War Propaganda Now Promoted as 'News'

The propaganda war rages on in the Kosovo crisis, with both NATO and the Belgrade government charging the other with distorting the facts. Whose "truth" will you believe?

The London Times, July 11, 1998, editorialized: "Want to start a war? Better yet, want the United States, Britain, France, NATO and the United Nations on your side? Call in the cameras ... it lies in those magic initials CNN, NBC, BBC..."

"Ethnic Cleansing," "Genocide"," "Atrocities," "Mass Rape," "Aggression" -- shortly after bombs rained down on sites in Yugoslavia, U.S. officials and the Western media renewed the propaganda war over the airwaves, battling for the hearts and minds of the American public. But in one of the first wars in the age of communication technology, satellites and the Internet, Western officials are finding out that your enemy is not as easy as it had been in the past.

U.S. servicemen of the 193rd Special Operations carry out "psycho ops" or psychological operations just as others before them did in Vietnam and Iraq. Soldiers regularly fly a massive C-130 cargo jet over Belgrade, the Yugoslav capital, dropping pro-NATO flyers and transmitting pirate-radio broadcasts of NATO's version of the news.

"We tell people the truth about ethnic cleansing and why they should not believe [the Serbian government's] Big Lie," Major Matt Venhaus of the 4th Psycho Ops Group from Fort Bragg, N.C., told a London Times reporter.

But do Serbs believe that the West's version of the news is the truth? "The Serbs are responsible for a lot of nasty things," Dusan Masic, an independent journalist from the Serbian news agency B92, told the Canadian National Post Online. "But you people in the international press really don't know what you are writing about."

Ted Carpenter of the Cato Institute, author of The Captive Press, criticized media coverage of the civil war that has been going on for the past seven years in Yugoslavia.

According to Carpenter: "Here you clearly see a case of the media and its images driving government policy. It was more evident in Bosnia. We're now seeing it again in Kosovo, where so much of the press coverage doesn't even make a pretense of objectivity."

On June 1, 1997, Cable News Network (CNN) correspondent Christiane Amanpour reported that a Serb military force led by so-called Serbian paramilitary leader "Arkan" executed a group of Croats. The report displayed a

Compuserb.com, a pro-Serb web site, however, identified the picture as one obtained by CNN from autopsy files belonging to Dr. Zoran Stankovic, a Serbian doctor. According to Stankovic's file, the deceased men in the picture were not Croats, but were Serbian men-all clearly identified in the picture-killed in a skirmish with Croats.

The creator of the web site, a Serb living in California, charged that Amanpour and CNN willfully distorted facts surrounding the death in order to discredit the Belgrade government and its political agenda to the world. A group of WWII veterans echoed this charge in an advertisement placed in The Washington Times, July 29, 1998, regarding, among other things, CNN's misrepresentation of this picture.

"They were all Serbs, axed to death by Croatians forces in Borovo Naselje, in 1991. Image manipulation and this macabre use of Serb victims relabeled as either Croatians or Muslims was common among 'advocacy journalists' in the civil war," the ad read.

VERY PRIVATE

Many have accused the government and media of being in bed together. CNN's Christiane Amanpour and State Department spokesman James Rubin are shown here in a wedding photo taken at St. Stephen church, located in a 15th Century castle just north of Rome, Italy, in August 1998. According to a BBC report, some of the more prominent guests at the "private affair' included Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, John Kennedy, publisher of George magazine, and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.

The Serbs point out that Amanpour married State Department spokesman James Rubin in a "very private" wedding in a castle, north of Rome, Italy, in August 1998. According to the official Serbian government view, she is more interested in promoting the U.S. Department of State's perspective than objectively reporting facts.

Serbian journalists say the images of "concentration camps" and the stories of "genocide" have been used by Westem media to liken the Serbian military to Nazis of WWII Germany.

According to National Post Online, these allegations first surfaced after an Independent Television Network (ITN) film crew took footage several years ago of an encampment, claiming it was set up by Serbian soldiers as a holding camp for Muslim civilians. The ITN crew filmed a horribly emaciated man, identified as a Bosnian Muslim, walking inside the camp, along a barbed-wire fence.

The ITN footage later turned out to be bogus, when it was discovered the film crew had been shooting from inside the barbed-wire fence. The camp turned out to be a refugee holding center for Serbs. The photographed man was Slobodan Konvjevic, a Serb, who was emaciated from a 10-year bout with tuberculosis. The camera crew filmed him through the fence, walking on the outside of the enclosure.

KENNETH BACON ...U.S. propagandist.

Serbs say recent allegations of mass rapes in a Serbian military base in Kosmet, promulgated by Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon and State Department spokesman James Rubin, have also been widely propagandized.

French journalist Jerome Bony said these allegations are old news. Bony said he found no "hard" evidence of mass rapes after visiting Bosnia in 1993, when the allegations first surfaced that Serbian soldiers were raping Muslim women.

Bony wrote for Le Point magazine, March 13, 1993: "I was told, 'go to Tuzla gymnasium; there you will find 4,000 raped women.' At 20 kilometers, this figure dropped to 400. At 10 kilometers, only 40 were left. Once at the site, I found only four women to testify."