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After retired Gen. Wesley Clark testified at the United Nations international criminal tribunal in The Hague — where former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic is being tried on 66 charges, including crimes against humanity — Clark boasted to the New York Times that he is the only Democratic presidential hopeful "who's ever faced a dictator down. I'm the only one who's ever testified in court against one." Now Clark can boast that he's the only Democratic hopeful to testify against a dictator who quickly thereafter was elected to his country's parliament, as happened Sunday. (Not that Milosevic or Serbian Radical Party...

ELECTION 2004Bush takes on SorosFund-raising e-mail urges support to counter billionaire's campaign Posted: December 29, 20035:00 p.m. Eastern © 2003 WorldNetDaily.com The campaign to re-elect President George W. Bush has taken aim at his 10th rival in the race – non-candidate George Soros. Staffers fired off an e-mail to Republican supporters in an effort to counter the billionaire-financier's campaign to oust the incumbent, reports the Independent. George Soros WorldNetDaily reported the Hungarian-born philanthropist seeks to raise up to $75 million and has pledged more than $15 million of his own money to prevent Bush from staying in the White House. He committed...

Clark's credibility gap - Jeff Jacoby December 22, 2003 Wesley Clark, the four-star general who commanded US forces in Europe during the Kosovo war, is running for president as an opponent of the war in Iraq. So what will he say, a questioner asks, when the Bush camp levels the obvious criticism: If General Clark had his way, Saddam Hussein would still be in power. "If General Clark had his way," the candidate instantly replies, "we'd have had Osama bin Laden dead or alive two years ago, and the world would have been a lot safer. And then we'd have...

Last Updated: 12/17/2003 15:31:25 Middle East GREECE DEEMS THREAT FROM BOSNIAN ARABS ATHENS [MENL] -- Greece has determined that its national security interests are being threatened by Al Qaida-aligned Arab agents in Bosnia. The Cabinet of Prime Minister Costas Simitis has convened to discuss what officials termed the threat from an estimated 2,000 Bosnian Arabs to the Olympic Games in August 2004. Officials said Western intelligence agencies have assessed that some of those Arab nationals could be training to carry out attacks on Israeli, U.S. or other targets during the Olympics in Athens. Officials said the threat of an Al...

<p>The Hague, Netherlands -- U.S. presidential politics can be played on any stage, and for the past two days it has unfolded behind closed doors in a courtroom in the Netherlands.</p> <p>As President Bush basked in the capture of Saddam Hussein, Gen. Wesley Clark, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, has had a strangely coincidental opportunity to point to his history with another man accused of war crimes: former President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia.</p>

Four years after it was "liberated" by a NATO bombing campaign, Kosovo has deteriorated into a hotbed of organized crime, anti-Serb violence and al-Qaeda sympathizers, say security officials and Balkan experts. Though nominally still under UN control, the southern province of Serbia is today dominated by a triumvirate of Albanian paramilitaries, mafiosi and terrorists. They control a host of smuggling operations and are implementing what many observers call their own brutal ethnic cleansing of minority groups, such as Serbs, Roma and Jews. In recent weeks, UN officials ordered the construction of a fortified concrete barrier around the UN compound on...

US Presidential Candidate Clark Testifies at Milosevic Trial Lauren Comiteau Amsterdam 15 Dec 2003, 19:26 UTC Presidential hopeful Wesley Clark is in The Hague testifying at the war crimes trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. In two days of closed testimony, General Clark is expected to be questioned about the period when he was commander of NATO forces, during the alliance's 1999 bombing campaign against Yugoslavia. The former Yugoslav leader has always insisted if any war crimes were committed in Yugoslavia, they were committed by NATO forces. Now he will get to question the man who led the military...

There was this movie with Peter Sellers in which he played a character who was -- with all this political correctness floating around, we don't know the appropriate phrase du jour; perhaps it is -- "mentally challenged," but who everybody else thought was a great genius. At a press conference he was asked what he thought of China. He paused, bowed his head and slowly said, "China is full of Chinese." The reporters nodded their heads in awe and murmured, "Full of Chinese, hmm," remarking to each other how brilliant he was. Money also does this to people. If you...

Just the other day, I was saying to my wife, "You know what I need? Seven billion dollars." Of all the coincidences! A few hours later, I turn on the TV and here's George Soros, one of the world's richest men, saying that he is willing to give away his entire fortune to defeat President Bush. What's Soros' fortune worth? Seven billion dollars. Exactly to the penny, or rather, to the billion, what I asked for. To get the money, all I have to do is defeat President Bush; right, Mr. Soros? I'm willing. I'm game. Just show me the...

WASHINGTON - Retired Gen. Wesley Clark (news - web sites) will interrupt briefly his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination to testify at the U.N. war crimes trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic (news - web sites). AP Photo Slideshow: Wesley Clark Clark said Sunday the Swiss chief prosecutor in the trial at The Hague (news - web sites), Carla Del Ponte, has asked him to appear in mid-December to testify against the ousted Serb leader. "Because of the historic importance of this proceeding — the first trial of a head of state before a war crimes tribunal —...

