Dubious Sources:
How Project Censored Joined The Whitewash of Serb AtrocitiesBy David
Walls
[from New Politics, vol. 9, no. 1 (new series),
whole no. 33, Summer 2002]
| David Walls is professor
of sociology at Sonoma State University. He is the author of The
Activist's Almanac: The Concerned Citizen's Guide to the Leading
Advocacy Organizations in America (Simon &
Schuster/Fireside, 1993). |
FOR 25 YEARS, PROJECT CENSORED has scanned the
alternative press for hot stories that the mainstream media fail to cover. Each
year it designates 10 top "censored" stories (along with the next 15 runners
up), drawing on the work of Sonoma State University students and faculty,
community volunteers, and a national panel of media judges to review the stories
for relevance and accuracy. For many, these awards have become "Alternative
Pulitzers," commendations for excellence in independent reporting. At its best,
the project has provided a vital corrective to bias and complacency in the
corporate-dominated media.
I had been on friendly terms for several years with Project Censored's founder,
Carl Jensen, and, more recently, the current director, Peter Phillips. As
manager of Sonoma State University's foundation for a time, I cheered with
Jensen when he brought in the first modest checks from that limited circle of
progressive foundations and philanthropists willing to fund critical media
projects. After watching Jensen run Project Censored out of his hip pocket, I
thought it a wonder that he managed, with these small grants and an enthusiastic
group of undergraduate students, to turn out an annual book with a commercial
publisher since 1993, plus a 20th anniversary collection in 1997.1 As
Jensen made plans to retire in 1997, few sympathizers thought the project would
survive for long. That Jensen could defy "founder's syndrome" and turn his baby
over to someone else was another small miracle.
When the highly improbable comes to pass, you want to cut it a little slack. And
Phillips, his anointed successor, is, like me, a lefty sociologist. When I had
disagreements with Project Censored's selections over the years, I shelved them,
rationalizing that the media are not my field and I was busy enough with my own
work. So when I surveyed the Censored 2000 volume, I was surprised by
my reaction to its treatment of Kosovo. Project Censored had given this single
topic an unprecedented five story awards plus a commentary by Michael Parenti,
who has served on Project Censored's national panel of judges for several years.
Even more troubling, for two years in a row Project Censored had whitewashed
human rights atrocities committed by Serbs in the former Yugoslavia: Censored
1999 denies gruesome crimes at the Omarska camp in Bosnia in 1992 and Censored
2000 denies a massacre of civilians at Racak in Kosovo in 1999.
Reliance
on dubious sources and a lack of rigorous research and fact-checking have
tarnished the project's reputation as a media watchdog. On the subject of the
former Yugoslavia, Project Censored, I sadly concluded, had departed the terrain
of the democratic Left for a netherworld of conspiracy theorists,
Marxist-Leninist sects, and apologists for authoritarian regimes.
Pipelines and Lead Mines
ODDLY ENOUGH, Censored 2000's top- ranked
story on Kosovo is the least substantial: story #6, "NATO Defends Private
Economic Interests in the Balkans." Of the three articles cited, two are about
oil from the Caspian Sea region, arguing that a pipeline has to be built through
the Balkans because shipping oil across the Black Sea and through the Bosporus
would be too environmentally risky. There is legitimate concern over an
excessive number of tankers passing the narrow waterway near Istanbul, but the
remedy given most serious consideration is a pipeline through Turkey to the
Mediterranean. Although a Balkan pipeline route has been the subject of a modest
feasibility study, the U.S. government continues to support a pipeline proposed
by BP Amoco and Chevron from Baku in Azerbaijan to the Turkish port of Ceyhan on
the Mediterranean. That puts the pipeline through the Caucasus, nearly a
thousand miles east of the Balkans.2
The
third article cited in story #6 is by Sara Flounders, "Kosovo: It's About the
Mines," originally from a July 1998 issue of Workers World, the
publication of the Workers World Party (WWP), a Leninist sect formed by the late
Sam Marcy in 1959. Marcy had left the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party to give
public support to the USSR for crushing the Hungarian revolt of 1956. The WWP
went on to support the Kim Il Sung regime in North Korea, the Warsaw Pact
suppression of "socialism with a human face" in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and the
Chinese crackdown on the Tiananmen Square democracy movement in 1989. Flounders
is co-director of the International Action Center, a WWP front group for which
one-time U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark serves as figurehead.3
Flounders
argues the Serbian-controlled Trepca mining complex in Kosovo is coveted by U.S.
