Michael Moore to Wesley Clark: Run! (for Pres.)

According to an must-read report by Ken McCarthy at Brasscheck, the military was far more deeply involved in the Waco massacre than is generally realized. Behind the military's part in the operation was now NATO commander General Wesley Clark. Among the points McCarthy makes are these:

- The military's involvement in a domestic law enforcement matter was illegal.

- Used in the Waco massacre operation were 13 track vehicles, 9 combat engineer vehicles, 5 tank retrieval vehicles, and a tank.

- The military equipment and personnel came from the US Army base at Ft. Hood, Texas, headquarters of III Corps. According to an account from attorney David T. Hardy, who filed a freedom of information action in the incident, "The operation required mustering approximately a hundred agents (flown in from sites around the country), and who received military training at Ft. Hood. They traveled in a convoy of sixty vehicles and were supported by three National Guard helicopters and one fixed-wing aircraft, with armored vehicles in reserve."

- Clark was the Commander 1st Cavalry Division, Fort Hood, Texas from August 1992 to April 1994. The Mt. Carmel raid was on February 29, 1993. The arson-murders occurred April 19. Clark had been Commander of the National Training Center and Deputy Chief of Staff for Concepts, Doctrine and Developments, US Army Training and Doctrine Command TRADOC, where Clark was Deputy Chief right before becoming an armor commander at Ft Hood, has as its primary mission to "prepare soldiers for war and design the army of the future." Item number one from the TRADOC vision statement: "...enable America's Army to operate with joint, multinational and interagency partners across the full range of operations."

- President Clinton said, "The first thing I did after the ATF agents were killed, once we knew that the FBI was going to go in, was to ask that the military be consulted because of the quasi-military nature of the conflict."

- Attorney General Janet Reno attempted to explain away the FBI use of US Army tanks as being equivalent to an innocuous "rent a car" arrangement.

- From early in the siege, "Operation Trojan Horse" became a popular destination for special forces officers both from around the United States and from its closest ally, the UK. They came to observe the effectiveness of various high tech devices and tactics that were being tested against the Branch Davidians. -- Two unnamed high ranking Army officers personally presented Attorney General Janet Reno with the final assault tactics for her, as chief law enforcement officer of the US, to sign off on.

- General Clark's last assignment before taking over NATO was as Commander-in-Chief, United States Southern Command, Panama, where he commanded all U.S. forces and was "responsible for the direction of most U.S. military activities and interests in Latin America and the Caribbean." i.e. the support of repressive Latin American military and police operations and a phony war against drugs.

Meanwhile, Dan Gifford, producer of "Waco: The Rules of Engagement" writes that "Secret anti-terrorist U.S. Army Delta Force and British SAS soldiers were present at FBI invitation as 'observers.' But reports of those troops illegally killing Americans on American soil persist from sources that have provided accurate information in the past. So do reports of classified weapons testing on the Davidians that was being micro managed, along with everything else, from Washington.

By John Chuckman

(YellowTimes.org) - The Perfumed Prince declared himself a Democrat. Many Americans may not recognize the nickname bestowed upon Wesley Clarke by British colleagues as he strutted around Serbia with his set of platinum-plated general's stars carefully repositioned each day to a freshly-starched and ironed camouflage cap, wafting a thick vapor trail of cologne. His lack of judgment demonstrated in Serbia -- including an order to clear out Russian forces that British general Sir Michael Jackson had to ignore for fear of starting World War III -- should be enough to utterly disqualify him as a candidate for President. But this is America, land of opportunity.

The former general scents, through the mists of his musky cologne, an opportunity for service. Hell, we're at war, and any real general is better than a former male cheerleader from Andover who cross-dresses as a combat pilot. Dreams of being the hero on a white horse beckon. A fatal attraction in the American people to used-up generals is how the country managed to elect some of its worst presidents -- Grant, Jackson, and Garfield, for example.

Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts announced that he wants the Democratic presidential nomination. He chose to ask for it from the deck of an aircraft carrier. I have no idea why he would repeat any part of Bush's pathetic stunt, but to my mind it is an immediate strike against his competence. Perhaps he hoped for a promotional deal on a doll in combat gear to memorialize the occasion? That is, after all, a good deal of the country's idea of war, limited-edition collector dolls with lots of cute little zippers, flaps, and pockets (all handsomely made in China or Indonesia). Never mind real war where pilots drop cluster bombs and napalm on tiny desperate figures far below, and the occupying troops slosh through the resulting human gore, a good deal of it belonging to children in Iraq.

Well, Kerry was awarded some medals during Vietnam, so that does set him apart from Bush. Kerry's doll could feature cute little medals to set it apart, but then he threw the originals into a trash bin at a veterans' demonstration in front of the Capitol in 1971. That's not the kind of association that excites collectors of expensive kitsch in America's better class of trailer parks.

By the way, does anyone know whether the Bush Elite Aviator doll wets? Perhaps you can change its undies as girls did with Betsy Wetsy decades ago? This would offer opportunities for different editions. Bush Original could chug little water-filled six-packs while Bush Holier-Than-Thou used a miniature pitcher of iced tea.

Senator Kerry's involvement with Vietnam certainly reflected the war's extremes. He earned his medals in questionable actions including the shooting of a man who was running away and the killing of a child by a member of his crew. Remember another Kerry, a former Senator, the boyish one from Nebraska who spells his name "Kerrey," a Medal of Honor winner in Vietnam, much admired until it was learned that his grisly work there had been as a member of one of the night-crawling murder squads? If only Americans could once see what utterly filthy stuff war really is, the world might be spared a lot of needless horrors.

John Kerry, having become an opponent of the war in which he served, made a speech to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971, describing some of what he had witnessed in Vietnam. Americans had "raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephone to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country." I can only admire such truthfulness, but Kerry's first instinct, years before, had been to contribute to the mayhem. Only when it was politically opportune did he oppose it. I get the same morally confused signals today with a speech delivered from an aircraft carrier while Iraqis suffer miserably from what such killing machines already have inflicted.

The Democrats held their first debate, hoping desperately to find an attractive candidate. Senator Joe Lieberman was there, but you have to wonder why anyone would vote to replace Bush with Lieberman. The pair remind me of one of those 1950's cheap horror films about a monster with two heads lurching over the countryside.

Lieberman's many pious-fraud battles over personal expression suggest that the Two Heads may actually have shared a single brain at birth. Just like his Twin Head, Lieberman avoided military service out of personal interests without hint of conscience or principle, and, just like his Twin Head, Lieberman always stands ready to see people blown up in foreign lands, just so it's "our boyz" doing the blowing up. Capital punishment warms his heart, too, and he has organizational connections with Dick Cheney's wife, America's intellectual gorgon.

Even the Rev. Al Sharpton, also a candidate, doesn't bring quite the same rank smell to the nostrils.

Former general Powell, who once could have been President and have had his own fancy soldier doll, instead ends his career as a tiresome door-to-door salesman in shiny-bottomed pin-striped pants, pitching plans nobody wants to the United Nations. That "irrelevant" institution, as it was hotly described by Powell's sales manager only a short while ago, now is being offered something called "a role" in Iraq. A role, in the weird idiom of Bush's Washington, consists of sending vast quantities of money and troops to a reeling, miserable country Americans are already sick of hearing about without having anything to say about their use or the country's fate. Say-so would stay in the Oval Office, the source of the vicious tantrums that created all the destruction. As of this writing, stubborn blockheads in Germany and France had rejected the attractive limited-time offer.

