Left I on the News

More mass graves vanish, this time in Kosovo

Left I on the News has touched on the bogus nature of claims of "300,000 Iraqis in mass graves" many times, most extensively here. And more than a year ago, we noted: "Time after time, as in Kosovo, claims of genocide or hundreds of thousands killed have turned out to be wildly exxagerated."

And today, a little more of the truth about the mass graves of Kosovo has emerged (full story only available to subscribers):

"The war crimes tribunal in The Hague is 'beginning to panic' over its case against former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic according to a Vancouver detective sent to unearth mass graves in Kosovo and a Canadian filmmaker who documented the exhumations.

"'I would think they'll have a tough time with the charge of genocide with only 5,000 bodies,' said retired Vancouver detective sergeant Brian Honeybourn. 'It seems as though The Hague is beginning to panic.'

"Mr. Milosevic's trial is to resume next week with the former Serbian dictator defending himself against charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. Former Canadian Supreme Court justice Louise Arbour made history when she laid the charges -- the first against a head of state -- as the tribunal's special prosecutor.

"Calgary filmmaker Garth Pritchard and Sgt. Honeybourn are critical of Ms. Arbour, now UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and her claims that the Serbs, directed by Mr. Milosevic, murdered as many as 200,000 civilians during its ethnic cleansing of Kosovo.

"The alleged massacres were used by U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Western leaders as justification for their bombing campaign and intervention in Kosovo, and were regularly and routinely reported as fact on television networks such as the CBC and CNN, as the West backed the Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) against the Serbs.

"'This was a massacre that never happened,' Mr. Pritchard maintains.

"Sgt. Honeybourn and forensic team leader Brian Strongman echoed Mr. Pritchard's doubts that the genocidal massacre by the Serbs ever took place.

"'I can't say that there weren't 200,000 bodies because I wasn't covering the entire country,' said Sgt. Honeybourn.

"'But I never saw any sign of anything like 200,000. If there were that many, then why did they have us exhuming single graves? The biggest mass grave we examined contained about 20 and there was another one of 11. But mostly our nine-member team worked on single graves.'

"In the six weeks Sgt. Honeybourn spent digging up fetid graves in Kosovo during the sweltering summer of 1999, the Canadian team exhumed 86 bodies."

Just one more object lesson in not believing anything that you hear from the U.S. government or the corporate media. Their modus operandi is to demonize people and countries (Castro/Cuba, Kim/North Korea, Hussein/Iraq, Milosevic/Serbia, etc.) and then count on the American public to believe whatever swill they are fed about the demonized. Will people (like, just for a recent example, the Washington Post film reviewer mentioned in the post just below this one) who realize they were lied to and manipulated about Iraq ever learn this lesson, and stop believing everything else they are fed? I hope so, although my confidence is low, because people who fundamentally buy into "the system" ("democracy", capitalism, imperialism) have a hard time seeing through even obvious lies because they have so much of an investment (psychological if not financial) in that system.