by Paul Craig Roberts
Thursday, January 12, 2006
President George W. Bush has destroyed America’s economy, along with America’s reputation as a truthful, compassionate, peace-loving nation that values civil liberties and human rights.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard University budget expert Linda Bilmes have calculated the cost to Americans of Bush’s Iraq war to be between $1 trillion and $2 trillion. This figure is 5 to 10 times higher than the $200 billion that Bush’s economic adviser Larry Lindsey estimated.
Lindsey was fired by Bush because his estimate was three times higher than the $70 billion figure that the Bush administration used to mislead Congress and the American voters about the burden of the war. You can’t work in the Bush administration unless you are willing to lie for dub-ya.
Americans need to ask themselves if the White House is in competent hands when a $70 billion war becomes a $2 trillion war. Bush sold his war by understating its cost by a factor of 28.57. Any financial officer anywhere in the world whose project was 2,857 percent over budget would instantly be fired for utter incompetence.
Bush’s war cost almost 30 times more than he said it would because the moronic neoconservatives that he stupidly appointed to policy positions told him the invasion would be a cakewalk. Neocons promised minimal U.S. casualties. Iraq already has cost 2,200 dead Americans and 16,000 seriously wounded—and Bush’s war is not over yet. The cost of lifetime care and disability payments for the thousands of U.S. troops who have suffered brain and spinal damage was not part of the unrealistic rosy picture that Bush painted.
Stiglitz’s $2 trillion estimate is OK as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go far enough. My own estimate is a multiple of Stiglitz’s.
Stiglitz correctly includes the cost of lifetime care of the wounded, the economic value of destroyed and lost lives, and the opportunity cost of the resources diverted to war destruction. What he leaves out is the war’s diversion of the nation’s attention away from the ongoing erosion of the U.S. economy. War and the accompanying domestic police state have filled the attention span of Americans and their government. Meanwhile, the U.S. economy has been rapidly deteriorating into Third World status.
In 2005, for the first time on record, consumer, business and government spending exceeded the total income of the country. Net national savings actually fell.
America can consume more than it produces only if foreigners supply the difference. China recently announced that it intends to diversify its foreign exchange holdings away from the U.S. dollar. If this is not merely a threat in order to extort even more concessions from Bush, Americans’ ability to consume will be brought up short by a fall in the dollar’s value, as China ceases to be a sponge that is absorbing an excessive outpouring of dollars. Oil-producing countries might follow China’s lead.
Now that Americans are dependent on imports for their clothing, manufactured goods and even high technology products, a decline in the dollar’s value will make all these products much more expensive. American living standards, which have been treading water, will sink.
A decline in living standards is an enormous cost and will make existing debt burdens unbearable. Stiglitz did not include this cost in his estimate.
Even more serious is the war’s diversion of attention from the disappearance of middle-class jobs for university graduates. The ladders of upward mobility are being rapidly dismantled by offshore production for U.S. markets, job outsourcing and importation of foreign professionals on work visas. In almost every U.S. corporation, U.S. employees are being dismissed and replaced by foreigners who work for lower pay. Even American public school teachers and hospital nurses are being replaced by foreigners imported on work visas.
The American Dream has become a nightmare for college graduates who cannot find meaningful work.
This fact is made abundantly clear from the payroll jobs data over the past five years. December’s numbers, released on Jan. 6, show the same pattern that I have reported each month for years. Under pressure from offshore outsourcing, the U.S. economy only creates low-productivity jobs in low-pay domestic services.
Only a paltry number of private sector jobs were created—94,000. Of these 94,000 jobs, 35,800—or 38 percent—are for waitresses and bartenders. Health care and social assistance account for 28 percent of the new jobs, and temporary workers account for 10 percent. These three categories of low-tech, nontradable domestic services account for 76 percent of the new jobs. This is the jobs pattern of a poor Third World economy that consumes more than it produces.
America’s so-called First World superpower economy was only able to create in December a measly 12,000 jobs in goods-producing industries, of which 77 percent are accounted for by wood products and fabricated metal products—the furniture and roofing metal of the housing boom that has now come to an end. U.S. employment declined in machinery, electronic instruments, and motor vehicles and parts.
Two thousand six hundred jobs were created in computer systems design and related services, depressing news for the several hundred thousand unemployed American computer and software engineers.
When manufacturing leaves a country, engineering, R&D and innovation rapidly follow. Now that outsourcing has killed employment opportunities for U.S. citizens and even General Motors and Ford are failing, U.S. economic growth depends on how much longer the rest of the world will absorb our debt and finance our consumption.
How much longer will it be before “the world’s only remaining superpower” is universally acknowledged as a debt-ridden, hollowed-out economy desperately in need of IMF bailout?
COPYRIGHT 2006 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
The Politics of the Srebrenica Massacre
by Prof Edward S. Herman
July 7, 2005
Znet
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"Srebrenica" has become the symbol of evil, and specifically Serb evil. It is commonly described as "a horror without parallel in the history of Europe since the Second World War" in which there was a cold-blooded execution "of at least 8,000 Muslim men and boys." [1] The events in question took place in or near the Bosnian town of Srebrenica between July 10 and 19, 1995, as the Bosnian Serb army (BSA) occupied that town and fought with and killed many Bosnian Muslims, unknown numbers dying in the fighting and by executions. There is no question but that there were executions, and that many Bosnian Muslim men died during the evacuation of Srebrenica and its aftermath. But even though only rarely discussed there is a major issue of how many were executed, as numerous bodies found in local grave sites were victims of fighting, and many Bosnian Muslim men who fled Srebrenica reached Bosnian Muslim territory safely. Some bodies were also those of the many Serbs killed in the forays by the Bosnian Muslims out of Srebrenica in the years before July 1995.
The Srebrenica massacre has played a special role in the politics of Western treatment of the restructuring of the former-Yugoslavia and in Western interventionism more broadly, and it is receiving renewed attention and memorialization at its tenth anniversary in July 2005. It is regularly cited as proof of Serb evil and genocidal intent and helped justify a focus on punishing the Serbs and Milosevic and NATO's 1999 war on Serbia. It has also provided important moral support for the further Western wars of vengeance, power projection, and "liberation," having shown that there is evil that the West can and must deal with forcibly.
However, there are three matters that should have raised serious questions about the massacre at the time and since, but didn't and haven't. One was that the massacre was extremely convenient to the political needs of the Clinton administration, the Bosnian Muslims, and the Croats (see Section 1 below). A second was that there had been (and were after Srebrenica) a series of claimed Serb atrocities, that were regularly brought forth at strategic moments when forcible intervention by the United States and NATO bloc was in the offing but needed some solid public relations support, but which were later shown to be fraudulent (Section 2). A third is that the evidence for a massacre, certainly of one in which 8,000 men and boys were executed, has always been problematic, to say the least (Sections 3 and 4).
1. Political Convenience
The events of Srebrenica and claims of a major massacre were extremely helpful to the Clinton administration, the Bosnian Muslim leadership, and Croatian authorities. Clinton was under political pressure in 1995 both from the media and from Bob Dole to take more forceful action in favor of the Bosnian Muslims, [2] and his administration was eager to find a justification for more aggressive policies. Clinton officials rushed to the Srebrenica scene to confirm and publicize the claims of a massacre, just as William Walker did later at Racak in January 1999. Walker's immediate report to Madeleine Albright caused her to exult that "spring has come early this year." [3] Srebrenica allowed the "fall to come early" for the Clinton administration in the summer of 1995.
Bosnian Muslim leaders had been struggling for several years to persuade the NATO powers to intervene more forcibly on their behalf, and there is strong evidence that they were prepared not only to lie but also to sacrifice their own citizens and soldiers to serve the end of inducing intervention (matters discussed further in Section 2). Bosnian Muslim officials have claimed that their leader, Alija Izetbegovic, told them that Clinton had advised him that U.S. intervention would only occur if the Serbs killed at least 5,000 at Srebrenica. [4] The abandonment of Srebrenica by a military force much larger than that of the attackers, and a retreat that made that larger force vulnerable and caused it to suffer heavy casualties in fighting and vengeance executions, helped produce numbers that would meet the Clinton criterion, by hook or by crook. There is other evidence that the retreat from Srebrenica was not based on any military necessity but was strategic, with the personnel losses incurred considered a necessary sacrifice for a larger purpose. [5]
Croatian authorities were also delighted with the claims of a Srebrenica massacre, as this deflected attention from their prior devastating ethnic cleansing of Serbs and Bosnian Muslims in Western Bosnia (almost entirely ignored by the Western media), [6] and it provided a cover for their already planned removal of several hundred thousand Serbs from the Krajina area in Croatia. This massive ethnic cleansing operation was carried out with U.S. approval and logistical support within a month of the Srebrenica events, and it may well have involved the killing of more Serb civilians than Bosnian Muslim civilians killed in the Srebrenica area in July: most of the Bosnian Muslim victims were fighters, not civilians, as the Bosnian Serbs bused the Srebrenica women and children to safety; the Croatians made no such provision and many women, children and old people were slaughtered in Krajina. [7] The ruthlessness of the Croats was impressive: "UN troops watched horrified as Croat soldiers dragged the bodies of dead Serbs along the road outside the UN compound and then pumped them full of rounds from the AK-47s. They then crushed the bullet-ridden bodies under the tracks of a tank." [8] But this was hardly noticed in the wake of the indignation and propaganda generated around Srebrenica with the aid of the mainstream media, whose co-belligerency role in the Balkan wars was already well-entrenched. [9]
The International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY) and UN also had an important role to play in the consolidation of the standard Srebrenica massacre narrative. From its inception the ICTY served as an arm of the NATO powers, who created it, funded it, served as its police arm and main information source, and expected and got responsive service from the organization. [10] The ICTY focused intensively on Srebrenica and provided important and nominally independent corroboration of the massacre claims along with citable "judicial" claims of planned "genocide." The UN is less thoroughly integrated into NATO-power demands, but it is highly responsive and in the Srebrenica case it came through just as the United States and its main allies desired. [11]
This political interest in the Srebrenica massacre hardly proves that the establishment narrative is wrong. It does, however, suggest the need for caution and an awareness of the possibility of falsification and inflated claims. That awareness has been entirely absent from mainstream treatment of Srebrenica.
2. The Serial Lying Before and After Srebrenica
At each stage in the dismantlement of Yugoslavia, its ethnic cleansing, and before and during the NATO war over the Kosovo province of Serbia in 1999, propaganda lies played a very important role in forwarding conflict and anti-Serb actions. There were lies of omission and lies that directly conveyed false impressions and information. An important form of lie of omission was the regular presentation of Serb misbehavior as unique to the Serbs, not also characteristic of the behavior of the Muslims and Croatians or of the conflict overall. In case after case the media would report on Serb attacks and atrocities, having neglected to report the prior assaults on Serbs in those same towns and making the Serb behavior seem like unprovoked acts of aggression and barbarity.
This was evident from the very start of the serious fighting in 1991 in the republic of Croatia. In their treatment of the Eastern Croatian city of Vukovar, for example, the media (and ICTY) focused exclusively on the federal Yugoslav army's capture of the town in the fall of 1991, completely ignoring the prior spring and summer's slaughter by Croatian National Guard troops and paramilitaries of hundreds of ethnic Serbs who had lived in the Vukovar area. According to Raymond K. Kent, "a substantial Serb population in the major Slavonian city of Vukovar disappeared without having fled, leaving traces of torture in the old Austrian the spring catacombs under the city along with evidence of murder and rape. The Western media, whose demonization of the Serbs was well underway, chose to overlook these events…" [12] This selective and misleading focus was standard media and ICTY practice.
Lies of omission were also clear in the attention given Bosnian Serb prison camps like Omarska, which the media focused on intensively and with indignation, when in fact the Muslims and Croats had very similar prison camps-at Celebici, Tarcin, Livno, Bradina, Odzak, and in the Zetra camp in Sarajevo, among other sites-[13] with roughly comparable numbers, facilities, and certainly no worse treatment of prisoners; [14] but in contrast with the Serbs, the Muslims and Croats hired competent PR firms and refused permission to inspect their facilities-and the already well-developed structure of bias made the media little interested in any but Serb camps.
Wild allegations of Auschwitz-like conditions in Serb "concentration camps" were spread by "journalists of attachment" who lapped up propaganda handouts by Muslim and Croat officials and PR hirlings. Roy Gutman, who won a Pulitzer prize jointly with John Burns for Bosnia reporting in 1993, depended heavily on Croat and Muslim officials and witnesses with suspect credentials and implausible claims, and he was a major source of inflated, one-sided, and false "concentration camp" propaganda. [15] John Burns' Pulitzer award was based on an extended interview with Boris Herak, a captured Bosnian Serb supplied to him and a Soros-funded film-maker by the Bosnian Muslims. Several years later Herak admitted that his extremely implausible confession had been coerced and that he had been forced to memorize many pages of lies. Two of his alleged victims also turned up alive in later years. In reporting on Herak, John Burns and the New York Times (and the Soros-funded film) suppressed the credibility-damaging fact that Herak had also accused former UNPROFOR commandant, Canadian General Lewis Mackenzie, of having raped young Muslim women at a Serb-run bordello. [16] These scandalous awards are symptomatic of the media bias that was already overwhelming in 1992 and 1993.
In a recent development of interest, on a visit to the dying Alija Izetbegovic, Bernard Kouchner asked him about the Bosnian Serb concentration camps, whereupon Izetbegovic, surprisingly, admitted that these claims had been inflated with the aim of getting NATO to bomb the Serbs. [17] This important confession has not been mentioned in the U.S. or British mainstream media.
One of the most important propaganda lies of the 1990s featured the Serb-run Trnopolje camp, visited by Britain's ITN reporters in August 1992. These reporters photographed the resident Fikret Alic, showing him emaciated and seemingly inside a concentration camp fence. In fact, Fikret Alic was in a transit camp, was a sick man (and was sick with tuberculosis long before reaching the camp), was not in any way representative of others in the camp, and was soon able to move to Sweden. Furthermore, the fence was around the photographers, not the man photographed. [18] But this hugely dishonest photo was featured everywhere in the West as proving a Serb-organized Auschwitz, was denounced by NATO high officials, and helped provide the moral basis for the creation of the ICTY and its clear focus on Serb evil.
In the case of the siege of Sarajevo, as with conflict around many "safe haven" towns, the Bosnian Muslim government engaged in a steady program of provoking the Serbs, blaming them for the ensuing response, lying about casualties, and trying-usually successfully-to place the blame on the Serbs. As Tim Fenton has said, "Massacre allegations by the Bosnian Muslims followed any reported conflict as night followed day: most notoriously Muslim Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic claimed the UN was responsible for the deaths of 70,000 in Bihac in early 1995, when in fact there had barely been any fighting and casualties were small." [19]
A remarkable feature of the Bosnian Muslim struggle to demonize the Serbs, in order to get NATO to come to Bosnian Muslim aid with bombs, was their willingness to kill their own people. This was most notable in the case of the ruthless bombing of Sarajevo civilians in three massacres: in 1992 (the "Breadline Massacre"), 1994 (the Markale "Market Massacre") and a "Second Market Massacre" in 1995. In the standard narrative the Serbs were responsible for these massacres, and it is admittedly not easy to believe that the Muslim leadership would kill their own for political advantage even if the evidence points strongly in that direction. But these massacres were all extremely well timed to influence imminent NATO and UN decisions to intervene more forcibly on behalf of the Bosnian Muslims. More important, numerous UN officials and senior Western military officials have claimed that the evidence is strong in all three cases that the actions were planned and executed by Bosnian Muslims. [20] U.S. Army officer John E. Sray, who was on the scene in Bosnia during these and other massacres and was head of the U.S. intelligence section in Sarajevo, even suggested that the incidents, and probable Bosnian Muslim official connivance in these atrocities, "deserve a thorough scrutiny by the International War Crimes Tribunal." [21] Needless to say no such scrutiny was forthcoming. In short, this view of the three massacres is not conspiracy theory, it is a conclusion based on serious and substantial evidence, but not even debated in the party-line dominated accounts of recent Balkan history. [22]
Both before and after Srebrenica lying about numbers killed was also standard practice, helpful in sustaining the dominant narrative. For Bosnia, in December 1992 the Bosnian Muslim government claimed 128,444 deaths of their forces and people, a number which grew to 200,000 by June 1993, rising to 250,000 in 1994. [23] These figures were swallowed without a qualm by Western politicians, media, and intellectual war-campaigners (e.g., David Rieff), with Clinton himself using the 250,000 figure in a speech in November 1995. Former State Department official George Kenney has long questioned these figures and marveled at media gullibility in accepting these claims without the least interest in verification. His own estimate ran between 25,000 and 60,000. [24] More recently, a study sponsored by the Norwegian government estimated the Bosnian war dead as 80,000, and one sponsored by the Hague Tribunal itself came up with a figure of 102,000 dead. [25] Neither of these studies has been reported on in the U.S. media, which had regularly offered its readers/listeners the inflated numbers.
A similar inflation process took place during the 78-day NATO bombing war in 1999, with high U.S. officials at various moments claiming 100,000, 250,000 and 500,000 Serb killings of Kosovo Albanians, along with the lavish use of the word "genocide" to describe Serb actions in Kosovo. [26] This figure gradually shrank to 11,000, and has remained there despite the fact that only some 4,000 bodies were found in one of the most intense forensic searches in history, and with unknown numbers of those bodies combatants, Serbs, and civilian victims of U.S. bombing. But the 11,000 must be valid because the NATO governments and ICTY say it is, and Michael Ignatieff assured readers of the New York Times that "whether those 11,334 bodies will be found depends on whether the Serb military and the police removed them." [27]
This record of systematic disinformation certainly does not disprove the truth of the standard narrative on the Srebrenica massacre. It does, however, suggest the need for a close look at the claims, which have proved so convenient, a close look that the mainstream has steadily refused to provide.
3. The Problematic Massacre Claims
By the time of the Srebrenica events of July 1995 the stage had been well set for making massacre claims effective. The serial lying had been largely unchallenged in the mainstream, the demonization process and good-versus-evil dichotomy had been well established, the ICTY and UN leadership were closely following the agenda of the United States and its NATO allies, and the media were on board as co-belligerents.
In this environment, context-stripping was easy. One element of context was the fact that the "safe area" concept was a fraud, as the safe areas were supposed to have been disarmed, but weren't, and with UN connivance. [28] They were therefore used by the Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica and other safe havens as launching pads for attacks on nearby Serb villages. In the three years prior to the massacre well over a thousand Serb civilians were killed by Muslim forces in scores of devastated nearby villages; [29] and well before July 1995 the Srebrenica Muslim commander Nasir Oric proudly showed Western reporters videos of some of his beheaded Serb victims and bragged about his killings. [30] Testifying before the Tribunal on February 12, 2004, UN military commander in Bosnia in 1992 and 1993, General Philippe Morillon, stated his conviction that the attack on Srebrenica was a "direct reaction" to the massacres of Serbs by Nasir Oric and his forces in 1992 and 1993, massacres with which Morillon was closely familiar. [31] Morillon's testimony was of no interest to the Western media, and when the ICTY finally got around to indicting Nasir Oric on March 28, 2003, very possibly to create the image of judicial balance, he was charged with killing only seven Serbs who were tortured and beaten to death after capture, and with the "wanton destruction" of nearby villages. Although he openly bragged to Western reporters of slaughtering Serb civilians, the ICTY reportedly "found no evidence that there were civilian casualties in the attacks on Serb villages in his theater of operations." [32]
When the Bosnian Serbs captured Srebrenica in July 1995, it was reported that the 28th regiment of the Bosnian Muslim Army (BMA), comprising several thousand men, had just fled the town. [33] The media failed to ask how such a large force could have been present in a disarmed "safe area." Having also succeeded in ignoring the prior abuses emanating from the safe area, this allowed them to follow a quickly established party line of a planned "genocide" and inexplicable brutality rather than the vengeance which the media allow as semi-exoneration of violence by "worthy" victims (e.g., Kosovo Albanians driving out and killing Serbs and Roma after the NATO takeover of Kosovo).
A second element of context was the possible political basis for the surrender of Srebrenica by a force in a good defensive position, outnumbering the attacking BSA by a 6-1 or 8-1 ratio, but retreating in advance of the assault, their leaders having been withdrawn previously by order of the Bosnian Muslim leadership. [34] This left the population unprotected, and made the BMA cadres vulnerable as they retreated in disarray toward Bosnian Muslim lines. Could this have been another self-sacrificing maneuver by the leadership to produce victims, perhaps designed to help meet the Clinton 5,000 target and induce more forcible NATO intervention? These questions never arose in the mainstream media.
The Srebrenica events had a number of features that made it possible to claim 8,000 "men and boys" executed. One was the confusion and uncertainty about the fate of the fleeing Bosnian Muslim forces, some reaching Tuzla safely, some killed in the fighting, and some captured. The 8,000 figure was first provided by the Red Cross, based on their crude estimate that the BSA had captured 3,000 men and that 5,000 were reported "missing." [35] It is well established that thousands of those "missing" had reached Tuzla or were killed in the fighting, [36] but in an amazing transformation displaying the eagerness to find the Bosnian Serbs evil and the Muslims victims, the "reaching safety/killed-in-action" basis of being missing was ignored and the missing were taken as executed! This misleading conclusion was helped along by the Red Cross's reference to the 5,000 as having "simply disappeared," and its failure to correct this politically biased usage and claim despite its own recognition that "several thousand" refugees had reached Central Bosnia. [37]
It was also helped along by the Bosnian Muslim leadership's refusal to disclose the names and numbers of those reaching safety, [38] but there was a remarkable readiness in the Western establishment not only to ignore those reaching safety, but also to disregard deaths in fighting and to take dead bodies as proving executions. The will to believe here was limitless: reporter David Rohde saw a bone sticking up in a grave site near Srebrenica, which he just knew by instinct was a remnant of an execution and serious evidence of a "massacre." [39] It was standard media practice to move from an asserted and unproven claim of thousands missing, or a report of the uncovering of bodies in a grave site, to the conclusion that the claim of 8,000 executed was thereby demonstrated. [40]
With 8,000 executed and thousands killed in the fighting there should have been huge grave sites and satellite evidence of both executions, burials, and any body removals. But the body searches in the Srebrenica vicinity were painfully disappointing, with only some two thousand bodies found in searches through 1999, including bodies killed in action and possibly Serb bodies, some pre-dating July 1995. The sparseness of these findings led to claims of body removal and reburial, but this was singularly unconvincing as the Bosnian Serbs were under intense military pressure after July 1995. This was the period when NATO was bombing Serb positions and Croat/Muslim armies were driving towards Banja Luka. The BSA was on the defensive and was extremely short of equipment and resources, including gasoline. To have mounted an operation of the magnitude required to exhume, transport and rebury thousands of corpses would have been far beyond the BSA's capacity at that time. Furthermore, in carrying out such a program they could hardly hope to escape observation from OSCE personnel, local civilians, and satellite observations.
