Dear RN,
Bill Blum aptly titled this message "Surprise, Surprise".... By now, we have
gotten so we expect lies from our governments. ....I think these lies (like
the lie about Iraqi soldiers taking babies from incubators in Kuwait) are
the best evidence we have that something is seriously wrong. It is one thing
to do something stupid but believe sincerely that you are doing the best
thing. It is quite another to do something you know is wrong and try to get
away with it by pretending you believe you are doing it for "humanitarian"
reasons.
Of course, when NATO finally admitted it had bombed the Chinese embassy
intentionally, in October, the embassy bombing was no longer front page news
so most of our neighbours still don't know they were lied to...
all the best, Jan
*********************************************************************
From: •••@••.•••
Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1999 21:33:33 EDT
Subject: surprise, surprise
Nato bombed Chinese deliberately
John Sweeney and Jens Holsoe in Copenhagen and Ed Vulliamy in Washington
The Observer (London), Sunday October 17, 1999
Nato deliberately bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the war in
Kosovo after discovering it was being used to transmit Yugoslav army
communications.
According to senior military and intelligence sources in Europe and the US
the Chinese embassy was removed from a prohibited targets list after Nato
electronic intelligence (Elint) detected it sending army signals to
Milosevic's forces.
The story is confirmed in detail by three other Nato officers - a flight
controller operating in Naples, an intelligence officer monitoring Yugoslav
radio traffic from Macedonia and a senior headquarters officer in Brussels.
They all confirm that they knew in April that the Chinese embassy was acting
as a 'rebro' [rebroadcast] station for the Yugoslav army (VJ) after alliance
jets had successfully silenced Milosevic's own transmitters.
The Chinese were also suspected of monitoring the cruise missile attacks on
Belgrade, with a view to developing effective counter-measures against US
missiles.
The intelligence officer, who was based in Macedonia during the bombing,
said: 'Nato had been hunting the radio transmitters in Belgrade. When the
President's [Milosevic's] residence was bombed on 23 April, the signals
disappeared for 24 hours. When they came on the air again, we discovered they
came from the embassy compound.' The success of previous strikes had forced
the VJ to use Milosevic's residence as a rebroadcast station. After that was
knocked out, it was moved to the Chinese embassy. The air controller said:
'The Chinese embassy had an electronic profile, which Nato located and
pinpointed.'
The Observer investigation, carried out jointly with Politiken newspaper in
Denmark, will cause embarrassment for Nato and for the British government. On
Tuesday, the Queen and the Prime Minister will host a state visit by the
President of China, Jiang Zemin. He is to stay at Buckingham Palace.
Jiang Zemin is still said to be outraged at the 7 May attack, which came
close to splitting the alliance.The official Nato line, as expressed by
President Bill Clinton and CIA director George Tenet, was that the attack on
the Chinese Embassy was a mistake. Defence Secretary William Cohen said: 'One
of our planes attacked the wrong target because the bombing instructions were
based on an outdated map.'
Later, a source in the US National Imagery and Mapping Agency said that the
'wrong map' story was 'a damned lie'.
Tenet apologised last July, saying: 'The President of the United States has
expressed our sincere regret at the loss of life in this tragic incident and
has offered our condolences to the Chinese people and especially to the
families of those who lost their lives in this mistaken attack.
Nato's apology was predicated on the excuse that the three missiles which
landed in one corner of the embassy block were meant to be targeted at the
Yugoslav Federal Directorate for Supply and Procurement, the FDSP. But
inquiries have revealed there never was a VJ directorate of supply and
procurement at the site named by Tenet. The VJ office for supplies - which
Tenet calls FDSP - is some 500 metres down the street from the address he
gave. It was bombed later.
Moreover the CIA and other Nato intelligence agencies, such as Britain's MI6
and the code-breakers at GCHQ, would have listened in to communication
traffic from the Chinese embassy as a matter of course since it moved to the
site in 1996.
A Nato flight control officer in Naples also confirmed to us that a map of
'non-targets': churches, hospitals and embassies, including the Chinese, did
exist. On this 'don't hit' map, the Chinese embassy was correctly located at
its current site, and not where it had been until 1996 - as claimed by the US
and NATO.
Why the Chinese were prepared to help Milosevic is a more murky question. One
possible explanation is that the Chinese lack Stealth technology, and the
Yugoslavs, having shot down a Stealth fighter in the early days of the air
campaign, were in a good position to trade. The Chinese may have calculated
that Nato would not dare strike its embassy, but the five-storey building was
emptied every night of personnel. Only three people died in the attack, two
of whom were, reportedly, not journalists - the official Chinese version -
but intelligence officers.
The Chinese military attache, Ven Bo Koy, who was seriously wounded in the
attack and is now in hospital in China, told Dusan Janjic, the respected
president of Forum for Ethnic Relations in Belgrade, only hours before the
attack, that the embassy was monitoring incoming cruise missiles in order to
develop counter-measures.
Nato spokesman Lee McClenny yesterday stood by the official version. 'It was
a terrible mistake,' he said, 'and we have apologised.' A spokesman for the
Chinese embassy in London said yesterday: 'We do not believe that the embassy
was bombed because of a mistake with an out-of-date map.'
**************************************************************
From: "Viviane Lerner" <•••@••.•••>
To: "GSN" <•••@••.•••>
Subject: KOSOVO: First came the war, then the winter
Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2000 15:58:17 -1000
POWER CRISIS WORSENING
IN KOSOVO
======================
PRISTINA, January 15, 2000 (The Associated Press)
First came the war, then the winter - leaving the
province of Kosovo cold and dark with little
electricity.
In the snow-covered capital, Pristina, the standard
greeting is: ``Do you have power?'' and U.N. officials
advise residents to huddle together for warmth.
The majority of Pristina's 600,000 or so residents
have been receiving electricity for less than six
hours a day. Some have gone without for 48 hours in a
stretch.
It's a problem that has disrupted regular life in
Kosovo, caused much discomfort and posed danger in
homes and hospitals alike. Because water is pumped by
electricity, the outages have caused pipes to run dry,
which in turn has caused shutdowns in the central
heating system.
All but emergency surgery has been canceled at the
hospital. Without heat, city schools have been forced
to close in the afternoons. Only businesses and
restaurants that have generators can keep regular
hours.
========
THE NEWS
========
The news edited by Rade Kuzmanovic
AIM, Belgrade, January 15, 2000 17:17h
===================================================
For more information visit our Academic Information
Network site at http://www.aim.ac.yu/
