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MEMO From Laura Jones Subject Very Good News Date Friday, February 23, 2001 To The Entire Cosmos I am dedicating this memo to my newest grandchild, my 22nd, Rose Elise, born yesterday afternoon, on the birthday of her first cousin, Jessi. My regular chat group already knows her older brother, Jeffrey, just turned four. Once when I sent a memo from his house, I showed him the ikon for connecting the computer to the remote server (now when he plays computer he makes the dial-up noises with his mouth) and the one for mailing the e-mail, after the line of blue boxes filed across, I told him he was now world famous! So, thinking he was still connected to the world because theirs is a speaker phone, he ran to get his harmonica and played it by the speaker phone, sorry you didn’t get to hear him as he is very musical. All this good news needs very little commentary, but since I am adding the Aymara list to my usual chat group who have been with me all along, I will just note that throughout the months after we started bombing Orthodox Serb Kosovo, I myself reported just about everything you will find in the letter from Benjamin C. Works of Sirius. I sent it out in my memos and I posted it on my web page which I invited lots of people to visit. Of course I didn’t have Works’ inside sources, but I was nevertheless extremely effective at the time because our propaganda machine was going full tilt – and just take a look at the influential people I was reaching, all the Orthodox Patriarchs, Pope John Paul, some heads of state, I had more at the time, I reduced my chat group as things improved, I used to send to someone in BBC and various other media, plus I had people in our government including Madeleine Albright who definitely was much influenced by what I said, I mean, our bombing was known as "Madeleine’s war, and you can bet I got on her case, but strong. And she felt the heat, Al Gore was the one who replied to me, but I hadn’t written to him, but rather to her, so I knew she got the message. And later after she shaped up and I praised her for it, she sent me a special thank you note. Incidentally, you will note that the 7 reformed Albanian brothers mention Hashim Thaci as really the worst, and it is noted that the Albanian people do not like him as was indicated in the last elections which he lost bigtime. Well, he is the person Albright chose to deal with at Rambouillet, not with any duly elected Albanian, although Dr. Ibrahim Rugova was an elected official, but of a moderate bent whereas Thaci was an unelected war lord who solidified his power by slaughtering his opponents. And Albright had no intention of negotiating anything at all at Rambouillet, she said "We will just raise the bar a little higher than we know they [Milosevich] will accept as an excuse to bomb them." All of this I of course reported long before it hit the headlines of the – well, it still hasn’t even hit all the headlines yet, I doubt Works’ letter will get in the Hartford newspaper once edited by Charles Dudley Warner. Well, it was when Albright was scared to death (I bet her blood pressure is higher than mine) when she saw what she had done by putting Thaci in power that she – definitely became a different kind of person. But as we see, all her back peddling was not sufficient to eliminate the terrorist machine she had created. So, Aymara, see what good work I do? And we will be just as effective in Latin America. We will do what Bodo Hombach is proposing: "Economic cooperation in the Balkans will erode the borders that have sprung up during a decade of ethnic conflict and create firewalls of prosperity around the region's hotspots." The Aymara are going to bring prosperity to Latin America precisely because this worldwide thrust to pursue "economic and technical cooperation [to] build ties between countries that have long eyed each other with mistrust" is going to require a lot, a whole lot of translation! Ours is going to be a tremendously lucrative commercial venture! I know this because at one point I tried to develop the Logos system for Eastern Europe and Russia but Bud Scott wouldn’t let me have it. My son who also worked at Logos said it was because Bud and the rest were satisfied with all the money they were getting from the about 4 big customers they had at that time and did not want to be "taken cheap" with a lot of customers paying less. That’s what we will be doing, but it won’t have the name Logos, it will have the beautiful name Aymara. Everyone in the cosmos will know what a perfect language Aymara is! Subject: Economic growth to create firewall around Balkans hotspots Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2001 12:10:17 PST AFP / James Hider Organization: Copyright 2001 by Agence France-Presse (via ClariNet) Newsgroups: clari.world.europe.balkans,clari.world.europe SKOPJE, Feb 22 (AFP) - Economic cooperation in the Balkans will erode the borders that have sprung up during a decade of ethnic conflict and create firewalls of prosperity around the region's hotspots, the head of the Balkans Stability Pact said here Thursday. Bodo Hombach said economic and technical cooperation, beginning in the energy sector, would build ties between countries that have long eyed each other with mistrust, and link the potential "boom region" to the rest of Europe. He was speaking on the sidelines of the Southeastern Europe Cooperation summit in Skopje, where economic ministers paved the way for a meeting of Balkans presidents and prime ministers on Friday. Rising prosperity across the Balkans also will build firewalls around hotspots such as Kosovo and southern Serbia, Hombach said, where ethnic tension, killings and conflict have outlived the democratic changes of the past year. He said that developing the Balkans energy supply would encourage growth and investment, but the policy of taking small steps in the sector would also have an important political aspect, which he called "preventative diplomacy." "Connectivity in the energy sector is a wonderful example of regional cooperation," he said, citing post-World War II economic ties developed between erstwhile enemies in France and Germany. "That's where you create mutual dependencies and mutual inter-connectedness. That's a good start for a common approach to create togetherness in other fields," he said. He called the situation in southern Serbia, where ethnic Albanian rebels are fighting for union with Kosovo, a "nuisance", but insisted the reformist authorities in Belgrade had shown laudable restraint in not using the strong-arm tactics of Slobodan Milosevic whom they ousted last October. And in Kosovo, he said an increase in trade and investment would isolate extremists who were trying to purge the Yugoslav province of the 100,000 Serbs who have stayed since the UN took over the unruly region in June 1999. "My concept is to create stability around the hotspots, not to go into the hotspots. I don't have the police or military at my disposal," he said. "I am convinced we can overcome ethnic conflict. No one is crazy enough to still want to still want to have ethnic conflict if it means cutting off your own leg to do so," he said. Last week, a bomb attack on a Serbian convoy escorted by NATO-led peacekeepers killed 10 people, just days after a similar convoy ambush left one Serb dead. On Sunday, attacks in southern Serbia left three Serb police and one ethnic Albanian rebel leader dead. Leaders from Yugoslavia, Albania, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey, Macedonia, Romania and Croatia, as well as EU foreign police chief Javier Solana, were to discuss the unrest on Friday. Hombach said they would be building on a genuine wish for peace after a decade of bitter nationalist conflict as the former Socialist Yugoslavia cracked apart into its constitutive republics. He said that on Monday, a group of around 20 ethnic Albanian guerrillas had arrived in an Macedonian Albanian village. When Macedonia troops surrounded the village, it was local Albanian leaders who intervened and told the gunmen to leave. A quarter of Macedonia's population of two million are ethnic Albanians; the remainder are Slavic Macedonians. Macedonian government spokesman Antonio Milososki said a cabinet meeting Wednesday had "strongly condemned extremist Albanians trying to provoke conflict and a new crisis in the region." Macedonia has stepped up border patrols and cooperation with the Kosovo peacekeeping force after clashes with armed groups based in Kosovo in recent weeks. Several leaders, including Turkish Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit and his Greek counterpart Costas Simitis, had arrived late Thursday for the summit. The foreign ministers from Yugoslavia and Macedonia, Goran Svilanovic and Srdjan Kerin, signed an accord on their common border, to be formally inked Friday by Presidents Vojislav Kostunica and Boris Trajkovski. * * * THE NEW YORK TIMES, Friday, February 23, 2001 Seven Kosovar Brothers Say 'Enough Is Enough' After Attack By CARLOTTA GALL PRISTINA, Kosovo, Feb. 21 - The seven brothers of the Geci family were always at the forefront of the war against Serbia, and their home lies in the hilly central heartland of the Kosovo Albanians' fight for independence. Last weekend, they took a courageous step of a different kind, gathering the people of their village to denounce the bomb attack that killed at least 11 Serbian civilians last Friday. There is a climate of fear in Kosovo: although most Albanians say they are tired of violence, and voted overwhelmingly for the more moderate of their political parties in last October's municipal elections, few will speak out, let alone act against the perpetrators of violence. But the Geci brothers, led by Fadil Geci, 39, a