So there is justice.

What are these duties? Can anyone tell me if this means a planned visit to Russia means a possible unplanned visit to Chechnya? Will I need to bring my own gun? Or will it be supplied to me by the government?

The propaganda - NATO implications: 500,000...then 250,000...

then 100,000...and now..."at most, 3,000 people were killled."

By John Catalinotto

via www.reagan.com

9-2-00

On August 17, NATO officials privately conceded that the figures they released in 1999, allegedly a count of the people killed by Yugoslav forces in Kosovo and repeated in headlines all over the Western world, were much higher than the actual number of people killed there.

Independent findings by forensic teams of many nationalities working for

ICTY, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the Hague, have forced NATO's admission. The ICTY say that a total of fewer than 3,000 bodies were exhumed and all have been examined.

While they have not yet officially released their report, spokespeople for ICTY said that "at most, 3,000 people were killed". They also said that there was no evidence of mutilations, that not all the dead can be proved to be victims of murder or execution and that many among them were Serbs or other non-Albanians.

Last year NATO charged that Yugoslav forces had massacred at least 10,000 people, but only after NATO spokespeople first tried to imply that 500,000, then 250,000, then 100,000 supposedly "missing" people had also been killed.

They used such claims to try to justify NATO bombings, that had in fact no basis under United Nations treaty laws, or, indeed, NATO's own charter.

NATO has now been forced to admit, in effect, that it waged a lying war of deliberate propaganda via the Western media, to win support for its own illegal intervention that is known to have killed over 3,000 Yugoslavian citizens, about one-third of them children.

Washington and NATO have not produced the slightest hard evidence that Yugoslav forces carried out even a small-scale massacre of civilians, let alone anything like the "genocide" which they were repeatedly charged with in the Western press and on TV news bulletins.

The ICTY - itself created and funded by the NATO powers - has now been forced to expose NATO's "Big Lie".

According to a report in the August 18 British Guardian, Mark Laity, the new acting NATO spokesperson, said: "NATO never said the missing were all dead. The figure we stood by was 10,000." Laity even protested, desperately trying to pretend that NATO's intervention had probably stopped further killing.

The truth is that NATO's bombing killed thousands of people, and drove many thousands more - Albanians as well as Serbs - from their homes. And, that only since NATO occupied Kosovo, right-wing Albanian forces have killed some 1,000 people, mostly Serb and Romany, while pushing those of all 23 other non-Albanian ethnic groups - (not one of which had any complaints when ruled from Belgrade ! - for almost a century !) - right out of the region.

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The point is not to say that 3000, or 300, or even one death are not important.

The first point is:

Where is the dividing line to justify overt, unilateral, intervention into the internal affairs of a sovereign state? Where does one draw the line? # of deaths, nature of deaths? If this line is to be drawn, is it a matter of policy? Do you (US) apply this policy in all cases of the world? If you do not apply this policy in all cases,so why and what is the criteria for the applicable case?

No 2:

The deaths were not only on the Albaian side. The 3000 bodies are not only Albanian/Muslim. Once again, where is this dividing line that focuses US policy, and who decides it? and more importantly, for what REAL reasons is it decided?

No 3:

Why is it just and humanitarian for US to bomb Serbian civilians for this cause, and not just or humanitarian for Russian to bomb Chechnyan's. Even a better question: why is it unjust for Saddam in Iraq to kill Kurds when it seems to be just (in your eyes) for Turkey to do the same?

No 4:

Explain to me how to justify your policy in Kosovo in light of the fact that the expressed mission statement of KFOR specifically states they do not administer justice in the provence of Kosovo, and thus do not guarantee any mutual rights to Serbian minority in the provence?

Do you really believe these actions were carried out on purely humanitarian grounds (as "advertised")? Do you think you have furthered the cause of true democracy and opportunity by what situation you have helped (even maybe caused) to be created in all of the former Yugoslavia?

Do you think maybe Slobodan Milosevics in the world (along with the Samoza's, Otega's, Saddam's) are in fact fed by the ill fated, myopic foreign policy of some American policy makers?

Writing in Slate, Anne Applebaum put this argument at its starkest. Russia has a choice, she explained. "It can go on 'pretending to be a great power,' competing with the United States…or it can recognize that its imperial days are over. Putin can salvage something from this crisis, so to speak, only if he is intelligent enough to use it as an excuse to retrench, to focus on Russia's ailing economy…to start thinking about the plight of ordinary Russians rather than the fate of 'Mother Russia.'" If the Russians are lucky, they may yet get to live the happy life accorded to small insignificant European powers (whose fate is to be at the beck and call of great powers): "President Putin could cut Russia's military expenditure and military ambitions. Russia's annual budget expenditure, after all, is a quarter the size of Holland's. Although it would take a brave leader to reduce Russia's armed forces to Dutch levels, to do so may be Russia's last chance at retaining Holland's international influence." Applebaum's choice of Holland is interesting. Next to Great Britain, there is no other country in the world that follows America's lead as slavishly as Holland.