On August 10, 1995, Madeleine Albright showed some satellite photos at a closed session of the Security Council, as part of a denunciation of the Bosnian Serbs, including one photo showing people--allegedly Bosnian Muslims near Srebrenica--assembled in a stadium, and one allegedly taken shortly thereafter showing a nearby field with "disturbed" soil. These photos have never been publicly released, but even if they are genuine they don't prove either executions or burials. Furthermore, although the ICTY speaks of "an organized and comprehensive effort" to hide bodies, and David Rohde claimed a "huge Serb effort to hide bodies," [41] neither Albright nor anyone else has ever shown a satellite photo of people actually being executed, buried, or dug up for reburial, or of trucks conveying thousands of bodies elsewhere. This evidence blank occurred despite Albright's warning the Serbs that "We will be watching," and with satellites at that time making at least eight passes per day and geostationary drones able to hover and take finely detailed pictures in position over Bosnia during the summer of 1995. [42] The mainstream media have found this failure to confirm of no interest.
There have been a great many bodies gathered at Tuzla, some 7,500 or more, many in poor condition or parts only, their collection and handling incompatible with professional forensic standards, their provenance unclear and link to the July 1995 events in Srebrenica unproven and often unlikely, [43] and the manner of their death usually uncertain. Interestingly, although the Serbs were regularly accused of trying to hide bodies, there has never been any suggestion that the Bosnian Muslims, long in charge of the body search, might shift bodies around and otherwise manipulate evidence, despite their substantial record of dissembling. A systematic attempt to use DNA to trace connections to Srebrenica is underway, but entails many problems, apart from that of the integrity of the material studied and process of investigation, and will not resolve the question of differentiating executions from deaths in combat. There are also lists of missing, but these lists are badly flawed, with duplications, individuals listed who had died before July 1995, who fled to avoid BSA service, or who registered to vote in 1997, and they include individuals who died in battle or reached safety or were captured and assumed a new existence elsewhere. [44]
The 8,000 figure is also incompatible with the basic arithmetic of Srebrenica numbers before and after July 1995. Displaced persons from Srebrenica-that is, massacre survivors-- registered with the World Health Organization and Bosnian government in early August 1995, totalled 35,632. Muslim men who reached Muslim lines "without their families being informed" totaled at least 2,000, and some 2,000 were killed in the fighting. That gives us 37,632 survivors plus the 2,000 combat deaths, which would require the prewar population of Srebrenica to have been 47,000 if 8,000 were executed, whereas the population before July was more like 37-40,000 (Tribunal judge Patricia Wald gave 37,000 as her estimate). The numbers don't add up. [45]
There were witnesses to killings at Srebrenica, or those who claimed to be witnesses. There were not many of these, and some had a political axe to grind or were otherwise not credible, [46] but several were believable and were probably telling of real and ugly events. But we are talking here of evidence of hundreds of executions, not 8,000 or anything close to it. The only direct participant witness claim that ran to a thousand was that of Drazen Erdemovic, an ethnic Croat associated with a mercenary group of killers whose members were paid 12 kilos of gold for their Bosnian service (according to Erdemovic himself) and ended up working in the Congo on behalf of French intelligence. His testimony was accepted despite its vagueness and inconsistencies, lack of corroboration, and his suffering from mental problems sufficient to disqualify him from trial--but not from testifying before the Tribunal, free of cross-examination. within two weeks of this disqualification from trial. This and other witness evidence suffered from serious abuse of the plea-bargaining process whereby witnesses could receive mitigating sentences if they cooperated sufficiently with the prosecution. [47]
It is also noteworthy how many relatively impartial observers in or near Srebrenica in July 1995 didn't see any evidence of massacres, including the members of the Dutch forces present in the "safe area" and people like Henry Wieland, the chief UN investigator into alleged human rights abuses, who could find no eyewitnesses to atrocities after five days of interviewing among the 20,000 Srebrenica survivors gathered at the Tuzla airport refugee camp. [48]
4. Anomalies
One anomaly connected with Srebrenica has been the stability of the figure of Bosnian Muslim victims-8,000 in July 1995 and 8,000 today, despite the crudity of the initial estimate, the evidence that many or most of the 5,000 "missing" reached Bosnian Muslim territory or were killed in the fighting, and the clear failure to produce supportive physical evidence despite a massive effort. In other cases, like the 9/11 fatality estimate, and even the Bosnian killings and Kosovo bombing war estimates, the original figures were radically scaled down as evidence of body counts made the earlier inflated numbers unsustainable. [49] But because of its key political role for the United States, Bosnian Muslims and Croats, and an almost religious ardour of belief in this claim, Sebrenica has been immune to evidence. From the beginning until today the number has been taken as a given, a higher truth, the questioning of which would show a lack of faith and very likely "apologetics" for the demon.
Another anomaly also showing the sacred, untouchable, and politicized character of the massacre in Western ideology has been the ready designation of the killings as a case of "genocide." The Tribunal played an important role here, with hard-to-match gullibility, unrestrained psychologizing, and incompetent legal reasoning, which the judges have applied to Serb-related cases only. On gullibility, one Tribunal judge accepted as fact the witness claim that Serb soldiers had forced an old Muslim man to eat the liver of his grandson; [50] and the judges repeatedly stated as an established fact that 7-8,000 Muslim men had been executed, while simultaneously acknowledging that the evidence only "suggested" that "a majority" of the 7-8,000 missing had not been killed in combat, which yields a number substantially lower than 7-8,000. [51]
The Tribunal dealt with the awkward problem of the genocide-intent Serbs bussing Bosnian Muslim women and children to safety by arguing that they did this for public relations reasons, but as Michael Mandel points out, failing to do some criminal act despite your desire is called "not committing a crime." [52] The Tribunal never asked why the genocidal Serbs failed to surround the town before its capture to prevent thousands of males from escaping to safety, or why the Bosnian Muslim soldiers were willing to leave their women and children as well as many wounded comrades to the mercies of the Serbs; [53] and they failed to confront the fact that 10,000 mainly Muslim residents of Zvornik sought refugee from the civil war in Serbia itself, as prosecution witness Borislav Jovic testified. [54]
Among the other idiocies in the Tribunal judges' argument, it was genocide if you killed many males in a group in order to reduce the future population of that group, thereby making it unviable in that area. Of course, you might want to kill them to prevent their killing you in the future, but the court knows Serb psychology better-that couldn't be the sole reason, there must have been a more sinister aim. The Tribunal reasoning holds forth the possibility that with only a little prosecution-friendly judicial psychologizing any case of killing enemy soldiers can be designated genocide.
There is also the problem of definition of the group. Were the Serbs trying to eliminate all the Muslims in Bosnia, or Muslims globally? Or just in Srebrenica? The judges suggested that pushing them out of the Srebrenica area was itself genocide, and they essentially equated genocide with ethnic cleansing. [55] It is notable that the ICTY has never called the Croat ethnic cleansing of 250,000 Krajina Serbs "genocide" although in that case many women and children were killed and the ethnic cleansing applied to a larger area and larger victim population than in Srebrenica. [56] (On August 10, 1995, Madeleine Albright cried out to the Security Council that "as many as 13,000 men, women and children were driven from their homes" in Srebrenica.) [57] Perhaps the ICTY had accepted Richard Holbrooke's comic designation of Krajina as a case of "involuntary expulsions." [58] The bias is blatant; the politicization of a purported judicial enterprise is extreme.
Media treatment of the Srebrenica and Krajina cases followed the same pattern and illustrates well how the media make some victims worthy and others unworthy in accord with a political agenda. With the Serbs their government's target, and their government actively aiding the massive Croat ethnic cleansing program in Krajina, the media gave huge and indignant treatment to the first, with invidious language, calls for action, and little context. With Krajina, attention was slight and passing, indignation was absent, detailed reporting on the condition of the victims was minimal, descriptive language was neutral, and there was context offered that made the events understandable. The contrast is so gross as to be droll: the attack on Srebrenica "chilling," "murderous," "savagery," "cold-blooded killing," "genocidal," "aggression,"and of course "ethnic cleansing." With Krajina, the media used no such strong language-even ethnic cleansing was too much for them. The Croat assault was merely a big "upheaval" that is "softening up the enemy," "a lightning offensive," explained away as a "response to Srebrenica" and a result of Serb leaders "overplaying their hand." The Washington Post even cited U.S. Ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith saying the "the Serb exodus was not 'ethnic cleansing'." [59] The paper does not allow a challenge to that judgment. In fact, however, the Croat operations in Krajina left Croatia as the most ethnically purified of all the former components of the former Yugoslavia, although the NATO occupation of Kosovo has allowed an Albanian ethnic cleansing that is rivalling that of Croatia in ethnic purification.
Another anomaly in the Srebrenica case is the insistence on bringing all the criminals (Serb) to trial and getting the willing executioners (Serb) to admit guilt as necessary for justice and essential for reconciliation. A problem is that justice cannot be one-sided or it ceases to be justice, and shows its true face as vengeance and a cover for other political ends. Ethnic cleansing in Bosnia was by no means one-sided, and deaths by nationality were not far off from population proportionality; [60] the Serbs claim and have documented thousands of deaths at the hands of the Bosnian Muslims and their imported Mujahedin cadres, and by the Croatians, and they have their own group examining and trying to identify bodies at an estimated 73 mass graves. [61] This victimization has hardly been noticed by the Western media or ICTY-the distinguished Yugoslav forensic expert Dr. Zoran Stankovic observed back in 1996 that "the fact that his team had previously identified the bodies of 1,000 Bosnian Serbs in the [Srebrenica] region had not interested prosecutor Richard Goldstone." [62] Instead, there is a steady refrain about the Serbs tendency to whine, whereas Bosnian Muslim complaints are taken as those of true victims and are never designated whining.
Rather than producing reconciliation the steady focus on Srebrenica victims and killers makes for more intense hatred and nationalism, just as the Kosovo war and its violence exacerbated hatred and tensions there and showed that Clinton's claimed objective of a tolerant multi-ethnic Kosovo was a fraud. In Kosovo, this one-sided propaganda and NATO control has unleashed serious and unremitting anti-Serb-along with anti-Roma, anti-Turk, anti-dissident-Albanian-- violence, helped along by the willingness of the NATO authorities to look the other way as their allies-the purported victims-take their revenge and pursue their long-standing aim of ethnic purification. [63] In Bosnia and Serbia the Serbs have been under steady attack, humiliated, and their leaders and military personnel punished, while the criminals among the Bosnian Muslims, Croats, and NATO powers (e.g., Clinton, Blair, Albright, Holbrooke) suffer no penalties [64] and may even be portrayed as dispensers of justice (Clinton et al.).
.
It is clear that the objectives of the retribution-pushers are not justice and reconciliation-they are to unify and strengthen the position of the Bosnian Muslims, to crush the Republica Srpska, and possibly even eliminate it as an independent entity in Bosnia, to keep Serbia disorganized, weak and dependent on the West, and to continue to put the U.S. and NATO attack and dismantlement of Yugoslavia in a favorable light. The last objective requires diverting attention from the Clinton/Bosnian Muslim role in giving Al Qaeda a foothold in the Balkans, Izetbegovic's close alliance with Osama bin Laden, his Islamic Declaration declaring hostility to a multi-ethnic state, [65] the importation of 4,000 Mujahaden to fight a holy war in Bosnia, with active Clinton administration aid, and the KLA-Al Qaeda connection.
These aspects of the siding with the Bosnian Muslims have always been awkward for the war propagandists, and they became more so after 9/11-the U.S. 9/11 Commission Report claims that two of the 19 hijackers, Nawaf al Hazmi and Khalid al Mihdhar, and a "mastermind" of the attack, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, "fought" in Bosnia, and that bin Laden had "service" offices in Zagreb and Sarajevo. [66] Despite the huge focus on 9/11 and Al Qaeda these links have not been featured in the mainstream media and have not influenced Bosnian proconsul Paddy Ashdown, who attended Izetbegovic's funeral and continues to push Bosnian Muslim interests. The Serbs, of course, were complaining about the brutality (and beheadings) of the Mujahaden in 1993, but the media and ICTY were not interested then and remain uninterested. Let's just talk about Srebrenica, the Bosnian Muslims as unique victims, and Clinton's and the West's generous if belated service to those victimized underdogs.
But didn't the Bosnian Serbs "confess" that they had murdered 8,000 civilians? This has been the take of the Western media, but again demonstrating their subservience to their leaders' political agenda. The Bosnian Serbs actually did put out a report on Srebrenica in September 2002, [67] but this report was rejected by Paddy Ashdown for failing to come up with the proper conclusions. He therefore forced a further report by firing a stream of Republica Srpska politicians and analysts, threatening the RS government, and eventually extracting a report prepared by people who would come to the officially approved conclusions. [68] This report, issued on June 11, 2004, was then greeted in the Western media as a meaningful validation of the official line-the refrain was, the Bosnian Serbs "admit" the massacre, which should finally settle any questions. Amusingly, even this coerced and imposed report didn't come near acknowledging 8,000 executions (it speaks of "several thousand" executions). What this episode "proves" is that the Western campaign to make the defeated Serbia grovel is not yet terminated, and the media's continuing gullibility and propaganda service.
Conclusion
The "Srebrenica massacre" is the greatest triumph of propaganda to emerge from the Balkan wars. Other claims and outright lies have played their role in the Balkan conflicts, but while some have retained a modest place in the propaganda repertoire despite challenge (Racak, the Markale massacre, the Serb refusal to negotiate at Rambouillet, 250,000 Bosnian dead, the aim of a Greater Serbia as the driving force in the Balkan wars), [69] the Srebrenica massacre reigns supreme for symbolic power. It is the symbol of Serb evil and Bosnian Muslim victimhood, and the justice of the Western dismantling of Yugoslavia and intervention there at many levels, including a bombing war and colonial occupations of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo.
But the link of this propaganda triumph to truth and justice is non-existent. The disconnection with truth is epitomized by the fact that the original estimate of 8,000, including 5,000 "missing"--who had left Srebrenica for Bosnian Muslim lines-was maintained even after it had been quickly established that several thousand had reached those lines and that several thousand more had perished in battle. This nice round number lives on today in the face of a failure to find the executed bodies and despite the absence of a single satellite photo showing executions, bodies, digging, or trucks transporting bodies for reburial. The media have carefully refrained from asking questions on this point, despite Albright's August 1995 promise that "We will be watching."
That Albright statement, and the photos she did display at the time, helped divert attention from the ongoing "Krajina massacre" of Serbs in Croatian Krajina, an ethnic cleansing process of great brutality and wider scope than that at Srebrenica, in which there was less real fighting than at Srebrenica, mainly attacks on and the killing and removal of defenseless civilians. At Srebrenica the Bosnian Serbs moved women and children to safety, and there is no evidence of any of them being murdered; [70] whereas in Krajina there was no such separation and an estimated 368 women and children were killed, along with many too old and infirm to flee. [71] One measure of the propaganda success of the "Srebrenica massacre" is that the possibility that the intense focus on the Srebrenica massacre was serving as a cover for the immediately following "Krajina massacre," supported by the United States, was outside the orbit of thought of the media. For the media, Srebrenica helped bring about Krajina, and the Serbs had it coming. [72]
The media have played an important role in making the Srebrenica massacre a propaganda triumph. As noted earlier, the media had become a co-belligerent by 1991, and all standards of objectivity disappeared in their subservience to the pro-Bosnian Muslim and anti-Serb agenda. Describing the reporting of Christine Amanpour and others on a battle around Goradze, U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel John Sray wrote back in October 1995 that these news reports "were devoid of any semblance of truth," that Americans were suffering from "a cornucopia of disinformation," that "America has not been so pathetically deceived" since the Vietnam War, and that popular perceptions of Bosnia "have been forged by a prolific propaganda machine..[that has] managed to manipulate illusions to further Muslim goals." [73]
That propaganda machine also conquered the liberals and much of the left in the United States, who swallowed the dominant narrative of the evil Serbs seeking hegemony, employing uniquely brutal and genocidal strategies, and upsetting a previous multi-cultural haven in Bosnia-run by Osama bin Laden's friend and ally Alija Izetbegovic, and with rectification brought belatedly by Clinton, Holbrooke and Albright working closely with Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia! The liberal/left war coalition needed to find the Serbs demons in order to justify imperial warfare, and they did so by accepting and internalizing a set of lies and myths that make up the dominant narrative. [74] This liberal/"cruise missile left" (CML) combo was important in helping develop the "humanitarian intervention" rationale for attacking Serbia on behalf of the Kosovo Liberation Army, and in fact preparing the ground for Bush's eventual basing of his own wars on the quest for "liberation." [75] The Srebrenica massacre helped make the liberals and CML true believers in the crusade in the Balkans and gave moral backup to their servicing the expanding imperial role of their country and its allies.
Former UN official Cedric Thornberry, writing in 1996, noted that "prominently in parts of the international liberal media" the position is "that the Serbs were the only villains," and back at UN headquarters in the spring of 1993 he was warned: "Take cover-the fix is on." [76] The fix was on, even if only tacit and built-in to the government-media-Tribunal relationship. It helped make the Srebrenica massacre the symbol of evil and, with the help of Tribunal "justice," and support of liberals and CML, provided a cover for the U.S.-NATO attack on and dismantling of Yugoslavia, colonial occupations in Bosnia and Kosovo, and justification for "humanitarian intervention" more broadly. What more could be asked of a propaganda system?
Notes:
*This paper is partly drawn from and cites chapters in a forthcoming book on the Srerbrenica massacre, Srebrenica: The Politics of War Crimes, written by George Bogdanich, Tim Fenton, Philip Hammond, Edward S. Herman, Michael Mandel, Jonathan Rooper, and George Szamuely. This book is referred to in the notes below as Politics of War Crimes. The author and his colleagues are indebted to Diana Johnstone, David Peterson, Vera Vratusa-Zunjic, Milan Bulajic, Milivoje Ivanisevic, Konstantin Kilibarda, and George Pumphrey for advice. Johnstone's Fools Crusade is a fine basic statement of an alternative perspective on the Balkan Wars; George Pumphrey's "Srebrenica: Three Years Later, And Still Searching," is a classic critique of the establishment Srebrenica massacre narrative and repeatedly hit the target with facts and analyses still not rebutted.
1. "Bosnia: 2 Officials Dismissed for Obstructing Srebrenica Inquiry," AP Report, New York Times, April 17, 2004; Marlise Simons, "Bosnian Serb Leader Taken Before War Crimes Tribunal," New York Times, April 8, 2000; UN, The Fall of Srebrenica (A/54/549), Report of the Secretary-General pursuant to General Assembly resolution 53/35, November 15, 1999, par. 506 (http://www.un.org/News/ossg/srebrenica.pdf )
2. See Ivo Pukanic, "US Role In Storm: Thrilled With Operation Flash, President Clinton Gave the Go Ahead to Operation Storm," Nacional (Zagreb), May 24, 2005.
3. Barton Gellman, "The Path to Crisis: How the United States and Its Allies Went to War," Washington Post, April 18, 1999
4. "Some surviving members of the Srebrenica delegation have stated that President Izetbegovic also told that he had learned that a NATO intervention in Bosnia and Herzegovina was possible, but could occur only if the Serbs were to break into Srebrenica, killing at least 5,000 of its people. President Izetbegovic has flatly denied making such a statement." The Fall of Srebrenica (A/54/549), Report of the Secretary-General pursuant to General Assembly resolution 53/35, November 15, 1999, par. 115, (http://www.haverford.edu/relg/sells/reports/UNsrebrenicareport.htm)
The UN report does not mention that there were nine others present at that meeting, and that one of them, Hakija Meholijic, former Srebrenica chief of police, has stated that eight of them (all those living) "can confirm" the Clinton suggestion. (Dani, June 22, 1998: http://cdsp.neu.edu/info/students/marko/dani/dani2.html)
5. Politics of War Crimes, Bogdanich, chapter 2, "Prelude to Capture," and Fenton, chapter 3, "Military Context." See also Tim Ripley, Operation Deliberate Force (Center for Defence and Security Studies: 1999), p. 145.
6. In his Balkan Odyssey, Lord David Owen stated that "By acquiescing in the Croatian government's seizure of Western Slavonia, the Contact Group had in effect given the green light to the Bosnian Serbs to attack Srebrenica and Zepa" (pp. 199-200). Owen was mistaken; the Contact Group was serving one side only, and the media's failure to report on and criticize the approved aggression made it possible to present the takeover of Srebrenica as a unique and unprovoked evil.
7. Veritas estimated that 1,205 civilians were killed in Operation Storm, including 358 women and 10 children. In the graves around Srebrenica through 1999, among the 1,895 bodies only one was identified as female. See "Croatian Serb Exodus Commemorated," Agence France Press, Aug. 4, 2004; also, Veritas at www.veritas.org.yu.
8. Ripley, Operation Deliberate Force, p. 192. See also footnotes 56 and 70.
9. The co-belligerency role was described by Peter Brock in "Dateline Yugoslavia: The Partisan Press," Foreign Policy, Winter 1993-94. A forthcoming book by Brock, on Media Cleansing: UNcovering Yugoslavia's Civil Wars, shows this partisanship in greater and effective detail. In his autobiography, U. S. Secretary of State James Baker says that he instructed his press secretary, Margaret Tutweiler to help Bosnian Foreign Minister Haris Silajzdic utilize the Western media to further the Bosnian Muslim cause, noting that he "had her talk to her contacts at the four television networks, the Washington Post and the New York Times." James A. Baker, The Politics of Diplomacy (Putnam: 1995), pp. 643-4.
10. As NATO PR spokesman Jamie Shea stated on May 16, 1999, when asked about NATO's vulnerability to Tribunal charges, he was not worried. The prosecutor, he said, will start her investigation "because we will allow her to." Further, "NATO countries are those that have provided the finance," and on the need to build a second chamber "so that prosecutions can be speeded up...we and the Tribunal are all one on this, we want to see war criminals brought to justice." http://www.nato.int/kosovo/press/p990516b.htm
See Michael Mandel, How America Gets Away With Murder (London: Pluto, 2004), chaps. 4-5; Edward Herman, "The Milosevic Trial, Part 1," Z Magazine, April 2002.
11. See Politics of War Crimes, chap. 7, Bogdanich, "UN Report on Srebrenica-A distorted Picture of Events."
12. Raymond K. Kent, "Contextualizing Hate: The Hague Tribunal, the Clinton Administration and the Serbs," Dialogue (Paris), v. 5, no. 20, December, 1996 (as posted to the Emperor's Clothes website, http://www.emperors-clothes.com/misc/kent.htm)
13. Carl Savitch, "Celebici," http://www.serbianna.com/columns/savich/047.shtml.
14. It would be hard to surpass the savagery of the Bosnian Muslims at the Celebici camp, described in ibid. See also, Diana Johnstone, Fools' Crusade (Pluto: 2002), pp. 71-72.
