[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 83 (Monday, June 14, 1999)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1246-E1247]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




CRISIS IN KOSOVO (ITEM NO. 8)--REMARKS BY JOHN R. MACARTHUR, PUBLISHER 
                          OF HARPER'S MAGAZINE

                                 ______
                                 

                        HON. DENNIS J. KUCINICH

                                of ohio

                    in the house of representatives

                         Monday, June 14, 1999

  Mr. KUCINICH. Mr. Speaker, on May 20, 1999, I joined with Rep. 
Cynthia A. McKinney, Rep. Barbara Lee, Rep. John Conyers and Rep. Peter 
DeFazio in hosting the fourth in a series of Congressional Teach-In 
sessions on the Crisis in Kosovo. If a peaceful resolution to this 
conflict is to be found in the coming weeks, it is essential that we 
cultivate a consciousness of peace and actively search for creative 
solutions. We must construct a foundation for peace through 
negotiation, mediation, and diplomacy.
  Part of the dynamic of peace is a willingness to engage in meaningful 
dialogue, to listen to one another openly and to share our views in a 
constructive manner. I hope that these Teach-In sessions will 
contribute to this process by providing a forum for Members of Congress 
and the public to explore alternatives to the bombing and options for a 
peaceful resolution. We will hear from a variety of speakers on 
different sides of the Kosovo situation. I will be introducing into the 
Congressional Record transcripts of their remarks and essays that shed 
light on the many dimensions of the crisis.
  This presentation is by John R. (Rick) MacArthur, president and 
publisher of Harper's Magazine. Mr. MacArthur is an award-winning 
journalist and author. He received the 1993 Mencken award for the best 
editorial/opinion column. He also initiated the foundation-inspired 
rescue of Harper's in 1980, and since then the magazine has received 
numerous awards and the support of advertisers and readers alike. Mr. 
MacArthur is the author of Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in 
the Gulf War, a finalist for a 1993 Mencken Award for books. A tireless 
advocate for international human rights, Mr. MacArthur founded and 
serves on the board of directors of the Death Penalty Information 
Center and the MacArthur Justice Center.
  Mr. MacArthur describes how government institutions and their willing 
accomplices in the news media mislead the public during periods of 
wartime. He cites specific instances from the Gulf War as well as the 
current War in Yugoslavia. He also discusses how both sides in the War 
in Yugoslavia engage in propaganda, often involving the 
misrepresentation and invention of atrocity stories to suit political 
purposes. Mr. MacArthur makes a compelling case for how war undermines 
the trust that the American people have in their institutions, with 
truth and accuracy as the victims. I commend this excellent 
presentation to my colleagues.

   Presentation by John R. MacArthur, Publisher of Harper's Magazine

       The first thing to keep in mind is that all governments lie 
     in wartime, more or less in proportion to what they view as 
     their political needs. Much more rarely do they lie in the 
     pursuit of strategic military objectives or to protect 
     military security, which is their oft-stated claim. 
     Occasionally military commanders get the upper hand and their 
     general obsession with secrecy and control can overcome the 
     will of the politicians and their civilian advisors, but 
     usually the politicians call the tune. They lie, and when 
     they lie in concert with their military subordinates it is 
     for one principle reason, and that is to manipulate 
     journalists and mislead the public. In our country this 
     matters more than in, say, North Vietnam, because we 
     Americans operate on the quaint, old-fashioned notion of 
     informed consent of the governed. The thought in the 
     government is that if too much bad or unpleasant news gets to 
     the people, as it finally did in Vietnam, the people might 
     turn against the war policy of their leaders, which the 
     leaders would prefer not to happen. Thus we cannot talk about 
     war coverage in Kosovo without talking about NATO, US, and 
     Serbian censorship and information management.
       NATO and the US are trying to manage the bad news in a 
     variety of ways. Some of their techniques have succeeded in 
     keeping us in the dark, and some have backfired. A case in 
     point comes from Newsday's senior Washington correspondent 
     Pat Sloyan whose upcoming article in the June American 
     Journalism Review details the NATO public relations response 
     to the April 14th bombing of the mixed procession of military 
     and civilian vehicles near Jakovo that killed upwards of 82 
     Albanian civilians, who, of course, we were supposed to 
     protect. You'll recall the delay in NATO's response, and the 
     playing of an audio tape debriefing of a US air force pilot 
     identified only as ``Bear 21.'' ``Bear 21'' is heard 
     sincerely explaining how hard he tried to hit the military 
     vehicle, but the implication by NATO and by the PR people was 
     that ``Bear 21,'' with all his good intentions, had simply 
     missed his target and killed civilians. In fact, ``Bear 21'' 
     did hit the military vehicle, not the tractors. A review of 
     the gun-sight footage revealed later that other NATO pilots 
     may have killed the civilians. I think they probably did, 
     and, as Sloyan writes, senior US military officials who spoke 
     on condition of anonymity say General Clark's staff had 
     purposely singled out the F-16 pilot, ``Bear 21,'' in an 
     attempt to minimize public criticism of the civilian bombing. 
     The hope was that the public would be sympathetic to someone 
     who had taken great care to be accurate. ``They [that is, 
     NATO], picked him for propaganda reasons,'' says a senior US 
     military official. The blame-placing outraged senior military 
     officials, who said it deliberately misrepresented the event, 
     and smeared an excellent pilot.
       That's a fairly sophisticated public relations maneuver, 
     but NATO is resorting to