and European capitalists for its reserves of lead, zinc, copper, cadmium, gold
and silver. Well, the prices of these minerals have been steady or declining for
the last ten years. There's no world shortage of any of them; for most there's a
glut. The fate of global capitalism hardly hangs on a polluted lead mine in
Kosovo. Ironically for those who saw Slobodan Milosevic as the last defender of
socialism, it was the Milosevic regime which attempted to privatize the Trepca
complex and sell it to a Greek company, while it is the Kosovar Albanians who
claim it is still state property.4 Censored
2000's story #6 amounts to little more than a conspiratorial fantasy.
Atrocious History
RECENT REPORTS HAVE UNDERCUT the credibility of Censored
2000's story #12: "Evidence Indicates No Pre-war Genocide in Kosovo and
Possible U.S./KLA Plot to Create Disinformation." On January 16, 1999, the
bodies of some 45 victims were found at Racak, Kosovo, and documented at the
sites where they were found by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in
Europe (OSCE). Some 23 of the bodies had been found together in a gully, victims
of an apparent massacre. U.S. diplomat William Walker led a group of reporters
to the site and charged that Serbian police had killed the 45 Kosovars. Serb
officials countered that a battle scene had been rearranged by the Kosovo
Liberation Army (KLA) to look like an atrocity. Walker has an unsavory
reputation from his days in El Salvador, but there is no evidence that he had
anything to do with staging an atrocity. As a European Union Forensic Expert
Team was already conducting investigations in Kosovo, its Finnish Director, Dr.
Helena Ranta, was asked by the OSCE to help perform autopsies on 40 of the
victims who had been moved to Pristina. Her initial report on the autopsies by
the team was completed on March 17, 1999 and noted that there was "no indication
of the people being other than unarmed civilians."5 Some
skepticism about the Racak event may have been warranted at this time, but
Project Censored should have reserved judgment until the forensic research was
completed.
Dr.
Ranta's EU Forensic Expert Team returned to Racak in November 1999 and March
2000 to recover additional evidence at the gully where the 23 bodies were
found. Newsweek broke a story in its April 24, 2000 issue that the team
had discovered bullets in the gully, confirming that the killing was indeed a
massacre as earlier reported.6 Dr.
Ranta presented the final report of the team to the EU's Western Balkans Working
Group in Brussels on June 21, 2000. The report was sealed and delivered to the
ICTY in the Hague, where it became part of the evidence leading to an indictment
of Milosevic. Serb officials and their allies continued attempting to spin the
interpretation of the Racak killings as a hoax, arguing that the autopsies
produced no definitive evidence of a massacre.
As
three colleagues of Dr. Ranta's in Helsinki prepared to publish an article in
the journal Forensic Science International on the Racak victim
autopsies, the Berliner Zeitung repeated the claim that the autopsies
showed no evidence of a massacre and that this was the final report on the
matter. In fact, the FSI article, based only on the early 1999
autopsies, made no judgment about whether a massacre had occurred or not. This
story was then repeated in the U.S. by the organization Fairness and Accuracy in
Reporting (FAIR), by Martin Lee in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and
others.7
Under pressure in Europe to counter these interpretations, the Council of the EU
declassified the Executive Summary of the final report of the EU Forensic Expert
Team in Kosovo in February 2001. The summary notes that bullets and bullet
fragments had been found in the gully where photographs taken at the time showed
the bodies to be positioned, and that DNA evidence on the bullets connected them
to the bodies autopsied. In a separate interview, Dr. Ranta estimated the bodies
had been shot from a distance of a couple of meters. The evidence confirmed that
an atrocity had been committed.8
Project Censored also highlighted three additional stories on Kosovo in Censored
2000: #10, #20, and #22, which variously blame the war over Kosovo on the
U.S., NATO, the IMF, the World Bank, and U.S. and German arms dealers. Sources
for these stories include two of the most prolific apologists for Serbia:
Paris-based writer Diana Johnstone (#10) and University of Ottawa economics
professor Michel Chossudovsky (#s 20 and 22). Johnstone, once the respected
European correspondent for In These Times, was also a source for the
dubious Balkan oil pipeline tale in story #6.
