[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 84 (Tuesday, June 15, 1999)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1262-E1264]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




CRISIS IN KOSOVO (ITEM NO. 9) REMARKS BY RICK NEWMAN, SENIOR EDITOR FOR 
                       U.S. NEWS AND WORLD REPORT

                                 ______
                                 

                        HON. DENNIS J. KUCINICH

                                of ohio

                    in the house of representatives

                         Tuesday, June 15, 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 lasting peace is to be achieved 
in the region, 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, medication, 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 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 Rick Newman, Senior Editor covering defense 
for US News and World Report. He began covering military affairs in 
1995, and to date has reported on a wide spectrum of defense issues 
from overseas operations to the future of military technology. He was 
awarded the Gerald R. Ford Prize for Distinguished Defense Reporting 
for his work in 1996. Mr. Newman graduated from Boston College in 1988 
with B.A.s in English literature and economics.
  Mr. Newman relates his first-hand experience with the treatment of 
journalists by the military during periods of wartime. He discusses the 
key lessons that he believes the military has learned over the years 
about how to advance their propaganda by manipulating public opinion 
through a willing press corps. Following these remarks is an article by 
Mr. Newman about how NATO bombings have pulverized Yugosavian targets 
and caused widespread suffering in the civilian population.

       Presentation by Rick Newman OF U.S. News and World Report

       One formula for starting a story is to begin with some 
     anecdote that illustrates a larger point you want to get 
     across. That's how I'm going to start today, with an 
     anecdotal lead.
       I'm the defense reporter for US News; my job is to cover 
     the military, down to the soldiers who fight in the field, 
     the airmen who fly the planes, and so on. About three or four 
     months ago I had made arrangements with the army to 
     ``imbed,'' as they say, with any army troops who got involved 
     in some kind of campaign in Kosovo, whether that be 
     peacekeeping which it looked like at the time, or whatever. 
     They said ``Roger that,'' (that's what they say in the army) 
     and everything looked like it was in order. I told them that 
     I wanted to get a good ``imbedding'' slot with the command 
     part of this group. That means I would deploy with them, I 
     would basically live with them. I would be one of them in a 
     way, except I wouldn't carry a weapon, and I'd see what they 
     do from their perspective.
       So this was all going along fine, and Task Force Hawk, this 
     group of helicopters, gets deployed to Albania. They call me 
     up and say, ``Are you ready to deploy? You're going to be in 
     the hip pocket of the commander for this thing. You're going 
     to be able to see how he runs this show.'' And I said, ``That 
     sounds great.'' I eventually got my way over to Europe, told 
     them what day I was going to show up. I had to go down to 
     Fifth Headquarters in Heidelberg, Germany, get outfitted with 
     ``mop gear,'' which is the chemical weapons protection stuff 
     that goes from head to toe. They gave me a Kevlar helmet and 
     a flack vest; I made a reservation to fly into Albania the 
     next day and join up with them.
       That night I got a call from the public affairs guy with 
     Task Force Hawk in Albania. He said, ``Just want to check in 
     with you, Rick, and I just want to advise you of something. 
     The commanders here, someone pointed out to them a story that 
     you wrote about indicted war criminals in Bosnia last year 
     and military efforts to track down some of those people. And 
     this was a story that revealed some details about secret 
     operations and so on, and the guy said, `Having seen that 
     story they just don't feel they can trust you anymore, and 
     you're no longer welcome to embed with the command element of 
     Task Force Hawk.' '' So I said, ``That's wonderful news. 
     Thank you very much. I'll head back home.''
       That's about how the first 4 to 5 weeks of this war went, 
     in terms of relations between the press and the military. The 
     press was largely kept outside the gates, outside the fence, 
     looking in, trying to figure out what was going on, not 
     getting a lot of information on what was going on, very 
     sparse statements coming out. In the last four weeks or so 
     that has improved. NATO and the Pentagon have been releasing 
     more information, and I've had some better opportunities 
     personally to cover some of the people who are actually 
     fighting this war, to find out how they do it, what they 
     think about it, and so on. But this is a problematic war in 
     terms of coverage by the press. There is tension in all wars 
     between the military and the press

