus of 'terrorist' street fighters in three West Bank towns. Hidden in the concrete warren of the Jenin refugee camp is a bomb-making factory where the suicide belts and the explosives are made... ...This is a weapons making factory... ...Jenin, just a few miles from the Israeli town of Afula, has become one of the most important bases from which suicide attacks are launched."

Friday, 22 February, 2002, 18:00 GMT The ugly war: Children of vengeance; Correspondent, BBC; Producer/Director: Stuart Tanner Executive Producer: Tom Roberts Editor: Fiona Murch
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/correspondent/1834452.stm

Just a quick note about the quote above: Since the BBC says that there is a bomb-making factory and that this is one of the most important bases from which suicide attacks are launched, why exactly is the word 'terrorist' in quotes?

[6] The Toronto Sun,  April 1, 2001 Sunday,  Final Edition,  Comment;,  Pg. C6;,  1382 words,  The Hoax That Started A War; How The U.S., Nato And The Western Media Were Conned In Kosovo,  PETER WORTHINGTON, TORONTO SUN.
http://www.ptb.be/scripts/article.phtml?section=A3ABBBACAF&obid=8587

[7] Milosevic read the full transcript of this documentary film in his opening statements at The Hague. The relevant transcript is:
Thursday, 14 February 2002; p. 228, lines 13 to 22.
http://www.un.org/icty/transe54/020214IT.htm

Note: the general's name is incorrectly spelled "Heinz Loquae" in the transcript.

[8] Agence France Presse, February 23, 1998 22:24 GMT, SECTION: International news, LENGTH: 631 words. HEADLINE: Washington ready to reward Belgrade for “good will”: envoy

[9] For the KLA-Al Qaeda connection, see:

"Bin Laden in the Balkans"; The Washington Times; June 22, 2001
http://emperors-clothes.com/news/binl.htm

For the heroin trade connection to the KLA, consult this article, whose title says it all:

The Gazette (Montreal), November 27, 1999, FINAL, 4850 words, The Kosovo connection: The shooting has stopped, but the Kosovo Liberation Army isn’t resting. It is still a major player in the international heroin trade, ALEX ROSLIN.

[9a] THE HOAX THAT STARTED A WAR; HOW THE U.S., NATO AND THE WESTERN MEDIA WERE CONNED IN KOSOVO, The Toronto Sun, April 1, 2001 Sunday,, Final Edition, Comment;, Pg. C6;, 1382 words, PETER WORTHINGTON, TORONTO SUN

[10] Title: To the dismay of State Department officials, NATO's intervention in Yugoslavia has been called 'Albright's war.'; The Washington Post,  May 02, 1999, Sunday, Final Edition,  BOOK WORLD; Pg. X04,  1947 words,  Identity Crisis,  Walter Reich, Special to The Washington Post.

[11] 'Sunday Times' (London), 12 March 2000 “CIA Aided Kosovo Guerrilla Army” by Tom Walker and Aidan Laverty.

That article is reproduced in full (plus an introduction by Jared Israel) here:
http://emperors-clothes.com/news/ciaaided.htm

[12] For more on the shady Mr. Walker, see
http://www.emperors-clothes.com/analysis/meetmr.htm

[13] 'Sunday Times' (London), 12 March 2000 “CIA Aided Kosovo Guerrilla Army” by Tom Walker and Aidan Laverty.

That article is reproduced in full (plus an introduction by Jared Israel) here:
http://emperors-clothes.com/news/ciaaided.htm

To learn more about how the CIA and other covert forces were mobilized against the Serbs, read:

THE OSLO WAR PROCESS; Norwegians are the diplomatic 'advance guard' of the US-European empire. They helped destroy Yugoslavia. They set Israel on the path to destruction. Now they will finish destroying Sri Lanka. Next: India; Historical and Investigative Research, 29 Oct 2005; by Francisco Gil-White
http://www.hirhome.com/yugo/oslo-intro.htm

[13a]  Associated Press Worldstream, August 13, 1998; Thursday, International news, 472 words, Albanian official reportedly admits CIA operating in the country, even in [the north], ARLINDA CAUSHOLLI , TIRANA, Albania.