15. See the two works by Peter Brock, note 9 above; also Johnstone, Fools' Crusade, pp. 70-83.
16. For details and citations see Brock's article and book (note 9 above).
17. Bernard Kouchner, Les Guerriers de la Paix (Paris: Grasset, 2004), pp. 372-4.
18. Johnstone, Fools' Crusade, pp, 72-73; Thomas Deichmann, "Misinformation: TV Coverage of a Bosnian Camp," Covert Action Quarterly, Fall, 1998, pp. 52-55.
19. In a private communication dated November 21, 2003.
20. For a good summary of the case that these were "Self-Inflicted Atrocities," with further references, see the Senate Staff Report of January 16, 1997, on "Clinton Approved Iranian Arms Transfers Help Turn Bosnia Into Militant Islamic Base," http://www.senate.gov/%7erpc/releases/1997/iran.htm#top. See also Cees Wiebes, Intelligence and the War in Bosnia, 1992 - 1995, London: Lit Verlag, 2003, pp. 68-69: http://213.222.3.5/srebrenica/toc/p6_c02_s004_b01.html ).
21. John E. Sray, "Selling the Bosnian Myth to America: Buyer Beware," Foreign Military Studies, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, October, 1995,.
22. For exceptions to this rule, Leonard Doyle, "Muslims 'slaughter their own people.'" The Independent, Aug. 22, 1992; Hugh Manners, "Serbs 'Not Guilty' of Massacre," The Sunday Times [London], Oct. 1, 1995. David Binder was unable to get his own paper, the New York Times, to publish analyses of possible Muslim involvement in Sarajevo massacres; he had to publish these elsewhere. See David Binder, "The Balkan Tragedy: Anatomy of a Massacre," Foreign Policy, No. 97, Winter, 1994-1995; David Binder, "Bosnia's Bombers," The Nation, October 2, 1995
23. For a good summary, Srdja Trifkovic, "Une spectaculaire revision de chiffres," Balkan Infos (B.I.), February 2005.
24. George Kenney, "The Bosnian Calculation," New York Times Magazine, April 23, 1995.
25. See Trifkovic, supra note 23; also, http://grayfalcon.blogspot.com/2004/12/death-tolls-part-3.html.
26. See Edward Herman and David Peterson, "The NATO-Media Lie Machine: 'Genocide' in Kosovo," Z Magazine, May 2000: http://www.zmag.org/ZMag/articles/hermanmay2000.htm
27. Michael Ignatieff, "Counting Bodies in Kosovo," New York Times, November 21, 1999.
28. Politics of War Crimes, Bogdanovich, chap. 2, "Prelude to Capture."
29. Detailed evidence was presented to the UN on "War Crimes and Crimes of Genocide in Eastern Bosnia (Communes of Bratunac Skelani, and Srebrenica) Committed Against the Serbian Population from April 1982 to April 1993," by the Yugoslav Ambassador to the UN; see also Joan Phillips, "Victims and Villains in Bosnia's War," Southern Slav Journal, Spring-Summer 1992.
30. Bill Schiller, "Muslims' hero vows he'll fight to the last man," Toronto Star, January 31, 1994; John Pomfret, "Weapons, Cash and Chaos Lend Clout to Srebrenica's Tough Guy," Washington Post, February 16, 1994.
31. Carl Savich, "Srebrenica and Naser Oric: An Analysis of General Philippe Morillon's Testimony at the ICTY," http:/www.serbianna.co.
32. "No Evidence of Civilian Casualties in Operations By Bosnian Commander," BBC Monitoring International Reports, April 11, 2003; for a review of Oric's operations and a critical analysis of the ICTY decision, Carl Savitch, "Srebrenica: The Untold Story," http://www.serbianna.com/columns/savich/o51.html.
33. Politics of War Crimes, chaps 2-3. The UN estimated that there had been 3-4,000 Bosnian Muslim soldiers in Srebrenica just before its fall.
34. Ibid.
35. Politics of War Crimes, chap. 2.
36. "Conflict in the Balkans, 8000 Muslims Missing," AP, New York Times, Sept. 15, 1995.
37. One Red Cross official told a German interviewer that the Muslims who reached safety "cannot be removed from the list of missing….because we have not received their names," quoted in Pumphrey, "Srebrenica: Three Years Later, And Still Searching." See also, "Former Yugoslavia: Srebrenica: help for families still awaiting news," International Committee of the Red Cross, September 13, 1995 http://www.icrc.org/Web/Eng/siteeng0.nsf/iwpList74/7609D560283849CFC1256B6600595006
38. Ibid.
39. Johnstone, Fools' Crusade, p. 76.
40. This jump from a few bodies to 8,000 was recently illustrated in the treatment by Tim Judah and Daniel Sunter in the London Observer of the video of six killings of Bosnian Muslims, given heavy publicity in June 2005-it is the "smoking gun,…the final, incontrovertible proof of Serbia's part in the Srebrenica massacres in which more than 7,500 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were murdered." ("How the video that put Serbia in dock was brought to light," June 5).
.
41. ICTY, Amended Joinder Indictment, May 27, 2002, Par. 51: http://www.un.org/icty/indictment/english/nik-ai020527c.htm.; David Rohde, "The World Five Years Later: The Battle of Srebrenica Is Now Over The Truth," New York Times, July 9, 2000.
42. Steven Lee Meyers, "Making Sure War Crimes Aren't Forgotten," New York Times, September 22, 1997. In fact, one U.S. official acknowledged in late July 1995 that "satellites have produced nothing." Paul Quinn-Judge, "Reports of Atrocities Unconfirmed So Far: U.S. Aerial Surveillance Reveals Little," Boston Globe, July 27, 1995.
43. The web site of the International Commission on Missing Persons in the Former Yugoslavia acknowledges that the bodies "have been exhumed from various gravesites in northeast HiH," not just in the Srebrenica region; quoted in a 2003 Statement by ICMP Chief of Staff Concerning Persons Reported Missing from Srebrenica in July 1995, Gordon Bacon.
44. Politics of War Crimes, Rooper, chap. 4, "The Numbers Game."
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid.; also, Politics of War Crimes, Szamuely, chap. 5, "Witness Evidence."
47. Szamuely, "Witness Evidence."
48. Tim Butcher, "Serb Atrocities in Srebrenica are Unproven," The Daily Telegraph, July 24, 1995.
49. Politics of War Crimes, Rooper, chap. 4, "The Numbers Game."
50. This claim appears in the November 1995 indictments of Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic; it was recounted by the French policeman, Jean-Rene Ruez, and first surfaced at the ICTY in early July, 1996, during a seven-day publicity-stunt-type hearing into the charges against Karadzic and Mladic. As Associated Press reported Ruez's liver-eating testimony at the time (Jennifer Chao, July 3, 1996):
"Amid the feverish mass murder was throat-gagging sadism. Ruez cited an incident where a soldier forced a man to cut open his grandson's stomach and eat part of his liver. "He took the old man and put a knife in his hand ... and cut open the stomach of the little boy and then with the tip of his knife took out an organ from the inside of the child's stomach and he forced the man to eat that part,' Ruez told the court."
51. Politics of War Crimes, Mandel, chap. 6, "The ICTY Calls It 'Genocide'."
52. Ibid.
53. Chris Hedges, "Bosnian Troops Cite Gassing At Zepa," New York Times, July 27, 1995.
54. Jovic testified in the Milosevic trial on November 18, 2003-www.slobodan-milosevic.org- November 18, 2003.
55. Politics of War Crimes, Mandel, chap. 6; also, Michael Mandel, How America Gets Away With Murder (Pluto: 2004), pp. 157-8.
56. Carlos Martins Branco, a former UN military observer in Bosnia, contended that it was in Krajina rather than Srebrenica that one can identify a pre-meditated genocidal process "when the Croatian army implemented the mass murder of all Serbians found there. In this instance, the media maintained an absolute silence, despite the fact that this genocide occurred over a three month period. The objective of Srebrenica was ethnic cleansing and not genocide, unlike what happened in Krajina, in which, although there was not military action, the Croatian army decimated villages." "Was Srebrenica A Hoax? Eye-Witness Account of a Former UN Military Observer in Bosnia," http://globalresearch.ca/articles/BRA403A.html
57. Madeleine Albright, again before the Security Council (The Situation in the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (S/PV.3564), UN Security Council, August 10, 1995, 5.30 p.m., pp. 6-7):
58. Richard Holbrooke, on The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, Transcript #5300, August 24, 1995.
59. "U.N. Report: Bosnian Serbs Massacred Srebrenica Muslims," Washington Post, Aug. 12, 1995; John Pomfret, "Investigators Begin Exhuming Group of Mass Graves in Bosnia," Washington Post, July 8, 1996. Biggest "upheaval" is in "Softening Up The Enemy," Newsweek, Aug. 21, 1995.
60. See the evidence drawn from the Norwegian study of Bosnia casualties in: http://grayfalcon.blogspot.com/2004/12/death-tolls-part-3.html.
61. Slavisa Sabijic, "The Trade in Bodies in Bosnia-Herzegovina": http://www.serbianna.com/press/010.html; Joan Phillips, "Victims and Villains in Bosnia's War," Southern Slav Journal, Spring-Summer 1992.
62. "Yugoslav Forensic Expert Says No Proof About Srebrenica Mass Grave," BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, July 15, 1996.
63. Kosta Christitch, "Les veritable raisons d'une faillite," B.I., March 2005. As Diana Johnstone has said, "by endorsing every accusation against Serbs, and ignoring crimes against Serbs, the United States and its NATO allies have given carte blanche to violence against them. Ethnic Albanian children are growing up in the belief that nobody really blames them for hunting down elderly 'Skrinje' (the ethnic slur for Serbs) and beating them to death." "The OSCE Report: Things Told and Things Seen," ZNet Commentary, Dec. 26, 1999.
64. There have been a modest number of exceptions, mainly Muslim and Croat small fry, usually indicted at a time when the imbalance appeared exceptionally gross and some PR offset was needed. None of the leaders of Croatia or Bosnia were indicted, although it was alleged that indictments were near soon after Tudjman's and Izetbegovic's deaths, although the long delays were never explained. No leader or anybody else in NATO was ever indicted. For a good discussion of the deep bias, Mandel, How America Gets Away With Murder, Part II.
65. In his 1970 Islamic Declaration, never repudiated by him, Izetbegovic said: "There is neither peace nor coexistence between the 'Islamic religion' and non-Islamic social and political institutions…Having the right to govern its own world, Islam clearly excludes the right and possibility of putting a foreign ideology into practice on its territory." Quoted in Johnstone, Fools' Crusade, p. 58.
66. The 9/11 Commission Report, Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, Official Government Edition, pp. 58, 146-147, 155, 238-239.
67. Documentation Centre of Republic of Srpska, Report About Case Srebrenica (The First Part), (Banja Luka, Sept. 2002).
68. Gregory Copley, "US Official Implicated With Bosnian High Representative Ashdown in Attempting to Force Fabricated Report on Srebrenica," Defense & Foreign Affairs Daily, September 8, 2003: http://www.slobodan-milosevic.org/news/ssi09082003.htm; Nebojsa Malic, "Srebrenica Revisited: Reports, Confessions and the Elusive Truth," Antiwar.com, June 24, 2004: http://antiwar.com/malic/?articleid=2865
69. On the fallacies of the claims regarding Racak, Rambouillet and the Serb drive for a Greater Serbia as a reality and causal force, see Johnstone, Fools' Crusade, and Mandel, How America Gets Away with Murder.
70. Only one body found around Srebrenica in the graves explored through 1999 was identified as female.
71. See note 7 above. Tim Ripley says that "Thousands of people, those too old or infirm to flee,…remained behind. UN patrols soon found hundreds had been murdered by Croat soldiers and civilians. Almost every home had been looted." (p. 192).
72. Serb refugees in Srebrenica in 1997 are explained as "coming from neighborhoods elsewhere that Croat and Muslim armies emptied in retaliation for the Srebrenica atrocities and other such killings." Dana Priest, "U.S. Troops Extend a Hand To Refugees Tainted by War," Washington Post, Feb. 18, 1997.
73. Sray, "Selling the Bosnian Myth."
74. For an account and critique of these humanitarian interventionists, see Edward Herman and David Peterson, "Morality's Avenging Angels: The New Humanitarian Crusaders," in David Chandler, ed., Rethinking Human Rights (Palgrave: 2002). For a more extensive dismantling of their arguments, see Johnstone's Fools' Crusade and Mandel's How America Gets Away With Murder.
75. On the meaning and application of "cruise missile left" (my phrase), see my "The Cruise Missile Left: Aligning with Power," Z Magazine, November, 2002; and "The Cruise Missile Left (part 5): Samantha Power And The Genocide Gambit," ZNet Commentaries, May 17, 2004.
76. Cedric Thornberry, "Saving the War Crimes Tribunal; Bosnia Herzegovina," Foreign Policy, September 1996.
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© Copyright Edward S. Herman, Znet, 2005
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July 7, 2005
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"Srebrenica" has become the symbol of evil, and specifically Serb evil. It is commonly described as "a horror without parallel in the history of Europe since the Second World War" in which there was a cold-blooded execution "of at least 8,000 Muslim men and boys." [1] The events in question took place in or near the Bosnian town of Srebrenica between July 10 and 19, 1995, as the Bosnian Serb army (BSA) occupied that town and fought with and killed many Bosnian Muslims, unknown numbers dying in the fighting and by executions. There is no question but that there were executions, and that many Bosnian Muslim men died during the evacuation of Srebrenica and its aftermath. But even though only rarely discussed there is a major issue of how many were executed, as numerous bodies found in local grave sites were victims of fighting, and many Bosnian Muslim men who fled Srebrenica reached Bosnian Muslim territory safely. Some bodies were also those of the many Serbs killed in the forays by the Bosnian Muslims out of Srebrenica in the years before July 1995.
The Srebrenica massacre has played a special role in the politics of Western treatment of the restructuring of the former-Yugoslavia and in Western interventionism more broadly, and it is receiving renewed attention and memorialization at its tenth anniversary in July 2005. It is regularly cited as proof of Serb evil and genocidal intent and helped justify a focus on punishing the Serbs and Milosevic and NATO's 1999 war on Serbia. It has also provided important moral support for the further Western wars of vengeance, power projection, and "liberation," having shown that there is evil that the West can and must deal with forcibly.
However, there are three matters that should have raised serious questions about the massacre at the time and since, but didn't and haven't. One was that the massacre was extremely convenient to the political needs of the Clinton administration, the Bosnian Muslims, and the Croats (see Section 1 below). A second was that there had been (and were after Srebrenica) a series of claimed Serb atrocities, that were regularly brought forth at strategic moments when forcible intervention by the United States and NATO bloc was in the offing but needed some solid public relations support, but which were later shown to be fraudulent (Section 2). A third is that the evidence for a massacre, certainly of one in which 8,000 men and boys were executed, has always been problematic, to say the least (Sections 3 and 4).
1. Political Convenience
The events of Srebrenica and claims of a major massacre were extremely helpful to the Clinton administration, the Bosnian Muslim leadership, and Croatian authorities. Clinton was under political pressure in 1995 both from the media and from Bob Dole to take more forceful action in favor of the Bosnian Muslims, [2] and his administration was eager to find a justification for more aggressive policies. Clinton officials rushed to the Srebrenica scene to confirm and publicize the claims of a massacre, just as William Walker did later at Racak in January 1999. Walker's immediate report to Madeleine Albright caused her to exult that "spring has come early this year." [3] Srebrenica allowed the "fall to come early" for the Clinton administration in the summer of 1995.
Bosnian Muslim leaders had been struggling for several years to persuade the NATO powers to intervene more forcibly on their behalf, and there is strong evidence that they were prepared not only to lie but also to sacrifice their own citizens and soldiers to serve the end of inducing intervention (matters discussed further in Section 2). Bosnian Muslim officials have claimed that their leader, Alija Izetbegovic, told them that Clinton had advised him that U.S. intervention would only occur if the Serbs killed at least 5,000 at Srebrenica. [4] The abandonment of Srebrenica by a military force much larger than that of the attackers, and a retreat that made that larger force vulnerable and caused it to suffer heavy casualties in fighting and vengeance executions, helped produce numbers that would meet the Clinton criterion, by hook or by crook. There is other evidence that the retreat from Srebrenica was not based on any military necessity but was strategic, with the personnel losses incurred considered a necessary sacrifice for a larger purpose. [5]
Croatian authorities were also delighted with the claims of a Srebrenica massacre, as this deflected attention from their prior devastating ethnic cleansing of Serbs and Bosnian Muslims in Western Bosnia (almost entirely ignored by the Western media), [6] and it provided a cover for their already planned removal of several hundred thousand Serbs from the Krajina area in Croatia. This massive ethnic cleansing operation was carried out with U.S. approval and logistical support within a month of the Srebrenica events, and it may well have involved the killing of more Serb civilians than Bosnian Muslim civilians killed in the Srebrenica area in July: most of the Bosnian Muslim victims were fighters, not civilians, as the Bosnian Serbs bused the Srebrenica women and children to safety; the Croatians made no such provision and many women, children and old people were slaughtered in Krajina. [7] The ruthlessness of the Croats was impressive: "UN troops watched horrified as Croat soldiers dragged the bodies of dead Serbs along the road outside the UN compound and then pumped them full of rounds from the AK-47s. They then crushed the bullet-ridden bodies under the tracks of a tank." [8] But this was hardly noticed in the wake of the indignation and propaganda generated around Srebrenica with the aid of the mainstream media, whose co-belligerency role in the Balkan wars was already well-entrenched. [9]
The International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY) and UN also had an important role to play in the consolidation of the standard Srebrenica massacre narrative. From its inception the ICTY served as an arm of the NATO powers, who created it, funded it, served as its police arm and main information source, and expected and got responsive service from the organization. [10] The ICTY focused intensively on Srebrenica and provided important and nominally independent corroboration of the massacre claims along with citable "judicial" claims of planned "genocide." The UN is less thoroughly integrated into NATO-power demands, but it is highly responsive and in the Srebrenica case it came through just as the United States and its main allies desired. [11]
This political interest in the Srebrenica massacre hardly proves that the establishment narrative is wrong. It does, however, suggest the need for caution and an awareness of the possibility of falsification and inflated claims. That awareness has been entirely absent from mainstream treatment of Srebrenica.
2. The Serial Lying Before and After Srebrenica
At each stage in the dismantlement of Yugoslavia, its ethnic cleansing, and before and during the NATO war over the Kosovo province of Serbia in 1999, propaganda lies played a very important role in forwarding conflict and anti-Serb actions. There were lies of omission and lies that directly conveyed false impressions and information. An important form of lie of omission was the regular presentation of Serb misbehavior as unique to the Serbs, not also characteristic of the behavior of the Muslims and Croatians or of the conflict overall. In case after case the media would report on Serb attacks and atrocities, having neglected to report the prior assaults on Serbs in those same towns and making the Serb behavior seem like unprovoked acts of aggression and barbarity.
This was evident from the very start of the serious fighting in 1991 in the republic of Croatia. In their treatment of the Eastern Croatian city of Vukovar, for example, the media (and ICTY) focused exclusively on the federal Yugoslav army's capture of the town in the fall of 1991, completely ignoring the prior spring and summer's slaughter by Croatian National Guard troops and paramilitaries of hundreds of ethnic Serbs who had lived in the Vukovar area. According to Raymond K. Kent, "a substantial Serb population in the major Slavonian city of Vukovar disappeared without having fled, leaving traces of torture in the old Austrian the spring catacombs under the city along with evidence of murder and rape. The Western media, whose demonization of the Serbs was well underway, chose to overlook these events…" [12] This selective and misleading focus was standard media and ICTY practice.
Lies of omission were also clear in the attention given Bosnian Serb prison camps like Omarska, which the media focused on intensively and with indignation, when in fact the Muslims and Croats had very similar prison camps-at Celebici, Tarcin, Livno, Bradina, Odzak, and in the Zetra camp in Sarajevo, among other sites-[13] with roughly comparable numbers, facilities, and certainly no worse treatment of prisoners; [14] but in contrast with the Serbs, the Muslims and Croats hired competent PR firms and refused permission to inspect their facilities-and the already well-developed structure of bias made the media little interested in any but Serb camps.
Wild allegations of Auschwitz-like conditions in Serb "concentration camps" were spread by "journalists of attachment" who lapped up propaganda handouts by Muslim and Croat officials and PR hirlings. Roy Gutman, who won a Pulitzer prize jointly with John Burns for Bosnia reporting in 1993, depended heavily on Croat and Muslim officials and witnesses with suspect credentials and implausible claims, and he was a major source of inflated, one-sided, and false "concentration camp" propaganda. [15] John Burns' Pulitzer award was based on an extended interview with Boris Herak, a captured Bosnian Serb supplied to him and a Soros-funded film-maker by the Bosnian Muslims. Several years later Herak admitted that his extremely implausible confession had been coerced and that he had been forced to memorize many pages of lies. Two of his alleged victims also turned up alive in later years. In reporting on Herak, John Burns and the New York Times (and the Soros-funded film) suppressed the credibility-damaging fact that Herak had also accused former UNPROFOR commandant, Canadian General Lewis Mackenzie, of having raped young Muslim women at a Serb-run bordello. [16] These scandalous awards are symptomatic of the media bias that was already overwhelming in 1992 and 1993.
In a recent development of interest, on a visit to the dying Alija Izetbegovic, Bernard Kouchner asked him about the Bosnian Serb concentration camps, whereupon Izetbegovic, surprisingly, admitted that these claims had been inflated with the aim of getting NATO to bomb the Serbs. [17] This important confession has not been mentioned in the U.S. or British mainstream media.
One of the most important propaganda lies of the 1990s featured the Serb-run Trnopolje camp, visited by Britain's ITN reporters in August 1992. These reporters photographed the resident Fikret Alic, showing him emaciated and seemingly inside a concentration camp fence. In fact, Fikret Alic was in a transit camp, was a sick man (and was sick with tuberculosis long before reaching the camp), was not in any way representative of others in the camp, and was soon able to move to Sweden. Furthermore, the fence was around the photographers, not the man photographed. [18] But this hugely dishonest photo was featured everywhere in the West as proving a Serb-organized Auschwitz, was denounced by NATO high officials, and helped provide the moral basis for the creation of the ICTY and its clear focus on Serb evil.