What these three stories and Michael Parenti's commentary (ch. 6) lack is a
balanced historical perspective on the last decade of war in the former
Yugoslavia. Two points should be highlighted. First, and most importantly, the
unraveling of Tito's multi-ethnic and politically balanced Yugoslavia was begun
by Milosevic when he moved to end the autonomy of Kosovo and Vojvodina provinces
in 1989. Kosovo's Albanians lost their legislature, their Albanian-language
schools and employment opportunities, and became second class citizens in a
region where they were a 90 percent majority. Milosevic refused for a decade to
deal with Ibrahim Rugova, the leader of a popular nonviolent movement to restore
rights for Kosovo's Albanians. These actions were interpreted by the other
republics of Yugoslavia as an attempt by Milosevic to establish Serbian
domination of the entire country. Although there are villains on all sides of
the Yugoslavian wars, Milosevic had the most power within the confederation and
the greatest responsibility for its collapse.
Second,
NATO intervention in Kosovo followed a brutal war in Bosnia, which reached its
nadir in Srebrenica, a UN-protected "safe area," in July 1995. Some 300 lightly
armed Dutch troops in the UN force were pushed aside by heavily armed Bosnian
Serb forces, and 7,000 unarmed Bosnian Muslim men and boys were marched off and
killed. Some 4,500 bodies were recovered by mid- 2001.9 This
event is widely acknowledged to be the largest atrocity to occur in Europe since
the end of World War II. Bosnian Serb general Radislav Krstic was tried by the
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in the Hague,
and was convicted of genocide in August 2001 for his responsibility for this
slaughter.10
In
light of the centrality of the Srebrenica atrocity, it shows breathtaking
audacity for Michael Parenti in his Censored 2000 commentary to refer
to Srebrenica only to mention killings by Bosnian Muslims in the area in 1992,
three years before the infamous massacre. In his comments appearing as chapter
6, "The Media and their Atrocities," Parenti writes disparagingly about accounts
of atrocities in Bosnia: "Hyperbolic labeling takes the place of evidence:
'genocide,' 'mass atrocities,' 'systematic rapes,' and even 'rape camps'--camps
which no one has ever located." (p. 208) Parenti continues this denial in his
recent book, To Kill a Nation.11
To
the contrary, solid evidence of systematic rape was presented in the recent
trial of Serb army commander Dragoljub Kunarac and two paramilitary leaders who
were charged with presiding over the rape, torture, and sexual enslavement of
dozens of women during 1992 and 1993 in the southeastern Bosnian town of Foca.12 Sixteen
brave Bosnian women had testified against Kunarac and his colleagues. Women's
groups and human rights advocates around the world hailed the guilty verdict by
the ICTY, delivered in the Hague on February 22, 2001. For the first time, an
international court ruled that the systematic rape of women in wartime must be
considered a war crime and a crime against humanity. People on the Left ought to
be equally enthusiastic about this precedent.
Interestingly,
for someone with such strong views about contemporary Yugoslavia, Parenti has
almost nothing to say in his several related articles and books about its
principal post-WWII leader, Marshall Tito (Josip Broz). Tito led the first
Communist country to break with Stalin in 1948, was a leader of the non-aligned
movement, and supported interesting experiments in worker self-management.
