We’d be absolute fools if we were to expect politicians (ours or foreign) to adhere to any elements of the truth – whatever it may contain. To that end some twisting (we call it spins in the U.S.) are both unavoidable and to be expected. But what if those spins result in loss of human life (or many lives, as I will show here)? Is that person(s) to be held accountable? What moral boundaries are there in our society (mainly the United States whish prides itself in fairness, democracy, freedom, and all other similarly abstract nouns). Kindly note that I AM an American of Serbian birth, which in way impairs my objectivity, additionally I had used almost exclusively non-Serbian sources just to avoid any semblance of being pro-Serbian.

Let’s take only a few protagonists and only a handful of events that have been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, while unfolding in public by a massive media presence in and around today’s Kosovo.

Source link:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/12/AR2007031200972.html

Washington Post By Richard Holbrooke Tuesday, March 13, 2007; Page A17 quotes “Remember Kosovo? It was the big story in 1999, when 78 days of U.S.-led NATO bombing liberated the overwhelmingly Albanian region from repressive Serb control. Its final status was left unresolved under a compromise U.N. Security Council resolution. The United Nations has administered the region, and NATO has protected it, ever since. But the United States and the European Union neglected the final-status issue while positions hardened in Kosovo and Belgrade.

On March 26, the formidable U.N. special envoy, former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari, will present to the Security Council a plan that would lead to phased independence for Kosovo, with strong guarantees for the rights of the Serb minority there. Belgrade is deeply opposed, as it has been to any change in the status of Kosovo, an area that the Serbs feel is part of their historic territory but that is now more than 90 percent Albanian. In the end, the Serbs will have to face the truth: Kosovo is gone from Serbia forever, a result of the policies of the former Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic.
Serbia's future — and it could be bright — lies within the European Union, if it can get past its own paralyzing historical myths. A peaceful path to Kosovo's independence would open up the entire Balkans, including Serbia, to a promising new era of regional cooperation.

What a clever insightful, generous view. Never-mind that within all the above text neither an ounce of truth has escaped his pen, nor an ounce of objectivity.

To look a little more closely at Richard Holbrooke’s deeds we can summon his past actions that clearly demonstrate an agenda riddled with cynicism, subjectivity, one-sidedness and gross inaccuracy. The first picture I enclosed is captioned as follows: “KLA's Godfather - Richard Holbrooke
Richard Holbrook, Clinton's "troubleshooter", was the KLA's godfather. It was not his only "pact with the devil" (as he called bringing the mujahedins into Bosnia in his memoirs). How this saxophone-policy by Western pragmatists can come back to haunt the West was demonstrated on Sep. 11 in a very graphic way (Photo of Holbrooke with KLA gunman in Kosovo, summer 1998)”

More on Mr. Holbrooke’s achievements at: http://www.kosovo.net/news/archive/2004/April_13/6.html

Let’s move on away from March 2007

These same “endangered Albanian majority” – not even close to a majority except for that province in the same fashion in which Mexicans are majority in parts of Los Angeles, you can’t take out Orange county, Ventura county and LA county and find a Mexican majority and claim they are all oppressed by the state of California, but such thinking obviously doesn’t bother Holbrooke. Albanians are about 3% of the Serbian State but within Kosovo province (county) they constitute over 90% population. There is nothing abnormal when people of the same ilk gravitate towards their own kind.

What kind is that?

a) MSNBC titles it: “Sex, drugs and guns in the Balkans
Ethnic Albanian rebels benefit from sex slavery By David Binder and Preston Mendenhall
Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3071971/
Let’s only copy the very first paragraph: “TIRANA, Albania - Organized crime syndicates in the Balkans, spawned when communism collapsed a decade ago, are thriving on illegal trade in drugs and sex slaves. The final destination for much of the goods and services is Western Europe. The trade, which yields billions of dollars each year, doesn’t just pay for the mansions and yachts of wealthy traffickers. It also has a political purpose — supporting the purchase of arms for Albanian rebels. Nearly two years after NATO troops drove Serb forces from this region, rebels are believed to still be skimming profits from drug and sex slave trafficking to fund illegal arms purchases for ethnic Albanian rebel movements.”

Pretty clear to me, I don’t know about other readers or R. Holbrooke, he probably has a different spin on this… you’d think?

