Overkill defined The assault on the Branch Davidian religious sect by Federal agents, resulting in the death of over 80 adults and children, is one of the dark moments in U.S. history. The military vehicles used in the raid came from a nearby army base, where they were under the command of General Wesley Clark.
As the Commander 1st Cavalry Division, Fort Hood, Texas (August 1992-April 1994), he transitioned the Division into a rapidly deployable force and conducted three emergency deployments to Kuwait.
The initial reaction of virtually every person who hears about Clark's involvement in the attack on the Mt. Carmel Center of the Branch Davidians outside of Waco, Texas is surprise and/or disbelief: "I thought it was an ATF/FBI operation that went wrong and all the military did was lend a few tanks."
Military Personnel and Equipment
Personnel
Active Duty Personnel - 15
Texas National Guard Personnel - 13
Track vehicles
Bradley fighting vehicle (OMZ) - 9
Combat Engineer Vehicle (M728) - 5
Tank Retrieval vehicle (M88) - 1
Abrams Tanks (M1A1) - 2
(Source: Department of the Treasury, Report of the Department of the Treasury on the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms Investigation of Vernon Wayne Howell also known as David Koresh, U.S. Government Printing Office, September 1993)
West Point graduate Joseph Mehrten Jr. tells Insight, "Clark had to have knowledge about the plan because there is no way anyone could have gotten combat vehicles off that base without his OK. The M1A1 Abrams armor is classified 'Secret,' and maybe even 'Top Secret,' and if it was deployed as muscle for something like Waco there would have been National Firearms Act weapons issues. Each of these M1A1 Abrams vehicles is armed with a 125-millimeter cannon, a 50-caliber machine gun and two 30-caliber machine guns, which are all very heavily controlled items, requiring controls much like a chain of legal custody. It is of critical importance that such vehicles could not have been moved for use at Waco without Clark's knowledge."
On Meet the Press in November, Clark defended a friendly meeting he had with one of Milosevic's henchmen, General Ratko Mladic (see photo below), who is also wanted for war crimes, including the "ethnic cleansing" massacre of over 7500 Muslim men and boys in the enclave of Srebrenica, an act some describe as "the worst atrocity in Europe since World War II." (BBC Profile: Ratko Mladic) He is presently being sought by Interpol.
A U.S. official has compared Clark's meeting with Mladic to "cavorting with Hermann Goering," the Nazi Reichsmarshall and Luftwaffe-Chief who committed suicide at the Nuremburg trials, after being sentenced to death for crimes committed during World War II. Clark defends it by saying Mladic was not indicted at the time and the meeting was to help bring about a peace treaty.
Mladic was on a government "watch" list of suspected war criminals when he met with Clark. Further, Clark was in violation of State Department's express wishes that he not to meet with the Serb. According to a World New Daily article: "The State Department immediately went into damage-control mode and cabled European embassies to assure them of no change in U.S. policy toward the Bosnian Serbs."
So, while Clark and his apologists downplay the incident as a one-time occasion, the reality was different; his climb up the ranks is said to have stalled for a time at three stars because of his palling around with the bloody murderer. Wesley Clark's meeting with Radko Mladic, though, is far from his last friendly encounter with the sort of uniformed hoodlums American soldiers in the past risked their very lives to defeat. After assuming the NATO Supreme command in1997, Clark had close ties with Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) Chief of Staff Commander Brigadier Agim Ceku and KLA Leader Hashim Thaci, ties which cannot be so easily explained away.
