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All brasscheck.com dispatches on the US-led
attack on Yugoslavia are available, complete
with index, at http://www.brasscheck.com/yugoslavia
Please inform your friends, colleagues, and
others who you think might care.
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May 19, 1999

Every ground war needs an "incident"

Is there a ground war in the works? Some ominous
signs on the propaganda front:

* The AP, which has functioned like a NATO
public relations firm throughout the war,
has virtually stopped all stories of civilian
casualties and replaced them with ones
claiming the "effectiveness" of the bombing.

* For the last few days, multivarious "ground war"
stories have taken over the headlines: "Blair says now"
"Clinton says no" "Clinton says maybe" "What about the
Apache helicopters?" and on and on.

* The details of the suffering of refugees
in woefully under funded NATO refugee camps
- which have been previously ignored - are now
being highlighted, particularly by the
AP, as a motivation for "doing something"
to repatriate them.  (The absurdity of
using additional aggression to repatriate
people who left their homes as a result of
NATO bombing has not been raised.)

* The small stream of pseudo-atrocity stories is
accelerating.  Most recently a group of male Albanian
refugees said they were "roughed up" by Yugoslavian
police.

If true, it's contemptible behavior to be sure,
but recall that in New York City incidents like
this are a *daily* occurrence for minorities and make
headlines only in the most extreme cases such as when
an unarmed man with no criminal record or behavior was
shot down with an excess of 30 bullets. Or when police
were  caught red handed torturing a man by sodomizing
him with a mop handle. (Both cases currently in
the court system.)

In summary, reports that would implicate
NATO in atrocities are being eased out of the
US public's consciousness while motivations
for and the idea of the "normality" of a ground
invasion is being methodically introduced.

All that's needed now is an "incident" to
galvanize US public opinion.

Contrary to fraudulent US news polls, most US
citizens, far from being in favor of the
assault on Yugoslavia, either admit they don't
understand what's going on or are opposed
to it.

History has shown tt takes the illusion of a terrible
atrocity or an imminent threat to American safety to
persuade US citizens to support a war.

In previous military assaults, the necessary "incidents"
have been simply made up. Some recent examples:

In Sudan, a $100,000,000 pharmaceutical plant
was destroyed because it was said to be manufacturing
"nerve gas." The charge has since been dropped and
$25 million of the owner's money seized by the
US has been returned - 18 months later.

In Panama, long time CIA asset and George Bush
colleague Manuel Noriega was declared an
international drug dealer and US special
operations units fanned out through Panama
creating "incidents," (ex. taking shots at
US military installations and, dressed in
civilian clothes, provoking Panamanian
military into aggressive acts "against
American citizens.")

In Grenada, the US claimed the island had
been turned into a storehouse for Communist
weaponry and that an airfield under construction
there was being built to stage attacks on the
US. No weapons were found. The airport was in fact
being built by European investors to stimulate
the tourist trade.

In Vietnam, there was the Tonkin Gulf incident
in which Lyndon Johnson falsely claimed that
the North Vietnamese attacked US Navy
warships thus starting the official US military
assault against Vietnam.

If the US decides on a ground war, there
*must* be an incident to trigger it. What
form will the triggering incident for the
next escalation of the war take?

Here's a report on a technique that has already been
used successfully against Yugoslavia:

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April 28, 1999 (Brasscheck)

CNN: The New Hearst

(Note: William Randolph Hearst openly bragged about using false
reports in his newspapers to help start the Spanish-American War.)

The "rationale" for the all-out assault on Yugoslavia, including
numerous civilian tagets, is that it's needed to stop the atrocities
being committed by the Serbs. This one-sided version of events
promoted non-stop by CNN since the war civil war in Bosnia. Here's
just one example of the blatant misrepresentation that CNN has
engaged in while reporting on the tragic situation in the Balkans.

"... Another big CNN story early in the Bosnian conflict was
the killing, allegedly by Serb snipers, of two "Muslim babies" on a bus.
Who could not have been horrified by the tragic sight of the funeral
service for those innocent Muslim babies?

Where were Ms. Amanpour and CNN to set the record straight? If it had not
been for French 2 TV that covered the funeral, this writer would never have
known that the babies were Serbian (not Muslim) killed by a Muslim sniper,
as was made painfully clear by the presence of a Serbian Orthodox priest
conducting the funeral service. . . before it was interrupted by a grenade
attack.

However, in the CNN coverage *the priest had been cropped out*, leaving the
American audience to believe that Serbs were not only the assassins, but
were also responsible for the grenade attack."

Source: Stella Jatras, The Washington Times. March 14, 1999
"Odd alliance at State, CNN?"

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Note: Ms. Amanpour has recently arrived in Albania.