TEXT: "The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency is operating in Albania, helping rebuild the country’s internal security capability, the head of the Albanian Secret Service was quoted Thursday as saying.

In an interview with the independent newspaper Shekulli, Fatos Klosi said that relations between his Albanian Secret Service, or SHIK, and the CIA “were intensified in the last months” and that “CIA specialists” were operating in the country.

“They even have offices in the north,” he added, referring to the area near the border with Yugoslavia's Kosovo province, where the Kosovo Liberation Army [KLA] maintains sanctuaries.

[14] THE OSLO WAR PROCESS; Norwegians are the diplomatic 'advance guard' of the US-European empire. They helped destroy Yugoslavia. They set Israel on the path to destruction. Now they will finish destroying Sri Lanka. Next: India; Historical and Investigative Research, 29 Oct 2005; by Francisco Gil-White
http://www.hirhome.com/yugo/oslo-intro.htm

[14a] The Ottawa Sun,  April 15, 2001 Sunday,  Final Edition,  Comment;,  Pg. C4;,  868 Words,  Keeping Peace, Making War; Documentary Argues That If Nato Had Stayed Out Of The Kosovo Conflict, The Balkan People Would Have Been Better Off,  Peter Worthington, Toronto Sun, Toronto

[14b] The Toronto Sun,  April 1, 2001 Sunday,  Final Edition,  Comment;,  Pg. C6;,  1382 words,  The Hoax That Started A War; How The U.S., Nato And The Western Media Were Conned In Kosovo,  PETER WORTHINGTON, TORONTO SUN.
http://www.ptb.be/scripts/article.phtml?section=A3ABBBACAF&obid=8587

[15] "The Judge As Prosecutor: Two Days At The "Trial" Of Slobodan Milosevic"; by Ian Johnson
http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/ian/day.htm

"Official Statements Prove Hague 'Tribunal' Belongs to NATO"
by Jared Israel
http://emperors-clothes.com/docs/h-list.htm

[16] “On the basis of the information available, the committee recommends that no investigation be commenced by the OTP in relation to the NATO bombing campaign or incidents occurring during the campaign.”

The key point is this: the Tribunal's committee recommended that "no investigation be commenced." In other words, the Tribunal did not find NATO 'not guilty' of war crimes in Yugoslavia; rather, the Tribunal decided that it was in principle impossible that NATO could have committed crimes of war in Yugoslavia, and therefore it would not investigate allegations of NATO war crimes.

The quotation above is the last, concluding line in: "ICTY, Final Report to the Prosecutor by the Committee established to Review the NATO bombing Campaign Against the FRY," PR/P.I.S./510-E, 13 June 2000.

This document may be found in Krieger, H. (2001). "The Kosovo conflict and international law: An analytical documentation 1974-1999," Cambridge International Documents Series, Volume II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (pp.340-352).

[16a] Holocaust's Child, The Washington Post, February 09, 1997, Sunday, Final Edition, OP-ED; Pg. C07, 1249 words, Walter Reich

[16b] To understand the Bosnian Muslim movement led by Alija Izetbegovic, read:

"What really happened in Bosnia?Were the Serbs the criminal aggressors, as the official story claims, or were they the victims?"; Historical and Investigative Research, 10 March 2003; by Francisco Gil-White.
www.ihrhome.com/yugo/ihralija1.htm

To understand the Croatian movement led by Franjo Tudjman, read:

"To Croatia, the Vatican, and the Krajina Serbs"; Historical and Investigative Research; February 2002; by Francisco Gil-White
http://www.hirhome.com/yugo/kosovo.htm#APPENDIX

To understand the Kosovo Albanian movement led by the KLA, read:

"The Serbs Were Not Oppressing Kosovo Albanians...Quite the opposite"; Emperor's Clothes; February 2002; by Francisco Gil-White
http://www.emperors-clothes.com/gilwhite/talk.htm

