https://www.viexpo.com/kosovo-war/archive-through-april-19-2000/ Disaster Message Service Discussion Board en-US Thu, 30 Apr 2026 13:02:54 +0000 wpForo 60 https://www.viexpo.com/kosovo-war/archive-through-april-19-2000/paged/3/#post-22007 Thu, 20 Apr 2000 01:01:00 +0000 singled out another for praise. That officer, also not identified, raised questions about the
target, Mr. Tenet said. In the days before the bombing, he called analysts at NIMA and at the
NATO headquarters in Naples to express doubts, Mr. Tenet said.

Memories of his objections vary, and other intelligence officials raised questions about them.
The officer, who once worked in the same proliferation office involved in targeting the
embassy, now works in the Technical Management Office, an operation involved in highly
classified operations, officials said.

He had no authority to review targets, or even know what they were, but heard informally that
the directorate was being targeted, officials said, adding that he then called the imagery
analyst at NIMA. On that day, April 29, nine days before the bombing, he told the analyst that
he had recently spoken to a source who confirmed the directorate's actual location, about
1,000 yards south of the embassy.

At that point, a senior intelligence official said, the NIMA analyst could have withdrawn the
target's "bombing encyclopedia" number or alerted more senior officials. Instead, he promised
to call the officer who had identified the target in the first place.

The NIMA analyst tried unsuccessfully to arrange a meeting between the two agency officers,
who did not know each other, officials said. On May 3, the analyst produced six more images
of the building and its surroundings, which confirmed to the skeptical officer that the target
was not the directorate, the officials said.

At that point, he raised his concerns with military officers in Naples, but he did not make his
questions official or sound grave enough to remove the target from the list, the officials said.
Then, he left work for three days to attend a training session.

When he returned, on May 7, he learned -- again informally -- that the target was on that night's
list. He called Naples a second time, through back channels, but spoke to a different officer,
who informed him that the B-2 was already on its way from its base in Missouri, according to
officials.

"It didn't really raise the panic you think it would have," a defense official said.

While Mr. Tenet commended the officer's efforts, another senior agency official was critical of
the fact that the officer -- perhaps out of fear that he was acting beyond his responsibilities --
had never voiced doubts to the assistant director of intelligence for military support, who was
in a position to have put a hold instantly on the target.

The Questions: No Indications of a Sinister Plot

Last year, The Observer of London, in conjunction with Politiken, a Danish newspaper,
published articles suggesting that the bombing was deliberate. Their stories said that the
strike had been intended to silence transmitters at the embassy being used for rebroadcasting
communications for the Yugoslav armed forces or, later, by the Serbian paramilitary leader
known as Arkan.

All of the officials interviewed by the Times said they knew of no evidence to support the
assertion, and none has been produced. They said there was also no evidence that the
Chinese had in any way aided the Serbian war effort, though one NATO diplomat said it was
impossible to rule out the possibility that the Chinese shared information with the Serbs.

Officials rejected the idea that the Chinese Embassy was being used for rebroadcasting and
said they did not suspect during the war that it was doing that. General Kelche said
photographs taken after the strike showed ordinary antenna on its roof, not microwave dishes
that would have been used in military communications.

The officials said that after the bombing they did learn a great deal about the embassy's
intelligence operations, including the background of the three Chinese journalists who were
killed and who American officials say were in fact intelligence agents.

"It is -- or was -- considered the major collection platform for Europe," a senior defense official
said. "One could say it was a silver lining to the bombing, but it was not deliberate."

The European newspapers also said there had been a list of targets ruled off limits for air
strikes that included the Chinese Embassy -- at its actual address, not the mistaken one -- and
that the embassy at some point was removed from the list.

According to the officials interviewed by The Times, American commanders in Europe did
maintain such a list of buildings, like hospitals, churches and embassies. The Chinese
Embassy was on that list, officials said, but at its old address and was not removed. They said
the embassy was also listed at the wrong address on a similiar list in Britain.

Roy W. Krieger, a lawyer who represents one of the supervisors who was reprimanded by Mr.
Tenet, said neither his client nor any of the others intended to bomb the embassy. "No sinister
conspiracy exists, only a systemic failure masquerading as a conspiracy," he said.

He criticized the punishment of the C.I.A. officials alone, even though the NIMA map contained
a critical error and none of the Pentagon's data bases included information on the embassy's
actual location.

"The C.I.A.'s action is even more troubling in the face of the refusal of the Department of
Defense to even acknowledge its failures contributing to this tragic event," he said.

After the bombing, Mr. Hamre and the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time,
Gen. Joseph W. Ralston, conducted the Pentagon's review of the targeting, but it was never
made public. Officials from the Joint Chiefs of Staff refused repeated requests to be
interviewed, as did Air Force commanders, on orders from their Chief of Staff, Gen. Michael E.
Ryan, according to a spokesman.

