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Pentagon
says it did not intentionally manipulate Kosovo war tape from CNN
After showing a video last
year purporting to demonstrate that NATO pilots didn’t have time to see
a civilian train before they “accidentally” blew it to bits during the
war against Yugoslavia, the Pentagon recently admitted the tape it showed
was not in real time but was in fact compressed and sped up three times
faster than normal.
The Pentagon claims it didn’t
intentionally mislead the media and the public. Translation — they think
we’re idiots. In fact, US Air Force officials apparently knew for several
months that the released videotape was inaccurate. Did they come forward
immediately to rectify the error? Of course not. Only after a German newspaper
started poking holes into the Pentagon’s story a few weeks ago did anyone
from the US military come forward to correct the “inadvertent” error.
Personally I don’t think it
matters much whether the tape was slowed down or sped up. We now know
that the principal justification for going to war against Yugoslavia —
to present massive human rights violations committed by Serbian forces
— was largely a lie. Yugoslavian forces committed human rights violations,
to be sure, but nothing approaching the Hitler-ian level President Clinton
and Secretary of State Madeline Albright said made intervention absolutely
necessary.
One of the most fundamental
ways of judging the legitimacy of warfare is the principal of proportionality
— the suffering warfare imposes should be proportional to the suffering
it is intended to stop or prevent. With the supposed widespread human
rights violations exposed as nonsense, the actions taken by NATO forces
clearly violated the proportionality principal. In fact NATO actions may
have resulted in nearly as many civilian deaths as Serbian forces did.
And shame on the national media
for their coverage of this and other stories surrounding the war in Yugoslavia.
When the train bombing originally occurred American viewers were treated
to the compressed video tape supporting the Pentagon’s decision over and
over again. The retraction barely made it onto network news shows. NBC,
for example, didn’t run its story on the new evidence until 20 minutes
into its news broadcast. Along with the failure to include any discussion
on evidence that NATO intentionally bombed the Chinese embassy, the broadcast
media’s performance in covering the war against Yugoslavia has been pathetic
on all fronts.