In the case of the siege of Sarajevo, as with conflict around many "safe haven" towns, the Bosnian Muslim government engaged in a steady program of provoking the Serbs, blaming them for the ensuing response, lying about casualties, and trying-usually successfully-to place the blame on the Serbs. As Tim Fenton has said, "Massacre allegations by the Bosnian Muslims followed any reported conflict as night followed day: most notoriously Muslim Prime Minister Haris Silajdzic claimed the UN was responsible for the deaths of 70,000 in Bihac in early 1995, when in fact there had barely been any fighting and casualties were small." [19]
A remarkable feature of the Bosnian Muslim struggle to demonize the Serbs, in order to get NATO to come to Bosnian Muslim aid with bombs, was their willingness to kill their own people. This was most notable in the case of the ruthless bombing of Sarajevo civilians in three massacres: in 1992 (the "Breadline Massacre"), 1994 (the Markale "Market Massacre") and a "Second Market Massacre" in 1995. In the standard narrative the Serbs were responsible for these massacres, and it is admittedly not easy to believe that the Muslim leadership would kill their own for political advantage even if the evidence points strongly in that direction. But these massacres were all extremely well timed to influence imminent NATO and UN decisions to intervene more forcibly on behalf of the Bosnian Muslims. More important, numerous UN officials and senior Western military officials have claimed that the evidence is strong in all three cases that the actions were planned and executed by Bosnian Muslims. [20] U.S. Army officer John E. Sray, who was on the scene in Bosnia during these and other massacres and was head of the U.S. intelligence section in Sarajevo, even suggested that the incidents, and probable Bosnian Muslim official connivance in these atrocities, "deserve a thorough scrutiny by the International War Crimes Tribunal." [21] Needless to say no such scrutiny was forthcoming. In short, this view of the three massacres is not conspiracy theory, it is a conclusion based on serious and substantial evidence, but not even debated in the party-line dominated accounts of recent Balkan history. [22]
Both before and after Srebrenica lying about numbers killed was also standard practice, helpful in sustaining the dominant narrative. For Bosnia, in December 1992 the Bosnian Muslim government claimed 128,444 deaths of their forces and people, a number which grew to 200,000 by June 1993, rising to 250,000 in 1994. [23] These figures were swallowed without a qualm by Western politicians, media, and intellectual war-campaigners (e.g., David Rieff), with Clinton himself using the 250,000 figure in a speech in November 1995. Former State Department official George Kenney has long questioned these figures and marveled at media gullibility in accepting these claims without the least interest in verification. His own estimate ran between 25,000 and 60,000. [24] More recently, a study sponsored by the Norwegian government estimated the Bosnian war dead as 80,000, and one sponsored by the Hague Tribunal itself came up with a figure of 102,000 dead. [25] Neither of these studies has been reported on in the U.S. media, which had regularly offered its readers/listeners the inflated numbers.
A similar inflation process took place during the 78-day NATO bombing war in 1999, with high U.S. officials at various moments claiming 100,000, 250,000 and 500,000 Serb killings of Kosovo Albanians, along with the lavish use of the word "genocide" to describe Serb actions in Kosovo. [26] This figure gradually shrank to 11,000, and has remained there despite the fact that only some 4,000 bodies were found in one of the most intense forensic searches in history, and with unknown numbers of those bodies combatants, Serbs, and civilian victims of U.S. bombing. But the 11,000 must be valid because the NATO governments and ICTY say it is, and Michael Ignatieff assured readers of the New York Times that "whether those 11,334 bodies will be found depends on whether the Serb military and the police removed them." [27]
This record of systematic disinformation certainly does not disprove the truth of the standard narrative on the Srebrenica massacre. It does, however, suggest the need for a close look at the claims, which have proved so convenient, a close look that the mainstream has steadily refused to provide.
3. The Problematic Massacre Claims
By the time of the Srebrenica events of July 1995 the stage had been well set for making massacre claims effective. The serial lying had been largely unchallenged in the mainstream, the demonization process and good-versus-evil dichotomy had been well established, the ICTY and UN leadership were closely following the agenda of the United States and its NATO allies, and the media were on board as co-belligerents.
In this environment, context-stripping was easy. One element of context was the fact that the "safe area" concept was a fraud, as the safe areas were supposed to have been disarmed, but weren't, and with UN connivance. [28] They were therefore used by the Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica and other safe havens as launching pads for attacks on nearby Serb villages. In the three years prior to the massacre well over a thousand Serb civilians were killed by Muslim forces in scores of devastated nearby villages; [29] and well before July 1995 the Srebrenica Muslim commander Nasir Oric proudly showed Western reporters videos of some of his beheaded Serb victims and bragged about his killings. [30] Testifying before the Tribunal on February 12, 2004, UN military commander in Bosnia in 1992 and 1993, General Philippe Morillon, stated his conviction that the attack on Srebrenica was a "direct reaction" to the massacres of Serbs by Nasir Oric and his forces in 1992 and 1993, massacres with which Morillon was closely familiar. [31] Morillon's testimony was of no interest to the Western media, and when the ICTY finally got around to indicting Nasir Oric on March 28, 2003, very possibly to create the image of judicial balance, he was charged with killing only seven Serbs who were tortured and beaten to death after capture, and with the "wanton destruction" of nearby villages. Although he openly bragged to Western reporters of slaughtering Serb civilians, the ICTY reportedly "found no evidence that there were civilian casualties in the attacks on Serb villages in his theater of operations." [32]
When the Bosnian Serbs captured Srebrenica in July 1995, it was reported that the 28th regiment of the Bosnian Muslim Army (BMA), comprising several thousand men, had just fled the town. [33] The media failed to ask how such a large force could have been present in a disarmed "safe area." Having also succeeded in ignoring the prior abuses emanating from the safe area, this allowed them to follow a quickly established party line of a planned "genocide" and inexplicable brutality rather than the vengeance which the media allow as semi-exoneration of violence by "worthy" victims (e.g., Kosovo Albanians driving out and killing Serbs and Roma after the NATO takeover of Kosovo).
A second element of context was the possible political basis for the surrender of Srebrenica by a force in a good defensive position, outnumbering the attacking BSA by a 6-1 or 8-1 ratio, but retreating in advance of the assault, their leaders having been withdrawn previously by order of the Bosnian Muslim leadership. [34] This left the population unprotected, and made the BMA cadres vulnerable as they retreated in disarray toward Bosnian Muslim lines. Could this have been another self-sacrificing maneuver by the leadership to produce victims, perhaps designed to help meet the Clinton 5,000 target and induce more forcible NATO intervention? These questions never arose in the mainstream media.
The Srebrenica events had a number of features that made it possible to claim 8,000 "men and boys" executed. One was the confusion and uncertainty about the fate of the fleeing Bosnian Muslim forces, some reaching Tuzla safely, some killed in the fighting, and some captured. The 8,000 figure was first provided by the Red Cross, based on their crude estimate that the BSA had captured 3,000 men and that 5,000 were reported "missing." [35] It is well established that thousands of those "missing" had reached Tuzla or were killed in the fighting, [36] but in an amazing transformation displaying the eagerness to find the Bosnian Serbs evil and the Muslims victims, the "reaching safety/killed-in-action" basis of being missing was ignored and the missing were taken as executed! This misleading conclusion was helped along by the Red Cross's reference to the 5,000 as having "simply disappeared," and its failure to correct this politically biased usage and claim despite its own recognition that "several thousand" refugees had reached Central Bosnia. [37]
It was also helped along by the Bosnian Muslim leadership's refusal to disclose the names and numbers of those reaching safety, [38] but there was a remarkable readiness in the Western establishment not only to ignore those reaching safety, but also to disregard deaths in fighting and to take dead bodies as proving executions. The will to believe here was limitless: reporter David Rohde saw a bone sticking up in a grave site near Srebrenica, which he just knew by instinct was a remnant of an execution and serious evidence of a "massacre." [39] It was standard media practice to move from an asserted and unproven claim of thousands missing, or a report of the uncovering of bodies in a grave site, to the conclusion that the claim of 8,000 executed was thereby demonstrated. [40]
With 8,000 executed and thousands killed in the fighting there should have been huge grave sites and satellite evidence of both executions, burials, and any body removals. But the body searches in the Srebrenica vicinity were painfully disappointing, with only some two thousand bodies found in searches through 1999, including bodies killed in action and possibly Serb bodies, some pre-dating July 1995. The sparseness of these findings led to claims of body removal and reburial, but this was singularly unconvincing as the Bosnian Serbs were under intense military pressure after July 1995. This was the period when NATO was bombing Serb positions and Croat/Muslim armies were driving towards Banja Luka. The BSA was on the defensive and was extremely short of equipment and resources, including gasoline. To have mounted an operation of the magnitude required to exhume, transport and rebury thousands of corpses would have been far beyond the BSA's capacity at that time. Furthermore, in carrying out such a program they could hardly hope to escape observation from OSCE personnel, local civilians, and satellite observations.
On August 10, 1995, Madeleine Albright showed some satellite photos at a closed session of the Security Council, as part of a denunciation of the Bosnian Serbs, including one photo showing people--allegedly Bosnian Muslims near Srebrenica--assembled in a stadium, and one allegedly taken shortly thereafter showing a nearby field with "disturbed" soil. These photos have never been publicly released, but even if they are genuine they don't prove either executions or burials. Furthermore, although the ICTY speaks of "an organized and comprehensive effort" to hide bodies, and David Rohde claimed a "huge Serb effort to hide bodies," [41] neither Albright nor anyone else has ever shown a satellite photo of people actually being executed, buried, or dug up for reburial, or of trucks conveying thousands of bodies elsewhere. This evidence blank occurred despite Albright's warning the Serbs that "We will be watching," and with satellites at that time making at least eight passes per day and geostationary drones able to hover and take finely detailed pictures in position over Bosnia during the summer of 1995. [42] The mainstream media have found this failure to confirm of no interest.
There have been a great many bodies gathered at Tuzla, some 7,500 or more, many in poor condition or parts only, their collection and handling incompatible with professional forensic standards, their provenance unclear and link to the July 1995 events in Srebrenica unproven and often unlikely, [43] and the manner of their death usually uncertain. Interestingly, although the Serbs were regularly accused of trying to hide bodies, there has never been any suggestion that the Bosnian Muslims, long in charge of the body search, might shift bodies around and otherwise manipulate evidence, despite their substantial record of dissembling. A systematic attempt to use DNA to trace connections to Srebrenica is underway, but entails many problems, apart from that of the integrity of the material studied and process of investigation, and will not resolve the question of differentiating executions from deaths in combat. There are also lists of missing, but these lists are badly flawed, with duplications, individuals listed who had died before July 1995, who fled to avoid BSA service, or who registered to vote in 1997, and they include individuals who died in battle or reached safety or were captured and assumed a new existence elsewhere. [44]
The 8,000 figure is also incompatible with the basic arithmetic of Srebrenica numbers before and after July 1995. Displaced persons from Srebrenica-that is, massacre survivors-- registered with the World Health Organization and Bosnian government in early August 1995, totalled 35,632. Muslim men who reached Muslim lines "without their families being informed" totaled at least 2,000, and some 2,000 were killed in the fighting. That gives us 37,632 survivors plus the 2,000 combat deaths, which would require the prewar population of Srebrenica to have been 47,000 if 8,000 were executed, whereas the population before July was more like 37-40,000 (Tribunal judge Patricia Wald gave 37,000 as her estimate). The numbers don't add up. [45]
There were witnesses to killings at Srebrenica, or those who claimed to be witnesses. There were not many of these, and some had a political axe to grind or were otherwise not credible, [46] but several were believable and were probably telling of real and ugly events. But we are talking here of evidence of hundreds of executions, not 8,000 or anything close to it. The only direct participant witness claim that ran to a thousand was that of Drazen Erdemovic, an ethnic Croat associated with a mercenary group of killers whose members were paid 12 kilos of gold for their Bosnian service (according to Erdemovic himself) and ended up working in the Congo on behalf of French intelligence. His testimony was accepted despite its vagueness and inconsistencies, lack of corroboration, and his suffering from mental problems sufficient to disqualify him from trial--but not from testifying before the Tribunal, free of cross-examination. within two weeks of this disqualification from trial. This and other witness evidence suffered from serious abuse of the plea-bargaining process whereby witnesses could receive mitigating sentences if they cooperated sufficiently with the prosecution. [47]
It is also noteworthy how many relatively impartial observers in or near Srebrenica in July 1995 didn't see any evidence of massacres, including the members of the Dutch forces present in the "safe area" and people like Henry Wieland, the chief UN investigator into alleged human rights abuses, who could find no eyewitnesses to atrocities after five days of interviewing among the 20,000 Srebrenica survivors gathered at the Tuzla airport refugee camp. [48]
4. Anomalies
One anomaly connected with Srebrenica has been the stability of the figure of Bosnian Muslim victims-8,000 in July 1995 and 8,000 today, despite the crudity of the initial estimate, the evidence that many or most of the 5,000 "missing" reached Bosnian Muslim territory or were killed in the fighting, and the clear failure to produce supportive physical evidence despite a massive effort. In other cases, like the 9/11 fatality estimate, and even the Bosnian killings and Kosovo bombing war estimates, the original figures were radically scaled down as evidence of body counts made the earlier inflated numbers unsustainable. [49] But because of its key political role for the United States, Bosnian Muslims and Croats, and an almost religious ardour of belief in this claim, Sebrenica has been immune to evidence. From the beginning until today the number has been taken as a given, a higher truth, the questioning of which would show a lack of faith and very likely "apologetics" for the demon.
Another anomaly also showing the sacred, untouchable, and politicized character of the massacre in Western ideology has been the ready designation of the killings as a case of "genocide." The Tribunal played an important role here, with hard-to-match gullibility, unrestrained psychologizing, and incompetent legal reasoning, which the judges have applied to Serb-related cases only. On gullibility, one Tribunal judge accepted as fact the witness claim that Serb soldiers had forced an old Muslim man to eat the liver of his grandson; [50] and the judges repeatedly stated as an established fact that 7-8,000 Muslim men had been executed, while simultaneously acknowledging that the evidence only "suggested" that "a majority" of the 7-8,000 missing had not been killed in combat, which yields a number substantially lower than 7-8,000. [51]
The Tribunal dealt with the awkward problem of the genocide-intent Serbs bussing Bosnian Muslim women and children to safety by arguing that they did this for public relations reasons, but as Michael Mandel points out, failing to do some criminal act despite your desire is called "not committing a crime." [52] The Tribunal never asked why the genocidal Serbs failed to surround the town before its capture to prevent thousands of males from escaping to safety, or why the Bosnian Muslim soldiers were willing to leave their women and children as well as many wounded comrades to the mercies of the Serbs; [53] and they failed to confront the fact that 10,000 mainly Muslim residents of Zvornik sought refugee from the civil war in Serbia itself, as prosecution witness Borislav Jovic testified. [54]
Among the other idiocies in the Tribunal judges' argument, it was genocide if you killed many males in a group in order to reduce the future population of that group, thereby making it unviable in that area. Of course, you might want to kill them to prevent their killing you in the future, but the court knows Serb psychology better-that couldn't be the sole reason, there must have been a more sinister aim. The Tribunal reasoning holds forth the possibility that with only a little prosecution-friendly judicial psychologizing any case of killing enemy soldiers can be designated genocide.
There is also the problem of definition of the group. Were the Serbs trying to eliminate all the Muslims in Bosnia, or Muslims globally? Or just in Srebrenica? The judges suggested that pushing them out of the Srebrenica area was itself genocide, and they essentially equated genocide with ethnic cleansing. [55] It is notable that the ICTY has never called the Croat ethnic cleansing of 250,000 Krajina Serbs "genocide" although in that case many women and children were killed and the ethnic cleansing applied to a larger area and larger victim population than in Srebrenica. [56] (On August 10, 1995, Madeleine Albright cried out to the Security Council that "as many as 13,000 men, women and children were driven from their homes" in Srebrenica.) [57] Perhaps the ICTY had accepted Richard Holbrooke's comic designation of Krajina as a case of "involuntary expulsions." [58] The bias is blatant; the politicization of a purported judicial enterprise is extreme.
Media treatment of the Srebrenica and Krajina cases followed the same pattern and illustrates well how the media make some victims worthy and others unworthy in accord with a political agenda. With the Serbs their government's target, and their government actively aiding the massive Croat ethnic cleansing program in Krajina, the media gave huge and indignant treatment to the first, with invidious language, calls for action, and little context. With Krajina, attention was slight and passing, indignation was absent, detailed reporting on the condition of the victims was minimal, descriptive language was neutral, and there was context offered that made the events understandable. The contrast is so gross as to be droll: the attack on Srebrenica "chilling," "murderous," "savagery," "cold-blooded killing," "genocidal," "aggression,"and of course "ethnic cleansing." With Krajina, the media used no such strong language-even ethnic cleansing was too much for them. The Croat assault was merely a big "upheaval" that is "softening up the enemy," "a lightning offensive," explained away as a "response to Srebrenica" and a result of Serb leaders "overplaying their hand." The Washington Post even cited U.S. Ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith saying the "the Serb exodus was not 'ethnic cleansing'." [59] The paper does not allow a challenge to that judgment. In fact, however, the Croat operations in Krajina left Croatia as the most ethnically purified of all the former components of the former Yugoslavia, although the NATO occupation of Kosovo has allowed an Albanian ethnic cleansing that is rivalling that of Croatia in ethnic purification.
Another anomaly in the Srebrenica case is the insistence on bringing all the criminals (Serb) to trial and getting the willing executioners (Serb) to admit guilt as necessary for justice and essential for reconciliation. A problem is that justice cannot be one-sided or it ceases to be justice, and shows its true face as vengeance and a cover for other political ends. Ethnic cleansing in Bosnia was by no means one-sided, and deaths by nationality were not far off from population proportionality; [60] the Serbs claim and have documented thousands of deaths at the hands of the Bosnian Muslims and their imported Mujahedin cadres, and by the Croatians, and they have their own group examining and trying to identify bodies at an estimated 73 mass graves. [61] This victimization has hardly been noticed by the Western media or ICTY-the distinguished Yugoslav forensic expert Dr. Zoran Stankovic observed back in 1996 that "the fact that his team had previously identified the bodies of 1,000 Bosnian Serbs in the [Srebrenica] region had not interested prosecutor Richard Goldstone." [62] Instead, there is a steady refrain about the Serbs tendency to whine, whereas Bosnian Muslim complaints are taken as those of true victims and are never designated whining.
Rather than producing reconciliation the steady focus on Srebrenica victims and killers makes for more intense hatred and nationalism, just as the Kosovo war and its violence exacerbated hatred and tensions there and showed that Clinton's claimed objective of a tolerant multi-ethnic Kosovo was a fraud. In Kosovo, this one-sided propaganda and NATO control has unleashed serious and unremitting anti-Serb-along with anti-Roma, anti-Turk, anti-dissident-Albanian-- violence, helped along by the willingness of the NATO authorities to look the other way as their allies-the purported victims-take their revenge and pursue their long-standing aim of ethnic purification. [63] In Bosnia and Serbia the Serbs have been under steady attack, humiliated, and their leaders and military personnel punished, while the criminals among the Bosnian Muslims, Croats, and NATO powers (e.g., Clinton, Blair, Albright, Holbrooke) suffer no penalties [64] and may even be portrayed as dispensers of justice (Clinton et al.).
.
It is clear that the objectives of the retribution-pushers are not justice and reconciliation-they are to unify and strengthen the position of the Bosnian Muslims, to crush the Republica Srpska, and possibly even eliminate it as an independent entity in Bosnia, to keep Serbia disorganized, weak and dependent on the West, and to continue to put the U.S. and NATO attack and dismantlement of Yugoslavia in a favorable light. The last objective requires diverting attention from the Clinton/Bosnian Muslim role in giving Al Qaeda a foothold in the Balkans, Izetbegovic's close alliance with Osama bin Laden, his Islamic Declaration declaring hostility to a multi-ethnic state, [65] the importation of 4,000 Mujahaden to fight a holy war in Bosnia, with active Clinton administration aid, and the KLA-Al Qaeda connection.
These aspects of the siding with the Bosnian Muslims have always been awkward for the war propagandists, and they became more so after 9/11-the U.S. 9/11 Commission Report claims that two of the 19 hijackers, Nawaf al Hazmi and Khalid al Mihdhar, and a "mastermind" of the attack, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, "fought" in Bosnia, and that bin Laden had "service" offices in Zagreb and Sarajevo. [66] Despite the huge focus on 9/11 and Al Qaeda these links have not been featured in the mainstream media and have not influenced Bosnian proconsul Paddy Ashdown, who attended Izetbegovic's funeral and continues to push Bosnian Muslim interests. The Serbs, of course, were complaining about the brutality (and beheadings) of the Mujahaden in 1993, but the media and ICTY were not interested then and remain uninterested. Let's just talk about Srebrenica, the Bosnian Muslims as unique victims, and Clinton's and the West's generous if belated service to those victimized underdogs.
But didn't the Bosnian Serbs "confess" that they had murdered 8,000 civilians? This has been the take of the Western media, but again demonstrating their subservience to their leaders' political agenda. The Bosnian Serbs actually did put out a report on Srebrenica in September 2002, [67] but this report was rejected by Paddy Ashdown for failing to come up with the proper conclusions. He therefore forced a further report by firing a stream of Republica Srpska politicians and analysts, threatening the RS government, and eventually extracting a report prepared by people who would come to the officially approved conclusions. [68] This report, issued on June 11, 2004, was then greeted in the Western media as a meaningful validation of the official line-the refrain was, the Bosnian Serbs "admit" the massacre, which should finally settle any questions. Amusingly, even this coerced and imposed report didn't come near acknowledging 8,000 executions (it speaks of "several thousand" executions). What this episode "proves" is that the Western campaign to make the defeated Serbia grovel is not yet terminated, and the media's continuing gullibility and propaganda service.
Conclusion
The "Srebrenica massacre" is the greatest triumph of propaganda to emerge from the Balkan wars. Other claims and outright lies have played their role in the Balkan conflicts, but while some have retained a modest place in the propaganda repertoire despite challenge (Racak, the Markale massacre, the Serb refusal to negotiate at Rambouillet, 250,000 Bosnian dead, the aim of a Greater Serbia as the driving force in the Balkan wars), [69] the Srebrenica massacre reigns supreme for symbolic power. It is the symbol of Serb evil and Bosnian Muslim victimhood, and the justice of the Western dismantling of Yugoslavia and intervention there at many levels, including a bombing war and colonial occupations of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo.
But the link of this propaganda triumph to truth and justice is non-existent. The disconnection with truth is epitomized by the fact that the original estimate of 8,000, including 5,000 "missing"--who had left Srebrenica for Bosnian Muslim lines-was maintained even after it had been quickly established that several thousand had reached those lines and that several thousand more had perished in battle. This nice round number lives on today in the face of a failure to find the executed bodies and despite the absence of a single satellite photo showing executions, bodies, digging, or trucks transporting bodies for reburial. The media have carefully refrained from asking questions on this point, despite Albright's August 1995 promise that "We will be watching."