Jumping into present day, we find reports like this: “KLA sold Kosovo Serb organs in Albania” Posted by: Romano Them
Belgrade, 21 March 2008 - The prosecutor is to look into the sale of organs of Kosovo Serbs who vanished during and after the 1999 bombing.
“We are checking some informal statements we obtained through operative work that, in 1999, two trucks carrying imprisoned Kosovo Serbs were sent to Albania,” said War Crimes Prosecutor Vladimir Vukčević.
He said that the informal information had been obtained from Hague Tribunal investigators.
According to those sources, there are unregistered mass graves with bodies of murdered Serbs in Albania.
In her book, “The Hunt”, to be published in Italy on April 3, the former Hague Tribunal Chief Prosecutor Carla Del Ponte states that, during investigations into war crimes committed by the Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA, against Serbs and other non-Albanians, the prosecutor’s office was informed that persons who disappeared during the Kosovo conflict were used in organ smuggling operations.
The office obtained information that UNMIK investigators and officials had received from groups of so-called reliable journalists, according to whom, Kosovo Albanians had transferred 300 Serb and other non-Albanian hostages in trucks to northern Albania in the summer of 1999.
Those prisoners were first imprisoned in camps in places like Kukes and Tropoje.
According to journalist sources, the younger and fitter prisoners were examined by doctors, got food and were not beaten. After that, they were kept in custody in other centers in Burel and the surrounding area.
One group was held in barracks behind a yellow house some twenty kilometers to the south of that town, states the former prosecutor.
One room in that yellow house, according to the journalists, served as an operation room where doctors extracted prisoners’ organs.
Afterwards, the organs, according to the sources, were sent abroad from Rinas airport near Tirana where they were used in transplantations for patients who had paid for it.
Daily Večerenje Novosti brings more details from the book, which says that the Hague and UNMIK investigators, and several journalist, along with an Albanian prosecutor, made a trip to the yellow house in 2003.
“It was now white,” Del Ponte writes. “Despite the fact that investigators discovered traces of yellow paint on it, the owner denied it was ever repainted.”
In its vicinity, investigators also found pieces of gauze, used syringes, two plastic IV solution bags, “petrified in mud”, empty medicine bottles, including muscle relaxants used during surgeries.
Inside the house itself, forensics discovered traces of blood on the walls and on the floor in one of the rooms. A section of the floor, sized 180 by 60 centimeters, was clean.
“The owner of the house offered a series of explanations to the investigators when it came to the origin of the blood traces. First, he said that his wife gave birth in that room many years ago. But when the wife made her statement and said that all their children were born elsewhere, he claimed that his family used the room to slaughter animals in order to celebrate a Muslim holiday,” Del Ponte writes.
As for the Albanian prosecutor who accompanied them, the former chief Hague prosecutor says he at one point bragged he had cousins who were KLA members.
“There are no graves of Serbs here,” the Albanian official said. “But, if they took the Serbs from the Kosovo border and killed them, they did the right thing”.
Again, I am a little lost in the field of “flexible ethics” but it seems that kidneys, livers and other organs of perfectly healthy persons were taken out and offered to the highest bidders. Nazi images come to my mind, I can’t vouch for Holbrooke’s mind one way or another. The above article is sourced from: http://kosovoroma.wordpress.com/2008/03/24/kla-sold-kosovo-serb-organs-in-albania/

And today’s Coup de Gracie (in words of Buggs Bunny): BBC has published source at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7256488.stm

Could Balkan break-up continue?
By Tim Judah
Balkans analyst
To me (I can’t vouch for Halbrooke) this is like interviewing count Dracula about the blood supply at the World Health Organization or the Blood Bank. Never mind the text, you can read it on your own, but look at the image they provide. All of a sudden there is “Northern Kosovo” – I’m surprised it wasn’t placed inside of Norway or Sweden but inside of Serbia again.
All of this in spite of constant warnings and reminders such as: Kosovo Liberation Army and Albanian Sponsors
Have Well Documented Roots in The Heroin Trade
By Michael C. Ruppert
The Drug Trade Is Entrenched in NATO Politics
Sourced at: http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/regional/KLA1.html
Quote: “An exceptional record of respected media sources from the U.S. and Europe have documented that the Kosovo Liberation Army and their Albanian sponsors are heroin financed organized crime groups struggling to dominate the flow of middle eastern heroin into Europe and even the Eastern United States.
The Christian Science Monitor reported on Oct. 20, 1994: "Disrupted by the Yugoslav conflict, drug trafficking across the Balkans is making a comeback as Albanian mafia barons carve out a new smuggling route to Western Europe, bypassing the peninsula's war zones, according to United Nations and other narcotics experts." To document the increase in traffic through the Albanian Kosovar region The Monitor continued, "For example, just 14 pounds of hard drugs were seized by Hungarian police in 1990, but by August this year [1994] the figure had risen to 1,304 pounds."
And in the very end lets look at the statement of Dr. Rice to Russian foreign minister Lavrov from 3 years ago: “Kosovo will in no way be a precedent, it is a limited “one-time-event” which guarantees freedom to a minority oppressed by the Serbians for the last 50 years”.
Following that logic I equally conclude that Charles Manson and other mass murderers are a majority oppressed by the minority of the guards at San Quentin prison. Should we consider giving them the same benefit of an oppressed minority? This is when Franz Kafka and absurd thinking can be useful, since up to now we in the United States have done nothing but promoted a criminal enterprise to oppress a Christian minority in Kosovo, by nothing short of outright lies and spins away from any truth at all times.

Although I haven't yet read this book as of yet, I am sure there isn't anything in it that won't surprise me at all. I have long suspected that Reverend Graham was a right wing leaning, support any war no what matter the cost in human lives and in dollars wasted. Reminds me of John Hagees endorsement of George W Bushs bloody and illegal war in Iraq. Simply put billy Graham is a pious fraud, always has been, always will be, Son Franklin is proof that the apple doesn't indeed fall far from the tree.

Seems like there's been some really good stuff happening today in DC

When the feds do bail out the financial system, what will they do to ensure that they aren't also bailing out the people who got us into this mess? Bondholders must take a harcut. The stock options of executives who got rich playing heads I win tails you lose must be cancelled.

Now that the economic crunch is reaching those near the top of the pyramid, there is finally a sense that the US is facing a real crisis. The dream is in great danger because the ruling elite stopped looking after the collective interests of society and all but stopped investing in the future.

Politicians now promise to protect us from dangers we cannot see. Neoconservatives created a phantom enemy. In a disillusioned age, enemy creation is a power rewarding those with the darkest nightmares.

Deregulation had built the church and seed money was needed to grow the flock. We're all Keynesians on the way down. Bubbles are to the industries that host them what clear-cutting is to forest management The housing bubble has left us in dire shape.

A cure for a wrong diagnosis is useless (Chalmers Johnson). The looming recession ought to drive the price down. So why is oil getting more expensive? It's all speculation.