An Ominous Turn in the National Debate A reported comment by billionaire philanthropist George Soros asserting that the policies of America and Israel are to blame for the resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe is sparking outrage everywhere from the White House to the American Jewish leadership and prompting concern about a wider backlash against Israel. Mr. Soros, the New Yorker who made his fame as a money manager and then as a philanthropist, has taken an increasingly high-profile role recently as a critic of the Bush administration. He’s pledged $10 million to an effort to unseat President Bush. He has...

George Soros: A chance for soft power in the Balkans By George Soros Published: May 22 2003 20:43 | Last Updated: May 22 2003 20:43      Yet the Balkans are a vital part of Europe. The US has made clear its intention to diminish its involvement in the region, so the European Union must take the lead. In the past, the EU has responded to negative developments; now it must articulate a positive vision.   Fighting in the Balkans has subsided but future peace is far from assured. Kosovo remains unresolved; the union between Serbia and Montenegro is tenuous...

Retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark, the Little Rock native and former NATO supreme allied commander in Europe, has resigned as managing director of merchant banking for the Stephens Group Inc. of Little Rock effective Friday, a company spokesman confirmed. "He told several of us that his first assignment would be to Kuwait City for CNN," Stephens spokesman Frank Thomas said. "It was a very amicable parting, very comfortable." Clark couldn't be reached for comment Friday morning. He joined Stephens in July 2000, the same month he retired from the Army. He serves on the boards of directors of Acxiom...

...in one astonishing statement three days before Clark announced his candidacy, Clark's former boss, Gen. H. Hugh Shelton, raised the most serious questions about Clark's military record, which is, of course, all he really has to run on. Shelton, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on 9/11, said: "I've known Wes a long time. I will tell you the reason he came out of Europe early had to do with integrity and character, issues that are very near and dear to my heart." According to military historian Thomas Fleming, "This is the most critical statement by one...

SOME FACTS ABOUT GENERAL CLARK       General Wesley Clark.  A hero.  Medal winner.  A born leader.  The man that has GW Bush ready to just give up and quit.  Really?  Not everyone thinks so.  Take, for instance,  General Sir Mike Jackson, commander of the international K-For peacekeeping force.  "I'm not going to start the third world war for you."  It seems Clark had given an order to send in troops to attack Russian troops who were in the process of taking over the airfield of Kosovo's provincial capital.  Fighting  and killing Russian troops was not part of the war plan to...

Ground-Breaking Srebrenica Guilty Plea By Emir SuljagicInstitute for War and Peace ReportingMay 2, 2003 Key suspect provides unprecedented and chilling inside account of the Bosnian Serb atrocity. In a watershed confession on May 6, former Bosnian Serb security officer Momir Nikolic pleaded guilty to crimes against humanity for his role in the 1995 killing of more than 7,000 Bosnian Muslim men from Srebrenica. Dressed in a dark green suit, Nikolic appeared visibly disturbed as he appeared before the tribunal. He bit his lips in agitation as he offered his plea. In exchange for his admission of guilt, the prosecution...

After the Army, Clark signs up as businessman Doors open for retired general Retired Gen. Wesley Clark’s business resume reads as if it belongs to an upwardly mobile executive who’s had his nose to the grindstone for three decades. In the three years since he left the Army, Clark has signed on as an adviser or director with more than half a dozen companies, written two books, worked as a CNN pundit and launched a campaign to become president of the United States. The common denominator: He was working with a government he knows inside out. The information that...

Key Srebrenica Witness Admits Lying Momir Nikolic's fictional account of massacre raises questions about plea-bargain system. By Chris Stephen in The Hague (TU 327, 29 September 2003) The Hague prosecution's star witness in the Srebrenica case has admitted in court that he lied in testimony when he said he ordered one of the biggest single massacres of Bosnian Muslims. Former Bosnian Serb army captain Momir Nikolic's admission in a courtroom appearance this week will undermine confidence in other details he has supplied about the Srebrenica killings in July 1995, and raises questions about how plea-bargain agreements are negotiated with those...

Clark highlighted some of the violence that 44,000 peacekeepers, including about 5,800 Americans, have faced since NATO's Kosovo Force deployed into the war torn province. During the first six months, 615 incidents of hostile fire, 15 mortar or recoilless rifle attacks, 20 altercations with unruly crowds, 129 grenade attacks and 58 mine strikes occurred in the area where U.S. troops serve.

On the Fox News Hannity & Colmes Show of August 21st, General Wesley Clark said the President Bush removed Saddam Hussein “under false pretenses.” The General should know something about false pretenses, as he was the NATO military commander in 1999, during the military intervention in Kosovo. This operation, during our recent co-presidency, was designed to save Muslim Kosovo from a rabid Serbian leader. It was hyped by a media campaign that charged “ethnic cleansing,” but found little evidence of mass murder (unlike the killing fields of Iraq). The propaganda campaign included faked photos supposedly taken of starving concentration camp...