Perhaps Parenti's silence on Tito is explained by his greater sympathy for the
Soviet Union, as evidenced in the chapter "Stalin's Fingers" in his Blackshirts
& Reds, which attempts to belittle the crimes of Stalin.13
Practicing Denial
SHOULD I HAVE SEEN THIS COMING? Censored 1999 selected
as its #17 censored story, "U.S. Media Provides Biased Coverage of Bosnia." The
primary article concerned the visit by British Independent Television News (ITN)
in August 1992 to Bosnian Serb detention camps at Omarska and Trnopolje. The
issue revolved around whether a widely-publicized photo of an emaciated Muslim
man leaning against a barbed- wire fence presented a misleading picture of the
camps. On August 5, 1992, the ITN team of Penny Marshall and Ian Williams,
accompanied by reporter Ed Vulliamy of The Guardian, visited and filmed
at the Omarska and Trnopolje camps, reporting that grim things were happening to
Bosnian Muslims at the hands of the Bosnian Serbs running the camps. A still
shot from ITN video of an emaciated Bosnian Muslim man standing behind barbed
wire was picked up by numerous media around the world and used to illustrate
various news stories on ethnic cleansing and brutality by the Serbs. The
emaciated man was Fikret Alic, who had been transferred to Trnopolje from the
Keraterm camp, where, according to an interview with Vulliamy, he had been
ordered to help dispose of the nearly 200 bodies of men killed in the massacre
in Room 3 on July 24, 1992.14
Ormarska,
Trnopolje, and Keraterm were three notorious detention centers operated in 1992
by Bosnian Serbs near the municipality of Prijedor. Although Trnopolje had been
cited by the ICTY as a place of systematic rape of women, in its description of
its #17 story Project Censored commented, "American journalists who repeated
unconfirmed stories of Serbian atrocities could count on getting published. On
the other hand, there was no market for stories by a journalist who discovered
that Serbian 'rape camps' did not exist." (p. 73) The ICTY indictment of the
former mayor of Prijedor, Milomir Stakic, includes the following excerpts from
descriptions of the camps:
The conditions in the Omarska, Keraterm and Trnopolje camps were abject and
brutal. Bosnian Serb military and police personnel in charge of these
facilities, their staff, and other persons who visited the camps, all of
whom were subject to the authority and control of the Crisis Staff, killed,
sexually assaulted, tortured, and otherwise physically and psychologically
abused the detainees in the camps. . . .
At
Omarska, prisoners were crowded together with little or no facilities for
personal hygiene. They were fed starvation rations once a day and given only
a few minutes to go to the canteen area, eat and then leave. The little
water they received was often foul. Prisoners had no changes of clothing and
no bedding. They received no medical care.
Killings
and severe beatings of prisoners were commonplace. The camp guards, who were
both police and military personnel, and others who came to the camp and
physically abused the prisoners, used all manner of weapons during these
beatings, including wooden batons, metal rods and tools, lengths of thick
industrial cable, rifle butts and knives. Both female and male prisoners
were beaten, raped, sexually assaulted, tortured and humiliated. Hundreds of
the detainees, whose identities are known and unknown, did not survive the
camp. . . .
Keraterm
camp was located at a former ceramics factory in Prijedor. Conditions for
prisoners were similar to those in Omarska camp. . . . Many detainees were
executed in the camp. On one night in July, 1992, more than 150
military-aged men from the "Brdo" region were executed.
Trnopolje
camp was established at the site of a former school and adjacent buildings
in Trnopolje village. It was the largest camp and the location to which
Bosnian Muslim and Bosnian Croat women, children, and the elderly were
taken. The hygiene facilities were grossly inadequate. Minimal rations were
provided on a sporadic basis, with female detainees eventually being allowed
to leave the camp to forage for food in the surrounding village. The camp
served as the staging point for the mass deportation of all those who
survived the initial attacks and camp regime. It also served a much more
sinister purpose: the sexual assault, rape, and torture of many of the women
detained there by camp personnel, who were both police and military
personnel, and by other military units from the area who came to the camp
for that specific purpose. In many instances, the women and girls were taken
from the camp and raped, tortured, or sexually abused at other locations. In
addition, many prisoners both male and female were killed, beaten and
otherwise physically and psychologically maltreated by the camp personnel
and other Serbs and Bosnian Serbs who were allowed into the camp.15
The ICTY trial of Keraterm camp security commander Dusko Sikirica ended with a
guilty plea agreement in November 2001, and in March 2001 former Prijedor mayor
Milomir Stakic was arrested in Belgrade and transferred to the Hague to stand
trial for crimes committed at the three camps under his jurisdiction.
Weaving a Fabric of Deceit
SUPPORTERS OF THE MILOSEVIC REGIME and apologists
for the Bosnian Serbs began a long propaganda campaign in the mid-1990s to
obscure what really happened at the camps near Prijedor. Unraveling this fabric
of deceit takes us along the fringes of the Stalinoid Left, and reveals how
Project Censored got caught up in the whitewash. The impetus for the cover-up
began with the trial of Dusko Tadic, the first case completed through conviction
and sentencing by the ICTY.