Mr. Goss, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said members of Congress had
intensely questioned officials. In the end, he said he was confident in their assurances it had
not been a deliberate strike.


have a look at this old article:

Lies, Damn Lies...&
Maps

at

http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/jared/Lies.html]]> Kosovo War daniela https://www.viexpo.com/kosovo-war/archive-through-april-19-2000/paged/3/#post-22007 https://www.viexpo.com/kosovo-war/archive-through-april-19-2000/paged/3/#post-22006 Thu, 20 Apr 2000 00:55:00 +0000 strikes that included the Chinese Embassy -- at its actual address, not the mistaken one -- and
that the embassy at some point was removed from the list.

According to the officials interviewed by The Times, American commanders in Europe did
maintain such a list of buildings, like hospitals, churches and embassies. The Chinese
Embassy was on that list, officials said, but at its old address and was not removed. They said
the embassy was also listed at the wrong address on a similiar list in Britain.

**************************************


THE NEW YORK TIMES
April 17, 2000

FATEFUL CHOICE
A special report.

Chinese Embassy Bombing: A Wide Net of Blame

By STEVEN LEE MYERS

WASHINGTON, April 16 -- In the weeks before the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade
last May, NATO was under tremendous pressure to escalate its war against Yugoslavia. The
alliance's supreme commander demanded 2,000 targets in Serbia -- a number some aides
considered arbitrary and too high for a country the size of Ohio.

Having begun the war for Kosovo with too few targets and the unrealistic hope of a quick
victory, NATO had to scramble for new targets. According to a NATO official, the pressure was
so intense that a cook and a motor pool worker with sufficiently high security clearances were
drafted into NATO's targeting office in Mons, Belgium, to help with paperwork on potential
missions.

In this atmosphere the Central Intelligence Agency submitted its first targeting proposal of the
war. It was selected by its Counter-Proliferation Division, which had no particular expertise in
either the Balkans or in picking bombing targets. The target was accepted, officials said,
without further vetting by the military.

In fact, it was the Chinese Embassy. It was described in a secret document given to President
Clinton for his approval as a warehouse that was headquarters of Yugoslav Army procurement.
The document, provided to The New York Times by a military officer, included a satellite
photograph, a casualty estimate and a description of the site.

The only thing that turned out to be accurate was the casualty estimate. The description of
the target's relevance to the war was misleading and, one senior intelligence official said, it
should have been apparent to any imagery expert that the building shown did not look
remotely like a warehouse or any Serbian government building.

Ever since the bombing, Chinese officials have angrily accused the United States of a
deliberate attack, while American officials have insisted that it was an error.

In an attempt to unravel what really happened, spurred in part by articles in two European
newspapers suggesting that the bombing had been deliberate, The New York Times
interviewed more than 30 officials in Washington and in Europe.

While the investigation produced no evidence that the bombing of the embassy had been a
deliberate act, it provided a detailed account of a broader set of missteps than the United
States or NATO have acknowledged, and a wider circle of blame than the government's
explanation of a simple error of judgment by a few people at the C.I.A.

None of the people interviewed at the Pentagon, C.I.A., the State Department and the military
mapping agency, or at NATO offices in Brussels, Mons, Vicenza, Italy and Paris said they had
ever seen any document discussing targeting of the embassy, nor any approval given to do so.
No one asserted that he or she knew that such an order had been given.

The bombing resulted from error piled upon incompetence piled upon bad judgment in a
variety of places -- from a frantic rush to approve targets to questionable reliance on inexpert
officers to an inexplicable failure to consult the people who might have averted disaster,
according to the officials.

In retrospect, they said, the bombing, if not intended, could have been avoided at several
points along the way.

Last week, 11 months after the fact, the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet,
dismissed a midlevel officer who put the X on what turned out to be the embassy. He also
disciplined six other employees, saying that agency officers "at all levels of responsibility"
contributed to the bombing.

The Pentagon has not conducted its own review but administration officials say the matter is
now closed. China rejected Mr. Tenet's discipline as inadequate.

American officials have tried to explain how such a bizarre chain of missteps could have taken
place in intelligence and military organizations that pride themselves on technological
prowess.

"This was an error compounded by errors," said Under Secretary of State Thomas R. Pickering,
who had the job of explaining the attack to the Chinese last year.

Even some NATO and American officials acknowledge that they cannot explain how or why so
many mistakes occurred.

Chinese officials have been particularly suspicious since the attack actually hit the defense
attaché's office and the embassy's intelligence cell. But what neither they nor American
officials have disclosed is that the bombs, Pentagon officials said, were actually targeted
throughout the building. At least one and maybe two of the bombs did not explode, the officials
said.

Had the strike gone as planned, the embassy would have been demolished, the death and
destruction far worse.

Even some of those who accept the American assurances that the bombing was accidental
say they believe that blame has not yet been shared by all of those who contributed to the
mission.

"It was a systemic problem," said Representative Porter J. Goss, the Republican from Florida
who is chairman of the House's Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. "It was not a
problem just at the C.I.A. The fact of the matter is that, at least at the Pentagon, somebody
should stand up and say it isn't just the agency's fault. To fire one person and let off all the
other agencies -- including the White House -- isn't doing justice to justice."

The Rush to Target: A Chaotic Scramble to Meet the Demand

NATO's initial plan was to bomb Yugoslavia for two nights, with daytime pauses to allow
President Slobodan Milosevic to agree to NATO's demands that he withdraw Serbian forces
from Kosovo. "You show them some lead -- boom! boom! -- and they'll fold," a NATO officer in
Belgium said. "That was definitely the prevailing opinion."