The KLA has justly been described as a group of Marxist-Leninist "narco-terrorists," signifying both its attacks on innocent civilians and its involvement in the illegal drug trade. Despite this well-documented reputation or, perhaps, oblivious to it, Senator Joe Lieberman said: "The United States of America and the Kosovo Liberation Army stand for the same values and principles . . . Fighting for the KLA is fighting for human rights and American values." (Washington Post, Apr.28, 1999) As William Norman Grigg, a senior editor of The New American, points out, Lieberman's equating of Communist thugs with our high-minded principles was seconded by American and British military leaders (including General Wesley Clark) stationed in Kosovo during the war there:
In congressional testimony last December, Ralf Mutschke, assistant director for Interpol’s Criminal Intelligence Directorate, noted: "In 1998, the U.S. State Department listed the KLA as a terrorist organization, indicating that it was financing its operations with money from the international heroin trade and loans from Islamic countries and individuals, among them allegedly Osama bin Laden." According to Mutschke, bin Laden also lent to the KLA the services of one of his military commanders, who led "an elite KLA unit during the Kosovo conflict."
While funding for the KLA may have come from bin Laden, as Mutschke pointed out, training for the KLA’s leaders came from American and British special forces and intelligence personnel. The March 12, 2000 issue of the London Sunday Times disclosed that "American intelligence agents have admitted they helped to train the Kosovo Liberation Army before NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia," which began in March 1999. CIA officers who were sent to Kosovo supposedly to monitor a cease-fire between the KLA and the Serbian government actually spent their time "developing ties with the KLA and giving American military training manuals and field advice on fighting the Yugoslav army and Serbian police." They also gave KLA commandos such gifts as "satellite telephones and global positioning systems." In fact, several KLA commanders "had the mobile phone number of General Wesley Clark, the NATO commander." (Emphasis added; Behind the Terror Network Apparently, Clark's wasn't the only phone number of an important American possessed by the KLA. Mary Mostert writes: "The group suddenly burst on the world stage in 1998 as the favorite of the Clinton administration under then Secretary of State Madeline Albright, who was reported to have supplied KLA leader, Hasim Thaci, a satellite phone and her personal telephone number.
Wesley Clark, defender of KLA terrorists, joins race to White House)
The March 27th issue of The Herald of London revealed: "Both the UK and the US set up clandestine camps inside Albania to teach the KLA effective guerilla tactics.... Despite government denials on both sides of the Atlantic, SAS [British Special Forces] and US Delta Force instructors were used to train Kosovar Volunteers in weapons handling, demolition and ambush techniques, and basic organization."
To judge from its background, the KLA would seem an unlikely recipient of such favorable attention from the West. New York Times Balkans correspondent Chris Hedges points out that the group’s leadership is composed of "diehard Marxist-Leninists (who were bankrolled in the old days by the Stalinist dictatorship next door in Albania) as well as descendants of the fascist militias raised by the Italians in World War II." The January 21, 1999, issue of the French journal Liberation described the KLA as "totalitarian in its methods," and reported that its leaders have "remained largely true to the Maoist origins of its founders."
In 1993 Croatian Army Brigader General Agim Ceku (later in charge of the KLA) masterminded what is sometimes referred to as the Medak Pocket, a "scorched earth operation" that resulted in the total destruction of three Serbian villages and the massacre of over 100 civilians. From a report of Canadian "peacekeeping" forces, we read:
As the sun rose over the horizon, it revealed a Medak Valley engulfed in smoke and flames. As the frustrated soldiers of 2PPCLI waited for the order to move forward into the pocket, shots and screams still rang out as the ethnic cleansing continued.... About 20 members of the international press had tagged along, anxious to see the Medak battleground. Calvin [a Canadian officer] called an informal press conference at the head of the column and loudly accused the Croats of trying to hide war crimes against the Serb inhabitants. The Croats started withdrawing back to their old lines, taking with them whatever loot they hadn't destroyed. All livestock had been killed and houses torched. French reconnaissance troops and the Canadian command element pushed up the valley and soon began to find bodies of Serb civilians, some already decomposing, others freshly slaughtered.... Finally, on the drizzly morning of Sept. 17, teams of UN civilian police arrived to probe the smoldering ruins for murder victims. Rotting corpses lying out in the open were catalogued, then turned over to the peacekeepers for burial. (Cited, Michel Chossudovsky, NATO has installed a reign of terror in Kosovo)