newsviewsnolose@yahoogroups.com on behalf of dick.mcmanus
NATO bombing of Serbs in Kosova was a war crime
August 20, 2008: In 1999, NATO bombed Serbia and Kosovo for 78-day which killed hundreds of people in hospitals, schools, churches, parks and television studios, and destroyed economic infrastructure.
The former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia in the Hague was Carla Del Ponte. Carla Del Ponte, this year published her memoir The Hunt: Me and War Criminals. This book reveals unpalatable truths about the West's intervention in Kosovo. Under pressure from Washington and London, an investigation into NATO war crimes at this tribunal were scrapped.
The justification for the NATO bombing was that the Serbs were committing "genocide" in the secessionist province of Kosovo against ethnic Albanians. David Scheffer, U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes, announced that as many as "225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59" may have been murdered.
The tribunal announced the final count of the dead in Kosovo: 2,788. Iinternational teams descended upon Kosovo to exhume the mass graves. The FBI failed to find a single mass grave and went home. The Spanish forensic team did the same and said the stories of mass graves were all war propaganda machines."
Del Ponte in her book states that the KLA kidnapped hundreds of Serbs and transported them to Albania, where their kidneys and other body parts were removed; these were then sold for transplant in other countries. She also says there was sufficient evidence to prosecute the Kosovar Albanians for war crimes, but the investigation "was nipped in the bud" so that the tribunal's focus would be on "crimes committed by Serbia." She says the Hague judges were terrified of the Kosovar Albanians--the very people in whose name NATO had attacked Serbia.
KLA was ethnically cleansing more than 200,000 Serbs and Roma from the province. Kosovo has no formal economy and is run, in effect, by criminal gangs that traffic in drugs, contraband and women.
This included combatants on both sides and Serbs and Roma murdered by the KLA. There was no genocide in Kosovo. The genocide was a lie. The NATO attack had been fraudulent.
U.S. diplomat William Walker seriously discredited news reports of a true Kosovo Albanian atrocity, an alleged execution-massacre of 45 people by Yugoslav (Serb) police in the Kosovo village of Racak January 15, 1999 This incident was used to justify NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia . In Kosovo, as confirmed by KLA press statements, Walker worked closely with the KLA in his capacity as the head of the Kosovo Verification Mission. Clinton sent made him the UN administrator for Eastern Slavonia from 1997 to 1998.
"http://www.balkanpeace.org/index.php?index=article&articleid=12224"
Interestingly, William Walker, the first Western diplomatic observer on the scene at Racak, was involved previously in the Iran-Contra scandal in funding the covert U.S.-backed anti-government force in Nicaragua. Afterwards, he was appointed as U.S. ambassador to El Salvador, during which time the death squad activity against left-wing guerillas escalated.
Pres. Bill Clinton tried to make Walker Ambassador to Panama, in 1993, the Catholic Church in Panama and local political activists reacted loud and fast and this changed Clinton mind and he was not appointed.
William Walker, the U.S. diplomat who first acquired notoriety in Central America in the late 1980s, is now being used to promote a seriously discredited atrocity story to justify NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia [see box]. It has been a hard sell for someone with Walker's reputation.
Walker was U.S. ambassador to El Salvador in November 1989 when six leading Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter were dragged from their beds and murdered by the Salvadoran Army.
The killings were carried out by the Atlacatl Battalion, which was recruited, trained, and deployed by the U.S. military, supposedly in order to improve the Salvadoran Army's human rights performance. The Atlacatl was responsible for the worst atrocities of the entire war.
Walker's Cover-Up
As declassified State Department cables later showed, Walker worked diligently to cover up the real authors of the Jesuit murders, particularly Army Chief of Staff René Emilio Ponce, who was identified in the 1993 United Nations Truth Commission on El Salvador as the senior officer behind the crimes.
Although journalists suspected Ponce from the first days, Walker suggested the killers were FMLN guerrillas. The suggestion was dismissed as absurd by Jesuits, given the proximity of the murder scene to Salvadoran Armed Forces headquarters, where soldiers would certainly have noticed the shooting.
When Lucia Barrera de Cerna, a neighbor of the Jesuits and the only eyewitness who dared to come forward, said that she had seen men at the murder scene dressed in camouflage uniforms similar to those of the Salvadoran Army, Walker launched a smear campaign against her, telling journalists that Ms. Cerna had fabricated her story under instructions from a human rights worker. He played a key role in organizing the ordeal in Miami in which she was held incommunicado and terrorized in an effort to get her to recant her story.
When Walker learned that the Jesuits and the Spanish and French embassies were flying Ms. Cerna and her husband out of El Salvador for safety, he hurried with aides to the airport. He insisted that U.S. officials accompany the Cernas on their flight to Miami, supposedly to ease their way through passport control. After arguments with French diplomats who were providing the plane and seemed to smell a rat, Walker got his Embassy legal officer and an FBI agent aboard the flight.
Once in Miami, instead of being received by American Jesuits as planned, she and her husband were hustled by U.S. authorities to a hotel where they were held by the FBI for a week of "questioning."
Ms. Cerna was subjected to what Jesuit Provincial José María Tojera later called a "cruel interrogation." San Salvador's Roman Catholic Archbishop, Arturo Rivera y Damas, called it "aggressive and violent" and "blackmail," saying her questioners threatened to send Mr. Cerna, or both of them, back to El Salvador if she didn't change her story and "tell the truth."
Faced with the threat to her husband, whom U.S. officials were already accusing of being a member of the FMLN, Ms. Cerna recanted her testimony and said she had heard and seen nothing, and in fact never even got out of bed that night. She returned to her original testimony as soon as she was free of the control of U.S. authorities.
State Department cables released in 1994 reveal. He was requesting Washington to halt all investigation of the Jesuit killings immediately, and to order the Embassy to do the same.
"I have reached the conclusion," he wrote in a cable on the Jesuits' case, "that the [U.S.] Embassy [in San Salvador] must cease the pursuit of unilateral overt information-gathering or face continued no-win decisions and criticism. I recommend that the Embassy be so instructed and that all further investigative effort be left to the GOES [government of El Salvador]. SECRET."
Walker first emerged in the Iran-Contra Scandal as the right-hand man of Oliver North and Elliott Abrams in illegal arms shipments to the Contras out of Ilopango airbase in El Salvador. Walker was responsible for setting up a phony humanitarian operation at an airbase in Ilopango, El Salvador. This shell organization was used as a conduit for arms and supplies to the Contra and cocaine back to the US.
Before that, he was deputy chief of mission at the embassy in Honduras when U.S. authorities were recruiting officers from Somoza's deposed National Guard to establish the Contras, and forming military death squads that murdered hundreds of Honduran workers, labor organizers and students.
The Contra force had been set up in Honduras in the early 1980s, the very time that William Walker was posted to the US Embassy there as Deputy Chief of Mission. Walker was responsible for setting up a phony humanitarian operation at an airbase in Ilopango, El Salvador. This shell organization was used as a conduit for arms and supplies to the Contra and cocaine back to the US. In 1985 he was promoted to the post of Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Central America until 1988. This promotion made him a special assistant to Elliot Abrams, who was then Assistant Secretary of State. In 1988, he was Ambassador to El Salvador till to 1992.
Any "regrets" he felt must not have lasted long. In May 1996, a decade after the Iran-Contra debacle, Walker was head of a ceremony honoring more than 5,000 U.S. soldiers who secretly fought in El Salvador, in direct violation of the congressional restriction limiting the number of U.S. military "advisers" to 55.10
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