That Albright statement, and the photos she did display at the time, helped divert attention from the ongoing "Krajina massacre" of Serbs in Croatian Krajina, an ethnic cleansing process of great brutality and wider scope than that at Srebrenica, in which there was less real fighting than at Srebrenica, mainly attacks on and the killing and removal of defenseless civilians. At Srebrenica the Bosnian Serbs moved women and children to safety, and there is no evidence of any of them being murdered; [70] whereas in Krajina there was no such separation and an estimated 368 women and children were killed, along with many too old and infirm to flee. [71] One measure of the propaganda success of the "Srebrenica massacre" is that the possibility that the intense focus on the Srebrenica massacre was serving as a cover for the immediately following "Krajina massacre," supported by the United States, was outside the orbit of thought of the media. For the media, Srebrenica helped bring about Krajina, and the Serbs had it coming. [72]
The media have played an important role in making the Srebrenica massacre a propaganda triumph. As noted earlier, the media had become a co-belligerent by 1991, and all standards of objectivity disappeared in their subservience to the pro-Bosnian Muslim and anti-Serb agenda. Describing the reporting of Christine Amanpour and others on a battle around Goradze, U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel John Sray wrote back in October 1995 that these news reports "were devoid of any semblance of truth," that Americans were suffering from "a cornucopia of disinformation," that "America has not been so pathetically deceived" since the Vietnam War, and that popular perceptions of Bosnia "have been forged by a prolific propaganda machine..[that has] managed to manipulate illusions to further Muslim goals." [73]
That propaganda machine also conquered the liberals and much of the left in the United States, who swallowed the dominant narrative of the evil Serbs seeking hegemony, employing uniquely brutal and genocidal strategies, and upsetting a previous multi-cultural haven in Bosnia-run by Osama bin Laden's friend and ally Alija Izetbegovic, and with rectification brought belatedly by Clinton, Holbrooke and Albright working closely with Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia! The liberal/left war coalition needed to find the Serbs demons in order to justify imperial warfare, and they did so by accepting and internalizing a set of lies and myths that make up the dominant narrative. [74] This liberal/"cruise missile left" (CML) combo was important in helping develop the "humanitarian intervention" rationale for attacking Serbia on behalf of the Kosovo Liberation Army, and in fact preparing the ground for Bush's eventual basing of his own wars on the quest for "liberation." [75] The Srebrenica massacre helped make the liberals and CML true believers in the crusade in the Balkans and gave moral backup to their servicing the expanding imperial role of their country and its allies.
Former UN official Cedric Thornberry, writing in 1996, noted that "prominently in parts of the international liberal media" the position is "that the Serbs were the only villains," and back at UN headquarters in the spring of 1993 he was warned: "Take cover-the fix is on." [76] The fix was on, even if only tacit and built-in to the government-media-Tribunal relationship. It helped make the Srebrenica massacre the symbol of evil and, with the help of Tribunal "justice," and support of liberals and CML, provided a cover for the U.S.-NATO attack on and dismantling of Yugoslavia, colonial occupations in Bosnia and Kosovo, and justification for "humanitarian intervention" more broadly. What more could be asked of a propaganda system?
Notes:
*This paper is partly drawn from and cites chapters in a forthcoming book on the Srerbrenica massacre, Srebrenica: The Politics of War Crimes, written by George Bogdanich, Tim Fenton, Philip Hammond, Edward S. Herman, Michael Mandel, Jonathan Rooper, and George Szamuely. This book is referred to in the notes below as Politics of War Crimes. The author and his colleagues are indebted to Diana Johnstone, David Peterson, Vera Vratusa-Zunjic, Milan Bulajic, Milivoje Ivanisevic, Konstantin Kilibarda, and George Pumphrey for advice. Johnstone's Fools Crusade is a fine basic statement of an alternative perspective on the Balkan Wars; George Pumphrey's "Srebrenica: Three Years Later, And Still Searching," is a classic critique of the establishment Srebrenica massacre narrative and repeatedly hit the target with facts and analyses still not rebutted.
1. "Bosnia: 2 Officials Dismissed for Obstructing Srebrenica Inquiry," AP Report, New York Times, April 17, 2004; Marlise Simons, "Bosnian Serb Leader Taken Before War Crimes Tribunal," New York Times, April 8, 2000; UN, The Fall of Srebrenica (A/54/549), Report of the Secretary-General pursuant to General Assembly resolution 53/35, November 15, 1999, par. 506 (http://www.un.org/News/ossg/srebrenica.pdf )
2. See Ivo Pukanic, "US Role In Storm: Thrilled With Operation Flash, President Clinton Gave the Go Ahead to Operation Storm," Nacional (Zagreb), May 24, 2005.
3. Barton Gellman, "The Path to Crisis: How the United States and Its Allies Went to War," Washington Post, April 18, 1999
4. "Some surviving members of the Srebrenica delegation have stated that President Izetbegovic also told that he had learned that a NATO intervention in Bosnia and Herzegovina was possible, but could occur only if the Serbs were to break into Srebrenica, killing at least 5,000 of its people. President Izetbegovic has flatly denied making such a statement." The Fall of Srebrenica (A/54/549), Report of the Secretary-General pursuant to General Assembly resolution 53/35, November 15, 1999, par. 115, (http://www.haverford.edu/relg/sells/reports/UNsrebrenicareport.htm)
The UN report does not mention that there were nine others present at that meeting, and that one of them, Hakija Meholijic, former Srebrenica chief of police, has stated that eight of them (all those living) "can confirm" the Clinton suggestion. (Dani, June 22, 1998: http://cdsp.neu.edu/info/students/marko/dani/dani2.html)
5. Politics of War Crimes, Bogdanich, chapter 2, "Prelude to Capture," and Fenton, chapter 3, "Military Context." See also Tim Ripley, Operation Deliberate Force (Center for Defence and Security Studies: 1999), p. 145.
6. In his Balkan Odyssey, Lord David Owen stated that "By acquiescing in the Croatian government's seizure of Western Slavonia, the Contact Group had in effect given the green light to the Bosnian Serbs to attack Srebrenica and Zepa" (pp. 199-200). Owen was mistaken; the Contact Group was serving one side only, and the media's failure to report on and criticize the approved aggression made it possible to present the takeover of Srebrenica as a unique and unprovoked evil.
7. Veritas estimated that 1,205 civilians were killed in Operation Storm, including 358 women and 10 children. In the graves around Srebrenica through 1999, among the 1,895 bodies only one was identified as female. See "Croatian Serb Exodus Commemorated," Agence France Press, Aug. 4, 2004; also, Veritas at www.veritas.org.yu.
8. Ripley, Operation Deliberate Force, p. 192. See also footnotes 56 and 70.
9. The co-belligerency role was described by Peter Brock in "Dateline Yugoslavia: The Partisan Press," Foreign Policy, Winter 1993-94. A forthcoming book by Brock, on Media Cleansing: UNcovering Yugoslavia's Civil Wars, shows this partisanship in greater and effective detail. In his autobiography, U. S. Secretary of State James Baker says that he instructed his press secretary, Margaret Tutweiler to help Bosnian Foreign Minister Haris Silajzdic utilize the Western media to further the Bosnian Muslim cause, noting that he "had her talk to her contacts at the four television networks, the Washington Post and the New York Times." James A. Baker, The Politics of Diplomacy (Putnam: 1995), pp. 643-4.
10. As NATO PR spokesman Jamie Shea stated on May 16, 1999, when asked about NATO's vulnerability to Tribunal charges, he was not worried. The prosecutor, he said, will start her investigation "because we will allow her to." Further, "NATO countries are those that have provided the finance," and on the need to build a second chamber "so that prosecutions can be speeded up...we and the Tribunal are all one on this, we want to see war criminals brought to justice." http://www.nato.int/kosovo/press/p990516b.htm
See Michael Mandel, How America Gets Away With Murder (London: Pluto, 2004), chaps. 4-5; Edward Herman, "The Milosevic Trial, Part 1," Z Magazine, April 2002.
11. See Politics of War Crimes, chap. 7, Bogdanich, "UN Report on Srebrenica-A distorted Picture of Events."
12. Raymond K. Kent, "Contextualizing Hate: The Hague Tribunal, the Clinton Administration and the Serbs," Dialogue (Paris), v. 5, no. 20, December, 1996 (as posted to the Emperor's Clothes website, http://www.emperors-clothes.com/misc/kent.htm)
13. Carl Savitch, "Celebici," http://www.serbianna.com/columns/savich/047.shtml.
14. It would be hard to surpass the savagery of the Bosnian Muslims at the Celebici camp, described in ibid. See also, Diana Johnstone, Fools' Crusade (Pluto: 2002), pp. 71-72.
15. See the two works by Peter Brock, note 9 above; also Johnstone, Fools' Crusade, pp. 70-83.
16. For details and citations see Brock's article and book (note 9 above).
17. Bernard Kouchner, Les Guerriers de la Paix (Paris: Grasset, 2004), pp. 372-4.
18. Johnstone, Fools' Crusade, pp, 72-73; Thomas Deichmann, "Misinformation: TV Coverage of a Bosnian Camp," Covert Action Quarterly, Fall, 1998, pp. 52-55.
19. In a private communication dated November 21, 2003.
20. For a good summary of the case that these were "Self-Inflicted Atrocities," with further references, see the Senate Staff Report of January 16, 1997, on "Clinton Approved Iranian Arms Transfers Help Turn Bosnia Into Militant Islamic Base," http://www.senate.gov/%7erpc/releases/1997/iran.htm#top. See also Cees Wiebes, Intelligence and the War in Bosnia, 1992 - 1995, London: Lit Verlag, 2003, pp. 68-69: http://213.222.3.5/srebrenica/toc/p6_c02_s004_b01.html ).
21. John E. Sray, "Selling the Bosnian Myth to America: Buyer Beware," Foreign Military Studies, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, October, 1995,
22. For exceptions to this rule, Leonard Doyle, "Muslims 'slaughter their own people.'" The Independent, Aug. 22, 1992; Hugh Manners, "Serbs 'Not Guilty' of Massacre," The Sunday Times [London], Oct. 1, 1995. David Binder was unable to get his own paper, the New York Times, to publish analyses of possible Muslim involvement in Sarajevo massacres; he had to publish these elsewhere. See David Binder, "The Balkan Tragedy: Anatomy of a Massacre," Foreign Policy, No. 97, Winter, 1994-1995; David Binder, "Bosnia's Bombers," The Nation, October 2, 1995
23. For a good summary, Srdja Trifkovic, "Une spectaculaire revision de chiffres," Balkan Infos (B.I.), February 2005.
24. George Kenney, "The Bosnian Calculation," New York Times Magazine, April 23, 1995.
25. See Trifkovic, supra note 23; also, http://grayfalcon.blogspot.com/2004/12/death-tolls-part-3.html.
26. See Edward Herman and David Peterson, "The NATO-Media Lie Machine: 'Genocide' in Kosovo," Z Magazine, May 2000: http://www.zmag.org/ZMag/articles/hermanmay2000.htm
27. Michael Ignatieff, "Counting Bodies in Kosovo," New York Times, November 21, 1999.
28. Politics of War Crimes, Bogdanovich, chap. 2, "Prelude to Capture."
29. Detailed evidence was presented to the UN on "War Crimes and Crimes of Genocide in Eastern Bosnia (Communes of Bratunac Skelani, and Srebrenica) Committed Against the Serbian Population from April 1982 to April 1993," by the Yugoslav Ambassador to the UN; see also Joan Phillips, "Victims and Villains in Bosnia's War," Southern Slav Journal, Spring-Summer 1992.
30. Bill Schiller, "Muslims' hero vows he'll fight to the last man," Toronto Star, January 31, 1994; John Pomfret, "Weapons, Cash and Chaos Lend Clout to Srebrenica's Tough Guy," Washington Post, February 16, 1994.
31. Carl Savich, "Srebrenica and Naser Oric: An Analysis of General Philippe Morillon's Testimony at the ICTY," http:/www.serbianna.co.
32. "No Evidence of Civilian Casualties in Operations By Bosnian Commander," BBC Monitoring International Reports, April 11, 2003; for a review of Oric's operations and a critical analysis of the ICTY decision, Carl Savitch, "Srebrenica: The Untold Story," http://www.serbianna.com/columns/savich/o51.html.
33. Politics of War Crimes, chaps 2-3. The UN estimated that there had been 3-4,000 Bosnian Muslim soldiers in Srebrenica just before its fall.
34. Ibid.
35. Politics of War Crimes, chap. 2.
36. "Conflict in the Balkans, 8000 Muslims Missing," AP, New York Times, Sept. 15, 1995.
37. One Red Cross official told a German interviewer that the Muslims who reached safety "cannot be removed from the list of missing….because we have not received their names," quoted in Pumphrey, "Srebrenica: Three Years Later, And Still Searching." See also, "Former Yugoslavia: Srebrenica: help for families still awaiting news," International Committee of the Red Cross, September 13, 1995 http://www.icrc.org/Web/Eng/siteeng0.nsf/iwpList74/7609D560283849CFC1256B6600595006
38. Ibid.
39. Johnstone, Fools' Crusade, p. 76.
40. This jump from a few bodies to 8,000 was recently illustrated in the treatment by Tim Judah and Daniel Sunter in the London Observer of the video of six killings of Bosnian Muslims, given heavy publicity in June 2005-it is the "smoking gun,…the final, incontrovertible proof of Serbia's part in the Srebrenica massacres in which more than 7,500 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were murdered." ("How the video that put Serbia in dock was brought to light," June 5).
.
41. ICTY, Amended Joinder Indictment, May 27, 2002, Par. 51: http://www.un.org/icty/indictment/english/nik-ai020527c.htm.; David Rohde, "The World Five Years Later: The Battle of Srebrenica Is Now Over The Truth," New York Times, July 9, 2000.
42. Steven Lee Meyers, "Making Sure War Crimes Aren't Forgotten," New York Times, September 22, 1997. In fact, one U.S. official acknowledged in late July 1995 that "satellites have produced nothing." Paul Quinn-Judge, "Reports of Atrocities Unconfirmed So Far: U.S. Aerial Surveillance Reveals Little," Boston Globe, July 27, 1995.
43. The web site of the International Commission on Missing Persons in the Former Yugoslavia acknowledges that the bodies "have been exhumed from various gravesites in northeast HiH," not just in the Srebrenica region; quoted in a 2003 Statement by ICMP Chief of Staff Concerning Persons Reported Missing from Srebrenica in July 1995, Gordon Bacon.
44. Politics of War Crimes, Rooper, chap. 4, "The Numbers Game."
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid.; also, Politics of War Crimes, Szamuely, chap. 5, "Witness Evidence."
47. Szamuely, "Witness Evidence."
48. Tim Butcher, "Serb Atrocities in Srebrenica are Unproven," The Daily Telegraph, July 24, 1995.
49. Politics of War Crimes, Rooper, chap. 4, "The Numbers Game."
50. This claim appears in the November 1995 indictments of Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic; it was recounted by the French policeman, Jean-Rene Ruez, and first surfaced at the ICTY in early July, 1996, during a seven-day publicity-stunt-type hearing into the charges against Karadzic and Mladic. As Associated Press reported Ruez's liver-eating testimony at the time (Jennifer Chao, July 3, 1996):
"Amid the feverish mass murder was throat-gagging sadism. Ruez cited an incident where a soldier forced a man to cut open his grandson's stomach and eat part of his liver. "He took the old man and put a knife in his hand ... and cut open the stomach of the little boy and then with the tip of his knife took out an organ from the inside of the child's stomach and he forced the man to eat that part,' Ruez told the court."
51. Politics of War Crimes, Mandel, chap. 6, "The ICTY Calls It 'Genocide'."
52. Ibid.
53. Chris Hedges, "Bosnian Troops Cite Gassing At Zepa," New York Times, July 27, 1995.
54. Jovic testified in the Milosevic trial on November 18, 2003-www.slobodan-milosevic.org- November 18, 2003.
55. Politics of War Crimes, Mandel, chap. 6; also, Michael Mandel, How America Gets Away With Murder (Pluto: 2004), pp. 157-8.
56. Carlos Martins Branco, a former UN military observer in Bosnia, contended that it was in Krajina rather than Srebrenica that one can identify a pre-meditated genocidal process "when the Croatian army implemented the mass murder of all Serbians found there. In this instance, the media maintained an absolute silence, despite the fact that this genocide occurred over a three month period. The objective of Srebrenica was ethnic cleansing and not genocide, unlike what happened in Krajina, in which, although there was not military action, the Croatian army decimated villages." "Was Srebrenica A Hoax? Eye-Witness Account of a Former UN Military Observer in Bosnia," http://globalresearch.ca/articles/BRA403A.html
57. Madeleine Albright, again before the Security Council (The Situation in the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (S/PV.3564), UN Security Council, August 10, 1995, 5.30 p.m., pp. 6-7):
58. Richard Holbrooke, on The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, Transcript #5300, August 24, 1995.
59. "U.N. Report: Bosnian Serbs Massacred Srebrenica Muslims," Washington Post, Aug. 12, 1995; John Pomfret, "Investigators Begin Exhuming Group of Mass Graves in Bosnia," Washington Post, July 8, 1996. Biggest "upheaval" is in "Softening Up The Enemy," Newsweek, Aug. 21, 1995.
60. See the evidence drawn from the Norwegian study of Bosnia casualties in: http://grayfalcon.blogspot.com/2004/12/death-tolls-part-3.html.
61. Slavisa Sabijic, "The Trade in Bodies in Bosnia-Herzegovina": http://www.serbianna.com/press/010.html; Joan Phillips, "Victims and Villains in Bosnia's War," Southern Slav Journal, Spring-Summer 1992.
62. "Yugoslav Forensic Expert Says No Proof About Srebrenica Mass Grave," BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, July 15, 1996.
63. Kosta Christitch, "Les veritable raisons d'une faillite," B.I., March 2005. As Diana Johnstone has said, "by endorsing every accusation against Serbs, and ignoring crimes against Serbs, the United States and its NATO allies have given carte blanche to violence against them. Ethnic Albanian children are growing up in the belief that nobody really blames them for hunting down elderly 'Skrinje' (the ethnic slur for Serbs) and beating them to death." "The OSCE Report: Things Told and Things Seen," ZNet Commentary, Dec. 26, 1999.
64. There have been a modest number of exceptions, mainly Muslim and Croat small fry, usually indicted at a time when the imbalance appeared exceptionally gross and some PR offset was needed. None of the leaders of Croatia or Bosnia were indicted, although it was alleged that indictments were near soon after Tudjman's and Izetbegovic's deaths, although the long delays were never explained. No leader or anybody else in NATO was ever indicted. For a good discussion of the deep bias, Mandel, How America Gets Away With Murder, Part II.
65. In his 1970 Islamic Declaration, never repudiated by him, Izetbegovic said: "There is neither peace nor coexistence between the 'Islamic religion' and non-Islamic social and political institutions…Having the right to govern its own world, Islam clearly excludes the right and possibility of putting a foreign ideology into practice on its territory." Quoted in Johnstone, Fools' Crusade, p. 58.
66. The 9/11 Commission Report, Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, Official Government Edition, pp. 58, 146-147, 155, 238-239.
67. Documentation Centre of Republic of Srpska, Report About Case Srebrenica (The First Part), (Banja Luka, Sept. 2002).
68. Gregory Copley, "US Official Implicated With Bosnian High Representative Ashdown in Attempting to Force Fabricated Report on Srebrenica," Defense & Foreign Affairs Daily, September 8, 2003: http://www.slobodan-milosevic.org/news/ssi09082003.htm; Nebojsa Malic, "Srebrenica Revisited: Reports, Confessions and the Elusive Truth," Antiwar.com, June 24, 2004: http://antiwar.com/malic/?articleid=2865
69. On the fallacies of the claims regarding Racak, Rambouillet and the Serb drive for a Greater Serbia as a reality and causal force, see Johnstone, Fools' Crusade, and Mandel, How America Gets Away with Murder.
70. Only one body found around Srebrenica in the graves explored through 1999 was identified as female.
71. See note 7 above. Tim Ripley says that "Thousands of people, those too old or infirm to flee,…remained behind. UN patrols soon found hundreds had been murdered by Croat soldiers and civilians. Almost every home had been looted." (p. 192).
72. Serb refugees in Srebrenica in 1997 are explained as "coming from neighborhoods elsewhere that Croat and Muslim armies emptied in retaliation for the Srebrenica atrocities and other such killings." Dana Priest, "U.S. Troops Extend a Hand To Refugees Tainted by War," Washington Post, Feb. 18, 1997.
73. Sray, "Selling the Bosnian Myth."
74. For an account and critique of these humanitarian interventionists, see Edward Herman and David Peterson, "Morality's Avenging Angels: The New Humanitarian Crusaders," in David Chandler, ed., Rethinking Human Rights (Palgrave: 2002). For a more extensive dismantling of their arguments, see Johnstone's Fools' Crusade and Mandel's How America Gets Away With Murder.
75. On the meaning and application of "cruise missile left" (my phrase), see my "The Cruise Missile Left: Aligning with Power," Z Magazine, November, 2002; and "The Cruise Missile Left (part 5): Samantha Power And The Genocide Gambit," ZNet Commentaries, May 17, 2004.
76. Cedric Thornberry, "Saving the War Crimes Tribunal; Bosnia Herzegovina," Foreign Policy, September 1996.
.
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The Torture Garden
From: Rasputin/GNN
Mon, 25 Jul 2005 14:36:33 / Government
………………..
In 1994 a CIA training manual was declassified: “Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual—1983”. It was released in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.
It taught Central American regimes how to torture dissidents.
A darkly comic disclaimer (rather like the oft-seen “the views expressed in this film do not necessarily reflect…”) begins the Manuel:
“The use of force, mental torture, threats, insults or exposure to inhumane treatment of any kind as an aid to interrogation is prohibited by law, both international and domestic; it is neither authorized nor condoned.”
Another section states:
“While we do not stress the use of coercive techniques, we do want to make you aware of them and the proper way to use them.”
One technique cites: “experiments conducted on volunteers who allowed themselves to be suspended in water while wearing blackout masks. They were allowed to hear only their own breathing and faint sounds from the pipes. “The stress and anxiety become almost unbearable for most subjects,” the manual says.
Former CIA agent John Stockwell writes in The Secret Wars of the CIA, June 1986:
“We had the `public safety program’ going throughout Central and Latin America for 26 years, in which we taught them to break up subversion by interrogating people. Interrogation, including torture, the way the CIA taught it.