[[Page E1263]]

     that's trying to cover them. I think it's worse in this case.
       The war is not going well. Clearly it's not going well. You 
     don't have to be a genius to see that the stated aims of the 
     people who launched this are not being achieved, and on the 
     military side there are rules designed to limit access by the 
     press even more than usual. For instance, General Clark, 
     who's the four-star general in Europe running this thing, 
     instituted essentially a gag rule on all of his subordinate 
     commanders. They have been forbidden to talk to the press--
     absolutely forbidden, on the record or not--and you can 
     imagine the sort of effect that has had down the chain for 
     people who are not technically commanders or subordinate 
     commanders. They technically could talk but they don't want 
     to risk stepping outside that rule. So this has been a very 
     difficult war to cover, in terms of just finding out what is 
     going on. I think we are getting more information about what 
     is going on because, ironically, official Serb TV is 
     broadcasting it and that gives us some material to go back 
     and pry information we otherwise wouldn't be getting out of 
     these people.
       For me this boils down to what I am going to call ``three 
     lessons learned.'' This is what they do in the military after 
     something is over or while it is going on: they figure out 
     what the lessons learned are. So I am just going to go 
     through three here.
       First lesson learned for me is that no news is bad news. If 
     the Pentagon is not telling you what's happening in an 
     operation, it's probably because what's happening is not good 
     or does not appear to be favorable to the Pentagon. I believe 
     this was the case for the first four weeks, when they would 
     not say  anything about how many sorties they were flying, 
     what kinds of weapons they were using, what they were 
     doing, what they were accomplishing. The fact is that they 
     were accomplishing almost nothing. It was one of the 
     weakest starts to an actual war in recent times, and that 
     was reflected in the fact that not much was happening. On 
     the other side it was a demonstrable failure, because all 
     these ethnic Albanians were being flushed out of Kosovo.
       Second lesson learned is that the body count mentality is 
     alive and well, only these days we're not counting bodies, 
     we're counting targets. We get this rundown of targets at the 
     Pentagon every day. They'll say, for example: ``Last night we 
     struck eighteen target sets, there were 96 dimpies (a 
     particular aim point on a target), today we've flown such and 
     such sorties.'' This all seems to beg the question of how 
     this is relevant to the objective of the war. We've heard 
     more about these counts that supposedly demonstrate success 
     than we have about how this war is actually doing in 
     accomplishing the goals stated by President Clinton and 
     others at the outset. That's something to watch out for. I 
     think the press has been somewhat gullible in this.
       My third lesson learned is that the spokesmen for this war, 
     the spinmeisters, are in many cases smarter than the press. I 
     think the propaganda campaign has been very successful. I 
     think the Pentagon and NATO have managed to find slow news 
     days to get their message across. I think they have 
     distracted attention on a regular basis from the observable 
     fact that this war is not accomplishing what it is supposed 
     to accomplish. I'll run down a list of a few things here. One 
     of my pet peeves has been the headlines that say ``NATO 
     Intensifies Air War.'' We see this headline almost every 
     week. Technically you could drop one additional bomb per day 
     and you'd be intensifying the air war, which is nearly what 
     has been happening. I think that this is less intense than 
     any air war any member of the air force can recall. That's 
     the nature of this graduated campaign.
       I'll also mention briefly some of the claims from the 
     podium at the Pentagon and the podium at NATO headquarters 
     about atrocities. These are interesting standards for 
     reporting this sort of thing. I'm thinking, for instance, of 
     the rape camps. When Ken Bacon, the Pentagon spokesman, first 
     mentioned the rape camps he was pressed about the source of 
     the information, and it turned out the source was one person, 
     probably an indirect source, and probably a member of the 
     KLA. I don't think that that's the standard the Pentagon 
     usually applies, and I know that if we apply that standard in 
     journalism we get criticized for having low standards. That 
     seems to be the standard these days. Another example is the 
     Secretary of Defense saying, ``We have reports that up to a 
     hundred thousand ethnic Albanians may have been murdered.'' I 
     seriously doubt they have evidence that a hundred thousand 
     have been murdered. I think they have evidence that something 
     less than ten thousand have been murdered.
       We'll see how this gets sorted out when this war is over. 
     The last thing that has kind of bothered me is everything 
     that the press has been making out of various weapons 
     systems. First it was the A-10, the low flying attack plane. 
     We were just waiting for the A-10 to get into the action back 
     around week two or week three. This is the thing that flies 
     low under certain circumstances that don't exist in 
     Yugoslavia yet. It flies low and can blow up dozens of tanks 
     on a pass with its thirty-millimeter gun. The New York Times 
     had a picture of the A-10s being deployed to Italy. The A-10 
     hasn't done anything of the sort, as anyone who has been 
     associated with this campaign could have told you and did 
     tell some of us from the very beginning. We're running these 
     stories, we're sort of being urged, or certainly not 
     discouraged, to run these stories, because it sounds like a 
     wonder weapon is in the offing here, and Milosevic had better 
     back down. The Apache helicopters are another example of 
     this. There have been questions about how and when those are 
     going to be used. From the day it was announced they were 
     going, they have been held out as a big wonder weapon.
       I'll just end with the thought that when this is over, we 
     in the press are going to do a lot of post-mortem analysis of 
     how this campaign went. I think there's also a case to be 
     made that there should be a lot of post-mortem analysis of 
     how the press handled this war.