[John Chuckman is former chief economist for a large Canadian oil company. He has many interests and is a lifelong student of history. He writes with a passionate desire for honesty, the rule of reason, and concern for human decency. He is a member of no political party and takes exception to what has been called America's "culture of complaint" with its habit of reducing every important issue to an unproductive argument between two simplistically defined groups. John left the United States as a poor young man from the South Side of Chicago when the government embarked on the murder of millions of Vietnamese in their own land because they happened to embrace the wrong economic loyalties. He lives in Canada, which he is fond of calling "the peaceable kingdom."]

PROGRESSIVE REVIEW, JULY 1999 - Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in The Secret Life Of Bill Clinton writes, "The Branch Davidian siege was clearly on Foster's mind. He was 'drafting a letter involving Waco' on the day of this death, surely a point of some significance. He kept a Waco file in the locked cabinet that was off limits to everybody, including his secretary. His widow mentions Waco twice in her statement to the FBI: 'Toward the end of his life, Foster had no sense of joy or elation at work. The Branch Davidian incident near Waco, Texas, was also causing him a great deal of stress. Lisa Foster believes that he was horrified when the Branch Davidian complex burned. Foster believed that everything was his fault.'"

Evans-Pritchard makes no claim that Waco was a cause of Foster's death. After discussing other anomalies, such as his ties to the National Security Agency, the investigative reporter notes, "The point is that Foster was involved in activities that belie the carefully drawn portrait of a bemused country lawyer, and that have clearly been obscured on purpose."

These comments are worth reviving because of Counterpunch's revelation that two key Army officers were involved in the Justice Department planning for Waco and that Clinton had abrogated an longtime American principle of not using the military in domestic law enforcement.

We now also know that NATO chief Wesley Clark, then Texas-based, at the very least approved the seconding of logistical support from his command. We know that important records in Foster's possession were removed. And we know that a military intelligence group moved in on the White House following his death for unknown purposes.

This all, however, merely adds to the mystery of Foster. What remains true is that the existing facts argue strongly against Foster having died in a park of his own hand. Put directly, if he did kill himself, someone moved him afterwards, or else he was murdered. Under what circumstances and for what reasons, we still don't know.

Anyone seeking to understand the bloody fiasco of the Serbian war need hardly look further than the person of the beribboned Supreme Allied Commander, General Wesley K. Clark. Politicians and journalists are generally according him a respectful hearing as he discourses on the "schedule" for the destruction of Serbia, tellingly embracing phrases favored by military bureaucrats such as "systematic" and "methodical".

The reaction from former army subordinates is very different.
"The poster child for everything that is wrong with the GO (general officer) corps," exclaims one colonel, who has had occasion to observe Clark in action, citing, among other examples, his command of the 1st Cavalry Division at Fort Hood from 1992 to 1994.

While Clark's official Pentagon biography proclaims his triumph in "transitioning the Division into a rapidly deployable force" this officer describes the "1st Horse Division" as "easily the worst division I have ever seen in 25 years of doing this stuff."

Such strong reactions are common. A major in the 3rd Brigade of the 4th Infantry Division at Fort Carson, Colorado when Clark was in command there in the early 1980s described him as a man who "regards each and every one of his subordinates as a potential threat to his career".

While he regards his junior officers with watchful suspicion, he customarily accords the lower ranks little more than arrogant contempt. A veteran of Clark's tenure at Fort Hood recalls the general's "massive tantrum because the privates and sergeants and wives in the crowded (canteen) checkout lines didn't jump out of the way fast enough to let him through".

Clark's demeanor to those above is, of course, very different, a mode of behavior that has earned him rich dividends over the years. Thus, early in 1994, he was a candidate for promotion from two to three star general. Only one hurdle remained - a war game exercise known as the Battle Command Training Program in which Clark would have to maneuver his division against an opposing force. The commander of the opposing force, or "OPFOR" was known for the military skill with which he routinely demolished opponents.

But Clark's patrons on high were determined that no such humiliation should be visited on their favorite. Prior to the exercise therefore, strict orders came down that the battle should go Clark's way. Accordingly, the OPFOR was reduced in strength by half, thus enabling Clark, despite deploying tactics of signal ineptitude, to triumph. His third star came down a few weeks later.

Battle exercises and war games are of course meant to test the fighting skills of commanders and troops. The army's most important venue for such training is the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, where Clark commanded from October 1989 to October 1991 and where his men derisively nicknamed him "Section Leader Six" for his obsessive micro-management.

At the NTC, army units face a resident OPFOR that has, through constant battle practice coupled with innovative tactics and close knowledge of the terrain, become adept at routing the visiting "Blue Force" opponents. For Clark, this naturally posed a problem. Not only were his men using unconventional tactics, they were also humiliating Blue Force generals who might nurture resentment against the NTC commander and thus discommode his career at some future date. To the disgust of the junior OPFOR officers Clark therefore frequently fought to lose, sending his men on suicidal attacks in order that the Blue Forces should go home happy and owing debts of gratitude to their obliging foe.

All observers agree that Clark has always displayed an obsessive concern with the perquisites and appurtenances of rank. Ever since he acceded to the Nato command post, the entourage with which he travels has accordingly grown to gargantuan proportions to the point where even civilians are beginning to comment. A Senate aide recalls his appearances to testify, prior to which aides scurry about the room adjusting lights, polishing his chair, testing the microphone etc prior to the precisely timed and choreographed moment when the Supreme Allied Commander Europe makes his entrance.

"We are state of the art pomposity and arrogance up here," remarks the aide. "So when a witness displays those traits so egregiously that even the senators notice, you know we're in trouble." His NATO subordinates call him, not with affection, "the Supreme Being".

"Clark is smart," concludes one who has monitored his career. "But his whole life has been spent manipulating appearances (e.g. the doctored OPFOR exercise) in the interests of his career. Now he is faced with a reality he can't control." This observer concludes that, confronted with the wily Slobodan and other unavoidable variables of war, Clark will soon come unglued. "Watch the carpets at NATO HQ for teeth marks."

Members of Congress who, during their spring recess, met in Brussels with Gen. Wesley Clark, the NATO supreme commander, were startled by his bellicosity. According to the lawmakers, Clark suggested the best way to handle Russia's supply of oil to Yugoslavia would be aerial bombardment of the pipeline that runs through Hungary. He also proposed bombing Russian warships that enter the battle zone. The American general was described by the members of the congressional delegation as waging a personal vendetta against Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. "I think the general might need a little sleep," commented one House member.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia
Some things you should know about it

Beginning about two weeks after the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia began in March, 1999, international-law professionals from Canada, the United Kingdom, Greece, and the American Association of Jurists began to file complaints with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague, Netherlands, charging leaders of NATO countries and officials of NATO itself with crimes similar to those for which the Tribunal had issued indictments shortly before against Serbian leaders. Amongst the charges filed were: "grave violations of international humanitarian law", including "wilful killing, wilfully causing great suffering and serious injury to body and health, employment of poisonous weapons and other weapons to cause unnecessary suffering, wanton destruction of cities, towns and villages, unlawful attacks on civilian objects, devastation not necessitated by military objectives, attacks on undefended buildings and dwellings, destruction and wilful damage done to institutions dedicated to religion, charity and education, the arts and sciences."

The Canadian suit names 68 leaders, including William Clinton, Madeleine Albright, William Cohen, Tony Blair, Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien, and NATO officials Javier Solana, Wesley Clark, and Jamie Shea. The complaint also alleges "open violation" of the United Nations Charter, the NATO treaty itself, the Geneva Conventions, and the Principles of International Law Recognized by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. The complaint was submitted along with a considerable amount of evidence to support the charges. The evidence makes the key point that it was NATO's bombing campaign which had given rise to the bulk of the deaths in Yugoslavia, provoked most of the Serbian atrocities, created an environmental disaster, and left a dangerous legacy of unexploded depleted uranium and cluster bombs.