They developed a wire. They gave them crank generators, with `U.S. AID’ written on the side, so the people even knew where these things came from. They developed a wire that was strong enough to carry the current and fine enough to fit between the teeth, so you could put one wire between the teeth and the other one in or around the genitals and you could crank and submit the individual to the greatest amount of pain, supposedly, that the human body can register.”
“Public Safety Program”. Tell me that’s not the most mind-fuckingly Orwellion-sounding department you’ve heard in your entire life.
The head of the Office of Public safety in Montevideo, 1969-70 was Jim Jones’ good friend, Dan Mitrione.
“I can teach you about torture, but sooner or later you’ll have to get involved. You’ll have to lay on your hands and try it yourselves.” – Dan Mitrione
“The precise pain, in the precise place, in the precise amount, for the desired effect.” — Dan Mitrione
“As subjects for the first testing they took beggars … from the outskirts of Montevideo, as well as a woman apparently from the frontier area with Brazil. There was no interrogation, only a demonstration of the effects of different voltages on the different parts of the human body…. The four of them died.” — Manuel Hevia Cosculluela, former CIA agent and associate of Mitrione
“All they [the guinea pigs, beggars from off the streets] could do was lie there and scream. And when they would collapse, they would bring in doctors and shoot them up with vitamin B and rest them up for the next class. And when they would die, they would mutilate the bodies and throw them out on the streets, to terrify the population so they would be afraid of the police and the government.”
Torture becomes a “normal, frequent and habitual occurrence” including “electric shocks to the genitals, electric needles under the fingernails, burning with cigarettes, the slow compression of the testicles, daily use of psychological torture”
According to a report based on US State Department documents obtained by Senator James Abourezk in 1973”
“pregnant women were imprisoned with their very young infants and subjected to the same treatment” —
“Dan Mitrione was [himself] kidnapped in 1970 by the Tupamoros. They do not torture him. They demand the release of some 150 prisoners in exchange for him. With the determined backing of the Nixon administration, the Uruguayan government refuses. … Mitrione’s dead body is found on the back seat of a stolen car.”
“Mr. Mitrione’s devoted service to the cause of peaceful progress in an orderly world will remain as an example for free men everywhere.” — Ron Ziegler, White House spokesperson
After Mitrione’s death, Frank Sinatra and Jerry Lewis performed at a benefit for his wife.
The art of torture is becoming more and more sophisticated.
SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNOLOGICAL OPTIONS ASSESSMENT
STOA
6 January 1998
...describes various drugs being used in interrogation: (e.g. Aminazin, apomorphine, curare, suxamethonium, haloperidol, insulin, sulfazin, triftazin, tizertsin, sanapax, etaperazin, phrenolong, trisedil, mazjeptil, seduksin and motiden-depo)
Other torture hardware includes electroshock weapons, electrically heated hot tables, whips, iron-chain filled rubber hoses, cat-o’-nine-tails, clubs, canes, specially designed torture devices and interrogation rooms using white noise (Sweeney 1991a and 1991b) and stroboscopic UV light.
Helen Bamber, Director of the British Medical Foundation for the Treatment of the Victims of Torture, has described electroshock batons at ‘the most universal modern tool of the torturers’. (Gregory, 1995) Recent surveys of torture victims have confirmed that after systematic beating, electroshock is one of the most common factors (London, 1993);
As usual, the United States is at the fore of producing and exporting this technology around the world.
…………….
Some charming terms for torture in Chinese:
In China there are dian ji (electrical assault), gui bian (down on knees whipping), jieju (chains and fetters), shouzhikao (finger cuffs), zhiliaio (rod fetters), menbanliao (shackleboard) (Figs. 39, 40, & 45.) and so on, (Human Rights Watch, 1992; Amnesty International, 1992b).
These techniques involve what is called, in the torture bizz, hardware. There is also software, now popularized by images from Guantanamo Bay.
Some people think software is more effective.
It is arguable whether it is more humane.
Can you use the word “humane” in describing torture of any kind?
Some think “software”, in addition to being more effective, is actually more brutal.
Because it endeavors to break the human spirit.
“What has evolved from this quest for ever more powerful techniques to break the human spirit is a classical form of operant conditioning designed to teach the target psyche debilitation, dependence and dread (Biderman & Zimmer, 1965).
Jose Barrera, a former member of the CIA-trained Battalion 316 in Honduras:
“The first thing we would say is that we know your mother, your younger brother. And better you cooperate, because if you don’t, we’re going to bring them in and rape them and torture them and kill them,” Barrera said.
The CIA’s manuel explains:
“The threat to inflict pain may trigger fears more damaging than the immediate sensation of pain. In fact, most people underestimate their capacity to withstand pain.”
“The pain which is being inflicted upon him from outside himself may actually intensify his will to resist. On the other hand, pain which he feels he is inflicting upon himself is more likely to sap his resistance.
“For example, if he is required to maintain rigid positions such as standing at attention or sitting on a stool for long periods of time, the immediate source of pain is not the ‘questioner’ but the subject himself.” ” After a period of time the subject is likely to exhaust his internal motivational strength.”
Inducing dread: The manual says a breakdown in the prisoner’s will can be induced by strong fear, but cautions that if this dread is unduly prolonged, “the subject may sink into a defensive apathy from which it is hard to arouse him.”
It adds: “It is advisable to have a psychologist available whenever regression is induced.”
What makes a man capable of torturing his fellow man?
A woman who testified internationally after the declassification of the CIA’s torture manuel stated:
“The most horrible thing about it was in fact, that the people doing the torture were not raving psychopaths.’ She couldn’t break mental contact with them the way you could if they were psychopath. They were very ordinary people….”
Could you torture someone?
I remember a line from The Corporation where Chomsky says: “Any one of us…could be a gas chamber attendent or a Saint”.
I think a lot of it has to do with hierarchy, especially the pronounced military form. Take the Japanese during WWII, who committed probably the most barbarous torture the world has ever seen. Their command structures were extremely rigid. Obedience was enforced with vicious punishment for tiny infractions, or even no infractions at all, as Iris Chang outlines in her book The Rape of Nanking.
Honore Daumier’s famous cartoon of one soldier whipping another, each inferior in rank to the next, is a good repesentation, I think. The rage one feels towards one’s “superior” is sublimated onto one’s “inferior”.
Throw in some race/class/national “superiority” complexes, some “divine will” and some “greater good” and you’re good to go.
So where does it all end?
I think the light at the end of the tunnel, unfortunately.
“Some interrogation techniques are intended to kill. For example the use of a heavy wooden roller to crush the limbs of detainees in Kashmir. This practice results in the release of myoglobin, heme and other related muscle proteins and toxins (Rhabdomyolysis) which leads to acute renal failure. In the absence of kidney dialysis, the results are fatal.127 Other regimes have resorted to delayed poisoning of their dissidents who die after their release from incarceration, e.g. by the use of Thallium which was deployed against Kurds in Iraq and most recently (according to the ongoing Truth Commission), by South Africa’s Apartheid regime.128
Cockburn:
“Start torturing and it’s easy to get carried away. Torture destroys the tortured and corrupts the society that sanctions it. Just like the FBI after September 11, the CIA in 1968 got frustrated by its inability to break suspected leaders of Vietnam’s National Liberation Front by its usual methods of interrogation and torture. So the agency began more advanced experiments, in one of which it anesthetized three prisoners, opened their skulls and planted electrodes in their brains. They were revived, put in a room and given knives. The CIA psychologists then activated the electrodes, hoping the prisoners would attack one another. They didn’t. The electrodes were removed, the prisoners shot and their bodies burned. You can read about it in Gordon Thomas’ book “Journey into Madness.”
That passage is from an article called “Torture: as American as Apple Pie”.
It reminds me of a Negativland song: “The Bottom Line”.
Over the sounds of a man screaming under brutal electro-shock torture, a soothing voice opines:
“The threat of death just isn’t enough to control people, so the ante has been raised. How? With torture. And high-tech torture at that. As the technocrats say, “it’s functional”.
That’s why everyone who’s intelligent and un-anaesthatized enough to care, has sort of put their life on hold…underneath all the defensive layers of denial…we’re all afraid of being tortured…homosexually gang raped or having it happen to someone we love…we’re all self-consciously living a lie…we’re all happy Joes…
How did it happen here in the land of the free and the home of the brave?...I mean in some banana Republic…some distance past like the Spanish Inquisition or WWI: the Nazis and the fanatical Japs…but not us Ameicans…GI Joe, Frank Sinatra, Jerry Lewis, Autumn in New York, baseball, college football, Glenn Miller…somehow it doesn’t fit with torture…but it does of course it does…because it was always a facade the image of America…and now the facade has finally failed….like a burned out clutch, or a decayed tooth that breaks open…they both smell bad, strange, ominous…
Mon, 25 Jul 2005 14:36:33 / Government
………………..
In 1994 a CIA training manual was declassified: “Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual—1983”. It was released in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.
It taught Central American regimes how to torture dissidents.
A darkly comic disclaimer (rather like the oft-seen “the views expressed in this film do not necessarily reflect…”) begins the Manuel:
“The use of force, mental torture, threats, insults or exposure to inhumane treatment of any kind as an aid to interrogation is prohibited by law, both international and domestic; it is neither authorized nor condoned.”
Another section states:
“While we do not stress the use of coercive techniques, we do want to make you aware of them and the proper way to use them.”
One technique cites: “experiments conducted on volunteers who allowed themselves to be suspended in water while wearing blackout masks. They were allowed to hear only their own breathing and faint sounds from the pipes. “The stress and anxiety become almost unbearable for most subjects,” the manual says.
Former CIA agent John Stockwell writes in The Secret Wars of the CIA, June 1986:
“We had the `public safety program’ going throughout Central and Latin America for 26 years, in which we taught them to break up subversion by interrogating people. Interrogation, including torture, the way the CIA taught it.
They developed a wire. They gave them crank generators, with `U.S. AID’ written on the side, so the people even knew where these things came from. They developed a wire that was strong enough to carry the current and fine enough to fit between the teeth, so you could put one wire between the teeth and the other one in or around the genitals and you could crank and submit the individual to the greatest amount of pain, supposedly, that the human body can register.”
“Public Safety Program”. Tell me that’s not the most mind-fuckingly Orwellion-sounding department you’ve heard in your entire life.
The head of the Office of Public safety in Montevideo, 1969-70 was Jim Jones’ good friend, Dan Mitrione.
“I can teach you about torture, but sooner or later you’ll have to get involved. You’ll have to lay on your hands and try it yourselves.” – Dan Mitrione
“The precise pain, in the precise place, in the precise amount, for the desired effect.” — Dan Mitrione
“As subjects for the first testing they took beggars … from the outskirts of Montevideo, as well as a woman apparently from the frontier area with Brazil. There was no interrogation, only a demonstration of the effects of different voltages on the different parts of the human body…. The four of them died.” — Manuel Hevia Cosculluela, former CIA agent and associate of Mitrione
“All they [the guinea pigs, beggars from off the streets] could do was lie there and scream. And when they would collapse, they would bring in doctors and shoot them up with vitamin B and rest them up for the next class. And when they would die, they would mutilate the bodies and throw them out on the streets, to terrify the population so they would be afraid of the police and the government.”
Torture becomes a “normal, frequent and habitual occurrence” including “electric shocks to the genitals, electric needles under the fingernails, burning with cigarettes, the slow compression of the testicles, daily use of psychological torture”
According to a report based on US State Department documents obtained by Senator James Abourezk in 1973”
“pregnant women were imprisoned with their very young infants and subjected to the same treatment” —
“Dan Mitrione was [himself] kidnapped in 1970 by the Tupamoros. They do not torture him. They demand the release of some 150 prisoners in exchange for him. With the determined backing of the Nixon administration, the Uruguayan government refuses. … Mitrione’s dead body is found on the back seat of a stolen car.”
“Mr. Mitrione’s devoted service to the cause of peaceful progress in an orderly world will remain as an example for free men everywhere.” — Ron Ziegler, White House spokesperson
After Mitrione’s death, Frank Sinatra and Jerry Lewis performed at a benefit for his wife.
The art of torture is becoming more and more sophisticated.
SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNOLOGICAL OPTIONS ASSESSMENT
STOA
6 January 1998
...describes various drugs being used in interrogation: (e.g. Aminazin, apomorphine, curare, suxamethonium, haloperidol, insulin, sulfazin, triftazin, tizertsin, sanapax, etaperazin, phrenolong, trisedil, mazjeptil, seduksin and motiden-depo)
Other torture hardware includes electroshock weapons, electrically heated hot tables, whips, iron-chain filled rubber hoses, cat-o’-nine-tails, clubs, canes, specially designed torture devices and interrogation rooms using white noise (Sweeney 1991a and 1991b) and stroboscopic UV light.
Helen Bamber, Director of the British Medical Foundation for the Treatment of the Victims of Torture, has described electroshock batons at ‘the most universal modern tool of the torturers’. (Gregory, 1995) Recent surveys of torture victims have confirmed that after systematic beating, electroshock is one of the most common factors (London, 1993);
As usual, the United States is at the fore of producing and exporting this technology around the world.
…………….
Some charming terms for torture in Chinese:
In China there are dian ji (electrical assault), gui bian (down on knees whipping), jieju (chains and fetters), shouzhikao (finger cuffs), zhiliaio (rod fetters), menbanliao (shackleboard) (Figs. 39, 40, & 45.) and so on, (Human Rights Watch, 1992; Amnesty International, 1992b).
These techniques involve what is called, in the torture bizz, hardware. There is also software, now popularized by images from Guantanamo Bay.
Some people think software is more effective.
It is arguable whether it is more humane.
Can you use the word “humane” in describing torture of any kind?
Some think “software”, in addition to being more effective, is actually more brutal.
Because it endeavors to break the human spirit.
“What has evolved from this quest for ever more powerful techniques to break the human spirit is a classical form of operant conditioning designed to teach the target psyche debilitation, dependence and dread (Biderman & Zimmer, 1965).
Jose Barrera, a former member of the CIA-trained Battalion 316 in Honduras:
“The first thing we would say is that we know your mother, your younger brother. And better you cooperate, because if you don’t, we’re going to bring them in and rape them and torture them and kill them,” Barrera said.
The CIA’s manuel explains:
“The threat to inflict pain may trigger fears more damaging than the immediate sensation of pain. In fact, most people underestimate their capacity to withstand pain.”
“The pain which is being inflicted upon him from outside himself may actually intensify his will to resist. On the other hand, pain which he feels he is inflicting upon himself is more likely to sap his resistance.
“For example, if he is required to maintain rigid positions such as standing at attention or sitting on a stool for long periods of time, the immediate source of pain is not the ‘questioner’ but the subject himself.” ” After a period of time the subject is likely to exhaust his internal motivational strength.”
Inducing dread: The manual says a breakdown in the prisoner’s will can be induced by strong fear, but cautions that if this dread is unduly prolonged, “the subject may sink into a defensive apathy from which it is hard to arouse him.”
It adds: “It is advisable to have a psychologist available whenever regression is induced.”
What makes a man capable of torturing his fellow man?
A woman who testified internationally after the declassification of the CIA’s torture manuel stated:
“The most horrible thing about it was in fact, that the people doing the torture were not raving psychopaths.’ She couldn’t break mental contact with them the way you could if they were psychopath. They were very ordinary people….”
Could you torture someone?
I remember a line from The Corporation where Chomsky says: “Any one of us…could be a gas chamber attendent or a Saint”.
I think a lot of it has to do with hierarchy, especially the pronounced military form. Take the Japanese during WWII, who committed probably the most barbarous torture the world has ever seen. Their command structures were extremely rigid. Obedience was enforced with vicious punishment for tiny infractions, or even no infractions at all, as Iris Chang outlines in her book The Rape of Nanking.
Honore Daumier’s famous cartoon of one soldier whipping another, each inferior in rank to the next, is a good repesentation, I think. The rage one feels towards one’s “superior” is sublimated onto one’s “inferior”.
Throw in some race/class/national “superiority” complexes, some “divine will” and some “greater good” and you’re good to go.
So where does it all end?
I think the light at the end of the tunnel, unfortunately.
“Some interrogation techniques are intended to kill. For example the use of a heavy wooden roller to crush the limbs of detainees in Kashmir. This practice results in the release of myoglobin, heme and other related muscle proteins and toxins (Rhabdomyolysis) which leads to acute renal failure. In the absence of kidney dialysis, the results are fatal.127 Other regimes have resorted to delayed poisoning of their dissidents who die after their release from incarceration, e.g. by the use of Thallium which was deployed against Kurds in Iraq and most recently (according to the ongoing Truth Commission), by South Africa’s Apartheid regime.128
Cockburn:
“Start torturing and it’s easy to get carried away. Torture destroys the tortured and corrupts the society that sanctions it. Just like the FBI after September 11, the CIA in 1968 got frustrated by its inability to break suspected leaders of Vietnam’s National Liberation Front by its usual methods of interrogation and torture. So the agency began more advanced experiments, in one of which it anesthetized three prisoners, opened their skulls and planted electrodes in their brains. They were revived, put in a room and given knives. The CIA psychologists then activated the electrodes, hoping the prisoners would attack one another. They didn’t. The electrodes were removed, the prisoners shot and their bodies burned. You can read about it in Gordon Thomas’ book “Journey into Madness.”
That passage is from an article called “Torture: as American as Apple Pie”.
It reminds me of a Negativland song: “The Bottom Line”.
Over the sounds of a man screaming under brutal electro-shock torture, a soothing voice opines:
“The threat of death just isn’t enough to control people, so the ante has been raised. How? With torture. And high-tech torture at that. As the technocrats say, “it’s functional”.
That’s why everyone who’s intelligent and un-anaesthatized enough to care, has sort of put their life on hold…underneath all the defensive layers of denial…we’re all afraid of being tortured…homosexually gang raped or having it happen to someone we love…we’re all self-consciously living a lie…we’re all happy Joes…
How did it happen here in the land of the free and the home of the brave?...I mean in some banana Republic…some distance past like the Spanish Inquisition or WWI: the Nazis and the fanatical Japs…but not us Ameicans…GI Joe, Frank Sinatra, Jerry Lewis, Autumn in New York, baseball, college football, Glenn Miller…somehow it doesn’t fit with torture…but it does of course it does…because it was always a facade the image of America…and now the facade has finally failed….like a burned out clutch, or a decayed tooth that breaks open…they both smell bad, strange, ominous…
"A Dream Only American Power Can Inspire"
The Project for the New American Century’s vision of global military dominance
by Dru Oja Jay
Critics of US foreign policy no longer need to make the argument that the US is trying to undermine the UN and international law, while making active use of global military dominance; the Project for the New American Century is doing it for them. Founded in 1997 on the premise that "too few political leaders today are making the case for [American] global leadership", the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) is a right wing, Washington-based think tank committed to "promoting the idea that American leadership is good both for America and for the world."
What makes the Project different from other think tanks and foundations is the amount of direct influence it wields. Signatories of the organization's 1997 "statement of principles" include high-profile positions within government--current Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush (George W's brother)--as well as prominent neoconservatives Francis Fukuyama, Steve Forbes, Norman Podhoretz, Dan Quayle and William Kristol.
What does increased "American leadership" consist of? The Project has made the case for its comprehensive vision of global governance through a series of open letters to the president and high-profile op/ed articles, which are available at newamericancentury.org.
Most prominently, PNAC explicitly insists that the UN and international law do not govern, but are simply means by which specific action can gain legitimacy. But they also contend that such an approach to the UN is already widely agreed upon by members the American elite. In an Washington Post op/ed, Robert Kagan argued that "to most American multilateralists the U.N. Security Council is not the final authority. It's like a blue-ribbon commission. If it makes the right recommendation, it strengthens your case. If not, you can always ignore it."
Indeed, PNAC is in this case not much different from Bill Clinton, who declared that the US would act "multilaterally when possible but unilaterally when necessary." PNAC and the Bush Administration differ only to the extent to which they have shed any veneer of multilateral intention.
But PNAC's vision of "global American leadership" goes beyond the mere denial of limits on American power. In almost every article or publication that bears its name, PNAC insists on massive increases in defense spending. "Rebuilding America's Defenses," a 75 page report authored by PNAC members in 2000, calls for raising US defense spending to "a minimum level of 3.5 to 3.8 percent of gross domestic product, adding $15 billion to $20 billion to total defense spending annually." The year following September 11, the Bush Administration has shown increased enthusiasm for PNAC's plan, calling for a $48 billion defense budget increase in 2002.
“Advanced forms of biological warfare that can ‘target’ specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool.” —PNAC
At the time the report was written, the US already outspent Russia--the closest military power--by a factor of six to one. And yet in PNAC's reports and articles, hugely increased defense spending is never presented as anything less than crucial. Their reasoning is twofold. First, if the US allows its global military dominance to slip, then powers such as Russia, China or North Korea will grab more regional power, leading to a decline in US dominance worldwide. The extra $20-$40 billion per year in defense spending will go to developing technologies to keep the US military able to "fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars", proactively overshadowing regional sovereignty. Secondly, they insist, American power is necessary for maintaining US interests globally. Not surprisingly, US interests are equated with the well being of all other countries on the planet.
At issue is what various PNAC members describe as the "American Peace," or, in a direct reference to the Roman Empire, the Pax Americana . The authors of "Rebuilding America's Defenses" write, "at current budget levels, a [military] modernization or transformation strategy is in danger of becoming a 'no-war' strategy. While the American peace might not come to a catastrophic end, it would quickly begin to unravel; the result would be much the same in time." In other words, if the US does not maintain the clear global dominance it continues to possess in the post-Cold War years, then the international order will collapse back into regional spheres of influence; India, Europe, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and China will attempt to carve out their own regional niches, unless American military power is there to stop them.
For PNAC, rebuilding US military power involves at least three main objectives. First, an "increase in active-duty strength from 1.4 million to 1.6 million," which would enable the US to better fight and win the aforementioned "multiple, simultaneous theater wars" in addition to performing "'constabulary' duties associated with shaping the security environment in critical regions."
Second, missile defense is central to continued American dominance. The notion of "mutually assured destruction", whereby countries that possess nuclear weapons can "assure" that anyone who attacks them will suffer a nuclear annihilation, is unacceptable. To PNAC, this places an unacceptable limit on American power. "Without [ballistic missile defenses], weak states operating small arsenals of crude ballistic missiles, armed with basic nuclear warheads or other weapons of mass destruction, will be a in a strong position to deter the United States from using conventional force, no matter the technological or other advantages we may enjoy." The US would be left unable to attack who it chooses, when it chooses.
Third, PNAC advocates funding research into assessing the threat and potential uses of new technology ("cyber warfare"), and the development of new weapons. In the case of nuclear weapons, the influence of PNAC on the current Administration's policy is clear. In addition to keeping an arsenal of hundreds of nuclear warheads (to ensure the destruction of anyone who attacks the US directly), new "tiny nukes" have recently been developed for the stated purpose of targeting deep underground bunkers, though their use in deterring smaller attacks and adding another facet to US military might are also well documented. The plans for these developments were clearly laid out in PNAC's 2000 report, and given the significance of using nuclear weapons as anything other than a deterrent, the degree of influence PNAC wields is all too clear.
