Thanks for that. When important info is scrubbed from the current page it makes me suspicious as to when it might be scrubbed from the history as well. I like Wikipedia, but I like the Internet Archive for keeping it honest even more.
You're welcome. I've done some more checking. Googling "Clinton compared the events of Kosovo to the Holocaust" and "Wikipedia" I found that sentence in the current article for '
NATO bombing of Yugoslavia' (not for the 'Kosovo War', though, and I think it belongs there too). Instead of the 500,000 missing or dead in the earlier 'Kosovo War' article, it includes this inaccurate -- but somewhat lower -- estimate, "In May 1996, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen suggested that there might be up to 100,000 Albanian fatalities."[102] However, five months after the conclusion of NATO bombing, only 2,108 bodies were found, with a total estimate not exceeding eleven thousand.[103]" Also, "Clinton, citing the same figure, spoke of 'at least 100,000 (Kosovar Albanians) missing'".[98]
I haven't checked the New York Times source for the earlier 500,000 attribution. If it's in the paper, though, then I think it belongs in the Wikipedia article -- unless there was subsequently a retraction -- because it's a more egregious example of the administration's overestimation of the casualties (especially if that number was widely publicized). The direct quotations of 100,000 from Cohen and Clinton, though, are pretty bad as they are.
Uh, oh. Can't blame Wikipedia editors for scrubbing the 500,000, even from the current article. :-) I found the original
New York Times source, and a correction states that the NYT article "...referred incorrectly [in November] to a State Department briefing on April 19. The department did not say that up to 500,000 Kosovar Albanians were missing and feared dead." (I'd be curious to see exactly what was reported in the NYT on April 19 or the following day.)
Clinton's calling it a Holocaust, though, and the estimate of 100,000 (instead of a few thousand) were bad enough, and do seem to support your thesis.