American officials said they had always been prepared for a longer war, but when the bombing
began on March 24, NATO had only 219 targets for all of Serbia, focused on air defenses and
military communications.

On the first night, 51 of those targets were struck; by the third night, NATO had exhausted
nearly half the original targets, even as Serbian forces began expelling Kosovo's Albanians en
masse.

"We woke up to the fact that Milosevic wasn't going to come out on the front lawn with a white
flag," the NATO officer said.

That realization touched off a scramble to find more targets. While diplomats wrestled over
whether to begin bombing more politically sensitive targets, including those in Belgrade,
NATO's military commanders, who for four decades had planned for war against the Soviet
Union, found themselves grossly unprepared for the task of choosing targets for this kind of air
campaign, the officials said.

The alliance had only two targeting centers, at the Joint Analysis Center in Britain and at the
Air Force's European headquarters in Germany, both run by Americans.

Only Britain also contributed fully developed targeting proposals, and there were only two
dozen of those, NATO officials said.

As the war continued, the American targeters were producing 10 to 12 new targets a day,
while allied pilots were striking at twice that rate.

By early April, Lt. Gen. Michael C. Short, the alliance's air commander, kept raising the problem
during NATO commanders' morning video conferences. "I'm running out of targets," he barked
one morning, according to an officer who was there.

Gen. Wesley K. Clark, NATO's supreme commander, asked why he did not have 4,000 targets
on his desk, a NATO officer said. By mid-April, General Clark halved his demand, and the Air
Force's intelligence director for Europe, Brig. Gen. Neal T. Robinson, agreed.

According to several officials, the goal became an obsession -- derided by targeting officials as
"T2K." Each morning, General Robinson briefed commanders on progress toward the goal. A
month into the campaign, they still had only 400 fixed targets, not counting tanks and other
weapons pilots were trying to hit in Kosovo.

General Clark declined to be interviewed for this article.

Picking targets is normally a painstaking process, involving reams of intelligence reports
checked and rechecked against satellite photographs. By mid-April, NATO reached out to any
military command with targeting expertise.

At that point, General Clark began to expand the scope of targets to include electrical grids
and commercial facilities like tobacco warehouses and the Yugo automobile car factory.
"You've destroyed virtually every military target of significance," an aide to General Clark said.
"Now what do you do? You start looking for other targets."

Even so, by the end of the war, NATO had produced only 1,021 fixed targets. Of those, they
bombed roughly 650.

Some senior officials played down the rush for targets, saying that as chaotic as the process
was, there were ultimately very few errors in targeting. But officials in Europe and Washington
maintained that as the pressure for targets intensified, proposals were not as thoroughly
reviewed as they could -- or should -- have been.

Among those was the one received by fax from the C.I.A.

The C.I.A. had provided information on scores of targets throughout the war, but it had not
previously been asked to propose its own, Mr. Pickering and other officials said. Its history of
picking targets has been checkered. During the Persian Gulf war, it sent bombers after a
supposed intelligence bunker that proved to be an air raid shelter filled with women and
children.

The agency has its own targeting cell, but it was the Counter-Proliferation Division, a small
office whose focus was the spread of missiles and nuclear, chemical and biological weapons,
that proposed this target.

Officers there saw the war as an opportunity to destroy the headquarters of the Federal
Directorate for Supply and Procurement, long a concern because of its suspected involvement
in smuggling missile parts to places like Libya and Iraq, intelligence officials said.

The directorate is an arm of Yugoimport, an ostensibly private corporation but one that like
most industry in Yugoslavia is closely linked to the ruling elite around Mr. Milosevic. Several
officials conceded that it had only a tangential relation to the war's objectives; the targeting
document showed that experts estimated only civilian casualties inside, not military
casualties.

"It had nothing to do with the war in the Balkans," an official said. "They were thinking, 'While
we're bombing anyway, here's a target that should have a great benefit to the nation and what
we're doing.' "

Other officials disputed that, citing intercepted radio transmissions and agents' reports that
the directorate was organizing truckloads of spare surface-to-air missile parts, as well as
artillery and mortar shells, for the Serbian forces.

Even so, when agency officials talked about the proposed target in at least three meetings,
they spent more time discussing whether they could legally justify the attack under the
international rules of war than they did about the location of the headquarters itself.

The division's officers had no specific expertise in targeting or the Balkans, the officials said.
None of those involved have been identified, but officials said the officer who has received the
most blame -- and was dismissed by Mr. Tenet -- was a retired Army officer who had been
contracted to work in the division.

He had been told to locate the directorate's headquarters and set to work, according to a
person familiar with his task. On April 9, he called the National Imagery and Mapping Agency in
suburban Washington requesting a map of Belgrade. Using it and two tourist maps, the officer
tried to pinpoint the headquarters, equipped only with its address.

A senior defense official said the address -- 2 Bulevar Umetnosti in New Belgrade -- came from
a letter intercepted by intelligence officials, though the address was easily available, including
from the directorate's internet site.