PNAC does not stop at nukes on the battlefield, however; biological weapons are also newly in-bounds when American power is at stake. The authors of "Rebuilding" write: "advanced forms of biological warfare that can 'target' specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool." The simultaneous, casual willingness to develop biological weapons, target civilians based on their race, and use terror to maintain global US dominance could be dismissed as the rantings of deranged right-wing wackos, were it not for PNAC's clear power and influence.
But PNAC is adamant that it does not merely advocate US power for its own sake. The writings of William Kristol, Robert Kagan, Gary Schmitt, and the official PNAC reports make constant reference to "moral clarity", American principles, democracy, and freedom. The American "commitments" and "global responsibilities" are invoked repeatedly in reference to US military activities overseas.
PNAC's justification for American dominance seems to be based on the use of overwhelming American power for moral ends that are in the interest of everyone's security and economic well-being. PNAC advocates using US power "to spread democratic principles and deter and defeat the opponents of our civilization." A "safer future" can be built if the US "promotes democracy in the Arab world as an antidote to radical Islam". "This is not a crusade. It's a foreign policy of enlightened self-interest."
Since Sept 11, this vision of foreign policy has gained a new legitimacy. Last January, Robert Kagan wrote, "must we wait for another attack, perhaps involving these awful weapons, before we use our power and influence to compel change?" As in Afghanistan and Iraq, it is no longer enough to "spread democratic principles"; they must now be instilled, if not imposed directly through military force.
The definition of democracy employed in US foreign policy, however, is a particular one. Democracy is desirable to the extent that it is synonymous with a free market economy open to foreign (read: US) investment. Democratic states that are dependent on the US for much their economic well being are, in turn, also much more likely to side with the US on international issues.
In this respect, PNAC's ascent does not represent a shift from the foreign policies of Reagan or Clinton. As they write in their "Statement of Principles", "such a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity may not be fashionable today. But it is necessary if the United States is to build on the successes of this past century and to ensure our security and our greatness in the next."
The "enlightened self interest" approach to foreign policy does not, then, preclude terrorizing people who choose a path other than Washington-approved liberal democracy, or supporting dictators who are willing to align with US interests. Iraqis, for example, still remember seeing Donald Rumsfeld shake hands with Saddam Hussein when the US mended relations with Iraq in time to supply Hussein with weapons and funding for the duration of the Iran-Iraq war.
More recently, early PNAC member Paul Wolfowitz expressed dismay that Turkey's Military did not play enough of a "leadership role" when the overwhelming popular opposition to hosting US troops resulted in a Parliamentary vote against allowing access to the US.
PNAC signatory Eliot Abrams , who pled guilty to two counts perjury after he lied to Congress about the Iran-Contra affair but was pardoned by George Bush Sr. and hired as "Senior Director for Democracy, Human Rights, and International Operations" by George Bush Jr. is another example of selectively democratic tendencies that PNAC inherits from the Reagan years. Abrams was central to the US training and funding of right-wing paramilitary groups in El Salvador, to which a UN truth commission attributed the majority of 22,000 atrocities that took place in the 1980s. According to reports published by the Observer , Abrams was involved in the attempted coup in Venezuela last year (another example of a democracy not being in line with US interests). No doubt, the members of PNAC are sincere when they speak of democracy being in US interests, but it is presumably more so when the country is bombed and occupied by American troops.
Despite frequent references to "rule of law", PNAC is singularly opposed to any limits placed on US power, including international law. In this, however, they are hardly unique; no one in the US elite is interested in considering the possibility of US generals or presidents being charged with war crimes, or the possibility of paying reparations to countries bombed and forgotten. PNAC itself emphasizes the underlying consensus about US global dominance; where they differ is in the extreme to which they are eager to take such dominance, and in their will to declare this eagerness willingly.
Further reading:
NewAmericanCentury.org, the official web site.
Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century, the September, 2000 report authored by PNAC
PNAC.info, "An effort to investigate, analyze, and expose the Project for the New American Century, and its plan for a 'unipolar' world."
StopSleeping: Project for the New American Century, an overview with links to thoroughly researched information on PNAC members.
by Dru Oja Jay
Critics of US foreign policy no longer need to make the argument that the US is trying to undermine the UN and international law, while making active use of global military dominance; the Project for the New American Century is doing it for them. Founded in 1997 on the premise that "too few political leaders today are making the case for [American] global leadership", the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) is a right wing, Washington-based think tank committed to "promoting the idea that American leadership is good both for America and for the world."
What makes the Project different from other think tanks and foundations is the amount of direct influence it wields. Signatories of the organization's 1997 "statement of principles" include high-profile positions within government--current Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush (George W's brother)--as well as prominent neoconservatives Francis Fukuyama, Steve Forbes, Norman Podhoretz, Dan Quayle and William Kristol.
What does increased "American leadership" consist of? The Project has made the case for its comprehensive vision of global governance through a series of open letters to the president and high-profile op/ed articles, which are available at newamericancentury.org.
Most prominently, PNAC explicitly insists that the UN and international law do not govern, but are simply means by which specific action can gain legitimacy. But they also contend that such an approach to the UN is already widely agreed upon by members the American elite. In an Washington Post op/ed, Robert Kagan argued that "to most American multilateralists the U.N. Security Council is not the final authority. It's like a blue-ribbon commission. If it makes the right recommendation, it strengthens your case. If not, you can always ignore it."
Indeed, PNAC is in this case not much different from Bill Clinton, who declared that the US would act "multilaterally when possible but unilaterally when necessary." PNAC and the Bush Administration differ only to the extent to which they have shed any veneer of multilateral intention.
But PNAC's vision of "global American leadership" goes beyond the mere denial of limits on American power. In almost every article or publication that bears its name, PNAC insists on massive increases in defense spending. "Rebuilding America's Defenses," a 75 page report authored by PNAC members in 2000, calls for raising US defense spending to "a minimum level of 3.5 to 3.8 percent of gross domestic product, adding $15 billion to $20 billion to total defense spending annually." The year following September 11, the Bush Administration has shown increased enthusiasm for PNAC's plan, calling for a $48 billion defense budget increase in 2002.
“Advanced forms of biological warfare that can ‘target’ specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool.” —PNAC
At the time the report was written, the US already outspent Russia--the closest military power--by a factor of six to one. And yet in PNAC's reports and articles, hugely increased defense spending is never presented as anything less than crucial. Their reasoning is twofold. First, if the US allows its global military dominance to slip, then powers such as Russia, China or North Korea will grab more regional power, leading to a decline in US dominance worldwide. The extra $20-$40 billion per year in defense spending will go to developing technologies to keep the US military able to "fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars", proactively overshadowing regional sovereignty. Secondly, they insist, American power is necessary for maintaining US interests globally. Not surprisingly, US interests are equated with the well being of all other countries on the planet.
At issue is what various PNAC members describe as the "American Peace," or, in a direct reference to the Roman Empire, the Pax Americana . The authors of "Rebuilding America's Defenses" write, "at current budget levels, a [military] modernization or transformation strategy is in danger of becoming a 'no-war' strategy. While the American peace might not come to a catastrophic end, it would quickly begin to unravel; the result would be much the same in time." In other words, if the US does not maintain the clear global dominance it continues to possess in the post-Cold War years, then the international order will collapse back into regional spheres of influence; India, Europe, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and China will attempt to carve out their own regional niches, unless American military power is there to stop them.
For PNAC, rebuilding US military power involves at least three main objectives. First, an "increase in active-duty strength from 1.4 million to 1.6 million," which would enable the US to better fight and win the aforementioned "multiple, simultaneous theater wars" in addition to performing "'constabulary' duties associated with shaping the security environment in critical regions."
Second, missile defense is central to continued American dominance. The notion of "mutually assured destruction", whereby countries that possess nuclear weapons can "assure" that anyone who attacks them will suffer a nuclear annihilation, is unacceptable. To PNAC, this places an unacceptable limit on American power. "Without [ballistic missile defenses], weak states operating small arsenals of crude ballistic missiles, armed with basic nuclear warheads or other weapons of mass destruction, will be a in a strong position to deter the United States from using conventional force, no matter the technological or other advantages we may enjoy." The US would be left unable to attack who it chooses, when it chooses.
Third, PNAC advocates funding research into assessing the threat and potential uses of new technology ("cyber warfare"), and the development of new weapons. In the case of nuclear weapons, the influence of PNAC on the current Administration's policy is clear. In addition to keeping an arsenal of hundreds of nuclear warheads (to ensure the destruction of anyone who attacks the US directly), new "tiny nukes" have recently been developed for the stated purpose of targeting deep underground bunkers, though their use in deterring smaller attacks and adding another facet to US military might are also well documented. The plans for these developments were clearly laid out in PNAC's 2000 report, and given the significance of using nuclear weapons as anything other than a deterrent, the degree of influence PNAC wields is all too clear.
PNAC does not stop at nukes on the battlefield, however; biological weapons are also newly in-bounds when American power is at stake. The authors of "Rebuilding" write: "advanced forms of biological warfare that can 'target' specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool." The simultaneous, casual willingness to develop biological weapons, target civilians based on their race, and use terror to maintain global US dominance could be dismissed as the rantings of deranged right-wing wackos, were it not for PNAC's clear power and influence.
But PNAC is adamant that it does not merely advocate US power for its own sake. The writings of William Kristol, Robert Kagan, Gary Schmitt, and the official PNAC reports make constant reference to "moral clarity", American principles, democracy, and freedom. The American "commitments" and "global responsibilities" are invoked repeatedly in reference to US military activities overseas.
PNAC's justification for American dominance seems to be based on the use of overwhelming American power for moral ends that are in the interest of everyone's security and economic well-being. PNAC advocates using US power "to spread democratic principles and deter and defeat the opponents of our civilization." A "safer future" can be built if the US "promotes democracy in the Arab world as an antidote to radical Islam". "This is not a crusade. It's a foreign policy of enlightened self-interest."
Since Sept 11, this vision of foreign policy has gained a new legitimacy. Last January, Robert Kagan wrote, "must we wait for another attack, perhaps involving these awful weapons, before we use our power and influence to compel change?" As in Afghanistan and Iraq, it is no longer enough to "spread democratic principles"; they must now be instilled, if not imposed directly through military force.
The definition of democracy employed in US foreign policy, however, is a particular one. Democracy is desirable to the extent that it is synonymous with a free market economy open to foreign (read: US) investment. Democratic states that are dependent on the US for much their economic well being are, in turn, also much more likely to side with the US on international issues.
In this respect, PNAC's ascent does not represent a shift from the foreign policies of Reagan or Clinton. As they write in their "Statement of Principles", "such a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity may not be fashionable today. But it is necessary if the United States is to build on the successes of this past century and to ensure our security and our greatness in the next."
The "enlightened self interest" approach to foreign policy does not, then, preclude terrorizing people who choose a path other than Washington-approved liberal democracy, or supporting dictators who are willing to align with US interests. Iraqis, for example, still remember seeing Donald Rumsfeld shake hands with Saddam Hussein when the US mended relations with Iraq in time to supply Hussein with weapons and funding for the duration of the Iran-Iraq war.
More recently, early PNAC member Paul Wolfowitz expressed dismay that Turkey's Military did not play enough of a "leadership role" when the overwhelming popular opposition to hosting US troops resulted in a Parliamentary vote against allowing access to the US.
PNAC signatory Eliot Abrams , who pled guilty to two counts perjury after he lied to Congress about the Iran-Contra affair but was pardoned by George Bush Sr. and hired as "Senior Director for Democracy, Human Rights, and International Operations" by George Bush Jr. is another example of selectively democratic tendencies that PNAC inherits from the Reagan years. Abrams was central to the US training and funding of right-wing paramilitary groups in El Salvador, to which a UN truth commission attributed the majority of 22,000 atrocities that took place in the 1980s. According to reports published by the Observer , Abrams was involved in the attempted coup in Venezuela last year (another example of a democracy not being in line with US interests). No doubt, the members of PNAC are sincere when they speak of democracy being in US interests, but it is presumably more so when the country is bombed and occupied by American troops.
Despite frequent references to "rule of law", PNAC is singularly opposed to any limits placed on US power, including international law. In this, however, they are hardly unique; no one in the US elite is interested in considering the possibility of US generals or presidents being charged with war crimes, or the possibility of paying reparations to countries bombed and forgotten. PNAC itself emphasizes the underlying consensus about US global dominance; where they differ is in the extreme to which they are eager to take such dominance, and in their will to declare this eagerness willingly.
Further reading:
NewAmericanCentury.org, the official web site.
Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century, the September, 2000 report authored by PNAC
PNAC.info, "An effort to investigate, analyze, and expose the Project for the New American Century, and its plan for a 'unipolar' world."
StopSleeping: Project for the New American Century, an overview with links to thoroughly researched information on PNAC members.
The "Clash of Civilizations"
A Plan to Expand American Supremacy
by THIERRY MEYSSAN*
The Islamic complot and clash of civilizations theory has been progressively devised since 1990 in order to provide the military industrial complex with a spare ideology after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Bernard Lewis, a British Middle East specialist, Samuel Huntington, an American strategist, and Laurent Murawiec, a French consultant, were the main creators of this theory which justifies, not always in a logical way, the US crusade for oil.
The September 11, 2001 attacks, attributed to an “Islamic conspiracy” by the Bush administration, were interpreted as the first manifestation of a “clash of civilizations” both in Europe and the United States.
Thus, the Arab-Muslim world would have waged a war against the Jewish-Christian world. There would not be any other solution than the victory of one over the other: the triumph of Islam and the imposition of a world Caliphate (that is, an Islamic Empire) or the victory of the “American values” shared by a modern Islam in a globalized world.
An Apocalyptic doctrine
The Islamic complot and clash of civilizations theory proposes a holistic explanation of the world and establishes a world order after the disappearance of the Soviet Union. There is no longer a West-East confrontation between two superpowers with conflicting ideologies, but a war between two civilizations or, better to say, between a modern civilization and an archaic form of barbarism.
This theory, when stating that Islam is in war against American values, takes for granted that Islam cannot be modernized. This culture could not be isolated from the Arab society in the 7th Century, whose structures perpetuated, above all, the inferiority of women and only conceived its expansion through violence at the style of the Prophet’s war.
Likewise, this theory stipulates that “the United States” promotes freedom, democracy and prosperity, that it embodies modernity and represents the highest level of progress, the end of History.
Therefore, September 11, 2001 was the first battle of this war of civilizations, as Pearl Harbor was -for the United States- the first battle of the Second World War. That is, this war has no resemblance with previous ones.
During the first two World Wars, military coalitions had to fight titanic combats. During the Cold War, military combats were limited to peripheral areas or low-intensity conflicts (guerrillas), while the central clash opposes two superpowers from the ideological point of view. During the fourth World War, which has just begun, the classic military battles are replaced by asymmetric wars: a single power, leader of all other States, fights against a non-State omnipresent terrorism.
However, this is not a war between State despotism and resistance groups, but rather an insurrection of democracies against the Islamic tyranny oppressing the Muslim Arab world in an attempt to impose a world Caliphate.
This struggle between Good and Evil has its crystallization point in Jerusalem. It is there, after the Armageddon, where Christ’s return will mark the triumph of the «manifest destiny» of the United States, «the single free nation on Earth» entrusted by the divine Providence to shed the «light of progress upon the rest of the world». Thus, the unconditional support to Israel against Islamic terrorism constitutes a patriotic and religious duty of every American citizen, even though a Jew can only find salvation through his conversion to Catholicism.
A complex
This presentation of the Islamic complot and clash of civilizations theory is, in no way, an exaggeration. On the contrary, it is completely true to what American political parties and mass media are disseminating. Of course, from time to time one could wonder about its root prejudices, its internal coherent and irrational nature.
The Muslim-Arab world and Jewish-Christian world concepts are dubious themselves. Originally, the term “Jewish-Christian” did not refer to all Jews and Christians but, on the contrary, to a reduced group of original Christians who were still Jews, before the separation of the Church from the Synagogue. But, at the end of the 1960s, that is, after the United States came closer to Israel and the Six Day War, this term assumed a political meaning. It then referred to the NATO block, the West, in opposition to the Soviet block, known as the East.
At this point, there is a recycling of concepts. Today, the West is, more or less, the same as before, while the East (Soviet block) is no longer the adversary, but the Middle East. These concepts have nothing to do with geography or culture, but with propaganda alone.
Thus, Australia and Japan are West from the political point of view, like two European States whose population is Muslim: Turkey and Bosnia Herzegovina. And there is another important problem: in many States, mainly around the Mediterranean, it is impossible to currently distinguish the Jewish-Christian civilization from the Muslim-Arab civilization.
Therefore, the war of civilizations means the launching of civil wars to separate populations. From this viewpoint, Yugoslavia constitutes a successful experience. The struggle for the implementation of the separation project implied the eradication of the secular idealism. Then, it is inevitable, in the long run, for the French Republic [1] to become the most important structural resistance within the «West» block.
On the other hand, the prejudice by which the Islam is incompatible with modernity and democracy presupposes a great ignorance. The expression “Muslim-Arab world” emphasizes that the Islam is actually more comprehensive than the Arab world though the image we have is very narrow. Few Americans know that Indonesia is the first Muslim State in the world. Can we reasonably say that Abu Dhabi and Dubai are not as modern as Kansas? Can we sincerely affirm that Bahrain is not as democratic as Florida? One of the mechanisms of this discourse is to associate Islam with the 8th Century Arabia. But, do we associate Christianity with the Middle East Ancient Times?
In correlation, this theory is based on the belief on “American values”. And this is, indeed, a simple belief because, how can we think so highly of a country whose Constitution does not recognize popular sovereignty, whose President was not elected but appointed, where corruption among Parliamentarians is not prohibited but regulated, where a prisoner is kept in solitary confinement without trial, with a concentration camp in the Cuban territory of Guantanamo, that imposes death penalties and tortures, where important newspaper owners receive weekly orders from the White House, that drops bombs on the civil population in Afghanistan, that kidnaps a democratically elected President in Haiti, that finances mercenaries to defeat democratic governments in Venezuela and Cuba, etc?
In sum, this theory is closely associated with an Apocalyptic religious thinking. The American Revolution is a complex movement where different ideologies merge. But, in the end, it is a religious project which served as a United States foundation and that religious project is what the current American administration must defend today.
The oath of loyalty, in effect since the Cold War and currently challenged in the Supreme Court, implies that in order to be an American citizen you must believe in God. George W. Bush came to the White House with his Christian faith as a political program and has professed fundamentalist beliefs according to which mankind was only created a few thousand years ago and without the evolution of species. In the White House, he established a Bureau of Initiatives based on Faith.
John Ashcroft, Secretary of Justice, echoed the «We have no other King than Jesus» motto. The Health Secretary shoved prophylactic programs in the name of religious convictions. The Defense Secretary included missionaries form Graham’s Church in the Coalition Forces sent to Iraq with the purpose of converting the population in Iraq.
There are many other examples like these ones leading us to wonder reasonably whether the United States is really a modern country, an open and tolerant country or rather the incarnation of sectarianism and archaism.
The Origin of the concept
Bernard LewisThe «clash of civilizations» expression stemmed out in 1990 for the first time in an article by Middle East expert Bernard Lewis, generously entitled «The Roots of Muslim Rage» [2]. It includes the fact that Islam has nothing good and the bitterness it causes among Muslims turns into a rage against the West. Nevertheless, victory is guaranteed, as well as the “Lebanization” of the Middle East and the strengthening of Israel.
Bernard Lewis, who is 88 years old today, was born in the United Kingdom and trained as jurist and Islam expert. During the second World War he worked in the military intelligence agencies and the Arab Bureau of the British Ministry of Foreign Affairs. During the 1960s he became an important expert consulted by the Royal Institute of International Affairs where he was considered an outstanding specialist on British humanitarian interference in the Ottoman Empire and one of the last advocators of the British Empire.
Sponsored by the CIA, he participated in the Congress for Cultural Freedom where he was entrusted with the writing of a book entitled «The Middle East and the West» [3]. In 1974, he moved to the United States. He became professor in Princeton and adopted the American citizenship. Soon, he was advisor to Zbigniew Brzezinski, the National Security Advisor under President Carter. Together, they conceived the theoretical basis of the «instability arch» concept and planned the destabilization of the communist government in Afganistán.
In France, Bernard Lewis was a member of the NATO-follower Foundation Saint-Simon, for which he produced a booklet entitled «Islam and Democracy» in 1993, whose publication resulted in an interview for the French newspaper Le Monde. In that interview, he managed to deny the genocide committed against the Armenians, for which he was sent to trial [4].
However, the clash of civilizations concept evolved rapidly; from the neocolonial discourse on the white supremacy to the description of a world confrontation whose result was uncertain. This new meaning is owed to professor Samuel Huntington who, by the way, is not an Islamic expert but a strategist. Huntington develops this theory in two articles - “The Clash of Civilizations?” and “The West Unique, Not Universal”- and a book originally entitled “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order” [5].
It is no longer a struggle against Muslims but a priority struggle before the struggle against the Chinese world. As in the Rome foundation myth, the United States must eliminate its adversaries one by one in order to achieve the final victory.
Samuel Huntington is one of the most important intellectuals of our times, not because his works are rigorous and brilliant, but because they constitute the ideological foundation of modern fascism.
In his first book entitled «The Soldier and the State», published in 1957, he attempts to prove that there is an ideologically united military cast while civilians are politically divided [6]. Thus, he develops a concept of a society in which trade regulations would be eliminated and the political power would be in the hands of multinationals under the tutelage of a Praetorian Guard.
In 1968, he published «Political Order in Changing Societies», a thesis where he affirms that authoritarian regimes are the only ones capable of modernizing Third World countries [7]. Secretly, he participates in the creation of the think tank group that submitted a report to the presidential candidate, Richard Nixon, on the way to reinforce the CIA secret actions [8].
In 1969-1970, Henry Kissinger, who is fond of secret actions, exerted his influence so as to appoint him as member of the Presidential Task Force on International Development [9]. Huntington advocates the need for a dialectic game between the Department of State and multinationals; the first one will have to exert pressure upon developing countries for them to adopt liberal legislations and to quit nationalizations while multinationals should transfer to the Department of State their knowledge on the countries where they work [10].
He then joins the Wilson Center and creates the Foreign Policy magazine. In 1974, Henry Kissinger appointed him a member of the USA-Latin America Relations Committee. Huntington actively participated in the enthronement of General Augusto Pinochet in Chile and Jorge Rafael Videla in Argentina. There, he tried, for the first time, his social model and shows that a non-regulated economy is compatible with a military dictatorship.