In June, some of the complainants met in The Hague with the court's chief prosecutor, Louise Arbour of Canada. Although she cordially received their brief in person, along with three thick volumes of evidence documenting the alleged war crimes, nothing of substance came of the meeting, despite repeated follow-up submissions and letters by the plaintiffs. In November, her successor, Carla Del Ponte of Switzerland, also met with some of the complainants and received extensive evidence. The complainants' brief in November pointed out that the prosecution of those named by them was "not only a requirement of law, it is a requirement of justice to the victims and of deterrence to powerful countries such as those in NATO who, in their military might and in their control over the media, are lacking in any other natural restraint such as might deter less powerful countries." Charging the war's victors, not only its losers, it was argued, would be a watershed in international criminal law. In one of the letters to Arbour, Michael Mandel, a professor of law in Toronto and the initiator of the Canadian suit, added:

«Unfortunately, as you know, many doubts have already been raised about the impartiality of your Tribunal. In the early days of the conflict, after a formal and, in our view, justified complaint against NATO leaders had been laid before it by members of the Faculty of Law of Belgrade University, you appeared at a press conference with one of the accused, British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, who made a great show of handing you a dossier of Serbian war crimes. In early May, you appeared at another press conference with US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, by that time herself the subject of two formal complaints of war crimes over the targeting of civilians in Yugoslavia. Albright publicly announced at that time that the US was the major provider of funds for the Tribunal and that it had pledged even more money to it.»{1}

Arbour herself made little attempt to hide the pro-NATO bias she wore beneath her robe. She trusted NATO to be its own police, judge, jury, and prison guard. In a year in which the arrest of General Pinochet was giving an inspiring lift to the cause of international law and international justice, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, under Arbour's leadership, ruled that for the Great Powers it would be business as usual, particularly the Great Power that was most vulnerable to prosecution, and which, coincidentally, paid most of her salary. Here are her own words:

«I am obviously not commenting on any allegations of violations of international humanitarian law supposedly perpetrated by nationals of NATO countries. I accept the assurances given by NATO leaders that they intend to conduct their operations in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in full compliance with international humanitarian law. I have reminded many of them, when the occasion presented itself, of their obligation to conduct fair and open-minded investigations of any possible deviance from that policy, and of the obligation of commanders to prevent and punish, if required.»{2}

NATO Press Briefing, May 16, 1999: Question: Does NATO recognize Judge Arbour's jurisdiction over their activities? Jamie Shea: I think we have to distinguish between the theoretical and the practical. I believe that when Justice Arbour starts her investigation [of the Serbs], she will because we will allow her to. ... NATO countries are those that have provided the finance to set up the Tribunal, we are amongst the majority financiers.

The Tribunal -- created in 1993, with the US as the father, the Security Council as the mother, and Madeleine Albright as the midwife -- also relies on the military assets of the NATO powers to track down and arrest the suspects it tries for war crimes. There appeared to be no more happening with the complaint under Del Ponte than under Arbour, but in late December, in an interview with The Observer of London, Del Ponte was asked if she was prepared to press charges against NATO personnel. She replied: "If I am not willing to do that, I am not in the right place. I must give up my mission." The Tribunal then announced that it had completed a study of possible NATO crimes, which Del Ponte was examining, and that the study was an appropriate response to public concerns about NATO's tactics. "It is very important for this tribunal to assert its authority over any and all authorities to the armed conflict within the former Yugoslavia."

Was this a sign from heaven that the new millennium was going to be one of more equal justice? Could this really be? No, it couldn't. From official quarters, military and civilian, of the United States and Canada, came disbelief, shock, anger, denials ... "appalling" ... "unjustified". Del Ponte got the message. Four days after The Observer interview appeared, her office issued a statement: "NATO is not under investigation by the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. There is no formal inquiry into the actions of NATO during the conflict in Kosovo."{3} And there wouldn't be, it was unnecessary to add. But the claim against NATO -- heretofore largely ignored by the American media -- was now out in the open. It was suddenly receiving a fair amount of publicity, and supporters of the bombing were put on the defensive. The most common argument made in NATO's defense, and against war-crime charges, has been that the death and devastation inflicted upon the civilian sector was "accidental". This claim, however, must be questioned in light of certain reports. For example, the commander of NATO's air war, Lt. Gen. Michael Short, declared at one point:

«If you wake up in the morning and you have no power to your house and no gas to your stove and the bridge you take to work is down and will be lying in the Danube for the next 20 years, I think you begin to ask, "Hey, Slobo, what's this all about? How much more of this do we have to withstand?"»{4}

General Short, said the New York Times, "hopes that the distress of the Yugoslav public will undermine support for the authorities in Belgrade."{5} At one point, NATO spokesman Jamie Shea added: "If President Milosevic really wants all of his population to have water and electricity all he has to do is accept NATO's five conditions and we will stop this campaign."{6} After the April NATO bombing of a Belgrade office building -- which housed political parties, TV and radio stations, 100 private companies, and more -- the Washington Post reported:

«Over the past few days, U.S. officials have been quoted as expressing the hope that members of Serbia's economic elite will begin to turn against Milosevic once they understand how much they are likely to lose by continuing to resist NATO demands.»{7}

Before missiles were fired into this building, NATO planners spelled out the risks: "Casualty Estimate 50-100 Government/Party employees. Unintended Civ Casualty Est: 250 -- Apts in expected blast radius."{8} The planners were saying that about 250 civilians living in nearby apartment buildings might be killed in the bombing. What do we have here? We have grown men telling each other: We'll do A, and we think that B may well be the result. But even if B does in fact result, we're saying beforehand -- as we'll insist afterward -- that it was unintended.

Following World War II there was an urgent need for a permanent international criminal court to prosecute those accused of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide, but the Cold War intervened. Finally, in 1998 in Rome, the nations of the world drafted the charter of The International Criminal Court. American negotiators, however, insisted on provisions in the charter that would, in essence, give the United States veto power over any prosecution through its seat on the Security Council. The American request was rejected, and primarily for this reason the US refused to join 120 other nations who supported the charter. The ICC is an instrument Washington can't control sufficiently to keep it from prosecuting American military and government officials. Senior US officials have explicitly admitted that this danger is the reason for their aversion to the proposed new court.{9} But this is clearly not the case with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. It's Washington's kind of international court, a court for the New World Order.

NOTES

1. This and most of the other material concerning the complaint to the Tribunal mentioned here were transmitted to the author by Mandel and other complainants.
2. Press Release from Chief Prosecutor Louise Arbour, The Hague, May 13, 1999.
3. The Observer (London), December 26, 1999; Washington Times, December 30 and 31, 1999; New York Times, December 30, 1999
4. Washington Post, May 24, 1999, p.1
5. New York Times, May 13, 1999, p.1
6. NATO press conference, Brussels, May 25, 1999
7. Washington Post, April 22, 1999, p.18
8. Ibid., September 20, 1999, p.1
9. New York Times, December 2, 1998, p.1; January 3, 2000

The above is excerpted from "Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower" by William Blum
 http://members.aol.com/superogue/

Amid Nato military supremo Wesley Clark's onslaught on the civilians of Serbia the question arose: did Clark hone his civilian-killing skills at Waco, where the FBI oversaw the largest single spasm of slaughter of civilians by law enforcement in US history, when nearly a hundred Branch Davidians died amid an assault by tanks, flame-throwers and snipers.

The tanks were from Fort Hood, where Wesley Clark was, in early 1993, commander of the Cavalry Division of the US Army's III Corps. In our last issue we cited a congressional report commissioned in the aftermath of Waco which described how Texas governor Anne Richards had consulted with Clark's number two at Fort Hood. Then, on April 14, there was a summit at the Justice Department in Washington, where Attorney General Janet Reno, top Justice Department and FBI officials and two unnamed senior Army officers reviewed the final assault plan scheduled for April 19.