[16bb] http://www.hirhome.com/yugo/ihralija3.htm#hero

[16c] http://www.hirhome.com/yugo/ihralija3.htm#ruderfinn

[16cc] For Jared Israel's explanation of the genesis of Emperor's Clothes, read:
http://www.emperors-clothes.com/editors.html

[16d] "Dutch Report: Us Sponsored Foreign Islamists In Bosnia"; By Richard J Aldrich; The Guardian (LONDON); Monday April 22, 2002

To read the Guardian article, go to “Dutch Report: Us Sponsored Foreign Islamists In Bosnia,” at
http://emperors-clothes.com/analysis/used.htm

[17] "Knut Vollebaek's Rambouillet Diplomacy: A crime against peace and an insult to reason"; Historical and Investigative Research; by Francisco Gil-White and Jared Israel.
http://www.hirhome.com/yugo/oslo4.htm

[18]  Liberty, July 1999: Inquiry: How Murderous Are the Serbs? By David Ramsay Steele.

[19] Shortly after Walker announced his fictitious massacre, Diana Johnstone posted a translation of the articles from 'Le Figaro' and 'Le Monde' which contradicted him. She included her own comments as well. See 'The Racak Incident' at
http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/Johnstone/racakhoax.htm

[20] To learn about how Norwegian diplomats do much of the dirty work of the US-led Empire, read:

THE OSLO WAR PROCESS; Norwegians are the diplomatic 'advance guard' of the US-European empire. They helped destroy Yugoslavia. They set Israel on the path to destruction. Now they will finish destroying Sri Lanka. Next: India; Historical and Investigative Research, 29 Oct 2005; by Francisco Gil-White
http://www.hirhome.com/yugo/oslo-intro.htm

[21] "Helena Ranta testifies at Milosevic trial in The Hague: Former Yugoslav President accuses Finn of involvement in NATO conspiracy"; Foreign - Thursday 13.3.2003; Helsingin Sanomat (Helsinki), International Edition
http://www.helsinki-hs.net/news.asp?id=20030313IE2

[22] For those readers of ours who have not seen the term “Roma,” this is the label that the population known derogatorily as “Gypsies” uses for themselves, and it is also the term they wish others to use.

[23] Visit this link for articles which talk about what Kosovo has become, thanks to NATO.
http://emperors-clothes.com/yugo.htm#4

[23a] An article published in the Daily Telegraph, after the bombing, by a puzzled David Millward, who reported on just how eager Albanians were to leave Kosovo and go to Belgrade.

[Quote From Daily Telegraph Starts Here]

Ethnic Albanians are eager to move to Belgrade from Kosovo, despite the presence of Nato troops in the province. A noticeboard at the Yugoslav capital's only mosque is crammed with slips of paper from Kosovars offering two or, in one case, three flats in Pristina for one in Belgrade.

[Quote From Daily Telegraph Ends Here]

Notice that this is after NATO ‘won,’ which, as Millward points out, means that NATO troops were all over Kosovo. And yet the Albanians whom NATO had supposedly started a war to protect felt safer with the Serbs - the same Serbs who had supposedly been trying to genocidally cleanse them from the province.

Naturally, this was enough to make poor Mr. Millward dizzy! So he scratched his head and proclaimed it all a great ‘paradox’:

“The ease with which the Muslims live in Belgrade is one of the paradoxes of a country that has been ripped apart over the past decade by ethnic conflict.”

Mr. Millward is insisting on NATO’s interpretation of events no matter what contrary evidence surfaces. If you do that, then, certainly, things will seem terribly paradoxical.

NATO claimed up to 500,000 Albanian civilian deaths by Milosevic’s forces, but The Hague’s forensic investigators could not find even *one* of the bodies? Paradox. The Serbs are the heroes of WWII, the only ones to die in the hundreds of thousands because they chose to defend their Jewish compatriots, when they could have done otherwise, but according to NATO they became ‘the new Nazis’? Paradox. Milosevic (the ‘new Hitler,’ says NATO) supposedly whipped up the Serbs into a murderous frenzy and started a race war, but in fact his speeches call for tolerance and unity and read as if they were written by Martin Luther King or Gandhi? Paradox. Milosevic, says NATO, organized an ethnic cleansing campaign against the Albanians, but these latter want to escape Kosovo to go live in Belgrade? Paradox.