Tadic
was the former owner of a café in Kozarac, a town near Prijedor, and a member of
the reserve traffic police. He was arrested in Munich, Germany, in February 1994
and brought to the Hague to stand trial for numerous heinous crimes, including
the beating and torture of several men at the Omarska camp on various dates
between June 18 and July 27 of 1992--the last of which took place within 10 days
of the visit to Omarska by the ITN crew. The Tadic trial began in May 1996 and
lasted through October.
The
final witness for Tadic's defense was German freelance writer Thomas Deichmann,
who appeared as a media expert, presenting an argument that witnesses against
Tadic could identify him only because numerous news stories on German television
had made Tadic's image well known. After a long string of prosecution witnesses
had claimed to have known Tadic for years, Deichmann's testimony was evidently
not persuasive, as the court issued a guilty verdict in May 1997 and a sentence
in July 1997. Among the many offenses cited in the sentencing judgment for which
Tadic was found guilty "beyond a reasonable doubt" was a particularly horrendous
sexual mutilation of a man at Omarska.16
After
the Tadic trial, Deichmann visited Trnopolje in December 1996 and talked with
Bosnian Serb officials about the camp, which had been closed down shortly after
the ITN visit in August 1992. He wrote an article for the German magazine Novo,
which was then translated and published in the British journal Living
Marxism in February 1997 under the title "The Picture that Fooled the
World," claiming that the famous ITN photo of Fikret Alic had been staged to
falsely portray the facilities as concentration camps and the Serbs as
modern-day Nazis. Deichmann pointed out that the ITN news team was shooting from
within a barbed-wire enclosure at men who had come to the fence to talk with
them.
Living
Marxism (later renamed LM) was started in 1988 by members of a
British Trotskyist splinter, the Revolutionary Communist Party. In an article
titled "Living Marxism--Festering Fascism?" British journalist George Monbiot
described LM's curious ties to right-wing writers and think tanks.17 Deichmann's
article "The Picture that Fooled the World" is also reprinted in the IAC book
NATO in the Balkans, along with chapters by Michel Chossudovsky, Lenora
Foerstel, and IAC associates Ramsey Clark, Sara Flounders, and Richard Becker,
and Workers World Party founder Sam Marcy.18
ITN
filed a libel suit against LM for the charges in the Deichmann article,
and in March 2000 a British court found that LM had presented no
credible evidence to support its charges that ITN had set out to deceive its
viewing public. The court awarded ITN a large financial judgment of 375,000,
bankrupting LM. Deichmann's well-traveled article next appeared in
modified form--with a summary of his Bosnia story and general commentary on the
impact of media on political leaders--in the magazine Covert Action
Quarterly (CAQ), following an unusual set of events.
Terry
J. Allen, the respected 9-year editor of CAQ, and her two assistants
were fired in May 1998 by CAQ's corporate officers Louis Wolf, Ellen
Ray, and Bill Schaap. Allen says she was fired because she "refused to be
bullied by Wolf, Ray, and Schaap into publishing whacko-conspiracy theories and
articles that served their agenda but failed to distinguish between facts and
political fairy tales." Among the "inferior or polemical material" proposed by
the publishers was "a story presenting Serbia as the blameless victim of Bosnian
aggression."19 Under
editorial direction from the publishers, CAQ then published Deichmann's
modified article as "Misinformation: TV Coverage of a Bosnian Camp" in its Fall
1998 issue, along with an article by Diana Johnstone, "Seeing Yugoslavia Through
a Dark Glass."20
Meanwhile,
Project Censored director Peter Phillips was invited to present a paper in
Athens, Greece, in May 1998, at a conference which brought together a group of
radical journalists, most of whom were anti-NATO and pro-Serb. Alternatively
titled "The Media's Dark Age: a 21st Century Dialogue" or the "International
Conference on the Ownership and Control of the Media," the meeting was co-hosted
by the Andreas Papandreou Foundation and Women for Mutual Security (WMS),
directed by Margaret Papandreou. The WMS affiliate in the United States is
represented by Lenora Foerstel, an International Action Center activist. Other
IAC speakers at the conference included Ramsey Clark and Sara Flounders, whose
conference papers were published in Censored 1999, along with those of
two other participants. Phillips met Deichmann on this trip and apparently
accepted the credibility of his story on the Bosnian camps. Project Censored
selected the Deichmann and Johnstone stories from the Fall 1998 CAQ for
its #17 story for Censored 1999.