The two Army officers at the Justice Department that day were Colonel Gerald Boykin, and his superior, Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the head of Special Forces at Fort Bragg. Though Clark (who had served with Schoomaker) was not directly involved in the onslaught on the Branch Davidians, the role of the US Army in that affair throws into harsh relief the way prohibitions against the use of the US military for civilian law enforcement can be swiftly by-passed.

Boykin and Schoomacher were present because the Army's Fort Bragg-based Combat Applications Group-popularly known as the Delta Force-had been enlisted as part of the assault team on the Branch Davidian Compound. It appears that President Clinton had signed a waiver of the Posse Comitatus Act, with the precedent being Ronald Reagan's revocation of the Act in 1987, allowing the Delta Force to be involved in suppressing the Atlanta prison riot.

The role of the Delta Force, the identity of the two Army officers, the revocation of Posse Comitatus all form part of the disclosures of a forthcoming documentary film, Waco: A New Revelation, put together by part of the team that produced an earlier, excellent film, Waco: Rules of Engagement. Following our questions about Wesley Clark's possible involvement at Waco, producer/researcher Mike McNulty called us with some details of his new documentary-directed by Jason van Fleet and due to be released in July.

After energetic use of Freedom of Information Act enquiries, plus research in three repositories in Texas holding evidence from the Waco inferno, plus other extensive investigations, McNulty and his team have put together an explosive file:

· 28 video tapes from the repositories show that in the final onslaught on the Waco compound were members of the US military in special assault gear and with name tags obscured. As noted above, Clinton's revocation of the Posse Comitatus Act made this presence legal. McNulty isolates Vince Foster as the White House point man for the Waco operation.

McNulty cites Foster's widow as saying that the depression that prompted the White House lawyer's death was fueled by horror at the carnage at Waco for which the White House had given the ultimate green light. Foster was writing a Waco report when he died. McNulty says that some documents about Foster and Waco were among those removed from his office after his death, later to surface in a White house store room sheltering archives of the First Lady.

The film, McNulty says, discloses how the federal assault team placed explosives on top of a compound bunker whither the feds believed the Branch Davidian leaders might flee. Material evidence collected by McNulty shows that the FBI/Delta assault force bombarded the compound with pyrophoric - i.e. fire-causing - projectiles.

Erosion of Posse Comitatus Act prohibitions on the involvement of the US military in law enforcement here is particularly sinister. The congressional report on Waco showed that some Army officers were extremely disturbed at requests for military assistance by the FBI, and there were some acrimonious exchanges at the time. The drug war, needless to say, has been a prime solvent in this process of erosion. One factor is the malign cross-fertilization occurring when these so-called "elite units" - the Army's Combat Application Group, the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team, the Navy's SEALs - all train together, along with SWAT teams from police forces across the country. Thousands of law enforcement officers have now cut their teeth on the homicidal commando techniques most flagrantly displayed by the killers assembled in the British SAS, members of which were also present at the Waco siege. The Rambo mindset now saturates law enforcement, and even the rangers in Fish and Game Departments now pack heat. Both CounterPunch editors have had the experience of being asked to down their fly rods and produce ID, by young Fish and Game rangers with semi-automatics on their hips.


AWOL from Albania?

Chris Sorochin, a CounterPuncher in Brooklyn, tells us of the momentous climax to a visit he recently paid to Hitler's mountain retreat, Berchtesgaden. As Chris and his companions stood surveying the vertiginous spectacle so savored by the Fuehrer, their attention was seized by a helicopter which rose to eye level, as the pilot surveyed them. Knowledgeable chopper buffs in Chris's party identified the helicopter as an Apache.

Recycle, Then Kill

As Nato airstrikes flattened oil refineries and showered depleted uranium across Yugoslavia, the US Army mounted a gung-ho pr campaign touting its new sensitivity to the environment. The Army's green credo, "Sustaining the Land We Defend", is displayed in a glossy ad in Soldier magazine depicting an M-16 toting soldier, equipped with night-vision goggles, striding across the earth. The text of the ad proclaims: "The Army's ability to train effectively and meet the highest standards in service to America depends on your actions as soldiers today. By considering the environment in everything you do, you help sustain the Army's training lands, protect the nation's natural resources, and ensure a safe and healthy environment for fellow soldiers, their families and our civilian communities". The ad urges soldiers "to follow environmental guidelines" during drills because "readiness depends on healthy landscapes and training ranges".

In an era when many enlisted men are on food stamps, the Army tells soldiers to recycle at every opportunity, noting that it "lightens the load on America's landfills, decreases the Army's disposal costs and helps installations pay for quality of life programs". The Army, ever vigilant when it comes to fighting wasteful spending, notes that "preventing pollution reduces waste and save millions of dollars for readiness". Alas, the EPA's Toxic Release Inventory cites the Pentagon as being one of the top ten polluters in the nation. This is probably an gross understatement, since the Army is exempt from many reporting requirements and there is little legal recourse to compel the military to clean up its mess. When it comes to dump sites, no company comes close. A report by the Military Toxics Projects shows that there are more than 11,000 hazardous waste dumps at the Pentagon's 900-plus sites in the United States. Cleanup has taken place at less than 400 of the dumps. Somehow we don't think this is what Ed Abbey had in mind when he called for a new generation of eco-warriors.

Robertson's plum job in a warring Nato

As Blair's man is installed, Richard Norton-Taylor details the way the alliance generals have been fighting

Tuesday August 3, 1999

No sooner are we told by Britain's top generals that the Russians played a crucial role in ending the west's war against Yugoslavia than we learn that if Nato's supreme commander, the American General Wesley Clark, had had his way, British paratroopers would have stormed Pristina airport threatening to unleash the most frightening crisis with Moscow since the end of the cold war.

"I'm not going to start the third world war for you," General Sir Mike Jackson, commander of the international K-For peacekeeping force, is reported to have told Gen Clark when he refused to accept an order to send assault troops to prevent Russian troops from taking over the airfield of Kosovo's provincial capital.

Hyperbole, perhaps. But, by all accounts, Jackson was deadly serious. Clark, as he himself observed, was frustrated after fighting a war with his hands tied behind his back, and was apparently willing to risk everything for the sake of amour-propre .

Nato's increasingly embarrassing, not to say ineffective, air assault on Yugoslavia, had ended. It was over, not least as General Sir Charles Guthrie, chief of the defence staff, acknowledged in an interview with the Guardian, thanks to the intervention of Moscow - its refusal to come to the aid of Belgrade. The point was emphatically underlined by Jackson in a further interview over the weekend with the Sunday Telegraph.

"The event of June 3 [when Moscow urged Milosevic to surrender] was the single event that appeared to me to have the greatest significance in ending the war," said Jackson. Asked about the bombing campaign, he added pointedly: "I wasn't responsible for the air campaign, you're talking to the wrong person."

Having helped Nato out of its predicament, Moscow was embroiled in arguments with Washington about the status of Russian troops in the K-For operation. For reasons to do with efficiency as much as power politics, the west insisted the Russian contingent must be "Nato-led". With or without Yeltsin's say-so, on June 12 a group of some 200 Russian troops drove out of Bosnia - where they were serving with the Nato-led S-For stabilisation force - and in full view of the world's television cameras made for Pristina airport where Jackson had planned to set up his K-For headquarters guarded by British paratroopers.

The Russians had made a political point, not a military one. It was apparently too much for Clark. According to the US magazine, Newsweek, General Clark ordered an airborne assault on the airfield by British and French paratroopers. General Jackson refused. Clark then asked Admiral James Ellis, the American commander of Nato's southern command, to order helicopters to occupy the airport to prevent Russian Ilyushin troop carriers from sending in reinforcements. Ellis replied that the British General Jackson would oppose such a move. In the end the Ilyushins were stopped when Washington persuaded Hungary, a new Nato member, to refuse to allow the Russian aircraft to fly over its territory.