regional leader of the Democratic League of Kosovo, a moderate party, decided with the bomb blast that enough was enough. "We had a meeting in the village and decided it was the worst, most cowardly thing what happened," Mr. Geci said. "We must find who did this. It would be easier to breathe freely and for the internationals to do their job if we do." Only one Albanian-language daily, Koha Ditore, expressed outrage at the bus attack, the bloodiest and most brazen assault on the Serbian minority in more than a year. Bota Sot, the newspaper that supports Mr. Geci's own party, played it down, placing the story on an inside page. Albanian politicians issued standard statements, and only one, the former rebel commander, Ramush Haradinaj, condemned the bus bomb as an act of terrorism. "That was a brave move, to use the word terrorism," said Veton Surroi, publisher of Koha Ditore. "At last we are not alone." Because he dares to speak his mind, Mr. Geci said he fears his life is in danger from hard-line opponents of his party. In an interview at his home in Lausa, a village still in ruins from the 1999 Kosovo war, he accused people by name, in particular the former political leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army, Hashim Thaci, and his associates, of being behind much of the violence in the province. Mr. Thaci denies orchestrating the violence and pointed to his public statements condemning the latest attack and others. Nevertheless, the public perception that he is involved in corruption and violence cost him in last October's election, where his party finished with a disappointing 27 percent of the vote. The violence in Kosovo has acquired new dimensions in the last few months. There are now daily clashes between Albanian rebels and Serbian forces across the border east of Kosovo, where three Serbian police officers were killed when a land mine destroyed their car two days after the bus blast, and armed activity and gunrunning is spilling into neighboring Macedonia. Extra troops have been sent to join the American soldiers patrolling the eastern border. United Nations police officers have had three riot teams on standby since Friday as protests have flared in the Serbian enclaves across Kosovo and blocked the main road south from the capital, Pristina, for days. In the cycle of blood and vengeance that has driven the death and destruction of the past 10 years, no one questions that there will be more violence. A Yugoslav minister warned this week that Albanian rebels were planning a coordinated offensive in March across Kosovo, southern Serbia and even into Macedonia. In Kosovo, peacekeepers and United Nations police officers are more cautious in their assessment, but they say that it takes only a handful of men to start something, and if they are determined, terrorists can get through the most stringent security measures. The international peacekeeping mission is looking increasingly troubled, and contributing nations are divided as to how to proceed, one senior British officer said. He saw the overriding mission now as one of containing what he termed the Albanian threat to the whole region, with the immediate task being to suppress the insurgency of armed Albanian rebels inside southern Serbia. This officer, reflecting continuing European objections to independence for Kosovo, said that extremists must be suppressed and the Albanians persuaded to accept that Kosovo will always be part of Serbia. Peacekeepers, United Nations police officers and administrators display impatience with the Kosovo Albanians nowadays. Some attribute the escalating violence to a hard core of pro-independence supporters who see their goal slipping away. Others say organized crime is driving the violence and criminals want Kosovo to remain unstable so that they thrive. "There's drugs going through here, weapons, a lot of women being trafficked and abused, stolen vehicles - so it's big money," said Norm Boucher, director of operations of the United Nations police in Kosovo. "The weapons are coming from far away, from China and Russia. That states that a lot of people are involved, they are making big bucks and trying to protect their territory." Mr. Boucher, a Canadian police officer, put the bus attack down to hatred for Serbs and opposition to the return of Serbian refugees to the province. But the design and execution of the explosion was nearly perfect, denoting a high level of expertise and leadership, he said. Although the police have a good lead with two men arrested at the scene, the general climate of fear and threats - as well as the lack of sophisticated intelligence equipment and of a witness protection program - will make it difficult to find the ringleaders behind the bombing, he said. For Mr. Geci, it is crucial that the perpetrators of this and other crimes are caught. Most violent crimes in Kosovo remain unsolved, but he