But the paradoxes can easily be made to disappear if only we allow ourselves to grow skeptical of NATO’s official story. The Serbs are not the new Nazis. They are what they always have been: the Serbs, moral heroes with a staunch and unique tradition of ethnic and religious tolerance that even NATO’s attack could not shatter, as the surprised Mr. Millward documents. There was no campaign of ethnic cleansing. If there had been, naturally, Kosovo Albanians would not have been jumping over each other to go to Belgrade after the bombing. Were Jews rushing back to Berlin after 1945?

Quoted article: The Daily Telegraph, UK; Muslims seek a haven from hatred in Belgrade; August 10, 1999; By David Millward in Belgrade. Full text:
http://emperors-clothes.com/gilwhite/ball.htm#_ftn18

[24] The Associated Press,  March 18, 1999, Thursday, PM cycle,  International News,  507 words,  Yugoslav army gearing up for war in Kosovo,  JOVANA GEC, Associated Press Writer,  PRISTINA, Yugoslavia

[25] "The Finnish forensic team, sent in by the European union, did not establish a case of massacre for the Racak incident, in which 40 people died last January 15. A conclusion of "massacre" did not fall within the competence of the EU forensic team or any other person having participated solely in the investigation of the bodies, read a summary given by Helena Ranta, chief of the forensic team... No sooner had the bodies been found close to Racak, a village south to the Kosovo provincial capital of Pristina, William Walker, head of the Kosovo verification mission alleged that it was a massacre. The Finnish pathologists said that laymen with little criminal investigation knowledge may tend to interpret what they saw at the site of the tragedy at Racak as massacre. Ranta explained that the missing eyes and ears could be related to animal activities such as stray dogs or to the high pressure of projectiles. The Finnish pathologist said that now it is up to the local law enforcement authorities to piece together all evidence to establish a criminal case. However, Ranta emphasized that so many people died at "approximately the same time" was a crime against humanity and she appealed to the international community to continue what it has been doing to help stop such crime in Kosovo, where so far some 2,000 people died in armed conflicts."

Xinhua News Agency,  MARCH 17, 1999, WEDNESDAY,  578 words,  eu forensic team establishes no massacre case for racak incident,  pristina, kosovo, yugoslavia, march 17; ITEM NO: 0317288

[26] http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_against_humanity 

[27] "Finnish investigator Helena Ranta to testify at Milosevic trial"; Foreign - Tuesday 26.11.2002; Helsingin Sanomat (Helsinki), International Edition
http://www.helsinki-hs.net/news.asp?id=20021126IE10

[28] The New York Times,  March 18, 1999, Thursday, Late Edition - Final Correction Appended,  Section A; Page 13; Column 1; Foreign Desk,  544 words,  Serbs' Killing of 40 Albanians Ruled a Crime Against Humanity,  By CARLOTTA GALL,  PRISTINA, Serbia, March 17

[29] "Helena Ranta testifies at Milosevic trial in The Hague: Former Yugoslav President accuses Finn of involvement in NATO conspiracy"; Foreign - Thursday 13.3.2003; Helsingin Sanomat (Helsinki), International Edition
http://www.helsinki-hs.net/news.asp?id=20030313IE2

[30] Krieger, H. (2001). The Kosovo conflict and international law: An analytical documentation 1974-1999, Cambridge International Documents Series, Volume II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp.197-199

[31] J. Rainio, K. Lalu, and A. Penttila, 'Independent forensic autopsies in an armed conflict: Investigation of the victimes from Racak, Kosovo...', Forensic Science International 116:171-185 (2001)
http://emperors-clothes.com/docs/fsi.pdf

NOTE 1: The Report is posted for Fair Use Only. It is in PDF format and requires 'Acrobat Reader' which is probably already on your computer. If not, it can be downloaded by going to http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/alternate.html

NOTE 2: Physicist Sanjoy Mahajan has translated a Berliner Zeitung piece about the Finnish Report, which straightforwardly says that the Finns found no evidence of a massacre.
www.campeace.org/yuarchive/Racak.htm

[32] The New York Times,' January 22, 1999, Note that the report is entitled 'Charting a Massacre: The Monitors' Report.'

