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Citizens of a free country ought to
expect they won't be burdened with the kind of propaganda
barrage that has come to be associated with Nazi "interior
ministers" such as Josef Goebbles or Soviet "media spokesmen"
like Vladimir Posner. However, the more information that
comes out about the NATO war in Kosovo, the more evident is
the fact that NATO made an apparent "policy decision" to lie
about Serbian atrocities. It seems the western democracies
"stole a page from the play books" of their former
totalitarian adversaries in Germany and the Soviet Union.
Writing recently in Liberty Magazine,
David Ramsey Steele points out that in Kosovo we were told
before the bombings that there was mass genocide occurring,
the figure of "100,000 or more" was tossed around even
though there was no evidence to back-up this claim. One
media pundit suggested the number would be a
quarter-of-a-million dead. NATO even gave a name to this
"campaign of mass genocide," it was dubbed "Operation
Horseshoe" but, as Steele says, the factual basis for the
existence of such a genocide is spurious at best. In fact,
Steele likens it to the Bryce report that reported falsified
claims of genocide in Belgium in World War I.
Later after the NATO bombs began
dropping, the official NATO claim was dropped to around
10,000 as it became clear no mass graves or killing fields
even existed. The actual number of people found in the
reported mass-graves totals slightly more than 2,000, a far
cry from the hundreds of thousands that we were told
originally. The loss of 2,000 lives is a great tragedy, but
there are more Americans than that killed domestically every
year and it hardly warrants the kind of violent response we
saw in Kosovo. In fact, Mr. Steele states that Kosovo was
safer than any major U.S. city prior to the NATO bombing.
Moreover, as Steele shows, it is hardly evident that each of
those bodies was killed as a result of a campaign of
genocide.
Finally, Steele points out that the
stories about Kosovo came not only from NATO officers but
also from officials of the United Nations as well as from
our own government. However, a few sources closely followed
developments and seemed to get the story about right. Pablo
Ordaz of El Pais magazine, Audrey Gillan of the
London Review of Books and even two members of an
inspection team sent to Kosovo for the purpose of
investigating purported mass graves all challenged the
stories of the propaganda machine.
Steele also shows that while we were told
of ethnic cleansing and Kosovars who were being forced from
their homes, the truth of the matter is they were being
forced from their homes because of the danger and
destruction being caused by NATO bombing in the region. If
anything, this so-called ethnic cleansing appears as a
direct result of NATO action. In fact, as Steele states, now
that NATO and the KLA have control of Kosovo there have been
widespread reports that the people we were supposedly
protecting, the Kosovars, are now engaged in a murdering
spree against the Serbians.
Instead of hearing the truth from our
leadership, we were fed emotional tales of mass killing that
were entirely blown out of proportion in order to justify
force and violence in the region.
The sad trail of lies in Kosovo merely
reinforces two facts. The first is that our republic depends
upon a press that will question the claims of our leaders
instead of just accepting them. The second is that Congress
has shirked both its Constitutional responsibility to
declare war before U.S. troops are sent into battle and its
oversight responsibility to closely monitor the
administration in its carrying out of foreign policy
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