Jackson got full support from the British government for his refusal to carry out the American general's orders. When Clark appealed to Washington, he was allegedly given the brush-off. The American is said to have complained to Jackson about the British general's refusal to accept the order to take over Pristina airfield, and Jackson's subsequent appeal to his political masters when Clark visited Kosovo on June 24.

The unsuccessful issuing of Clark's order has left a bitter taste, especially given the delay in US marines joining the K-For operation - a delay which Jackson had been prepared to indulge even though it held up the entry into Kosovo. Had the British general carried out Clark's instruction, all hope for a compromise with the Russians would have been shattered. In the end, Nato and Moscow reached a compromise and General Jackson willingly provided water and other supplies to stranded Russian paratroopers holed up at the airfield. He swallowed any hurt pride he might have had by insisting, not entirely convincingly, that control of the airfield was not important.

The episode triggers reminiscences of the Korean war. Then, General Douglas MacArthur, commander of the UN force, wanted to invade, even nuke, China, until he was brought to heel by President Truman. So concerned was Clement Attlee that he urgently flew to Washington to put an end to such madness. MacArthur was relieved of his command.

The comparison, of course, is not exact, but worth recording nonetheless. Last week, Clark was told in a telephone conversation from General Henry Shelton, chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, that he must leave his post early and make way for an older man, General Joseph Ralston, a favourite of the American defence secretary, William Cohen. Clark fell victim, not only to the Pristina airfield row, but to his tense relationship with Washington throughout the war - his repeated requests for more aircraft, including Apache helicopters (never used in conflict because of the risk to pilots), the need for a ground force contingency plan and an altogether more effective strategy against Milosevic, a man he got to know well during the 1995 Dayton peace negotiations on Bosnia. Asked to comment on Clark's forced retirement, Jackson replied: "He is my superior officer and that's it."

So Nato will have a new supreme military commander close to Cohen and a new secretary-general - George Robertson - equally close to the US defence secretary as documents released under the US freedom of information act and reported today elsewhere in this newspaper testify. Though Nato was looking for a German - the defence minister, Rudolf Scharping declined - Robertson is said to have the enthusiastic support of the French and German governments to succeed the Spaniard, Javier Solana, who will take up a new post responsible for developing the EU's incipient common foreign and security policy.

What does Robertson's appointment - expected to be formally approved tomorrow - signify ? He is regarded as having a "safe" pair of hands. He is unlikely to take risks. His main task will be to straddle the Atlantic, to help patch fissures in the alliance which almost cracked during the Kosovo war, and to persuade the Europeans to cooperate more effectively in the defence and security field.

Robertson has talked much of "defence diplomacy". He will need to put this into practice, no more so than in Nato's relations with Russia, as the transatlantic alliance looks towards the east. The superficial rhetoric, Anglo-American arrogance, and the dangerously presumptuous approach towards Moscow, must be laid to rest.

Even Liberal Journalists Fawn Over Generals

Daily Camera (Boulder)
January 26, 2003

*David Barsamian is director of Alternative Radio, the Boulder-based
award-winning weekly series. He is the author of "The Decline & Fall of
Public Broadcasting."

When the United States marches to war, the media march with it. And within
the media, the generals generally are heavily armed with microphones.

The din of collateral language is rising to cacophonous levels. The
mobilization and ubiquity of present and past brass on the airwaves is an
essential component of manufacturing consent for war. Perhaps we need
no-air zones for them. That's unlikely to happen when ABC/TV and NPR's
Cokie Roberts gushes, "I am, I will just confess to you, a total sucker
for the guys who stand up with all the ribbons on and stuff and they say
it's true and I'm ready to believe it."

Just look at one three-day period in early January. On PBS' "The NewsHour"
on Jan. 2 with Ray Suarez as host, the lead story was Iraq. The guests
were Patrick Lang, U.S. Army, and John Warden, U.S. Air Force.

They were joined by Geoffrey Kemp, a war hawk and ex-Reagan NSC staffer.
The discussion totally focused on strategies and tactics. How many troops
would be needed to "do the job?" What would the bombing campaign look
like? And the inevitable, When will the war begin? It's kind of like
placing bets on a bowl game.

Suarez, formally of NPR's "Talk of the Nation" played the classic role of
the unctuous and compliant questioner. There were no uncomfortable
inquiries about the U.N. weapons-inspection process, casualty figures,
international law, the U.N. Charter or the notorious U.S. practice of
double standards on Security Council resolutions.

Instead, the pundits pontificated on troop deployments, carrier battle
groups and heavy infantry forces such as the 3rd Mechanized Division.
Warden wondered aloud if "we need those ground forces in place before we
initiate hostilities?" Then he interestingly added that there is "no Iraqi
offensive capability outside their borders." This went right by Suarez,
always the smiling and polite host.

The next day, CNN scored a general trifecta. Aaron Brown, anchor of "News
Night," had on Gen. Wesley Clark, former NATO commander and now on the CNN
payroll, Army Brig. Gen. David Grange and Air Force Maj. Gen. G. Don
Shepperd. With the banner of "Showdown Iraq" on the screen, Clark said,
"The U.S. is going to do it," meaning attack Iraq. Then Brown, ever
sedate, opined "It's going to happen mid-February-ish."

On Jan. 4, Scott Simon, host of NPR's "Weekend Edition," had retired
Marine Lt. Gen. Bernard Trainor on. Trainor is now senior fellow at the
Council on Foreign Relations.

Displaying his vast linguistic skills, and indeed mimicking network
anchors, Trainor twice referred to "Sodom Hussein." Simon then mentioned
the enforcement of no-fly zones without saying they are unilaterally
imposed by the United States and have no standing in international law.

Then without any sense of irony or history, the two did a back and forth
on the possibility of the Iraqi military being charged with war crimes.
Trainor said that the Iraqis "all know about the Nuremberg trials." Again,
this demonstrates the amnesiac quality of the media. A central part of the
indictment against the Nazis, and for which they were hanged, was the
"planning and waging of aggressive war."

In 1991, the United States deliberately targeted water-purification
plants, sewage-treatment facilities and power plants, knowing that it
would produce widespread disease and death. That cannot be a topic for
polite discussion. And it isn't. War crimes are "their" crimes, not ours.

Trainor closed by saying that the U.S. military buildup in the Gulf is "so
important" because "all of this is to convince the enemy they'd better
think twice about trying to defend a bankrupt regime." There you've got it
from liberal NPR. If Iraqis try to defend themselves against attack, they
face war crime tribunals. Simon: "General, thank you very much." Trainor:
"All right, Scott. It's been a pleasure."

Short of having U.N. inspectors coming in to the United States and
monitoring the airwaves and destroying all weapons of mass distraction,
what is to be done? That is the crucial question. While applying pressure--
can anyone say boycott?--on the corporate media and their advertisers,
progressives need to vigorously support existing independent media and go
about creating and funding new media. Media projects must be at the center
of any progressive movement's agenda. I am happy to report that as I
travel around the country as part of my USA (United States of Amnesia)
tour, I see signs everywhere of young people in particular producing
media.

[Note: Original article has been nuked from the Daily Camera op-ed section. Archive taken from
 http://mailman.efn.org/pipermail/local_activists/2003-February/001861.html]

July/August 1999

Legitimate Targets?

How U.S. Media Supported War Crimes in Yugoslavia

NATO justified the bombing of the Belgrade TV station, saying it was a legitimate military target. "We've struck at his TV stations and transmitters because they're as much a part of his military machine prolonging and promoting this conflict as his army and security forces," U.S. General Wesley Clark explained--"his," of course, referring to Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic. It wasn't Milosevic, however, who was killed when the Belgrade studios were bombed on April 23, but rather 20 journalists, technicians and other civilians.