The NIMA map, produced in 1997, shows major buildings and geographic features. It does not
specify street addresses, but it identifies major landmarks. It was designed, a senior
intelligence official said, for ground operations, like the evacuation of personnel from the
American embassy.

One of the landmarks on the map is the headquarters of Mr. Milosevic's Socialist Party, which
is on a parallel street, Milentija Popovica, and which NATO bombed during the war. Knowing
that address and the address of other buildings on that same street, the officer used a
technique called "resection and intersection" to locate what he thought was the
headquarters.

The method involves finding addresses on parallel streets and drawing lines to the targeted
street on the presumption that numbering schemes are uniform. It is used for generally
locating landmarks in a city for such things as search and rescue missions. "To target based
on that is incomprehensible," one official said.

Having chosen what he thought was the directorate, the officer called NIMA on April 12 or 13
and asked for satellite images of the site, which he received on the 14th, officials said. At that
point a NIMA analyst assigned the building a number -- 0251WA0017 -- from the military's
"bombing encyclopedia," a worldwide compendium of potential targets and other landmarks.

According to the officials interviewed, the satellite images did not raise concerns. When Mr.
Pickering, the under secretary of state, briefed the Chinese about the bombing last summer,
he said there were no seals or flags that would identify it as a diplomatic compound. An
incredulous Chinese official asked why America's satellites did not see it was an embassy.
"Didn't you see the green tiles on the roof?" the official asked, according to an American who
was there.

In fact, a senior intelligence official said, satellite images contained clues that should at least
have prompted questions -- not necessarily that it was the embassy, but rather about whether
it was the headquarters of a Yugoslav arms agency.

"It doesn't look like an office building," the official said. "It looks like a hotel. It's too nice a
place. Given all the space around it, I didn't see external fencing that I would expect from a
government facility."

The Review: An Immense Error, Perfectly Packaged

Compounding the mistake, according to the officials, was the initiative taken by the officer
who located the target. He produced what one official called a "superficially perfect" proposal
by downloading from the military's secure intranet a targeting form and filling it out -- complete
with the "bombing encyclopedia" number, as well as eight-digit longitudinal and latitudinal
figures.

Impressively packaged, the proposal prompted no questions. The C.I.A.'s assistant director of
intelligence for military support, Brig. Gen. Roderick J. Isler, ultimately approved it, and it
arrived at the European Command and the Joint Chiefs of Staff appearing to be a more
advanced proposal than it was, the officials said.

"This target came with an aura of authority because it came from the C.I.A.," said John J.
Hamre, who recently stepped down as deputy secretary of defense.

Mr. Hamre said the Joint Chiefs never conducted a thorough review of the target. The reasons
are not clear. Instead the chiefs received two proposals for the same target, one from the
C.I.A. and another from European Command, which did not note that it originally came from the
agency, and approved it. "They got false confirmation," an intelligence official said.

Agency officials said their officers had never intended the target to be viewed by the Pentagon
as a complete proposal, but simply as a nomination. Instead, as one NATO officer put it, "it
went through like a cog on an assembly line."

By April 28, 10 days before the bombing, planners in Europe had assigned the target, like every
one in the war, a sequential number. It was No. 493, and the essential information about the
target was boiled down to a single document to be presented to President Clinton and other
NATO leaders.

This document identified the target as "Belgrade Warehouse 1," but under a heading called
"linkage" called it the "HQ for the Federal Directorate Supply and Procurement." The objective
was to "destroy warehouse and contents," which it went on to say would undercut the ability
of Serbian forces to receive new supplies.

It also classified the possibility for collateral damage as "tier 3 high," which an official said
referred to the likelihood of the impact of the bombs sending shards of glass flying
considerable distances. That indicated analysts were able to distinguish the embassy's
marble and glass structure. The directorate's headquarters was made of white stone.

Three red triangles on the image depict the points at which the bombs were to strike. The
document also estimated that casualties would range from three to seven civilians,
presumably those working inside, while the estimate for unintended civilian casualties, which
also included those who might happen by at the time, ranged from 25 to 50.

The bombing, in fact, killed three and wounded at least 20.

Mr. Tenet has said that the C.I.A. proposed only one target during the war. Actually, the agency
proposed two or three more, but after the embassy bombing, Pentagon officials refused to
strike them.

In the end, despite its supposed value, NATO never did attack the intended target.

Allied Concerns: An American Goal: Keeping Secrets

As with most of attacks during the war, especially the strikes in Belgrade, planning and
execution were done by Americans. In raids involving the stealthy B-2's and F-117 fighters,
many details about the attacks were classified as "U.S. only," mainly for fear of revealing
secrets about those aircraft.

After the war, some allies questioned the practice. The French Ministry of Defense's report on
the war last November complained of military operations "conducted by the United States
outside the strict NATO framework and procedures."

A senior NATO diplomat said the United States attacked 75 to 80 targets in this way. The
Chinese Embassy was one of them.

The control of information limited the number of allied officers who might have been able to
notice the targeting error.

Gen. Jean-Pierre Kelche, who as chief of the defense staff is France's top military officer, said
that in spite of the restrictions on the military operations, all of the specific targets were
reviewed by the political and military leaders of the major allies, including Prime Minister
Jacques Chirac of France and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain.

