Erlanger also quoted a surviving journalist who said that Everything crashed. There was no way out. There was smoke everywhere. It was terrible. People were screaming. It was like a nightmare. Another reported a huge detonation, and everything went completely dark. The scene, Erlanger reported, was an increasingly familiar one of smashed glass, broken walls, twisted timbers, scorched paint and emotional devastation. These last quotes, however -- as independent journalist David Peterson reminds us -- are not from January 2015. Rather, they are from a report by Erlanger on April 24 1999, which received far less attention. Erlanger was reporting on the NATO missile attack on Serbian state television headquarters that knocked Radio Television Serbia off the air, killing 16 journalists. NATO and American officials defended the attack, Erlanger reported, as an effort to undermine the regime of President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia. Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon told a briefing in Washington that Serb TV is as much a part of Milosevics murder machine as his military is, hence a legitimate target of attack. There were no demonstrations or cries of outrage, no chants of We are RTV, no inquiries into the roots of the attack in Christian culture and history. On the contrary, the attack on the press was lauded. The highly regarded U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke, then envoy to Yugoslavia, described the successful attack on RTV as an enormously important and, I think, positive development, a sentiment echoed by others. There are many other events that call for no inquiry into western culture and history -- for example, the worst single terrorist atrocity in Europe in recent years, in July 2011, when Anders Breivik, a Christian ultra-Zionist extremist and Islamophobe, slaughtered 77 people, mostly teenagers. Also ignored in the war against terrorism is the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times -- Barack Obamas global assassination campaign targeting people suspected of perhaps intending to harm us some day, and any unfortunates who happen to be nearby. Other unfortunates are also not lacking, such as the 50 civilians reportedly killed in a U.S.-led bombing raid in Syria in December, which was barely reported. One person was indeed punished in connection with the NATO attack on RTV -- Dragoljub Milanović, the general manager of the station, who was sentenced by the European Court of Human Rights to 10 years in prison for failing to evacuate the building, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. The International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia considered the NATO attack, concluding that it was not a crime, and although civilian casualties were unfortunately high, they do not appear to be clearly disproportionate.
Posted on: Tue, 20 Jan 2015 07:31:46 +0000
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