Clark's logic is exactly the same as that of the death squad commander who orders the assassination of a journalist or a publisher whose opposition newspaper supports the goals of a guerrilla movement. The targeting of the studio was a war crime, perhaps the most indisputable of several war crimes committed by NATO in its war against Yugoslavia.

But let's accept for the sake of argument that it is legitimate to target and kill journalists who are furthering the war aims of your military enemy. Wouldn't the vast majority of U.S. journalists covering the war in Yugoslavia have been, in that case, legitimate targets?

Actually, it could be argued that Yugoslavian state TV was doing less to support its government's war than the bulk of media outlets in the U.S. For the most part, the Serbian media were ignoring the war crimes committed by their own government--the massacres and brutal expulsion of ethnic Albanians from their homes in Kosovo--pretending instead that the massive flow of refugees from Kosovo was solely the result of NATO bombing.

The U.S. media, on the other hand, attempted to justify the war crimes committed by their nation's government, and sometimes even complained that criminal attacks were not being carried out. In their zeal to present the war against Yugoslavia as a moral crusade, members of the media sometimes slipped into the mentality that the attack on Yugoslavia was supposedly intended to combat: the logic of ethnic cleansing.

Real crimes, false guilt

Ethnic cleansers mobilize support by portraying their victims as deserving of victimization--by asserting that, as a group, they are guilty of such crimes or are otherwise so contemptible that being driven from their homes is a small price for them to pay.

Ideally, the propaganda will make use of real atrocities committed by members of the group that one wants to expel. In drumming up support for ethnic cleansing in majority-Serb areas of Croatia and Bosnia, for example, Serbian media in the early '90s dwelt obsessively on the collaboration of some Croatians and Bosnian Muslims with the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia during World War II--collaboration that was real enough, and resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Serbs, but which did not transmit a genetic culpability to Croatians and Bosnian Muslims in general. (Belgrade's media seems to have generally avoided this imputation of blood guilt to Albanians during the conflict over Kosovo, instead presenting mostly disingenuous assertions of brotherhood.)

This same technique can easily be used against ethnic Serbs, since there's no lack of atrocities committed by Serbians. Here's the New York Times' liberal columnist Anthony Lewis (5/29/99), explaining why "those who have been critical" of the bombing of Yugoslavia should "think again about which side they are on":

In 1992 the Serbian commander in Bosnia, Ratko Mladic, told his gunners in the hills around Sarajevo, "Burn it all." And they did: hospitals, universities, mosques, homes. That should be remembered when Serbs today describe themselves as victims.

What should be remembered, exactly? That a Serbian committed infamous war crimes, therefore whatever is done to Serbians is excusable? That's probably not too different from what Mladic was thinking about the Bosnian Muslims.

Target Milosevic--or Serbs?

At the beginning of the bombing of Yugoslavia, NATO was stressing the idea that Milosevic alone was responsible for the war, and that the airstrikes were aimed at only him. "We're not at war with anybody, and certainly not with the people of Yugoslavia," NATO spokesperson Jamie Shea insisted at a NATO briefing.

And at first, most of the U.S. media went along with this line, presenting a rather colorless, opportunistic bureaucrat as a Hitlerian lunatic who had single-handedly launched war after war to satisfy his own personal hatreds. "The Face of Evil" was how Newsweek described Milosevic on its April 19 cover. Time's Lance Morrow (4/12/99), with astute grasp of the use of physical detail to inspire hate, described Milosevic's "reddish, piggy eyes set in a big round head." Time (5/3/99) took him even lower down the bestiality scale with a cartoon of "Slobbo the Nutt," a "worm-like leader."

From the beginning, however, there were prominent pundits and news outlets that took issue with the idea that Serbian civilians should not suffer from the bombing. In the April 5 Time, for example, reporter Bruce Nelan took issue with NATO's use of lighter bombs in the Yugoslav war, noting that "smaller bombs means there's less certainty about destroying the target in one attack. And if the pilot has to come back, that increases the risk to him in order to lessen the risk of civilians on the ground--a kind of Disneyland idea of customer service that rankles many war fighters at the Pentagon."

Not long into the war, NATO did relax the rules of engagement for the bombing campaign, quite predictably increasing the number of innocents killed by U.S. bombs--a development that was cheered by some pundits. New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman wrote on April 6 that "people tend to change their minds and adjust their goals as they see the price they are paying mount. Twelve days of surgical bombing was never going to turn Serbia around. Let's see what 12 weeks of less than surgical bombing does. Give war a chance."

Likewise, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer (4/8/99) criticized the "excruciating selectivity" of NATO's bombing raids and applauded the fact that "finally they are hitting targets--power plants, fuel depots, bridges, airports, television transmitters--that may indeed kill the enemy and civilians nearby."

"There would be nothing moving"

It's worth remembering that the laws of war, which the United States and other members of NATO are obligated by treaty to observe, specifically forbid the targeting of civilians or facilities used mainly by civilians. (A rare U.S. media acknowledgement of these obligations occurred in a St. Louis Post-Dispatch op-ed, "Is U.S. Committing War Crimes From on High?", 5/3/99.) Protocol 1, Section IV of the Geneva Convention sets forth the basic rule:

In order to ensure respect for and protection of the civilian population and civilian objects, the Parties to the conflict shall at all times distinguish between the civilian population and combatants and between civilian objects and military objectives and accordingly shall direct their operations only against military objectives.

Keep that legal standard in mind when you read Friedman in the New York Times (4/23/99), sounding remarkably like Ratko Mladic:

Let's at least have a real air war. The idea that people are still holding rock concerts in Belgrade, or going out for Sunday merry-go-round rides, while their fellow Serbs are "cleansing" Kosovo, is outrageous. It should be lights out in Belgrade: Every power grid, water pipe, bridge, road and war-related factory has to be targeted.

Like it or not, we are at war with the Serbian nation (the Serbs certainly think so), and the stakes have to be very clear: Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 too.

And when you listen to Bill O'Reilly, the top-rated commentator on the Fox News Channel (4/26/99):

If NATO is not able to wear down this Milosevic in the next few weeks, I believe that we have to go in there and drop leaflets on Belgrade and other cities and say, "Listen, you guys have got to move because we're now going to come in and we're going to just level your country. The whole infrastructure is going."

Rather than put ground forces at risk where we're going to see 5,000 Americans dead, I would rather destroy their infrastructure, totally destroy it. Any target is OK. I'd warn the people, just as we did with Japan, that it's coming, you've got to get out of there, OK, but I would level that country so that there would be nothing moving--no cars, no trains, nothing.

These commentators, and others like them, are advocates of war crimes; they're advocating that NATO commit the exact same crimes for which Milosevic was indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal. The same section of the Geneva Protocols that forbids the deliberate killing of civilians forbids the targeting of civilian objects, and obviously it's no more legal to tell people to leave their homes or be bombed than it is to tell them to leave their homes or be shot. And the laws of war do not allow one side to commit criminal acts against civilians because crimes have been committed by the other side.

Accountable for the dictator

The concept that underlies these bloodthirsty calls for attacks on Serbian civilians is collective guilt: the idea that an entire ethnic group can be held responsible for the actions of their leaders--or rulers. As Anthony Lewis put it (New York Times, 5/29/99): "NATO air attacks have killed Serbian civilians. That is regrettable. But it is a price that must be paid when a nation falls in behind a criminal leader."