     
                                  ____
   Making War From 15,000 Ft.--A War of Half Measures Runs Short on 
                     Targets and Political Support

                         (By Richard J. Newman)

       If a rising unemployment rate is any indication of how a 
     war is going, then NATO ought to be pleased. According to 
     Serbian government estimates, nearly half a million 
     Yugoslavs, many employed in factories shattered by NATO 
     bombs, have lost their jobs since the airstrikes began in 
     March. Other privations are setting in. Serbia last week cut 
     civilian gasoline rations in half, to about 2.5 gallons per 
     car each month.
       Yet as NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia enters its sixth week, 
     it is in Washington that the will to fight seems wobbly. The 
     House of Representatives last week voted exactly half for, 
     and half against, a simple show of support for the air war. 
     Another vote barred President Clinton from sending ground 
     troops into Kosovo without congressional approval. Before 
     Operation Desert Storm against Iraq in 1991, by contrast, 
     Congress voted 302 to 230 to authorize all forms of military 
     action.
       The home front. Publicly, President Clinton shrugged off 
     the no-confidence votes. But morale at the White House is in 
     a ``downward spiral,'' according to one official there. And 
     the war is just starting to hit home in America. The roughly 
     2,000 reservists now packing their bags are just a fraction 
     of the 33,000 that the Pentagon could call up--for an air 
     campaign that President Clinton indicated could last into 
     July.
       A decisive turn in the war certainly would sway some 
     doubters. Yet details emerging on the conduct of Operation 
     Allied Force reveal a campaign that seems as halfhearted as 
     the political support in Washington. The intensity of the 
     effort--gauged by ``sortie rates'' and other measures--is 
     lower than that of any other U.S. air operation in recent 
     history. Severe restraints on what NATO can bomb continue to 
     frustrate war planners; even Great Britain, America's 
     staunchest ally in the campaign, has vetoed targets sought by 
     military commanders. And only in the last week has NATO 
     started arranging basing rights and making other crucial 
     preparations for 300 additional aircraft requested in early 
     April. ``The air war is going badly,'' says Michael O'Hanlon 
     of the Brookings Institution in a study released last week. 
     ``The urgency of changing the war's strategy is . . . 
     great.''
       NATO officials disagree, and point to strains within 
     Yugoslavia as evidence that their deliberate approach is 
     getting somewhere. Last week a flamboyant Yugoslav deputy 
     prime minister, Vuk Draskovic, demanded on television that 
     Slobodan Milosevic ``stop lying'' to the Serbian people. His 
     candor promptly got him fired. Twenty-seven other prominent 
     Belgrade intellectuals signed an open letter urging Milosevic 
     (and NATO) to end hostilities. British officials reported 
     that five retired Yugoslav generals were under house arrest--
     apparently for opposing Milosevic's tactics--and that 
     hundreds of conscripts were deserting the Yugoslav Army each 
     week.
       A surge in travel to Moscow could be a further sign that 
     Milosevic, and NATO, are looking to cut a deal. Both Strobe 
     Talbott, the U.S. deputy secretary of state, and United 
     Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan conferred last week with 
     Victor Chernomyrdin, Russia's former prime minister and now 
     its mediator in the Balkans. Chernomyrdin then jetted off to 
     Belgrade. The attention heartened Kremlin officials, who hope 
     that Russia will have a role not just as a ``postman'' 
     delivering messages but as a ``middleman'' trusted by the 
     Serbs and heeded by NATO.
       Languor. Yet Belgrade continues to defy NATO's air war, 
     which has been portrayed as intense but by important measures 
     is actually rather languorous. The sortie rate--the number of 
     flights flown per plane, per day--is less than 0.5, according 
     to NATO officials and an independent analysis by Anthony 
     Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International 
     Studies. That means each NATO jet flies on average just once 
     every two days. By comparison, the sortie rate was about 1.25 
     during the Persian Gulf war and about 2.0 during Operation 
     Deliberate Force, the bombing of Bosnia that helped to bring 
     Milosevic to the bargaining table in 1995. Both of these 
     campaigns also opened with severe bombardments. Retired Air 
     Force Maj. Gen. Charles Link says the Kosovo campaign should 
     have started the same way: ``In the first two nights we 
     should have taken out the targets we took out over the next 
     21 days.'' He maintains that NATO jets based in Italy--closer 
     to their targets than most aircraft were during the gulf 
     war--ought to be good for at least two sorties per day.
       That would let NATO bomb many more targets--except that 
     approved targets appear to be in short supply. NATO officials 
     say that Lt. Gen. Michael Short, commander of