said that only the arrest of criminals - and not politicians' statements - will change the minds of Albanians about abandoning violence. "The population can speak out the moment the criminals are caught," he said, "not when someone tells them what to do." Mr. Geci also wants the United Nations administration to give the people of Kosovo a stronger voice with parliamentary elections this year. "It could be more dangerous if the citizens have no power," he said. "There should be institutions and law enforcement, and slowly people should be made to work under supervision of the U.N. And if a few criminal groups get caught, the others will go quiet." * * * Letters to Editor: [EMAIL PROTECTED] SIRIUS: Response to Hartford Courant Date: Friday, February 23, 2001 9:58 AM "...I have further corroboration from US Army Col. Douglas MacGregor, who headed NATO's 'Joint Operations Center' planning staff during the air war and other military sources inside the NATO staff. As Col. MacGregor wrote me earlier this month: 'We sent in a team to inspect the mines as soon as NATO troops arrived in Kosovo. There was no evidence of any mass murder in the mines, bodies or anything else.' Doug has also contacted MPR and the report's producers and made this statement directly to them, confirming further details." - Benjamin Works, SIRIUS [The following op-ed has not been published by the Hartford Courant. It was received from and is posted with permission of the author.] ====================================== February 17, 2001 The Hartford Courant Dear Sirs: RE: "Serbs Should Face Their Past" It is sad to read an editorial so full of mis-information and error in the paper once edited by Charles Dudley Warner. The editors and readers should know several things: Serbia is very likely to give a full, open and fair trial of Mr. Milosevic and principle associates, as it has every right to do under existing UN law. President Vojislav Kostunica, who personally translated our "Federalist Papers," intends that Yugoslavia's justice system will be restored and its honor refurbished, to the extent possible. He is right that the trial should be held in Belgrade, first. This trial will explore both alleged war crimes --including the charges under The Hague Tribunal's indictment-- and alleged civil crimes under Yugoslavian law. Only once those trials are concluded will it be reasonable to consider further trial by the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY), now sitting in judgement at The Hague. Serbia has every reason to cooperate with the ICTY during its trial in Belgrade, foremost to demonstrate clearly before the international community and the Yugoslav people the facts. Those will tend to demonstrate that the Hague tribunal's indictment, is in fact, mostly bogus charges based on propaganda generated by the United States government and NATO and have little to no foundation in fact. Once that happens, the ICTY will be seen as a dangerous partisan authority, not an even-handed guardian of justice. It is important for the Courant and its readers to understand that the ICTY's rules of evidence, procedure and even definitions of war crime are badly flawed and highly politicized, as a Belgrade court will make clear. This has a bearing on the prospect for the successor "Rome Treaty" and the proposed International Criminal Court (ICC), which even legal experts involved in its framing, now criticize as dangerous. President Bush and Congress intend to stop that treaty, which represents a clear danger to US troops, and other military personnel, engaged in future combat situations. The treaty is salted with all manner of vague language, and trivializes war crimes by blurring the distinction between military actions and ordinary civilian crime. Its very procedures are in clear and consistent violation of our Constitution and our right to a fair trial by a jury of our peers. Yes, there are some bona fide Serb war criminals from the Bosnian and Croat wars, but even worse crimes were committed by Croat, Bosnian Muslim and Albanians and mostly swept under the rug. The Canadian Army is furious with the ICTY for covering up Croat crimes committed under their noses in 1993 and 1995. Reported, documented, filed away by the politicized prosecutors. What the Hague Tribunal prosecutor will find out some time this Spring (and to her embarrassment, and ours) is that the Yugoslavian judicial and law enforcement bureaucracies did a thorough job of documenting the crimes and incidents --mostly pitched battles and skirmishes-- that did result in the loss of life on both sides of the KLA's ugly little insurrection. As to the National Public Radio/Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) report alleging an atrocity (the incineration of 1500 Albanian corpses at the Trepca mine, The Courant is particularly mis-informed. First, this report has been promptly and unqualifiedly