And if it is wrong now, it was wrong then too.
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http://www.balkanpeace.org/monitor/yeco/yeco06.shtmlTHE LONDON INDEPENDENT, Monday, November 22, 1999
US 'lost count of uranium shells fired in Kosovo'
By Robert Fisk in Pristina
American aircraft used so much depleted uranium ammunition during the Nato bombardment of Serbia that US officials are now claiming - to the disbelief of European bomb disposal officers - that they have no idea how many locations may be contaminated by the radioactive dust left behind by their weapons.
British and other ordnance officers ordered to defuse live ammunition in Kosovo have been fobbed off by the US military with "security" objections - and then with statements that no record was kept of depleted uranium (DU) munitions used in the Kosovo war.
A growing number of doctors and scientists suspect that an explosion of cancers in southern Iraq is caused by the US use of depleted uranium tank and aircraft munition warheads during the 1991 Gulf War. British and American doctors have suggested that it may also be a cause of the "Gulf War syndrome", which has caused the death of up to 400 veterans. Despite these fears, Nato this summer refused to assist a UN team investigating the use of depleted uranium munitions in Kosovo.
But information given to The Independent by European military sources in Kosovo demonstrates just why Nato should be so reluctant to tell the truth about the anti-armour ammunition - a waste product of the nuclear industry which burns on impact and releases toxic and radioactive material when it explodes. For it transpires that DU was used by A-10 "tankbuster" aircraft for more than a month in at least 40 locations in Kosovo, many of them "fake" military targets set up by the Serbs to lure pilots away from their tanks and artillery positions.
More tragically, A-10 aircraft used DU ammunition in two attacks against Kosovo Albanian refugees, the first on 14 April on the main road between Djakovica and Prizren. Hundreds of civilians were wounded in these attacks, carried out when Nato pilots - flying at more than 15,000 feet to avoid any injury to themselves - bombed refugee columns in the belief that they were military convoys.
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http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0923-08.htmGiven our collective recurring political amnesia, let's turn to an eye-opening August 1999 report from our British friends at The Guardian, concerning Clark's role as Supreme Allied Commander - a post viewed by Clark supporters as a major qualification to be our next president.
"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, but rather 20 journalists, technicians and other civilians... 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."
If you think the Guardian editors were being overly harsh in describing this as a "war crime," keep in mind that a panel of 16 judges from 11 countries who, at a people's tribunal meeting in New York before 500 witnesses, found U.S. and NATO leaders guilty of war crimes against Yugoslavia in the March 24 to June 10, 1999, "humanitarian" attack on that country.
As for Clark's reputation among the rank and file in our military establishment, the highly decorated and straight-talking Col. David Hackworth has written that Clark is "known by those who've served with him as the 'Ultimate Perfumed Prince.' (He) is far more comfortable in a drawing room discussing political theories than hunkering down in the trenches where bullets fly and soldiers die."
And we haven't even scratched the surface in discussing Clark's idealization of the Powell Doctrine, which led to NATO forces dropping tons of depleted uranium bombs on Kosovo, creating widespread civilian sickness as a result of contamination associated with DU. ___________________________________________________________
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Kosovo/Story/0,2763,208056,00.htmlA month later, with Nato getting increasingly frustrated about Milosevic's refusal to buckle, Mary Robinson, the UN human rights commissioner, said Nato's bombing campaign had lost its "moral purpose".
Referring to the cluster bomb attack on residential areas and market in the Serbian town of Nis, she described Nato's range of targets as "very broad" and "almost unfocused". There were too many mistakes;
the bombing of the Serbian television station in Belgrade - which killed a make-up woman, among others - was "not acceptable". Nato, which soon stopped apologising for mistakes which by its own estimates killed 1,500 civilians and injured 10,000, said that "collateral damage" was inevitable, and the small number of "mistakes" remarkable, given the unprecedented onslaught of more than 20,000 bombs.
Yet once Nato - for political reasons, dictated largely by the US - insisted on sticking to high-altitude bombing, with no evidence that it was succeeding in destroying Serb forces committing atrocities against ethnic Albanians, the risk of civilian casualties increased, in Kosovo and throughout Serbia.
Faced with an increasingly uncertain public opinion at home, Nato governments chose more and more targets in urban areas, and experimented with new types of bombs directed at Serbia's civilian economy, partly to save face. By Nato's own figures, of the 10,000 Kosovans massacred by Serb forces, 8,000 were killed after the bombing campaign started.
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