After LM was
bankrupted by the ITN libel suit, the only place to find Deichmann's original
article, with photos, has been Jared Israel's website, Emperor's Clothes.21 Jared
Israel also produced a 30-minute video, "Judgment," on the ITN visit to Omarska
and Trnopolje camps, in cooperation with Deichmann and the Milosevic-controlled
Serbian television station RTS. A military escort and an RTS video crew
accompanied the ITN team, and RTS appears to have spent most of its time filming
ITN filming the inhabitants of the camps. "Judgment" describes Omarska as a
"detention center for POWs" and Trnopolje as "a refugee camp." Keep in mind that
as a witness in the Tadic trial, Deichmann knew very well what the evidence was
about atrocities at Omarska. Aging New Lefties may recall Jared Israel's earlier
notoriety for helping destroy Students for a Democratic Society in 1969 as a
member of the Maoist Progressive Labor Party.22
WHAT SHOULD PROJECT CENSORED have known, and when
should they have known it? Project Censored had ample opportunity to learn about
the horrors at Ormarska, Trnopolje, and Keraterm camps. The Dusko Tadic trial
outcome had been posted at the ICTY website since the announcement of the guilty
verdict on May 7, 1997 and the sentencing judgment on July 14, 1997. Numerous
articles and book reviews covering war crimes in Bosnia appeared in both the
mainstream and the alternative press.23 CAQ's
firing of Terry Allen in May 1998 was well known among the alternative press and
should have been taken as a warning signal by Project Censored. All this
information was readily available long before Censored 1999 went to
press in late 1998 with its credulous acceptance of Deichmann's sectarian
viewpoint.
Once
committed to defending Deichmann's story on the alleged distortion of the
Bosnian detention camps' benign character by the Western media, it was a small
step for Project Censored to accept the interpretation of the January 1999 Racak
atrocity in Kosovo as a hoax. In June 1999, well before Project Censored's
judges had chosen the top censored stories for that year, Peter Phillips issued
an op-ed piece titled "Disinformation and Serbia: U.S. Media Bias," in which he
linked Omarska and Racak as examples of "demonize-the-Serb stories."24
In
my view, Project Censored needs to recover its grasp of a working distinction
between facts and ideology, between reporting and propaganda. I hope those
associated with the project can review its mission and methodology and get it
back on track to becoming a fresh, exciting, and serious source of criticism of
the contemporary media scene.25 If
Project Censored chooses to oppose intervention in the Balkans, it can find
grounds for doing so without falsifying history and denying war crimes.
Notes
- Censored 1999, Censored 2000, and Censored 2001 are
all published by Seven Stories Press in New York (www.sevenstories.com/);
the 20th anniversary volume is titled 20 Years of Censored News (Seven
Stories, 1995). Project Censored's website is at www.projectcensored.org.
- See "The Busy Bosporus Is Likely to Get Even Busier," New York Times,
January 28, 2001; and "Caspian's Oil, Chevron's Sweat: A Saga," Wall
Street Journal, February 26, 2001, p. A14.
- A. Belden Fields, Trotskyism and Maoism: Theory and Practice in
France and the United States (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1988), pp.
148-150; on Clark and the International Action Center, see Ian Williams, "Ramsey
Clark, the War Criminal's Best Friend," Salon, June 21, 1999,
and John B. Judis, "The Strange Case of Ramsey Clark," The New Republic,
April 22, 1991, pp. 23-29.
- See the report of the International Crisis Group,
Trepca: Making Sense of the Labyrinth.
- See Dr. Helena Ranta's report on the autopsies.
- Joshua Hammer, Unearthing the Truth, Newsweek,
April 24, 2000, p. 49.