[33] 'Sunday Times' (London), 12 March 2000 “CIA Aided Kosovo Guerrilla Army” by Tom Walker and Aidan Laverty

[33a] Tanjug, Feb. 16, 1999

[34] Newsweek, May 15, 2000 v135 i20 p22  The Kosovo Cover-Up: NATO said it won a great victory, but the war did very little damage to Serb forces. By not conceding this, the Pentagon may mislead future presidents about the limits of U.S. power. A NEWSWEEK exclusive. (National Affairs).

[34a] "How the Pentagon Unwittingly Admitted NATO Leaders are Guilty of War Crimes against Yugoslavia: Excerpt from Pentagon Press Conference, 14 April 1999"; Comments by Jared Israel; Emperor's Clothes; 30 January 2004.
http://emperors-clothes.com/docs/waldpress.htm

[35] The Toronto Sun,  April 1, 2001 Sunday,  Final Edition,  Comment;,  Pg. C6;,  1382 words,  The Hoax That Started A War; How The U.S., Nato And The Western Media Were Conned In Kosovo,  PETER WORTHINGTON, TORONTO SUN.

[36] http://www.hrw.org/press/1999/jan/yugo-prs.htm

[37]  Liberty, July 1999: Inquiry: How Muderous Are the Serbs? By David Ramsay Steele.

[38] BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, May 9, 1997, Friday, Part 2 Central Europe, the Balkins; FORMER YUGOSLAVIA; FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF YUGOSLAVIA; KOSOVO; EE/D2914/A, 143 words, "Loyal" Albanian shot dead by unknown gunmen, Source: Tanjug news agency, Belgrade, in Serbo-Croat 1456 gmt 7 May 97

[38a] Agence France Presse,  March 04, 1998,  International news,  243 words, "Albanian separatists vow 'multiple vengeance'"

[39] "The Serbs Were Not Oppressing the Kosovo Albanians: Quite The Opposite"; Emperor's Clothes; February 2002; by Francisco Gil-White.
http://www.psych.upenn.edu/~fjgil/Kosovo.htm

[40] "The Freezer Truck Hoax: How NATO framed the Serbs"; Emperor's Clothes; 19 September 2002; by Francisco Gil-White.
http://www.hirhome.com/yugo/freezer1.htm

[41] http://www.hirhome.com/yugo/freezer_app.htm

[42] The Toronto Sun,  April 1, 2001 Sunday,  Final Edition,  Comment;,  Pg. C6;,  1382 words, The Hoax That Started A War; How The U.S., Nato And The Western Media Were Conned In Kosovo,  Peter Worthington, Toronto Sun

[43] "Humanitarian War: Making the Crime Fit the Punishment"
by Diana Johnstone
http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/Johnstone/crime.htm

[44] You will find the most complete documentation on the Nazi origins of the 'Palestinian movement' here:

“HOW DID THE ‘PALESTINIAN MOVEMENT’ EMERGE? The British sponsored it. Then the German Nazis, and the US.”; Historical and Investigative Research; 13 June 2006; by Francisco Gil-White.
http://www.hirhome.com/israel/pal_mov4.htm

[44a] "Is the US an ally of Israel? A chronological look at the evidence";  Investigative and Historical Research; by Francisco Gil-White
http://www.hirhome.com/israel/ihrally.htm

[45] http://www.hrw.org/about/ 

[46] Deutsche Presse-Agentur, January 29, 1999, Friday, International News, 164 Words, "Belgrade To Blame For Racak Massacre, Says Human Rights Group," London

Notice something very interesting about this DPA wire. It begins with the following sentence:

"The Yugoslav government is to blame for the Racak massacre that left 45 ethnic Albanians dead in the southern Serbian province of Kosovo, a human rights group said Friday."