At the same time, his friend Zbigniew Brzezinski introduced him to a private circle: the Trilateral Commission. Once in this Commission he drafted a report entitled “The Crisis of Democracy” [11] where he promotes a more elitist society that would limit access to universities and the freedom of press.
When Jimmy Carter got rid of members from the Nixon and Ford administrations, Brzezinski, now National Security Advisor, gave a hand to his friend Huntington who then managed to remain in the White House and became planning coordinator of the National Security Council.
During this period, Huntington began his active collaboration with Bernard Lewis and conceived the need to first dominate the oil areas within the instability arch before attacking Communist China. Even though this was not a “clash of civilizations” yet, it was indeed quite similar.
But professor Samuel Huntington was forced to face an uncomfortable scandal. Reportedly, the CIA was paying him for publishing articles, in university magazines, justifying secret actions as a way to maintain order in countries where a friendly dictator suddenly died. When the scandal was forgotten, Frank Carlucci appointed him as member of the National Security Council and Defense Department Joint Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy [12].
His report would serve to justify the “Star War” program. Today, professor Huntington is manager of the Freedom House, an anticommunist association headed by former CIA Director, James Woolsey.
Jerusalem and the Mecca
Laurent MurawiecThe clash of civilizations theory crystallizes in religious matters. The Jewish-Christian control of Jerusalem is a required talisman for global victory. If the West loses the Holy City, it will also lose the strength to fulfill its manifested destiny, its divine mission. Likewise, if Muslims lose their control over the Mecca, their religion will crumble to pieces. Of course, this is not rational at all, but those superstitions are always present in the American popular press and form part of a well-conceived political discourse.
On July 10, 2002, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz convened the quarterly meeting of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee [13]. Only twelve members attended the meeting. Attendants heard the paper presented by a French expert of the Rand Corporation, Laurent Murawic, entitled «Expel Saudis from Arabia». The lecture was divided into three parts and the projection of 24 slides. At the beginning, Murawiec reintroduced Bernard Lewis theory: the Arab world has been under a crisis for two centuries. It has been unable to carry out an Industrial Revolution nor a Numeric Revolution.
This failure causes a frustration turned into a rage against the West, especially because the Arabs do not know how to debate since in their culture violence is the single political means. From that viewpoint, the 9/11 attacks are nothing but a symptomatic expression of their great dissatisfaction.
In the second part, Murawiec describes the Royal Saudi family as incapable of controlling the situation. Saudis have developed a “wahabism” in the world to fight against both communism and the Iranian Revolution, but today they no longer control what they have created.
Finally, the lecturer proposes a strategy: Saudis have the oil (at last, we got to the bottom of this matter), the petrodollars and the custody of Holy Places. They are the central and single pillar around which the Muslim-Arab world spins. Getting rid of them, the United States can take control of the oil it needs for its economy, the money coming from oil that it erroneously paid in the past and, above all, the Holy places and, therefore, the Muslim religion. Anf after the crumbling of Islam, Israel would be able to carry out the annexation of Egypt.
Laurent Murawiec was consultant of French Minister of Defense Jean-Pierre Chevènement and gave courses at the School of Social Science Higher Studies (EHESS, French acronym) [14]. For many years he was advisor of Lyndon LaRouche, then he suddenly abandoned him and joined the neoconservatives. Today, he is expert at the Richard Perle`s Hudson Institute and collaborates with Daniel Pipes` Middle East Forum.
This meeting made a lot of noise. The Saudi Arabian Ambassador demanded an explanation and Mr. Perle, the meeting organizer, was asked to be more discreet for a time. Murawiec was invited to abandon the Rand Corporation. In any case, the meeting had been convened by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz who were fully aware of what the consequences would be. It was simply a trial to see how far the Pentagon could go.
Thierry Meyssan
Journalist and writer, president of the Voltaire Network.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Here we establish a difference between the French Republic as an idea and France as a nation-State.
[2] «The Roots of Muslim Rage» by Bernard Lewis, Atlantic Monthly, September 1990.
[3] The Middle East and the West, by Bernard Lewis, Weidenfelds & Nicholson, 1963 (an Encouter Book).
[4] See «Affaire Forum des Associations arméniennes de France & LICRA contre Bernard Lewis» [Case of France Armenian Associations Forum and LICRA against Bernard Lewis], December 21, 1995 trial, 17e Chambre du TGI in Paris.
[5] “The Clash of Civilizations?” and “The West Unique, Not Universal”, Foreign Affairs, 1993 and 1996; The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, 1996.
[6] The Soldier and the State by Samuel Huntington, Harvard University Press, 1957.
[7] Political Order in Changing Societies by Samuel Huntington, Yale University Press, 1968
[8] The group was composed by Francis M. Baton, Richard M. Bissell jr., Roger D. Fisher, Samuel Huntington, Lyman Kirkpatrick, Henry Loomis, Max Milliken, Lucien W. Pye, Edwin O. Reischauer, Adam Yarmolinsky and Franklin Lindsay.
[9] Presidential Task Force on International Development, presided over by Rudolph Peterson.
[10] The United States in Changing Wold Economiy, US Government Printing Office, 1971.
[11] The Crisis of Democracy by Crozier, Huntington and Watanuky, New York Press University, 1975.
[12] Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy. It includes Charles M. Herzfeld, Fred C. Iklé, Albert J. Wohlstetter, Anne Armstrong, Zbigniew Brzezinski, William P. Clark, W. Graham Claytor, Jr, General Andrew J. Goodpaster, Admiral James L. Holloway. III, Samuel P. Huntington, Henry A. Kissinger, Joshua Lederberg, and Generals Bernard A. Schriever and John W. Vessey.
[13] Headed by Richard Perle, the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee includes Adelman, Richard V. Allen, Martin Anderson, Gary S. Becker, Barry M. Blechman, Harold Brown, Eliot Cohen, Devon Cross, Ronald Fogleman, Thomas S. Foley, Tillie K. Fowler, Newt Gingrich, Gerald Hillman, Charles A. Horner, Fred C. Ikle, David Jeremiah, Henry Kissinger, William Owens, J. Danforth Quayle, Henry S. Rowen, James R. Schlesinger, Jack Sheehan, Kiron Skinner, Walter B. Slocombe, Hal Sonnenfeldt, Terry Teague, Ruth Wedgwood, Chris Williams, Pete Wilson and R. James Woolsey, Jr.
[14] Created after the French Liberation under the inspiration of the CIA, the l’EHESS should act as counterpart of the CNRS under communist influence. Even today, this School is generously financed by the Fondation franco-américain (French-American Foundation)
by THIERRY MEYSSAN*
The Islamic complot and clash of civilizations theory has been progressively devised since 1990 in order to provide the military industrial complex with a spare ideology after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Bernard Lewis, a British Middle East specialist, Samuel Huntington, an American strategist, and Laurent Murawiec, a French consultant, were the main creators of this theory which justifies, not always in a logical way, the US crusade for oil.
The September 11, 2001 attacks, attributed to an “Islamic conspiracy” by the Bush administration, were interpreted as the first manifestation of a “clash of civilizations” both in Europe and the United States.
Thus, the Arab-Muslim world would have waged a war against the Jewish-Christian world. There would not be any other solution than the victory of one over the other: the triumph of Islam and the imposition of a world Caliphate (that is, an Islamic Empire) or the victory of the “American values” shared by a modern Islam in a globalized world.
An Apocalyptic doctrine
The Islamic complot and clash of civilizations theory proposes a holistic explanation of the world and establishes a world order after the disappearance of the Soviet Union. There is no longer a West-East confrontation between two superpowers with conflicting ideologies, but a war between two civilizations or, better to say, between a modern civilization and an archaic form of barbarism.
This theory, when stating that Islam is in war against American values, takes for granted that Islam cannot be modernized. This culture could not be isolated from the Arab society in the 7th Century, whose structures perpetuated, above all, the inferiority of women and only conceived its expansion through violence at the style of the Prophet’s war.
Likewise, this theory stipulates that “the United States” promotes freedom, democracy and prosperity, that it embodies modernity and represents the highest level of progress, the end of History.
Therefore, September 11, 2001 was the first battle of this war of civilizations, as Pearl Harbor was -for the United States- the first battle of the Second World War. That is, this war has no resemblance with previous ones.
During the first two World Wars, military coalitions had to fight titanic combats. During the Cold War, military combats were limited to peripheral areas or low-intensity conflicts (guerrillas), while the central clash opposes two superpowers from the ideological point of view. During the fourth World War, which has just begun, the classic military battles are replaced by asymmetric wars: a single power, leader of all other States, fights against a non-State omnipresent terrorism.
However, this is not a war between State despotism and resistance groups, but rather an insurrection of democracies against the Islamic tyranny oppressing the Muslim Arab world in an attempt to impose a world Caliphate.
This struggle between Good and Evil has its crystallization point in Jerusalem. It is there, after the Armageddon, where Christ’s return will mark the triumph of the «manifest destiny» of the United States, «the single free nation on Earth» entrusted by the divine Providence to shed the «light of progress upon the rest of the world». Thus, the unconditional support to Israel against Islamic terrorism constitutes a patriotic and religious duty of every American citizen, even though a Jew can only find salvation through his conversion to Catholicism.
A complex
This presentation of the Islamic complot and clash of civilizations theory is, in no way, an exaggeration. On the contrary, it is completely true to what American political parties and mass media are disseminating. Of course, from time to time one could wonder about its root prejudices, its internal coherent and irrational nature.
The Muslim-Arab world and Jewish-Christian world concepts are dubious themselves. Originally, the term “Jewish-Christian” did not refer to all Jews and Christians but, on the contrary, to a reduced group of original Christians who were still Jews, before the separation of the Church from the Synagogue. But, at the end of the 1960s, that is, after the United States came closer to Israel and the Six Day War, this term assumed a political meaning. It then referred to the NATO block, the West, in opposition to the Soviet block, known as the East.
At this point, there is a recycling of concepts. Today, the West is, more or less, the same as before, while the East (Soviet block) is no longer the adversary, but the Middle East. These concepts have nothing to do with geography or culture, but with propaganda alone.
Thus, Australia and Japan are West from the political point of view, like two European States whose population is Muslim: Turkey and Bosnia Herzegovina. And there is another important problem: in many States, mainly around the Mediterranean, it is impossible to currently distinguish the Jewish-Christian civilization from the Muslim-Arab civilization.
Therefore, the war of civilizations means the launching of civil wars to separate populations. From this viewpoint, Yugoslavia constitutes a successful experience. The struggle for the implementation of the separation project implied the eradication of the secular idealism. Then, it is inevitable, in the long run, for the French Republic [1] to become the most important structural resistance within the «West» block.
On the other hand, the prejudice by which the Islam is incompatible with modernity and democracy presupposes a great ignorance. The expression “Muslim-Arab world” emphasizes that the Islam is actually more comprehensive than the Arab world though the image we have is very narrow. Few Americans know that Indonesia is the first Muslim State in the world. Can we reasonably say that Abu Dhabi and Dubai are not as modern as Kansas? Can we sincerely affirm that Bahrain is not as democratic as Florida? One of the mechanisms of this discourse is to associate Islam with the 8th Century Arabia. But, do we associate Christianity with the Middle East Ancient Times?
In correlation, this theory is based on the belief on “American values”. And this is, indeed, a simple belief because, how can we think so highly of a country whose Constitution does not recognize popular sovereignty, whose President was not elected but appointed, where corruption among Parliamentarians is not prohibited but regulated, where a prisoner is kept in solitary confinement without trial, with a concentration camp in the Cuban territory of Guantanamo, that imposes death penalties and tortures, where important newspaper owners receive weekly orders from the White House, that drops bombs on the civil population in Afghanistan, that kidnaps a democratically elected President in Haiti, that finances mercenaries to defeat democratic governments in Venezuela and Cuba, etc?
In sum, this theory is closely associated with an Apocalyptic religious thinking. The American Revolution is a complex movement where different ideologies merge. But, in the end, it is a religious project which served as a United States foundation and that religious project is what the current American administration must defend today.
The oath of loyalty, in effect since the Cold War and currently challenged in the Supreme Court, implies that in order to be an American citizen you must believe in God. George W. Bush came to the White House with his Christian faith as a political program and has professed fundamentalist beliefs according to which mankind was only created a few thousand years ago and without the evolution of species. In the White House, he established a Bureau of Initiatives based on Faith.
John Ashcroft, Secretary of Justice, echoed the «We have no other King than Jesus» motto. The Health Secretary shoved prophylactic programs in the name of religious convictions. The Defense Secretary included missionaries form Graham’s Church in the Coalition Forces sent to Iraq with the purpose of converting the population in Iraq.
There are many other examples like these ones leading us to wonder reasonably whether the United States is really a modern country, an open and tolerant country or rather the incarnation of sectarianism and archaism.
The Origin of the concept
Bernard LewisThe «clash of civilizations» expression stemmed out in 1990 for the first time in an article by Middle East expert Bernard Lewis, generously entitled «The Roots of Muslim Rage» [2]. It includes the fact that Islam has nothing good and the bitterness it causes among Muslims turns into a rage against the West. Nevertheless, victory is guaranteed, as well as the “Lebanization” of the Middle East and the strengthening of Israel.
Bernard Lewis, who is 88 years old today, was born in the United Kingdom and trained as jurist and Islam expert. During the second World War he worked in the military intelligence agencies and the Arab Bureau of the British Ministry of Foreign Affairs. During the 1960s he became an important expert consulted by the Royal Institute of International Affairs where he was considered an outstanding specialist on British humanitarian interference in the Ottoman Empire and one of the last advocators of the British Empire.
Sponsored by the CIA, he participated in the Congress for Cultural Freedom where he was entrusted with the writing of a book entitled «The Middle East and the West» [3]. In 1974, he moved to the United States. He became professor in Princeton and adopted the American citizenship. Soon, he was advisor to Zbigniew Brzezinski, the National Security Advisor under President Carter. Together, they conceived the theoretical basis of the «instability arch» concept and planned the destabilization of the communist government in Afganistán.
In France, Bernard Lewis was a member of the NATO-follower Foundation Saint-Simon, for which he produced a booklet entitled «Islam and Democracy» in 1993, whose publication resulted in an interview for the French newspaper Le Monde. In that interview, he managed to deny the genocide committed against the Armenians, for which he was sent to trial [4].
However, the clash of civilizations concept evolved rapidly; from the neocolonial discourse on the white supremacy to the description of a world confrontation whose result was uncertain. This new meaning is owed to professor Samuel Huntington who, by the way, is not an Islamic expert but a strategist. Huntington develops this theory in two articles - “The Clash of Civilizations?” and “The West Unique, Not Universal”- and a book originally entitled “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order” [5].
It is no longer a struggle against Muslims but a priority struggle before the struggle against the Chinese world. As in the Rome foundation myth, the United States must eliminate its adversaries one by one in order to achieve the final victory.
Samuel Huntington is one of the most important intellectuals of our times, not because his works are rigorous and brilliant, but because they constitute the ideological foundation of modern fascism.
In his first book entitled «The Soldier and the State», published in 1957, he attempts to prove that there is an ideologically united military cast while civilians are politically divided [6]. Thus, he develops a concept of a society in which trade regulations would be eliminated and the political power would be in the hands of multinationals under the tutelage of a Praetorian Guard.
In 1968, he published «Political Order in Changing Societies», a thesis where he affirms that authoritarian regimes are the only ones capable of modernizing Third World countries [7]. Secretly, he participates in the creation of the think tank group that submitted a report to the presidential candidate, Richard Nixon, on the way to reinforce the CIA secret actions [8].
In 1969-1970, Henry Kissinger, who is fond of secret actions, exerted his influence so as to appoint him as member of the Presidential Task Force on International Development [9]. Huntington advocates the need for a dialectic game between the Department of State and multinationals; the first one will have to exert pressure upon developing countries for them to adopt liberal legislations and to quit nationalizations while multinationals should transfer to the Department of State their knowledge on the countries where they work [10].
He then joins the Wilson Center and creates the Foreign Policy magazine. In 1974, Henry Kissinger appointed him a member of the USA-Latin America Relations Committee. Huntington actively participated in the enthronement of General Augusto Pinochet in Chile and Jorge Rafael Videla in Argentina. There, he tried, for the first time, his social model and shows that a non-regulated economy is compatible with a military dictatorship.
At the same time, his friend Zbigniew Brzezinski introduced him to a private circle: the Trilateral Commission. Once in this Commission he drafted a report entitled “The Crisis of Democracy” [11] where he promotes a more elitist society that would limit access to universities and the freedom of press.
When Jimmy Carter got rid of members from the Nixon and Ford administrations, Brzezinski, now National Security Advisor, gave a hand to his friend Huntington who then managed to remain in the White House and became planning coordinator of the National Security Council.
During this period, Huntington began his active collaboration with Bernard Lewis and conceived the need to first dominate the oil areas within the instability arch before attacking Communist China. Even though this was not a “clash of civilizations” yet, it was indeed quite similar.
But professor Samuel Huntington was forced to face an uncomfortable scandal. Reportedly, the CIA was paying him for publishing articles, in university magazines, justifying secret actions as a way to maintain order in countries where a friendly dictator suddenly died. When the scandal was forgotten, Frank Carlucci appointed him as member of the National Security Council and Defense Department Joint Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy [12].
His report would serve to justify the “Star War” program. Today, professor Huntington is manager of the Freedom House, an anticommunist association headed by former CIA Director, James Woolsey.
Jerusalem and the Mecca
Laurent MurawiecThe clash of civilizations theory crystallizes in religious matters. The Jewish-Christian control of Jerusalem is a required talisman for global victory. If the West loses the Holy City, it will also lose the strength to fulfill its manifested destiny, its divine mission. Likewise, if Muslims lose their control over the Mecca, their religion will crumble to pieces. Of course, this is not rational at all, but those superstitions are always present in the American popular press and form part of a well-conceived political discourse.
On July 10, 2002, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz convened the quarterly meeting of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee [13]. Only twelve members attended the meeting. Attendants heard the paper presented by a French expert of the Rand Corporation, Laurent Murawic, entitled «Expel Saudis from Arabia». The lecture was divided into three parts and the projection of 24 slides. At the beginning, Murawiec reintroduced Bernard Lewis theory: the Arab world has been under a crisis for two centuries. It has been unable to carry out an Industrial Revolution nor a Numeric Revolution.
This failure causes a frustration turned into a rage against the West, especially because the Arabs do not know how to debate since in their culture violence is the single political means. From that viewpoint, the 9/11 attacks are nothing but a symptomatic expression of their great dissatisfaction.
In the second part, Murawiec describes the Royal Saudi family as incapable of controlling the situation. Saudis have developed a “wahabism” in the world to fight against both communism and the Iranian Revolution, but today they no longer control what they have created.
Finally, the lecturer proposes a strategy: Saudis have the oil (at last, we got to the bottom of this matter), the petrodollars and the custody of Holy Places. They are the central and single pillar around which the Muslim-Arab world spins. Getting rid of them, the United States can take control of the oil it needs for its economy, the money coming from oil that it erroneously paid in the past and, above all, the Holy places and, therefore, the Muslim religion. Anf after the crumbling of Islam, Israel would be able to carry out the annexation of Egypt.
Laurent Murawiec was consultant of French Minister of Defense Jean-Pierre Chevènement and gave courses at the School of Social Science Higher Studies (EHESS, French acronym) [14]. For many years he was advisor of Lyndon LaRouche, then he suddenly abandoned him and joined the neoconservatives. Today, he is expert at the Richard Perle`s Hudson Institute and collaborates with Daniel Pipes` Middle East Forum.
This meeting made a lot of noise. The Saudi Arabian Ambassador demanded an explanation and Mr. Perle, the meeting organizer, was asked to be more discreet for a time. Murawiec was invited to abandon the Rand Corporation. In any case, the meeting had been convened by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz who were fully aware of what the consequences would be. It was simply a trial to see how far the Pentagon could go.
Thierry Meyssan
Journalist and writer, president of the Voltaire Network.
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[1] Here we establish a difference between the French Republic as an idea and France as a nation-State.
[2] «The Roots of Muslim Rage» by Bernard Lewis, Atlantic Monthly, September 1990.
[3] The Middle East and the West, by Bernard Lewis, Weidenfelds & Nicholson, 1963 (an Encouter Book).
[4] See «Affaire Forum des Associations arméniennes de France & LICRA contre Bernard Lewis» [Case of France Armenian Associations Forum and LICRA against Bernard Lewis], December 21, 1995 trial, 17e Chambre du TGI in Paris.
[5] “The Clash of Civilizations?” and “The West Unique, Not Universal”, Foreign Affairs, 1993 and 1996; The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, 1996.
[6] The Soldier and the State by Samuel Huntington, Harvard University Press, 1957.
[7] Political Order in Changing Societies by Samuel Huntington, Yale University Press, 1968
[8] The group was composed by Francis M. Baton, Richard M. Bissell jr., Roger D. Fisher, Samuel Huntington, Lyman Kirkpatrick, Henry Loomis, Max Milliken, Lucien W. Pye, Edwin O. Reischauer, Adam Yarmolinsky and Franklin Lindsay.
[9] Presidential Task Force on International Development, presided over by Rudolph Peterson.
[10] The United States in Changing Wold Economiy, US Government Printing Office, 1971.
[11] The Crisis of Democracy by Crozier, Huntington and Watanuky, New York Press University, 1975.
[12] Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy. It includes Charles M. Herzfeld, Fred C. Iklé, Albert J. Wohlstetter, Anne Armstrong, Zbigniew Brzezinski, William P. Clark, W. Graham Claytor, Jr, General Andrew J. Goodpaster, Admiral James L. Holloway. III, Samuel P. Huntington, Henry A. Kissinger, Joshua Lederberg, and Generals Bernard A. Schriever and John W. Vessey.
[13] Headed by Richard Perle, the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee includes Adelman, Richard V. Allen, Martin Anderson, Gary S. Becker, Barry M. Blechman, Harold Brown, Eliot Cohen, Devon Cross, Ronald Fogleman, Thomas S. Foley, Tillie K. Fowler, Newt Gingrich, Gerald Hillman, Charles A. Horner, Fred C. Ikle, David Jeremiah, Henry Kissinger, William Owens, J. Danforth Quayle, Henry S. Rowen, James R. Schlesinger, Jack Sheehan, Kiron Skinner, Walter B. Slocombe, Hal Sonnenfeldt, Terry Teague, Ruth Wedgwood, Chris Williams, Pete Wilson and R. James Woolsey, Jr.
[14] Created after the French Liberation under the inspiration of the CIA, the l’EHESS should act as counterpart of the CNRS under communist influence. Even today, this School is generously financed by the Fondation franco-américain (French-American Foundation)
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