clocker bob wrote:Michael Parenti has more integrity in one sweaty sock than you do, Wood Goblin. If you can't concede that 'exaggeration' was employed by US officials to sell that war, then you are a hopeless dicksucker for the warmongers.

clocker bob's first post to the thread ( related to kosovo ) wrote: The Serbs have gotten a raw deal in the US media. The war crimes were exaggerated, the 'tyranny' of Milosevic was grossly exaggerated, the mass graves in Kosovo were exaggerated.

WG's first reply wrote: What utter shit this is.

CB's second reply wrote:Don't put words in my mouth.

The sizes of the mass graves were exaggerated. The war crimes of Milosevic were exaggerated. I understand that 'exaggerated' means 'to enlarge beyond truth'- do you understand the word 'exaggerated' to mean that I am saying that the Serbs had clean hands? When you react to words that are not there, you look like a kneejerk apologist.

WG claims that I used a bad source, when the US officials words are on the record wrote: Clever--quote an article that lists ridiculous numbers of dead civilians (100,000-200,000) and then claim victory when the actual number of dead falls short of that.

CB wrote:Thus, a week before the bombings began, David Scheffer, U.S. State Department ambassador at large for war crime issues, announced that "we have upwards of about 100,000 [ethnic Albanian] men that we cannot account for" in Kosovo. A month later, the State Department claimed that up to 500,000 Kosovo Albanians were missing and feared dead. By mid-May U.S. Secretary of Defense William Cohen stated that 100,000 military-aged men had vanished and might have been killed by the Serbs. Not long after-as public support for the war began to wane-Ambassador Scheffer escalated the 100,000 figure to "as many as 225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59" who remained unaccounted. He considered this to be one of the greatest genocidal crimes against a civilian population. Indeed it was, if true.

WG wrote:Fine, some US officials overestimated the number of missing Kosovars--of course, I'll also note that half of those quotes say than the Albanian men "are unaccounted for," which doesn't mean "are dead" last time I checked.

WG wrote:Did they find 200,000 bodies? No, of course not, but that was a shitty estimate to begin with. (No, I don't particularly care who made that estimate.)"

Wood Goblin wrote: I hope to one day have as much integrity as he does.

kebabdylan wrote:are the two of you going through a break up or something? Seriously, why the name calling?

I'm bowing out of this one now...

Wood Goblin wrote: But you also put "tyrant" in quotes, so I'm not the only one who should be admitting a mistake here. Dude was a tyrant, no irony quotes, no waffles.

In her book Fool's Crusade Paris-based journalist Diana Johnstone contends that Milošević's actions during the conflict in the Balkans were no worse than the crimes of the Croats or the Bosnian Muslims, asserting also that the massacre in Srebrenica has been exaggerated. Johnstone's intellectual independence has, however, been called into question by claims that she is a long-standing friend of Milošević's widow, Mirjana Marković, and thus biased in such judgments. There is no evidence to support this and Johnstone says she has never met Marković in her life.

Political scientist Edward Herman endorsed Johnstone's findings in his review of Fool's Crusade in the Monthly Review [10].

In another book, The New Military Humanism, Noam Chomsky, who at times writes collaboratively with Herman, disagrees with Johnstone's views on Milošević, the Serbs, and Srebrenica in particular. Whilst Chomsky believes that the massacres at Srebrenica did occur, he does not believe that Milošević was involved in it, pointing to the Dutch report that claimed that he was horrified to hear of it.[12] He has described Milošević as a "terrible person", but still believes that he was not a dictator and that his crimes have been exaggerated whilst the crimes of the C.I.A.-backed KLA have been ignored.[13] In a 1999 interview, Chomsky sparked controversy with his view that to call the deaths in Kosovo a "genocide" was "an insult to the victims of Hitler".[14]