U.S. media saw no contradiction between calling Milosevic a "dictator" and holding the people of Yugoslavia morally responsible for his actions. After starting out with a paragraph worrying that Milosevic might "retreat... from Kosovo with his dictatorship intact," the New York Times' Blaine Harden went on to assert: "It is worth remembering, though, that Mr. Milosevic is an elected leader, having won three elections that were more or less fair." Arguing with a member of Congress, Fox's O'Reilly (4/26/99) declared: "I don't understand why you don't think the Serb people should be held accountable for this dictator. He serves at their behest."

Actually, in his current role as president of Yugoslavia, Milosevic was not popularly elected; he was chosen by the Yugoslav federal assembly, in an irregular vote in which he was the only candidate allowed. Perhaps a more direct indication of the level of Milosevic's support is the fact that an opposition coalition won the November 1996 local elections in 14 of Serbia's 19 largest cities, including many of the communities where NATO's attacks were concentrated.

Still, there was a widespread sense that the Serbs, by failing to respond with outrage to reports of atrocities in Kosovo, had lost the moral standing to protest the NATO bombs falling on Belgrade. In a New Republic article (5/10/99) headlined "Milosevic's Willing Executioners," Stacy Sullivan writes: "The relative absence of effective Serbian protest and, especially, the silence of intellectuals on the matter of war crimes raise disturbing questions about the culpability of Serbs as a whole in the actions of the authoritarian government that rules them." The New York Times' Harden (5/9/99) makes a similar case in an article with the frightening headline "How to Cleanse Serbia"--though it's hard to take an analysis of the Balkans very seriously that refers to Montenegro as an "obscure" place.

How could the people of Serbia sit by while such terrible things are being done? In a country like the United States, where the government has sponsored massive atrocities in countries from Indonesia to Guatemala with only muted protests--where the secretary of state replies to a report that half a million children have been killed in Iraq by sanctions with the statement that "we think the price is worth it" (60 Minutes, 5/12/96)--this question should really not be such a puzzle.

Clearly, believing that there is something essentially wrong with Serbs is a more comforting position than recognizing that people in various countries have the ability to rationalize away the bad things that their governments do. That's a syndrome that media figures who justified the U.S. bombing of civilian targets in Yugoslavia should hardly have been unfamiliar with.

GEN. WESLEY CLARK JOINS CSIS

Former Supreme Allied Commander Named Distinguished Adviser

Contact: Mark Schoeff Jr. 202-775-3242, Stephen Chappell 775-3167

WASHINGTON, July 10, 2000 — Retired U.S. Army Gen. Wesley K. Clark, who commanded the first major combat operation in NATO history, was named today a distinguished senior adviser at CSIS.

Clark, Supreme Allied Commander Europe from July 10, 1997, until May 3, 2000, will work with the Center across the full range of its programs, concentrating particularly on international security. Clark was in overall command of NATO's military forces in Europe and led approximately 75,000 troops from 37 NATO and other nations participating in ongoing operations in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo. In 1999, Clark commanded the alliance's military response to the Kosovo crisis -Operation Allied Force.

Clark also was head of the U.S. European Command, responsible for all U.S. military activities in 89 countries and territories covering more than 13 million square miles of Europe, Africa, and the Middle East and involving approximately 109,000 U.S. troops.

Clark served as commander in chief of the U.S. Southern Command, Panama, from June 1996 to July 1997, where he commanded all U.S. forces and was responsible for most U.S. military activities in Latin America and the Caribbean. From April 1994 to June 1996, he was the staff officer responsible for global politico-military affairs and U.S. military strategic planning for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He also led the military negotiations for the Bosnian Peace Accords at Dayton.

Clark graduated first in his 1966 class at the United States Military Academy at West Point. He holds a master's degree in philosophy, politics, and economics from Oxford University, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. He is a graduate of the National War College, Command and General Staff College, Armor Officer Advanced and Basic Courses, and Ranger and Airborne schools.

Among his military decorations are the Defense Distinguished Service Medal (five awards), Distinguished Service Medal (two awards), Silver Star, Legion of Merit (four awards), Bronze Star Medal (two awards), Purple Heart, Meritorious Service Medal (two awards), and the Army Commendation Medal (two awards). In addition, Clark received more than 20 major military awards from foreign governments, including honorary knighthoods from the United Kingdom and the Netherlands as well as the Commander of the Legion of Honor from France.

"Wes Clark combines extraordinary skill as a soldier and military strategist with vast experience in public policy and distinguished scholarship. We are fortunate to have the benefit of his association with the Center. He will be a great asset to CSIS as we engage the foreign and security policy agenda facing the nation in the new century," said CSIS president and CEO John Hamre.

For those in the audience who did not have a flier, I began to explain the picture which showed General Clark in a congratulatory handshake with Hashim Thaci, leader of the KLA, which under the noses of KFOR had murdered or ethnically cleansed thousands of Kosovo Serbs and had destroyed more Orthodox Christian churches and monasteries than were destroyed in 500 years under the Ottoman Empire. Next to Thaci was Bernard Kouchner, Chief U.N. administrator in Kosovo, British General Sir Michael Jackson, and Agim Ceku, who commanded the Croatian Army in "Operation Storm" that ethnically cleansed 250,000 Serbs from Krajina and murdered thousands and who now commands the Kosovo Protection Corps (KPC), the thinly disguised successor to the KLA. It should be noted that the KLA, with whom we allied ourselves, at one time was designated by the U.S. State Department as a terrorist organization. Of course, this is the same KLA about whom Senator Joe Lieberman said: "The United States of America and the Kosovo Liberation Army stand for the same values and principles . . . Fighting for the KLA is fighting for human rights and American values." (Washington Post, Apr.28, 1999). Clark at Borders bookstore, Pentagon Center Mall, 17 Jul 2001 by Colonel George Jatras, USAF (Ret.)

Gen. Wesley Clark Fights On and On

November 12, 1999

At the beginning of the Kosovo conflict,CounterPunch delved into the military career of General Wesley Clark and discovered that his meteoric rise through the ranks derived from the successful manipulation of appearances: faking the results of combat exercises, greasing to superiors and other practices common to the general officer corps. We correctly predicted that the unspinnable realities of a real war would cause him to become unhinged. Given that Clark attempted to bomb the CNN bureau in Belgrade and ordered the British General Michael Jackson to engage Russian troops in combat at the end of the war, we feel events amply vindicated our forecast.

With the end of hostilities it has become clear even to Clark that most people, apart from some fanatical members of the war party in the White House and State Department, consider the general, as one Pentagon official puts it, "a horse's ass". Defense Secretary William Cohen is known to loathe him, and has seen to it that the Hammer of the Serbs will be relieved of the Nato command two months early.

Adding to this humiliation have been numerous post-war reports from the ground in Kosovo making it clear that the air campaign supervised by Clark inflicted little damage on the Serb army. Derisive comments from Serb generals on the general ineffectiveness of Nato's tactical air campaign have only rubbed salt in his wounds. Accordingly, on September 16, in a desperate effort to redeem the tarnished record of his military command, Clark summoned the Nato press corps in Brussels to hear his own version of events.

True to form, Clark's presentation opened with a gross distortion of the truth: "From the outset of this campaign, we said we would be attacking on two air lines of operation. There would be a strategic attack line" against Serb air defenses, headquarters, supply lines and a "tactical line of operation against the Serb forces in Kosovo and in southern Serbia".

In fact, neither Clark nor anyone else in the U.S. chain of command imagined that the war would involve more than a brief demonstration of Nato firepower in the forms of attacks on air defense radars, communications centers and other fixed targets, thus providing Milosevic with the excuse the U.S. thought he wanted to throw in his hand.
"The Joint Chiefs went along with [the war] on the strict understanding that it would last a maximum of two days", says one Pentagon official with direct knowledge of these events. "No one really planned for what to do after that."