"The Soviet era placed a low value on the lives of ordinary Russians," intones the Financial Times, "nowhere more than in the armed forces where political leaders have accepted loss of life on a scale unacceptable in the west." The West does not accept loss of life when it comes to trained soldiers. But it has no qualms about inflicting large-scale loss of life on others – particularly unarmed civilians. Concern about Serb casualties was not exactly uppermost in the minds of policymakers last year as they sent the bombers and missiles happily on their way. The Financial Times complains about "the residual Soviet obsession with secrecy, shown by the reluctance to accept western help and the limited and contradictory information released to the public. Almost all the known facts have been revised or modified over the week: the location and depth of the submarine on the seabed; the number of sailors on board; the status of rescue efforts; whether signs of life were detected; how long the oxygen can last; even when the accident happened." It is, of course, unheard of in the West to provide erroneous or confused information about an accident that later needs to be revised. The TWA 800 disaster took place more than four years ago. Yet there is still dispute as to the cause of the crash. During the investigation, any number of theories have been put forward and widely accepted.

Moreover, is it likely that if one of our nuclear-powered submarines went down, the US Government would ask for help from other countries? Would the prospect of Russian divers poking around the wreckage be greeted with enthusiasm in Washington? Indeed, can we even be certain that we would ever find out about a US submarine disaster? NATO powers that detected the underwater explosions could easily be prevailed on to keep this information to themselves. As for the Russians, who would believe their claims to have evidence of a US submarine blowing up? Certainly not our gullible media.

"Linked to the secrecy," the FT continues, "is the enduring refusal to make anyone personally accountable for the submarine disaster, or the rescue operation." This editorial was written a few days after the Kursk sank. No one has any idea yet what happened in the Barents Sea, but already the FT is demanding dismissals. It is mass firings before any of the facts have been established that marked the Soviet era.

Let us repeat: We have no idea what it was that sent the Kursk to the bottom of the Barents Sea. We do not know whether all or most of the crew perished following the massive explosions. We do not know whether a Western rescue submarine could have made a successful docking or not. We do not know if anyone at all could have been rescued. Even if we do not know what happened, it is clear already that the initial cozy, comforting story of bumbling Ivan has little bearing on reality. The Russians have insisted from the beginning that the cause of the accident was a collision with another – possibly British, possibly American – submarine. The damaged foreign submarine then limped its way to a Norwegian port for repairs. Both the British and the US Governments have denied this. Needless to say, the media have accepted their denials without further investigation.

Yet the United States has admitted that two of its submarines were in the vicinity of the Kursk just before the accident, monitoring the Russian naval exercises. During the orgy of denunciations of Russian imperial ambitions, no one thought it relevant to ask why there were US submarines in the Barents Sea – hardly the US coastline? The Russians claim to have found fragments of a foreign submarine near where the Kursk sank. Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev has asserted that shortly after the Kursk went down, men on two Russian ships detected signs of a large underwater object in the vicinity, about the same size as the Russian submarine. Moreover, at the same time the Russians observed a signal buoy of the type Western fleets use to send emergency messages by satellite to their command bases.

Though the British and the Americans strenuously deny being involved in a collision, it is "apparent that both governments," according to a Reuters story, "were withholding information under their own longstanding refusal to comment on submarine spying operations directed at the Russian fleet." In other words, there is not the slightest reason to believe their denials. Whether or not a collision took place, NATO would deny it. "When Russian officials at NATO headquarters inquired whether 'even one ship was there where the accident took place, they told us no, there were no NATO ships there,' the official said, adding that Russian officials had reported back that they overheard 'conversation that if this incident had happened,' NATO officials 'would never acknowledge it.'"

The New York Times, in a rare moment of candor, revealed the other day, that "during the cold war…on more than a dozen occasions, Russian and Western submarines banged into one another." Moreover, the Times goes on, "the Russians have long resented the fact that many of the collisions occurred in or near their waters and, in their view, amounted to hit-and-run jobs, as American and British spy submarines quickly fled to safety." "In or near the waters" – so much then for Russia's aggressive imperial designs! There are no instances of collisions taking place in the Caribbean or the Mediterranean. Thus Russian suspicions about US submarines are scarcely without foundation. A recent AP story recounted the 1968 sinking of a Soviet submarine. "Russian officials long have suspected that the Soviet sub K-129 was struck by an American submarine, the USS Swordfish. But the US Navy says the Soviet vessel, armed with nuclear missiles and with a crew of 98, suffered a catastrophic internal explosion when it sank in the central Pacific on March 11, 1968. As recently as last fall, Russian government officials complained that Washington was covering up its involvement." The Russians say that six days after the accident, the USS Swordfish docked at Yokosuka, Japan to repair a bent periscope. The Americans claim that the Swordfish collided with an ice pack and was 2,000 miles away from the K-129 when it sank. However, the AP story goes on, "Moscow has requested the Swordfish's deck logs, to trace its movements, but the Pentagon has refused. The Swordfis