"It was supposed to be an arms storage facility," General Kelche said in an interview in Paris.
"It's clear the nature of that target did not create any problems for me."

He said the unilateral American operations were a political problem, but not an operational
one. He added, however, that the militaries of each country were responsible for reviewing
those targets its forces were scheduled to strike.

When Mr. Tenet dismissed the officer blamed for targeting and disciplined six others, he
singled out another for praise. That officer, also not identified, raised questions about the]]> Kosovo War daniela https://www.viexpo.com/kosovo-war/archive-through-april-19-2000/paged/3/#post-22006 https://www.viexpo.com/kosovo-war/archive-through-april-19-2000/paged/3/#post-22005 Thu, 20 Apr 2000 00:23:00 +0000 in one place; though, I'm also certain that some can object to
these copy-paste stuff...

THE NEW YORK TIMES
April 16, 2000

WEEK IN REVIEW

WARBUCKS

How to Build Weapons When Money Is No Object

By TIM WEINER

WASHINGTON -- The crash last week of an Osprey aircraft,
which killed 19 marines, was a grim reminder that the military
builds weapons and aircraft that cost fortunes and still fail.

The Pentagon will spend $310 billion this year. That is more than the
world's 12 next-largest militaries combined, more than half the budget
of the United States, excluding benefits like Medicare and Social
Security. But that money buys weapons that "take far too long to
build, cost far too much and don't deliver as promised," said Louis J.
Rodrigues, the top expert on military procurement at the General
Accounting Office, the independent investigative arm of Congress.

The bill for six new systems -- three new tactical jet fighters,
along with the Osprey, the Comanche helicopter and the
beleaguered missile defense program -- will come to more
than half a trillion dollars. Most, if not all, will go into
full-scale production with open questions about their cost and
effectiveness.

The Pentagon's position is plain: there can be no price tag
on national security. These weapons represent America's global
superiority. If they are costly, so be it.

"We're going to have to pay for it," Defense Secretary William Cohen
told Congress last month when asked about the price of these weapons.
"It's going to cost more money, and we ought to face up to it and say
we're a rich country." He was seconded by Gen. Henry H. Shelton,
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who testified that "there simply is no
alternative" to spending hundreds of billions on "state-of-the-art weapons
and technology to defend America."

But the issue of how wisely the Pentagon spends money persists. Not
that much has changed since 1969, when an Air Force financial analyst,
A. Ernest Fitzgerald, uncovered the very first billion-dollar cost overrun,
on the Air Force's C-5A plane.

"There are only two phases of a weapons program," Mr. Fitzgerald
famously said. " 'Too early to tell' and 'Too late to stop.' "

Billion-dollar overruns are now commonplace. Last week alone brought
three of them: more than $1 billion on a new version of the Patriot missile,
which failed in the 1991 gulf war; more than $1.4 billion on the Crusader
artillery system and more than $2 billion on a new Navy destroyer. And
though the Marines insisted last week that the Osprey is a well-tested
bargain at $40 million a plane, Pentagon records released on Wednesday
show that the true figure is $83 million, and that the plane still has crucial
tests to pass.

"Fundamental weapons system problems persist," said David M. Walker,
the comptroller general of the United States, who runs the General
Accounting Office. "We have a process that is very costly and does not
give you what you want."

That process begins with top-secret threat assessments. What if an ally
buys American fighter jets and turns into an enemy? The Pentagon has
responded to that possibility with three tactical fighter programs, at a total
projected cost of $350 billion.

Envisioning threats creates an urgency about finding technologies to
defeat them. Thus, the threat of nuclear annihilation led to the "peace
shield" -- the Star Wars system on which $60 billion has been spent
without a single working system to show for it. The Pentagon said last
week it would spend $30 billion more on a far smaller shield.

Repeatedly, Mr. Rodrigues said, "we bring in critical technology that is
unproven," instead of drawing on existing state-of-the-art systems that
have passed rigorous tests. This leads to building systems while still trying
to figure out how to make them work. For example, the Air Force has
begun building F-22's -- at $200 million per plane, history's most
expensive jet fighter -- even though the design keeps changing and the
on-board computers need testing.

Weapons that depend on unproven technology often fail to pass tests.
The tendency, then, is to fudge the tests, and in fact, most of the
Pentagon's biggest new weapons have been marked by "insufficient and
often unrealistic testing," along with overstated performance claims and
understated cost reports, the accounting office says.

Uncertain technology also leads to
development periods of 15 to 20 years, twice as long as a generation
ago. Over time, costs rise, old weapons wear out and the new ones may
not even meet the nation's evolving needs when they are delivered.

"Many of the systems that are being produced and are being
contemplated were designed during the cold war," Mr. Walker said. "But
do they make sense? What is the current and projected threat? We are
so far ahead of the rest of the world. How far ahead do you need to be?
Wants are unlimited -- but what do we really need?"

Ultimately, changes in weapons procurement may not come until costs
get so high that they dry up funds for recruiting, training and paying
servicemen and women. But it's clear what needs to be done.

First, the Pentagon must begin acting more like a business, using proven
technology when possible, rather than inventing technologies and hoping
they will work, Mr. Rodrigues said.