Clark intended the briefing to provide unassailable confirmation of his wartime claims that Nato pilots had destroyed hundreds of Serb tanks and other heavy weapons. Yet he had a problem, since the teams he dispatched to Kosovo immediately after the war could only find 26 tanks and self-propelled artillery pieces destroyed on the ground. Accordingly, Clark tried to dazzle his audience with military managerial techno-speak about the "building block methodology" employed in preparing his assessment, which permitted NATO's supreme commander to add another 67 "successful strikes" to the "catastrophic kills" represented by the 26 tanks and self-propelled artillery pieces he had already claimed.

With the sleight of hand of a true briefer, Clark left the impression in the minds of the press corps that in each of these 67 strikes the targets had actually been destroyed. But the "methodology" meant merely that the target was added to the score so long as two or more sources-i.e. the pilot's claim, plus perhaps video footage or a report from someone else in the area-indicated that the weapon had hit the target. With such casuistry, Clark was able to inflate the total figure to 93-not far from the wartime boast of 110 such kills.

Even the paltry claim of 26 destroyed targets in this category should be viewed with skepticism. An alert friend of CounterPunch in the defense community points out that slide # 27 in the briefing features a "tank" destroyed by a U.S. Navy F-14 mission. Actually, slide #27 shows not a tank but a second world war U.S. tank destroyer known as the M-36, famously ineffective even when introduced in 1943, and later donated to Yugoslavia some time in the 1950s. Perhaps, our friend suggests, "The Yugos took one look at what they got, and then put the things in front of the nearest VFW-equivalent meeting halls. Then, along come [the Nato attacks] and the word goes out: 'we need hulks to serve as decoys for the Americans to blow up.' Wes Clark & staff collect the imagery and proudly display their 'kill'".

This same observer notes that the Pentagon is working on what will be a "lying, cheating, thieving" after-action report, basing his description on news that the work is being supervised by deputy defense secretary John Hamre, a noted time-server and catspaw of the uniformed military.

Among the many issues the report is not expected to address is the sudden disappearance, half way through the conflict, of the $2 billion B-2 stealth bomber, described by Clark as one of the "heroes" of the war. Forty-three days into the conflict, the B-2 was reported as having flown "nearly fifty" sorties. When the war ended after 78 days of bombing, an authoritative report stated that the B-2 had flown a total of 49 missions, indicating that it "fell out of the war" half way through. Presumably, the costly behemoths were deteriorating at such a rate that the Air Force decided to relegate the plane to its alternative mission as backdrop for President Clinton's demonstrations of martial resolve on TV.

Another topic on which we may expect Hamre to remain diplomatically silent is the ingenuity with which the Serbs diverted the anti-radar Harm missiles launched in enormous numbers by Nato's planes. Early on, the Serbs discovered that a microwave oven, adjusted to operate with the door open, appears exactly like an air defense radar to the $750,000 missiles - a very cost-effective exchange.

Despite such embarrassments, Clark can take heart from the fact that his influence on warfare already transcends the Balkans. Since Operation Allied Force laid waste to the Serbian civilian infrastructure, the targeting of such infrastructure has become routine and acceptable. The Israelis, who have for years shown relative care in avoiding the Lebanese infrastructure in their raids, were quick to change tactics, citing the Balkan operation as a legitimizing precedent. More recently the gangsters in the Kremlin have used the same justification for their terror-bombing of Chechnya.

Since Clark may be chagrined at his reception in post-war Washington, he should perhaps look to Tel Aviv and Moscow for a more fulsome recognition of his role in history.

DEFENDING AMERICA

April 20, 1999

CLARK AND VIETNAM.

NATO's Wesley Clark is not the Iron Duke, nor is he Stormin' Norman. Unlike Wellington and Schwarzkopf, Clark's not a muddy boots soldier. He's a military politician, without the right stuff to produce victory over Serbia.

Known by those who've served with him as the "Ultimate Perfumed Prince," he's far more comfortable in a drawing room discussing political theories than hunkering down in the trenches where bullets fly and soldiers die. An intellectual in warrior's gear. A saying attributed to General George Patton was that it took 10 years with troops alone before an officer knew how to empty a bucket of spit As a serving soldier with 33 years of active duty under his pistol belt, Clark's commanded combat units -- rifle platoon to tank division - for only seven years. The rest of his career's been spent as an aide, an executive, a student and teacher and a staff weenie.

Very much like generals Maxwell Taylor and William Westmoreland, the architect and carpenter of the Vietnam disaster, Clark was earmarked and then groomed early in his career for big things. At West Point he graduated No. 1 in his class, and even though the Vietnam War was raging and chewing up lieutenants faster than a machine gun can spit death, he was seconded to Oxford for two years of contemplating instead of to the trenches to lead a platoon.

A year after graduating Oxford, he was sent to Vietnam, where, as a combat leader for several months, he was bloodied and muddied. Unlike most of his classmates, who did multiple combat tours in the killing fields of Southeast Asia, he spent the rest of the war sheltered in the ivy towers of West Point or learning power games first hand as a White House fellow.

The war with Serbia has been going full tilt for almost a month and Clark's NATO is like a giant standing on a concrete pad wielding a sledgehammer crushing Serbian ants. Yet, with all its awesome might, NATO hasn't won a round. Instead, Milosovic is still calling all the shots from his Belgrade bunker, and all that's left for Clark is to react. Milosevic plays the fiddle and Clark dances the jig. 'Stormin' Norman or any good infantry sergeant major would have told Clark that conventional air power alone could never win a war -- it must be accompanied by boots on the ground.

German air power didn't beat Britain. Allied air power didn't beat Germany. More air power than was used against the Japanese and Germans combined didn't win in Vietnam. Forty three days of pummeling in the open desert where there was no place to hide didn't KO Saddam. That fight ended only when Schwarzkopf unleashed the steel ground fist he'd carefully positioned before the first bomb fell.

Doing military things exactly backwards, the scholar general is now, according to a high ranking Pentagon source, in "total panic mode" as he tries to mass the air and ground forces he finally figured out he needs to win the initiative. Mass is a principle of war. Clark has violated this rule along with the other eight vital principles. Any mud soldier will tell you if you don't follow the principles of war you lose.

One of the salient reasons Wellington whipped Napoleon in 1815 at Waterloo is that the Corsican piecemealed his forces. Clark's done the same thing with his air power. He started with leisurely pinpricks and now is attempting to increase the pain against an opponent with an almost unlimited threshold. Similar gradualism was one of the reasons for defeat in Vietnam.

Another mistake Clark's made is not knowing his enemy. Taylor and Westmoreland made this same error in Vietnam. Like the Vietnamese, the Serbs are fanatic warriors who know better than to fight conventionally in open formations. They'll use the rugged terrain and bomber bad weather to conduct the guerrilla operations they've been preparing for over 50 years.

And they're damn good at partisan warfare. Just ask any German 70 years or older if a fight in Serbia will be another Desert Storm. It's the smart general who knows when to retreat. If Clark lets pride stand in the way of military judgment, expect a long and bloody war.

Clark is a longtime friend of Clinton which helped rise to the top. He has also been employed by the Stephens Group, part of the Stephens family empire that helped to launch Clinton's career and keep him in the 1992 primaries despite cash problems. Wesley Clark joined Little Rock-based Stephens Group Inc. [111 Center Street, Little Rock, Arkansas 72201 (800) 643-9691, www.stephens.com] as a corporate consultant to help develop emerging-technology companies.

For Immediate Release June 29, 2000 ... "U.S. Army Gen. Wesley K. Clark recently retired after 34 years of dedicated military service to his country. A native of Little Rock, Ark., Clark and his wife now reside in Arlington, Va. Their son, Wesley Jr., is a screenwriter in Los Angeles."