[[Page E1264]]

     all the NATO air forces in the campaign, has argued that he 
     does not need the 300 extra aircraft requested by Gen. Wesley 
     Clark, the NATO commander. ``The air view is, just open up 
     the target list,'' says one NATO official.
       Clark and others insist they have done that, by bombing one 
     of Milosevic's mansions, an increasing number of government 
     buildings in Belgrade, and TV towers used to broadcast 
     Yugoslav propaganda. NATO aircraft recently have been flying 
     a total of nearly 700 sorties per day, about 400 more than in 
     the opening days of the war. Attacks against Serbian forces 
     in Kosovo have more than tripled. Concussions now shake 
     Belgrade nightly. And 26 fuel-tanker planes are on their way, 
     along with 10 additional B-52 bombers configured to drop 
     conventional ``dumb'' bombs.
       Yet this intensification of the bombing comes after most of 
     Kosovo's ethnic Albanians have been driven from their homes, 
     and there is skepticism even at the Pentagon that airstrikes 
     alone will ever force Serbian troops out of Kosovo and let 
     the Albanians return to their homes. NATO's strategy 
     essentially has been to starve Serbian forces of fuel and 
     supplies by attacking bridges, roads, and other supply lines, 
     petroleum reserves, and storage sites. There is little doubt 
     those attacks have hurt. All of the major roads from Serbia 
     proper into Kosovo have been bombed, and at least 30 highway 
     and railroad bridges throughout the country have been knocked 
     down. NATO has destroyed all of Yugoslavia's oil-refining 
     capability, and the alliance is preparing this week to begin 
     enforcing a naval embargo against tankers bringing oil into 
     ports in Montenegro, the smaller of Yugoslavia's two 
     republics.
       Gassed up. But without NATO ground troops to challenge 
     them, it may be many months before Serbian forces in Kosovo 
     actually cease to function. O'Hanlon argues that given months 
     of warning that NATO air attacks could come, Serbian troops 
     probably have hidden reserves of fuel inside Kosovo. And they 
     are helping themselves to fuel stocks left behind by fleeing 
     Albanians. NATO reports indicate that fuel shortages are 
     causing mobility problems in some units--but that won't force 
     those units out of Kosovo. And ``long before any Serbian 
     forces starve in Kosovo,'' says O'Hanlon, ``huge numbers of 
     ethnic Albanians will have starved first.'' Beyond that, 
     Milosevic has been adding to his forces in Kosovo despite 
     troubles with transportation. Clark himself acknowledged last 
     week that Yugoslavia has been ``bringing in reinforcements 
     continually.''
       The ultimate battle, then, is not of guns but of wills. The 
     natural advantage would seem to lie with NATO, which must 
     only tolerate political discomfort, while Serbs have to watch 
     their economy being pulverized one bomb at a time. Yet NATO's 
     very caution, meant to keep the politicians on board, already 
     bears the marks of a military failure. And as Congress showed 
     last week, that's hard for any politician to support.

     

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