Second, the services must stop warring among themselves for money.
Retired Adm. Bill Owens, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in
1994 and 1995, says the services must be stripped of the power to
demand new weapons, which should reside with the secretary of defense
and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This would constitute a
revolution inside the Pentagon.

Now is the time to change, while America stands unchallenged in military
and political power, Admiral Owens said. But of the Pentagon, he
warned, "If we don't get some major reform done inside that building in
the way we buy weapons systems, we will pass some critical point where
we no longer can do what the nation needs us to do."]]> Kosovo War daniela https://www.viexpo.com/kosovo-war/archive-through-april-19-2000/paged/3/#post-22005 https://www.viexpo.com/kosovo-war/archive-through-april-19-2000/paged/3/#post-22004 Thu, 20 Apr 2000 00:18:00 +0000 April 16, 2000

American Effort to Isolate Belgrade Falters

By STEVEN ERLANGER

BELGRADE, Serbia, April 15 -- Despite the indictment of
President Slobodan Milosevic on war crimes charges and the
efforts of Washington to isolate his regime, the Western diplomatic
quarantine of Yugoslavia has broken down, with every major European
country represented here by senior diplomats.

Only the United States has no diplomats here and has no plans to send
any as long as Mr. Milosevic remains in power, even though it continues
to retain a local staff of about 50 people.

Most NATO countries withdrew their diplomats during the war, but have
slowly seen the need for some representation in Belgrade, generally
regarding Yugoslavia as too important to ignore. But sending new
ambassadors is awkward because convention requires a meeting with the
head of state, who in this case has been indicted for war crimes.

On the French Embassy here, there is a sign that says, "Embassy of
Switzerland, French interest section." But the embassy functions with
some three diplomats, who issue visas, provide consular services but also
behave like diplomats. Similarly, the British, with a senior diplomat who
had already served four years here, are formally represented by Brazil,
the Germans by Japan.

And both France and Germany have issued limited visas, for European
parliamentary meetings, to Yugoslav officials like the former Socialist
Party spokesman, Ivica Dacic, who are on the European and American
lists of people banned from traveling to the West.

In general, the Europeans want to distinguish between the isolation of the
government and Serbian people, who still regard themselves as
Western-oriented. The tension between the Clinton administration and
the European Union over the efficiency of sanctions and how to bring
down Mr. Milosevic surfaces regularly, with many Europeans believing
that opening up trade, contacts and travel with Serbia will bring down
Mr. Milosevic much faster than isolation, which the regime manipulates in
its propaganda of a brave Serbia surrounded by enemies.

This winter, for example, the Europeans went ahead with oil and energy
aid for Serbian cities controlled by the opposition against strong initial
American objections, and the Europeans also forced through the lifting of
a ban on air travel to and from Belgrade -- one of the main requests of
the democratic opposition here.

Just last week, Australia rebuffed sharp American complaints and sent a
new ambassador to Belgrade who presented his credentials to Mr.
Milosevic on Thursday, together with the new Russian ambassador, in a
ceremony covered lavishly in the state news media here.

Washington and many European capitals are trying to avoid giving Mr.
Milosevic that kind of propaganda opportunity, which would let him
show that the world is coming to terms with his survival in power.

The Australian foreign minister, Alexander Downer, said that Canberra
had refused a direct American request, reportedly from Secretary of
State Madeleine K. Albright, to drop the appointment, or at least to skip
the meeting with Mr. Milosevic and fax the new ambassador's credentials
instead.

But the Yugoslav Foreign Ministry has insisted that countries abide by the
Vienna conventions governing diplomacy and present credentials to the
head of state. The Americans "asked us if we would fax the credentials,"
Mr. Downer said. "The Yugoslav authorities made it clear they wouldn't
accept faxed credentials."

The Greeks and Italians, NATO members with traditionally close
historical and business ties to the Serbs, kept embassies open here during
the bombing war, as did Canada. The Italians also want to send a new
ambassador here, but are trying to negotiate a way to avoid a meeting
with the indicted Mr. Milosevic.

But they are expected to have no more success than the Australians did,
which will force them to either meet Mr. Milosevic or downgrade their
official representation here to a chargé d'affaires or deputy chief of
mission ad interim, appointments that do not require the presentation of
credentials to the head of state.

Diplomats here said they had hoped that the strange tale of the
Portuguese ambassador, Antonio Tanger de Correa, would create a
model. Portugal is the current president of the European Union, a
six-month term that ends with June, and Lisbon requested Belgrade to
approve the appointment before the war and Mr. Milosevic's indictment.

Unusually, given his European role, Belgrade agreed to accept his
credentials at the level of the first deputy foreign minister. But the
government does not invite Mr. Tanger de Correa to receptions or
official meetings because his credentials have not been presented to the
head of state, inviting the Portuguese deputy chief of mission instead.

"At first we thought there would be a 'Portuguese model,' " one diplomat
said. "But we were wrong. The Portuguese ambassador is really treated
like a nonentity here, not really like a diplomat at all."

A Yugoslav diplomat said: "We are a real country and not some African
colony," stressing that diplomatic conventions require ambassadorial
appointments to be accepted by heads of state.

