By Brian Carnell

Sunday, January 9, 2000

After showing a video last year purporting to demonstrate that NATO pilots did not have time to see a civilian train before they "accidentally" blew it to bits during the war against Yugoslavia, the Pentagon recently admitted the tape it showed was not in real time but was in fact compressed and sped up three times faster than normal.

The Pentagon claims it did not intentionally mislead the media and the public. Translation -- they think we are idiots. In fact, US Air Force officials apparently knew for several months that the released videotape was inaccurate. Did they come forward immediately to rectify the error? Of course not. Only after a German newspaper started poking holes into the Pentagon's story a few weeks ago did anyone from the US military come forward to correct the "inadvertent" error.

Personally I do not think it matters much whether the tape was slowed down or sped up. We now know that the principal justification for going to war against Yugoslavia -- to present massive human rights violations committed by Serbian forces -- was largely a lie. Yugoslavian forces committed human rights violations, to be sure, but nothing approaching the Hitler-ian level President Clinton and Secretary of State Madeline Albright said made intervention absolutely necessary.

One of the most fundamental ways of judging the legitimacy of warfare is the principal of proportionality -- the suffering warfare imposes should be proportional to the suffering it is intended to stop or prevent. With the supposed widespread human rights violations exposed as nonsense, the actions taken by NATO forces clearly violated the proportionality principal. In fact NATO actions may have resulted in nearly as many civilian deaths as Serbian forces did.

And shame on the national media for their coverage of this and other stories surrounding the war in Yugoslavia. When the train bombing originally occurred, American viewers were treated to the compressed video tape supporting the Pentagon's decision over and over again. The retraction barely made it onto network news shows. NBC, for example, didn't run its story on the new evidence until 20 minutes into its news broadcast. Along with the failure to include any discussion on evidence that NATO intentionally bombed the Chinese embassy, the broadcast media's performance in covering the war against Yugoslavia has been pathetic on all fronts.

Source:

Pentagon says it did not intentionally manipulate Kosovo war tape from CNN

Discuss (0 Replies) | Printer Friendly