[[Page E1247]]

     less sophisticated manipulation techniques as well, some of 
     which seem quite pointless to me. In the Gulf War you'll 
     recall reporters were not permitted to interview soldiers, 
     sailors, and airmen without a military press agent present 
     at all times. This was done naturally to discourage the 
     troops from making any offhand or calculated criticisms of 
     US policy, of their living conditions, of their fears of 
     going into battle, in short, anything that might have 
     suggested that their morale wasn't anything but 100% A-OK. 
     Today at the Aviano airbase in Italy, not only do you 
     still need a military escort present, but you can't use 
     the name or hometown of your interview subject. The 
     bizarre justification for this is allegedly to protect the 
     families of the servicemen, or the servicewomen, from 
     Yugoslav hate mail. I'm wondering if this is a military 
     security matter or some weird form of political 
     correctness in which the receivers of the bombs aren't 
     permitted to express their hatred for those who deliver 
     the bombs. But actually I think it's more likely just 
     propaganda, because we're inevitably going to kill Serb 
     and Albanian civilians and we don't want to associate 
     actual names and faces with the killing. That would be bad 
     for morale, both within the air force and outside the air 
     force. It's pure and simple PR.
       This brings up the larger question of war coverage and 
     propaganda. NATO and Serbia are currently engaged in a 
     propaganda war that hinges to some extent on accurate or 
     inaccurate war coverage. Paradoxically, the side that is cast 
     as the villain in the war, the enemy of freedom and 
     tolerance, is the side that is permitting and encouraging the 
     best war coverage. The Serbs think bad news helps their case 
     because nobody on our side wants to see the blood of 
     civilians on our hands. NATO realizes this and is trying to 
     mitigate the propaganda value of dead civilians with 
     allegations of atrocities committed by the Serbs against 
     innocent Albanians. NATO and its supporters in the media are 
     hyping Holocaust analogies in particular. Fred Hiatt in the 
     Washington Post threw all caution and sense of proportion to 
     the winds last week, making an explicit comparison between 
     the expulsion and flight of the Albanians and the Auschwitz 
     extermination camp. NATO talks about the rape camps, mass 
     graves, and summary executions. They cite as evidence spy 
     satellite photographs, but won't show us these photographs.
       Meanwhile, thanks to the Yugoslav political imperative, 
     correspondents like the outstanding Paul Watson of the Los 
     Angeles Times report things like: ``Something strange is 
     going on in [this Kosovar Albanian village] in what was once 
     a hard-line guerrilla stronghold, where NATO accuses the 
     Serbs of committing genocide.'' He goes on to report that by 
     their own accounts the Albanian men are not living in a 
     concentration camp, or being forced to labor for the police 
     or army, or serving as human shields for Serbs. I think 
     you've probably seen other stories saying that these Serbs 
     for whatever reason are encouraging Albanians to move back 
     into their homes. This of course in no way excuses the 
     expulsion of the hundreds of thousands who are in the refugee 
     camps, but there is a battle of propaganda going on now of 
     epic proportion.
       I would, I suppose immodestly, ask you to ask yourselves 
     and your elected representatives and maybe your local 
     newspaper editors why it is that our memories are so short on 
     the question of successful propaganda. Just seven years ago, 
     John Martin of CBS News and I revealed elements of an 
     atrocity that allegedly occurred during the Gulf War, which 
     had a great deal to do with the Senate vote in favor of going 
     to war, the Senate War Resolution. I am referring to the baby 
     incubator murders of 1990 and 1991 allegedly committed by 
     Iraqi soldiers in Kuwaiti hospitals. I hope you remember that 
     it was entirely false, entirely fraudulent. Not one baby was 
     killed by Iraqi soldiers. It's possible that babies died from 
     neglect, because most of the foreign medical staff had fled 
     the Kuwaiti hospitals, but there was no looting of 
     incubators. At one point President Bush, sounding very much 
     like President Clinton, declared that babies were being 
     ``scattered like firewood'' across the hospital floors. More 
     famously, in this case, the daughter of the Kiwaiti 
     ambassador, Naira Al Sabah, testified as an anonymous refugee 
     before House Human Rights Caucus, saying that she herself had 
     witnessed 15 babies being removed from incubators. Everybody 
     believed it. By the end of it, Amnesty International, which 
     got suckered into the story as well, had declared that 312 
     babies had been killed this way. Another hearing was held in 
     front of the UN Security Council, where a surgeon--he called 
     himself a surgeon--said that he had personally supervised the 
     burial of 40 babies outside the hospital where they had been 
     killed. After the war, he recanted. He turned out to be a 
     dentist, not a surgeon, and so on and so forth. This was not 
     just in the august chambers of the House of Representatives, 
     but before the United Nations Security Council. So I am 
     astonished that there is so little skepticism about the 
     atrocity stories.
       The exaggeration of atrocities, or the invention of 
     atrocity stories, has the paradoxical effect of minimizing 
     the real horror of a war. In other words, because there's a 
     Holocaust going on, well, if a few hundred civilians have to 
     die, it's not such a big deal. I think that's one of the 
     propaganda motives of NATO right now, to hype the atrocities 
     and push the Holocaust analogies as much as possible in order 
     to minimize the horror over the deaths of hundreds of 
     civilians, Albanians and Serbs, caused by our side.

     

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