The subject of the first sentence is "a human rights group" and therefore the sentence should be properly written: "A human rights group claims that the Yugoslav government...etc."

Putting the subject at the end the way DPA did makes the sentence hard to process. So why do it? Is it because the phrase, "The Yugoslav government is to blame," then becomes the one thing that is easy to process, and therefore the thing that lingers?

And notice that DPA resorts to the same tactic in the headline, which reads: "Belgrade To Blame For Racak Massacre, Says Human Rights Group."

[47] http://www.hrw.org/press/1999/jan/yugo-prs.htm 

[48] Shortly after Walker announced his fictitious massacre, Diana Johnstone posted a translation of the articles from 'Le Figaro' and 'Le Monde' which contradicted him. She included her own comments as well. See 'The Racak Incident' at
http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/Johnstone/racakhoax.htm

[49] THE OSLO WAR PROCESS; Norwegians are the diplomatic 'advance guard' of the US-European empire. They helped destroy Yugoslavia. They set Israel on the path to destruction. Now they will finish destroying Sri Lanka. Next: India; Historical and Investigative Research, 29 Oct 2005; by Francisco Gil-White
http://www.hirhome.com/yugo/oslo2.htm

[50] The Washington Post, January 28, 1999, Thursday, Final Edition, A SECTION; Pg. A01, 1482 words, Serbs Tried To Cover Up Massacre; Kosovo Reprisal Plot Bared by Phone Taps, R. Jeffrey Smith, Washington Post Foreign Service, RACAK, Yugoslavia, Jan. 27

[51] The Ottawa Citizen, January 28, 1999, Thursday, FINAL EDITION, WORLD; Pg. C2, 1322 words, Phone taps reveal attempt to cover up Kosovo killings, THE OTTAWA CITIZEN, RACAK, Yugoslavia

[52] February 14, 2002 Thursday Section: International News; Distribution: Asia; England; Africa; Middle East; Length: 456 Words; Headline: Former President's Opening Statement Heats Up The Halls Of Justice; Byline: Anthony Deutsch; Associated Press Writer; Dateline: The Hague, Netherlands

[52a] Milosevic read the full transcript of this documentary film, entitled "It All Started With A Lie," in his opening statements at The Hague. The relevant transcript is:
Thursday, 14 February 2002; p. 226, lines 20 to 25.
http://www.un.org/icty/transe54/020214IT.htm

[53] Shortly after Walker announced his fictitious massacre, Diana Johnstone posted a translation of the articles from 'Le Figaro' and 'Le Monde' which contradicted him. She included her own comments as well. See 'The Racak Incident' at
http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/Johnstone/racakhoax.htm

This is a quote from the Le Figaro article:

"The question deserves to be raised in the light of a series of disturbing facts. In order to understand, it is important to go through the events of the crucial day of Friday in chronological order. At dawn, intervention forces of the Serbian police encircled and then attacked the village of Racak, known as a bastion of UCK (Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA) separatist guerrillas.

The police didn't seem to have anything to hide, since, at 8:30 a.m., they invited a television team (two journalists of AP TV) to film the operation."

[54] "Helena Ranta testifies at Milosevic trial in The Hague: Former Yugoslav President accuses Finn of involvement in NATO conspiracy"; Foreign - Thursday 13.3.2003; Helsingin Sanomat (Helsinki), International Edition
http://www.helsinki-hs.net/news.asp?id=20030313IE2

[55] The most dramatic case of this so far was during the cross-examination of Rade Markovic, which has to be seen to be believed. Markovic's testimony should have brought the entire trial to a close, to Milosevic's benefit, and watching judge May's performance as he attempted to prevent Milosevic's cross-examination reveals exactly what this tribunal is, and what it's for (nothing to do with justice).

"Slobodan Milosevic Cross-Examines Rade Markovic,"
Comments by Jared Israel
http://emperors-clothes.com/milo/july26.htm

[56] "The Freezer Truck Hoax: How NATO framed the Serbs"; Emperor's Clothes; 19 September 2002; by Francisco Gil-White
http://www.hirhome.com/yugo/freezer1.htm

www.hirhome.com