Other governments have avoided the problem by not rotating
ambassadors or by bringing in lower-ranking diplomats, effectively
downgrading relations. This is what Washington had done even before
the NATO bombing war, with the embassy here headed by a senior
diplomat, Richard Miles, who had been an ambassador in other countries
but had a deputy rank here. Mr. Miles is an ambassador again, now in
Bulgaria.

The Czech Republic, which is applying to the European Union, has kept
its ambassador here, Ivan Busniak, for about four years. But Prague is
unsure if it will rotate him. If he leaves, Prague -- mindful of its Western
orientation -- has decided to replace him with a deputy chief of mission
ad interim "and wait for better times," the ambassador said.

The Clinton administration sharply denied a report in last week's Sunday
Times of London that it would send a low-level diplomat here by June.
The State Department spokesman, James P. Rubin, said: "There is no
consideration whatsoever about returning a diplomat to Belgrade." But he
said that discussions continued through third parties, including the Swiss,
about appointing "protecting powers" in each other's country to take care
of consular problems, property questions and other issues.

But even those discussions are frozen, officials of both countries say. The
Americans objected to Belgrade's request that China act for it in
Washington, so Belgrade objected to the American request for first
Sweden and then Switzerland. Washington wants Belgrade to pick a
country that is traditionally neutral; Belgrade says it can pick whatever
country it wants, and it has also asked for the keys to its Washington
embassy, which the Americans sealed during the war.]]> Kosovo War daniela https://www.viexpo.com/kosovo-war/archive-through-april-19-2000/paged/3/#post-22004 https://www.viexpo.com/kosovo-war/archive-through-april-19-2000/paged/3/#post-22003 Thu, 20 Apr 2000 00:06:00 +0000 April 15, 2000

Kosovo Polje, April 14th - Ethnic-
Albanian bandits threw bombs on three Serbian houses in the night
between Wednesday and Thursday, in Kosovo Polje.

An explosive device was thrown into the house of Rajko Masulovic
in Branko Radicevic Street. During that incident he and his family were in
the neighbor's house. In the fire which then broke out a part of the house
was burned down, as well as the furniture and personal papers of
Masulovic. "Molotov cocktail" was also thrown into the house of Zlata
Colic and Ljubisa Bojanic. Bojanic`s home has been the target of similar
attacks several times so far.

It is suspected that Sefedin Hida organizes and also participates in the
nocturnal bomb and robbery attacks. His daughter and son-in -law work
as translators at UNMIK.

Bullies attacked, the same night, the house of Gavriolo Radulovic in Cara
Dusana Street, and broke all windows. This was the fourth attack on
Radulovic. He was also shot at two months ago.

All these assaults have the aim to frighten Serbs, and are conducted after
their refusal to sell their houses and estates to ethnic-Albanians.]]> Kosovo War daniela https://www.viexpo.com/kosovo-war/archive-through-april-19-2000/paged/3/#post-22003 https://www.viexpo.com/kosovo-war/archive-through-april-19-2000/paged/2/#post-22002 Thu, 20 Apr 2000 00:03:00 +0000 April 16, 2000

Pristina, April 15th - Members of the KFOR Peace Forces in
Kosmet seized yesterday at the checkpoint 10 kilometers from
Gnjilane large quantity of arms, including mines and shells. The
arms were transported by Albanians, said today KFOR in
Pristina, and western agencies report.

On that occasion, two Albanian truck-drivers were arrested and put into
custody in the American base "Bondsteel", KFOR spokesman, Major
Frank Benjaminsen said, as AFP reports.

According to his words, while searching the truck, Austrian peacekeepers
found 77 antitank mines, 40 shells, over 1000 bullets, one semiautomatic
gun, two rifles and a machine gun.

Benjaminsen said there was no information about the destination of the
arms.

The fact that this amount of arms can be found in the possession of those
who were "disarmed" long ago, as international forces have been claiming
for months now, remains without explanation.]]> Kosovo War daniela https://www.viexpo.com/kosovo-war/archive-through-april-19-2000/paged/2/#post-22002 https://www.viexpo.com/kosovo-war/archive-through-april-19-2000/paged/2/#post-22001 Wed, 19 Apr 2000 23:58:00 +0000 April 16 2000

Ailing troops sue over
Balkan war syndrome

SOLDIERS who served in the former Yugoslavia plan to
sue the Ministry of Defence (MoD)after suffering chronic
health problems they believe were caused by "Balkan war
syndrome", writes Lois Rogers.

Doctors link their symptoms to exposure to depleted
uranium in anti-tank missiles used during the Kosovo conflict.
Research has shown that the heavy metal causes health
problems leading to cancer, neurological and immune system
defects and reproductive system damage.

Up to 10,500 Britons were sent to Kosovo to assist in
peacekeeping missions and many were exposed to the fine,
poisonous dust, which remains in the atmosphere and
pollutes water supplies, after Nato's bombardment.

However, the MoD said: "We have done considerably more
research into depleted uranium than other nations as it has
been raised as a concern for a number of Gulf war veterans.
We have seen no evidence to suggest it is the cause of any
illness among them and we are not aware of any
compensation claims from Kosovo veterans."

