~At least 100,000 and possibly as many as 500,000 Kosovo Albanian men are unaccounted for, raising fears that they may have been killed by Serb forces, U.S. officials said Monday.~
~But a State Department written report on "ethnic cleansing'' in Kosovo issued Monday said the number of missing men ranges "from a low of 100,000, looking only at the men missing from among refugee families in Albania, up to nearly 500,000, if reports of widespread separation of men among internally displaced persons within Kosovo are true.'' [...] But, said one official, "There's a tremendous amount of concern that the worst case scenario that many feared has happened.''~
This wasn't just about "displaced persons", as he went on to say:
~He said the United States has reports -- at least two from satellite imagery and others from refugees and members of the Kosovo Liberation Army -- of what may be 43 mass burial sites in Kosovo. ... These are places where large areas of earth have been disrupted since NATO began its air war against Yugoslavia on March 24.~
~U.S. officials said there is good reason to presume the worst about any of the Kosovo Albanians reported missing.~
He was talking "mass burial sites", not just people who could not be accounted for. And the "worst case" was "500,000 Kosovo Albanian men are unaccounted for", not including women and children, which would mean the total is implied to be much higher.
Good find. With several papers reporting it at the time of the briefing itself (April), a mere retraction by the New York Times later (in November) shouldn’t be enough to discredit the report that the claim was made. The quotations from the other papers indicate that the upper “State Department” estimate of the missing was 500,000, “raising fears that they may have been killed by Serbian forces”. Also that number was more consistent with Clinton’s comparison with the “Holocaust” (and in stark contrast with the confirmed evidence of only a few thousand).