- J. Rainio, K. Lalu, and A. Penttilä, "Independent Forensic Autopsies in
an Armed Conflict: Investigation of the Victims from Racak, Kosovo," Forensic
Science International, Vol. 116, Issues 2-3 (February 15, 2001), pp.
171- 185 (available at
http://worldnews2.homestead.com/files/racakautopsies.htm; Berliner
Zeitung, January 17, 2001, available on the web (in German) at www.Berlin
Online.de/aktuelles/berliner_zeitung/politik/.html/1510.htm. For FAIR's
statement on Racak, see
Doubts on a Massacre: Media Ignore Questions About
Incident That Sparked Kosovo War; also Martin A. Lee,
More Bloodshed in the
Balkans: The Bitter Legacy of NATO's 'Humanitarian' War, San Francisco
Bay Guardian, March 26, 2001.
- The Executive Summary of June 2000 is available, along with related news
reports and interviews with Helena Ranta, on the
Balkan Witness website.
-
Grave Found in Bosnia With 200 Bodies, New York Times,
July 9, 2001.
- Marlise Simons,
Tribunal in Hague Finds Bosnia Serb Guilty of
Genocide, New York Times, August 3, 2001, p. A1; the ICTY
judgment is available
here.
- Michael Parenti, To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia (London
and New York: Verso, 2000).
- Marlise Simons,
Bosnian War Trial Focuses on Sex Crimes, New York
Times, February 18, 2001, p. 4 ; Marlise Simons,
3 Serbs Convicted in
Wartime Rapes, New York Times, February 23, 2001, p. A1.
- Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the
Overthrow of Communism (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997), ch. 5,
pp. 76-86.
- Vulliamy's reports on the Bosnian camps and on the ITN/LM libel trial
are available at https://www.theguardian.com/us.
Use the search function.
(Diana Johnstone was also represented in Censored 1999 with an
article supporting the #17 story.)
- The
Milomir Stakic indictment of March 13, 1997.
Amended indictment (April 2002).
See also Marlise Simons,
3 Ex-Guards at Bosnia Camp Are Sentenced by Hague Panel, New York
Times, November 14, 2001, p. A6.
- See the
Tadic judgment.
- George Monbiot,
Living Marxism--Festering Fascism?" Prospect,
November 1998; see also Matthew Price,
Raving Marxism, Lingua Franca,
April 2000.
- Ramsey Clark et al., NATO in the Balkans: Voices of Opposition (New
York: International Action Center, 1998).
- Amanda Ripley,
Fascist Lefties," Washington City Paper, May
22-28, 1998; includes letters between Allen and CAQ's
publishers.
- Diana Johnstone,
Seeing Yugoslavia Through a Dark Glass: Politics, Media,
and the Ideology of Globalization
-
https://web.archive.org/web/20010413042638/www.emperors-clothes.com/images/bosnia/camp.htm
- Check the references to Jared Israel in the index to Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS (New
York: Vintage Books, 1974), and Alan Adelson's pro-PL account, SDS: A
Profile (New York: Scribner, 1972). Censored 2001 gave an
award (#17) to a story by Chossudovsky and Israel; Chossudovsky's sympathy
for Maoism is apparent in his book Towards Capitalist Restoration?
Chinese Socialism After Mao (New York: St. Martin's, 1986), that
concludes with hopes for a second cultural revolution. (p. 221)
- See, for example, Mark Danner,
America and the Bosnia Genocide, The
New York Review of Books, December 4, 1997, pp. 55-65--a review of
books by Roy Gutman, Ed Vulliamy, Omarska camp survivor Rezak Hukanovic, and
others;
"The Evil at Omarska" -- an excerpt on Hukanovic's experience -- in The
New Republic, February 12, 1996, pp. 24-29; and Eric Alterman, "Bosnian
Camps: A Barbed Tale," The Nation, August 4, 1997, pp. 18-20--an
article about the ITN libel suit against LM which challenged the
substance of Deichmann's article.
- Peter Phillips,
Disinformation and Serbia: U.S. Media Bias
- For links to further discussion in the alternative media of Project
Censored's purpose and methodology, see Tim Redmond,
The Censored Debate,
on the San Francisco Bay Guardian website, April 19, 2000.
Published at
https://archive.newpol.org/issue33/walls33.htm
(Hyperlinks updated in this Balkan Witness version)