Twelve servicemen - 11 of whom are still serving - are
preparing to sue. If the initial claims are successful, they
could open the floodgates for a multi-million-pound group
action which could deeply embarrass the government.

The MoD is still struggling to fend off claims by thousands of
Gulf war veterans, who say they were made seriously ill by a
hastily administered cocktail of vaccines in-tended to protect
them from biological warfare agents.

Belgium, which had troops serving alongside British soldiers
in Kosovo, has already begun a systematic review of the
health of the 14,000 troops it sent to the region. Tests have
identified cases of men suffering the effects of exposure to
uranium - even though they were not de-ployed in high-risk
areas.

In Britain, however, the official response has been
unequivocal. A secret memo circulated two weeks ago to
army medical staff by the biological weapons unit at Porton
Down has insisted there was no evidence of risk to British
troops who served in Kosovo.

"I don't know how they can say that," said a 27-year-old
man still in the airborne unit he served with in Kosovo. He
has been crippled by fatigue.

"We are expected to do regular five-mile runs as part of our
training, and I just can't make it," he said. "I am dreading my
next medical in June. I am going to be thrown out."

Another 24-year-old, who is also still in the army, re-ported
debilitating fatigue and excruciating joint pain. "People like us
just have no future," he said.

America was the only allied force to use depleted uranium
(DU) in its missiles. So far it has admitted to firing about 10
tons of DU-bearing missiles from aircraft over Kosovo last
year. Requests for details on missile rounds used in Serbia
have been resisted.

Dan Fahey, a DU re-searcher at the Military Toxins Project
in Washington, said: "We know it has been used in many
more locations than we have been led to believe. The biggest
danger is to the local population."

Additional reporting: Estelle Doyle]]> Kosovo War daniela https://www.viexpo.com/kosovo-war/archive-through-april-19-2000/paged/2/#post-22001 https://www.viexpo.com/kosovo-war/archive-through-april-19-2000/paged/2/#post-22000 Fri, 14 Apr 2000 12:18:00 +0000 justification was quickly rendered void by their
WW2-style bombing and their disregarding of
ANYthing ANYone had to say on the matter.
=
unicef, all i see from my distant vantage point
are centuries-old buildings pointlessly destroyed,
and too much _death_ bestowed upon the innocent
and uninvolved.
milosevic, running dog that he may well be, is
still in power and _nothing_ was made better.

and _more_ NATO bombing _still_ wont make
_anything_ better.

staying tuned, we are...we so far away from
there..]]> Kosovo War L'menexe https://www.viexpo.com/kosovo-war/archive-through-april-19-2000/paged/2/#post-22000 https://www.viexpo.com/kosovo-war/archive-through-april-19-2000/paged/2/#post-21999 Thu, 13 Apr 2000 12:03:00 +0000
Personaly, I think the Disney Channel is more educational.]]> Kosovo War unicef https://www.viexpo.com/kosovo-war/archive-through-april-19-2000/paged/2/#post-21999 https://www.viexpo.com/kosovo-war/archive-through-april-19-2000/paged/2/#post-21998 Wed, 12 Apr 2000 20:15:00 +0000 staff into
newsroom

Julian Borger in Washington
Wednesday April 12, 2000

Two leading US news channels
have admitted that they allowed
psychological operations officers
from the military to work as
placement interns at their
headquarters during the Kosovo
war.

Cable Network News (CNN) and
National Public Radio, (NPR)
denied that the "psy-ops" officers
influenced news coverage and
said the internships had been
stopped as soon as senior
managers found out . For its part,
the army said the programme
was only intended to give young
army media specialists some
experience of how the news
industry functioned.

The interns were restricted to
mainly menial tasks such as
answering phones, but the fact
that military propaganda experts
were even present in newsrooms
as reports from the Kosovo
conflict were being broadcast
has triggered a storm of criticism
and raised questions about the
independence of these networks.

"Maybe CNN was the target of a
psy-ops penetration and is still
too naive to figure out what was
going on," wrote Alexander
Cockburn, a liberal newspaper
commentator. "In the Kosovo
conflict, as with other recent
wars, CNN's screen was filled
with an unending procession of
bellicose advocates of bombing,
many of them retired US
generals."

CNN hosted five psy-ops officers
as temporary, unpaid workers
last year, while NPR took three,
all from the army's 4th
Psychological Operations Group,
based at Fort Bragg, North
Carolina. The army's
psychological operations are
prohibited by law from
manipulating the US media.

After the existence of the CNN
internship programme was
published in the Dutch
newspaper, Trouw, the network
immediately cancelled it.

Susan Binford, the head of CNN
public relations said: "Is the
whole thing embarrassing? Yes.
Did it compromise us
journalistically? No."

However, the independent
watchdog group, Fairness &
Accuracy in Reporting asked in a
press release: "Even if the
psy-ops officers working in the
newsroom did not influence news
reporting, did the network allow
the military to conduct an
intelligence-gathering mission
against CNN itself?"


http://www.newsunlimited.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,158410,00.html]]> Kosovo War daniela https://www.viexpo.com/kosovo-war/archive-through-april-19-2000/paged/2/#post-21998