contradicted by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe's monitoring authorities, by NATO and by appropriate sources within the US government, as soon as it aired. In fact, the story was discredited as erroneous (none dared admit it was a naked propaganda fabrication) right after the 1999 war. In fact General Wesley Clark dispatched an investigation team to the site on the day NATO entered Kosovo in June 1999. They came up blank; then an expert French forensics team surveyed the site exhaustively, nothing, zip, nada. Further, as a military news analyst, I have further corroboration from US Army Col. Douglas MacGregor, who headed NATO's "Joint Operations Center" planning staff during the air war and other military sources inside the NATO staff. As Col. MacGregor wrote me earlier this month: "We sent in a team to inspect the mines as soon as NATO troops arrived in Kosovo. There was no evidence of any mass murder in the mines, bodies or anything else." Doug has also contacted MPR and the report's producers and made this statement directly to them, confirming further details. Another detail was reported to me by one of Doug's fellow staff officers, who wishes to remain anonymous: The Trepca mine (a very large non-ferrous metals facility) was under constant infra red satellite surveillance throughout the 78-day war. The refinery smelter furnaces never registered as "hot spots," which in the case of civilian facilities is impossible to disguise. Worse, in "reporting" this recycled story, MPR had the audacity to double the estimated body count from the original NATO war-time propaganda story: NATO had estimated 750 bodies had been incinerated, "Auschwitz-style." In fact, none had been incinerated anywhere in Kosovo, except by the KLA in the summer of 1998. You see, the KLA's daddies were the Nazis in World War 2 and what our government failed to report from 1992-2001 was that the Croat nationalists, Bosnian Nationalists and Albanian "freedeom fighters" were a bizarre combination of Nazi Revanchists, Mafia gangsters and other sociopaths. In fact, NATO investigators found no credible evidence of any large-scale massacres or a pattern of local massacres across the province. Some smaller crimes occurred, but on both sides; the KLA has a well-known record before, during and since the air war of a pattern of the most cowardly and dastardly murders of innocent Albanians, Serbs, Gorani Muslims, Turks, Gypsies, Croat Catholics and other minorities. These are unregenerate bushwhackers, and now they occasionally snipe at US, British, French and other NATO soldiers. As to the Courant's own errors of detail, the two Serb "sources" for the MPR report were never identified as "Serb military officers," but alleged themselves to be members of one of those countless "paramilitaries" whose role has been wildly exaggerated. The hallmark of big lies and propaganda is "the embellishing detail." In the MPR story, they make much of how there can be the complete destruction of DNA in the furnace. But the conveyor was too small to handle human bodies. So, they added an embellishment about an ore grinder, which you cite, not realizing that bodies ground up would leave blood and other tissue traces all around such machinery, impossible to entirely clean away. Hartford has a heroin problem; I distinctly remember reading of students at Trinity College overdosing in their dorm, over a pizza, in March 2000. Ask the Hartford, New York City and other major city police chiefs who is dealing heroin. In my old neighborhood in New York City, Albanians dealt heroin and cocaine to the street vendors from pizzarias and coffee shops. In fact, ask Mayor Giuliani, who prosecuted the Kosovo Heroin Mafia, reported on the front page of the Wall Street Journal; September 9, 1985. You will find an exhaustive archive on the subject of the KLA, Kosovo Mafia and their drug and prostitution operations at the website reference below. When Mr. Milosevic faces his accusers in Belgrade, later this year, I fear you will see that most of the charges are without factual basis. In particular, the infamous "Racak Massacre," of Jan. 15, 1999 will also turn out to have been a propaganda misrepresentation by our State Department's Mr. William Walker, and others. The international forensics reports and other evidence from the time clearly indicate that this "alleged atrocity" was fabricated. The Serbs will face --squarely-- their past, this year. Can America's news organs face the facts? Benjamin C. Works Executive Director The Strategic Issues Research Institute (of the United States) - SIRIUS Arlington, VA www.siri-us.com The writer enlisted from Connecticut in the US Army, served in Vietnam, graduated from Yale University and has served as an on-air military analyst with CBS Radio News, FoxNews since January 1991. He is also a trustee of a Veterans watchdog group, "Soldiers For The Truth." |
